I opened my mouth to argue, but he had a point. Brant might act like a hothead, but the guy was sharp.
“I know,” I said, “but I have something I need to return to the Order if I want to stop everyone trying to kill me.”
His brow cocked. “Care to tell me what it is?”
“As I told you earlier, the Order sent me on a mission to steal an amulet yesterday,” I said. “Then they backtracked and sent me to put it back where I found it. Turns out it’s more than an amulet. It’s someone’s soul.”
Brant’s eyes widened. “A soul amulet?”
“You’ve got it.” I checked it was still in my pocket. “I have to give it back to the Order, or else the Death King’s people will find out I’m the one who has it. And then? I’ll envy that decomposing skeleton, that’s for sure.”
“You can’t,” he said.
“What do you mean, I can’t?” I said. “I can’t keep it. And the Death King isn’t exactly known for listening to reason. This is the Order’s responsibility.”
“I don’t disagree, but they already told you to return it to the Parallel.”
“There was nobody to return it to,” I responded. “The place was overrun with wights. I guess the Death King found out about the theft, but his people didn’t find the amulet because I had it. He’s going to think it was me who stole it.”
Which… I had. Accidentally, of course, but to the King of the Dead, I doubted it mattered.
His mouth flattened. “All right. I offered to help you before, and I meant it. Don’t go back to the Order. They’ll blame you, Liv. You know they will.”
Damn him for speaking the truth. As a rogue, he wasn’t beholden to the Order, and he’d shunned them for a reason. He also knew I was desperate. Desperate enough to consider taking him up on his offer.
“What is it you’re offering me?” I asked. “Can these so-called contacts of yours help me with this situation?”
He glanced around. “Not here. We can talk somewhere else.”
I shouldn’t. And yet.
“All right.”
6
Brant and I walked into a near-empty pub. He ordered a pint, while I ordered a diet coke. Alcohol made me sleepy, which was the last thing I needed at the moment. We took our drinks to a table in the far corner, and I checked to make sure nobody lurked nearby before I addressed Brant. “Tell me about these contacts of yours.”
“First things first,” he said. “That soul amulet. I heard rumours… but now you’ve confirmed how serious it is.”
“Rumours of what?”
“A thief who trades in souls.”
I stared at him for a second. “Since when was there trade in souls?”
“For years. Decades. At least as long as I’ve lived in the Parallel.”
I raised a brow. “Seriously? What use is a soul without a body?”
“To some, it’s as valuable as gold.”
“You mean, to spirit mages,” I said. “They’re extinct.”
“And Dirk Alban?”
A flinch travelled through my limbs. I gripped my glass. “He wasn’t a spirit mage. Just a practitioner.”
“Same difference,” he said. “Yes, most of them died out in the war, but it’s possible for any practitioner to learn basic spirit magic with the right teacher. You’re proof of that.”
My grip tightened. “You know how well it turned out for me. I stepped over a line and I’m still paying for it now.”
The worst part? I didn’t know what I’d done to draw the Order’s attention on that fateful day. All I knew Dirk had lost his life, while I’d lost my memories.
“I’m not denying you have reason to turn your back on it,” he said, “but trust me when I say the knowledge alone is valuable in the right hands, and the rumours say there’s a thief out there looking for items exactly like that amulet.”
I shook my head firmly. “Whatever you’re twisted up in, I want no part in it.”
“As long as you have that soul amulet, you’re involved,” he insisted. “I reckon you stole it from one of the soul thief’s underlings who was instructed to bring it back to him.”
“Then his underling shouldn’t have left it unattended,” I said. “Besides, the Death King’s people blew the thief’s hideout to pieces.”
A moment passed. “That’s not good. The Death King himself has his eye on the situation, and now you have the amulet—”
“He’s going to think I’m allied with this so-called soul thief.” My gut clenched. “Hence why I wanted it back in the Order’s hands, so they can give it back to him. Unless they sent me after it on purpose, but that’s paranoid even by my standards.”
He shook his head. “I suspect they sent you after a thief without knowing exactly what he stole. They might have heard of a stolen amulet…”
“But not that it had someone’s soul in it,” I finished. “That doesn’t mean I can’t return it to the Order. Whether they knew they were dealing with it or not, they have enough clout behind them that the Death King won’t slaughter them all on the spot.”
He shifted in his seat. “I don’t disagree, but there’re rumours drifting around the Parallel about disputes within the Order’s upper ranks. They won’t help you.”
“You seem confident of that.”
“I know them, and I know you,” he said in soft tones. “If the Order was fair, your punishment would have fit the crime. The way they treated you…”
I broke my gaze from his. Brant had always been intense, and one of the reasons he’d left for the Parallel was because he hadn’t been able to handle working in close proximity to the Order. I hadn’t realised that their treatment of me had struck him that deeply.
I turned my attention back to the matter at hand. “I should have dropped the damned soul amulet in the sewers.”
“No way,” he said. “Anyone might have found it, connected to the soul thief or otherwise, and then who knows what damage they might have caused?”
“I’d have returned it to the Death King himself if I didn’t think it’d get me blasted to pieces like that water mage.” I drank the rest of my diet coke and rose to my feet. “Look, I appreciate you looking out for me, but we’re talking in circles. If the Order is out, then I need to cross over into the swamp and find someone who can give the amulet to the person it originally belonged to.”
“Without witnesses,” he added. “Those wights are as likely to lose the amulet again as not. And liches are basically ghosts. You need to speak to a person.”
“Meaning one of the four Elemental Soldiers.” I doubted I’d be lucky enough to find all four of them patrolling again, but if I got Devon to make me a cantrip for invisibility, maybe I’d stand a chance of slipping past the gates and planting the amulet on one of them without being seen. It was starting to seem like my only remaining option.
“Liv, don’t go back there today,” he insisted. “The Death King will be on high alert this soon after the theft. You were lucky only a wight jumped you.”
“Yeah, I know.” I wanted rid of the amulet, but now I had him here, I might as well give him a grilling. “And this memory spell? Were you ever going tell me there was a way to get my magic back?”
His mouth pressed into a line. “I didn’t know. Not for a while. The Order has total control over spells of that nature, as well you know. But… I know people in the Parallel who are looking to change that.”
“Are you recruiting me to join a group of illicit practitioners?” Even he must know my job revolved around arresting said crooks, not joining their ranks.
“No,” he insisted. “I’m asking you to trust me. Have I ever given you reason to think I wouldn’t keep my word?”
“Ignoring the fact that you ditched me and ran off into Arcadia?” He could have come to see me any time I’d been in the Parallel, but he’d avoided it up until now. “What are you doing here, really?”
“Helping you,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know you were involved at first
, but I worried you’d become a target.”
It was classic Brant to shove his way into a case which had nothing to do with him when he got a hint of trouble pointing in my direction, but that didn’t work quell the lingering suspicions in the back of my mind. He hated the Order. Always had. But ultimately, I’d refused his offer to join him as a rogue, so we’d agreed to go our separate ways and he hadn’t contacted me since.
“Is that why you’re here, then?” I said. “You do have a permit, don’t you?”
“Of a sort.”
A forgery. Just perfect. “You expect me to believe you risked the Order’s wrath on a hunch that I might end up being targeted?”
“No, but I heard some odd reports from the Order’s direction via my contacts.”
“You still haven’t told me who these contacts of yours are.”
Brant had never exactly been on the straight and narrow. We’d met when I was fairly new to the Parallel, when I’d been on my first big mission to track down a rogue mage. His contacts in the city had saved my neck back then, but like all mages, he was willing to bend the rules at any time to further his own ends. When you could conjure up fire with a snap of your fingers, the Parallel seemed easy to navigate, and if I’d taken him up on his offer, I’d have spent my life hiding behind him. I hadn’t wanted that, and I’d assumed he understood.
The door creaked open, and Brant’s shoulders stiffened when someone walked in. Ordinary person or not, I couldn’t see in the dim lighting. Brant rose to his feet, then relaxed. “Hey, Vaughn.”
A skinny white guy with dark eyes and longish rocker-style hair sauntered over, looking me up and down. “This is she?”
“Hey,” I said warily. “I’m Liv.”
“I know.” He gave Brant a concerned look. “Just so you know, there’s a couple of Order employees putting out a warrant for a rogue someone spotted near their place. I think they may have seen through your fake permit.”
Brant swore. “Busybodies. Liv, you should go. Before they realise we’re together.”
Damn. The rest of our discussion would have to wait. I gave his mate a suspicious look, which he returned with a smile, and slipped out into the street.
Brant’s words hung over me like a raincloud as I headed home. The amulet’s weight in my pocket seemed to double with each step, and it was only now the chaos had calmed down that it hit me I was carrying someone’s life essence. Separating a soul from a body was impossible for anyone except for one of the Death King’s best, so it must belong to someone important. Most of his foot soldiers were like those wights—unthinking, unfeeling, inhuman. His fellow liches weren’t much better. Removing a soul had fairly intense side effects, most of which I’d have to ask the Death King himself about.
I entered the shop, finding Devon had closed up for lunch, and heard voices in the back. Mum and Elise. Oh, bugger. Why did my family have to be the sort of people who invited themselves over without being asked? In fairness, I wasn’t set to be working this weekend, but heaven knew what story Devon had told them.
I entered the living room to find Mum sitting beside her wife on the sofa. Mum and I shared the same pale skin and dark curly hair, with a smattering of freckles which only appeared in summer. Elise was a pretty woman of Asian descent who gave me a friendly smile as I walked in. Mum was as tall as Elise was mousy and small, and the adoring way they looked at one another would have been mildly sickening if they hadn’t been so bloody cute.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Half an hour,” said Mum. “Devon made us tea. Or, she tried to.”
I bit back a laugh. Devon made tea about as well as I played hockey. “Which did she forget? The milk or the teabags?”
“To boil the kettle,” Elise answered.
Devon shot me an irritated look. “In my defence, I expected you to be back by now.”
“Me too.” I wasn’t about to tell them about my near-brush with death or three—not to mention the dead person’s soul currently sitting in my pocket. Mum and Elise didn’t need to be burdened with my shit show of a life. As far as they knew, I worked in the Order’s office filing paperwork. “Want me to make some actual tea?”
“I handled it,” said Mum. “How have you been? What’s that on your coat?”
Swamp water. And essence of death. “Mud. Took a shortcut through the park on my way back from the shop.”
Small talk was not my strong point, and while I could tell Mum almost anything, her wife knew next to nothing of the magical world. Dad knew even less. He and Mum had split when I was a toddler, and he’d moved up to Manchester before the Order had contacted me at eleven and inducted me into the magical world. It was easier that way.
“Shop?” asked Elise. “What’d you get? You don’t have any shopping bags.”
“That’d be because I forgot to take my list with me.” And I needed to come up with better cover stories.
Mum cleared her throat. “I thought you might be handing out CVs.”
That would have been a better excuse. “Mum, people don’t do that anymore, not with online applications.”
I’d told her I was applying for jobs last time she’d visited, just to get her off my back. It was difficult to explain that I had zero options outside of the Order short of a permanent move into the Parallel. For all my unpleasant history with magic, cutting it out of my life would be akin to chopping off a limb.
Mum cast her gaze around the living room, which was tidy for once, given the dusting I’d given it this morning. Like most non-nerds, both Mum and Elise found our choice of décor baffling to say the least, from the anime figurines to the life-sized poster of the TARDIS on the living room door and the expanse of monster-infested dungeons covering the dining table.
“What’s that jar for?” She indicated the container where I’d trapped the phantom.
“There’s a dead person trapped in there,” said Devon.
I shot her a warning look. Elise blinked, confused, while Mum laughed. “Right, of course there is. Gaming prop, is it?”
“More or less.” Holding my tongue in front of Mum and Elise was an exercise in extreme self-control, sometimes, but in the long-term, it was better for them not to know that in my world, phantoms in jars were like fluffy bunny rabbits compared to some of the crap I’d seen in the Parallel. “So, how’s work?”
Having successfully diverted their attention from the jar, I moved onto safer topics. Devon kept trying to catch my eye, but there was no way I’d so much as allude to my chat with Brant in front of either of them. Not least because it’d kick off a why don’t you have a boyfriend conversation, which frankly I was in even less of a mood for than a chat about creepy phantoms in jars. Luckily, when Devon returned to the shop after her lunch break, the two of them took it as their cue to leave.
“We should be getting home,” Elise said. “Before rush hour.”
If you asked me, she was probably concerned that if she stayed too long, we’d rope her into a D&D game. “Sure. I’ll see you in a bit, okay? You too, Mum. Maybe text me first?”
Mum pulled me into a hug. “See you soon, pumpkin.”
I walked with them through the shop, where Devon sat fiddling with a cantrip behind the desk. There as a time when Mum would have been the first to know everything, but those days seemed as distant as my missing memories.
After the door closed behind them, Devon put down the cantrip. “Now you’re going to tell me why you were late back, right? What did the Order want?”
Right. The Order. She thought I’d gone there, not into the Parallel again. “I need an invisibility cantrip.”
“You want it by when?”
“Yesterday,” I said. “I need to get that amulet back into the right hands without being seen. I had a lucky escape earlier.”
“Back up a step,” she said. “You’re saying the amulet definitely isn’t what the Order wanted you to take? They made a mistake?”
Her words struck a chord in my brain, an
d a suspicion rose to the forefront of my mind. “I think someone tried to kill me.”
Devon stared at me for a moment. “You can’t leave me hanging like that. Go on.”
I told her everything, barely pausing for breath. When I got to the part about the soul amulet, she swore. “Why didn’t I realise what it was?”
“Because I never showed you.” I held out the amulet for her to look at. “I should have thought of it, too. But it’s absurd. I mean, who’d steal a lich’s soul?”
She took the amulet in both hands and held it up to the light, admiring the carved lines of the skull etched onto the surface. “So its owner is out to kill you.”
“Them and the rest of the Court of the Dead, yeah,” I said.
She let out a low whistle. “I can see why you’d need to be invisible. You want to get in and out of the Death King’s territory without being detected.”
“And put that amulet safely out of reach of any more potential thieves,” I said. “Brant told me—”
“Brant told you?” she said. “You went back to him?”
“I ran into him outside the Order,” I said. “He stopped them from slapping me with a disciplinary warning when a wight followed me from the other side, too.”
“So a wight attacked you, and you still want to go back?”
“Pretty sure I don’t have a choice in the matter. The Order aren’t going to help me.”
“Did Brant himself tell you that, by any chance?” she said. “You know, he is a rogue. And now he shows up while all this is going on…”
“He’s out to help me,” I said. “I don’t really have a choice but to trust him at this point.”
“You do,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, you two have a fair bit in common, but the trouble factor multiplies when you’re around one another. If it’s not one of you who’s deep in crap, it’s the other.”
I shook my head. “I need allies. Even ones who attract as much trouble as I do. Anyway, I’m lying low until the Death King calls his soldiers off. Then I’ll head back to the Parallel, but I need to be invisible when I do it.”
Thief of Souls Page 6