On the other hand, the idea of Adair being imprisoned next door to my place of employment didn’t exactly fill me with confidence either. Yet if he refused to confess to being behind the jailor’s death, then Tay would pay the price for it.
Harris reached the top of the stairs. “She’ll have one trial. One chance to explain herself. That’s all.”
“Are you sure you shouldn’t be focusing on Adair instead?” I pressed. “Unlike Tay, he definitely has the ability to influence people to do his bidding, and I’m not sure even the defences on this place can dampen it completely. How did he and the others get out last time?”
“Did you think I’d tell you?” He gave me a contemptuous stare. “You’re lucky you didn’t get arrested for aiding in their escape.”
“I didn’t know they escaped at all until Adair tried to kill me,” I pointed out. “When did it happen? Come on, you might as well tell me. They’re already at large.”
He scowled. “Less than a month ago. What does that have to do with anything?”
If they were involved with the jailor’s murder? A lot, possibly. Especially as the Family seemed to be making contingency plans for a war in which I wasn’t even sure who the major players were. I couldn’t think why the Family would murder the lead jailor, though, unless they’d intended to have revenge on the Houses for imprisoning them. But that didn’t work either. It hadn’t been the House of Fire’s jailor who’d been in charge of their incarceration after they’d been dug out of the wreckage of their house. They’d been locked up in a different facility north of the city, as far as I was aware.
“Because they used to make a living selling illegal cantrips.” I walked down the corridor to the room which contained Zade’s body, where I lifted the cantrip from the table, displaying the symbol on its surface. “That’s their signature. I thought their factories shut down five years ago.”
Or more accurately, burned down. I’d set the entire estate ablaze during my escape.
“You think your family made that cantrip?” Harris said from behind me. “Am I supposed to believe you weren’t involved?”
“Can I take this with me?” I said, ignoring his taunts. “Maybe the Death King knows where it came from.”
Unlikely, but I could ask Miles or his friends if he didn’t. If it’d been obtained somewhere local, the Spirit Agents would be more likely to know, since they were based here in Elysium. As the cantrip itself was blank, it wasn’t like I could use it against anyone, as the guards ought to know well.
“Go ahead,” said Harris. “And don’t come back here again unless you have something useful to say.”
I slipped the cantrip into my pocket. Whether Tay had been the killer or not, it wouldn’t hurt to figure out how the murderer had taken the guard’s life without leaving more than a rash on his face.
“I’ll inform the Death King you have no desire for an alliance with him,” I said to him, reaching the door. “Or should I mention that you might be open to transferring a certain prisoner to the Court of the Dead?”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Is it true? He can’t use his powers on the dead?”
“Yes, it’s true.” I didn’t expect him to take my word for it, but the Death King would gladly confirm anything I said. “It’s also true that he’s more likely to start talking if the Death King is the one running the interrogation.”
Harris studied me. “I’ll ask. If it turns out you’re bullshitting, we’ll move up your friend’s trial.”
My hands clenched at my sides, over the cantrip in my hand. “If you even think about hurting Tay without first considering the Death King’s offer, then I’ll insert this cantrip somewhere you won’t forget in a hurry.”
And with that, I left the House of Fire and walked out into the street. The citadel towered over the rooftops, an obsidian structure gleaming against the overcast sky. While a node gleamed nearby, it wasn’t too far a walk to the Spirit Agents’ home from here. While I hadn’t heard from any of them since my first day working for the Death King, they’d want to know about the strange murder in the heart of the House of Fire.
Not that any of them were fans of Tay, either… but despite it all, I didn’t want her to die.
3
It took me close to an hour of walking in circles through the confusing warren of streets around Elysium’s centre before I reached the house where the Spirit Agents made their home. It was a pretty nice house by the Parallel’s standards, with whitewashed walls and a wide garden with neatly trimmed lawns. Someone among the Spirit Agents must be a keen gardener, because it wasn’t exactly common to hire services to mow one’s lawn here in the Parallel, where having a roof over your head was in no way guaranteed.
I entered via the gate and knocked on the red-painted door. I hoped Miles might answer, but Tate, a guy of around my age with dark skin and hair shaved to stubble, looked me up and down and said in disinterested tones, “Oh, it’s you.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I said. “Is Miles in?”
“Sure.” He called over his shoulder, “Miles?”
Miles appeared at the door a few seconds later, his straw-coloured hair rumpled as though he’d neglected to cut it recently. Together with his casual clothes and lean and unassuming figure, he looked nothing like he could rip the soul out of a person with his fingertips if he wanted to. The Death King might have the intimidation factor mastered, but the understated threat of the average spirit mage meant that few would look at the group of close-knit twenty-somethings and teenagers who lived here and believe they could give the Houses of the Elements a run for their money.
“Hey, Bria.” Miles’s mouth quirked in surprise at the sight of me on the doorstep. “Did the Death King send you to reprimand me for not checking in with him?”
“Nah, I was in the area and thought I’d drop by to talk.” I added the unspoken word alone. While the other Spirit Agents were his closest friends, I’d prefer that they didn’t find out about the jailor’s death or that my ex-best friend was suspected of his murder, even if Zade had been a total wanker whose fate I’d hardly shed tears over.
“We can talk out here,” he said, indicating the garden.
“Sure.” The two of us walked across the path winding through the lawn. Several vampire chickens were still roaming around, and I watched them peck at the ground for a moment while I gathered my thoughts. “Who set up this place? I didn’t know Spirit Agents were keen gardeners.”
“Tate and Shelley,” he responded. “This is possibly the best-tended garden in the entire Parallel. The house used to belong to a vampire, you know, so we take good care of it.”
“Seriously?” I looked up at the house, trying to picture a shadowy vampire roaming its bright corridors. “Why would anyone abandon a house like this?”
“The house’s owner left Elysium to join the vampires’ council in Arcadia,” he said. “Lord Blackbourne let us have the property. He’s the leading vampire lord.”
“I think I’ve seen him before,” I responded. “He’s a friend of the Death King’s, right?”
“Sure,” he said. “Speaking of whom, how’s living in the castle working out for you? The job isn’t too strenuous, right?”
“It wasn’t, at least until he sent me to the House of Fire to negotiate with them,” I said. “Which went off the rails when it turned out someone was murdered in their jail.”
“Eventful week, then?” he said. “Who died?”
“The chief jailor,” I said. “Not someone I particularly liked. The slight problem is that everyone is trying to blame Tay for it. She somehow got out of her cage at the time of his death and is refusing to admit why.”
“You think she’s innocent?” He lowered his voice, his jaw tensed. “You know what she did to you. To all of us.”
I knew, all right. Her betrayal had nearly got us killed. Several of the Spirit Agents had died in the battle, which meant their distrust of me wasn’t without reason. They were the ones who’d got me into the D
eath King’s contest to begin with, but I gathered that nobody here had expected me to win. I pretended not to see the faces watching us from the windows, turning my head away and dropping my voice.
“I don’t know why she’d bother lying,” I murmured. “I think she went to speak to Adair when she was out of her cage, so he might have used his mind-control on her, but I don’t know where she would have got the cantrip which killed the guard. Pretty sure they took all her weapons off her when they brought her in.”
“Then she got it from one of his allies,” said Miles. “She’s resourceful, isn’t she? If she won’t tell you she’s innocent, she’s got something to hide.”
I should have known Miles wouldn’t believe she was innocent, though I wasn’t certain why I did, either. Old naivety, perhaps. Or the nagging sense that the rest of the Family had been awfully quiet about Adair ending up in jail again. I would have expected them to at least make a move to get their beloved son out of the House of Fire, but I hadn’t heard a word from them yet. They must know about my new position at the Death King’s side, too, and their ongoing silence made me edgy, to say the least.
I pulled the blank cantrip I’d taken from the House of Fire out of my pocket and showed it to Miles. “I know it’s blank now, but this is the cantrip that was used to kill the jailor. Check out the mark on the back. Have you seen it before?”
He examined the gleaming gold surface. “There’ve been a lot of those blank cantrips around lately. They aren’t local, but I’ve never seen that mark on any of them before.”
“It’s the Family’s signature,” I told him. “It used to be on every cantrip they manufactured. When they were jailed, everything they owned was destroyed. Or I thought it was.”
His brows rose. “Manufactured?”
“The Family’s house was like a giant factory for experimental magic,” I explained. “They mostly did it via creating new cantrips. There weren’t many cases where they used actual people to experiment on.”
Like my brother and me. Mostly they sold cantrips to anyone willing to take the risk to earn some quick cash and then monitored the results from a distance. I’d assumed Tay would have an aversion to anything they’d touched, cantrips included, but she’d gone as far as to take the Family’s side during the recent conflict. Before, I’d never have seen her as a cold-blooded killer, whatever the Houses might have said about her. They’d said the same about me, after all. Yet given what she’d done, had I truly known her at all?
“The Family escaped jail, right?” Miles said. “You think they went back to their home?”
“Couldn’t have,” I said. “I burnt it down. Razed the whole property when I escaped and left them for dead, destroying all their cantrips for good measure.”
My chest tightened with each word, as though part of me expected a bad reaction. Miles had accepted what I’d told him so far, but he hadn’t seen the Family’s depravity with his own eyes. Not yet.
“They must have found somewhere new to hide out, then,” he said. “How’d the jailor die? What did the cantrip do to him?”
“His body shut down, they said,” I said. “His face was covered in these odd blisters. That’s all I saw. The guards might not necessarily have known it was a cantrip that did it if they hadn’t found one next to the body.”
“Yeah, doesn’t sound familiar to me,” he said. “I can check with the others, if that’ll help. Maybe someone knows.”
“I was going to take it to the Death King,” I said. “Not that cantrips are his area of expertise either, but he tends to be in the know about everything going on in the Parallel.”
Judging by the way he’d known half the contenders competing to become the next Fire Element had turned out to be working against him, the guy played a long game. But he didn’t know the Family, not the way I did. Adair might be back in custody, but the others weren’t, and even I didn’t know their current whereabouts. The House of Fire had avoided making the information about their escape public, which perhaps wasn’t a surprise. Telling the population of Elysium that there was a group of magically gifted mass murderers on the loose went against their policy of pretending to be completely in control of the city.
As for the Death King? He had little to do with the Houses. In fact, I was supposed to be the person who ferried information between the Houses and him, but I hadn’t reckoned on them being so hostile to the notion of allying with him purely based on their hatred of me. I might have been a notorious criminal, but I’d also handed the Family to them in the first place. It’d taken all four of the Houses’ combined strength to get the three of them behind bars, and only because I’d significantly weakened them. The odds of me pulling off the same stunt again were low, but it’d be nice if the House of Fire’s guards wouldn’t automatically jump to the conclusion that I was the one in the wrong. If they’d told me where the Family had fled to after their escape, I might even be able to track them down. With or without Tay’s help.
“Yeah, the Death King will know,” Miles said. “Why’d he send you to the House of Fire, anyway?”
“To see if they’d be willing to work with him.” I shook my head. “He refused to listen when I told him they hate my guts, but I didn’t expect to find them dealing with a murder. They won’t even consider speaking to him until that’s cleared up, but if he offers to take a certain prisoner off their hands, they might change their minds.”
His eyes widened a little. “Your brother?”
“Not my brother, but yes.” I grimaced. “Honestly, he’d probably be more secure with the Death King, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to make an escape while they were moving him to the castle. He already gave them the slip once.”
“Yeah, they need to be careful,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t lock him up in one of their more secure facilities, like the one at the north of the city.”
“I think that’s where the whole Family was locked up until a month ago,” I said. “The guards wouldn’t tell me the details, but it’s the most secure of their prisons and the Family still managed to break out of there. I reckon that’s why the House of Fire took Adair in instead, so the others wouldn’t have the same knowledge of the layout. Once they’ve broken out of a place once, they’d be able to do the same again.”
I was kind of surprised they hadn’t tried to come and get him anyway, but it was beyond me to figure out the motives of the two people who’d raised me. For all we knew, they’d left Adair there as a punishment for getting himself caught.
“Yeah, the House of Fire likes to keep everything quiet,” Miles said. “They barely acknowledge we exist, which works in our favour.”
“Shawn thought they were going to take all the city’s mages under their control,” I said. “Including spirit mages.”
His jaw tightened. “Shawn thought that turning on the rest of us would be justified if it meant he could get revenge on behalf of the spirit mages who died in the war.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I hadn’t brought up the subject. Shawn had been one of Miles’s friends as well as a fellow Spirit Agent, and his betrayal hadn’t helped their distrusting attitude towards me—or mine towards them.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “The others are having a hard time dealing with the fallout, but I’m just glad we found out before we started working closer with the Death King again.”
“Be glad he revealed his true colours. He’s an arsehole.” I looked up at the sound of footsteps around the corner and saw the silhouette of someone outside the gate. “I think you have a visitor.”
“Maybe they’re here to pick up the vampire chickens,” he commented.
“I thought you were keeping them.”
“Nah, sooner or later someone will notice and tell tales on us to the authorities.” He walked around to the front of the house and halted dead in his tracks.
Harris, the security guard from the House of Fire, stood on the doorstep. Had he followed me here? Maybe I ought to have
watched my back more carefully, but I had assumed the guards would have been glad to be rid of me. Two more guards joined him, all of them wearing the same red-and-black uniform. My body tensed at the sight of them, automatically falling into a defensive stance.
“You again,” said Harris. “I thought you were going back to the Death King. Your… employer.” His tone dripped with scepticism.
“I dropped by here first to catch up with a friend,” I said. “What’re you doing here?”
“We have a directive from the upper echelons of the four Houses of the Elements, aimed at all independent mages in the city,” he said. “The new rules will ensure that the city of Elysium remains a safe place for mages and non-mages.”
“What rules?” said Miles. “Who even are you?”
“Harris,” he said. “Representative of the House of Fire.”
“Meaning he does the grunt work nobody else wants too,” I interjected. “What’s got the Houses all agitated, then? Aside from the obvious?”
The Family? Perhaps the Houses weren’t as indifferent to their escape as they seemed. The other guards scowled at me from behind Harris, cracking their knuckles.
“The amount of crimes committed by mages has been on the increase over the last few weeks,” he said. “Especially mages who aren’t registered with the Houses. How many people live here in this property?”
“None of your business,” said Miles. “We aren’t part of the Houses because we’re spirit mages, and our own House was shafted after the war, in case you’ve forgotten. But I guess you were a kid back then.”
I hadn’t even known there’d ever been a House of Spirit at all. Not that I’d met many spirit mages before I’d had my first run-in with the Spirit Agents, because to my knowledge, they’d been virtually wiped out in the war thirty years prior.
The guard cleared his throat. “I’m going to have to carry out a house inspection.”
House of Fire (Parallel Magic Book 2) Page 3
