by Lisa Daniels
They might have been dragons, but that didn’t stop them being poor. They were at the lowest possible caste of dragon society—the pond scum that floated upon the surface, only able to shift into creatures that were slightly smaller than the average horse, compared to the high-society dragons whose bloodlines allowed them to shapeshift into monstrosities as big as houses.
All of this meant that the job was everything. Regal was everything, even if he ran illegal underground deadrings and got his daughter involved in the fights. Mason had followed her, protected her, and taken the money from her father every month.
And now that little harridan was gone. Vanished from her bedroom. On his watch! Alarm bells rang when he saw her laptop was gone, and her backpack, small knitted bear, and diary. The suitcase was still here, but the bear and diary meant one thing: she’d run.
Mason took deep, heavy breaths through his nose, considering just how exactly he was going to convey this to Regal. The man was already on the shitlist with Zaimov. Any more bad news would send him through the roof, causing a hard, potentially spine-breaking landing on Mason’s back.
He simply couldn’t afford to be fired. Arla had only just started college, after that year of anxiety that she’d fail her exams or wouldn’t get into the university she wanted. His mother was paid peanuts at the moment, but she was close to a promotion, where she’d be paid considerably more than just peanuts. The last thing she needed was an excuse to relapse.
I’m seriously debating not saying anything. Yes—if he could figure out where she was, he could descend upon her and return without a feather ruffled. But of course, she might refuse to go as well. He might need to use considerable force, and if she resisted with all her might, all her magic…
Alright. He needed to go and find a new job and fast, then. He slunk downstairs, to see Regal sitting at the table. The man stared at him disdainfully. “Where’s my daughter?”
“She slipped out last night,” Mason said. “Went to a party and didn’t bother informing either of us.”
Regal sighed. “Of course she did. Know where?”
“No. Just the evidence she was going on her laptop.” Gods, it was easy to lie, wasn’t it?
“She might be hiding out at one of her little friends’ places, then,” Regal said in mild disgust. “Do bring her back, will you? We’ve got plans to make. Zaimov’s not one known for patience.”
Mason nodded, inwardly breathing in relief that Regal had accepted the lie so quickly. He was distracted this morning, with stress lines from the encounter last night, so it stood to reason he might be less tethered.
He’d banked on that, to be honest. “Right away, sir.”
The master of the house nodded, his eyes in a faraway place. “He shut down my operations,” Regal said softly. “Told me he found a guardian angel spirit for himself. All my efforts...” One hand clenched into a fist. Anger glittered in those suddenly focused eyes. “My efforts! Everything I did for him! And he—he offers me mercy. Ah yes. I’m so blessed.” There seemed to be a slight contradiction between the words said and the tone they were conveyed in.
Best not to tackle that too closely, Mason decided. He left the master of the house to it, and set to working out just where exactly Ellie had gone, and whether or not he had any alternative to hauling her back and quite possibly being mauled by whatever angry spirit she happened to raise up, and breaking that last thread of respect she might hold for him.
Maybe he could return to his family. They hadn’t seen him in weeks. Regal didn’t know where they lived. In fact, Mason wasn’t entirely sure if Regal even knew his employee had a family. Mason just didn’t bother talking about them.
He gathered his things, occasionally hearing Regal mutter to the demons in his head, and then inspected Ellie’s room. She did occasionally sneak out of the house for parties without her bodyguard around to pull her back to her father by the ear, so it was a plausible lie to feed Regal. So… she’d taken the stuffed bear, something her mother had given her when she was born. The girl clearly was planning a complete escape. She didn’t have any jobs aside from the deadring.
No one, however, took off unless they had something arranged. He highly suspected that even if her laptop was close, the history would be wiped. If she’s leaving, she won’t want to stay in Stoneshire, Mason decided. She’d go to another state. She only had an inbound passport, though, so it had to be somewhere within America itself. However, since America was a big place, that wasn’t the most helpful. What else did Mason know?
Chat platforms. He went to his computer and pulled up all the sites he knew her to be on, and special messaging groups, too. Ellie had less privacy than she believed. Nothing on her Facebook profile, since he knew the password. Nothing on her Skype, though it seemed she hadn’t used that for months. He crept through her life inch by inch until he settled on Discord, and the necromancer group she’d joined there. One unread message from a user vanished, meaning she was actively reading it at that moment. He clicked and saw a chatroom between Eleganza and TaliaTails, and got the information he needed in less than a minute.
She’d landed in Lasthearth. They were meeting up there. TaliaTails, a fellow necromancer, was taking her in as Ellie made her great escape.
Oh, Ellie… Mason shook his head. He didn’t want to scroll up any further. He already felt uncomfortable enough looking at private messages. He knew how the girl hated her privacy being targeted, and remembered the amount of times she’d asked him if he would be willing to disobey her father’s demands for her.
He was there for her more than her father ever was. It was an awkward start to be saddled with a nine-year-old girl, but she’d been a good client to work with. She deserved better than her father. He’d seen what happened with her mother, and the spirit of her mother after death.
He also knew what Regal could do to him, offering a fate worse than death.
Lasthearth, he thought, setting to book a ticket for himself, too. There were three flights a day, and obviously Ellie had gotten the earliest possible one. He could be on the plane in three hours’ time, and after he booked the ticket, he wondered just how exactly he’d be able to persuade her to come back across the country. She’d kick and scream, never wanting to get onto a flight. He wouldn’t blame her for kicking and screaming, either. It proved an annoyance, really, knowing how she worked.
I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, he told himself. An opportunity would present. Right now the priority was ensuring that he was in her presence, and that she was safe, beyond hauling her back to Regal.
* * *
Where Stoneshire was an old city predominantly full of cemeteries, old stone structures like castles and towers, and in general, designs to resist the frequent rains that hit the city, Lasthearth was more modern and vibrant in comparison. It didn’t have that same punch of the weight of history as Stoneshire did. It also seemed like a far less appropriate place for a necromancer to live.
He didn’t have a GPS tracker on anything of Ellie’s. Regal had considered it at one point, but he didn’t really suspect his daughter would ever dare to disobey and betray to such a degree.
She’s running. He thought about the brief flickers of conversation he had seen in her exchange with TaliaTails. That she intended to exchange information. In other words, become a turn-cloak. Perhaps ask for protection from the police and render his role invalid. He booked a hotel in Lasthearth near the airport, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to find her without any more evidence of where she was. Lasthearth was a big city. All he knew was that this TaliaTails lived here. Perhaps he should have scrolled back further on the private messages. He might have found out more personal information on this user that prompted him toward their identity.
Most likely a woman, anyway. Not some romantic interest she was running away to. Obviously a necromancer, so perhaps she might be on the registered necromancer list in Lasthearth. Magic users were required to be on a separate, national register, but the data
was sensitive, and he wouldn’t be able to find it via a simple Google search. Maybe he could find a Diviner, but they tended to charge obscene amounts for their services. Private investigator, maybe, but he wasn’t exactly rolling in dough.
Just have to do some classic, DIY investigation himself. TaliaTails didn’t appear in searches for Talia, Necromancer, Lasthearth, since he suspected that to be the actual name of the user. Next best thing was a search for all known incidents with necromancers, he thought, as he sat in a café and gulped down two espressos at once. Slim chance that this particular necromancer might have had anything to do with the incidents, as they might be underground and illegal, like Regal and Ellie were, but better than no chance at all.
His eyes settled on one incident, dated about five months ago, of a university attack thwarted by one Talia Grieves, who had a sister in the force: Rosen Grieves.
Now this looked promising. Could it be Talia Grieves? With her important councilman father, also a necromancer? Quite blue-blooded, this family. Talia was an archaeology student, her sister in law enforcement who was prominent in thwarting the city-wide accident-massacre in Stoneshire…
It had to be. Excitement at his discovery flowed through him like adrenaline. The Grieves family. Working in conjunction with forensic anthropologists in Stoneshire. Chasing down that route, he stumbled across something rather interesting. An Amelia Hargraves, whose Wikipedia conjured up a family name list, including a Morgana Hargraves who looked suspiciously like the necromancer known as Crimson in the underworld, come to think of it. Although it didn’t list Morgana as a necromancer, that wasn’t unusual. People tended to have that left out of their bios if they could.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out that Morgana Hargraves was part of a sting operation in the police? After all, there were prominent, famous bodies being robbed from their graves. The police needed to crack down on it somehow. And hadn’t she bought from the auction, too? Where the thieves were selling the bodies to necromancers?
The nest gets more infested the further I look at this, he thought. All the connections his brain was making felt just right.
Ellie wanted to join the operation. She wanted out, too. If he gave this information to Regal and by proxy, Zaimov, he could likely get kill orders placed on both families. Ellie would lose her connections, be isolated, and have no choice but to return.
Except, well, they were doing a lot of good. Unease twinged through Mason’s stomach. No… it didn’t sit well with him at all to do something so cruel. She didn’t deserve to have friends and associates killed just for that kind of control.
He ordered a third espresso, considering how to approach this.
Chapter Three – Ellie
Ellie stared in amazement at her friend’s place. The Grieves family lived in a mansion, of all places, and it was quite startling to see visually just how filthy rich they were. Talia Grieves, meanwhile, proudly showed Ellie around the place, including the pet cemetery in the garden where beloved pets were buried.
“I plan to move out soon, because I want to strike out on my own, like my sister did—but yeah, it’s a pretty cool place, isn’t it?”
“That’s a bit of an understatement now,” Ellie said, still gaping. “What a sight this is to my criminal eyes...”
“Come, now. You can’t be that much of a criminal,” Talia countered. The woman was taller than Ellie, with a confident manner about her that Ellie admired, and partially wanted to imitate. Her eyes were dark compared to Ellie’s blue, and she fitted the image of a necromancer far better in Ellie’s opinion.
“Not anymore, I suppose,” Ellie said. “I stopped with the deadrings since my father’s business got disrupted and he had to wait for a response from higher-ups.”
“Ugh. You’ve said so much about your father. I never can be sure if you like him or hate him.” Talia was leading Ellie into the house, preparing to introduce her to her father, Rickard, and then her sister. “But I suppose if you’re planning to ‘fess everything, it’s more hate than like.”
“It’s being tired, that’s what,” Ellie said. “It might even be good for him, too. If I can shut down all the operations, then he’d have no reason to stay in that world, surely.” Not that she was entirely sure. She hadn’t been educated quite as well as people like Talia had. Sure, she had private tuition, but all of that stopped at eighteen. She, however, had chosen to join the deadrings, so she couldn’t exactly blame her father for the lack of further education on that part.
“You really think so?” Talia tugged Ellie by the wrist. Both of them had met online almost three years ago, looking for a place to be themselves. It was nice just to be able to talk about typical things they couldn’t do with normal people. It was nice to have someone to share everything with. They got on well from the start, and ended up sharing a lot more of each other in DMs than intended. Even to the point where Ellie knew about Talia’s role in preventing a corpse invasion at her university, and that sometimes she worked with the police, because her whole family was in the business. The thing that interested Ellie the most was that Talia’s father happened to be a revenant.
Well, more like he’d struck a deal with a revenant, since an attempted assassination left him with brain damage, and his spirit was like, “nope, I ain’t having that”, and went straight to the depths of the Other Side to bargain with the devil.
That was super effing cool. It messed up all her knowledge of revenants, for sure. It messed up Talia’s, as well.
“My dad’s just here.” Talia straightened herself and rapped smartly on a rich walnut-colored door, replete with a shining brass handle. “The handle is too loud and it annoys him,” she explained, when Ellie asked why she didn’t use the handle.
“Come in,” said a low, imperious voice. Talia opened the door, and Ellie was greeted by the sight of a rapier-thin man with icy blue eyes sitting behind his desk. He seemed almost dwarfed by the desk, but there was a kind of arrogance about him that made someone pay attention. A revenant-man. Ellie couldn’t take her eyes off him. “Well? Introduce us, daughter.”
“Dad, this is Ellie Lockhart. Ellie, this is my dad, Rickard Grieves.”
Rickard graciously accepted Ellie’s proffered hand, and she felt a faint whispering in her mind when she did so, which caused the hairs on the back of her neck to rise.
“Talia has told me all about you,” he said. There was no real warmth in his voice—he was just going through the proper motions, as an aristocrat did. Or a councilman. “She tells me you are planning to give the police a lot of information. That you fought in deadrings.” A strange gleam entered his blue eyes.
“I did,” Ellie replied cautiously, hoping he wasn’t about to arrest her on the spot or something. Though she’d been accepted to stay here, and Talia assured her everything would be alright, there was still the unavoidable aspect of Ellie being a criminal—no, former criminal, she told herself firmly—and this entire family had worked on the other side in law enforcement or with it.
“You’ll have to tell me all about them,” Rickard said. “It is fascinating, the way some of us use our magic. Not the worst way I’ve seen it be used, either. I campaigned for the concept of necromancer duelists to be a legal sport. There is still a lot of resilience, though I think some of our governors are starting to see the merit in it.”
Ellie raised her eyebrows at the man, honestly surprised. “You really think it should be legal?”
“Of course. But for now, they remain a problem and are out of control, since people have taken to robbing corpses out of famous graves. We’ve had a rise in the number of cremations recently as a result.”
Not that even a cremation could stop a determined necromancer. They could use the ashes, too. It might be a harder link to maintain than with a body or with bones, but if there was even the slightest atom of that person’s physical body in the material world, then a necromancer had a link. Though, of course, they could just yank the soul into someone else’s body. Th
e connection might be less fluid, but it worked anyway. Those mismatched bodies and souls were what made those shambling, slow and jerky zombies.
“The business is about to crash,” Ellie said. “My father’s in deep trouble since he let his spirit go on a rampage.”
“He should have known better than to attempt to control a revenant,” said the revenant-human, which made Ellie wonder just how much of the human was left in him. “That was on the news. A secret deadring busted, thanks to a sting operation set up by the police.”
“It was a bit more than just that,” Ellie said, feeling instantly annoyed at how the media had chosen to portray it. “Some man called Zaimov came down to threaten my father.”
At this name, Rickard’s pupils contracted in sudden loathing. But his voice afterward didn’t reflect his expression. “I see. Well, they always need someone to run the show. Managers. CEO. Board members… it’s a profitable business. Anyway, I must get back to business. Thank you for introducing me to your friend, Talia. I’m sure she will be a great asset to our work.”
Just like that, they were dismissed, and Talia left the room with Ellie and showed her to where she’d be sleeping.
“Do you get the impression your father knows something about Zaimov?” Ellie asked.
Talia nodded. “He knows something, I think. But we won’t get it out of him directly. Anyway, here’s where you’re staying until we can educate you enough to maintain a job and get you out there.”
“Wonder what it’ll take to become an archaeologist?” Ellie asked. “I liked the sound of your course.”
Talia grinned. “Maybe you can apply to the same university I’m going to.”
Ellie grinned as well. Already, her life felt so much more interesting and vibrant, compared to being stuck in the house, or getting shuffled to some shady deadring.
