Warrior of Fire

by Shona Husk

  Leira glanced at Julian. “Let’s find out what her future holds.”

  He gave a single nod. “Hopefully she thinks she’s lost it, not that I stole it.”

  Leira looked at the melted chain link. “She thinks you’re under her spell at the moment.”

  He didn’t look thrilled. “I feel like a liar and a fraud.”

  “That’s because you are. Or you could call yourself a spy.” She smiled. “You know, doing dastardly stuff for the greater good?”

  He lifted one blond eyebrow.

  “Well you aren’t the only one being underhanded. Better to be alive than dead.” She pressed her lips together, well aware how lucky she’d been today. Maybe the paramedics had been right.

  “You can’t guarantee that either.”

  “I can check.” She had been checking and nothing was changing. It was as though her new fate had been locked in and she was going to die from smoke inhalation. She wanted to ask Julian what that would be like, but didn’t want him to then be thinking of the gruesome details.

  She didn’t want to know the details. She wanted to avoid the whole thing.

  They had nothing to make a circle with, and while she didn’t need one for scrying it would be better, especially as they were dealing with a Guardian. She had no candle and she didn’t feel up to holding fire. Magic required energy and concentration and she couldn’t do both. Today had been draining. “Can you make the circle and hold the fire for me?”

  A circle made of will wasn’t as strong as one with a physical component but it would do. Julian’s circle was solid but he was frowning.

  “You can do both?” She didn’t want him to lose control; then they’d both be doomed.

  “Yes. I haven’t held a circle of will for a while.” He held out one hand. A flame flicked to life on his palm. Then he grew it to the ball that she liked to use. Much nicer than using the flaming wreck of her car.

  “I’ll check the path she is on. I’ll have to do the location spell at home as I need a few things.” She wanted to get out of here tonight, but that wouldn’t happen. She needed to be observed apparently.

  “Do you know how to do one of them?” He sounded surprised.

  Did he think she couldn’t do any magic worth doing?

  She grinned. “Yep. Anything that doesn’t involve more than lighting a candle I’m fine with.” As soon as she wanted to do a bigger magic it all went bad. She was still cautious lighting a candle and there were several fire extinguishers in the house, and Saba’s shop.

  Just because she didn’t get burned didn’t mean that everything else was immune. That was what scared her. She didn’t want to be burning down her mother’s house or setting fire to the shop. Her bedspread or the towels in the bathroom, her own clothes once—twice now if she included today. Fire wasn’t fun. Maybe she should put a fire blanket in the car to smother herself.

  Holding the bracelet and thinking of Emily she tried to bring forth the vision. After a few minutes Julian handed her his pocketknife with his free hand. His gaze kept darting to the door. She was worried about being caught, which wasn’t helping her concentration.

  “Thanks.” She flicked a drop of her blood into the flame and let the rest fall on the bracelet. Personal sacrifice added strength to the magic. Albanex sacrificed others so that they had life and magic. The flame crackled, then swirled as though filled with oil. Black smoke coiled through the center exactly the same as the vision that she got for herself. “Whoa.”

  “That was weird. Are you sure that was for her?” He was watching the ball of fire in his hand.

  She glanced up at Julian. “Yeah. If it’s the same as mine, does that mean we’ll be there together?”

  Leira had the awful feeling that the fire that would kill her was going to be of her own making. She was going to kill Emily as well as herself. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  “That would make sense.” He was frowning. “I think you need to do everything you can to avoid her. We need to find her and get Dad or his buddies to bring her in.”

  “Agreed. You didn’t happen to find out where she was staying or put a bug on her phone?” That was probably hoping for too much.

  “No, I obviously don’t make a very good spy.”

  She smiled at him. “We’ll be able to locate her once I get out of here. Hopefully tomorrow. Will you be seeing her?”

  “Probably. She’ll be less likely to attack if she thinks I’m compliant.”

  “Be careful.” She put her hand over his.

  He leaned forward and kissed her. “I will be.”

  Chapter 14

  While Leira had assured Julian that it was fine if he stayed at her place even though she wasn’t there, it didn’t feel right. He hadn’t wanted to leave her alone at the hospital either, but there’d been no other choice. Then there was the fear that if Emily was watching the house, she’d know he wasn’t under her spell.

  Right now, he didn’t care what she saw. It only mattered that Leira and he survived. They had what they needed from Emily. Now it was time to do something before death caught up with them.

  Julian had rung his father when he’d left the hospital and said that they needed to meet. He didn’t want to be doing this over the phone. He wanted to be able to look his father in the eye and see if he was lying.

  By the time his father arrived at Leira’s house it was after ten at night. “You’ve been to see her then?”

  Julian didn’t know if his father meant Leira or Emily. He went with the first option. “Yes.” He’d been trying to work out what to say and how to say it for the last hour. He still had no idea. “It’s pretty clear Emily was trying to kill her in a car accident.”

  “We don’t have any evidence of that, yet. And even if we do find sugar in the tank, proving that Emily put it there will be impossible. Any fingerprints or DNA will be burned away.”

  “Much like the accidental house fire in Dover, all the evidence was destroyed. Like the fire that gutted my place, no proof.” He drew in a breath and looked at his father. “Like the fire that killed, Mum. No proof, but we all know Guardians were involved, right, Dad?”

  His father rubbed a hand over his face and leaned back in the armchair. “As I said, no proof.”

  Julian stared at him. “But you suspected.”

  His father was silent for a moment. In those seconds, he aged. “Yes.”

  “And you said nothing. All these years, you’ve let me and Kirin think it was just a hit and run. A drunk driver.”

  “Because that’s all we had. There was no evidence that it was a Guardian driving the other car, or that the fire was deliberately lit. It was a suspicion I had, that other Albah had, one that never went anywhere.” He closed his eyes and looked as pained as if the wound were fresh once more. “There was nothing I could do.”

  “You could have told me the truth.”

  “I didn’t want you growing up having nightmares about Guardians coming to get you. It was bad enough that other Albah were panicked that the Guardians might know that I’m king.”

  “So you hushed it all up.”

  “I didn’t have to. The police who investigated the accident did that. They had no evidence it was anything but a hit and run.” His father grimaced. “I don’t think the target was Anna. I think it was you boys. It fits the pattern. It’s why we moved away from Perth for a while and I took the job in Albany. We needed to get away.”

  “And now they’ve come back to finish the job.”

  “If they knew who I was, they’d have come after me, but they didn’t. They seem to go after soft targets. Young Albah who either don’t have magic yet or those who are still learning.”

  “I am neither. How many Albah have died in accidents? How many of them were dating a human?”

  Quinn didn’t move; it was as if he were frozen. He huffed out a breath. “Too many have died in accidents. But I am the one who keeps those records, and I can only
do that if it is reported or I see it on the news. I don’t want to start a mass panic. Plenty of Albah are married to humans and have been for years…decades. We need the human blood because are numbers are so few.”

  “I think we need a little more panic. We need to be more careful. I don’t want to be telling my children that they are the last of their kind. Leira is the only fire-using woman at the moment. There is no guarantee another will be born. Does that not worry you?” It worried him.

  “Of course, it does. But how do we hunt Guardians? Do we ban Albah from dating humans and bring back the marriages by bloodline?”

  Julian honestly didn’t know, but what they had been doing for the last couple of centuries wasn’t working. “That might save us from dying out.”

  “That will make more walk away. They will stop communicating. I have no authority, Julian. I am king in title only. It’s been that way for hundreds of years. Now we have the technology to reconnect, but many don’t.”

  “So they don’t know the danger they could be in.” Did they really think pretending they weren’t Albah would save them? “We don’t know if those bloodlines are dead or thriving.” Or really, how many Albah there were in the world. Was it two hundred, five hundred? Was there an enclave somewhere in Scandinavia where they could blend in better and where they lived by their own rules?

  “And I can’t force them to connect and to report in. All I can do is ask that they feed me information and that if they find other Albah to let them know we are here.”

  “A librarian, not a king,” Julian said softly. What was the point in maintaining a central contact when people didn’t want to use it? Or did they not use it because they didn’t think anything would happen. His father was right, though, what could they do?

  His father lowered his gaze. “Yes. I would love to do more. I can see what is happening.”

  “Then do something. You’re the one who can. You can inspire them.”

  “I can make no laws. Nothing I say is binding. The world has moved on from when there were city states, each with their own ruler. From when a Ryder could rule as a mayor or lord. The witch hunts scattered us, we sought safety in separation. Whole towns were wiped out. Leira knows all this. Now we are spread across the globe in an ever-thinning web.”

  “But we have the web to use. We have IVF.” The Albah needed to be using science to their advantage. Not just relying on magic. “We can use technology.”

  His father gave a dark laugh. “You try telling a woman that she needs to have an Albah baby and let me knew how that works out for you. Not many are like Archie Venn.”

  His father rarely talked about Finley’s mother. Leira’s mother. “And if I were to date her daughter?”

  “What do you mean if? I am not blind or stupid, Julian. There is no reason you can’t or shouldn’t. You aren’t related by blood.”

  “I know that.” If they had been, he would not have slid into Leira’s bed.

  “Then why the question?”

  “Will it be weird with Archie?”

  “Archie and I were over before Finley was born. We were friends thinking we were doing something good. She wanted to do the right thing by the Albah, and I was young enough not to think through the consequences of being a single father as well as a young cop. Your grandparents were equal parts thrilled and appalled.”

  He had one set of grandparents he’d never met. They had lived in Canada, where his mother had been from. His dad’s parents he only vaguely remembered. There had been nothing suspicious about their deaths. They had been old and they had died. As far as he knew there had never been any talk of them wanting to live forever as an Albanex.

  “You did it out of duty too.”

  His father nodded. “But that doesn’t take anything away from Finley; he was wanted.”

  Did Finley know that, or did he no longer care? Julian didn’t know the reason for the rift that had formed between his father and his older half-brother.

  “Did you love Mum or was that duty too?” It was the question he had wanted to ask for so long, but had always been afraid to know the answer to. Did it matter? He’d never felt unwanted as a child, and he’d seen the way his mother’s death had shaken his father.

  “I grew to love her, but I was always going to marry an Albah woman. I had to. I knew that, she knew that. If she hadn’t been married to me, she might have been safe. I live with that every day.” He laced his fingers. “Don’t rush in because you think it’s the right thing. Do it because you want it.”

  “Leira saw me in her future.”

  His father nodded. “I know about that. But your future isn’t carved in stone. It’s not even a detailed map. All she saw was the next big sign on the path you’re on. There are other choices. Just because she saw it doesn’t mean it has to happen.”

  Julian wasn’t worried that she’d seen them together. It was the changes that concerned him. “It’s gone.” He told his father about what Leira had seen for herself, him and Emily. “But we can track her. We can find her and catch her.”

  “And then what?”

  “Turn her over to the police?”

  “And face a minor shoplifting charge? That’s all we have on her at the moment. We can’t hold her for that. We need proof that she tampered with the car, that she was involved in arson. We have nothing.” His father lifted his hands. He was helpless, bound by the human laws he’d sworn to uphold

  “So make something up.” There had to be a way to get Emily and her kind off the streets so they stopped killing.

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. I have never been that cop and I don’t intend to start now.”

  “Then maybe the Albah need a secret police that deals with the Guardians.” The Guardians existed only to kill Albah. It was time the Albah turned the tables and went on the attack instead of waiting.

  His father leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “You will not take vigilante action.”

  “They are. They aren’t playing by the rules. Even human governments have spy agencies and black ops teams to deal with the stuff that no one can stomach. Maybe I need to attack to change my future. Maybe it’s all this sitting around that causes it. The Guardians think we are easy targets because we do nothing.”

  “Or maybe it’s leaping into a half-baked idea that draws their attention so they do a formal execution. That’s what Leira saw in your future. That hasn’t been done in over two hundred years.”

  “That you know of,” Julian snapped.

  “That I know of,” his father conceded. “I don’t like this any more than you. I don’t like that there was an Albanex running around and coincidently now there is a Guardian here. It’s too neat.”

  “They didn’t make the Albanex.” It wasn’t some kind of setup. An Albah had made the Albanex and drawn the gaze of the Guardians.

  “No they didn’t, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know who did and that they are letting it happen instead of acting.” His father’s words were carefully measured as though this was a suspicion he’d had for a while.

  “They want an excuse to hunt us down and the creator is giving them that. You really think they are letting him do this?”

  “I’m sure that the Guardians would like nothing more than a reason to declare all-out war on us. They could exterminate us in a few short months. It would be global and I doubt very much that any law enforcement group would put it together in time to stop it. Governments don’t move fast and they don’t communicate well with each other either.”

  “Governments would have to know about us to do anything.” And even then he doubted they would. If they knew about magic, they’d want to control it. That would make the Albah a target for every human, not just a select few.

  “I can’t protect all of us, even though that is what I’m supposed to do. At some point, I will have to hand this responsibility on, but I don’t know if Finley is ever going to be ready. Are you if you need t
o?” Quinn narrowed his eyes. “Or would you lead us into a battle we can’t win?”

  Julian sighed. He knew his father was right, but the lack of action was frustrating. “Can I spy on Emily?”

  “You tell me, how was your date with her?”

  He glanced at his father. “Are you spying on me?”

  “No, it’s what I would have done if a Guardian had tried a love spell on me. How is that going?”

  “Disturbingly. I want this dealt with.” He didn’t want to be playing games with Emily while she was planning ways to kill Leira. “If you can’t arrest her, what do we do?”

  “Wait until she does something we can arrest her for. I’ll get people into looking at ranches in Texas that might be linked to Guardian activity. Assuming she didn’t lie about that.”

  “I don’t think she lies about everything.” Just about the important things.

  * * * *

  Emily hadn’t expected the love spell to work at all, and yet there he was waiting for her at their café on his lunch break. There had been no repercussion and she certainly wasn’t miserable. Leira obviously hadn’t known what she was talking about.

  Having scoured the news sites, it was clear to Emily that Leira had survived the accident. She knew that the death didn’t have to be accidental, but she didn’t want the cops looking for her. For Julian’s father to be looking for her. She smiled as he sat. He didn’t smile.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A family friend was in an accident. Her car was tampered with.” He was watching her as though he suspected something.

  “Oh, how awful. I hope they catch the person.” How close were they to working out that it was her if they already knew that someone had put sugar in the fuel?

  “I’m sure they will. A suspicious fire, car tampering… It’s all starting to add up.” His words were carefully measured. “It’s like someone wants to hurt me and my friends.”

  Emily gave a laugh and hoped that it didn’t sound too nervous. “I think you might be being paranoid.”