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THE SOUL JAR
By
Jennifer Colgan
© copyright June, 2006, Jennifer Colgan
Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, © copyright June 2006
ISBN 1-58608-921-8
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Bree Sennett clamped her lips shut on a startled gasp as a long shadow fell across her hiding place. She pushed her body deeper into the shadowed niche where she crouched and listened to the measured footsteps coming across the dark, crowded storeroom.
Ming Xao Chen’s Curiosity Shop was supposed to be closed tonight. Bree had made certain the old man found his usual spot at the bar down the street. She’d seen him there, drinking rice wine with his two sons while the Chinese New Year parade snapped, crackled, and popped its way through the narrow streets of Chinatown. Certain that the shop’s eagle-eyed proprietor and his burly offspring were occupied for the night, Bree had let herself inside through the storeroom window.
Who else could be here? No one else had after-hours access to the shop, not even the Chen women. Lit only by the occasional flare of fireworks and the feeble glow of a single string of paper lanterns entwined around a clothesline several stories above, the alley out back had been heavily shadowed and completely empty when Bree arrived. No one could have seen her enter.
That meant the slow, deliberate footsteps that creaked across the shop’s dusty back room belonged to an intruder, a thief.
Bree slowly exhaled through clenched teeth. I don’t have time for this. She had a schedule to keep and a client to appease. She had to retrieve the artifact tonight or face losing more than just a percentage of her meager commission. The plane ticket wedged in the back pocket of her tight black jeans was non-refundable. Perhaps as a testament to her client’s confidence in her abilities, her travel arrangements had been made for her on a promise--one guaranteed by her life.
Bree waited the length of two heartbeats before climbing out of the niche behind a towering curio cabinet. She listened and gauged her rival’s whereabouts in the mazelike storeroom.
One aisle over to the left, a shadowy form stretched to snatch an object off a high shelf. Bree took mental inventory. That’s where Chen kept the dragon bones and the pearl handled daggers that he claimed could produce unhealing wounds with their short, blunt blades.
Nothing there worth taking. Chen had those objects mass-produced to appeal to the souvenir hunters and seekers of the macabre.
Bree took one measured step, then another. If the intruder only wanted dime store novelties, she might be able to grab the real treasure and be gone before he--or she--noticed.
“I’ll give you sixty seconds to climb back out that window and get lost before I call the police.”
Bree went still at the incongruous threat. That voice! Deep and sharp with a hint of Australian accent, it pierced her confidence to the bone. She caught her breath and berated herself for indulging in foolish fantasies when she was supposed to be focused on her job. Much as it might sound like him, she didn’t believe in ghosts.
She held her position, calling the intruder’s bluff.
“Thirty seconds.”
God! That voice sent shivers through her body and froze the breath in her lungs. It can’t be. It just can’t be. Fatigue and stress had to be causing her to hallucinate. Her conscience told her to run, to ignore the tumult of long-forgotten feelings and get away before the memories derailed her mission.
Her heart had other plans. How could she slink away in the night, leaving her treasure behind and never know who the haunting voice belonged to? She turned the corner, her heart thumping against her ribs as if it meant to escape and flee the scene.
The intruder hesitated only a moment before stepping out of the shadows next to a shelf lined with Yeti hands and petrified dinosaur brains. Bree let her gaze ride up from his black boots to the familiar cattle-horn belt buckle at his waist, past the white T-shirt and scuffed black leather jacket to the shaggy mane of sun-streaked hair.
She might not have believed it, might have dismissed his appearance as coincidence, until she looked into his familiar smoke-gray eyes. Her heart seemed to plummet to a spot just below her navel where it lay fluttering like a wounded bird. The air in her lungs hardened and her blood congealed. Had she lost her mind, or was she staring at a dead man?
Fortunately she’d survived too many tight spots to be rendered mute and immobile for long, but the single second of complete, numbing agony at seeing him again cost her.
Swallowing the bitter taste of his betrayal, she smiled at the man who had shattered her heart two years ago. At least he had the decency to look equally shocked when he recognized her.
“Mason MacKenzie,” she said, proud that her voice remained steady and smooth. “I thought I killed you.”
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