by Lisa Daniels
Yes, okay, father had lost his business. His earnings had slumped, ever since that day, when everything went wrong, and the malicious spirit her father tried to control turned out to be too powerful for anyone to handle. Yes, he deserved to lose it, after his own stubborn insistence of using a spirit too dangerous for any sane necromancer to go near, because he’d wanted to beat that girl.
Her father also didn’t seem able to accept this fact. He just kept croaking to her, “I won. I won. The spirit was mine. It’s mine!” As if a part of his brain had shut down, and refused to process any other thought. Since after all, when it came to any decent discussions with her father, it didn’t matter how reasonable you were, when he could simply shut down any reason and logic by letting it bounce off him and wither into nothingness.
Father was an idiot, certainly, when it boiled down to the core of their interactions. She didn’t agree with him at all. But this—that man coming here—changed everything.
She sat and observed from the stairs as the new man spoke to her father, casting a menacing shadow over the living room, almost drowning her father in it.
“You’ve screwed everything up. By rights you should be in a bodybag now, tied with stones and thrown in the deepest part of the ocean. You have made things inconvenient.” The man, a devil in Ellie’s eyes, paced up and down the room, his shoes squeaking against the polished wooden floor. He was built like a twig, a sinister twig all the same, the kind of person you might have a heart attack over if you saw them in the forest at night, and all Ellie knew about him previously was that he owned her father.
Though Regal conducted his business on the ground, there was always someone pulling the strings above. Someone like this long-fingered man. If he could be called a man. Her father, to be sure, was part werewolf, thanks to an ancestor four generations back, which made Ellie part one, too, though she had no external features that showed it.
“I apologize for the setback,” Regal said, and Ellie hated the tone of deference in his words. He was Regal, for god’s sake! He controlled the dead. He ran deadrings where necromancers used their summons to fight each other for money! Sure, she’d been going off her father for a while, ever since he became obsessed with spirits—ever since her own mother, turned into a guardian angel, was taken by him and used for whatever plans he had.
So, of course, Ellie needed to warn the next person she saw with a guardian spirit. The woman known as Crimson in the deadring needed to be warned. And now this man was opposite her father, staring at him as if he were worse than a speck of dust.
“Setback? Setback? Oh, you apologize, do you? That makes everything better, doesn’t it? You know damn well you messed up. The police were involved! Thanks to that giant, gaping hole your little spirit left in the side of your event!” The man paused for breath, still in the fury of his own storm. Her father attempted to stammer something, but was shut down. Amazing, how easily her father was silenced when it didn’t involve Ellie or the men he usually dealt with.
“We’ve lost millions in revenue since you decided to go ahead and do your own business. The police have shut down two of our auction places, and the clients are bleeding over to a different competitor, out of Stoneshire.” The evil man paused, huffing through his noise like a great elephant. “You will make up for this. From now on, you do everything I say. Because if you don’t… you will regret it in this world and the next.”
She couldn’t see her father’s expression from this angle, but rather imagine he paled. She decided in that moment to creep back upstairs, out of the scene of her father’s new disgrace, and up to her room. She passed the study area where her bodyguard currently stayed, hesitated, then went inside.
“Mason,” she said, smiling as he turned around from the computer screen, giving her a tired smile. “How much of the discussion downstairs did you hear?”
“All of it,” he rumbled in his deep, sonorous voice. Something of the dragon was in his features, from the hooded, crystalline green eyes, to the smooth, sharp angle of his cheekbones and chin. He had a kind of noble elegance about him, and due to her father’s insistence, he wore a black three-piece suit, with serpentine cuff links, two gold embroidered prongs to embellish the tailcoat he wore, and the shiniest pair of leather shoes Ellie had seen on anyone. “It sounds as if your father is in a situation he won’t be able to tunnel himself out of this time.”
Mason was referring to her father’s boast from his teenage years, where he’d tunneled out of a maximum-security prison with a chisel and hammer, and covered up the evidence with a poster. Ellie didn’t think it true, but her father used it to ingratiate himself with the criminal underworld. I was in prison, he said. I know how to deal with your kind.
“I want out of this place, Mason. Again.”
Mason’s expression became more guarded. “Your father’s orders are very specific to me, little one,” he said, and his use of that old endearment made Ellie sad. “If you attempt to leave, I’ll have no choice but to tell him. I’ll have to bring you back.”
“You do have a choice, though, Mason,” she insisted. “You could just say I slipped out one day, or that I drugged you and you were unconscious or something.”
The dragon man gave her a long, hard stare, and she sighed. For a moment, Mason looked as if he were about to lean over and ruffle her about the hair, just as he had done when she was little. His arm then twitched and planted itself down, awkwardly, upon the desk table instead. “As much as I would like to help you, little one, you are not responsible for my earnings. The client’s word is law.”
“I’m your client, too,” Ellie said. She stared into the dragon shifter’s eerie green eyes, and a memory entered her mind. One where she was nine years old, back when everything was right and perfect. A new bodyguard watched over her in dragon form. Noble and shimmering and a dark, moss green on his scales. She’d gone straight up to that dragon, bold as brass, clambering over his lizard body, lodging herself by his wings and giggling when he lifted one up and down slowly with her on it, causing her to tumble gently to the ground. He was smaller than she’d expected a dragon to be, like a stocky little horse, but still bigger than a child in her first decade of life.
Another time when she hurt her knee playing, and the dragon shifter had carried her and helped clean up the injury, and read her a story until she fell asleep.
She had great memories with Mason. But she knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that all those good memories were a front. He was paid to do all of this. Paid to accompany her to the deadrings that her father was running. Paid to watch her when she went to school, and to make sure no one hurt her, or that she didn’t use her powers to hurt them.
Which was always a possibility, given some of the stupid things they said and assumed. Do necromancers eat dead people? I heard they can’t get a real relationship, and that’s where their skills suddenly come in handy. Better than a blow-up doll, isn’t it? Eww, how gross… you have to be a real freak to enjoy this kind of stuff! The words of her classmates still rang in her mind years later, though they also chased her onto the internet, where the commentary became particularly vile. Mason had managed to cut off a lot of it just by being there, but he’d also opted to let her have some freedom in her interactions. So he wasn’t there for everything.
Ellie was twenty-two now, and Mason thirty-one. Eighteen when he became her bodyguard, plucked out of the sky by her father’s money and desire to have the best protection for his daughter.
It hurt a little to consider, but she’d have to not only escape her father’s clutches, but Mason’s as well. But whatever. That was the way the cookie crumbled, right? If she wanted a clean break, she needed to shrug away everything that linked her here.
Goodbye, Mason, she thought, feeling as if she were shedding her childhood away, a part of the happiest memories she had, as she smiled at him, said she was going to sleep, and walked to her room. The goodbye continued to echo, heavy and uncomfortable, and she tried not to think o
n it too deeply, because she needed to protect herself, now.
Drawing up her laptop, she opened up her messenger platform, intending to poke a long-distant friend of hers. A friend from the Necromancy Discord group she had joined, for people like herself, who wanted somewhere to talk and belong, to vent out their issues with people who really got it.
Ellie’s username was Eleganza, of course.
Eleganza: Hey. U here?
She waited for the response, heart thumping faster when the notion of what she was about to ask floated into her brain again. It was really quite a big ask, but this had to happen.
Besides, TaliaTails usually was online at this point in the evening. She was out of university then.
TaliaTails: y
Eleganza: Okay, so I kinda have a big favor to ask. Like, really, really big. And its related to what u said a few weeks back when u wanted to help with the thing.
TaliaTails: whats wrong? What happened?
Eleganza: Something big. I gotta get out. But I didn’t go to uni, I don’t have a job. I have a lot of money, ‘cause I was, u know, doing the thing.
TaliaTails: How much?
Ellie paused. Disclosing her full earnings from the deadring fights might be a tempting distraction for TaliaTails, who found herself a little squeezed by university life, given that her father was paying for the tuition, but not for anything else.
Eleganza: Enough. A lady doesn’t kiss and tell her secrets right?
TaliaTails: aww. Okay, yeah, sure. If you make it to Lasthearth, I’ll meet you at the airport. Do you need police protection?
And this was the real reason Ellie wanted to go through this with TaliaTails.
Eleganza: Yes. I cant do it here. Theyll know. I’ve got inside info. Heard u guys are all about the inside info.
TaliaTails: umm, yeah, but remember, I’m not the one in law enforcement. My sis is. I’m just a poor forensic archaeologist in training.
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 disgu
st. “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?