Page 9 of Death Warden
He took a couple of sips and closed his eyes. “I needed that. Do you have any chocolate biscuits?”
“Dammit, Tobias, fuck the biscuits. What happened to Mary and Leo and why has a book materialized in my apartment?”
His throat bobbed. “A fire.”
My pulse skipped a beat. “A fire?”
He nodded slowly. “Adi, there’s stuff you should know.”
“About fucking time.” Fin jumped onto the stool beside me, and I put my arm around him on reflex. “Go on,” he urged Tobias. “Tell her.”
Tobias shot him a sharp look before continuing. “The fire that killed your parents wasn’t an accident. Your parents were murdered.”
Murdered? The word echoed in my ears. I shook my head. “Nah, there was a report. I looked it up a few years ago. Accidental fire from a curling iron being left on. The report was clear.”
“The report was a lie.”
My chest tightened. “What? Why?” I swallowed my questions and organized my thoughts. I was savvy enough to know that reports could be faked if you had the clout to get it done. “Who killed them, and why?”
“A necromancer by the name of Dralos.”
Rage burned a path up my throat. All this time I’d been led to believe the fire that stole my family from me was an unfortunate accident. I’d come to accept the hand of fate, but now he was telling me that fate had nothing to do with it, that someone had taken my parents’ lives into their hands and murdered them in cold blood.
“Where is he? If you fucking know where he is, you have to tell me.”
His gaze dropped to the amulet around my neck. “He’s locked away. And the amulet around your neck is what keeps it that way.”
I glared at Tobias. “This amulet? The powerful family heirloom that has done nothing for me these past years?”
“Yes.”
I sat back and crossed my arms. “You better tell me everything, Tobias. Every. Little. Thing. Or I swear I’ll bring your ancestors back from the dead to haunt you.”
He didn’t even flinch. “You’re upset, I get it. I lied to you, kept secrets, but I had a good reason for that.”
I arched a brow. “I’ll be the judge of that. Spill it.”
He held up a hand to placate me. “Okay, okay. You know how rare true necromancers are. The Blackmore, Crescent, and Thorne families have been producing them for centuries. Living in harmony, allied by marriage, their bloodlines were strong. Then accidents began happening. Boating accident, then a car crash. There were several in a row over a space of three years. By the time we realized that the accidents weren’t accidents, it was too late. Each family had been whittled down to one generation strong.”
“And this Dralos dude was responsible?”
Tobias nodded. “He used dark practices and broke the rules to gain power, and he wanted more. I wasn’t sure how he found out about the bloodline artifacts, but once he did, he wanted to own them. Weakening the bloodlines was his only way to do it.”
“Artifacts, as in our family conduits?”
He nodded.
My family were Mageri born, as were the Crescents and Thornes, and Mageri needed artifacts to channel power.
“Thornes, Blackmores, and Crescents had three very powerful artifacts,” he continued. “The Thornes had a goblet that could make the drinker speak only the truth. The Crescents a book that would intuitively find you whatever spell you needed.”
“The book that’s in my living room.”
He nodded again. “And the Blackmores, your family…” His gaze fell on Finley. “They had a cat-sith, a creature of myth. An advisor in times of need.”
“I’d have been of more help if you’d removed the gag on me,” Finley said.
“Gag?”
