Fractured flame firebird.., p.4
Fractured Flame (Firebird Uncaged Book 1), page 4
When his hand released me, the cold took over.
And when I came to my senses, I wasn’t in the alley anymore.
4
Ray was gone. Utterly, inconceivably vanished.
And instead of the brick and mortar of the shops lining the street I’d just been on, black crystal cavern walls surrounded me on all sides. And heat, and light, and magic.
So much magic that my scrye swelled, the part of my consciousness I’d been taught to use to access magic exerting electric pressure against every cell in my body. I did my best to let it out, let it pass—but the reflective stone sent most of it right back at me.
I screamed, grinding my teeth together and squeezing my eyes shut, trying to at least imagine darkness inside me so I could regain control.
Wherever I’d been transported, it seemed like a place designed specifically to torture me.
Normally, there was a limit to how much light could exist in a dark space before it just became a bright space. But this space was both. Both the brightest and the darkest space I had ever been in. It probably had something to do with the cave’s walls, both black and reflective. Obsidian? This must be some sort of volcanic cave. But where was the light source, and how could it be so strong?
I forced my squinted eyes a tiny bit open and reached my hands out to push myself off the ground. My palm sliced itself on something sharp, and I bit back a yelp. Strangely, the pressure on my scrye immediately released, and the light dimmed. I still felt the magic all around me, but it was almost like it had been attacking me a moment ago, and now we were coexisting.
Looking down, I saw my blood coating a jagged piece of the black glass that had fallen onto the ground. The dark liquid began to absorb into the glass, and a few seconds later it was like it had never been there. But my hand continued to bleed.
Great. That’s not ominous at all. A magical cave that’s trying to eat me.
Opening my eyes all the way, I decided to test the water. It didn’t feel like I was a frog in a slowly heating pot, but then I supposed the point was that it never would. I tapped gently into my scrye to heal the slice on my hand, and the skin zipped up so fast I could barely even feel it, cells linking perfectly and dividing into new flesh to erase any evidence of the wound. Even the pain was gone, which was odd. Pain tended to linger after magical healing, because no one’s nervous system was wired to understand the things I could do.
Still, these were all good signs. If the magic was doing what I wanted, it wasn’t likely to fry me anytime soon.
A tunnel entrance loomed to my right. And if things hadn’t been creepy enough before, they certainly were now that the wind had started to die down and a scratching, scuttling noise was growing to take its place—coming from the tunnel. At least it sounded like it was moving away from me.
But aside from the tunnel, I could see no way out. And I didn’t know how I’d even gotten here, so I couldn’t go back the way I’d come.
Ray was still nowhere in sight, and that at least was good because he’d totally kicked my ass back on the street. I really had gotten rusty in the past year. Now I resented ever letting Becca convince me to stop trying to do Mitch’s job when men needed to be thrown out of the club. She’d said we would all make more money if I was less scary, and she had been right. It hurt now to remember her innocence, which had been strong enough to rub off on even me.
A Guardian caught off her guard, I thought, feeling naked and weak.
But I still had to hope it was Ray who’d brought me here, whether intentionally or by accident. If not . . . then I was lost in every way imaginable.
It seemed I only had one choice.
Once again feeling grateful for my thick-soled boots, I put one foot in front of the other and made my way across the small cave.
The tunnel shone brighter than the cavern I’d just been in. That should be a good sign. Wherever the light source, I was moving toward it. And now that the magic in here had stopped attacking me, I could appreciate its beauty. The walls of the tunnel were obsidian, same as the cavern, but it didn’t look like anything natural had created them. If this space had been created by volcanic activity long ago, I would have expected the obsidian to be lumpy, rough, and dull. Instead, it looked as if a jeweler had carved precise facets over every inch of the walls. The subtle light streaming through glittered as it glanced across every surface, the effect mimicking the vision of stars in the darkest night sky.
Even the creepy scuttling noises added to the breathtaking effect, musically in tune with the movement of light over the reflective facets of black glass.
That was, until the noises started moving toward me.
Whatever it was, it sounded so close, yet still I couldn’t see anything except stone and light and empty space. It paused for a moment, and then I could swear I heard it above me.
When I looked up, something small and black and hard dropped onto my face.
I opened my mouth instinctively to let out a scream, but it sounded garbled because tiny sharp claws had fallen between my lips.
Not cool. Better my mouth than my eyes, I thought in an attempt to stave off panic. I bent over and shook, trying to spit the creature off, but it held tight and crawled further up towards my scalp.
Then it bit me. Maybe. I didn’t even know if this thing had a mouth to bite me with, but I did know that it fucking hurt.
My hands flew to my face, pulling the thing off and hurling it at the wall. It crashed and then slid down with the sound of falling marbles. If those marbles could also chirp like a bird. But when I squinted to get a closer look at the fallen thing, it wasn’t marbles or a bird. More like some kind of tiny rabbit, closer to the size of a rat.
But if a rabbit had pounced on my head and bitten me, it wasn’t like any other kind of rabbit I’d ever known. My fingers gingerly crept through my hair, searching for the throbbing wound. They came away wet with yet more of my blood.
Another thing trying to eat me? Or . . .
I looked closer at the rabbit, which was now picking itself up, shaking off its defeat like a dog would shake off water. I could see no damage. In fact, it looked far too perfect for any living creature. It wasn’t real. More like a little sculpture crafted by a skilled artist and then animated by magic.
And the crafting material? Obsidian.
So, still the same thing trying to eat me, with a different mouth this time. I needed to get out of here, fast.
But the evil little bunny beat me to it, running off through the tunnel toward the light, and a moment later hundreds of identical shiny black rabbits had scurried down the walls to join it. I took a step forward and then stopped, wondering if it was really a good idea to follow this horde, even though it seemed to be my only way out.
Something squeaked by my feet, and I looked down to see a few of the obsidian bunnies looking up at me expectantly. They wanted me to follow. I wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse, but I didn’t really have a better idea.
I ran, and I didn’t stop until I found myself shrouded in the light at the end of the tunnel, my vision blasted as the walls disappeared and the bunnies dispersed and the world seemed vast and overwhelming again.
Overwhelming because this world was clearly not my world. The light wasn’t golden like the sun’s or silver like the moon’s. The sky wasn’t any sort of comforting shade of blue. It was all . . . not exactly red, but whatever you would get if you could somehow mix red with black and white at the same time. Red, but ethereal. With smoke and clouds and silvery sheens of magic floating every which way before a snow-topped mountain in the distance.
And in the midst of it all, right in front of me, a row of bodies tied to stakes. No, not stakes. Spits. Vertical spits, as the invisible, magical fire all around them roasted them alive.
Sacrifices . . . Could this be the realm of a god? I really hoped not, because everything I’d been taught about magic growing up was based on the idea that gods were a thing of the past—and that we were all better off leaving them there.
But the bodies lined up in front of me looked like nothing I’d ever seen. Some were completely charred beyond recognition, like Becca had been at the club.
Becca.
I ran closer to the spits. Not all of the people on them had fully burned yet. Not all of them were dead. And the one all the way on the end had a shining blond head of hair.
It was definitely Becca. No . . . It was Becca’s soul. After all the grueling work I’d done in my coven’s hospital, keeping screaming souls inside their dying bodies long enough for other mages to heal them—I knew a soul when I saw one. That distinctive shimmer, that unique aura of helplessness . . .
When I got closer, the eyes on Becca’s soul locked on mine, and her ghostlike mouth opened wide but no sound came out. Tiny flecks of her skin glowed molten and then floated away from her into the atmosphere. A slow process that would eventually land her exactly where she’d been at the club. Burned. Dead. Gone.
My hands reached out to untie her arms. If I could get her out of here . . .
But I couldn’t, because as soon as I touched her, she disappeared. It all disappeared. The air was suddenly cool and empty, the magic and the smoke and the dead bodies gone. All but one. Becca the charred corpse was on the pole in front of me, my hands reaching out to her in a gesture that hadn’t been futile a moment ago but certainly was now.
I’d somehow come back to reality and found my way back inside the club. Yet now, it was exactly where I didn’t want to be. It was wrong. Becca was already gone here, but she was still alive in whatever fantasy realm I’d just been in. Even if it wasn’t real—even if it couldn’t be real—the hope inside me felt real. And all I wanted was to find my way back to a place where I could still save my friend.
5
Strong hands restrained me before I could even think to stand up.
“Darcy Pierce, you are under arrest for fleeing an active crime scene.” This wasn’t Asshole Crane speaking, but his partner. The guy with the kink for extra tits.
His voice was louder, stronger, even though he was smaller in stature. But that didn’t surprise me. He was a human cop who’d just gotten drunk in an interspecies strip club and was now arresting the bartender. Fucking brazen.
“I didn’t flee. I was chasing the man you should be arresting. I—” I stopped.
There wasn’t really anything I could say. They were technically right. I should have told them to chase Ray instead of chasing him myself.
I wasn’t a Guardian anymore. It wasn’t my job to chase anyone, and more than that, it apparently wasn’t even allowed. I’d forgotten that, letting my feelings for Becca cloud my judgment, and now this drunken cop was clasping cold metal around my wrists as punishment.
Had I been so wrong to think I could just walk away from that life? Making drinks for horny men instead of saving people’s lives? I’d counted myself lucky to escape from Simeon’s clutches after he’d brainwashed me and made me useless, but maybe it wasn’t enough for me to refuse to protect monsters like him. Maybe there were more monsters in the world than I’d ever realized, and maybe I would have to start playing offense if I wanted to have any semblance of a life I didn’t hate.
“Okay,” I said, releasing the tension in my arms to show my compliance.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, arrest me. You’re right. I did leave a crime scene without permission. I’m sorry. I was a Guardian for four years, and Becca was my friend. I acted on my instincts without thinking, and I know what it must have looked like. I just want to help.”
He snorted. “You, help? Crane told me who you are, lady. The only way you’ll help is by sticking a knife in my back.”
Ugh. I was starting to think I’d been wrong in deciding last year that I could live with a ruined reputation. I could have fought harder to keep my job, but I’d chosen not to. My brain had been so scrambled at that point, it’d seemed better to be suspected as a betrayer than go back to the Guardians and admit I’d let a vampire cloud my judgment. But I knew it wasn’t better to be evil than incompetent—that was just my bruised ego, scrambling my brain even more.
It would certainly make things more difficult for me now.
I was about to tell the extra-titty lover that even if I really was an assassin, I doubted any of his enemies would be able to afford my fee. But then Crane stepped in front of us and saved me from myself.
“Let her up, Dirk.” He extended a hand down to me, then turned red when he realized I was cuffed and couldn’t take it. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I said, wondering why he was being nice to me. “I can stand up without hands.” And, with only a small brush against Dirk to get him out of my way, I did just that. Rusty or not, I still had strong legs.
A chunk of my hair fell into my face when I popped up, so I pulled some magic into my breath and blew it away, the dusty dark waves tickling my nose as they flew up and back, tucking neatly behind my ear.
Crane narrowed his eyes at me. “Ah, are you . . . ?” He looked at the bar for a moment, then back at me. “Did you . . . ?”
I had no idea what he was getting at, and apparently neither did Dirk, because he walked around me to smack Crane in the back and said, “Spit it out, man. What’d I tell you about questioning? You gotta ask full questions with your mouth. Not everyone’s a mind reader.”
Which one of them is a mind reader? I wondered. Gauging their lack of reaction to my clearly thought question, I realized it was probably neither of them. Someone else, then. I’d be on my guard.
“Did you do something to my drink?” Crane finally managed to ask, a tinge of hurt in his voice.
Wow, I thought. Either this was an act, or Detective Asshole was way too sensitive for his job.
“Nope, definitely not.” I only thought about doing something to your drink. “But it wouldn’t have been illegal if I had,” I pointed out, partly wishing I’d gone through with it.
If I had given him a touch of lust to drink, he’d be uniquely motivated to help me out of these cuffs.
“Then why . . .” He seemed unable to go on, and his face turned even redder.
“Words, man,” Dirk piped up.
“Never mind,” Crane mumbled, then quickly changed the subject. “So, are we bringing her in?”
“Yep,” Dirk answered. “Said she’d come willingly. Bet she knows lots. Put her in a room with Miriam, we might even be able to put her away for life.”
So Miriam must be the mind reader. And these two must be hoping to catch my “assassin” alter-ego in addition to Becca’s killer. Great. “Are you guys even DSC?”
Department of Supernatural Crime. They were the ones with jurisdiction over everything involving magic. Created twenty years ago when all the “supernatural” creatures had outed themselves, one after the other, like dominoes, after the first business-minded vampire had started selling immortality to the masses.
The Opening, we called it now, because it had been like opening floodgates on a new market so high in demand that it changed our entire society. Inhumanity was very lucrative, it turned out—despite the many humans who would always want to remain human, and despite their many prejudices.
That was all before my time, really. I was only a child when it happened, and I grew up as an orphan, like so many others, never knowing if my parents had left me to become vampires or if they’d been some new vampire’s first breakfast.
They were human; that was all I knew. And twenty years later, even though my adoptive family had taught me to use magic, I was still human too.
The DSC, though? Twenty years later, they were still a joke. While the government had struggled for years to allocate resources properly and get their act together to contain the chaos, private security companies had formed and grown and stepped up to the task. I’d worked for the biggest, best one up until last year.
As a Guardian, I’d done my job so well I’d barely needed to have any contact at all with the regular police, let alone the DSC. They operated separately, still, because the general populace couldn’t bear the idea of disbanding the regular cops, and the regular cops were about as effective as floppy fish against brown bears when it came to the “supernatural”—a term that had been under fire lately for its racist undertones. Vampires, shifters, and the rest were just as “natural” as humans, they argued. But no one had been able to coin a better term yet that would satisfy everyone and stick.
“Nah, we’re part of a new program,” Dirk said proudly. “Gonna clean up the city, and then everywhere else. For good.”
Whatever he was talking about, it sounded like a disaster waiting to happen.
“Umm,” Crane interrupted, “that’s not exactly—” He paused to rub his eyes. “We’ve been working with some DSC agents for the past couple months. Collaborating; trying to see how we can help each other be more effective. It’s just an experiment. Anyway—”
“Well, don’t tell her everything. She’ll use anything you say to witch her way out of those cuffs and turn it against you.”
Neither Crane nor I knew what to say to that, it seemed.
Witch? Yeah, right. Like that was a real thing.
I supposed it had been, at some point. Technically, the society of mages I’d grown up in were descendants of witches. Their ancestors had been taught to use magic by a god they’d worshiped—that was the difference between witches and mages. Both used magic, but witches by definition were servants of the gods.
Witches were a thing of the past because gods were a thing of the past. Gods needed worshippers to stay in power, and humanity had largely stopped worshipping long before the Opening.
This was why most humans still didn’t know it was within their ability to command magic. It was entirely possible for anyone, godly benefactor or no—it just didn’t come easy.
I had spent my childhood pouring long, grueling hours into study and practice, deciphering old, wordy tomes, mastering multiple forms of meditation, connecting my mind to my will and then controlling it. It was a skill, like any other, and I’d worked hard to be good at it.
