Touch of Death (Order of the Elements Book 2) Read online

  Brant grinned. “Hey, if it gives you an excuse to go into the Parallel without the Order kicking up a fuss, maybe you should play that card more often.”

  “I’ll pretend the Death King and I are BFFs.” I might be skirting his orders, but he must know I wasn’t a spy or a professional investigator. If I happened to find any clues at the market, I’d pass them to him if I had to, but I wasn’t holding my breath. As for not telling Brant? It wasn’t a light decision, but anything that could kill a lich could do much worse to a living person.

  Brant and I stepped through the node in a rush of energy which woke me up more thoroughly than a triple espresso shot. Revelling in the sudden burst of power in my veins, I didn’t see the revenants until we landed on top of them.

  Three figures appeared from the light, and Brant got between me and them, his hands alight with fire. I grabbed for my pouch of cantrips and flung a paralysis spell in their direction. The revenants all froze mid-motion, teeth bared and hands outstretched. They were shaped like skinny hairless humanoid beings with sharp nails and teeth. Vampires without the sex appeal, who fed on the energy from the nodes. Note to self: look before you leap next time.

  Brant blasted them with fire, and their papery skin ignited. Within seconds, all three turned into piles of ashes which scattered onto the rain-damp earth.

  “I’m guessing they were snacking on the node when we landed on top of them.” I ran my foot over the ashy ground, glad one of us had enough firepower to take them out without causing too much of a scene.

  “They don’t normally come to the surface, though,” Brant said.

  Fair point. While revenants and their vampire counterparts weren’t allergic to sunlight, they preferred the night hours. The day was overcast, admittedly, but the tunnels weren’t far from here. Strange for them to come aboveground, but maybe another group had driven them out of their usual hangout.

  Brant and I made our way through the winding dirt road to the tangle of warehouses on the outskirts of the city of Arcadia. For whatever reason, the vampires had ordered the central warehouse to be the designated area for all official magic-based trade, so most practitioners congregated around that area. This side of the city was also popular with mages, while elves, vampires, shapeshifters and other magical folk generally stuck to living among their own kind. Despite that, the markets were full of an eclectic bunch of people who came there on a daily basis for their magic fix.

  I looked up at the dull cloudy sky. “I should find Dex. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “Are you sure you want to take him into the market with you?” he said. “Fires spread in close quarters.”

  “Hey, I’m taking you with me.” I shot him a playful grin. “Didn’t you once set your own house on fire?”

  His cheeks turned adorably pink. “That was when I was a kid and I couldn’t control it.”

  Brant, like many mages, had been disowned by his regular human family after one fire too many and had ended up running away into the Parallel. He hadn’t had an easy life, and it’d be hypocritical of me to judge him for doing whatever was necessary to survive. The guy had an ethical code, which was more than I could say for most mages I’d met.

  The warehouse doors stood wide open to allow us to enter the market, which consisted of a collection of stalls selling everything from enchanted clothing to magical delicacies. Cantrips were widespread, ranging from expensive transformation spells to more everyday charms like insect repellents and water-breathing spells. The flow of foot traffic was aggressive enough that stopping to take a look ran the risk of being trampled by overeager practitioners searching for the latest bargains. Even the vampires, who didn’t usually venture outside during the day, were walking around with their hoods pulled up, their pale eyes scanning the wares on offer.

  The third time someone trod on my foot, I gave Brant an exasperated look. “Why not just ask someone for directions?”

  Brant, who’d rather cut off his own tongue than ask for assistance, shook his head, so I accosted a middle-aged man with a scarred face. “Hey, there. Any new practitioners in here?”

  He grunted. “There always are.”

  “Is there a group who are selling legit cantrips to the Order, then?” I elaborated.

  His head snapped up. “You’re with them? Get out of here.”

  Well, now. I hadn’t expected a direct answer, much less an overt display of aggression. “Why?”

  “I don’t trade with Order lackeys,” he said flatly.

  “We’re not with the Order,” Brant interjected. “We’re curious as to who these new practitioners are. It seems they’re snapping up a lot of the local business.”

  “Of course they are,” he said. “What do you expect? This place is littered with so-called magicians who’ll as soon as hex your testicles off as give you a protective charm.”

  “He’s not wrong there,” I whispered to Brant. “Whereabouts might we find these new practitioners?”

  “That way.” He pointed towards the back of the warehouse, the more run-down area where the ceiling leaked when it rained, and draughts snuck in through gaps in the walls.

  So the practitioners were overtly selling to the Order in front of witnesses? Interesting, and not typical of the Parallel. Despite the Order’s authority back on Earth, a lot of people in the Parallel didn’t trust them, and with good reason. The original Order of the Elements had been the ruling authority before the Council had been obliterated in the war, and the new authorities had kept the same name afterwards despite the unpleasant connotations. Which seemed a weird move to me, knowing what I now knew about spirit magic.

  The Parallel had been fractured long before the war, but when the Council of the Elements had been in charge, they’d at least tried to keep the population alive and thriving. Now, with the vampires ruling the city, they only needed to ensure enough humans survived to maintain their food supply. The rest of us could die for all they cared. The lack of safety regulations in here was testament enough to that, and I had to stop a kid of barely sixteen from buying a dud cantrip which was nothing more than a regular ten-pence piece covered in sharpie.

  “Hey, fuck off,” the seller said. “Mind your own business.”

  “Stop selling your shit to desperate kids, then.” I flicked the cantrip back into his face, and his shouts pursued me through the market stalls.

  Brant caught my arm. “Don’t go wandering off like that.”

  “I wasn’t about to get that kid get taken in,” I said, more irritable than usual due to the heat and the crowds and the general atmosphere of aggressive bartering.

  Then my gaze fell on the back row of stalls, an area which seemed positively pristine compared to the rest of the market. The back wall looked to have been completely rebuilt, while the ceiling no longer dripped the remnants of recent rainfall onto anyone unlucky enough to have their stalls set up below. A pair of long wooden tables dominated the rear of the warehouse, lined with endless coin-shaped cantrips arranged in rows of a dozen. Far too many to have been hand-crafted by a single person. A banner adorned the wall behind the tables. Collective of Spells. This was it.

  “Can I help you?” said a dark-skinned young woman with braided hair, stepping up behind the rows of cantrips.

  “Yes,” I said. “Did you make all these yourself?”

  “Oh, we’re not the manufacturers,” she said. “We just sell them.”

  Brant and I exchanged baffled looks. Partnerships like Devon’s and mine were common enough, but not on this scale. Each of the more complex spells would take hours to make, regardless of the practitioner’s skill level, and the materials alone would cost a lower-ranked Order employee several months of wages.

  “When you say you’re not the manufacturers, who made them?” asked Brant.

  “You’ll have to talk to a supervisor,” she said.

  “Meaning…?” I began.

  A short man elbowed past me and started negotiating for a price on sleeping spells as th
ough I wasn’t there. Trying to quash my irritation, I stepped aside to speak to Brant.

  “That’s not one person’s work,” he said, echoing my thoughts.

  “So there’s some kind of factory mass-producing cantrips?” That didn’t sound right, either. No machine could mimic a practitioner, and I’d always assumed there weren’t nearly enough people with a gift for spellwork within the city to form a collective.

  “No way,” he said. “That wouldn’t be possible even if this place wasn’t stuck in the Dark Ages.”

  “I wonder if the vampire council approved this,” I said in an undertone. “It seems set to shake up things in a major way.”

  The Death King wouldn’t care, most likely, but then again, his people had everything they wanted and needed. Being dead had its perks, that was for sure. The vampires, on the other hand, were control freaks, if not to the same degree as the Order was. They wouldn’t stand for anybody upending their status at the top of the food chain.

  A faint breeze drifted overhead, but not from a gap in the warehouse wall. Then, as though conjured up by my thoughts, the Air Element walked past the table, dressed in full armour with the Death King’s symbol on full display.

  “Great,” I murmured. “You know, I can see why the Death King wanted me to do the espionage part. His soldiers are as subtle as a house fire.”

  Mutters and whispers followed the Air Element’s path through the market. Everyone knew that uniform, if the expression of disdain and superiority wasn’t enough on its own. The breeze stirred up in the soldier’s wake sent several practitioners scrambling to stop their tables from falling over.

  And the prize for the most dramatic entrance of the week goes to…

  Resigned, I walked up to Ryan and halted before them. “Let me guess, you want to know why I’m slacking off on duty.”

  “I’m not here for you,” Ryan informed me.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “You forgot to add, I’m sorry for crashing into your bedroom and attacking you for a crime you never committed.”

  Too late, I remembered Brant… whose hands were sparking with fire. Oh, crap.

  “Apologise to her,” he said in a warning tone.

  Dammit. I had to get him out of here before the two of them kicked off a full-on brawl which might well end with half the market on fire.

  I grabbed Brant’s elbow. “We’ll talk later. C’mon, we don’t need to make a scene.”

  Ignoring the stares, I all but hauled Brant after me through the crowd towards the warehouse doors. After a moment, he stopped resisting, though his face remained twisted in a scowl. I released him when we reached the street, leaving the warehouse’s crowd behind.

  “What was that about?” I said. “Brant, put out the fire. People are staring.”

  He let the flames die down. “I don’t trust those Elements.”

  “Nor me. I wonder who they were looking for in there.” I took a few steps away from the warehouse door, keeping one eye on Brant. “I expected to get my ear chewed off for wandering around the market instead of going to see the Death King like I told the Order, but I guess the Elemental Soldiers didn’t hear about that. They weren’t around when I saw the Death King at his castle, either.”

  “Maybe he sent them to spy for him.”

  “I thought that was supposed to be my job,” I said. “Maybe the Death King asked them to check out the market, then. He must know about our new competitors.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “I’ll talk to my contacts, see who might know the brains behind the operation. There’s got to be a whole network involved with this Collective of Spells.”

  “Has to be, if they’re complying with Order standards.” Unease trickled down my spine. “I don’t like this.”

  Brant had mentioned changes in the Parallel, but he seemed as stumped by the new development as I was.

  “Nor do I,” he said. “Do you want to head home? Or… were you serious about checking in with the Death King?”

  “I would if I had anything to report to him,” I said. “I didn’t even think to ask at the market.”

  “What, about potential lich traitors passing on his secrets?” he said. “I doubt anyone out here would know. Besides, it’s probably too soon after the battle to bring up the subject.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured. “I don’t know what the Death King was thinking, offering me a job.”

  He glanced at me. “Did he offer to pay you well?”

  “Yes. That’s part of the problem.” I dug my hands in my pockets. “Since thanks to our friends back there, Devon and I are heading full-speed towards big trouble.”

  “Speaking of trouble…” He trailed off, pointed at three skeletal figures staggering in our direction.

  Ah, shit. The revenants from earlier had brought friends.

  5

  Brant leapt in with flaming hands, while I dug into the pouch at my waist. One of the revenants lunged at me, but I flicked a D20 at him and it hit it in the forehead, knocking it straight into the path of Brant’s flames. I scooped up the die before it fell victim to his fiery attack. The second revenant tried to take a bite out of my face, but I slammed my foot into its knee. Bone crunched, and it fell sideways into the path of Brant’s fire.

  Flames ate away at the revenants’ bones, turning all three of them into ashes.

  “What the hell is with these revenants?” I said. “They don’t normally come aboveground during the day, if at all.”

  “I know.” Brant shook a dusting of ashes from his hands, looking perturbed. “I reckon something drove them out of their nest.”

  My gaze fell on a nearby set of stairs leading into the tunnels that lay beneath the city. “They came from in there.”

  “Don’t tell me you want to go and look.”

  I answered by walking over to the stairs and peering down into the gloom. “Might as well do something constructive.”

  Brant groaned. “You know what, I’d have preferred it if you’d opted to visit the Death King. This sort of thing never ends well.”

  “I have played over two hundred hours of Skyrim, you know.” I pulled a cantrip infused with a light spell from my pocket. “I’m also wondering if Dex might be hiding underground. It’s strange for him not to at least show up and say hi.”

  I understood why Dex would avoid enclosed spaces after his bad experience in the Death King’s jail, but my curiosity about those revenants refused to be sated. What had happened to drive them away from the underground node?

  I flicked on my light spell and climbed downstairs, halting halfway to shine the light over the murky walls. The intrepid sorceress rolls a perception check. Nothing stirred in the darkness below. So far, so good.

  Brant descended behind me, grumbling under his breath. I continued until my feet touched down on solid ground, using the spell to light the gloom and wishing Dex was with me. It was odd for him to avoid me, but he wasn’t Brant’s biggest fan, and the two of us had been spending a lot more time together over the last few weeks.

  Brant reached the foot of the stairs behind me. He cupped a flame in his hands, his own handy torch. “I hope you know where you’re going.”

  “The node is that way.” I pointed through the murky tunnel. “I had to find my way out of here pretty fast a few weeks ago.”

  That, and I could feel the node’s current of magical energy thrumming below the earth like the pounding of a subterranean waterfall crashing onto the rocks below. Brant gave me a sideways look. “You sure that’s why, and not your sixth sense?”

  “My spider-senses are dead-on.” I shot him a grin, turning right down a tunnel. Brant fell into step with me, sliding his hand into mine. He didn’t need to hold my hand, but I didn’t push him away. I was still working on rebuilding trust between us. Since losing my memories, good friends were hard to come by. Opening my heart to a romantic relationship, even harder. Brant had been nothing but patient with me so far, thankfully.

  As the node’s buzzing grew s
tronger, a horrible smell rose from the tunnel ahead, like a drain clogged with decomposing rats.

  I gagged. “What the hell is that?”

  “Something dead,” said Brant grimly. “It’s been rotting down here for a while, I’m guessing.”

  “Ugh.” I slipped my hand out of his and pulled my coat over my nose and mouth. “I’d blame it for scaring off the revenants, but they don’t have any sense of smell. They’re foul enough on their own.”

  The node’s buzzing intensified, and the tips of my fingers tingled with static. I was too close to turn back now, so I finished rounding the corner. Brant halted mid-step, cursing under his breath. I squinted ahead, trying to see what his more effective eyesight had picked out, and my gorge rose.

  A pile of bodies lay in front of the surging energy of the node, roughly heaped on top of one another. Revenants, by the look of things, and not killed by anything human. Claw marks ripped through their papery skin, revealing splintered bones and torn flesh. No wonder those other revenants had run to the surface to feed. But what could have killed them in such a manner? Being undead, they were stronger and faster than regular humans, though I doubted a person had ripped them up. No, some kind of monster had ambushed them here in the darkness.

  “Creepy,” I murmured. “What do the vamps think of all this?”

  Revenants were cousins of sorts to the vampires, created when a vamp drained a human entirely of blood without feeding them vampire blood in order to complete the reanimation ritual. As a result, revenants fed on the energy of the nodes rather than drinking blood from living beings, so the vampires who ruled the city tended to leave them be. That didn’t make the fact that they’d been left to rot down here in the darkness any less strange.