I woke up to a blast of air hitting me in the face. Not a breeze from an open window, but a hurricane-like torrent that lifted me from my bed and slammed me into the wall so hard that starbursts of light winked before my eyes.
My gaze snapped open to the sight of the Death King’s Air Element standing over my bed, eyes narrowed in anger.
“Who did you tell?” they demanded.
I blinked, the back of my head throbbing. “Who—what? What are you talking about?”
Ryan raised a hand and slammed me into the wall again. Pretty lights twinkled in front of my vision, blurring the figure standing over the bed. Their hair was shaved to stubble, their nose pierced, and their armoured clothing a toned-down version of the clothes they wore when they rode a skeletal horse alongside their king. They stood a good five inches taller than me at just under six feet, which made their looming presence even more alarming when I was half awake and not wearing my glasses.
“Ow!” I yelped. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You betrayed us,” said the Air Element.
I’d done nothing of the sort. “I thought we weren’t enemies any longer.”
Okay, the King of the Dead had locked me in jail and ripped out my boyfriend’s soul, but that was the result of a misunderstanding after I’d accidentally stolen the amulet containing his own life essence. The Air Element and I had worked together to take down the rogue wannabe-spirit mage and returned the amulet to their king, and while I’d refused the Death King’s offer of a job, we hadn’t parted vowing to kill one another. So whatever the Air Element’s problem might be, I had nothing to do with it.
Another gust of air ripped through the room, and my bookshelf fell over, spilling volumes of manga all over the floor. “You told someone of my master’s secrets. Don’t deny it.”
“Who?” I said. “What secrets? I really don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Ryan frowned. “You don’t know.”
“Of course I don’t.” I shivered, my bare legs and arms exposed to the chill air stirred up by the Air Element’s arrival. I wore only a thin pair of pyjamas, with no weapons or even my lucky dice, but I still felt more exasperated and confused than frightened. Which probably said something about how screwed up my priorities were lately. “What does His Deathly Highness want, then? What’s got his tail in a twist?”
“You ought to show him more respect,” they said. “After the trouble you put him through, he was generous enough to offer you a job. Which you turned down.”
“Yeah, and I haven’t forgotten how he locked me in jail.” I sat up on the bed, my neck and back protesting at the movement after my surprise collision with the wall. “I might add that I also saved his life, so he has some nerve sending you here to threaten me. I didn’t tell anyone his secrets.”
Mostly because his secrets were mine, too. I’d used forbidden spirit magic to return his soul to its original vessel after Mr Cobb had tried to claim it as his own, and since I was the one who’d moved his soul into a new vessel to begin with—under duress, I might add—not blabbing worked in my favour as much as his.
Mr Cobb had nursed a bitter grudge towards the Order of the Elements for taking away his magic and had seen stealing the Death King’s soul as his only way to regain his lost glory. His grudge had also extended to me, since he and I had shared the same mentor, Dirk Alban. While Cobb had paid the price with his magic, the Order had spared me the same fate on account of my being underage. Instead, they’d removed all my memories of my training in spirit magic, which amounted to over two years of my life. Yet I still suspected the Death King could come up with a worse punishment than the Order if I told anyone that the notorious immortal death lord had a weakness after all.
Ryan gave me a long look. “You’d better be telling the truth.”
“It would help if you told me which secrets I’m supposed to have shared, and with whom.” The Death King had a whole castle’s worth of them, and I’d hardly scratched the surface.
Ryan didn’t answer my query. “If it wasn’t you, then someone else is sharing our private business with outsiders.”
“Did you ever catch that lich?” I asked. “The one who betrayed your king?”
From the Air Element’s disgruntled expression, I’d guess not. No surprises there, because all the liches in the court had turned on their master when Mr Cobb had briefly claimed the Death King’s soul. Since I was the only person who’d actually seen the traitorous lich scheming behind his back and all the liches looked the same to my human eyes, I hadn’t been able to pin down the traitor’s identity.
I’d always thought of the Death King as an all-powerful entity, so the idea that he could be thwarted had shaken me. Even more that I’d held his soul in my own hands… an experience I had zero desire to repeat. After all, the guy was infuriating, ruthless, and had a +5 in Annoying the Shit Out of Liv. All of which were good reasons for me to turn down his offer of a job even before he’d sent his Elemental Soldier to break into my house.
“You are invited to come and talk to my master to discuss this further,” they said. “I won’t discuss private matters in public.”
“If you didn’t want anyone listening in, you shouldn’t have broken into my house,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t know the node came out directly into your home.”
If that was an attempt at an apology, I wasn’t having any of it. My head was throbbing, my bookshelves were a mess, and I was irked as hell at the Death King for not just calling me like a normal person. It wasn’t like he couldn’t have astral projected over here.
Okay… maybe I didn’t want that. I hadn’t forgotten the time he’d paid a visit to my mum and her wife, Elise—a horrifying event which I hoped would never be repeated. Bloody lich lords.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll consider taking His Deathly Highness up on his offer.”
As the Air Element turned on the spot and vanished into the node, my Death Note poster fell off the wall with a crackle of finality. Wonderful.
Sitting up, I grabbed my glasses and put them on to survey the damage to my room. Luckily, Brant wasn’t here, or his fire magic might have caused a more permanent backlash. He had a tendency to overreact to any forms of hostility, especially against me. My books, manga and DVD shelves lay in a pile on the floor, while most of my posters had seen better days, but I’d got off easy, considering the Elemental Soldiers’ magic was the very best the Parallel had to offer.
The buzz of the node which went through the house had thoroughly banished any remnants of tiredness from my body, so I set about returning my room to its former state. As I set the bookshelves upright, Devon came into the room, her hair messy from sleep. The tips were dyed blue today, while she wore her Totoro onesie.
“What in the Elements’ name is going on?” she said. “I thought you and Brant were having really rough sex until I heard the crashing.”
“Nope. I got attacked by an Air Element.”
“You mean the Air Element?” She looked around at the carnage. “The Death King’s soldier?”
“You’ve got it.” I grabbed a stack of manga and set about arranging the volumes into the right order. “Rather than knocking on the door, they jumped through the node and woke me up by slamming my head into the wall a few times. Supposedly, someone’s sharing His Royal Deadliness’s secrets with outsiders.”
I’d known my brief history with the Death King was bound to get me into trouble again sooner or later, but I’d expected the trouble to come from the man himself. Maybe he was the one who’d told the Air Element to use force. It wouldn’t surprise me.
“Which secrets?” asked Devon.
“I tried asking and got zero response.” I shoved a stack of Fullmetal Alchemist manga onto the shelf. “I’m guessing it’s to do with His Highness’s detachable soul. Everyone knows about Cobb’s attempted coup by now, even if they don’t know how he came so close to besting the Death King.”
Devon clucked her tongue. “Who is it you’re supposed to have told, then? The Order?”
“I think the Order must already know.” I finished filling one shelf and moved to the next. “They’ve been allies with the Death King forever. That hasn’t changed after what Cobb did, as far as I know.”
Mr Cobb had tried to get me arrested along with him by bringing up my history of spirit magic at his trial, and only the Death King’s timely arrival had prevented me from winding up with another black mark on my record. I’d been doing my best to keep my head down and stay out of trouble in the weeks following my close call, but it seemed not everyone was following that advice.
“So they just… hopped through the node?” she said. “In the middle of our house?”
“Supposedly, they didn’t know it was here.” Which might well be the truth. I’d done my level best to keep the Death King from finding out our address. We had a difficult enough time keeping customers without the King of the Dead showing up here, thanks. “They want me to speak to the Death King, which absolutely isn’t happening now. I have a coffee date with Brant, besides.”
Aka, the one Element I could actually stand to be around at the moment. My boyfriend had a long-term permit from the Order so he could be here, which was a major sacrifice on his part considering his magic was dampened on this side of the nodes. But if it meant we could spend time together without running for our lives, he insisted it was worth it.
“Fun,” she said. “No missions from the Order, then?
“Nope.” Yet another reason to avoid tempting fate. The official rule was that crossings into the Parallel outside of official Order business were prohibited, and while most people broke that rule whenever they could get away with it, that didn’t mean I wanted to risk drawing the Order’s attention by following the Air Element back to their master’s castle.
Things had been different, once. The original Spirit Elements, who’d created the Parallel to begin with, had been held in high regard by the entire magical world, but during the elemental war a few decades back, the carnage they’d wreaked had wiped out the entire Council of the Elements and resulted in the Order outright banning spirit magic from use. No exceptions. Now Mr Cobb sat rotting in a jail cell, while I remained none the wiser as to how much he’d learned from Dirk Alban before I’d come to find myself standing beside our mutual mentor’s dead body when the Order had shown up to pass judgement on the pair of us.
“Better hope we get a shit-ton of business, then,” Devon said. “The landlord upped our rent again.”
“Shit, really? You never said.” She’d probably forgotten to. “I’m not holding out much hope that the Order will send me on any high-ranked missions soon.”
Our only other source of income came from the cantrips Devon sold, but since she could only sell to magical practitioners, that meant the bulk of our customers worked for or were associated with the Order. Yet another way they held us both under their control.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “If you ask me, Judith told half the Order we’re to blame for those deaths.”
I pulled a face. “I wish I didn’t think you were right.”
A number of Order personnel had been killed in the battle with Cobb and his allies, and since I was the one who’d led them into the conflict, many of them had been vocal about their disappointment that I’d got away without any serious punishment from the Order. That had been the Death King’s doing, which was yet another reason it made no sense for him to send one of his people to threaten me.
Devon backed out of my room. “I’m heading downstairs. There’d better not be any more Elements down there, because the next one’s getting a taster of my anti-gravity cantrip.”
“That’s what you’re calling it?” Devon’s lack of any custom jobs lately had prompted her to start inventing new cantrips using her spares, including one that sent anyone who touched it floating into the air like a balloon. It was a really good job I’d only set that one off inside the shop, or I’d probably have ended up drifting over the Atlantic Ocean. A bored Devon was a very dangerous thing.
Devon closed the door behind her, while I finished fixing up the bookshelves and then dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. I tugged a brush through my chin-length brown hair and popped in my contacts, then I grabbed my Parallel bag, telling myself it was just a precaution. In case Brant decided to hop over the nearest node to give the Death King a piece of his mind, for instance. He’d almost lost his soul protecting me, and he was a lot less forgiving of the Death King’s actions than I was.
My Parallel bag contained all the necessities for a mission on the other side. Clothes, snacks, water, torch, sleeping bag. It also contained my lucky dice, which the Death King had returned to me after his people had taken my possessions off me while I’d been in jail. It was a weird decision on his part, one I still didn’t know how to interpret. An apology for locking me up, a gesture of kindness, or another piece of leverage to use against me. Or maybe he didn’t want my crap littering his castle. Anyone’s guess.
It wasn’t worth trying to figure out the motives of an undead immortal who’d been around the Parallel for longer than I’d been alive, so I put the thought out of mind and went out to meet Brant.
