With an insidious mental scream, I wield my power tostab a shard of glass into Dan’s throat. The entire world, my world, our world, mine and my brother’s, stops for a single moment before I viciously jerk the shard back out.
A clean cut to the main artery.
Blood erupts from the wound. Blood as black as pitch.
CHAPTER ONE
LEO
I’m woken up by the acrid smell of dog breath panting hyperexcitedly into my face.
It was either that or the weight of King’s tubby, corgi-shaped body springing up and down on my chest.
I open my eyes just as King goes to lick my chin. Bringing up the hand I’ve freed from under my duvet, I flick at one of his large ears. King makes a disgruntled sniffing sound in response and retaliates against my attack by trying to nibble at my fingers.
“Oi.” I flick at his other ear. “Don’t give what you can’t take, King. We’ve discussed this before: no licking faces when your breath smells like arse. That’s the rule. We voted.”
By “discussed,” I mean I’ve continuously told him off for licking my face with his arse-breath, and he’s stared up at me with his grade-three intelligence level. King is no dolphin, but I think he understands me more than he pretends to. I don’t care if that sounds mad. If he understands “walk” and “postman” and “biscuit,” then he can probably understand “lick” and “no.”
King nips at my fingers again, and I huff at him in fond annoyance. He gives a high-pitched whine and pads his paws on my chest like a cat.
King often does things that remind me more of a cat. I think it’s because he hangs around with the cats on our street all the time. He doesn’t like the other dogs very much. I don’t blame him. There are seven dogs who live on our street, and every one of them is a prick.
“Okay.” I push at King’s squat body, rolling him off me so I can sit up. “I’m conscious and ready to serve, your liege.”
King barks playfully at me and leaps around on the bed like his stubby legs have springs wired into them.
I shove off my quilt and slide out of bed. It’s a nice four-poster, made of dark wood and with a blue canopy. My mum picked it out during one of her many campaigns to redecorate the entire house.
She’s rearranged and transformed my room a ridiculous number of times. Her most recent change has left me with light-blue paint on my walls, a stripped-back hardwood floor, and matching dark-wood furniture.
One thing I refused to let her change were the plastic glow stars covering my ceiling. They were a gift from my dad. Back when he was just slightly distant and mysterious and not a convicted murderer or Obsidian Inc. agent.
Obsidian Inc. is a secret supervillain organisation. They have a front as a tech and scientific research company. But in truth, they create and build terrible things aimed at controlling people, gaining power both monetarily and politically, and killing whoever gets in their way.
My dad was an OI agent. He was one of their most infamous assassins until the day he was brought down by the Forces of Investigation and Security Agency. They captured him when he was out on a mission, stopping him before he could cause any more damage.
FISA is a government agency which gathers vital intelligence both nationally and internationally, maintains the defence of the United Kingdom and its allies, and protects the people of the world from dangerous groups and organisations like OI.
I joined FISA when I was eighteen, becoming a field agent in hopes of balancing out the sins of my father by helping to protect innocent civilians from those like him and the people he worked for.
Ah, parents. Where would we get our personal bullshit from if our parents or parental figures didn’t stick the needle in and shoot us up with theirs first? We might be functional human beings. Can’t have that. It’s unnatural. Someone might end up happy without having to suffer for it. What’s a personality without a little bit of trash-and-dumpster fire threaded through it?
Wow. Okay, everyone. Sorry. That all sounds far too melodramatic. Apart from having two facepalms for parents, I’ve got almost all the good life cards. I’ll save my complaining for my next life, when I live in a cave and have no teeth or access to Pringles or autonomy or any of the other stuff I probably take for granted most of the time.
I grab my phone off the bedside table and check the time. It’s almost seven. I only dropped off to sleep two hours ago.
King makes like a baby kangaroo and bounces around my feet as I pull on some jogger bottoms, wary of walking around in just a vest and underwear. This might be my house, but Mum’s brought people over without me knowing about it before, and I’ve been caught half naked way too many times. Like a whole twice. Twice is too many times for multiple strangers to get an unwanted close-up view of your nakedness.Onceis too many, which is why I learned to be more careful.
I go through to the second-floor bathroom, which unlike many other rooms in the house, has retained its old-Victorian style. King follows closely behind me, his cold, wet nose nudging and sniffling at my feet.
Once I’m standing in front of the ornate sink, I set to work brushing my teeth and splashing my face a few dozen times with cold water. My brain feels like it’s one fuzzy blink away from crashing on me.
King barks again, and I point my electric toothbrush at him, only just remembering to turn it off first. I’ve forgotten that before and accidentally decorated the bathroom mirror with toothpaste spittle.
“Keep your ears on, will you?” I scold him. “I promise we’ll be out in the tit-freezing cold within the next five minutes.”
King tilts his head and barks again as if in open defiance, or possibly disbelief, at my claim.
