I entered via the gate and knocked on the red-painted door. I hoped Miles might answer, but Tate, a guy of around my age with dark skin and hair shaved to stubble, looked me up and down and said in disinterested tones, “Oh, it’s you.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I said. “Is Miles in?”
“Sure.” He called over his shoulder, “Miles?”
Miles appeared at the door a few seconds later, his straw-coloured hair rumpled as though he’d neglected to cut it recently. Together with his casual clothes and lean and unassuming figure, he looked nothing like he could rip the soul out of a person with his fingertips if he wanted to. The Death King might have the intimidation factor mastered, but the understated threat of the average spirit mage meant that few would look at the group of close-knit twenty-somethings and teenagers who lived here and believe they could give the Houses of the Elements a run for their money.
“Hey, Bria.” Miles’s mouth quirked in surprise at the sight of me on the doorstep. “Did the Death King send you to reprimand me for not checking in with him?”
“Nah, I was in the area and thought I’d drop by to talk.” I added the unspoken word alone. While the other Spirit Agents were his closest friends, I’d prefer that they didn’t find out about the jailor’s death or that my ex-best friend was suspected of his murder, even if Zade had been a total wanker whose fate I’d hardly shed tears over.
“We can talk out here,” he said, indicating the garden.
“Sure.” The two of us walked across the path winding through the lawn. Several vampire chickens were still roaming around, and I watched them peck at the ground for a moment while I gathered my thoughts. “Who set up this place? I didn’t know Spirit Agents were keen gardeners.”
“Tate and Shelley,” he responded. “This is possibly the best-tended garden in the entire Parallel. The house used to belong to a vampire, you know, so we take good care of it.”
“Seriously?” I looked up at the house, trying to picture a shadowy vampire roaming its bright corridors. “Why would anyone abandon a house like this?”
“The house’s owner left Elysium to join the vampires’ council in Arcadia,” he said. “Lord Blackbourne let us have the property. He’s the leading vampire lord.”
“I think I’ve seen him before,” I responded. “He’s a friend of the Death King’s, right?”
“Sure,” he said. “Speaking of whom, how’s living in the castle working out for you? The job isn’t too strenuous, right?”
“It wasn’t, at least until he sent me to the House of Fire to negotiate with them,” I said. “Which went off the rails when it turned out someone was murdered in their jail.”
“Eventful week, then?” he said. “Who died?”
“The chief jailor,” I said. “Not someone I particularly liked. The slight problem is that everyone is trying to blame Tay for it. She somehow got out of her cage at the time of his death and is refusing to admit why.”
“You think she’s innocent?” He lowered his voice, his jaw tensed. “You know what she did to you. To all of us.”
I knew, all right. Her betrayal had nearly got us killed. Several of the Spirit Agents had died in the battle, which meant their distrust of me wasn’t without reason. They were the ones who’d got me into the Death King’s contest to begin with, but I gathered that nobody here had expected me to win. I pretended not to see the faces watching us from the windows, turning my head away and dropping my voice.
“I don’t know why she’d bother lying,” I murmured. “I think she went to speak to Adair when she was out of her cage, so he might have used his mind-control on her, but I don’t know where she would have got the cantrip which killed the guard. Pretty sure they took all her weapons off her when they brought her in.”
“Then she got it from one of his allies,” said Miles. “She’s resourceful, isn’t she? If she won’t tell you she’s innocent, she’s got something to hide.”
I should have known Miles wouldn’t believe she was innocent, though I wasn’t certain why I did, either. Old naivety, perhaps. Or the nagging sense that the rest of the Family had been awfully quiet about Adair ending up in jail again. I would have expected them to at least make a move to get their beloved son out of the House of Fire, but I hadn’t heard a word from them yet. They must know about my new position at the Death King’s side, too, and their ongoing silence made me edgy, to say the least.
I pulled the blank cantrip I’d taken from the House of Fire out of my pocket and showed it to Miles. “I know it’s blank now, but this is the cantrip that was used to kill the jailor. Check out the mark on the back. Have you seen it before?”
He examined the gleaming gold surface. “There’ve been a lot of those blank cantrips around lately. They aren’t local, but I’ve never seen that mark on any of them before.”
“It’s the Family’s signature,” I told him. “It used to be on every cantrip they manufactured. When they were jailed, everything they owned was destroyed. Or I thought it was.”
His brows rose. “Manufactured?”
“The Family’s house was like a giant factory for experimental magic,” I explained. “They mostly did it via creating new cantrips. There weren’t many cases where they used actual people to experiment on.”
Like my brother and me. Mostly they sold cantrips to anyone willing to take the risk to earn some quick cash and then monitored the results from a distance. I’d assumed Tay would have an aversion to anything they’d touched, cantrips included, but she’d gone as far as to take the Family’s side during the recent conflict. Before, I’d
