Read Three the Hard Way Online
Authors: Sydney Croft
Three the Hard Way
Riptide Publishing
PO Box 6652
Hillsborough, NJ 08844
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Three the Hard Way
Copyright © 2014 by Sydney Croft
Cover art: L.C. Chase,
lcchase.com/design.htm
Editor: Sarah Frantz Lyons
Layout: L.C. Chase,
lcchase.com/design.htm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at
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ISBN: 978-1-62649-233-2
First edition
December, 2014
Also available in paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-62649-234-9
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Three the Hard Way
will be donated to the It Gets Better Project.
The It Gets Better Project’s mission is to communicate to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth around the world that it gets better, and to create and inspire the changes needed to make it better for them. Visit their website for more information and to find out how you can get involved:
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Lovers Taggart Brody and Justice McKinney possess special abilities that make them valuable to agencies who employ—or enslave—people with extraordinary talents. When tragedy tears them apart, Justice finds purpose working for the good guys: ACRO, the super-secret Agency for Covert Rare Operatives. But he never forgets Taggart or the past they once shared.
Heartbroken, Taggart runs from who he is . . . right into the arms of Ian Bridges. But Ian, battling his own demons, betrays Tag to the terrorist organization Itor. After months of torture, Tag manages to escape, but kills an ACRO agent in the process.
With nowhere left to turn, Tag disappears into the Alaskan wilderness, but it’s only a matter of time before his enemies track him down. He reaches out to Justice, and somehow Ian finds him too, hoping to right his wrongs. With ACRO and Itor both bearing down, the three men must figure out how to forgive, how to work together, and how to love each other—or the coming battle will destroy them all.
To all the Sydney Croft readers, old and new, for giving us a chance to revisit the ACRO gang, and for helping us to give back to an important charity.
“Hey, Taggart! Check this out!”
Taggart didn’t look up from the snare he was securing to a tree. Justice was probably just going to brag about his rock skipping skills anyway. Tag would have told him that he should be practicing setting traps, but Justice’s snares and deadfalls were almost as good as Tag’s. At ten years old, they could string tripwires, dig pitfalls, and lay ambushes like seasoned soldiers. Mostly, that was cool, but sometimes, secretly, he wished he could do normal stuff, like ride a bike or play video games with other kids. Being raised as survivalists sort of had its ups and downs.
“Tag! Look!”
Taggart finally turned to his best friend. Justice was standing at the edge of the pond, his hand outstretched, reaching for the metal rowboat twenty yards out. The boat, empty of everything but two wooden oars, was cutting through the water, coming at them fast enough to leave a wake.
“So you can attract metal objects,” Tag said, thoroughly unimpressed with Justice’s showing off. “I can too. And I learned how to control my magnetic gift a year earlier than you did.” His mom said he shouldn’t tease Justice about that, but Justice always rubbed in the fact that his ability was far more powerful. There was no way Tag could have drawn in the rowboat from that distance.
Justice grinned at him over his shoulder. “But can you
repel
metal?”
Suddenly, the boat came to an abrupt stop, and a second later, it pushed back in the opposite direction, its square stern making the reverse journey a little slower and rougher.
Tag ran over to his friend. “Dude! That’s awesome! Now you can fix the monkey bars you bent at school.”
A breeze blew Justice’s blond bangs into his eyes as he turned around to face Tag. The rowboat, forgotten now, bobbed around in a patch of lily pads. “Are you still mad about that? Seriously?”
“Someone could have seen you.” Tag picked up a flat, round rock and skipped it across the pond’s smooth surface.
“It was no big deal. I just wanted to see how strong my power is.”
That was a load of crap, as Tag’s mom would say. Justice was playing the whole thing off as if he’d bent the bars on purpose, but Tag had seen the way Justice had lost control of his emotions when a schoolyard bully had cruelly teased a crying girl near the slide, Two rusty nails and a wing nut had flown across the playground to stick to Justice and the monkey bars had begun to bow inward. Justice hadn’t stopped until Tag tackled him.
Still, Tag wasn’t going to humiliate his friend, and arguing would only make him mad anyway.
“You just need to be more careful. Our moms will kill us if they find out we’re using our powers in public. Worse, they’ll homeschool us again.”
They’d had to fight for the chance to go to public school because their mothers, fugitives from an evil agency that’d used them as human test subjects, wanted to keep them safe and out of the public eye. But Tag and Justice had finally convinced them that they could keep their powers under control. And mostly, they could.
And sure, there were times when they either weren’t careful or when they intentionally pushed the boundaries and did something stupid. But geez, they had these super cool powers they barely had the opportunity to use on the seventy acres of middle-of-nowhere Idaho where they lived.