The Locket And The Thief And Other Stories

Reworked Omnibus of stories from Rachel Lawson's The Magicians series, such as this Dark Fantasy-Gothic short story;

The Locket And The Thief

What if you lost the last physical thing that reminds you of a lost beloved child through theft, and it happens to be found upon the body of the now dead thief, and it is now in the hands of the police would you if you had access to would you take it back? Is stealing back your own stolen thing, really theft or is it? This is the situation where this coroner, Blake, finds himself in.

On a lonely quiet misty night after midnight in Melbourne, anything can happen and it did. At that hour, only the reckless and unprincipled wander around.

On such a night as this, a straggler from a theatre was wandering in the cool calming night remembering a lost daughter who he'd lost many years ago on a night like this. This day, to be exact, 28 years earlier. She was murdered with her husband as they walked the street he was in. He came as he always did this night to lay a rose for them. He did so unbothered, for all the times he had come. Before that night. He pulled out an old locket and looked at it sadly and opened it, looking at the pictures inside it. They were his daughter and her husband. The father pulled a red rose from his inside coat pocket and lay the rose on the wet road. As the father knelt laying the rose there was a noise nearby on the road like a splash in the puddle, he looked up and saw a man with a gun trained on him.