by Lisa Daniels
Which, to be honest, Ellie thought, sounded like a great occupation for a necromancer.
Eleganza: im booking my ticket now
Well, not quite now. She made sure to shut the door first, in case her bodyguard or father might snoop in. She also made sure she faced the door, so it wouldn’t be clear what kind of activity she was doing on her laptop. She’d need to wipe the history after, too. Because she felt fairly certain that they checked her research results, to make sure she wasn’t suddenly going to escape.
Her father likely thought that with his control of her money from the deadrings, she would be too stifled to move.
But she’d gotten quite a few underhand cash payments, too, placing them into a bank separate from the one her father owned, and without his knowledge. She’d asked the tellers especially. For every match she won, and even some of the matches she’d lost (and been certain she’d lose, or deliberately threw the match to do so), she’d stashed away a fair amount of the earnings without her father’s knowledge.
Pulling out all the stops, she booked her ticket for the wee hours of the morning. When she’d finished, her mouth was dry, her hands felt clammy and eel-like, and she wondered if her heart was beating so loud that her old bodyguard would pick it up from the other room with his sensitive hearing. Certainly it was loud for her.
The moments passed. She downloaded her e-ticket, gathered her passport (another thing she’d arranged without her father’s knowledge), and flinched when the front door slammed, signaling the departure of that man.
Her father crawled up the stairs afterward. He opened the door without knocking, as was his custom, which Ellie knew was to try and catch her in the act of doing something furtive. “We’re packing soon,” he said to her. “Soon as I’ve got this house sold, we’re going. I’ve been asked to use my services in a plane other than Stoneshire.” Her father held no hint of a smile in his voice or face. “You’ll have to establish yourself as a fighter in a new deadring.”
“Neat,” Ellie said, careful to display the reaction she knew her father wanted. “I was getting bored of all the necromancers here, anyway.”
“Even Crimson?”
“Crimson is a lame duck now,” Ellie replied. “She doesn’t have her super-powered guardian angel anymore, so she’s an average schmuck like the rest of us. And we know she wouldn’t stand a chance against me.” Ellie was rather proud of the swagger she managed to insert in her tone. He’d be convinced of this performance, hopefully. “Where we going?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Regal replied. “But it’ll be good for the change, I think. Good that Zaimov’s given us another chance.”
Yes, another chance, Ellie thought, smiling into her father’s face while her thoughts whirled. Another chance to be told what to do, by a man who’d sink you to the bottom of the ocean if you so much as breathed wrong. And by extension, she’d be a part of the body count, presumably. Being related to him and in the business as a fighter and all.
Regal smiled a tired smile and left the room without closing the door. The moment he vanished, Ellie’s expression dropped like a hammer hitting an anvil.
She really, really needed to get out of this place.
Chapter Two – Mason
Almost fourteen years, since he first became Ellie’s protector. Fourteen years of enduring tantrums, scraped knees, clouds of tears and watching that scruffy, wild child grow into a capable yet still wild woman, growing a new face and body to hide that nine-year-old within. He might have been dubious of the job at first, but you just got used to things, and they became an everyday part of life, and the money sent to his poor siblings got them right into college, their mother into rehab, and their father a proper gravestone after years with a wooden stub in the ground.
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 tha
t 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.”