Thief of Souls

by Emma L. Adams

I switched my glasses for contacts, grabbed my backpack, and for the second time in two days, I caught the bus to the Order’s headquarters. Since it was a weekend, the bus was packed and running at the speed of a legless wight, so it took me a full three-quarters of an hour to reach town.

  The instant I stepped off the bus, a blast of smoke hit me in the face, and my vision blurred, my eyes tearing up. At once, the humans around me erupted into panic, yelling and rubbing their eyes. They were under the impression someone had unleashed tear gas into the air, but I knew better.

  Someone had set off a cantrip. Someone who was willing to use magic in daylight, with human witnesses, no less. I’d scanned my fellow passengers on the bus, and none were magically inclined except for me. That made me the most likely target, but thanks to the smoke, I could hardly see where I was going, let alone who’d set off the cantrip. I felt my way forward with one hand outstretched, my instincts driving me to take this as far away from the bus stop as possible before I got yet another black mark on my record for making a scene in front of a bunch of ordinary humans.

  With my other hand, I reached into my pocket for a cantrip of my own. I couldn’t use anything overtly flashy for the sake of my human audience, but I could at least get my eyesight back before I walked into traffic.

  The instant I turned on the cantrip, a rush of sensation hit me. My sight returned to almost normal, while my sense of hearing and smell went into overdrive. The rumble of traffic rose to a roar like an oncoming truck, the wind became a storm, and the echoing sound of the attacker’s departure pounded against my ears.

  I pelted after the culprit down a street where the scent of traffic mingled with an unmistakeable tang of magic. I stood as good a chance of being hit by a passing car as I did by the attacker, but I was gaining on him. I dug into my bag for my umbrella, the closest thing to a weapon I was allowed to carry on this side, and gave it a swing, but it passed through empty air. A rush of energy tingling in my fingertips told me a node had switched on—and the thief had vanished from sight.

  I blinked hard, the glint of the node resolving into a steady stream of energy. I hadn’t even known there was a node in here, but the attacker would be running for freedom through the Parallel by now. Crap on toast.

  Footsteps came from behind me. I spun around and swung the umbrella with all my might. There came a crunch and a yelp, and my ex-boyfriend staggered away from me with one hand pressed to his face. Oops.

  Brant spat out curses. “Ow! What the hell, Liv?”

  “Sorry, couldn’t see you.” He was lucky I hadn’t carried anything stronger. Of course, knives and guns weren’t allowed, because of the ordinary humans. Which, fair enough. Most of us aren’t attacked by magically gifted rogues twice in two days. “I was chasing someone.”

  “In public?” He moved his hand to his nose as though checking if it was broken.

  “They attacked a bunch of ordinary humans in broad daylight.” I blinked, trying to clear the remainder of the smoke from my eyes. “What the hell are you doing here? Checking in with the Order?”

  “What else would I be doing?” He rubbed his cheek, where a livid bruise was beginning to form. “I saw you running, and I came to help you.”

  “Yeah, you got here too late,” I told him. “The person who set off the cantrip hopped through the node to the other side.”

  My eyes stung and burned as the effects of the sense-enhancing cantrip faded and the pain of the attacker’s spell returned. Nasty piece of work, that.

  “Who was it, a practitioner?” he asked.

  “I assume so. I’m also guessing the dude bought it from the market on the other side, unless it was a custom job.” I shoved my umbrella back into my bag. “What the hell did anyone have to gain by targeting human bystanders?”

  “I don’t know. Hang on a second.” He turned on his heel and headed towards the crowd dispersing around the bus stop.

  “Hey!” I followed after him, the weak daylight making the stinging sensation in my eyes worse. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for any traces of the attacker.”

  “There won’t be any.” Cantrips were made of a magical substance set to disintegrate within seconds of activation—a practice invented by rogues to prevent anyone tracking a spell back to its user. It also proved a handy way to hide the evidence from the ordinary humans, too, but today, it’d worked against us in a major way. “Does it matter if there is?”

  He turned back to me, his form blurring before my eyes. “I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be blamed for it.”

  “If you go over there and start acting suspiciously, they’ll blame you instead.” I blinked hard, willing my eyes to stop stinging. “Leave it alone.”

  He was silent for an instant. “I think we need to talk.”

  “That’s not what you said a year ago. I thought we were done talking.”

  He winced. “Look, there’s something major going on. And it’s not about us. Though if you’d like to talk about that, too, we can go ahead, but—”

  “I have to go to the Order,” I told him. “I can report the attack while I’m at it. Someone might have seen the chaos from over there.”

  “You can’t tell them!” His alarmed expression prompted me to look around to see if there were any Order employees within earshot, but there weren’t any. That cemented my suspicion that I’d been the target. If the attacker had been aiming for the Order, he’d have gone closer to their doors.

  “Why not? They’re more likely to help me than you are.” I drew in a breath. “You ditched me for the Parallel without so much as a goodbye. Now you have the nerve to show up here on what is shaping up to be the shittiest week of my life and butt into my business? Forget it.”

  I walked past him, resisting the impulse to rub the stinging from my eyes—it’d only make the pain worse. Like talking to Brant, pretty much. No matter how many times I’d rehearsed what I’d say if he showed up on my doorstep again, I hadn’t accounted for the universe’s habit of throwing plot twists in my path.

  Brant watched me walk. Then he said, “If you change your mind, you have my number.”

  If I did, it was on my old phone, buried in my junk drawer. I was late enough checking into the retrieval unit as it was, so I put that out of mind and walked towards the Order.

  As I neared the glass doors, doubts set in. Unwelcome as his presence might be, Brant might know something about who was targeting me. Besides, the Order hadn’t witnessed the attack. Telling them might well paint a target on my own head, especially with no proof. Would it really be worth the risk of another black mark on my record? The odds were slim, but for all I knew, the attacker had been aiming for someone else, someone with clout within the Order. Besides, now he was the Parallel’s problem, not mine.

  I made for the retrieval unit downstairs, where I found Mrs Carlisle, the department head, arranging a stack of boxes behind the desk where the kid had been sitting yesterday evening.

  “Mrs Carlisle,” I said. “I heard you wanted to talk to me. What’s the issue?”

  “Mr Cobb wants to see you,” she said shortly.

  “He does?” Why would a supervisor from another division want to talk to the likes of me? I ranked somewhere between pond scum and dirt in his eyes, and the only time we’d spoken was for him to yell at me for treading mud in the lobby. “Is it true what Judith said—that the amulet’s the wrong one? Because I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “Take it up with him,” she said, without lifting her head.

  I debated telling her a practitioner had attacked me in front of ordinary human witnesses, but as the head of the lowest branch of the Order, Mrs Carlisle had little more authority than I did.

  Instead, I climbed the stairs and made for the corridor of offices containing the supervisors for this Order branch. Mr Cobb oversaw finance or something equally inscrutable, so it was anyone’s guess what he wanted with me. I’d almost achieved a negative score in my statistics exam. He must be imp
ortant if he had his own name on his office door, so I dragged a hand through my hair to tidy it and hoped my eyes weren’t too red and teary from the cantrip blast.

  I rapped on the door with my knuckles, and a voice barked out, “Come in.”

  Drawing in a steadying breath, I entered. Mr Cobb sat at a desk in the office, wearing a tie so tight it was a wonder he could breathe, and a matching iron-grey suit. His dark hair was streaked with grey, too, his milky blue eyes too large for his pallid face. He held the amulet in one wrinkled hand, which banished all my hopes that the whole thing had been a mistake.

  “What is the issue?” I closed the door behind me. “I followed the orders to the letter. I was told to find a thief and retrieve his haul, and that amulet was all I found in his hideout.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it, given your track record,” he said, in cold tones.

  So that’s what this is about. I’d always suspected he was one of the supervisors involved in passing the sentence on me, and that he’d argued for me to lose more than my memories. His contempt for me made little sense otherwise. On the other hand, why make such a fuss over a simple amulet?

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “I brought everything I found inside the thief’s hideout—who was a water mage, by the way. That part wasn’t in the job description. But there were no other practitioners hiding in the Death King’s territory. I assumed that amulet was valuable, since it was hidden within a magical ward.”

  “You were mistaken,” he said. “This isn’t what we were looking for.”

  “It’s not the amulet you were looking for?” From his blank expression, it seemed he couldn’t appreciate a good Star Wars reference. “It was literally the only thing of value the thief had on him, as far as I’m aware.”

  How many amulets carved with decorative skulls were typically found lying around the swamp? Given that it was the Death King’s territory… a lot, possibly. Didn’t make his request to return it any less weird.

  “This is what I’ve been told from the upper room,” he said. “We can’t store this amulet here with no paperwork for it. It has to go back to the Parallel.”

  “The thief who stole it is dead. Or worse.” A shiver danced over my skin at the memory of his horrified screaming as the Death King and his four soldiers had cornered him. If he’d had anything else of value, they’d doubtless have taken it off him before they burned his corpse.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “The instructions from the upper room are clear. Take this amulet back with you and leave it where you found it.”

  “I reckon the Death King probably had his Fire Element burn the place to a crisp along with its owner.”

  His brow arched. “The Death King doesn’t leave his territory.”

  “I was on his territory.” I might as well have been addressing a brick wall. “That’s why I had to cross the node into my house instead of outside the Order’s headquarters. The Death King’s people were all riding in the swamp at once. They chased down the thief. It’s not safe for me to return there now.”

  Surprise momentarily crossed his face, mingling with contempt. “You used a node to travel into your house?”

  “Yeah, why?” I said. “I had a permit. It’s not against the rules.”

  I’d have thought he’d be grateful that I’d avoided dripping swamp water all over the lobby. Not to mention, if I’d used the node to hop into the Order’s headquarters, the phantom would have followed me here instead of home. The brief amusement wouldn’t have made up for how much trouble I’d have been in.

  He leaned forward in his seat. “No, but I’m surprised, given your… history, that you would use magic outside of the Order’s jurisdiction.”

  “It’s not magic.” Not in the usual sense. Anyone could travel via a node if they knew how to, but the Order kept that information under wraps for a reason. Couldn’t have the general public getting dangerous ideas.

  “Technicalities,” he said. “In any case, there’s no excuses. Take the amulet back to the swamplands and then come back here. Those are your orders.”

  Arse. “Can’t another retriever take it with them? There’s got to be at least one person in the building heading into the Parallel today.”

  “Certainly not,” he responded. “This is your responsibility to handle, Olivia. Consider your record.”

  As if I could forget it. I debated mentioning the attack at the bus stop, but I had an inkling I’d be wasting my time trying to justify myself to this guy. If I pushed the wrong buttons, he’d raise hell among the upper room, and I’d find myself in deeper shit than ever. Nearly half the senior supervisors had argued against me being allowed to keep my magic, while others had claimed that I should have lost more than two years of memories.

  I slid the amulet into my pocket with shaking hands, feeling Mr Cobb’s stare on my back. Looking for signs of lawbreaking, I’d guess.

  All right, then. I needed to take the amulet back to where I’d found it, and hope that this time, nothing followed me back home.

  4

  I was fifteen the first time I set eyes on Dirk Alban. At one time, I might have claimed I wasn’t enamoured the instant I saw him, but that would be a lie. Everyone was. When our academy class took a trip to the Order’s offices, he’d been the one to greet us, and he’d opened our eyes to the magical riches on the other side of the nodes. At the end of the day, he singled me out and gave me his contact details, telling me he could teach me magic.

  I didn’t know why I took him up on his offer. I only knew what the reports said, and by all accounts, he didn’t lure me in by using a spell or coerce me in any other manner. If he had, the Order might not have been forced to put me on trial. Sometimes I still heard his voice in my dreams, but whenever I tried to probe further, all I recalled was my mind cracking in two, leaving nothing but dust and regret and the stench of magic gone bad.

  In my first concrete memory after the incident, I’d come to, sitting on a steel-backed chair in one of the Order’s courtrooms. I’d been dizzy and disorientated, yet part of me knew I’d broken a deep, unforgivable rule, and that I was lucky to be alive.

  The Order told me Dirk was dead. They told me they’d found me standing beside his body, and that we’d both been found guilty of practising spirit magic. Only the fact that I was underage kept them from sentencing me to death. Instead, they’d tried to strip away my memories of our lessons, but in the process, they’d taken much, much more.

  Lost in sour thoughts, I walked straight past Brant on my way out of the Order.

  “Hey,” said Brant. “I’m sorry if I was too forward earlier.”

  “Uh-huh.” Even without the stinging aftereffects of the spell in my eyes, I still didn’t want to look directly at him. “I have to go back to the Parallel, so I won’t be seeing you later.”

  “What for?” he pressed. “If it’s a routine mission, I’m heading that way anyway. I did mean it when I said I owed you.”

  For an instant, I was tempted to take him up on the offer. “I was told to find an amulet yesterday. The Order then decided I brought them the wrong artefact, so I have to put it back in the middle of the swamp. If you really want to waste your time with that, then feel free.”

  His brows shot up. “Amulet, you say?”

  “Yeah, why? I don’t understand what the problem is.”

  The amulet didn’t even feel magical, however creepy it looked. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t supposed to have bothered with it, but the lengths the water mage had gone to keep it protected said otherwise.

  “Nor me, if you don’t tell me,” he said. “Who stole it?”

  “A water mage who’s currently sleeping with the fishes,” I responded. “I’m just gonna run this errand, and if you still want to talk to me, you can come and see me when the Order’s supervisors aren’t breathing down my neck.”

  “This is bullshit,” he said. “Look, you could just hand that amulet to me instead. It’s not like they�
��re going to walk into the Parallel and check. It’ll be stolen the instant you put it down, besides.”

  I know. That’s why it’s so weird for them to make such a fuss.

  “Why are you offering me help?” Call me suspicious, but he hadn’t walked back into my life for no reason. My thoughts might be clouded by the emotions brought on by our shared history, but I knew that much.

  “Because…” He hesitated. “I know the Order stole your magic from you. What if I could get it back?”

  I stared openly at him. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I know of someone who’s researching memory spells,” he said, speaking quickly. “I’ve met a lot of people in the last year who can do things with magic you’ve never seen before. In the Parallel, anything is possible.”

  No way. The Order had the monopoly on that kind of magic. If he’d found some dodgy experimental practitioner in the Parallel, who knew what the side effects would be? Besides, perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t remember a single word of Dirk Alban’s lessons. Ignorance meant the Order had no extra leverage to use against me.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m good. But I really do need to get this amulet back where it came from.”

  “I’ll come with you,” he persisted.

  I shook my head. “The Order will think we’re working together.”

  “We’re not breaking the law.” He reached out a hand. “You’re going to have to start trusting again, someday, Liv.”

  I forced a laugh. Today had brought a dozen reminders of why that was a bad idea already and it was barely mid-morning. “I just want to be left alone. Please.”

  Hurt flashed in his eyes, but he withdrew his hand. I felt like the biggest shithead in the world as I walked to the nearest node and rode the current over into the Parallel.

  I landed at the edge of the Death King’s swamp, energy coursing through my veins. Everyone said the nodes were the original source of the spirit mages’ power, and even without magic, I could still feel the current humming inside me. Yet everyone knew most of the spirit mages had died in the war and the rest had been executed for war crimes, and if I went back down that road, I’d end up the same way. Brant’s offer might be sincere, but it wasn’t worth the risk.