by Ann Denton
Mala pointed at the boy but kept her eyes on his mother. “Silence it, before I eat it.” The woman immediately scooped up her child and stepped back.
Mala turned to her guard. “You will escort me to Troe. You will do nothing foolish. Or I will wear the skins and eat the souls of everyone you’ve ever loved.”
She wondered for a second if she’d laid it on too thick. But then the guard stumbled over his feet as he turned and led Mala through the slithering queue of petitioners. As Mala followed him a bubble rose in her chest. Full of adrenaline, full of giddiness, she had to bite back a laugh that people were taking her seriously. That she was almost to her goal. That her power made people wet themselves. She felt like a kid who’d stolen sweets and gotten away with it. I’m just the mumbler’s daughter, everyone. Surprise. It’s a hoax. Until they skin me.
Mala bit her lip as the adrenaline bubble burst and fear came rushing back. She was treading in dangerous waters. The current could shift any moment, from fear to a mob mentality. She’d seen mob mentality at work …
She took a deep breath to steady herself as the last of the cubicle maze fell away to reveal a huge ballroom. The floors were white marble, but they were overshadowed by the walls. The walls were a blinding array of sparkling gemstones. Every Erlender for the last fifty years had been required to provide jewelry as part of their taxes. And Troe had decided that such magnificently useless trinkets shouldn’t be left in his coffers. They should line the walls. Artists had been commissioned to create murals from the jewelry. Murals of the time before the bomb—before the Freeze, Mala corrected herself. She had to start using Erlender terms for things. Particularly since she was about to become their queen.
Mala tore her eyes from visions of diamond airplanes soaring like angels through a sky of sapphires and amethysts. She focused on Troe, who perched upon a cracked leather recliner, listening to a scrawny woman blabber in front of him.
“Then he got the spots. All ova’. And my otha’ son. He gots ‘em too. And then everyone wuz gettin’ em. And fifteen youngin’s already died. We got six more so bad right now, they can’ see straight.”
Mala strode up to the front. The guards surrounding Troe immediately drew their weapons. Mala held up her hands to show she was unarmed.
Troe turned in his seat. His electric-green eyes seared her, taking in the state of her wet and shredded clothing. He glanced questioningly at the guard who had escorted her. But the guard merely trembled. His fear of a demon outranked his fear of his king.
“Your majesty,” Mala swept into a bow. “Might I trouble you for a glass of water?”
Troe cocked his head. “All this way, an’ that’s all you want? You coulda’ stopped at da’ river.”
“Please,” Mala made her tone respectful.
Troe nodded to a lackey, who ran out of the room, returning out of breath with a glass of water. The servant presented it to Mala.
“You have yer water,” Troe said. “Now I wancher name. An’ yer real purpose.”
“King Troe. I’m Mala. I’m here to be your queen.” Mala’s baritone echoed through the room. One of the guards cut off a laugh. Troe cracked a smile as he stared at her, eyebrows furrowed, trying to decipher her endgame.
Mala looked him in the eye as she saluted him with the cup. She suspected Troe would have had his servants add a little something ‘extra’ to her drink. Might as well let them think I’m immune to poison, since I’m a demon and all. Then she tipped the cup and let the water touch her closed lips. The melt took over. She returned to her own skin.
Shocked gasps erupted like geysers around the room. A hundred guns swiveled to face her.
Mala shook out her long curls. She tossed the cup aside, gave a small smile, and folded her hands demurely in front of her. “I do believe you’ve been told to expect me. Well, here I am.”
Feedback
I love love love you for reading this book! Thank you for climbing into my brain and taking the ride. You are amazing. Please leave me a review. I want to see what you think probably as much as you want to club me right now for a cliffhanger.
Burn—book 2 in the series—is available starting February 15, 2018. It’s from Lowe’s perspective and shows you everything that led him to sell Mala out. (Trust me, you want to know his side of the story before we get to book 3.) The first chapter starts on the next page.
I am working on book 3. Promise. If you email me and badger me enough, I do have a short story for Alba that I’m also writing. Badgering is probably the only way I’ll finish it. So… are you up for the challenge?
Burn Preview
The summer sun beat down on four men, an armored Jet Ski, and enough C-4 to obliterate a small town. The men stood on a pier, a ghost town devoured by trees behind them. Seventy-three years after the bomb, the town was little more than a husk, dry and cracked. Ready to blow away.
The men stared at the base of the pier, where the homemade Jet Ski-like contraption bobbed. Packed with explosives and a dozen specifications that made it dive and drive under the waves, it looked like the bastardized offspring of a dirt bike and a submarine.
Lowe took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Focus. You are the job. He climbed down the ladder to perch on the seat of the submersible Jet Ski the men had dubbed “The Dart.” The dull green wetsuit he wore nearly matched the water. Mud and leaves swirled around his toes, the scent of wet rot drifting up to greet him.
He slicked back his black curls so he could slide a pair of goggles over his eyes. His legs brushed against the explosives strapped to the Dart as he gripped the handlebars. A touch of fear shot up his spine. But he shook it off.
Lowe took slow, deep breaths and emptied his mind. His heart rate steadied, like clockwork. He’d been doing this long enough that even death could only scare him for a few seconds at a time.
Tier, the oldest of the group and the Ancient in charge of this mission, hefted a pair of jury-rigged oxygen tanks made of old fire extinguishers. The grey-haired man climbed lithely down the ladder. Backlit by the sun, his deep-set eyes looked like bottomless black pits as he handed the tanks to Lowe. How appropriately demonic he looks. Considering their assignment from the Senebal capital included the death of nearly a hundred magic-loving heathens, a demonic look was fitting for the man in charge.
Lowe strapped the tanks to his back, and coughed as he inhaled through his breathing apparatus. “Ein, couldn’t have cleaned this set out better?” he wheezed, pulling his mask off.
The lanky twenty-year-old shrugged. “Limited time.” Ein stood on the pier, shading his hazel eyes with his hand as he gazed down at Lowe. The Dart was his creation. As were the homemade breathing tanks. And just about everything else.
“Remember, set all the charges.” Ein waved an arm lazily at the distance. “Then you have to be at least a kilometer away to detonate. Unless you want to be eating your own kidneys.” He laughed hollowly.
“Good one Ein,” Bet, a bare-chested, sunburnt middle-aged soldier punched the arrogant kid on the shoulder. “Want to change our pants for us while you explain one more time? I don’t think I understood you the first fifty times.”
Lowe couldn’t help but grin. “I think we mud-breathers can handle it.” He turned away from Ein to look at Tier.
The Ancient gave him a nod, jowls wobbling slightly. He never said good-bye. It made things easier, even if it was an illusion. It helped maintain pretense. Focus. And right now, Lowe felt like he needed that focus. Even after thirty-seven confirmed kills, this would be his biggest assignment to date.
Just thirty kilometers upriver underwater. Slap explosives onto four boats. Haul ass farther upriver. Press button. Watch the river hemorrhage body parts. Easy night.
Lowe’s internal monologue was interrupted. On the pier, Bet suddenly transformed. His skin rippled. And abruptly, instead of a middle-aged man, a twelve-year-old boy stood in his place, holding up pants that were three times his size. Same face, same undeniable grin, it was still Bet
. But this was a twelve-year-old Bet. He had melted into a younger version of himself.
“Hand ‘em over,” Bet’s preteen voice hadn’t changed yet. His order was squeaky and high-pitched.
Ein tossed a wetsuit his way and Bet did a quick-change, grumbling all the while. “Still think you coulda’ rigged this thing so I didn’t have to melt into a muckin’ man-child.”
“It’s called maximum capacity muck-head,” Ein retorted. “With the explosives, something had to give. You weigh too much.”
Bet muttered curses unintelligibly as he clambered down the ladder. “I hate that kid,” Bet whined, taking his seat behind Lowe as Tier handed down more makeshift oxygen tanks.
“I think everyone does. Problem is, his stupid brain’s too valuable to waste,” Lowe huffed.
“Still think someone should twist his tadpole,” Bet groused as he readied himself.
“That’s an image I don’t want in my head when we’ve got hours of silence coming,” Lowe grumbled back.
Bet laughed. “But it’s accurate, isn’t it? Tiny wiggly little thing smaller than my pinkie.”
“I can hear you, you know,” Ein called down.
“And what are you gonna do about it, princess?” Bet winked. “Can’t mess with our rig now.”
“Just wait ‘til you get back to the Center,” Ein promised, a gleam in his eye. “I’ll have something special ready.”
“Only if it’s a kiss.” Bet blew one at Ein.
For once Ein didn’t have a retort, though his cheeks flushed in anger.
Little sludge-mouth deserves it. Even if he did get The Dart’s motor running, figure out the requirements to make the machine submersible, and do the C-4 calculations, Ein’s attitude always counteracted any of the good work he’d done. He might have been a genius, but he was not the Center’s most popular engineer, by far.
“Ok girls, enough,” Tier interjected. “Need to be down and set by twenty-one hundred. You won’t be able to track time, so get a move on. Detonation must happen before midnight, or those Erlender boats’ll be too close to Senebal forces. That cannot happen.”
What Tier didn’t say was that this mission was huge. The impact. The visibility. The President in Das Wort would be waiting for Tier’s report on the outcome.
The Erlender heathens had been getting more aggressive lately. And sending four boats downriver into Senebal territory was a gutsty move that could not be tolerated. The river did not belong to them. They were river-stealers. Infiltrators. Senebals had been fighting them for over fifty years, trying to save their homeland and their river after the rest of the world had been blown to smithereens.
The Erlenders wanted more of the river, more of the untainted water running through the Gottermund. More of the rich farmland along the banks. But they weren’t going to get it. Not if Tier and Lowe had anything to do with it.
Tier had told Lowe and Bet that President Stahl had gathered a group of town criers in Das Wort, ready to send them from village to village to tell the tale of defeat. All that needed to happen now was the defeat.
Lowe looked back up at Tier, who was still reciting the instructions they’d reviewed twenty times over.
“…you’ll report back to your base camp by sunrise. You will report back to the Center midday tomorrow. Get moving.”
Lowe tossed on his mouthpiece, ignoring the foul taste, turned the key in the ignition, and let the roar of the Dart fill his ears. When Bet tapped his stomach to signal ready, Lowe throttled into a dive. The water rose over their heads and the world turned into a brown haze, broken only by their powerful headlight. The beam flashed over fish, rocks, trash, and broken branches.
Lowe navigated by compass. He and Bet had practiced this run four times over the past two weeks at different times of day, so they would be perfect. He leaned right, and propelled them to an area where the current was slower. He avoided the big sandbars. He circled trash heaps where the fish darted in and out like tongues; heaps created in the chaos after the bomb, before the Senebals cracked down on everything related to the river.
The hours blurred together. It was almost as hypnotic as meditation. Lowe embraced the emptiness.
As the shafts of light piercing the water dimmed and the temperature dropped, Lowe knew they were getting close. He guessed it might be about nine at night. Sunset. Almost time. Almost there. He reached back and gave Bet a tap on the leg to signal readiness. His teammate acknowledged him with a return pat on Lowe’s stomach.
Lowe’s eyes diverted for a millisecond. But that was all it took for the current to shift.
A tree trunk appeared. Lowe swerved.
Not enough. The trunk slammed into the bow of the Dart. The impact jackhammered his bones.
Lowe bit down on his mouthpiece so hard he cracked a tooth. Muck! The tree trunk spun out and Lowe ducked. A massive black root smashed his shoulder. Bet’s arms tightened like iron restraints on his torso.
The Dart sputtered and died. Muck and shit. Lowe tried the key. A brief grumble of complaint issued from the machine. Then nothing. He tried again. It was dead. The engine had flooded.
Lowe scanned the underwater landscape, or what he could see of it. Damnit. At least two kilometers to go. Upriver. Against the current. Which was already steadily pushing them back. Urging them downstream.
Father mucking sludge. Lowe broke Bet’s hold, swung a leg off, and grabbed a handlebar. Bet slowly mirrored him on the other side. Without gesture, without even looking at one another, they began to push.
That mucking kid. Ein had added weights to the Dart, to help it stay submerged. Lowe felt like he was straining to push a grounded boat. A house. A mountain. It was impossible.
The press of the current against them, the weight of the Dart, the slime of the algae, all of it strained Lowe’s muscles. Bet’s preteen size didn’t help either.
Lowe’s chest heaved. There wasn’t enough oxygen in his tanks for this. He needed it for the swim later. Sludge!
He tapped Bet’s shoulder. The boy looked over. Lowe made a slashing gesture across his throat. Bet stopped pushing without argument. Lowe circled the Dart, pulling weights off and letting them drift to the riverbed, holding the machine in place. He shut off the headlight. Then he unraveled two coils of rope from under the seat. He tied one end to a harness on his belt. Bet mirrored him.
We’re gonna have to take a stand here. Mucking hell. He tried to remember what the surface above looked like. How wide the river was. Adrenaline fogged his thoughts. He couldn’t remember.
They’d picked the destination upriver because it was narrow. The banks were tall and rocks protruded and the boats would have to go through single file, like a line of ants. Upriver, Lowe and Bet would have had no problem swimming from the Dart to each boat. They’d planned to use the ropes to ease back down and gather more C-4.
Could we take it all at once? Will it weigh us down? If they come through above two at a time … what about going without the tethers? Danger is getting washed away, floating off with all that C-4. The last of our stash. Knocked out. They could pick us up.
Lowe swallowed bile and tried to control his insides. He tried to empty his mind. It was flooding with worry, like the Dart’s engine had. He didn’t want to meltdown. He forced emotion aside. No more. He named river plants. Listed types of fish. That worked for a while.
The problem was, there was nothing to do but wait. And waiting was agony. It was like liquid metal running through his veins, searing his blood. At least the adrenaline counteracted the water growing colder after sunset. At least it counteracted the blindness as the sunbeams above faded and the hazy brown became a deep, blinding black. He couldn’t even make out Bet’s features anymore. His partner was just a shadow.
Lowe’s shoulders grew stiff and he moved to keep limber. Can’t lock out when the time comes. It’s almost time. Almost time.
Finally, he heard it. A buzz. Like a bee. Hearing underwater was disorienting. He couldn’t get a feel for distance or dire
ction. His ears didn’t work quite right. But it was a motor. So it meant they were coming. He glanced at Bet to make sure he’d heard. But Bet was gone.
Muck! Lowe grabbed onto the Dart and propelled himself to the other side. Bet’s rope was still attached. He grabbed it. The rope was taut. Lowe let the current push him downstream, holding Bet’s rope like a lifeline. The darkness was a blindfold. He couldn’t see until he smacked into … Bet.
No arms grabbed Lowe. Bet didn’t make any hand signals. He just hung there, suspended, a lifeless, wide-eyed kite. His limbs trailed like limp ribbons in the current. Lowe checked for a pulse, even though he knew.
Damnit. Mud-breathing mucking sludge. Damn that tree. He was alone. He was in the wrong part of the river. And he was going to have to figure out how to blow up four boats by himself. Muck!
Acknowledgments
To the big man, Rob, and Sarah: you have my unending gratitude.
A huge thank-you to all those people who picked and prodded and complained and cajoled until I revised the story to their liking: Cass, Stefan, Jenn and Jennie (my girls), Chip, Karen, Aubry, Marian the Librarian, Eric, and everyone else. I am also eternally grateful to my parents for their support and my children for their inspiration.
About the Author
I’m at Stay at Home Bookkeeper for my husband and Stay at Home Mom to two wonderfully mischievous children under age 5. I write after bedtime, so I suppose I should thank the creators of Melatonin for the ability to write this book. Just kidding. Sorta.
I love the arts: painting, theatre, and reading. I have an undergrad degree in Playwriting and a grad degree in Theatre History. Socrates rocks my socks.
I’m an INTJ. If you’ve never taken a Meyers Briggs personality test, I recommend them.
I would love to talk to you about the book. Yes you. You can ask me questions on Facebook. If you sign up for my newsletter on my website, I’ll email you about upcoming books.
