Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

Author:Olivie Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Roots

Fox was seeking quiet when he came upon Vi.

He didn’t notice at first, of course, and he jumped when she turned her head.

“Right,” she confirmed, nodding. “Forgot?”

“I,” he began, then abandoned his efforts. “You’re a cat,” he noted instead, catching the sheen from the chandelier as light slid languidly over the ebony pitch of her fur.

“Perceptive,” Vi agreed, idly eyeing her paw. “Sort of happens when the sun goes down.”

“Mind if I sit with you?” Fox asked, glancing over his shoulder. “I’m avoiding the demon.”

“And Brandt too, I imagine,” Vi said.

“That’s the one I meant,” Fox replied, and Vi gave a strange, feline chuckle.

“Right,” she said again, staring back out over the lake.

Fox sighed quietly.

“The ghost isn’t here, is he?” Fox asked, glancing around, and Vi shook her head.

“You’ve never actually talked to a ghost, have you?” she prompted, and he shook his head. “So you’re totally a fraud.”

“Yes,” he said. “Almost entirely, actually.”

“Huh,” Vi said. “I take it I don’t have to pay you, then.”

“Well, who knows?” Fox asked, shrugging. “If I manage to get the job done somehow, it’s still a service worth paying for, isn’t it?”

“You can’t even see the ghost I’m paying you to remove,” Vi reminded him.

“True,” Fox conceded. “I don’t see him or much of anything, and yet I’m apparently responsible for saving mankind anyway, aren’t I?”

It came out a little more bitterly than he intended, and Vi saved him the trauma of a response. Instead she turned her head, her tail flicking slightly as she eyed a piece of lint that fell slowly through the air.

“So,” she said. “You’re a thief, then.”

“No,” Fox corrected, shaking his head. “Brandt’s a thief. It’s in his nature, down to the quick of it, down to his bones—he takes things,” he said bitterly. “He’s clever enough to know how to make use of something that isn’t his, and then he establishes dominion over it.” He swallowed firmly, then cleared the anguish from his throat. “It comes naturally to him, but not to me.”

“So what does that make you?” she prompted.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just lazy, mostly.”

Her slitted cat-eyes slid to his.

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

Fox sighed.

“I’m not really anything,” he told her.

He planned to stop there, but for whatever reason—perhaps because talking to a cat was its own soothing sort of practice—he kept going.

“I always thought that I would be, you know?” he prompted, falling down awkwardly beside her; facing the lake, as she did, though it was a difficult thing to accomplish, sitting backwards on the stiff Victorian sofa. “Something, I mean. Godson of Death,” he pronounced grandly, spreading his hand wide, as though to envision it on a marquee. “Beloved by a god, once,” he added under his breath, slowly letting his hand fall in defeat.

Vi let a few seconds pass, giving the statement its due melancholia.

“So what happened?” she asked eventually, and Fox opened his mouth.

Then he closed it.

Opened it again.

Sighed.

“The thing is,” he attempted, frowning slightly, “you can see angels, you know.

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