by White, Gwynn
Father didn’t back down, even though Aaron towered over him in his armor. “I do,” my father said, his tone calm, completely in control. “I have made a deal of my own with the Galactic Assembly.”
Aaron’s brows drew together in suspicion. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”
“Because you were too busy torturing my daughter.” Father set his hands on the bars.
I reached through the openings and placed my hands over his.
“They are lifting the death sentence, Terra,” Father told me.
“I don’t understand. How?”
“You can walk out of this cell right now, but it comes at a price. You will be exiled.” He paused. “And so will I.”
“Father—”
“We will be stripped of our titles and positions,” he cut through my protest. “And stripped of all our accessories.” He reached through the bars and set his hands on my cheeks. “But you will live, Terra. And you will be free.”
“You can’t do this,” I said, tears streaming freely down my cheeks, my heart aching. “You can’t give up everything for me.”
He kissed my hands. “No, you have it all backwards. I can’t lose you to keep everything else. And I can’t sell you as an indentured servant to the vampires. That is almost worse than death.”
“What of Elitia?” I asked.
“Davin will take care of our people.”
Aaron blinked in surprise. But anger quickly displaced his shock. I saw it then: he wanted me to work for him. He was still playing me, still manipulating me.
“My deal is better,” he declared.
“Working with the people who manipulated her?” Father retorted. “With the people who got her best friend convicted and sentenced to death? The people responsible for killing his parents? For destroying Pegasus and making Terra lose her friend?” His voice was scathing, his eyes burning with anger. “That is not better.” He turned to me. “It won’t be easy, Terra. Life out there, cut off from our people, is different. We won’t have our wealth, our position, our advantages.”
Without my accessories, I wouldn’t be able to control my magic, or my madness. That worried me more than titles or wealth.
“I can’t ask this of you,” I told my father.
“That’s the thing about being a father,” he replied. “You don’t have to ask, Terra. I would do anything for you.” He looked at Aaron. “Open the cell.” He spoke with the command of a king—and of a father.
Aaron matched his glare for a long moment, then he pressed a button on his arm. My cell swung open. Father set his hand on my back, leading me out.
“I had to do this, Terra,” he said in a low whisper as we walked. “Aaron and Lord Adrian planned this whole thing. They wanted you all along. They wanted to force you to work for them, to use you because your magic is unique. They’ve stolen Vib’s research. And they want to use it on you.” He linked my arm with his, steadying my shaking steps. “I won’t let that happen. Not now. Not ever. We must get you away from them.”
“I can’t believe you convinced the Galactic Assembly to go for this.”
“They only care about maintaining order, that someone is punished for every wrongdoing. It’s how they discourage others from repeating the offense. They consider this punishment worse than death.”
“Is it?” I asked.
His smile was like a ray of sunshine that broke through the storm. “That depends what we make of it.” He wrapped his arm around me. “But whatever we do, we will do it together.”
“Where will we go?” I asked him.
“Out there.” He waved his hand toward the endless horizon. “To the edge of civilization. Where we’ll make a new life for ourselves.”
Epilogue
Two Years Later
I stood in the front lounge of Phoenix Investigations. The old brick building was a bit run down. The wallpaper was peeling just a little too much. The floor was peppered with ink stains and the impact craters of dropped guns—and criminals’ heads. And the reception desk was ancient; phone numbers, lewd messages, and names inside hearts were carved into the wooden tabletop.
Yeah, it wasn’t glamorous, but it was home.
Father and I had scrimped and saved for every single thing in this office. Every cabinet, coat hook, and piece of furniture here had a story. We’d bought the desk for the price of carrying it away. The set of armchairs and matching sofa in the waiting room had come from an estate auction. They were actually in pristine condition. They were also bubblegum-pink with tiny yellow flowers. We’d gotten them cheap. No one else had wanted them. Imagine that.
Father had found a really big bronze statue of a phoenix at that same auction. It now sat opposite the front door. We saw it every time we stepped into the office. It was a reminder that we would rebuild our lives and rise from the ashes.
Seastone was our home now, a merchant world at the far end of the galaxy. There was a lot of work here for a father-daughter duo of private investigators. It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it was a life. And I had my father. That meant everything.
Right now, he was away hunting down one of the delightful miscreants of the galactic underworld. He’d just called to say he’d probably be back tomorrow, and then we’d put that reward money to good use. Our office was in desperate need of a new computer—and we were in desperate need of a meal that didn’t consist mainly of canned goods or instant noodles.
I’d just captured the money shot of a merchant lord breaking his prenup—with two of his wife’s friends—so I was done for the day. All that was left was cleaning the office so it didn’t resemble a page out of some cheesy noir novel. Sure, we were PIs, but we played the game in style. We even had a chandelier, a gift from an elven princess I’d managed to help out of a sticky betrothal.
As I wiped down the reception desk, I smiled at the memory of all those times Jason and I had gotten ourselves out of similar sticky situations. It felt like a lifetime ago. I hadn’t seen Jason in two years, not since we’d parted ways the day Pegasus was overrun by the galactic police.
Jason hadn’t come to see me. I’d looked for him, but I no longer had the same access to the portals that I’d once had. I knew the Galactic Assembly was still hunting the mages of Pegasus, but they hadn’t found them yet. I would have heard about that. Everyone in the galaxy would have heard about that. The longer the people of Pegasus eluded capture, the more determined the Galactic Assembly was to make an example of them for escaping justice.
If you could even call it that. Justice it was not. Once, a lifetime ago, I’d thought the Galactic Assembly was fair, but after all that had happened around the fall of Pegasus—and the following two years out here on the edge of civilization—I’d come to realize that there was no room for justice in politics. It was a circus of power, back-stabbing, and bribery. Case in point: Nemesis had been released within hours of her capture, and she was out terrorizing the galaxy again.
I walked down the hallway to my father’s office, straightening the picture frames hanging on the wall. Each one featured a photo of me and Father on a different world. I smiled at the one of us skydiving off of an airship. My father was my rock. I wouldn’t have made it out here without him.
I moved on to cleaning the armory. We didn’t have the cool magic-augmenting accessories and weapons like we’d had in our royal days. We’d had to work for every dented and rusted piece in this room. Like the furniture, each one had a story, a job behind it that had paid for it. I’d collected a few accessories, just enough to keep my magic in check, to keep me sane. I still missed my headband, the one Jason had given me. Nothing channeled my magic like it had. I wasn’t sure I’d ever find another accessory like it.
I still had his pendant, the symbol of our marriage that had never happened. The necklace had no magical power, only sentimental value, so the Galactic Authority had allowed me to keep it after they’d stripped me of everything else.
I probably should have sold it. We couldn’t afford luxuries—or ve
ry good food, for that matter. We pretty much lived from job to job. But I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. That pendant was all I had left of Jason.
Over the last year, I’d been saving up for my father’s birthday gift. I’d found a prime condition magic-augmenting accessory for him: a gold band worn around the throat. It enhanced a mage’s power of speech, so that the words he spoke would persuade others to his side. It was perfect for Father, who believed that conflicts were best solved with words, not weapons.
I only needed a few more months to pay for it. In the meantime, I’d put enough down to reserve it. I only hoped I’d have the money in time for his birthday.
As I hummed the old Hymn of Rosewater, an odd stillness crept over me. I felt like I was being watched. I turned around to find a shadow standing there, a man dressed in black. An assassin, my mind told me.
But even as my pulse spiked in alarm, I realized there was something familiar about that shadow.
“Jason?” I asked cautiously.
He flipped the hood off his head. My heart pounding even faster now—but from joy, not fear—I rushed forward to hug him. I stopped when I saw the cold look in his eyes.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “I’ve been trying to find you, but I didn’t know where you went.”
His face was hard. He looked like he’d been through hell. “Things have been difficult.”
“I heard tales of you, of a Phantom assassin. A wanted man. They call you the Phantom of Death.”
“We all do what we must to survive. So that our people survive.”
I lifted my hand to his face, but he withdrew from my touch. “I’ve missed you. But I’m getting the feeling you haven’t missed me.”
“As I said, things have changed.”
Guilt struck me like a bolt of lightning. “I’m sorry about your parents. If only I had—”
“I did not come here to fight. I’ve come to fulfill an old promise.”
“Which one?”
“I’ve found your brother Cameron,” he told me. “And I’m going to reunite you with him.”
THE END
* * *
Continue the Sorcery & Science series in VAMPIRES & VIGILANTES.
Learn more here:
www.ellasummers.com/vampires-vigilantes
* * *
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About the Author
Ella Summers has been writing stories for as long as she could read; she's been coming up with tall tales even longer than that. One of her early year masterpieces was a story about a pigtailed princess and her dragon sidekick. Nowadays, she still writes fantasy. She likes books with lots of action, adventure, and romance. When she is not busy writing or spending time with her two young children, she makes the world safe by fighting robots. Ella is the international bestselling author of the paranormal and fantasy series Legion of Angels, Dragon Born, and Sorcery & Science.
www.ellasummers.com
Spectral Shift
Daniel Arthur Smith
We were never alone-a prescient rendering of a dark cyberpunk future, a Neon Dystopia with a Lovecraftian flair
Abernathy Squire, an agent for the Homeland, is reluctant to come out of retirement. A century has passed since the Spectral Wars. The world has changed. The elite have fled to other planes and those left in the sprawling megacities are ruled by the five syndicates. No longer hidden, the Spectral races now mingle with the forever young mortals. But a friend and an artifact have gone missing, and this is his chance to settle an old score.
1
The fog beyond the plate glass flickered a cotton candy swirl of raspberry and bubblegum neon—but that wasn’t what grabbed Abernathy’s attention. There was something about the way those lights reflected against the wet pavement. He preferred the copper counter at the end of the bar where he could look out onto the intersection and the crowd wouldn’t bother him. He’d been peering out that window for a good hour by the time Jazz arrived.
Jazz slipped onto the next stool over, shuffled through the folds of his collar, flicked his earlobe twice—to shut down his embedded music player—then, fingers wide, raked his long hair away from his neck.
“Hey Abby, you all right? I saw you from across the street,” he said. “You looked dazed.”
Abernathy lifted his drink from the copper-top bar. Remnants of ice cubes floated on the surface.
“Deep thoughts,” he said, then sipped some vodka from the glass.
“Like what?”
“The familiarity.”
“The what?”
“There’s a comforting familiarity to the dampness of the street.”
“Oh. You’re drunk.”
“You should be.”
“I was wonderin’ if I was goin’ to see you,” Jazz said.
“I said I’d be here,” Abby replied.
Jazz removed his spectacles and carefully wiped each lens with a small piece of red silk. He lifted them into the air, squinting to see if they were clean.
“Who do you think you’re fooling?” Abby asked.
“Don’t you know?” Jazz asked. “Hiding your mod is all the rage.”
Abby raised his vodka. Hiding mods of any kind other than the ubiquitous age mod was more of a bit of etiquette. People were suspicious of those—like the bald giant behind the bar—who looked their age, but they were even more leery of anyone possessing additional mods. Not the odd prosthetic arm or leg, but the ultra-enhancements. Only agents of the Bureau and the elite Arcadians were legally allowed to possess high-end upgrades. The Arcadians had left the overcrowded Megs of the Homeland long ago, so anyone with an ultra-enhancement was either a Bureau special agent, mobbed up, or both.
Abby and Jazz had served in the Bureau.
Like most everyone else, Jazz—a man easily the same age as Abby, perhaps older—appeared to be in his early twenties. He made subtle efforts to hide the degree of his mods. A tattered hemp jacket from the Farm Plane, scruffy hair, and he enhanced the deception with the wire-frame spectacles.
“You can wear those,” Abby said, “but everyone in the Low has a story about you dating back to the war.”
Jazz turned his head toward a cute blonde, a MidHi at the far end of the bar, and winked. She returned the gesture with a flirtatious smile. “Not everyone,” he said, then leaned head and shoulders above the bar top. “Hey, old timer.”
Abby snickered. Dre could’ve been a grandson to either of the two.
“Can I get an ale?”
Dre didn’t pour a beer. He grabbed a rag and wiped the front of the antique register.
But Jazz was focused on the cute blonde at the end of the bar. She arched her eyebrow high and drew her lips into an unsubtle pucker. Jazz returned the exaggerated gesture then, with the back of his hand, wistfully brushed his hair from his face.
Abby rolled his eyes. “You know,” he said, “I can tell she’s wearing a shimmer without even shifting spectrum.”
“I’m sure everyone of that MidHi gang she’s with is wearing a digital cosmetic. So what?”
“She probably has a bent nose, or, better, no age mod.”
“You, my friend, have a rough way of seeing the world.”
“I’m just sayin’,” said Abby. He took another drink. “Did you make it to the Archive?”
“Yeah,” Jazz said.
“And?”
“You know, you could go down there. He’d love to see you.”
“He’d talk my ear off.”
“Well,” said Jazz, pulling a clear vid card from the inside of his hemp coat, “this is what the old man found. He also said that an old student of yours, Conrad Labreque, wants to meet up with you.”
Abby took the card. “Conrad, eh?”
“Orin made it sound like a social thing, like Conrad would love to get together for a beer.”
“And that’s it? No other names?”
“No, that wa
sn’t it. You were right. There’s been someone asking about you, apart from this Conrad. I didn’t hear it from Orin, though. I told you to keep under the wire.”
“I have been. Every case I take is…discreet. Where were they asking?”
“Over by The Wall.”
“Yeah?” Abby asked. “By The Wall, eh? You’ve been making the rounds.”
“I get over there whenever I can.”
Dre slammed an ale down in front of Jazz, sending suds across the bar, then walked away.
“Nine planes. Really?” said Jazz. His eyes crossed at Dre.
“He likes you,” Abby said.
“Can you tell?”
Jazz grabbed a handful of napkins, wiped the glass, then slugged a drink. “Ah,” he said. “Where was I?”
“The East River Sea Wall,” Abby said.
“Yeah, the Wall. I like to see the sky.”
“Not much to see at night.”
“Nothing to see here,” Jazz said. “You can’t even go MidHi anymore, the mobs converted all the parks to bootleg vegetable farms.”
Abby lifted his vodka. “To the sky,” he said.
Jazz raised his ale. “To the sky,” he repeated.
After the glasses again rested on the wooden bar, Abby asked, “Should I be concerned?”
Jazz shrugged. “Word is they’re offering credits.”
“That’s never good. Any idea who’s asking?”
“Nah. But that kid across the street is looking to collect.”
“That orange-haired K-kid over by the kiosk?”
Across the street, near the corner, was a lanky Korean teen, not yet old enough for an age mod—a K-kid.
Abby had already taken note.
In his oversized jacket and pants too tight for his twig legs, the kid looked like any other floating around the early morning Low. What made the kid stick out, apart from being a K-kid alone, was how badly he pretended to watch the kiosk screens, nervously pulling his lower lip away from his face while one eye intermittently peeped through a curtain of orange hair directly toward the window of the corner bar.