The Colossus Collection : A Space Opera Adventure (Books 1-7 + Bonus Material)

by Nicole Grotepas

  Holly cursed and ran after her. There was no time to wait for Charly and Shiro.

  Even as she chased after the Centau, Holly knew that she wouldn’t catch Xekna before she made it to the exposed hot heart of the moon. Holly’s arms and legs fought against her, dragging her down as she pushed on. She could barely call how she was moving running. It felt more like crawling.

  But she didn’t stop.

  Her heart pounded, resisting every step, begging to slow down, to stop. To lay down on the hot earth and dissolve into it. Her eyes watered. The air scorched the sensitive membranes in her nose. Existing was complete pain. How could the Centau simply stay there?

  When Holly finally reached the top of the crater, she tripped and fell forward. The ground was hard and unforgiving, a dark gray, cooled volcanic rock. Holly threw her hand out to catch herself and felt a sharp pain on her palm when she did. She struggled to her feet, seeing dark stains on the rock where her hand had been.

  She raised her eyes in time to see the Centau placing the angel in the crucible again. Xekna glanced back at Holly. She was about twenty feet away. Too far for Holly to stop her. The witch was going to melt the angel and there was nothing Holly could do to stop her.

  “Stop!” Holly managed. Her shout was hardly more than a rasp. “What are you even doing, you crazy Centau?”

  The Centau looked back at Holly and laughed. “Silence! You will ruin the ritual.”

  Holly laughed, which turned into a coughing spell.

  “What are you doing with it? Planning to make some bracelets? There’s gold all over for that. You don’t need to steal human treasures to do that.”

  “Be gone, human. You are too stupid to understand this deep, ancient magic.”

  Holly tried to get closer as she spoke, but the Centau saw it and moved around the periphery of the crater.

  “Stay back you impure vessel. The amulet I will make with the angel will make me the richest Centau in the the 6 Moons.”

  Holly wanted to laugh. The Centau was mad. “The angel is nothing! A trinket! An heirloom, but nothing more!”

  Xekna paused and turned her ferocious, mad gaze upon Holly. Her imperious Centau face held a fury unlike any Holly had seen before in a Centau. “You know nothing, human.”

  “Xekna, I know more than you think.”

  “Xekna? Who is Xekna? I am Magic Incarnate! I am the voice of Ancient Magic. You will call me Magic or I will destroy you.”

  Who was Holly to argue with such reason? “Magic, the angel holds no powers. The only power it has is the tenuous connection it gives us humans to our homeworld! Humans are nostalgic creatures, we long for the past, and we bring it with us into the future. Melting that cursed angel down won’t do anything to help you. And for the love of Ixion, you’re Centau. Aren’t you already rich?”

  Her eyes flashed and the grin she gave Holly, warped by the wavering pockets of steam that rose from hot ground, sent shivers up her spine.

  Xekna was apparently done with the conversation. She turned away from Holly and began to lower the long-handled crucible into the bubbling lava. The orange glow lit up the Centau’s soft, brown face and brilliant white hair. If that visage hadn’t concealed a startling, frightening madness, it would have been regal and beautiful.

  There was no way to stop Xekna now, short of reaching her before the damn angel hit its melting point over the exposed magma.

  Holly panicked, considered sprinting for the Centau, then remembered.

  Her aether whip!

  She yanked it off her belt—the handle was hot, but she didn’t falter—switched it on and flicked it once to warm up. The aether cracked in a satisfying bolt of power. Holly aimed it at the handle of the crucible. Xekna concentrated on lowering the crucible toward the gurgling lava. She didn’t see the glowing, violet lash coming for the handle. It connected, looped around the stone handle, and Holly jerked the whip back, ripping the handle of the crucible away from the Centau.

  The Centau shouted in alarm, her deep voice a bellow echoing over the crater. Holly dragged the long-handled blacksmith crucible toward her until it lay at her feet. Xekna’s piercing gaze swept to Holly. She screeched, her voice otherworldly, a harpy-like sound that would send scared travelers scrambling no questions asked.

  So far as Holly could see, Xekna had no weapon. Maybe her magic? Holly wasn’t sure. But she didn’t intend to wait around to find out if the crazed Centau could actually hurt her with magic.

  Holly grabbed the ridiculous angel trinket and ran.

  11

  Idris Caron was the dignitary. The one who had the honor of placing the angel on top of the tree.

  Holly muttered under her breath—no wonder he’d wanted the damn angel returned. It was for him!

  That wasn’t precisely fair. But making the mental accusation made her smile. It was clear from the grin on his face that he loved being the special figure who got to stand on ceremony and place an angel for all the humans present.

  He stood beneath the softly falling snow in a black wool coat delivering a little speech that Holly ignored. He smiled at the crowd gathered around the center of Analogue Alley. Halos of golden light illuminated the circle. There was only one Centau dignitary present, but there were other Centau there for the occasion—the kind who enjoyed the game of Analogue Alley—dressed in what some might call festive attire.

  Holly grabbed onto Odeon’s arm, and nuzzled close to him for a moment. She was so happy he’d recovered. That had been slow. Slower than any of them had ever expected, but he was well enough now to traipse out into the cold with her. He glanced down at her and smiled, his lavender complexion and brilliant eyes peeking out at her from within his hood. He hated the cold.

  “It’s beautiful. Cold, but invigorating, Holly Drake. It’s good to be here.”

  “Mulled wine?” Charly said, shoving a goblet of warm wine into Holly’s hand as she returned from the drinks vendor at the side of the street.

  Iain came up on her other side and slipped his arm through hers, a goblet of the warm wine in his hand.

  Shiro waltzed up carrying wine as well. He tapped the brim of his bowler with the lionhead of his cane. “Got here just in time, chaps. Can’t believe I almost missed it.”

  Darius appeared carrying two goblets. He handed one to Odeon. “Glad you could make it, Starlight. Don’t scare me like that again.” Darius shook his head at Odeon and sipped his wine.

  “No drinking till we’ve toasted!” Charly said.

  “Then do it,” Darius said.

  “Not till the lights are on!” Charly said.

  Holly craned her neck to see around a tall Centau who’d come to stand in front of them. Suddenly the lights on the tree flickered on. The Centau moved and Holly saw that Idris had let his son place the angel on top of the tree. He was just in the process of doing it when Holly’s view cleared. She took a breath. It was kind of magnificent. She let the breath out and smiled. “His son did it. I like that. It fits better. Better than a stuffy old man doing it,” she said.

  “Holly Drake, did I just hear you right? Did I not say that Christmas would get to you?” Iain asked, looking down at her, his eyes shining with mirth.

  “Never. Never,” she said, but her protests were too weak for anyone to take seriously. She grinned.

  Charly lifted her goblet. “To the best Christmas ever!”

  They laughed and raised their goblets to the toast.

  * * *

  THE END

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  Six Shadows

  1

  My fridge was almost totally empty except for three bottles of the best Kotan-style double IPAs, a chunk of brie cheese, and some juka-berry preserves to eat with the brie. These were the remainders of my contribution to a party I hadn’t wanted to attend, and the “contribution” was the only thing I knew I’d want to eat when I ended up going.

  I pulled out a beer, opened it, and put the preserves and brie on the counter. The beer hit my mouth hard and woke it up, then rippled through my body like a numbing tidal wave. I hadn’t eaten all day and the alcohol went straight into my bloodstream. The crackers that I’d taken to the party were in a cabinet. I pulled them out and began spreading brie and preserves over them. From a stool at the counter, I looked across the room and out the window to the city spires glittering in the afternoon light. I always kept my windows wide open. The view helped alleviate some of that feeling of being suffocated from living in the massive, teeming city.

  The day had been long, though it was only noon. I’d been awake since four when the homicide unit had gotten a call about the body of a witness related to the Trippel investigation. I’d gone in because my daughter Lucy was with her mom. The witness had been slated to testify against a corrupt government official, Enzo bloody Cole, who was still in office. Trippel had been his advisor. She’d been murdered.

  And now Ynes Oliver was also dead. Ynes could have broken the silence on whatever the hell was happening with the human proxies to the Centau-run Syndicate government—the race who ran the 6 Moon system. And now, nothing.

  My communicator rang. “Shit,” I said, before I even saw who it was. I had a hunch that it would be someone from the precinct.

  I held my communicator up to my ear. “Gabriel Bach.”

  “Hey Gabe. Having a good afternoon?”

  It was Miko, from the station. So I’d been right, but then I’m usually right about that because they’re the only ones who call me.

  “I was, but now I’m not.”

  “Sorry. I had no choice. We’ve got another dead one. Looks like murder.” She sounded unnaturally chipper. Probably because she hadn’t been at the early morning fun with me.

  “Then it probably was,” I sighed, rubbing my eyes. “Does anyone in this city ever die of natural causes?”

  “That’d be nice, for once . . . Oh, and Gabe, it’s a Yasoan. So it’s worse than normal.”

  She was right: the Yasoan were the peaceful race. Sure, they could be scoundrels, but if someone was murdering them, it was more a reflection on the murderer than anything the Yasoan had done.

  “Damn. This won’t be good—they never are, but a Yasoan? Murder weapon?” I paused, then added. “And where’s Meg? Is she with you?”

  “She’s not here. Just me and a couple of uniforms. We haven’t recovered the weapon yet. Still can’t tell how it happened. They’re looking. We’re looking.”

  “Alright. Find Meg for me. I’ll be there soon.”

  2

  A feeling permeated the victim’s condo. I knew it well, the strange fog that hung in a room where death lingered, a dampening of spirit that pressed up against the living. It was more an impression, a sense that the world wasn’t right more than anything else. It was an altogether different animal from the stench that accompanied bodies that had been left for a week or so.

  “Where’s Meg?” I asked Miko, who stood to my side scrawling stuff into her small notebook.

  “I called her but she said she’ll be at the station later. ‘I’m not Gabe’s lapdog.’”

  “Her words?”

  “Yep.”

  “Funny. I guess she and I think differently about that.” I stopped one of the forensic workers and asked him two things. One, if he could clear out for a few moments so their team didn’t overwhelm my space and make it hard for me to focus. And two, if he’d turn the temperature down in the room. We were in the middle of a Kotan summer and the days were especially hot in the tops of the spires where the sun beat hard on them. “You get a profile on the victim yet?”

  Miko flipped through her notebook. “Name’s Lennox Fogg. He lived here alone, but the neighbors often saw him bringing girls to his apartment. A while back, maybe seven or eight months ago they continually saw him with one woman. They say he spent most of his time in here, however. Didn’t have a job he went to, at least not one that had him leaving at regular times.”

  The body lay in the center of the front room. It wasn’t the penthouse suite, but close enough at two floors down from the top. The view from the window looked out on the City of Jade Spires, a seemingly endless city built by the Centau on the moon Kota. I stared out at the afternoon light. I could see the gondolas of the Spireway filing between the buildings on an intricate cable system. It was the best way to travel through the city, especially if you were rich and lived in the spire-tops or ever got claustrophobic down in the slot canyons of the city, like me.

  I took a deep breath and went to examine the body. I was sick of dead bodies. The idea is that a detective should get used to this shit, but I never have. Every victim got to me in some way, whether it was the frozen expression on their face, the signs of struggle under their fingernails or in their teeth, their age, or what I knew would nag at me about this one: that it was a Yasoan.

  “Yasoan male, perhaps twenty-nine, thirty human-years old,” I said.

  “Sounds right to me. That’s what I thought, too,” Miko said. “But it’s always hard to tell with the Yasoan.”

  “It’s their violet skin. Ages better than mine and yours.”

  The gray and red rug wasn’t soaked in blood, so we weren’t looking at that kind of injury. The body was facedown. I pushed the victim’s silken silver hair aside with my pen. Looked like he’d been hit in the back of the head. In that gruesome way of skull fractures, there was a depression where the hair and skin seemed to be caving in. Maybe not meant to be murder, but only time would confirm that. I inhaled, choking back my gag-reflex from seeing it.

  I really, really hated this part of the job. I usually saw signs of some kind of struggle or movement that might have happened after the injury—blood on a hand from instinctively trying to protect the wound. Or an indication that the victim tried to crawl away. This death looked almost instantaneous.

  I stood up. “Who found the body?”

  “His ex-girlfriend—Trixie Black. Says she came by to ‘drop off some of his things.’ Though they’ve been broken up for a while, she was still able to get into the condo. She knew the code on his scanner lock.”

  “You get to question her?”

  Miko nodded. “She’s gone. I printed a photo already.”

  She handed it to me. The photo was a headshot of a girl with tired eyes. Black hair and a light complexion. The corners of her lips were turned down. No one ever looked good after finding a body, especially when they were being photographed as a suspect in the investigation.

  “I’ll want to see your notes.” I handed the photo back to Miko and walked around the room, dodging the forensic team as they moved into a different room to give me space. “He hasn’t been dead that long, so it could have been her. Get someone checking the time-stamps on the locks as soon as possible. I want to see your notes on your preliminary interview with this ex-girlfriend. If she was his ex, why would she insist on getting inside? These indentions in the carpet,” I said, crouching again and pointing with the pen. “Did you notice them?”

  “Of course, sir. They’re older though. I can’t put a time frame on them, but the furniture’s been moved,” Miko said, stepping back. She bent down beside me, her long black hair falling forward till it covered the side of her face and shoulder, and tilte
d her head to judge the angles.

  “Get that hair contained,” I said, bristling that it wasn’t. Miko usually didn’t forget shit like that. She was a professional and that’s what I liked about having her on my team. She was a no-nonsense investigator.

  She pursed her lips, straightened, and fished a hair band out of her blazer pocket. After she put her hair up, she joined me again.

  “The chairs. Moved to get more space. A month or more ago. This rug is stiff. Firm. High quality fibers,” I said, testing it with my gloved fingers. I raised an eyebrow. “Something like this could hold its shape for quite a long time. But for what? Right? Seems odd.”

  She nodded and scribbled something into her notepad.

  I straightened and moved gingerly around the body, scanning the carpets before I put my foot down. Miko followed. “And did the murderer do it, or the victim?”

  “Never seen it before. Usually furniture gets moved to hide a bloodstain. But I can see under the chairs. There’s nothing there.”

  “What would have been happening that prompted the victim to move his furniture?”

  I bent to get a closer look at the head.

  “Red marks around the eye sockets and on the cheekbones. Pre-death bruising, it looks like. We’ll need the medical examiner’s report to tell us more.” Whether this was an accident, or something else, something natural: a heart attack, an aneurysm, or whatever else people died from that wasn’t murder.

  But usually a giant head wound meant it was murder.

  “Got an idea yet?” Miko asked.

  “No.”

  If not premeditated murder, then manslaughter.

  I glanced around the room from where the body was to gather the lay of the land. To the condo entrance from the body, it was a straight shot to the short corridor that led to the door. Off that corridor there was a coat closet and small bathroom. Another corridor led to the bedrooms. There was a fireplace and French doors to a balcony about eight feet from the victim’s head. A vast kitchen opened into the living room, giving the whole condo a spacious feeling. It was the armchairs that seemed to have been moved the most. They appeared to have been picked up and moved about two feet from their normal positions. From where I crouched, I spotted a few random-seeming holes in the wall.