Fire and Fantasy: A Limited Edition Collection of Urban and Epic Fantasy

by CK Dawn

  He caught her arm as she sidled by him and Muhammad who executed another bow at both her and Charlemagne.

  “The phooka doesn’t know you’re here?”

  “Officially, I’m spending a girlfriend’s-only weekend at Saras’s. The Hindu stylist at the salon,” she clarified at his blank look. “But if he suspected I was here, he’d leave me.” She averted her eyes from his incredulous look. “He’s promised it would be so and Quill and Ch’in have pledged their troths to him.”

  “A phooka, a goddess and a dragon king threaten you with abandonment should you blink twice at me, yet here you stand. You sure you don’t love me?”

  Dragon huffed a self-conscious laugh and pressed a shy kiss to the swirling scarification on his shoulder. She eased past Muhammad before Fel could give her a proper kiss and pushed through the emergency stair exit.

  “I’m outta here, buddy. You coming?” Charlie said.

  “Right behind you. Cyan protocol?”

  “Which one is that again? The one where we hire the people and go to the place that guy from Queen’s Port told us about? Or is it the one where we find the guy who knows about the Exit 54 job?”

  “Neither. Jesus Christ, Charlemagne,” Fel said, shaking his head.

  “No worries.” Charlie grinned at Muhammad as he left Fel’s motel room. “I’ll figure it out.”

  Smiling at his friend’s forgetfulness—which had ironically saved them more times than Fel could count during the war—Fel tried to make sense of Dragon’s effect on him. He dug under his bed for an old duffel and threw a few essentials in it: jeans, T-shirts, boxers, the gun from his sock drawer, a few extra mags, the knife that lived under his pillow, four carefully rolled wads of money he’d hidden in the hollowed out armrest of the ugly green sofa.

  Stopping, he raised his hand and called for Charlie’s half-full mug of faerie wine on the floor. The liquid in the cup splashed a bit as if something had just dived in, but otherwise remained unresponsive.

  A blast of icy cold trailed down his arm and he clenched his fingers into a fist as the last of Dragon’s boost left him. He had no idea what Dragon had done to him earlier to ignite his power, but it was better than the watered-down version undertow provided. More addictive too.

  His instant attraction to her made a strange kind of sense now. She’d literally filled the void his long-gone magic left behind when she took his hand. Even just being in her presence made him feel closer to being whole again, as hopeful as cracked, thirsty earth on a gray, ozone-laden morning.

  The distant cry of Sirens added their voice to the shuffle of feet and curious murmurs of a burgeoning crowd.

  Thelie and Rai-Rai most likely./ Fel thought of the two most underemployed demi-goddesses as he shoved his feet into a pair of worn motorcycle boots. He looked longingly at the designer suits hanging in his closet and pulled a faded, short-sleeved button-down from a hanger.

  “Keys are by the bed,” he told Muhammad. “Rent’s paid up through next week. Take what you can scavenge out of here and sell it to pay for the damage.” He nodded at the exploded bathroom door scattered over the floor. “If you go to Pawn It Again, Sam, don’t let Tony give you anything less than three hundred for the tux.”

  “Take care of yourself, Mr. Fel.” Muhammad moved swiftly into the room, his earlier timidity gone. He ran to the closet, pulled arm-loads of clothing out and piled them in the middle of the bed. Shoes came next and the small leather case containing Fel’s cuff links. “Genuine fae links,” Muhammad breathed as if he viewed the face of the God and scooped out the jewels and squirreled them away in his trouser pocket.

  Fel’s smile was rueful as he buttoned his shirt, slipped the bottle of faerie wine in his bag and strode to the fire escape outside his window without saying a word. He’d been stripped of his fae valuables the minute Mahb strung him up to receive the first of countless whippings. She even took his sword and gave it to the brownie who collected the palace’s recyclables.

  A glance back at Muhammad showed the thin human tying up the four corners of Fel’s polyester bedspread, throwing the pack over his shoulder and scuttling out the front door like a hobo dressed in embroidered silk.

  Fel turned away from his old digs and nimbly made his way down the iron fire escape, going over the details of the Cyan protocol: a bogus strategy he came up with during K'Davrah that was the signal to his men that the cover of whatever intelligence operation they conducted had been blown and that they should meet at the last civilian bar they’d raised hell in to reassess mission goals and plan a retreat strategy if necessary.

  Fel ducked behind a rusted dumpster then took a circuitous route to Vera’s, hoping that Charlemagne remembered that Cyan meant last seen. It’d be a hell of a thing if he mixed it up with the fifty-four job and went looking for a dimensional hub or, Shiva forbid, had the Sun’s summer gardens professionally TP-ed.

  Dragon kept her head down as she made her way to Snoozy’s. Tonight was karaoke night, which meant that Saras would be singing her tone-deaf heart out in the hopes of winning the prize: a date with Thad, Snoozy’s diffident yet irresistible bartender.

  No one had ever met Snoozy’s indefinable criteria for most “exquisite karaoke interpretation” which Dragon suspected suited Saras just fine. Though unofficially celibate, the former goddess made a big show out of looking for love in all the wrong places.

  For the most part she fooled everyone, but Dragon wasn’t even close to being everyone and could see through her best friend’s attempts to imitate normalcy so as to waylay concern, pity or derision. Pride, like love, made fools of us all.

  Dragon had planned to confront Saras about her dry spell last night as she camped out at the goddess’s loft for some much deserved girlfriend time, but a thorough analysis of Dragon’s life choices made Dragon’s own foolishness a priority.

  “It’s not the men,” Saras had casually mentioned. “You know that, right?”

  “I know.”

  “So why bother bang your head against this wall?” Saras asked and Dragon almost laughed out loud at the pair they made: a goddess who ran from love and a human who tried to force it into existence.

  “Been calculating the odds of love since Katie and Phyllis walked out on me,” Dragon admitted, relieved to have her neurosis exposed. “After they left, I figured seeing the potential in men and fixing them new would make finding real love a sure thing.” What need was there to leap into the unknown when a bit of extra work would yield the same results or better with considerably less risk?

  No wonder love evaded her. All these years she’d used her talent instead of her heart to find happiness—thought it was inexhaustible even when it was pieces of her soul that gassed her quest. All these years, all that was needed to find the pot at the end of the rainbow was faith. Faith that as she followed those ephemeral colors to their conclusion, love would be treasure that awaited her.

  Not sight. Only faith. Was it a coincidence then that Fel’s potential was hidden from her? Was it a coincidence that she found herself irresistibly drawn to him of all people?

  “I’m not excusing myself,” she’d told Saras as she ate a few forkfuls of heat-and-eat lasagna before rushing through a shower and heading back to Fel’s. “And my behavior right this second is the most perplexing it’s ever been. I just—” she broke off with a shrug.

  “Believe,” Saras had finished for her.

  “Never done that before,” Dragon agreed shakily.

  “You scared?”

  Dragon nodded. “I believe this is my shot, that it’s finally my turn, but if I’m wrong—and I very well could be… God, I get nauseous just thinking about it.”

  If not knowing if Fel was The One could make her nauseous, then her behavior this evening—and the power she gave him—should make her head explode. As it was she couldn’t form a thought that didn’t start with how, why and in the name of all that is holy how? She’d given Fel power. She’d called on her own ability and transferred it to him, s
omehow knowing that it wasn’t her ability to see that she gave him, but an upload of unadulterated power.

  “What the everlasting fuck,” she’d said to herself as she kept her head down and dodged gawkers outside the Yorktown. Her inclination had been to go home and let Jasper, Quill and Ch’in have at it. And if they couldn’t fix it, lord knows they’d know someone or know someone who knows someone who could.

  The thought of Fel made her reevaluate. Her family would flip out (again) if they knew she’d been with him these last couple days. “Inconceivable magical ability and murderous turn of events versus telling my parents I’ve been seeing a boy after all three explicitly forbade me to.” Standing in the middle of Crown Street, Dragon weighed her options and caved to the admittedly ridiculous fear of getting in trouble with her parents. Also, she needed a drink like you couldn’t imagine.

  Decision made, Dragon made her way downtown, stepping up to the nondescript door of Snoozy’s a few minutes later. She looked over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being observed, then knocked twice, then three times, then once.

  A small rectangle high on the door slid back to reveal a pair of tired, beady eyes. They examined Dragon coldly for a solid minute before saying, “Speak.”

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it to Goose’s gimp girlfriend Dee Dee, ninety-eight bottles of beer.”

  At the password, the locks were twisted with loud thunks and hinges screeched as the speakeasy door opened to admit her.

  Dragon nodded at the eight-foot Capuchin mummy that guarded the front door and headed down a dark corridor, cringing at the sound of Saras butchering Flamingo’s (a Halo City native and club favorite) only hit.

  The tunnel, replete with a rounded ceiling and mock cave drawings opened into ten thousand square feet of what was left of the Molasses Blood Theater. Only the odd rows of the orchestra, mezzanine and balcony were intact. The evens and rows one hundred through one twenty-three had been looted right down to the wood, nails, plaster and marble used to construct the theater two hundred years ago.

  Snoozy, one of the original stone-masons of the Molasses Blood, had gathered the rest of the Initial Seven—when they were still speaking—and defended the theater’s right-wall seating with their lives. Infighting rotted away at the Initial Seven until all that remained was the speakeasy that outlasted every hot spot and trendy bar for the last fifty years.

  The orchestra to Dragon’s left was filled with perplexed barflies gamely trying to make sense of the performance on the stage before them. Rows A through D in the mezzanine heckled Saras’s performance in between drink orders. The balcony gyrated wildly to Saras’s interpretation of Sex Me Up, Sex Me Down, Do It To Me All Around. A few couples and even one threesome followed the line dance’s instructions a bit too literally.

  Dragon waved at Saras who waved back as she took a deep breath to hit and hold the high E above middle C that Flamingo had made famous.

  Wincing at the off-key squeal that should’ve caused the walls to sweat blood, Dragon slid onto a padded barstool and stared at the tiers of liquor bottles trying to figure out which concoction of make-it-better-in-a-glass she wanted.

  “Gimme a Midnight Folly, Frankie,” Dragon said to the unsmiling eighty-year-old mixologist behind the bar.

  His world-weary eyes softened at the request and he shuffled to the refrigerator under the bar for a bottle of Molasses’s house champagne. To it he added a generous splash of Deviant Premium Vodka and the juice of fresh pomegranates, blueberries and dark violet grapes.

  “Girlfriend’s on fire tonight,” he said with a lazy, backwoods drawl. He placed the delicately wrought flute of swirling gloaming and an ice pack in front of Dragon and used a damp rag to clean the bar.

  “Pray the rest of the bar doesn’t go up in those kind of flames,” Dragon said. She sipped from her glass and placed the pack on her swelling face with a wince.

  Snoozy sauntered over to Dragon and surveyed her still-damp ensemble with a smirk, then addressed Frankie. “Her money’s no good tonight. In fact, make the next round a double. You look like you need it,” he said to Dragon.

  “You’re all heart, Snooz,” she shouted over Saras’s prolonged finale. “But I’ll pay my own way.”

  Among the compelling contradictions that ramped up Snoozy’s appeal, the least of which was his tall, blond, surfer-boy good looks and that he rarely ever slept, was the fact that he was a master at getting paid for things he ostensibly gave away for free.

  Rumor had it that the kind of quid pro quo he expected for a drink or two on the house was downright nasty.

  Snoozy pantomimed being stabbed in the heart, the light from the enormous chandelier glittered randomly across the deep V of his linen tunic and requisite cowrie shell necklace.

  “Not a fatal wound, I hope,” a deep, silky voice murmured as a smattering of relieved applause followed Saras’s stage-left exit.

  “My lord,” Snoozy said to the handsome man who eased onto the stool next to Dragon.

  A warm, medium brown that hinted at mixed heritage, the fae lord who sent a devastating smile in Dragon’s direction was the kind of gorgeous typical to his race, and while his looks were commonplace to miscellus, humans tended to be struck dumb by the otherworldly shimmer. An advantageous fact of life that most fae took for granted.

  However, falling prey to conceit, no matter how seductive or charmingly rendered, had always galled Dragon, so she strived to remain unaffected—even disappointed—by his straight white teeth and full lips that instantly provoked a visual of his precisely cut Caesar between her spread legs. His light brown eyes glittered, knowing her every thought. His shoulders were broad and the suit he wore with ruthless effortlessness no doubt covered a sculpted body.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Dragon muttered to herself and signaled Frankie to refill her drink.

  “Allow me,” the newcomer said, peeling a few vens from an impressive stack.

  “Generous of you.” Dragon deliberately crossed her legs away from him, noting the lotus flowers that scarred his hands. His genealogy included a complex design of emerald silk thread embroidered directly into his flesh, a detail indicating his direct lineage to the royal family.

  As Frankie mixed her drink, Dragon remembered Jasper’s tales of the predatory nature of high-born fae and stayed perfectly still, keeping her gaze neutral and lowered so as not to seem aggressive. She stifled a scream as she felt the heat of his face inches away from her ear and cheek. His breath, smelling faintly of verbena, caused a fearful shudder to ripple up and down her spine.

  “You smell familiar,” he growled, burying his nose in the curve of her neck. Unsatisfied with the information he gleaned there, he licked her cheek like it was the leftover frosting in a mixing bowl. “Oh that’s right,” he said, savoring her flavor. “You’re the Unspoken One’s new toy.” He tilted her jaw closer to him and tasted her again. His tongue had been deliberately split—a current trend that usurped clever tattoos and wince-inducing piercings—and the forked ends toyed with the corner of her mouth. “Not bad. A little fatty for my tastes, but definitely tender.”

  Dragon closed her eyes and tried to remember all of Jasper’s etiquette lessons about dealing with the noble members of the Shade, hoping to God they applied to this unknown Sun lord.

  “You honor me, my lord.” Eyes still lowered she reached for his left hand and laid a deferential kiss on each knuckle, the appropriate way for one of no rank to greet a personage of the highest rank.

  The fae lord pulled his hand away, looked at Dragon curiously before wetting a bar napkin and wiping the back of his hand. “How quaint.” Enunciating slowly as if addressing someone of feeble intelligence he said, “I am a Prince of the Sun. For someone like you to greet me without causing offense—well, there’s really nothing you could do that wouldn’t be an insult, but if you got on your knees I’d certainly appreciate the effort.”

  “I’m most skilled on m
y knees, highness,” Dragon said, her ire at his arrogance getting the best of her. “And am not remotely inconvenienced by even the…tiniest demonstration of civility.” Dragon glanced at his lap then met his gaze, smiling ferally as his eyes narrowed.

  Saras bounced to stand next to Dragon and raised her hands over her head. “I totally rule! Don’t leave me hanging, baby!”

  Rolling her eyes Dragon high-fived Saras’s hands.

  “Gimme something celebratory, Frankie.”

  “Shift ends in another couple of hours,” he offered.

  “I meant to drink.”

  “Me too, sugar,” he said and ambled off to make Saras a cocktail.

  Still grinning, Saras looked past Dragon and whistled when she got a gander at the slightly scowling fae lord. “Stop the presses,” she poked Dragon to get her attention. “Who’s the dish?”

  “An asshole,” Dragon said, leveling a smirk at the clearly annoyed fae.

  “Really?” Saras’s disappointment was obvious yet easily supplanted by the drink Frankie slid in front of her. “Shame.”

  “It’s a rare irony,” Gorgeous said, “to encounter a goddess of music and learning who very obviously can’t sing and never took the time to learn.”

  The area around them seemed to hush with foreboding and Snoozy and Frankie made themselves scarce with such speed, a light breeze actually ruffled Dragon’s hair.

  For her part, Dragon eased off her barstool and hitched onto a stool several feet away from the impending action.

  “Whom may I ask,” Saras said through clenched teeth, “do I have the pleasure of beating the shit out of?”

  Saras’s lost abilities were a sore subject for her, not the least because she’d never anticipated that it was her divinity that powered her ability not just to soothe and lure, but to carry a damn tune.

  A member of the prince’s entourage grabbed Saras around the neck and squeezed, his otherworldly strength an easy match for Saras’s.