A.K.A. Goddess Read Online Free PDF Page A

nice suit. Very nice suit. I should know, what with the company I’ve kept.

    Interesting choice for breaking and entering.

    It didn’t go with his black ski mask at all.

    “Ladies,” warned baritone, glancing between Sofie and me, “You do not want to go there.”

    Sofie said, “Put down the weapon and back away.”

    Apparently not one to take orders, he swung his gun toward her. But I stepped smoothly back into Sofie’s line of fire and slipped his legs out from under him as he shot.

    Four ounces of strength against a ton of force, as my sifu says. Appear, then disappear. You just have to sense your opponent’s weakness and know where to tap.

    Baritone landed on the concrete with a surprised grunt and his shot—to judge by a crash of breaking window glass—went wild. Sofie lunged forward, shoving her pistol into his face. “Drop the damn gun!”

    His fingers opened. His pistol clunked to the concrete.

    Then I heard the sound of an engine, behind us.

    “Down!” With a leap and a twist, I tackled Sofie to the walkway and rolled us behind a bench. More windows in Turbeville Hall exploded in a barrage of thorough gunfire.

    The Plymouth hadn’t been empty after all.

    “Damn!” Sofie yelled over the chaos, while baritone snatched his gun and ran. Maybe she could still have risked shooting him—if she wanted to shoot him in the back. He wasn’t our immediate threat anymore. Instead, she fired at the car once, twice, again.

    The Plymouth’s passenger door opened, baritone leaped in, and it peeled down the service walkway. The last of the gunfire came from us.

    “Damn!” Sofie repeated into the otherworldly silence that followed. We both sat up slowly, blinking against the heavy haze of gunsmoke. Nearby, from the hall, an afterthought of glass crashed from a broken window onto the ground. “If you’d gotten his gun, we could’ve printed it.”

    That had been my idea, before she showed up with her admittedly expert grasp of the patriarchal value of weapons. I said, “X146.”

    Sofie stared, then grinned. “You got the license?”

    “The first four characters, anyway.”

    “You go, girl!” She removed her radio from her belt, but I touched her wrist. “Don’t even think it,” she warned.

    “I know you’ve got to call it in, and I know I’ve got to stay here for the report,” I assured her. “But do me a favor. Don’t mention my name on the emergency band.”

    “Because…?”

    “Because I know someone who might be monitoring it. Or has other people doing the monitoring for him. I don’t want to see him a second time tonight.”

    Her dark eyes whitened. “Lex Stuart?”

    That was no psychic hunch. “I knew it. He was behind all the attention the police gave me tonight, wasn’t he?”

    “What’ve you got that has a man like Alexander Stuart throwing his weight around over a simple break-in?”

    “It’s complicated.”

    She grinned, clearly sensing a good story. “Let me just make this call,” she said.

    “‘Little girls break very easily,’” I said, after Sofie disconnected.

    She eyed me dubiously. “Come again?”

    “That’s what our gunman said. Not, ‘real easy,’ but ‘very easily.’ He’s got a formal education…and an expensive tailor.”

    “So you’re thinking he wasn’t just here to tag the building and maybe rip off some vending machines?”

    “I’m thinking he was here to get my information on Melusine.”

    “Meli-who?”

    “A French fairy-goddess my aunt and I are researching. Either someone with a lot of clout doesn’t want us finding it, or they want to find it first so they can destroy it.”

    “‘It’ being…?”

    “The Melusine Chalice,” I clarified. “Her ‘holy grail.’”

    We could hear sirens in the distance. This was going to be a long night, wasn’t it?

    “I thought there was only one Holy Grail,” said Sofie.

    “That’s in the classic version.” I wiped my palms where I’d scraped them on