House of Fire (Parallel Magic Book 2) Page 2

  “There has to be a mistake.” I took a step towards the door. “Can you let me in? I’ll talk to the man in charge. Maybe—”

  “The man in charge is the one who died,” he said. “Chief jailor.”

  “What?” No. He had to be lying. “You mean Zade?”

  “The one and only.” His leer twisted into an expression that contained more anger than humour. “Your friend is doomed, Bria.”

  Shit. His tone was dead serious. The former jailor of the House of Fire, who’d tormented me throughout my imprisonment, was dead.

  2

  I passed the sneering guard and walked into the hallway. Every inch of the place was seared into my memory from my inprisonment here, and it was easy for me to navigate my way through the whitewashed corridors to the source of the murmuring voices coming from behind a wooden door.

  The jailor’s body had been laid out on a low wooden table inside the room, and several other guards glanced at each other and muttered when I walked in. Ignoring their stares, I looked down at the body, at the face I’d seen from the other side of a barred door more times than I’d could count. He’d taken great pleasure in pushing the boundaries as to what the House was allowed to get away with in how they treated their prisoners, be it taunting me through the bars or ‘forgetting’ to feed me for days at a time. Yet lying there on the table, he looked unexpectedly pathetic, from the dishevelment of his usually neatly combed grey hair to the reddened blisters fanning across his papery skin which made him look like he’d been stung by a flock of angry hornets. The red-and-black uniform all the guards wore did not help that impression.

  I wrenched my gaze away from Zade’s face. “How did he die?”

  “His body shut down, seemingly of its own accord,” Harris said dispassionately. “We found a cantrip at the scene, but it was blank. Convenient.”

  “Where—” I broke off, seeing a blank cantrip lying on the edge of the table, face-down. Even blank, I recognised the signature on the back of the golden coin.

  The Family. The Family had created the cantrip. I wouldn’t lie, part of me had always wondered if someone in here hadn’t contributed to their escape. They were supposed to be incarcerated in the Houses’ most secure prison, not walking free.

  Not using their cantrips to kill people.

  “What’s she doing in here?” said one of the other guards. “Isn’t she… wait, isn’t that the Death King’s symbol?”

  “Got it in one.” I flashed the scarlet interior of my cloak at them. “Where did this cantrip come from?”

  “As if you don’t know,” said Harris.

  I frowned at him. “I had nothing to do with this. I’ve been in the Court of the Dead ever since the trials for the next Fire Element came to an end. Ask the Death King to back me up if you don’t believe me.”

  “Bold claim, that,” said one of the other guards.

  “Sure you want to risk pissing him off?” I said. “He sent me to negotiate with you about a new agreement between the Court of the Dead and the Houses of the Elements.”

  “A likely story,” said Harris. “You’re a former inmate. Why would the King of the Dead give a job to the likes of you?”

  “It’s true,” I told the guards. “Turns out I have the skills he wanted for his personal Fire Element, so he gave me the position. I take it you’re declining the Death King’s offer?”

  I hadn’t exactly expected the House to fall over themselves to team up with the Court of the Dead, but the fact that they outright refused to believe I worked for the Death King pissed me off to no end.

  “Tell your boss,” said Harris, “that we have our own business to deal with at this moment in time. Feel free to also tell him his new Fire Element’s best friend is a murdering liar.”

  “You mean you really think Tay’s the one who killed Zade?” I said. “Where would she have got hold of a cantrip? I assume you had the sense to confiscate everything she brought in with her.”

  I’d thought his comment about Tay was a taunt, but had she really been out of her cell when Zade had died? She wasn’t good at following orders at the best of times, but she must have known better than to murder the chief jailor and get herself caught at the scene of the crime. Besides, she couldn’t have got hold of a cantrip from behind bars. Right?

  “You tell me,” said Harris. “Your friend Tay was out of her cell when he died. Facts are facts.”

  “She couldn’t have got her hands on anything,” I said. “Not if she never left the place and was under constant guard. If there is a chance she might’ve got hold of a cantrip and sneaked out of her cell, then blame your own security for not keeping a close enough eye on her.”

  Harris scowled. “She’s a sneaky bitch. She has magic.”

  “She can’t walk through walls,” I said. “If someone managed to break in here and spoke to her, you might want to have another look at that, not focus all your attention on Tay.”

  Like me, Tay’s magic was different than the norm. Her ability to control and channel electric energy was previously unheard of, in fact, but the very walls of the dungeon cell would have muted her power. Not even spirit mages could use their astral projecting abilities to get into the lower levels of the building. So if someone had given her the means of killing a guard, they’d have had to walk in through the doors in person. Either the guards were admitting their security held more holes than my old shoes did, or they were too convinced that both Tay and I were lying to consider there might be issues with their assumptions.

  Harris walked up to me and waved the cantrip in my face. “You know where this cantrip came from?”

  “No.” It wasn’t a lie. The Family didn’t have the same resources as they had before. Or I thought they didn’t. “Don’t look at me like that. I have nothing to do with the Family and I have no idea where they’re hiding. I thought you were the ones who were supposed to keep them incarcerated. Have standards slipped that much?”

  Harris loomed closer, so close that I could smell the smoke on his breath. “You want to be locked up, too, is that it?”

  “You’re welcome to try,” I said. “And see if your security can keep out the Death King himself.”

  “Don’t lock her up,” said one of the other guards. “Look, she’s definitely wearing his gear. She can’t have taken it from Davies. We removed his body.”

  Harris shot him a glare. “Then she stole it from the castle. The Death King is losing control of his army, the rumours say.”

  “Not me.” I folded my arms. “You know, it’ll go a lot easier for all of us if you believed me. Do you want me to tell the Death King that you have no interest in accepting his offer to work with him?”

  “Not as long as your friend refuses to admit to any wrongdoing,” said Harris. “As long as there’s a killer loose in here, we’re not wasting our time by sending our people to negotiate with the Court of the Dead.”

  “Why don’t I talk to her myself?” I asked.

  I didn’t expect him to say yes, but another guard spoke up first. “Why not? Maybe the Death King’s Fire Element can help loosen her tongue. Better than waiting for her to decide to speak to us herself. Unless she responds better to force.”

  “If you hurt her,” I began heatedly, “I’ll bring a pack of liches in here with or without the Death King’s permission.”

  “The Death King doesn’t give a shit about the mages,” said Harris. “He doesn’t care about your friend.”

  Unfortunately, he might be right on that one, but that didn’t mean I’d let them get away with tormenting Tay. While they didn’t often use torture on their prisoners, it wasn’t illegal here in the Parallel, not when the Houses themselves had written the very laws governing the city of Elysium.

  The prisoners were organised by floor, with the least dangerous on the upper floors and the highest risk prisoners on the lower levels. Tay’s danger level had her on the lowest possible floor, and during our imprisonment, we’d been in cells opposite one another on the
same corridor. Ironically, behind bars was the best place I could have been the first time Zade had hauled me in here. At least until I’d been certain my so-called family weren’t going to be able to escape their own secure cells. More than five years had passed since then, yet the sight of the narrow staircase leading down into the depths of the prison brought all those old memories roaring to the surface.

  It’d been pure chance that’d seen Tay and I imprisoned close together. The House’s guards might not know all the details of my past, but they knew who’d raised me, who’d been responsible for my magical talent, and they hadn’t taken any chances. What they’d overlooked was that while Tay hadn’t been raised by the Family herself, their cantrips had gifted her with magic which was volatile and hard to control, and we’d bonded over that while plotting to escape. Eventually, we’d walked free and built a life together. Now that life lay in ashes, thanks to her decision to throw her lot in with a group of rogue spirit mages in the hopes of getting her magic under control and being on the winning side in a new elemental war.

  She’d paid the price for her choice. I felt it when I walked down the stairs to the lowest level—a pressure emanating from the row of cells that would have cut off my fire magic as effectively as dunking a bucket of water over my head. The cells were formed of thin bars made of an unbreakable metal, laced with the same material as the walls and ceiling of the dungeon which muted any magic that came into contact with it.

  Inside her cell, Tay was doing sit-ups on the hard floor. It couldn’t possibly be comfortable, but she’d never been good at dealing with being cooped up. The higher security prisoners weren’t allowed out of their cells at all, for any reason. No privileges. No escape. Unless you were resourceful like us, that is.

  Harris stood back to watch me as I approached the cell. “Tay?”

  She lifted her head, then she moved into a sitting position against the wall. “They got you, too?”

  “No.”

  Her gaze landed on the uniform I wore, and her eyes narrowed to slits. “I see how it is.”

  “Do you?” Defensiveness rose inside me. “I took the job working for the Death King because it’s that or let the Family hunt me down. The Family you helped when you turned against me.”

  “I’m not the one who encouraged them to come after you,” she countered. “You’re working for a murderer. You know how many people the Death King has had killed or turned into liches to join his army?”

  “Look, I was originally going to take the job to keep both of us safe,” I said. “Besides, you chose to turn your back on me. What was I supposed to do, go back to working for Striker? The authorities caught him, too.”

  “I know they did,” she said. “You couldn’t have picked anyone else to work for? The Court of the Dead is going to be one of the first places to fall apart when the war kicks off.”

  “I thought the war was on hold after most of the conspirators ended up jailed.” Including Shawn and the surviving spirit mages who’d betrayed the Spirit Agents. Most of the fire mages who’d tried to infiltrate the Death King’s castle had ended up dead or jailed, too.

  Okay, I understood why the guards wouldn’t believe in Tay’s innocence of the jailor’s death. Considering her allies had killed people and she’d let it slide, I wasn’t sure I did, either.

  “Not at all,” she said. “You haven’t seen the half of it yet.”

  “See, this is what I mean,” I said, trying to suppress a shiver of dread at her words. “You accuse me of working for a murderer, but I know what Adair and the Family did. I saw it for myself. Yet you worked with someone who was responsible for everything that went wrong in both our lives.”

  She ducked her head, not before I spotted a shimmer of guilt in her eyes. “The Family will be on the winning side in the war, I guarantee it. They’ll be ready to pick up the pieces.”

  I didn’t doubt they would. The Family didn’t start wars, for the most part. They just cleaned up the aftermath. Yet there was nothing they could gain from another conflict which they didn’t already have.

  Except me, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. I’d left Adair behind, left him for dead, and while he was as tightly locked up as Tay was, I couldn’t help wondering how he’d got out the first time around. Admittedly, there’s not much you can do to keep a half-elf, half-human semi-immortal with unpredictable magic under lock and key. Adair had the additional advantage of being able to use his own magic to persuade anyone to obey him, and I wasn’t sure even the magical protection on the dungeon would be able to keep it contained. If he was given the slightest leeway, he’d walk free once again, and I’d prefer not to end up taking the blame if he did. Though chance would be a fine thing if the Death King kept sending me to talk to these people. At least my alibi was solid and there was no denying I wore the symbol of the Court of the Dead.

  “Why did you come here, anyway?” asked Tay.

  “Why else? The head jailor was found dead and you’re the main suspect.” I sucked in a breath. “You know what they’ll do if you’re found guilty. I couldn’t walk away after that.”

  “Do you think I did it?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  She gave a shrug. “Guess you wouldn’t believe me either way.”

  That stung, but I brushed it off. “You haven’t seen Adair since they brought you in? Or heard from him?”

  “How would I? He’s miles away on the other side of this floor.”

  That’s not an answer. Adair’s mind-controlling abilities might have easily convinced her to kill the jailor if he’d managed to make eye contact with her during her brief escape from her cell. She wouldn’t have needed a cantrip to kill if she’d had access to her magic, but she didn’t. Adair, on the other hand? The verdict was out on that one.

  “Then why were you out of your cell?” I asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. “None of your business.”

  I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Tay, I’m trying to save your life.”

  “I don’t need your help,” she said. “I’ll speak for myself.”

  “You want to be executed for a crime you claim not to have committed?” I said. “Can’t you put aside our personal issues and focus on the big picture here? I’ll gladly leave you be if you just tell me what you want.”

  “I don’t want to die.” She spoke to her hands, not looking at me in the eyes. “But they’ve already decided I’m guilty. And I’m not willing to provide evidence otherwise.”

  “There you have it,” Harris said from behind me. “Sure your Death King master will come to the aid of a dead woman?”

  Tay’s head snapped up, disbelief colouring her voice. “That’s what you said? You told the guards the Death King would help save me?”

  Heat seared my neck. “Actually, that isn’t what I said. I did say that I’d bring a group of liches here to stop your execution if necessary, whether the Death King gave permission or not, but I’m thinking of retracting that promise.”

  “You think a bunch of dead people can help me?” she said.

  “I reckon the liches can give it a shot.” I turned to Harris. “I know you want a straight answer from her, but if I were you, I’d keep an eye on Adair. The guy can use persuasive magic. He might have ordered her not to answer any questions.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” said Harris.

  “I bet Adair’s hard to keep contained,” I added, ignoring his petulant tone. “Does his magic still work in here? Because that’s one hell of a gamble to take, unless you keep him blindfolded.”

  “Like you could do any better.”

  I lifted my head. “You know liches are immune to his persuasive magic, don’t you? If you ask me, he’d be more secure in the Death King’s jail than here. I’d like to see him try to convince them he had nothing to do with the jailor’s death.”

  “What?” He cocked a brow at me. “Nobody told me that before.”

  “I thought you knew.” Admittedly, most people didn’t
consider immortal lich lords when designing their jail cells. “Does that make you think differently about the Death King’s offer of cooperation with the House of Fire?”

  Tay made a sceptical noise. “He could gain the cooperation of all the Houses and it’d make no difference. The war will bring this place crashing down. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “You want me to make you take back those words?” said Harris.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “Tay, if you aren’t going to help me, then good luck. I’m outta here.”

  In truth, I was worried she’d provoke the guards into inflicting a worse punishment on her, and I had nothing more to say to convince her to admit the truth. Not as long as Adair held her in his grip. So I stepped away from her cell and followed Harris back upstairs, my mind ticking over the possibilities. Would the Death King dismiss my idea of taking Adair into custody outright, even if the House of Fire somehow agreed to the transfer?

  “Bitch deserves to die,” said Harris.

  Anger clenched inside me, even if I knew Tay hadn’t exactly made herself look the picture of innocence. “Look, I’m ninety percent sure Adair hit her with a full blast of his magic. It wouldn’t surprise me if he convinced her to kill the jailor before he was even imprisoned.”

  “Even if he did, she broke out of her cage by herself.” He tilted his head. “You want to visit him next?”

  “No thanks.” I suppressed a shudder, well aware that some of the guards believed I would take Adair’s side, given the chance. At least my new job gave me some measure of protection—once they stopped denying that I was telling the truth about being the new Fire Element, that is. Which might take a face-to-face meeting with the Death King himself.

  Unfortunately, I was going to have to go back to him and explain that the House of Fire refused to commit to any kind of deal for the time being, at least until he was able to give them an offer they might accept. If he did offer to take Adair off their hands, it would solve a lot of problems for them, and as a bonus, it would solve my worry that he’d give them the slip at the first opportunity.