Twenty-Four - Evangeline
Delilah’s hair was in complete disarray and her face was covered in soot. She looked at me all innocent like, her hands behind her back, her eyes wide. Behind her was a state of utter destruction, thankfully contained within her lab due to a lot of fucking wards. When I’d had this room constructed just for her, I had doubled the amount recommended. Then tripled it. And they still didn’t feel like enough.
“What happened?”
Delilah blinked. “You know that thing I wasn’t allowed to touch?”
My eyes narrowed. “You mean the volatile magic bomb that very clearly says in giant fucking letters: Delilah, do not fucking touch?”
She nodded. Glanced away. “Yeah…I touched it.”
My jaw clenched. The explosion definitely hadn’t been on cue. Every time I saw her, I always wondered just how the hel she had managed to survive this long. I would have fired her ages ago, but if she wasn’t experimenting in here, she would be experimenting out there and would accidentally kill a whole city or something. Or worse.
And the reason she wasn’t locked up or dead already via execution is because she came up with some pretty neat shit we got to use.
For the most part, the good outweighed the bad.
“Dammit, Delilah.”
“What?” Her eyes widened. “I was staring at it, not touching it even though I really wanted to. I started to think about turning away, but then I got your signal…” Wicked delight lit up her pale pink eye as a smile spread across her face. No regrets at all.
Her grin turned triumphantly sly. “And you should’ve seen my throw when I realised what was going to happen. I threw it straight into the bin from here.”
“The bin?”
“Mmm.”
“Why? It’s a bin without a lid and for paper. How did you think that was going to help?”
She blinked. Then shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I stared at her. “For someone so ridiculously clever, you are fucking stupid.”
She blushed but didn’t dispute it. All her brain power went to being a crazy magicist so it was no wonder she had very little thought left over for more mundane things like oh, I don’t know, fucking safety.
“Just clean this up, girl. I’ll have someone come down to fix the wards.” Although she loved messing around with magic, she had zero ability to use it herself.
Her blush darkened and she ducked her head as her hands came around to clasp in front of her. “Can it be Anthony?”
“Eighteen centimetres, chiselled like a brownie statue, especially down south, and who drops his trousers for anyone Anthony?”
She nodded.
“No.”
“But –” Her head snapped up on a pout.
“No. This is a punishment. I wanted you to do one little minor explosion that would require me to come down here, not try to actually level the building.”
“It was all contained in the wards,” she mumbled.
“Only by pure fucking luck.” I glanced at said wards painted on the walls, their blue glowing radiance emitting strong pulses of energy. Magic didn’t just disintegrate. It had to go somewhere. Wards helped contain it by literally eating it, but there was only so much they could consume before they popped.
Also literally.
Overstuff a ward and bam! Double explosion. Which explained the second boom we’d felt earlier. Thank gods the backup to the backup runes had held.
And thank gods Delilah was, for some reason, immune to magic. Like, absolutely completely immune to it. You couldn’t hit her wish a spell. When she mixed magic she wasn’t supposed to, it would destroy everything else but her.
She was an abdominally, even more so because she’d grown up without being drafted into the army and trained as a Vylian witch hunter.
Then again, the scouting agent had probably realised she’d be way more trouble than she was worth.
Sighing, she dropped her head again, then nodded. “I’ll best be cleaning up then,” she said. Turning around with her shoulders hunched, she reached out a hand to pick up a broom only to realise it wasn’t there. A silhouette of said broom from where it had disintegrated into ash and burned into the wall, on the other hand, was.
She stared at it for a second, then turned back to face me, a hesitant smirk on her face. “You wouldn’t happen to have a spare broom, would you?”
*****
A couple hours later, after having sent down a non-Anthony witch to re-ward the basement and having got my ass chewed out by Jerry from Oversight due to leaving a knife with Ashema, which had allowed her to escape (oh, no), I stepped into my office on the top floor with Redric behind me. He’d been as silent as a shadow since we had left the interrogation room, but as soon as I closed the door, he asked, “Is Delilah your daughter?”
I shook my head. “Nope, and you won’t ever meet her.”
I might have believed he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, but I wouldn’t bet her life on it. Just last night he’d happily killed me. Granted, I might have deserved it just a little for being a tad annoying while he’d tried to sleep, but –
“That was the best rest you’ve had in years,” Aurelia chimed in.
Regardless, he’d killed me. Had come all this way just to kill me. Had studied necromancy for twenty years just to kill me. When he had a record like that, I would be a fool to trust him.
Walking over to my desk, I gestured to the door on my left. “Books and TV are in there. I have stupid paperwork to do. Don’t bother me unless you want me to change your face so you can leave?”
His lips curled in disgust. “No. I don’t want your magic anywhere near me.”
“I won’t do anything funny.” I grinned, liking the idea of doing just that.
His eyes narrowed. “No.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself, but it’ll get boring in here very quickly. They know our faces, so it’ll be too big of a risk to leave as is. I wouldn’t even trust everyone in here either. If you find yourself getting cornered by an agent, feel free to kill first and revive as necessary.”
He stared at me as I settled into my chair. The desk between us was massive enough to lie on, and for one stupid moment, I thought about doing just that. Couldn’t exactly get pregnant twice.
And I fucking hated paperwork.
While the thought was in my head, I leaned back and rolled up my shirt, my eyes on my stomach. I pressed a finger to just below my belly button, then traced an upside down triangle with a circle in the middle of it and an X inside of that. With quick flicks of my finger, I drew three squiggles perpendicular to the edges of the triangle on the outside of it – the visually accurate rune for ‘keep out of my ovaries, sperm’!
Pressing my palm over the rune, I pushed my magic into it. Warmth spread from the invisible rune I’d drawn on myself, heating until it became nearly unbearably hot.
Then it started to cool and I removed my hand.
Any sperm that entered me now wouldn’t be able to fertilize my eggs. Unfortunately, any sperm already inside wasn’t targeted as the risk of the magic seeking me out instead of it was way too high. Some very skilled people could pull it off, and they worked in underground abortion clinics, but the lines were ridiculously long and were often stalked by undercover officers. When I’d become head of the place, I had redirected my agents to more important matters, but it was still illegal to have an abortion in Raza due to the kingdom needing soldiers to fight our wars, and the police knew the clinics were easy marks to meet their quotas. Any unwanted child could be immediately sold to the state, where they would train as soon as they could walk.
Dropping my shirt to cover myself, I looked up to find Redric still staring at me. “Did you want something?”
“What’s your daughter called?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Do you see her?”
My eyes narrowed as the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. “Why the interrogation?”
“If we do end up living together –”
I held up a hand, stopping him. “We’re never going to live together. I get you want an heir and you have this noble sense of duty concerning knocking me up, but one, I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve done just fine on my own and will continue to do so. Two, you live in Vyla and my job requires me to stay in Raza. Three, you hate me.” I cocked my head to the side. “Okay, fair, that one’s not a very big deal because you’re like a feral caterpillar.”
His mien turned into one of utter dryness.
“So redoing three, you like to kill me when you can’t sleep and doing so while I’m pregnant will most likely abort the pregnancy.” Shooting up straight in my seat, I started to exclaim, “That’s it!” but he shook his head and took a step back.
“I’m not hurting her.”
“She’s not even real yet. So you can just kill me now, resurrect me in like an hour or two after the sperm is gone, and whadabingwhadaboom. Can’t fertilise a corpse.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s your choice to take the potions, that’s fine, but I’m not helping you kill her.”
I exhaled heavily, wanting to argue that he wouldn’t be killing her given she wasn’t alive, but I knew there wasn’t any point. He had his beliefs and I wasn’t enough of a dick to force mine onto him.
So I just needed to find another necromancer.
Unfortunately, they were insanely rare and I only knew three. One was standing in front of me. The second really, really hated me and would in no way bring me back as, and I quote, “Not a single part of me is ever going in you. I would rather get eaten by a Alzan.” And the third, well, she was one of my only friends left, but she charged a fucking fortune and didn’t do mate rates. Or rather, she did ‘mate rates’, but they were even more in price because she knew how much I could afford.
The bitch.
I grinned at the thought of her, then groaned. Looked like I was stuck banking on the potions and weak, poor sperm.
“Wouldn’t happen to know anyone that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg, do you? Or one that’ll take a prosthetic leg?” I grinned. He did not. Rolling my eyes at his poor humour, I grabbed a blank filing report from inside a drawer and started filling it out so Jerry in Oversight could finally untwist his panties.
Aware that Redric still hadn’t left yet, I looked up in annoyance. “What?”
“What are we doing for lunch?”
My stomach growled, a hunger birthing into existence at his words. “There’s a minibar in there.” I pointed at the same door I’d pointed at earlier. It was furnished like a mini hotel room for the many nights I constantly slept here.
He disappeared through the door, and I returned my attention to my work. A few minutes later, he came back out. “You have nothing but beer and one bag of peanuts.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot to do the shopping.”
Opening the top left drawer on my desk, I pulled out a pile of menus. “Pick what you want, then call the number on the back and have it sent to 352 Western Street,” I said, tossing them onto the far end of the desk.
“Who lives there?”
“No one. The place is up for sale. But when the order is ready, I’ll make myself invisible, head there, and come back.”
“I’ll go.”
I cocked a brow. “Do you know how to pick locks? And you can’t make yourself visible again to get the food, then invisible to get back here without being seen.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m a big girl.” I narrowed my eyes, daring him to make some joke about my height. Wisely, he did not. “And I don’t like using my magic excessively. It makes it not like me.”
He snorted. “You cursed me all the time.”
“Cursing is different. Magic likes cursing people. It makes it happy.”
His eyes widened slightly. “You think magic is alive?”
I shrugged, well used to people laughing at me over this. “It makes sense.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Why do you think that?” he asked, and I stared at him, wondering if he was teasing me. But there was a genuine curiosity in his eyes rather than mockery.
Relaxing my muscles that had tightened in anticipation of his cruelness, I shrugged again. “Casting a spell is never the same. Even if you cast the exact same one for the exact same thing with the exact same restrictions on it. I could cast something perfectly one day, but then horribly the next. If it wasn’t alive, if it was just an energy to wield, then it would have the same outcome every time. But it doesn’t. It acts up like teenagers who’ve been told they can’t go out tonight.
I sat up a bit straighter. “And dark magic is a lot more powerful because it likes to hurt people. We’ve enslaved it, basically, forced it to do our bidding. That’s why magic is so dangerous. It’s like a tiger that is constantly being whipped in a cage…”
I trailed off, waiting for him to start laughing. My back became ramrod straight again in anticipation.
But he didn’t laugh.
He didn’t even crack a smirk.
He just looked distant for a bit as if he was seriously thinking about it. Then he shrugged. “Sounds believable.”
Grabbing the menus, he sat down on the sofa across from me and started flicking through them.
My eyes lingered on him for a good deal longer than they should’ve. A slow smile crept across my face.
He likes my theory.
Ducking my head, I finally concentrated on my work.
But that smile never did leave...