Shadowstorm (Sorcery and Science Book 6) (6 page)

She squeezed his hand, her grip as strong as ever. “Don’t be upset, Everett. You know how much your father has always wanted to chat up an Elition.”

Everett shook the stiffness from his hand and walked into the lounge. Bookcases filled to bursting lined the walls. The central point of the room was a wine barrel atop a blue and silver ornamental carpet. Four enormous sofas were positioned around it. Liam Black sat beside Terra on one of them, his hands dancing about in excited strokes.

“…and I’ve heard there’s this cocktail Elitions drink with poison as one of the ingredients?”

“Phantom’s Bite,” said Terra. “It contains Deathweed, a truly toxic substance. I’d highly discourage you from trying it, Mr. Black.”

“Oh, do call me Liam,” he said, beaming at her. “But if this Deathweed is so toxic, why have Elitions created a beverage around it?”

“Some of my people favor thrills over sense.”

Phantoms. Everett remembered Cameron telling him about the drink. The name was no coincidence. Phantoms in particular liked to dance before Death’s door, taunting him with their carousel act of impetuous stunts.

“Can you taste the poison?” he asked her.

“Pardon?”

“If I were to slip a drop of it into this wine,” he began, picking up the glass on the table. “Would you be able to taste it?” He held it out to her.

Terra stared at the glass. “Taste. Smell. Even see.” She took the glass in her hand and lifted it up, swirling it before her face. “Deathweed is not a subtle substance. A single drop will turn most liquids entirely black. And the smell is…”

“Rancid?” Liam offered.

“Zesty. It burns your nostrils.”

“A shame,” he sighed. “I’ll just have to find something more subtle.”

Everett hoped his father didn’t have a particular victim in mind.

Still peering through the glass, Terra clinked her fingernail against the lip. “If you don’t want your customers to notice the Mint of Midnight in here, you might want to drop the percentage by half.”

Liam nearly dropped his own wine glass, but he managed to recover without splashing more than a few drops on his shirt. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The wine here is at least five percent Mint of Midnight. It blends in quite well with the grain of the wine, but I can smell it. It’s possible some humans can too.”

Everett buried his face in his hands. “Please tell me Mint of Midnight is a type of wine grape.”

Liam remained mum.

“It’s a narcotic,” Terra told him. “Made from a flower that grows at the southern tip of Sunset Tail, one of the kingdoms on the Elition Western Continent.”

Everett glared at his father. “You’ve been stealing flowers from the Elitions?”

“Certainly not.” Liam puffed out his chest like an offended peacock. “I bought a crop of those flowers fair and square off a band of Elitions nineteen years ago.”

“Yeah, that sounds legitimate.” Everett turned to Terra. “From what I know, Elitions typically don’t barter off their drugs.”

She nodded. “You are correct.”

“You bought those flowers from a group of rogues,” Everett told his father. “Idiot.”

“Everett,” his mother’s hard voice said in warning as she entered the room with Ryder and his team.

“You two are lucky King River didn’t send Elition assassins after you.”

“Actually, my father didn’t become high king of Elitia until after my mother’s death. She was in charge back then,” said Terra.

Everett’s parents gaped at her.

“You are the princess of Elitia?” asked Liam.

Natalie smiled at her. “I’m sure there’s no need to share our little secret with your father.”

“That would prove difficult. I’ve had a bit of a falling out with my family.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, dear,” Natalie said sweetly.

“No, you aren’t,” Everett told her. “You’ve only ever looked out for your bottom line.”

“I realize you have some bottled up aggression toward us, Everett, but there’s no need to be rude in front of our guests,” she replied with infuriating calmness.

“ ‘Bottled up aggression’? As soon as you had enough money to buy this ridiculous island, you and Father bolted. You never lifted a hand to help the Revs.”

“That’s not true. We hired workers from the Rev islands,” Liam argued.

“Because they were the closest labor force. If Selpe workers had offered to do the job cheaper, you would have hired them instead.” He pointed at the wine glass. “Do the Selpes know, by the way, that you’ve been drugging them for the past two decades?”

“Mint of Midnight is undetectable in a lab analysis,” Liam said.

“I’ll take that as a no.” And thank goodness for it. He could hardly imagine the Selpes would be pleased to learn that.

“Don’t be so naive, Everett,” his mother said. “The Black Currant Ridge label didn’t become the preferred wine of the Selpe aristocracy nearly overnight without us taking a few shortcuts.”

“So I take it all your wine is laced with this substance?”

“Yes,” said Natalie. “You could say it’s the distinguishing feature of the Black Currant Ridge label.”

“It just gives our wine an extra kick which our customers appreciate,” Liam added. “It’s not harmful.”

Everett looked at Terra.

“He’s correct. It might make anyone who drinks the wine act a bit silly, but the Mint of Midnight won’t hurt them.”

Liam nodded.

“Though it is mildly addictive,” she told Everett.

“Naturally,” he replied. “They’d want to keep their customers coming back for more.”

Terra shrugged. “Compared to all the convoluted schemes we’ve lived through recently, this one is pretty innocuous actually.”

“You possess an uncommonly unbiased mind, dear. Have you considered trying your hand at business?” asked Natalie.

“No, it sounds potentially too hazardous to my sanity.”

“That’s the truth,” chuckled Liam.

“But if you want my advice, I suggest you rethink your use of Mint of Midnight.”

Liam perked up. “Do you have an odorless alternative in mind?”

“No, I just meant you should consider making your wine free of narcotics.”

“Why would we do such a thing?” he asked, perplexed.

“When the Selpes find out, they won’t react kindly.”

“You were right, dear,” Natalie told her with a sad smile. “It seems business is not for you after all.”

“We cannot simply remove the unifying element of all Black Currant Ridge wines,” said Liam.

“They’re all made from grapes, aren’t they?” Everett pointed out.

Natalie gave his head a patronizing pat. “You are a capable fighter, Everett. Why don’t you just stick to that?”

“And why don’t you finally skip to the part where you tell me what I’m doing here? And what this new information about the attack on Hope is. It sounds like you enlisted Ryder’s help to get me here, which at least means you didn’t collaborate with the Selpes as I’d feared. Ryder would never sell out the Revs.”

“Everett Benjamin Black!” his mother exclaimed in horror. “How ever could you think we’d sell out our own friends?”

“Actually, I thought that’s why Ryder was bringing me here: to kill you for being a Selpe collaborator.”

“Nah, I’m not stupid enough to take on your parents,” Ryder said. “They’re practically legends, you know. I’d hate to be just another dead body in their death count tally.”

Natalie turned her serious eyes on Everett. “And would you have done it? Had we been guilty, would you have helped him kill us?”

“Of course not. I was planning to protect you. Misguided as that idea was.”

His mother swallowed him up into a bone-crushing bear hug. “No, not misguided. It wasn’t because of us that Hope was attacked.”

“It was because of these,” Liam finished for her. He crouched down to pull something out from under the sofa. A wooden crate. He carried it over to Everett. “Take a look.”

Everett lifted up the lid to find a pile of Xenen artifacts inside.

CHAPTER FOUR

~
Artifacts ~

527AX January 8, Black Currant Ridge

THE XENENS HAD once ruled over all of what was today the Selpe and Avan Empires. Basically every square kilometer of land in the world that was outside of Elitia had belonged to the Xenen Dominion. At least until the Elitions got rid of them some five hundred years ago. By all accounts, the Xenens were an oppressive, utterly amoral folk who enjoyed butchering men and women almost as much as they did conducting perverted medical experiments on children. Everett didn’t think anyone missed them.

Despite their obscene appetite for pain, the Xenens were most famous for their technology. Even today, neither the Selpes nor the Avans had developed anything close to matching that which the Xenens had wielded half a millennium ago. The gadgets and doodads of the Helleans, the modern world’s most technologically advanced civilization, looked like children’s toys next to the few pieces that remained from the Xenens’ days in the world. In fact, a whole black market had developed around the salvaging and sale of Xenen artifacts.

The box of pieces sitting on the dining table between Everett and Terra was easily worth several million Crowns. Not that anyone knew how to turn any of these artifacts on. Remnants of a time long past, their batteries had all gone dead centuries ago.

“What do you think?” Everett asked Terra.

She shot the box a dirty look. “They’re tainted.”

“Poisoned? Booby-trapped?”

“Xenen,” she explained, using the word as though it were the most vile curse she knew.

Elitions despised the Xenens. It was in their history books. In their songs. Ingrained in their very cultural being. According to his Elition friend Ariella, the Elitions had ‘expelled the Xenens from this world’—whatever that meant. Perhaps, they’d merely expelled them to their graves.

“Would you like another apple tart, dear?” Natalie asked Everett.

He’d already snarfed down five, but he nodded anyway. There was always room in his stomach for his mother’s apple tarts.

“Do you have any more specific ideas about the artifacts?” he asked Terra.

“Perhaps if I had more information to go on,” she said, turning her eyes on the others. “Where were these found?”

It was Ryder who answered. “In an underground hideout on the island of Marsh, just after the Selpe attacks this past summer. The hideout had withstood the bombings. It’s heavily reinforced and pretty far underground, so a number of Rev mercenary guilds used it to store extra supplies. I and a few other survivors of the attacks stopped by there to resupply. We’d planned to flee the area before the Selpes found us. That was when we found this box down there.”

“And a crazy old woman along with it,” added one of Ryder’s men, speaking for the first time. “Muttering ‘they’re coming to kill me…to kill us all…to destroy everything’. A bit late on the warning. Most of that had already happened.”

“Who was she?” Everett asked.

“The den mother of the Fourteen Phantoms, the guild Hark and Kelten started up,” replied Ryder. “I’ve forgotten which of their mothers she actually was.”

At the word ‘Phantom’, Terra had pressed her lips together. She was obviously trying not to laugh. She pulled the box toward her and began to sift through the contents—without actually touching any of them.

“Neither of those two ever was the sharpest tool in the shed,” Everett said.

Fourteen Phantoms indeed. Not one of that band of misfits had even ever set eyes on an Elition.

“How did the Fourteen Phantoms manage to get their hands on a box of Xenen artifacts?” he asked Ryder.

“Who knows. They must have stolen it off of someone else. And because of that, the Selpes attacked us.”

“Do you have proof of that?” Everett asked.

Ryder shook his head. “No, that’s why I need you. Word is you’re playing with the big boys now, holding your own against Selpe Diamond Edges and Avan Spirit Reapers. Surviving the Crescent Order. Trading blows with Elitions.”

Beside Everett, Terra snorted. He gave her a hard look.

“Sorry. I’m just remembering your earlier description of Jason as demonic.”

“Jason?” Ryder wondered. His eyes lit up, going wide. “Jason Chanz? The assassin? You know him? Personally?”

“He’s dating Jason’s little sister,” Terra said. “Kind of.”

Ryder’s chest rumbled with laughter. “Perfect. You’re even crazier than I thought.”

“Thanks,” Everett said to Terra.

But Ryder thought Everett was talking to him. “It was a compliment. You hang out with the premier Elition assassin. Unraveling the truth about these Xenen artifacts and Hope should be just another day on the job for you.”

Everett sighed.
How do I always let myself get talked into these things?

“So, you think the Selpes had these artifacts, then the Fourteen Phantoms stole the box from them? And then what? The Selpes attacked the Rev islands to get them back?”

“Something like that,” said Ryder.

“You realize that makes no sense, right?” Everett pointed out. “It’s just not the Selpes’ style. First, the Selpe city of Decia was attacked. The Selpes accused us and then attacked Hope in retaliation. As sick as the Selpes are, I find it unlikely that they’d bomb their own city just to have an excuse to attack the Revs.”

“Maybe it has nothing to do with Decia. Maybe it’s all just a coincidence,” Ryder suggested. “Say a Selpe lord or two was collecting these artifacts as part of a scheme to move against enemies of the Selpe Empire—the Avans, for instance. These Selpe lords would be pretty motivated to get the artifacts back. Then Decia happened, and these lords managed to convince their emperor that we Revs were responsible. They planned on sending their own men in to search for and retrieve the hidden stash of Xenen artifacts. Does that sound more like the Selpes’ style?”

“Perhaps.”

“Hello, there. You don’t belong in here,” Terra declared, peering into the box.

She pulled out a tray, as large as a handheld chalkboard but as deep as a pie pan. Its frame was beige and made of wood. It seemed to serve both decorative and functional purposes. The depth of the tray suggested it was intended to hold something in there.

A combination of wood and slate parts, the no-tech piece looked about as Xenen as Everett looked Elition.
Wait a minute. Elition
, Everett pondered. The tray did resemble something found in Elition temples.