The Innocence of Death

by E G Stone

  I wished I had a heavy duffle bag to drop obnoxiously on the floor, but I settled for, “Seriously?! Couldn’t you two fight anywhere else besides my office?”

  Mercy hissed and straightened. She lifted her chin in the air and looked at me pointedly. “I had come to ask you to take on the Order of Silence as a client, when this traitor almost assaulted me.”

  “I am not a traitor,” Agravaine snarled, tightening his grip on the letter opener. “I left the Order of my own free will and I did not betray it in the process. I just exercised my right to a little piece of balance of my own without being tortured for it.”

  “You twisted everything the Order values and made it seem the demon before you left,” Mercy snarled. “Our ranks are so unsettled by the happening that the fate of the entire Order is threatened.”

  “Hold up!” I snapped. Surprisingly, everyone quieted, waiting for me to continue. I took off my glasses and cleaned them, wincing at the cracks in the lenses. “First off, why in the world would the Order want me to market for them. After all, I’m the one that took Agravaine out of there.”

  Mercy mumbled something incoherent and stared at the ground.

  “Sorry?” I asked, cupping my ear. “I missed that.”

  “She said that as you are a being of perfect balance, the Order feels that you are the only one who can rightfully advocate for their cause and paint a picture of balance for them,” Yolanda chirped in brightly. “Also, you are the only marketing agent in Elsewhere, so who else would they go to?”

  “Thanks,” I muttered. Mercy huffed and stared harder at the floor. Her emotionless facade was completely gone, which either meant that this was a big deal to her or that she really, really hated me. Somehow, I didn’t think that I was that big of a deal. “Look, Mercy, I know that you don’t like me. And I don’t imagine that’s going to change, not after I had to go and find Justice…”

  “He brought his fate upon himself,” Mercy said cooly.

  “Either way, you two were colleagues and I’m just a human, so that has to sting,” I said. “But you can’t honestly expect that I would take the Order of Silence on as a client? Not after what I saw there, and what they tried to do to me?”

  “That is what I told her,” Agravaine said. “She refused to leave, so I took it upon myself to make her.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” I stomped over and snatched the letter opener out of Agravaine’s hand. “There’s no need for violence. Actually, I’m making it a rule. No one commits any form of violence in my office. Ever. Got it?”

  “You refuse the Order, then,” Mercy said, her grip on her knife relaxing slightly.

  “I’m sorry for causing problems, but I don’t like the Order. I can’t do a good job of marketing if I don’t even like my client. Not that I’ve liked all my clients, but there are some lines you can’t cross,” I said flatly, stabbing the letter opener into my pen holder. Yolanda squeaked. “What?” I growled.

  “The letter opener goes next to the blotting paper,” Yolanda whispered. Mercy let out a snarl of annoyance and stalked from the office, her dress swirling dramatically as she left. The door closed behind her with a slam. Yolanda grinned. “She will not be back anytime soon, I think. You showed her, Cal!”

  “I thought she’d be pleased,” I said. “I thought she hated me.”

  “She does,” Yolanda assured me.

  “Right. That makes about as much sense as everything else I’ve dealt with recently. Well, how about you go take the rest of the day off. And possibly tomorrow,” I said. “I have a headache.”

  Yolanda nodded and left the office, though her exit was far less dramatic and far happier than Mercy’s. I sank into my chair, bloody clothes, wounded shoulder, cut back and all. “Okay, Agravaine. What are you really doing here?”

  The aurai sank into the chair across from my desk. “I am here to protect your interests.”

  “Nope, not buying it. Sorry,” I said. “Look, I get that I helped you out back at the Order, but that’s hardly a reason for you to hang around my office, protecting my interests or assets or whatever. You don’t owe me anything. What are you really looking for?”

  Agravaine studied the woodgrain on my desk intently, so I couldn’t see his eyes when he said, “I have been disowned by my family.”

  I leaned back in the chair and nearly yelped when the slice across my back throbbed in protest. Now that the adrenaline of the fight and its aftermath was gone, my body was protesting its various hurts. Loudly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Is it because you left the Order?”

  “Yes, as much as the manner in which I left it,” Agravaine murmured. “I was expected to rise within the ranks. Perhaps even work under Mercy or the Ancient One. It was my duty.”

  “And then I came along and you left the Order,” I finished the explanation. “I didn’t know it would end up that way. I never wanted you to be kicked out of your family. I just didn’t want you to be tortured.”

  “No, you have nothing to be sorry for. The choice to leave the Order was mine. That it was done while I was being conditioned did not help my cause. My family felt my injuries were…deserved,” Agravaine said. He turned to look out the window to the grey and silver lands beyond. “I disagreed. Now, I have nowhere to go.”

  “Well, you can stay here for a while,” I said tentatively. I hadn’t meant to get Agravaine into this trouble, but that didn’t mean I wanted to live with him. I barely knew the guy. The fact was, though, that I was partly responsible for his predicament. And I had to do something about it.

  “Actually, I was hoping you would give me a job,” Agravaine said with a smile. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I know you already have an assistant, but perhaps I could do footwork for you. Research.”

  “I don’t…I mean…Do you even have the skills for marketing? Yolanda’s good with computers, see,” I tried to explain. The guy didn’t need a place to stay, he needed a job? I had no idea whether or not I could even give him a job. What was my autonomy here? Would Death protest?

  “I was trained only in the arts of war and balance,” Agravaine said in a low voice. He pushed back from the desk, as though he was about to stand. “This was a bad idea.”

  “Now wait a minute. I was just getting an idea of your background,” I protested. “I never said I wouldn’t help you. You can be well, you’ll be my secondary assistant at the moment. I’ll get you trained and then you can take on clients of your own. After all, I am the only marketing agent in Elsewhere. I’m going to be swamped with work.”

  “I thought you worked for Death,” the aurai said, though he was leaning forwards with a spark of excitement in his eyes.

  “As you can see, I have people starting to pound down my door to get me to work for them.” I waved my hand at the empty letterbox. “Though, Mercy did approach me. And the vampires kidnapped me for my services. All within my first week, no less.”

  “So I have a job?” Agravaine asked cautiously.

  “Yes. I’ll have to talk with Death about benefits and pay and all that, especially since I’m not actually sure about my own pay and benefits, but—”

  “Thank you, Cal Thorpe!” Agravaine moved around the desk faster than I could blink and threw his good arm around my wounded shoulder. I let out a soft cry of pain. Agravaine didn’t seem to notice. He just bounded towards the door and left, grinning.

  “Ow,” I wheezed, leaning back in my chair.

  “You surprise me.” Death appeared near the corner of my desk and I jumped up from the chair so fast, you’d have thought I was one of those supernatural types. The resulting scream was due to pain, not terror.

  “Do you have to sneak up on a guy?” I demanded. “You scared the life out of me.”

  Death chuckled. “An interesting turn of phrase, given your current circumstances.”

  I scowled and sat back in the chair. “Ha ha, very funny. I surprise you in what way?”

  “Young Agravaine there. You gave him a job,�
�� Death said.

  “He got disowned by his family,” I said. “It was probably my fault. It was the least I could do.”

  “The fact that you even consider it to be your fault is what surprises me,” Death said. He held out a hand and the shadows congealed there into an image of a park. Actually it was the park where I had almost been killed. Creepy. “When we met, you were willing to take my deal purely out of self-interest. I had not expected you to care quite so much for those around you.”

  “Well, maybe you should have asked for a proper interview before you hired me,” I grumbled.

  “Much like you did with Agravaine?” Death asked. I sighed and my boss chuckled again, the sound eerily like a victory knell.

  “Did you have a reason for being here?” I asked. “I mean, I did find the right guy, didn’t I? Justice had…you know.”

  “Subverted my power? Yes. Though, I suppose it was my own fault for trusting him with it to begin with,” Death said as if he were musing over a sandwich, not talking about murder and, well, death. “It is an interesting phenomenon, to be wrong about somebody. It happens infrequently because I so rarely interact with the living.”

  “Except for all of the people you’ve hired on here,” I said. “Me—about to die. Agravaine lost his home. Yolanda was kicked out by the rock trolls for being too logical and happy. I bet Iggy has a tragic backstory. Mercy is afraid of showing how she feels. And Justice? What happened to his eyes?”

  Death frowned. “You are entirely too perceptive, Calvin Montgomery Thorpe.”

  “Are we like rescue animals to you? Or is just that we’re the ones Life rejected?” I asked, thoughts swirling in my head. “She actively defies you and yells at you and loves those who fight her. So why is she married to you?”

  “Because Life and Death are a force made in balance,” Death said, as if that explained everything.

  “Or it’s because you fight her. Very quietly, so that she doesn’t even know it’s happening sometimes,” I said. Death stared at me, a wry smile tugging at his mouth. That was more than a little disconcerting, considering that he had no eyes with which to stare.

  “I knew I picked rightly when I hired you,” Death said. Then, he frowned again. “Though I did make a mistake in separating you from your life-force.

  “You’re here to kill me,” I squeaked. I couldn’t be killed by any other means except possibly Death himself. That probably made me too dangerous. I suddenly felt very light-headed. My mouth dried out and my heart pounded loudly in my ears.

  “No,” Death shook his head. “I am here to fix my mistake. I will make you merely immortal, not, ah…eternal.”

  “Oh,” I breathed, letting out a sigh and leaning back in the chair. My muscles felt like water.

  “What had happened was that I inadvertently replaced your life-force with your soul, which cannot be killed,” Death said. “I had not anticipated the fact that humans require something on which to live. So I will fill you with an immortal life-force, taken from one recently dead.”

  “Justice,” I said in a low, broken voice. My mind flew to Justice and the moments before his death. Death had kissed him, had killed him. Had taken his life-force. And now he was, what, going to give that to me? I was partly responsible for Justice being dead in the first place. At least, it felt that way. I wasn’t sure the guilt of having his life-force in me would do me any good.

  “I have no other to give,” Death said. “And I cannot have you running around as you are. There would be too many repercussions.”

  Before I could even think about it, Death reached out and touched me on my head. I screamed, the feeling of being pulled apart in all directions too much to bear in silence. My limbs were torn to pieces, to ash. I was blinded, my eyes gouged out. I could feel every wound Justice had ever endured. I could feel the pain he bore when he realised that he loved Life, and that she would never love him back. I felt the countless lives that Justice had taken on behalf of Death. I felt the influence wielded in defence of Life. I could feel the horror at having Magnus’ blood on my hands—innocent blood. And the realisation that it was killing me. That Death, looming above me, had come to kill me.

  And then, I began to heal. My limbs became solid once more. My eyes grew back. My shoulder healed and my back as well. Light bloomed before my eyes and my stomach roiled.

  When I could breathe again without being nauseous or sick, I snapped back to reality. I was lying on the floor of my office, hardly able to move. Death was gone. I crawled my way up to my chair and saw a sticky note with flowing, unearthly handwriting tacked to the computer screen.

  Cal, you now have one life to live. Live it well.

  - Death

  One life to live. All I could think was that it sure was going to be a strange one.

  Acknowledgments

  If you asked how this book came about, I honestly couldn’t tell you. I can tell you that it was a NaNoWriMo story, written during my year in Edinburgh. I can tell you that I didn’t intend it to become a series, and certainly not on the scale that it is now planned to be. I can tell you that I had absolutely no plan for this book. But I can’t tell you what it was that made me start writing about an unfortunate marketing agent that worked for Death.

  If you don’t mind, I’d like you to assume that it was something clever. It’s just more fun that way.

  As it is, this book and the characters in it have grown far beyond my control and will appear in many other books to come.

  So I’d better thank some people for their help before things get too chaotic, though that should prove to be highly entertaining. First off, I’d like to thank my dad, who read the first iteration of this and said, “run with it.” That, and our subsequent discussions of puns on Life, Death, Time, Space, and the like, have helped to make this book into what it is, and shaped the series.

  I’d also like to thank Michael Evan for the editing and support. Let me just say, I warned you. It is not my fault if the characters take over.

  Then there is Fay, who is such a wonderful cover designer. She took my initial shot-from-the-hip idea and created something beautiful. Then, she didn’t complain once when I nixed that idea. Of course, she then went on to create something even more stunning. This goes to show why I rely on amazing people like her to actually do the covers.

  Now, I thank you so very much for reading this book and I hope you feel inspired to go and cause some trouble. Cal Thorpe and co shall return in book two: Knowledge Aforethought, where I play with Time.

  (Really, this series is basically me just going, “I couldn’t help myself.”)

  About the Author

  E.G. Stone is an independent author who has been writing, creating and causing vast amounts of trouble since the age of six. Since then, E.G. has improved rather a lot in both the trouble-causing and writing and now spends her time writing fantasy and science fiction. When not writing, she is off musing about the workings of languages, both real and created, or drawing and sewing. E.G. reads voraciously, perhaps to the point of slight-insanity. Weird, nerdy, perhaps a little crazy, she is having a grand old time writing, reading, reviewing, interviewing, and, naturally, continuing her endeavours in causing trouble.

  Also by E.G Stone

  Speaker of Words

  The Crow and the King

  The Wing Cycle:

  The One Who Could Not Fly

  To Never Hear the Song

  The Forsaking of the Blind

  Pestilence and Plague: An Anthology of Stories about the Virus

 

 

 
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