“You again,” said Harris. “I thought you were going back to the Death King. Your… employer.” His tone dripped with scepticism.
“I dropped by here first to catch up with a friend,” I said. “What’re you doing here?”
“We have a directive from the upper echelons of the four Houses of the Elements, aimed at all independent mages in the city,” he said. “The new rules will ensure that the city of Elysium remains a safe place for mages and non-mages.”
“What rules?” said Miles. “Who even are you?”
“Harris,” he said. “Representative of the House of Fire.”
“Meaning he does the grunt work nobody else wants too,” I interjected. “What’s got the Houses all agitated, then? Aside from the obvious?”
The Family? Perhaps the Houses weren’t as indifferent to their escape as they seemed. The other guards scowled at me from behind Harris, cracking their knuckles.
“The amount of crimes committed by mages has been on the increase over the last few weeks,” he said. “Especially mages who aren’t registered with the Houses. How many people live here in this property?”
“None of your business,” said Miles. “We aren’t part of the Houses because we’re spirit mages, and our own House was shafted after the war, in case you’ve forgotten. But I guess you were a kid back then.”
I hadn’t even known there’d ever been a House of Spirit at all. Not that I’d met many spirit mages before I’d had my first run-in with the Spirit Agents, because to my knowledge, they’d been virtually wiped out in the war thirty years prior.
The guard cleared his throat. “I’m going to have to carry out a house inspection.”
“A what?” Miles said blankly. “Inspection? What are you now, our landlord?”
“The Houses of the Elements own all the properties in this city,” said Harris. “Step aside. If you have nothing to hide, this will go quickly.”
Miles looked as baffled as I felt. “You should let me tell the others first, otherwise they’ll think we’re under attack.”
He pushed open the front door and walked in. I heard him exchange words with one of the other mages, and then he stuck his head out again. “Come on in. Don’t touch anything if you want to keep your fingers.”
I walked into the house behind Harris, more to keep an eye on him than anything else. The other spirit mages had gathered downstairs, watching the intruders with a mixture of wariness and confusion as their group split up to search the upper and lower floors. The war’s impact on the Parallel’s population of spirit mages explained why none of their group was older than their late twenties. They hadn’t been born when their predecessors had met their tragic fates, yet like everyone here in the Parallel, they’d lived under the shadow of the war their whole lives.
As the guards continued rampaging through the house, I ended up awkwardly standing next to Shelley, Miles’s second in command, who’d replaced Shawn after his betrayal. She was Tate’s brother, as I’d learned recently, and they shared the same dark skin and broad features. Where Tate’s hair was shaved to stubble, Shelley’s contained a vibrant pink streak. While she was friendly enough to the others, she wasn’t my biggest fan. For good reasons… like the ones who’d followed me here.
“I swear, if they trample the lawns…” Her mutters trailed off as one of the uniformed guards marched past and into the kitchen. “Don’t you even think about stealing our food supplies.”
“Not sure that’s what they’re after.” I shifted uncomfortably as a couple of the other mages shot me accusing gazes. Both were teenage girls, already bearing the scars and distrustful air of people who’d long since resigned themselves to being treated as pariahs by the magical community at large. Damn if I didn’t relate.
There has to be a better way than this. The Houses’ original purpose was to protect the public, not paint mages as a dangerous menace and ignore the real problems. The intruders showed no fear of the spirit mages in their presence as they continued their search of the house, and Harris returned to the sitting room carrying a box of cantrips. “Just what are these for?”
“The cantrips?” said Miles. “For protection, what else?”
“Acquired legally?”
My heart sank a little. Was this part of the Houses’ long-neglected promise to start cracking down on illegal cantrips? You’d think they’d be more concerned with the one which had killed the jailor, but this might be a test to learn if the Spirit Agents had been involved in his death.
“Yes,” Tate told him. “We have a supplier.”
Harris insisted on examining each cantrip individually, while his mates finished inspecting the rest of the house. Then he handed the box back to Miles. “We allow you to stay in this city with the understanding that you obey certain laws. If it turns out you have anyone or anything in this house which falls outside of those laws, we will punish everyone who lives under this roof equally.”
“I don’t recall breaking any laws,” said Miles. “We were just minding our own business over here.”
“Then you have nothing to fear from us,” said Harris. “As for you, Bria Kent, if I find out you’re lying, you know where you’ll end up.”
Behind bars. Yeah. I’d figured as much.
The three guards left the house without so much as an apology for the intrusion. Once they were gone, Miles went to the door and firmly closed it behind them. “Show’s over, folks. Go back to whatever you were doing.”
The spirit mages dispersed, with the exception of Shelley and Tate, whose shared look of suspicion wasn’t lost on me.
