Bryce

Thankfully, Thea caused that dreadful bottle to disappear with a flick of her wrist. She’d done that trick a few times, but I hadn’t bothered to ask her about it.

She wasn’t casting a spell, but she didn’t use incantations when using her fire magic. If she didn’t need to use incantations, that meant she was a natural caster, and not a learned one like I was.

Natural casters tended to be incredibly powerful, but lacked variety outside of their speciality. Which, for Thea, was fire and illusion.

Where learned casters could always learn new spells for any number of situations, natural casters rarely branched out beyond what spells they could innately cast.

I wasn’t actually sure how much of that applied to devils, but I would be surprised if they differed much.

It was possible that she had more talents that I didn’t know about, but I had never heard of anybody knowing spacial magic innately.

An enchanted item would be the most likely explanation. Items enchanted to store things in extra-dimensional space existed, but they were far from common and usually extremely expensive. Besides, an item like that would require direct contact with whatever she was storing, and I didn’t see anything like that near her palm.

I resigned myself to just ask her. “I cannot for the life of me figure out how you’re doing that.” We were still a few blocks from the warehouse whose address I had given the bartender, so we had some time to burn.

“Do what? Look great in a burnt and bloody outfit?” Thea twirled, causing the hem of her dress to rise slightly.

“Well, that and the dimensional magic. You’re clearly not casting a spell and I don’t see an enchanted item.”

“Oh that,” she held up her right hand and pointed towards her middle finger. “Interdimensional ring. I’m not surprised you didn’t notice. It’s spelled to avoid detection; wouldn’t want anybody stealing it.”

I couldn’t see anything at first. Even with her pointing directly at it, my mind would just keep slipping past where a ring should have been. I forced myself to concentrate on where Thea was pointing and I saw an unimpressive silver band.

“That couldn’t have been cheap.” I wasn’t detecting any ambient magic coming off the ring, which meant that it was an incredibly high-quality enchantment. It would take a master enchanter to put two spells on a piece of jewelry that small.

Thea lowered her hand and shrugged as if it was just a matter of course.

“It was a gift from the head of my household. I did a couple of favors for her off the books and to be honest, I think that she just didn’t like the design, too plain.”

“She didn’t like the design of a ring that most people can’t even see?” I asked.

Thea actually looked thoughtful for a moment before nodding. “Yeah, I think she prefers her invisible jewelry to be gold.”

I hadn’t been expecting that answer. I missed a step and had to catch myself to stop from falling over.

“Careful, Bryce, you’re still recovering,” Thea said. “You’ll need to rest as soon as we get a chance—and before you ask, no, being in a torture-induced coma doesn’t count as resting.”

She was probably right. I had gone a couple of days without sleep in the past, but never after draining my mana entirely or healing from being basically dead.

Nanites were amazing at keeping somebody going well past normal limits, but they still required food and rest to function. Both things I was sorely lacking.

“We’re almost at the address that I gave Teolix. We’ll have time to eat and rest when we get there. I’d be surprised if he gets out of his meeting before this evening, even then he’ll probably want to make us wait as some terribly misguided power move.”

I gave Thea my best attempt at a reassuring smile. It didn’t seem to convince her all that much, but she still nodded in return.

We walked the rest of the way in a companionable silence. Thea stayed near me, constantly on edge to catch me if I started to fall again.

I didn’t think it was all that necessary, but I could already guess that she wouldn’t listen to reason.

~~~~

The warehouse was massive. It had a set of double doors on the front, each about five meters wide and equally tall.

I had been renting the place for the last few decades to store equipment I ordered from out of the system. Daelin and I were the only ones allowed to approach the station, which meant I needed to have everything delivered here before transporting it up myself.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

We walked past the double doors to an alley on the far side where we could enter through a smaller door that was protected by a biometric scanner.

The interior felt nearly bare despite the dozens of boxes stacked in piles around the room. I walked to the corner that I was pretty sure had what I was looking for, and sure enough, I found it quickly.

I made a pretty poor attempt at prying the wooden crate open before Thea took pity on me and pulled the lid free.

“Whoa, those look comfy.” Thea started taking out bundles of vacuum sealed bags and opening them to allow air to inflate the pillows and blankets.

“I sure hope so; they weren’t cheap.” I started laying the blankets and pillows on the ground to create a kind of sleep nest.

“What are they doing packed up in a warehouse?” Thea asked.

“They were meant for my apartment, but I never bothered moving them there. Most nights I slept on the research station. I really only ever went back to my apartment to shower or manage my more clandestine activities.”

Thea scrunched up her nose and made a face at me. “Sounds like you need to shower more often.”

I made a noncommittal sound, but I didn’t disagree with her.

The executive of a colony wasn’t exactly critical for day-to-day tasks, but I had authority to make decisions and acted as the sole contact for corporate contracts. That combined with getting a little too invested in my research often meant going days without eating or sleeping

Hygiene would be pretty high on the list of things I would ignore when that happened.

The corporation had initially been reluctant to grant Daelin’s request to be allowed on the research station. They finally conceded when I ignored my bodily needs for so long that I collapsed with nobody around to help.

People were worried that I would die if left to my own devices. It was a little demeaning, but it was impossible to argue after it nearly happened multiple times.

I dropped myself into the blanket nest and felt my breathing slow as my eyelids drooped.

“Goodnight, princess.” Thea’s voice was the last thing I heard before drifting off to sleep.

~~~~

I must have gotten enough rest to allow my need for food to overpower my need for sleep, because I woke up a few hours later to my stomach demanding that I do something about it.

Thea had perched herself on the box above me. She was sitting cross-legged with her sheathed sword pointing into the ground. Her arms and chin were resting on the hilt. She was still awake, but looked tired.

“You weren’t watching me sleep, were you?” My voice was soft and groggy. She smiled at my question and looked down at me with her head still resting on the sword.

“Of course I was. Most people call it keeping watch, but we all know it’s just an excuse to creep on cute girls while they sleep.”

I laughed at that while stretching to wake up further. “I hope that I at least put on a good show for you.”

“Yep! You snore, loudly. Oh, and you drool.” I gasped and Thea started cackling loudly.

I rebutted her unrighteous laughter by throwing a pillow at her as hard as I could manage. She was too busy holding her stomach to block, which allowed the pillow to hit her directly in the face. She fell backwards and lifted her arms into the air in surrender.

“I yield! I yield! Please princess, I can’t take any more of this,” she protested between gasping breaths. “I’ll testify before the gods to your cherubic slumber. A sleeping Bryce is the height of celestial elegance. Truly an example set for every princess to one day aspire to.”

I lowered the pillow that I had been preparing to throw while raising an eyebrow. “Cherubic slumber?”

Thea leaned her head forward to look up at me and placed her right hand over her chest. “I swear it on my black heart.”

I was satisfied with that, so I dropped my weapon and started going through one of the smaller boxes.

“Is your heart actually black?” I asked.

Thea sat back up and tilted her head. “Not sure, I never actually felt the need to check. It’s probably not, though, just a figure of speech.”

I found a couple of sets of unbranded casual wear. It wouldn’t get me into a gala or anything, but it was light-years beyond the blood-soaked tracksuit I was currently wearing.

Unfortunately, they were much too large to fit Thea. When I brought it up, she just shook her head and smiled at me.

“I have some clothes in my storage that I can change into. I would say that it’s unfortunate that you wouldn’t fit into any of my clothes, but really I have no regrets about your whole, well, you.”

“You should go change behind those boxes over there then.” The look that she had been giving me was making me blush, so I quickly added to the demand, “Don’t you dare look over here until I finish changing!”

The casual wear was comprised of a pair of loose-fitting black cargo pants and a gray tank top with a dark burgundy jacket to go over it. It was practical and comfortable, the kind of thing I preferred whenever possible.

I didn’t have a change of shoes, so I was stuck with the white running shoes that were accented with blood. I was pretty sure that the blood was mostly my own, so there was at least that.

Once I finished changing, Thea came out from behind the boxes wearing a big stupid grin and giving me a thumbs up. She had definitely peeked while I was changing.

“Looking good. I liked the whole bloody victim chic, but this just blows that out of the water.”

I chose to take that as the compliment she probably intended it as, and smiled back at her in return.

“You don’t look half bad yourself.”

She had chosen an armored black leather riding jacket that looked like she’d had tailored for her body. Along with a tight-fitting pair of dark denim pants with combat boots that easily gave her an extra ten centimeters of height.

The sword that was still sheathed at her side gave her a sort of postapocalyptic greaser look. She had even attempted to complete the look by slicking her hair back again, which reminded me of the veritable rat’s nest that had formed in place of my hair.

I started digging through boxes again, looking for toiletries to help with that mess.

“Thanks! Although, the jacket is the only thing that’s even a little fire resistant, so we should try to avoid getting into a fight or I’ll start having to charge people for the view.”

A heat rose in my cheeks at the images that comment had forced into my mind.

“Right, in that case, let’s avoid angering the fire-breathing dragon because the entirety of my outfit is flammable, including me.”