Vusolaryn rolled his eyes.
“So our mothers prefer,” Mariena sighed. “But that’s just so last millennia.”
“And it is our Shire,” Vusolaryn turned to Esloah. “When’s lunch?”
I stepped forward. “First off, Georgia is our Shield, not your Shire. Your shire abuts our Shield within Faery. You have no place and no right within our Shield.”
Mariena’s eyes fixed on me. Discomfort and arousal battled for my foremost attention. “Oh, there’s something delicious about this bird.”
“I prefer warmer, more passionate fare,” Vusolaryn said.
“Forgive our Shieldheart,” Summuseraphi said. “He died twice defending our Sanctum from your knights.”
Faeries fixed their attention on Summuseraphi, all signs of boredom gone.
“I would never condone an attack on a Shield Sanctum,” Mariena said.
Vusolaryn darkened. “I certainly wouldn’t deign to order such an assault.”
“And yet I slew—yet Knights Dolumii and Gherrian were slain while assaulting our Shield,” I said. “Behold their swords as proof.”
All the faeries leapt to their feet. Outcries so clogged the air there was no way to unravel them. Thatch stood on his table, shouting to be heard until Summuseraphi quieted the crowd with a sudden blast of Light.
“Killing a Seelie Knight is an act of war,” Esloah said.
“Same,” an Unseelie prince spat.
Summuseraphi leaned close. “Perhaps I should handle things.”
I shrugged. “Even you can’t worsen this travesty.”
Summuseraphi’s expression hardened. He turned back to the assembled Courts. “Not only did Knight Dolumii and Knight Gherrian attack our Sanctum—”
“After slaying our Ignis,” I added.
Summuseraphi inclined his head. “After Knight Dolumii ambushed and killed our Ignis, he and Knight Gherrian or their confederates made off with the Sanctum’s eggs.”
Both sides erupted in denials again.
Both sides demanded satisfaction against me.
Both demanded I return their Champions’ swords.
Both insisted that if any of their subjects were present, they were only defending the Sanctum against their opposite Sidhe and both insisted they’d taken no eggs.
Summuseraphi defended me, refusing duels on my behalf that I’d have rather fought and trying to keep the discussion on point. He offered amnesty in return for the eggs despite my objections.
“You framed us,” Mariena said.
“How dare you?” Vusolaryn asked. “This means war!”
“It certainly does,” she said.
All pandemonium ceased.
Mariena and Vusolaryn smiled at one another and winked at me.
“Standard stakes?” Vusolaryn asked.
Mariena nodded. “First shopping rights to the Goblin Market for the next season.”
“What about wafer deaths?” Vusolaryn glanced at Summuseraphi. “Unintentional, of course.”
“Least deaths?” Mariena asked.
Vusolaryn glanced at Summuseraphi again. He gave Mariena a wink. “Least. Sprite laurel for a season?”
“And your best chef.”
“For a season,” Vusolaryn said.
They shook hands.
“War!” Vusolaryn and Mariena said together.
Both Courts stormed off to their pavilions with furious elegance, neither touching a single item of their prepared feasts.
“You did great,” I said. “You just put our Shield in the middle of a meat grinder.”
Summuseraphi glowered.
“No one died, that’s almost a miracle,” Thatch said. “If there’s any way the Wyld can help recover your eggs, I’ll happily provide it.”
“Perhaps you could illuminate how Knight Dolumii’s assault on our Ignis employed Wyldfae,” Summuseraphi said. “Or perhaps why my Praefecture has been under assault by your faeries?”
I drew Dolumii’s blade and shoved it just below the fork of Thatch’s legs as I seized his shirt. “I want to know everything you know about this sword, Sidhe. What happens to those slain with it?”
Thatch’s eyes widened. Waved his hands in the air. “I know nothing of this, nothing.”
“Then maybe I’ll kill you with it and you will.”
“Vitae, I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Summuseraphi grabbed my hands, forcing me to let Thatch go. “But, we cannot shed Sidhe blood in this place without starting a major war.”
All anger drained away, leaving me melancholy and disoriented.
Thatch scurried from my reach. “I swear, but I’ll seek out the...well, someone. I’ll find your answers, elf-slayer, I swear it.”
Before they could respond, Thatch sprinted across the meeting ground and into his tiny tent. The sky flickered from day to night, filled with countless stars close enough to touch.
“Great,” Summuseraphi said. “You just alienated our only ally.”
Bradley
Bradley lowered the bizarre chandelier down around Whisker’s cage. The drop-ceiling frame over which it hung groaned. The cat growled within the newly-reinforced cage. He considered lowering the chandelier all the way into place before feeding the cat, but making it wait for meals had doomed the last three cages.
“All right, all right. You’re going to get fat, you know.” He picked up a wire cage containing a plump alley rat. It hissed at him, glaring with beady eyes. Bradley dropped the rat into a kind of mesh airlock, ensuring the door double latched before drawing back the metal shield separating them.
The rat scrabbled to stay in the upper enclosure well away from the growling cat. Whiskers didn’t let it, shaking it free of its grip and shredding it with a choir of nauseating noises.
Bradley returned to his project while the cat daintily cleaned its long, bloody claws. It’d taken him two days to assimilate everything he could find on radiation, radiation detection and possible detection mediums. He’d scoured Atlanta and its flea markets for another two days, collecting an assortment of fuels and base materials to build the contraption that hung over the cat.
Someone knocked on his office door.
He threw a sheet over the cage. Whiskers voiced her displeasure with a low, highly unsettling sound.
Bradley opened the door. Delight filled him at the sight of overburdened gurneys. In the last week, something had changed on the streets. He’d received more deliveries than the whole rest of the year, all carrying mysterious lumps, covered by oddly-stained fabrics.
“It’s not that exciting, Doc.”
“Just love my job,” Bradley said.
He hurried to the back of his office, rolling forward empty examination tables to take their delivery. The first orderly stared at the mad assortment of small glass globes, little lights popping in the swirling gasses contained by two of them.
“Um, Doc?”
“Gas spectrometer of my own design, though I included a few elements of scintillation detectors. All very experimental of course, cutting edge probably, not that I know anyone else who’s working with such a thing. I might be the only one—”
“Whatever, Doc. What’s it do?”
“In theory?” Bradley asked.
He nodded.
“It detects radiation.”
The other orderlies hurried for the door. The first eyed the glowing orbs. “That sparkling means there’s some kind of radiation? Here?”
“Of course, how would I test a radiation detector if I didn’t have radioactive materials—”
“Thanks, Doc, lots to do. Just sign the papers and interoffice them to our department.”
The orderly pushed his gurney away at a run.
Bradley shrugged, delighted that more than one of his gasses seemed to be picking up the radiation emanating off Whiskers. He pushed the examination tables to one side and returned to lowering the cobbled-together gas spectrometer into place.
Only one orb sparkled. He frowned at it.
Did it exhaust the gas that fast?
He leaned closer, checking the hand scribbled label decrying the orb’s contents. A thought occurred to him. He dug under the discolored sheets, removing a limb so thickly tattooed and bruised, the skin resembled a moldy blackberry. He waved it near the detector. A second orb sparkled.
There must be more than one radiation involved.
Bradley clapped his free hand with the severed one. “Behold, Whiskers, a device to detect magic’s flavors and colors.”
Quayla
I woke in agony, not sure where I was, only that I hurt. I blinked up through the garden ceiling at a few stars strong enough to shine through Atlanta’s light pollution. Flashes of magic and urgency exploded like fireworks between the booming throbs in my head.
“Ani?” I rasped. I licked my lips and sucked on my tongue to ease a dry mouth that should never have needed moistening.
“Shield Quayla! You’re conscious,” Anima said.
“Yay?” I moaned. “Status?”
“You saved the Shield, Vitae too.”
Her words faded in and out. I think she said something about heroes, but I missed most of it from where I lay on consciousness’s seesaw.
“Quayla?”
She’s worried, not very automata of her.
A giggle escaped me. Pain transmogrified it into choking.
“Don’t you realize what this means?” Anima asked. “You risked yourself to save the Shield just like Mare. You’ve proven yourself.”
“Yay. Feels like I’m going to die like her now, too.”
“Hold on, it’ll be all right,” Anima said. “The others are on their way as soon as they clear their breaches.”
Whoever consciousness was playing with must have pissed it off because it jumped off the seesaw, took its ball and went home, dumping me into darkness’s lap.
Bradley
Another set of bodies awaited Bradley in the hall when he unlocked his door after a lunch time trip for more gas samples. Most of the corpses died from the normal kind the other examiners sent down when they were too busy playing golf. He got old age, stroke, and gunshot—nothing unexpected.
The higher percentage of bizarre corpses continued.
He wheeled them in one by one.
His chandelier sorted them as they came in. If the little globes remained dark, he pushed the body into a bay he reserved for natural—as opposed to supernatural—causes.
He’d added more gasses to his overhead detector, coming away with three that seemed able to pick up radiations foreign to anything in his medical books. He sorted the bodies red, blue, gold and multihued where more than one radiation seemed present in the bites, burns or stab wounds involved.
Once sorted, he started on all the normal work. Regardless of cause of death, those that’d died of natural methods required none of the special editing when filing their reports. Caught in gang drive-by didn’t raise any eyebrows upstairs.
Listing goblin bite as a cause of death had warranted him a trip upstairs where he’d been formally reprimanded for unprofessional conduct and allowing his fantasy life to intrude on official duties. Goblin bites became wild dogs and sword wounds became gruesome example-making knife play by some gang.
A small wand in his lab coat burned a hole in his pocket as he did the last evaluations on the poor woman whose buffet addiction had caused her to eat herself to a heart attack.
He took out a bulky device smaller than the chandelier. He’d cannibalized a universal remote bought at a flea market to join the other components. The number of batteries required unbalanced the device and made it unwieldy, but it was his first portable magic-o-meter.
I’ll do better on Rattler generation two.
The device resembled a bulky baby’s rattle. Three bulbs stuck out from its end, each filled with one of the gasses he’d found reactive to the radiation of the three types of magic he’d discovered so far.
I’ll keep swapping gasses and use my Damocles Magic-O-Meter to ensure I find them all.
He lowered his rattler over the first body, a college coed whose lower legs had been chewed off. Blue lit bright as a magic missile.
Bradley scowled.
Too many blues. Whatever these things are, they don’t respect us.
He moved to the other group. Red lit as he’d expected until the batteries died. He replaced them. The rattler was more sensitive than the big one, either because of a greater applied current, better proximity or the increased gas concentration of each globe.
Red Lights had killed almost as many as Blue Lights. Bradley didn’t know whether they’d always killed this many—at least before he occupied Basement E, but it seemed clear something was going on just based on the uptick in bizarre body count.
He moved to the third group. Most of these dead were either blazingly blue with a splattering or red or vice versa.
Some kind of gang war.
The bodies weren’t human. Their species wasn’t as easy to identify as troll was, but they were some kind of fantastic creature. A few radiated hints of the much rarer yellow. Either yellow never died or cleaned up after their bodies better.
Best as I can guess without actually being present, it seems the golden yellow light must be the good guys. They’re out there trying to stop red and blue all by themselves.
A grin spread across his face.
But not for much longer. Hold on, guys, help’s growing.
The Story Continues...
Thank you for reading Ashes of Raging Water.
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
Keep reading for more about the Blood Phoenix Chronicles, including an excerpt from BPC #2: Ruled by Tainted Blood
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BPC 2: Ruled by Tainted Blood
Excerpt: Fires of Vengeance
Ignis
A firestorm swirled Ignis back into existence. Flames reflected off the mirrored metal of his nest’s alcove, redoubling the heat of his furious snarl. Ashes floated down around him, settling back into the basin of his nest. He stared into his reflection, eyes still glowing coals.
“How dare he? I’ll hunt that infernal elf down if it takes—”
Anima’s voice rose from his nest. “Shield Ignis?”
“What?” Ignis snapped. “I’ve got to get back there.”
His Shield’s automata sounded hurt even though she wasn’t designed with emotions. “The Shieldheart and Summuseraphi are on route to the sight of your death. You are needed elsewhere.”
“That son-of-a-bitch faerie ripped my heart out of my chest while I was still alive.”
“I am sorry for your pain, but each of our shields has been ambushed and I’m seeing multiple coordinated incursions. Two shields and a Divine One for a single site is overkill.”
Ignis pushed open the alcove. Lingering handprints glowed on the metal. He descended the rear access steps of his apartment building’s ancient dead boiler. He yanked a pull chain. The handle warped, but a shor
t deluge of scalding water from the newer boiler cooled his skin.
The putti had reworked the boilers so that neither could be removed without compromising building integrity and added an adjoining entrance behind them into Ignis’s basement apartment.
A section of brick wall swung out of the way, admitting him into a large corner shower unit. A twist of a handle opened up shower heads above and around him, tepid water lowering his body temperature the rest of the way. He never used the hot water tap even in the cold of winter.
Ignis stepped out of the shower onto a fluffy slate grey rug and grabbed a matching if fluffier towel. He patted himself dry and took only a moment to double check his reflection. He was in a hurry to rip the Unseelie knight’s head off, but haste was dangerous—particularly when combined with fury.
His glance at the mirror showed Ignis in need of a body-wide shave, but otherwise his basic size, shape and nationality had returned to a close approximation of his former self.
His focus in the final moments of his last life had informed the makeup of his new body. He’d learned the technique from an earth phoenix that had been positively persnickety about his appearance. It didn’t always work. Little changes occurred no matter how much time he had to concentrate, but he never needed as many clothing changes as Aquaylae or Caelum.
Nobody needs as many changes as Caelum.
He dressed quickly and grabbed a spare hilt from his underwear drawer. The foot-long ironwood rod resembled nothing so much as a thick, intricately carved flute. Nonetheless his weapon’s flexibility served him better than Aquaylae’s karambit hilts or even Vitae’s fighting canes.
Ignis stepped out of his apartment building tense for a fight. One hand tucked inside his jacket, fingers wrapped white-knuckled around his hilt. Heat clung to his new skin, blood burning in his veins. Knight Dolumii had ambushed him with the help of some Wyldfae. They’d killed him, and Dolumii had stolen his heart.
If he thinks he’s going to control me, he’s got a lot to learn about fire.
Much to Ignis’s disappointment, nothing so much as looked at him funny on his march to the bus stop.
Nothing waiting for me here because I was the first ambush.
Ashes of Raging Water Page 25
