The Fire Within Series: Books 1 - 3

by Ella M. Lee

  “Good to meet you, Fiona,” Claudius said, holding out his hand.

  I clasped it in mine for a mere moment and immediately backed up, closer to Nicolas.

  “Nicolas,” he said, refocusing his attention. “Do you have everything you need for your investigation?”

  “Yes,” Nicolas said. “Arturo’s Minsk team has been helpful, although we haven’t found anything interesting yet. It’s as though Derek disappeared into thin air, but that is Meteor magic for you.”

  “I trust we will get to the bottom of this,” Claudius said.

  “I believe I am likely to run into Derek one way or another,” Nicolas said with a slight shrug. “He hates me and isn’t the type to let that go.”

  “Many people hate you,” Claudius said. I couldn’t tell if the words were meant as a subtle tease or merely a bland agreement.

  “I am rather talented in that regard,” Nicolas said. “Ciao. I’ll be in touch.”

  Claudius let out a sharp huff of air. “Ciao,” he echoed, studying me once more for a moment.

  Nicolas tugged me along toward the elevators that would bring us to street level.

  Being outside under the hot sun eased the tight coils around my heart. Although both Nicolas and Daniel had taken me out occasionally over the past few weeks, it had only temporarily relieved the suffocating feeling that I was bound forever to the clan house.

  But now I was a part of Water, with a life and a group and money and a future. I could come out here whenever I wanted. I could even stay out here all day if I chose to.

  I could breathe again.

  As we started across the street toward the garage that held the clan’s cars, I reached my hand out to Nicolas. It was an instinctive and automatic gesture; on our previous excursions, he had kept me close to him while outside.

  He paused, giving me a curious and amused look. When I didn’t withdraw, he took my hand in his and twined his fingers among mine.

  I don’t own you anymore, he told me silently, his voice ringing in my mind. You don’t need to keep so close.

  I shrugged. I want to.

  His eyes were fixed on the distant garage door, but I caught his slight grin.

  What does Claudius think of you? I asked, wondering about their relationship.

  Claudius saw more of my insanity than others did, back when Ryan first brought me here. He thinks I’m eccentric and strange and a psychopath who may snap at any moment, but he respects my ability to get shit done.

  I smiled. I don’t know if any of that is too far off the mark.

  He gave me a brief, teasing look. Oh, I snapped years ago.

  I laughed breathlessly and watched the breeze ruffle his messy hair. I enjoyed looking at him, enjoyed his contentment, enjoyed his warm skin against mine.

  I liked Nicolas a lot. More than I would have ever expected, given our rocky start. He was handsome and witty, and just the type of quiet intellectual that I was usually attracted to.

  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by my feelings.

  But he was also reserved and mysterious, and I had no idea what he thought of me beyond our professional relationship. Although I lived in his apartment, and we often shared his huge bed at night, we had somehow managed to give each other massive amounts of space. And although he held me and put his arms around me frequently, it was hard to tell if that was out of interest in me or just because that was how he chose to offer me comfort.

  Don’t overthink right now, I told myself, following him and Keisha up to the second floor of the garage. You have plenty of time to figure him out.

  I hated shopping and had been excited to get back to the clan house as quickly as possible until I learned what Daniel wanted me to do next.

  “Let’s go see Teng,” he said after barging into Nicolas’s apartment while I sorted through my newly purchased clothes.

  “What?” I asked, drawing back.

  The very idea of getting anywhere near Yu-Teng, Nicolas’s powerful elementalist group member, was nerve-wracking. I had only seen him in passing a few times in my weeks here, and I had come away from all those encounters feeling shaky.

  Teng was, according to Daniel, one of the best elemental magicians in the clan, with a fantastic amount of control over raw Water magic and its associated element. He was tiny, smaller than even short and thin Daniel, but every fiber of him screamed mean and dangerous and cruel.

  Suddenly, shopping for fancy clothes and picking color palettes for my apartment’s furniture seemed fun, and I wished I were still doing it.

  “Trust me, you’ll like this,” Dan said, holding his hand out to me gracefully. “Teng can help you with your new magic. He’ll be able to make it easier to handle.”

  I reluctantly picked myself up off the floor, enticed by Dan’s words. My Water magic was beautiful and majestic and easier to control than Flame, but it did rather annoyingly keep coming loose from its bindings. It wanted to move and writhe and reach out and touch things, and I was already getting a headache keeping it locked down all the time. Despite all my practice with magic, I couldn’t figure out how to make it behave.

  Any chance of calming it was appealing.

  Teng lived on the thirty-fifth floor, the floor below where Nicolas lived. His apartment was large and dark—the shades were pulled against the daylight—and contained a ton of computer equipment. Teng sat like a king on his throne at a desk that held four large monitors and several laptops and computer towers.

  He spun in his chair and blinked lazily at us. “Yo.”

  “Yo,” Daniel replied. “Fiona, Yu-Teng. Teng, this is Fiona.”

  Slowly, he stood and took several careful paces that landed him only a couple of feet in front of me. He was shorter than me, but the sheer press of his sophisticated magic made him imposing. I had no doubt that he could pin me where I stood and rip me to pieces if he wanted, and there would be nothing I could do about it. He was studying me with narrowed eyes as though he was considering it.

  Daniel didn’t seem worried. In fact, he was so nonchalant that he flopped onto Teng’s couch and started playing a game of Go with himself at the impressive board set up on the living room table.

  “Bring up a personal shield,” Teng said.

  I did as he asked, struggling to get my magic to hold the form with integrity. My flowing, sky-blue magic was simple and frail compared to everyone else’s in Nicolas’s group. It hovered close to my skin in a strong, shimmering layer of what we called a personal shield as I waited to see what would happen next.

  Teng blinked, and my shield disintegrated as his magic bit into it. He had been gentle, not blowing it apart with his own power, but the offensive move still sent a shock wave through me.

  I stumbled back a step, disoriented.

  Teng didn’t seem to care about my discomfort. He sidestepped me and picked up a pane of dark-tinted glass about the size of a piece of letter paper. He held it up between us. I could see it was enchanted to completely dampen any magic used on it—designed, no doubt, as a teaching tool.

  “Copy this,” he said, drawing a ward on it with his finger.

  The design was a basic alarm ward, commonly used to protect doors or windows, almost identical to the form we used in Flame. After that ward, he had me do three others, the last of which I had never seen before. It was some sort of specialized ward for preventing magical damage—this one was brutal to attempt to copy.

  “Stop fucking with her,” Daniel said, glancing up. I hadn’t thought he’d been paying attention, but he was as good as Nicolas when it came to doing multiple things at once.

  Teng offered me an amused shrug and gestured to the ground with his gloved hands. “Sit.”

  The next forty-five minutes were some of the most uncomfortable yet enlightening moments of my magical career. Teng’s superlative control over pure Water magic meant he had a unique ability: he could reach into me and manipulate my magic himself.

  That sort of power was unheard of within Flame, and
I had never interacted with someone like this before. The fact that he was a dangerous stranger made it even weirder. It felt almost creepily intimate. My magic was like a deep and sacred part of me, and it was now laid bare for him to touch and change.

  But Teng treated me professionally, helping me strengthen the ropes I had bound my magic into, and giving me advice about power flow and usage. He patiently repeated everything several times in a bored tone until I had the hang of it myself.

  I was startled and disoriented when he brought me back out of our focused meditation.

  “One last thing,” he said, his dark eyes intense and lit with his magic. “You tend to press on your magic. Those are your Flame instincts, but it’s a bad habit for Water. It’s not intuitive to someone with a dangerous type of magic, but you can safely let go with Water. Once you are used to it, you will find it helpful to hold Water more loosely and allow it to move.”

  I nodded attentively. I hadn’t said much more than yes and no to him, but I dredged up every ounce of courage I possessed and said, “Thank you.”

  His tilted eyes widened the slightest bit. “Uh-huh, m sai.”

  I knew this Cantonese word. I had heard it said about a million times between Nicolas and Daniel—who talked primarily in Cantonese around me—until I finally asked Dan what it meant. “No need,” he had told me, as in “no need for thanks.” The closest, it seemed, that Cantonese got to “you’re welcome.”

  Teng and I both clambered to our feet. I went to sit by Daniel. Teng took the seat across from him and assumed the role of Daniel’s phantom opponent. They made what I could only assume were teasing and derisive comments in Cantonese as they rapidly finished Dan’s game.

  I knew nothing about Go, and I didn’t even bother asking who won as Daniel and I left Teng’s apartment with hardly another few words exchanged. I breathed a sigh of relief once the door had shut behind us. Dan smiled.

  “My brave girl,” he said, wrapping an arm around me. “That was one of the hardest introductions you’ll need to go through here, and now it’s over.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Irina and Chandra will be harder, but yes. Teng scares most people. He works for Nicolas because Nicolas likes smart people, but also because not many other commanders could handle Teng.”

  “He doesn’t frighten Nicolas,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Dan said dismissively. “I don’t think anything frightens Nicolas.”

  “And he doesn’t frighten you,” I said.

  “No,” Dan said. “I get Teng. We’re both Hong Kongers. We have a lot in common.”

  I nodded mockingly. “You are both very short.”

  Dan hit my shoulder. “Nicolas didn’t beat you enough,” he told me haughtily. “You are bold, talking back to me like that.”

  “How could I possibly be afraid of you after all Nicolas put me through? He’d hurt me, and confuse me, and you’d pick me up and hold me together. If you were trying to be fearsome, you did a terrible job.”

  He pulled me into the elevator and jabbed the button for the twenty-fifth floor, laughing.

  “Someone needed to give you a reason to want to stay here,” he said. “Nicolas was doing a terrible job in that area. I tried to be better.”

  “I’m glad you’re my lieutenant,” I told him, following him out into the Menagerie, the clan house’s hip, glass-walled coffee shop.

  I took a startled step back as he spun to face me. “Really?” he asked, gripping my hands tightly.

  I blinked at him. His expression was utterly disarmed, almost shocked.

  “Yes, really,” I said. “Of course.”

  He smiled at me, a more vulnerable and sweeter smile than I usually saw from him.

  “No one has ever said that to me before,” he offered quietly.

  In that moment, he looked incredibly young and radiant. Daniel’s handsome face was made up of all sharp, angular lines, and his smile could charm anyone. Someday, he would make some woman very happy—but only if she understood that he didn’t care about the superficial things in life.

  Dan brushed off compliments about his looks and intelligence and achievements. What he wanted was proof that someone understood him on a deeper level. He wanted someone to love him for the things he valued about himself—his dedication, inner strength, and compassion.

  “Buy me a latté and I’ll say more nice things about you,” I said.

  His smile twisted into a mock pout. I caught his wrists as he made to pull away from me and tugged him back. He watched me with a tilted, curious expression.

  “Someday, probably soon, you’ll be a commander,” I told him. “When that happens, I will be your first group member. That is how awesome you are.”

  He didn’t seem to have any words, and that was the best response I could have received from him.

  “This place is so cool,” I said, looking out over Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour toward the city’s impressive skyline.

  Although Hong Kong had been my home for a month, I had seen very little of it. Water’s clan house was far outside the central part of the city, in Sha Tin, and Nicolas had largely confined me to that area, barring our one disastrous operation together.

  Tonight, he and Daniel had taken me out for a hot-pot dinner in the city to celebrate joining Water, and it was nice to relax with the two of them. They got along spectacularly well, and I loved watching them banter. Occasionally they let slip stories from when Nicolas had first bought Daniel at auction and had needed to endure his sullen teenage angst.

  After the meal, Daniel left to run errands in the city, and I asked if Nicolas would take me closer to the view I’d only been catching glimpses of all evening through the restaurant windows. I had never seen the city at night, and I was completely mesmerized by the bright lights as we walked together along the harborside boardwalk.

  Across the thin stretch of harbor was a tapestry of skyscrapers, all lit up, reaching toward the sky like jagged teeth that extended along the shoreline in both directions, set against dark and wild mountains.

  Nicolas stopped to lean against the railing, settling his forearms on the hard metal, stretching himself out elegantly.

  “I once spent weeks studying this exact scene,” he said quietly. He glanced behind us. “This is the hotel where Ryan brought Jasmine and me after we escaped from Smoke. I suppose you could say this view helped heal me.”

  I watched him warily, but he wasn’t sad or upset. I didn’t want to push him too hard about his past, but I did like collecting pieces of knowledge about him. It would take years, I imagined, to pull out a complete story, but I was willing to wait patiently.

  I sighed. “I spent my first twenty-two years thinking I’d never live anywhere except Nebraska. I was ready for a life of farming, maybe teaching English at a high school and probably settling down with a really boring guy. That was the path of least resistance, and I was fine with it. Then my father and brother were murdered and… well, has there ever been someone not fascinated by the idea that magic exists in the world? If somebody had told me where I’d be right now, I would have told them to lay off the drugs, but here I am. I think I’m doomed to start over every few years. Can’t wait to see what horrific thing happens when I’m thirty-three.”

  “My cycle seems to be roughly ten years,” Nicolas offered, staring out at the city.

  “How old are you, anyway? In real, mortal years?” I asked. “Please, please don’t say something ridiculous like a hundred and fifty.”

  He looked to be roughly twenty-five years old, but looks were deceiving in a clan.

  He blinked at me and then laughed. “Hardly. I’m forty-five. But ages eleven, twenty, twenty-nine, and forty-two have all changed or hurt me. Both, usually. I imagine I’m due for my next disaster right about the same time as you. Perhaps we can support one another through our despair.”

  “What happened at forty-two?” I asked.

  Twenty was likely when he joined Smoke, and twenty-nine mu
st have been his strange abilities appearing and his escape to Water, but what had happened merely three years ago to hurt him?

  “My mother passed away,” he said.

  I took his hand in mine, running my fingers over his knuckles. “I’m sorry.”

  I knew what that felt like. I could still remember my own grief and helplessness. Even the slightest waves can disturb a teenage girl, and I had been hit by a tsunami when I lost my mother at the age of seventeen. Losing one parent is the hardest thing in the world, and Nicolas’s mother had been his only parent.

  “One of the good things about my abilities is that it is very easy to distract myself with other people’s problems if necessary,” he said.

  “I’ve never been easy to distract. I’m a little ball of anxiety most of the time.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Nicolas said dryly, offering me a wry smile.

  “I bet you can’t wait for me to move out of your apartment and leave you alone,” I said, laughing.

  “I don’t know. I’m growing rather used to your presence. I might miss you. Who will warm my bed for me?”

  “I’ve told you, it’s not nice to tease,” I said, tapping his shoulder lightly.

  He offered me a charming smile. “I’m not teasing.”

  “Well… well, it’s not nice to be a shameless flirt,” I said, flustered.

  “You like it. I wouldn’t do it if it truly made you uncomfortable.” He looked me up and down, eyeing the space between us. “See? You’re even leaning into me now. You haven’t let go of my hand all night, even though I’ve barely touched you. And you’re currently looking at me like you’ve never seen anything so beautiful. I know that look. I’ve seen it before.”

  “The ego on you, to stand against this perfect skyline and think you’re the prettiest thing in sight.”

  But I was smiling, and Nicolas knew how much I liked his confidence. He was studying me with a delighted expression. He was always delighted when I was playful with him.