♥ Astrid ♥ Gunshots. Karate moves. Flipping through languages so fast that my brain struggled to catch up. These had been as familiar to me in the six years I had been in training as a school bell or sound of a teacher's voice might be to anyone else. At sixteen, I had seen more death than I cared to talk about. But what could I say? That was what life as a teenage spy was. And as part of America's little-known espionage agency Delta, that was what I had become accustomed to. But I couldn't have known that things were about to change. A new assignment came up, and though I was with people I had known for years, this one would change things so that my life would never be the same. A drug dealer, working undercover in France. People from my past, popping up in the most unexpected places. And the boy with the blue eyes, who could be completely for me or utterly against me; often, I didn't know which. This was one assignment that would stay with me forever. But, of course, I didn't know that as I headed in...to pure Hell. Welcome to Delta. Now that you're here, good luck getting out.

Volume 1: Pickpocketing Living in secret and stealing to eat is a hard life , but it's all Kuro has ever known. Fear and necessity honed him from a young age into the finest young thief in in the wizard kingdoms. Nobody can hide forever, though, and a run of poor luck lands Kuro in a place where his quick hands and quiet feet count for nothing: Avalon Academy, school of magic. Out of his depth and unable to escape, can Kuro find a place among the other misfits at the school, or will his past return to ruin the one chance he has to leave his life in the shadows?