“Not sure your flames will do much to a group of fire mages, Dex,” I said. “Besides, we need to find out who employed those assassins.”
“Worth a shot.” He zipped over to my shoulder. “Someone’s coming.”
The door wrenched open and two people appeared. One was a young black man with curly hair. The other was an older white guy, wearing a scowl on his pockmarked face.
“Who are you?” said the older guy.
“I’m here on behalf of the King of the Dead,” said Ryan, “and we found your address in the hands of a pair of assassins who tried to kill us.”
“Don’t look at me,” said his companion. “This is a safe house for mages.”
“And assassins?” I peered past him into the hall, where a faded carpet led up a set of crooked stairs. “I don’t think they were mages, but they may have been in league with the House of Fire.”
The merest shift in his expression drew my suspicion. “The House of Fire, you say?”
“Know them?” I said. “Have you seen a man called Brant Edwards?”
“Who?” said the older man.
“He might be using an alias,” I added. “What did he used to call himself… Flare?”
“Flare?” said the younger dude. “Haven’t seen him in months. Thought he was arrested or dead.”
So they have heard of him. “He’s on the run. If this is a safe house, he might be on his way here.”
“I know you, though,” said the older guy. “You’re Liv Cartwright, aren’t you?”
Brant had told them. I was going to kill him.
“I’m not here to talk about me,” I said evenly. “I’m here to ask about where Brant is hiding, if not here.”
“How am I supposed to know?” said the younger dude. “Flare disappeared months ago without so much as a word.”
Yeah, well. He ended up losing his soul to a vampire, so that turned out well.
“And the assassins?” Ryan put in. “Mind if we look around? If not, my master will have to pay you a visit in person.”
The two of them blanched. At least they had a healthy fear of the King of the Dead.
“Fine,” said the older guy, “but don’t harass my guests and don’t touch anything.”
They stepped aside to allow us to enter. A door on the left of the stairs led into the pub. I didn’t recognise any faces, and from the unfriendly stares we got from those nearest to the door, the Death King was not popular here.
“The fire mage isn’t in here,” Ryan murmured.
“Guess not.” But what about the assassins? If they’d planned to meet up here following their mission, anybody here might be their ally, but we wouldn’t win ourselves any friends if we walked around accusing everyone in the room of plotting against the Court of the Dead. We were already taking a major risk being out in public right after the vampires’ murders and Brant’s escape.
“Satisfied?” The older man escorted us to the door. “You’re making our guests nervous.”
“Good,” said Ryan. “Someone here was meeting with two assassins. If it turns out you’re covering for them, the King of the Dead will shut this place down.”
The mage winced. “There’s no need for that. This is a safe place.”
“For some people, maybe.” I eyed him. “Ever met him?”
“No.” He shuddered. “Creep. No offence.”
He sounded genuine enough for me to wonder if the assassins had carried this address in order to cover their traces. Brant hadn’t mentioned this place, but of course he hadn’t. He’d wanted me to see the best of him.
Now I knew more about what I’d done while working with Dirk Alban, it seemed an absurd idea. I’d been neck-deep in this long before I’d even met Brant.
And yet as long as my memories remained gone, I’d be at a disadvantage. I’d been haunted by Dirk Alban’s ghost for too long, yet for all that, I’d never really faced my history. Never dared to guess the worst of what I’d done in those missing years.
Maybe I’d belonged among the Death King’s people after all.
13
After we’d searched the whole safe house and came up empty, there was nothing more for us to do but head home. With the Death King gone and the contest’s events temporarily on hold, I was only making myself a target by staying in the Parallel, and if I drew the vamps’ attention, I’d end up in worse trouble.
Besides, if Brant hadn’t gone into hiding in the Parallel, maybe he’d come back home. To Earth. Part of me expected to find him waiting on the other side of the node, but instead, Devon’s crushing embrace caught me as soon as I reached the house.
“Whoa.” I caught my balance against the sofa. “You heard?”
“The Order called me,” she said. “They said you were supposed to be on an ambassadorial mission but there was some kind of attack and they lost contact. When they figured out that I didn’t know what they were talking about, they clammed up. What happened?”
“One of the vampires must have contacted the Order,” I said. “They pressured me into escorting Brant to the vampires for his trial, but the vamp ambassadors were assassinated on the way. Now Lord Blackbourne and his fellow vamps are probably going to blame me for it if the Death King can’t convince them otherwise, the assassins committed suicide rather than telling me who they worked for, and on top of that, I’m still on the hook to judge this bloody contest, if I don’t get arrested first.”
“Shit, Liv,” she said. “Who assassinated the vampires?”
“Not mages, I don’t think, but they’re working with the same liches who betrayed the Death King before,” I said. “We thought they all died along with the Crow, but we were wrong. If His Deathly Highness hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead.”
“Good timing.” She frowned. “Did he know?”
“I don’t think so, but he was already at the Order, for reasons he won’t tell me,” I said. “Holland set me up. Him and others at the Order are in league with the enemy.”
“He was working with the vampires?” she said. “No, he can’t have been, if he had the ambassadors killed.”
“To frame me,” I added. “Someone in the Order wanted to ensure I took the heat for Brant’s escape, too. He took off the instant I turned my back.”
“What does the Order have to gain from him escaping?” she said. “He broke their laws. And no offence, Liv, but he’s not much use to them dead or alive.”
“Yeah, I know.” I rubbed my forehead. “I think they wanted to pawn him off on the vampires, since Lord Blackbourne wanted him to stand trial in the Parallel anyway. But someone decided it’d be a good time to get rid of both of us at once.”
“You said you caught the assassins?” she said. “How?”
“Ryan and I tracked them down,” I said. “They committed suicide in the Death King’s jail before we could confirm who sent them. The address they were carrying on them turned out to be a dead end.”
“Holy crap,” she said. “Does the Death King know that?”
“Ryan will tell him, which is not going to go well,” I said. “But he’s the one who left me hanging, and he didn’t tell Ryan not to go after the assassins. Nor did he tell me his liches are leaving in droves. The only useful piece of information he’s given me is that his own Court used to be the House of Spirit—which would have been nice to know earlier.”
Her eyes rounded. “Of course.”
“You guessed?”
“If there’s houses for the other four elements, it stands to reason that there would have been a collective of spirit mages, too,” she said. “I’m more surprised he told you.”
“Don’t get too excited. He dropped that bombshell on me and then disappeared without saying another word.”
“Sounds about right.” Her eyes glittered with amusement, for some reason. “Another traitor in the Order? The school reunion is going to be interesting.”
I groaned. “Don’t remind me. You’re not planning on going, are you?”
�
�Maybe.” An inexplicable grin appeared on her face. “Did you see the photo online?”
“Devon, I couldn’t possibly be less interested,” I said. “And I thought you weren’t interested, either. What does it even matter, anyway?”
“I don’t want to go to the bloody reunion, I want you to look at the photo.”
My head hurt at the very notion of another trip down memory lane after the day I’d already had. “What photo? I don’t want to see my godawful school pictures.”
“Someone uploaded a picture of our class on social media, and I think you want to see it.”
When Devon focused, she focused. She wouldn’t let this drop until I did as she asked.
“All right,” I relented. “But don’t forget that time you were convinced I’d look amazing with hot pink hair. You know how that turned out.”
I picked up my phone and found I had indeed been tagged in a few photos by overly keen people who seemed under the impression our days at the academy had been the best of our lives. I scrolled down and found the picture Devon had referenced, which depicted our entire year group standing in the auditorium at the academy. I spotted my teenage self in the middle row, looking decidedly plain. Terrible hair, check. Terrible school uniform, check. Terrible classmates… hang on a moment.
My gaze snagged on a guy on the right, near the back, his face slightly turned away from the camera. I cast my mind around in search of his name, then saw someone had tried to tag him as ‘Greyson Beaumont’ but he had no social media account. Even in our terrible maroon uniform, a jolt of recognition hit me at the sight of him. His hair was shorter than it was now, but his face was almost the same.
“Devon,” I said slowly. “Is that who I think it is?”
“Finally she gets it,” she said. “I knew the guy looked familiar when he first walked into our shop. And get this… Greyson vanished from all contact not long after graduation. I don’t think he was ever on social networking sites. I asked a few of the others from our year and nobody knows where he ended up. Everyone else left a trail, even the ones who moved abroad. Not him.”
I cast my mind around. Had we been in any of the same classes? All my memories of the last two or three years of school were fuzzy and filled with gaps. Did he remember me? He must do. It wasn’t like I’d changed all that much, nor had he suffered any memory loss the way I had. So why in hell hadn’t he brought up the fact that we’d been classmates?
“Before graduation.” I checked the date on the photo. He must have disappeared weeks, months at most after the picture was taken. Nobody else seemed to have put two and two together, but who would have thought their classmate from the Order’s academy would become the King of the Dead? “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He didn’t want you to know how low he sank?”
“I wouldn’t call becoming one of the most powerful people in the Parallel ‘sinking low’.” I’d thought he’d never met me before. And in a way, he hadn’t. Not as the Death King, anyway.
As Greyson Beaumont, though? Grey. The vampires had known. The liches must know, too. But me… I’d known his name all along, and yet I hadn’t recalled a damn thing.
“Good news, then,” she said. “You have some ammunition to use against him if he tries to manipulate you again.”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m depending on him to stop the vamps punishing me for the double assassination. Especially when I tried to interrogate the assassins and they ended up dead.”
“Yeah, that’s bad luck,” she said. “And Brant… I wonder where he is now?”
“Hiding, if he has any sense,” I said. “With Davies in the House of Fire, maybe. The mages I spoke to denied having any knowledge of where he ran off to, but who else would have taken him in?”
For all I knew, the Death King might have tracked him down, handed him over to the vampires, and cleared my name all at once. Yeah, and maybe I’d make it to this week’s gaming night without being arrested. Some things were less likely than rolling a critical on a D20.
“Oh, yeah, I finished these.” Devon held up a handful of cantrips. “These are for all your stealth needs. Invisibility, sense enhancing, hiding your own traces, and a few paralysis ones. All set to disintegrate on contact. Not the reusable ones. You don’t want to leave any traces.”
“Good.” I took them. “Thanks, Devon. I have a feeling I’ll need them when I hunt down whoever’s working against us.”
The bitter truth was, I couldn’t take them on alone. Every time I’d fought a spirit mage alive or dead, I’d needed to rely on the Death King’s help. Yet even though I’d ultimately trusted him with my life, and vice versa, he hadn’t told me who he really was. Unlike me, his past didn’t lie buried beneath the haze of a memory spell, which gave him no excuses. Perhaps he didn’t trust me with that information. Or he thought I’d hold it against him.
Back in those days, he’d been a spirit mage, too. Yet as far as I knew, he hadn’t been foolish enough to get caught like I had.
Greyson Beaumont, huh. Maybe I could make use of that little snippet of information.
I hadn’t intended to astral project in my sleep, but I found myself drifting through the ceiling and up into the sky the instant my eyes closed. The city spread out beneath me, and when I stepped through the node, I found myself in front of the Citadel of the Elements beside the shadowy form of the Death King.
“Why here?” I asked. “Why do I always end up here?”
It wasn’t like I’d been looking for the guy, but maybe Devon’s words had been weighing on me more than I’d thought.
“Because it’s always easier to astral project on a path you’ve already travelled,” he said. “You and Ryan went out alone earlier to pursue the assassins, didn’t you?”
Ack. Admittedly, the dead assassins in the jail would have been difficult to explain away, so Ryan would have had no choice but to tell their master how they’d got there. “I wanted to find out where their employers were hiding. I didn’t expect them to die.”
“I would guess they were instructed to take their own lives in the event of their capture,” he said. “The same would have happened if I’d found them myself. Besides, we know who hired them.”
“And… Lord Blackbourne?” I asked. “Did you tell him who killed the emissaries?”
“I did,” he said. “I gave him the evidence, and he might have taken my word for it if not for the fire mage’s escape.”
Shit. “According to the mages, he’s not at their safe house, which was the address we found with the assassins.”
“Yes, Ryan told me that, too.” Exasperation laced his tone. “Not only are you incapable of obeying direct instruction, you seem hell-bent on getting my Elemental Soldiers to break the rules, too.”
I bristled. “Sorry I didn’t ask permission, but you stormed off and I wanted to find out where Brant was hiding. The mages at the hideout insisted they don’t know, but where else might he be? Unless he’s hiding in your spare room or something.”
“I’d advise you to forget about him,” said the Death King. “He’s not looking out for your best interests.”
“I figured that out when he sided with the dickheads who tried to have me killed, funnily enough.” My hands clenched. “With him on the run, you know the vampires will keep blaming me, don’t you?”
“The same would be true if they’d taken him in,” he said. “The connection between the two of you paints you as guilty in their eyes.”
“Fuck that.” I scowled. “Besides, if we hadn’t found those assassins, they might well have killed someone else or hunted us down at your castle. It doesn’t take a genius to say someone in the Order hired them, or they know who did. Someone with links to the liches who betrayed you.”
His gaze travelled past me, towards the shape of the citadel etched against the night sky. Beyond it, nodes shone like pillars of light piercing the heavens. While travelling to the Order might be simple, I’d be visible to anyone even if I infiltrated the pla
ce via astral projection. Here, the cloud cover and darkness prevented me from being spotted. Unlike the Death King, I didn’t wear a dark cloak and a mask over my face, though right now his face was visible enough that I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten him.
That damn school photo was going to haunt me until I asked him what the hell had happened after graduation. It seemed absurd to think that I’d been preparing to retake exams while he’d been taking over the Court of the Dead. Yet I’d seen the evidence for myself.
When he didn’t respond, I added, “Do you think the Order might be involved with whoever is trying to intervene in your trials, too? Is that why you were visiting them?”
“No,” he said. “It is no great secret that the Order dislikes the power I wield, as do many others, but I doubt the person intent on infiltrating my Court is the one who freed the fire mage and tried to frame you for murder.”
“No, the universe just decided I needed another enemy to deal with,” I said. “I wonder why the betrayer didn’t stand and fight.”
“Because he fears me, even now.” His words carried an undercurrent I couldn’t quite place. “I am the one who holds his soul in my hands, after all.”
And I could create a lich in the same way, if I had a soul amulet to hand. A dangerous power… and even more so in the hands of someone like the Crow or his followers. I had zero doubt that many, like Dirk Alban, would have abused that power. But then, what did that make me?
“Do you all give up your names when you turn?” I found myself asking. “Or is that just you… Greyson?”
He stilled for a moment, then his head tilted in my direction. “You figured it out.”
I tensed inexplicably, as though part of me expected him to strike me down for using his real name. “You should pay more attention to social media if you want to hide your identity. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It isn’t hidden to anyone who wants to know,” he said. “I doubted you’d remember me as well as I remembered you. Besides, it’s irrelevant.”
Trial of Shadows (Order of the Elements Book 3) Page 13