The Crown of Stones: Magic-Price Read Online Free

fidgeting to camouflage my continued hunt for a weapon. “I’m not buying your bullshit, Taren. You’re an assassin. You hide in the shadows. Slit the throats of defenseless people for money. Put off a kill for days to avoid confrontation. Apparently, you steal horses from defenseless old men as well. But you don’t sit and wait for me to show up so we can fight head on. And you don’t surrender.” Purposefully, I held her cold dark eyes with my pale ones. “You’re up to something.”
    Taren leaned down. She put her grimy face in mine and pressed her leather-clad breasts against my chest. “Have you ever thought that I let you catch me?”
    I laughed. “Who’s looking for a tumble, now?”
    “I admit I was curious, to see if you were as pretty up close as you are from far away. After all, with the amount of dust I was kicking up in your face it was hard to get a good look at those fabled, Shinree features of yours. Now that I have,” Taren ran a slow finger down the sharp slope of my nose, “it was so worth it.” Her caress meandered over the well-defined bones in my face, then across my mouth and jawline. “I find most of your kind uninteresting to look at. They all seem so watered down.”
    “That’s what happens after five hundred years of crossbreeding.”
    “But not you. You’re different,” she said thoughtfully, continuing to scrutinize me. “They really should make more like you.”
    “No, they shouldn’t.”
    Fingers still wandering, Taren bit her lip and shivered in approval. “Gods, but you are a tasty one.”
    “You can stop now.”
    “Why? Did I embarrass you? Don’t you like standing out?” She read the answer on me and laughed. “Gods, Troy, get over it. You’re a throwback. A relic. You don’t blend with anyone, not even your own kind.”
    I didn’t bother replying. Taren’s amusement evolved into a peal of taunting laughter and I knew, not only would she dismiss anything I said, she was right. Having been deliberately bred from two, full-blooded Shinree, I was one of the few of my race alive to descend directly from an untainted line. That made my appearance literally straight out of history.
    The old records describe my ancestors as tall with a build that’s naturally strong and lean. The sketches show their keenly sharp features and tanned skin, their distinctive pure white, colorless hair and matching eyes. And I wear their stamp, blatantly. Not just physically, either. I could draw the energy out of any stone pulled from the Shinree mines, shape it and bend it to my will, quicker and better than most.
    From the perspective of any breeder, I was the perfect Shinree specimen. From the perspective of the common man, I was an oddity, a curiosity. A danger.And they weren’t far off the mark. If you combine my conspicuous appearance with the brutal history of the Shinree, as well as my own, grave, personal transgressions, the air tends to get real uncomfortable when I walk in a room.
    Taren, however, looked a little too comfortable.
    “What do you want?” I asked her, shifting in the mud.
    “This.” She lowered the knife down inside the collar of my shirt and slid it under the thin strip of leather tied around my neck. Lifting the cord with the blade, she exposed the slender, black shard of obsidian fastened at the end. “I want this.”
    “The stone?” I hesitated. “Why?”
    “It’s pretty.”
    “It’s a rock. A poorly cut one at that.”
    “You’re just being modest.” Almost lovingly, she stared down at the shard. “We both know the energy it holds. The dark, wonderful power.”
    “There’s no power, Taren. I picked it up on the road a while back.”
    “And you kept it, why? Because it matched your coat?” She laughed at me, but the sound cut out abruptly. “It’s been trapped for so long. Waiting,” she said, in a dreamy, tender tone. “Waiting for you to feel it, to wake it up…to embrace it.” Taren’s eyes snapped from the shard, to mine.