Stolen Sign

Chapter 1

~ Sylas ~

The invitation, written in elegant silver letters on a black card, bounces off my forehead and lands in the wet ink of the spell I just finished copying onto a fine piece of parchment.

Restraining my temper with a supreme effort of will, I raise my eyes and meet my sister's glare.

"I'm not going, Lyssa. How many times do I have to say it?"

"It's a party, Sy, not a trip through hell! It'll be fun! Not that you would know 'fun' if it bit you on the ass."

"No, being bitten on the ass doesn't sound like fun," I agree, setting the offending card aside and carefully blotting the smeared ink.

There's no magic in my work, fortunately. It's merely a template for another Crafter to use. Even so, it had taken me several painstaking hours to copy it out, ensuring the accuracy of every letter, mark, and sign.

A single error could be catastrophic, and at the very least renders the spell null. Thanks to my sister and the party invitation from hell, my work is ruined.

I knew that thing spelled doom the moment Mr. Yorba handed it to me.

Meanwhile, my present danger has not yet passed.

I don't know why our parents—may they rest in Elysium—named my sister after a goddess of mindless rage, but sometimes she lives up to it. Thankfully, she switches tactics and enters 'cute younger sibling' mode, allowing the rest of the objects on my cluttered little desk to live.

"Come on, Sy," she whines, "just get me in. Then you can go read in a corner or something."

I rub the bridge of my nose and glance up at her. "This may come as a surprise to you, Lyss, but one reason I don't go to parties is to avoid being the guy who ends up reading in a corner."

"Urgh! You're impossible!" she huffs, and stomps across the floor of my tiny attic room to throw herself into an old stuffed chair. A puff of dust rises from the abused cushions, and she sneezes before fixing me with another glare. "Why'd they waste an invitation on you anyway?"

I focus on putting my spell-writing materials away and answer without looking up.

"They didn't. Mr. Yorba can't attend, so he passed it along to me."

Mr. Yorba is my boss, and the Crafter for whom I'd spent half a day carefully inking a spell.

"What?" She sits up. "Won't you, like, explode or something if you try to enter with someone else's invite?"

I roll my eyes. The Spellwrights are rich, powerful, and scary, but they're not that scary.

"No. Guests who can't attend can designate someone to go in their place. If you'd actually read the card, you'd know that."

Picking it up, I flip it open and read aloud.

"The Spellwright family cordially invites Mr. Joaquin Emmanuel Yorba to attend a charity auction and gala, to be held on the Ides of March, from sunset until midnight. If the honorable Mr. Yorba cannot attend, he may designate a representative to attend in his stead, whose name shall appear below, in the invitee's hand."

And, indeed, below this line, written in Mr. Yorba's shaky and uneven scrawl, is my name: Sylas Lovecraft. Kindly, he'd also scratched a pair of parentheses, in which are the two words responsible for my current headache: and guest.

Lyssa sits up, hands clasped in supplication, her pale face lit with renewed excitement.

"Oh, Sylas, can we please go? Please please pleeeeeeese?"

I set the invitation aside and stand, careful not to jostle my rickety desk as I do, and stretch the tension from my sore back. I'm only twenty-three, but Lyssa makes me feel old sometimes.

Not that it shows, apparently. People often mistake us for twins, though we're six years apart. She looks more mature than she is, while I look less. We share the same milk-colored skin, dark red eyes, and shiny black hair that has long defined the Lovecraft lineage. We're also similar in build. She's tall for a girl, I'm average height for a man, and we share the same features: arched brows, bowed lips, a sharp jawline, sloping nose, and—most strikingly, perhaps—dark red irises that often appear black.

We're almost identical, and yet she's gorgeous while I look like a freak.

And more than my social anxiety, shy nature, and deep hatred of the Spellwrights, it's her beauty that worries me.

Magic is passed along the female line. I'm a dead-end, magically speaking, but Lyssa is tempting fruit. Worse, the Spellwrights have three sons and no daughters. To keep hold of their considerable and daunting power, those sons will need wives who carry magic in their blood.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact Lyssa doesn't know how much I hate them, or why.

"Lyss... I'm sorry," I say, "but attending a fancy-ass party full of rich, snobby, fancy-ass Crafters is very low on my list of things to do. Only 'become a test subject for torture devices,' and 'die in agony,' are lower."

I'm exaggerating, of course, but subtlety often escapes Lyssa's grasp.

Manipulation, on the other hand, does not.

"Sy," she says, leaning forward, her dark eyes wide and hauntingly black in the dim light, "I just want a chance. Can't you give me that? It's one night—a few hours out of your life—but for me... It could be everything."

I turn away, making a pretext of continuing to stretch as I swallow the bitterness at the back of my tongue.

"Are you serious?" I ask, keeping my voice soft. "You'd actually want to risk that? The Spellwright boys may be hot and rich, but they're also on the hunt. Would you really want someone who only wanted you for your power?"

"Is this hypothetical 'someone' hot and rich?" Lyssa returns. "Because I can deal with that. I'm a Lovecraft."

I abandon my pretend stretches and turn to face her.

"Would you be happy, though? With someone who only loved you because you made them love you with a spell?"

She shrugs. "What's the difference? Magic or not, it's all just chemicals on the brain. The feelings would be real."

Giving up, I flop onto my narrow, lumpy bed, staring up at the horizontal slats of the angled ceiling above.

We've had this argument before—about the ethics of our Craft, and whether we would ever use it for ourselves. Lyssa doesn't see an issue with it. I do. If someone loved me, I'd want to know there was more to those feelings than a spell.

Then again, that's probably why Lyssa found her Sign at the usual age of nine, while I bear the shame of being Signless at twenty-three; we're Lovecrafts: our talent lies with love and lust, romance and desire, and I have very little interest in any of that.

It's because of this failing that we're in our current predicament. As a Signless Crafter, my prospects are dim, the work I can do is limited, and the wages I can earn are restricted by Crafter law.

We rented a room and an attic space in a run-down house at the city's edge. The room (Lyssa's) is nice; the attic space (mine) is not. We barely scrape by with the money I earn, working as a law clerk for Mr. Yorba, writing out spells for him because his Cerebral Palsy makes it hard for him to write his own. At seventeen, Lyssa's legally two years too young to profit from her Craft, and in the meantime she's my responsibility.

She's a good sister, does her homework and studies Craft without complaint, and (almost) never asks for more than I can give.

The least I can do is let her go to a party now and then; even if it is a party thrown by a bunch of immoral Relic dealers.

"Fine," I sigh, defeated. "We can go."