Hearts of Chaos

by Kira Brady

  “Plan first. You can’t just waltz into the ballroom and expect everyone to listen to you.”

  “I need credibility.”

  “Right. Now the prophecy is a good place to start. People know you have a claim to lead them, even if they don’t like it much. We should talk to the elders who were alive when the prophecy was made. They might take it most seriously.”

  “Are you sure that Aether blast didn’t come from Corbette?” Lucia asked again. “Maybe he tried to cheat by drawing the Aether to him. Or maybe he just lost control . . .”

  “If you hadn’t been staring so hard at his naked chest, maybe you would have felt it.”

  Lucia felt her cheeks heat. She’d never been as sensitive to the Aether as her sister was. She had to concentrate hard. “If we could find other people who felt what you felt, maybe we could convince them Corbette didn’t give up.”

  “But if you don’t believe me, we’re not going to be very convincing. Besides, are we trying to strengthen Corbette’s rule or replace him?”

  “I’m not strong enough to lead. Who could do it?” Lucia curled her hand into a fist and turned away from the window. This room—the Princess Suite—was where she lived when she wasn’t at her parents’ house. If she wasn’t going to be a pawn for either of them, she needed to find her own place. “People are forming their own alliances while we wait up here. Let’s go down and start slowly casting our net while the iron is hot. Del, please get the scarlet gown.”

  Delia’s eyes lit up. “That will certainly get everybody’s attention.” Her sister helped her into the very low-cut scarlet gown with silver thunderbolts embroidered at the neckline and hem. Lucia had planned to wear it to the grand ball at the end of the tournament, but why wait? She needed its confidence now. Her sister helped her twist her long white hair back in a simple wrapped ponytail. The brilliant splash of white against the scarlet was the reverse of her totem’s coloring. No one could ignore the Crane in this dress.

  Delia gave her a nod. “That’ll do. You should talk to Lord Douglass first. The Thunderbird won’t know what hit him in that dress.”

  “He would be a powerful ally.” Lucia slipped ruby earrings in her ears. Once she would have loved wearing this dress, but after what Rudrick had done to her, she felt overexposed showing so much cleavage. She needed to take back her body and find the sensual, passionate nature that she’d been born with. The growing storm outside seemed to have taken up residence in her belly. She couldn’t show fear; the animals would tear her apart.

  Lucia paused at the door to her room. “This is it, Del.”

  “You’ll do great.” Delia squeezed her tight and planted a kiss on her cheek. “We’re never alone. May the spirits of our ancestors guide us.”

  Lucia made her way down the grand staircase with her head high. The mansion’s lights had been dimmed. Outside, the storm grew, so loud that she didn’t hear the angry words coming from the foyer until she was almost upon them. She slowed as she realized it was Corbette and Kai. Her footsteps softened on the stairs. They argued about a woman. Were they talking about her? Corbette’s back was to her. The biodiesel light illuminated angry scratches down Kai’s cheeks.

  “—and then she said she was here for the throne. She would build a new Babylon and a third pantheon to replace the one she lost,” Kai said.

  “Did she actually call herself Tiamat?” Corbette demanded. “Could it be another deep water spirit, or a powerful ghost?”

  Tiamat! It couldn’t be.

  “No.” Kai ran his hands through his hair. Will came running from a nearby study bearing a glass of golden liquid. He shoved the glass into Kai’s shaking hands, and Kai tipped it back with a single swallow. He coughed. The color started to return to his face. “She spoke of her body like it didn’t belong to her. Zetian—I’ve fought her before, and she wasn’t this good.” He locked eyes with Corbette, and an understanding passed between them. “I’ve known her intimately, and she’s not the same woman.”

  Corbette hesitated a beat. “I see.”

  “She fights like an immortal, and her Aether control would give you a run for your money. Zetian was a formidable adversary, but she couldn’t touch the Aether except to Change. This new, improved version, she fights like a demon and fuc—”

  “Lady Lucia,” Will hissed.

  The three men’s eyes shot to her. Busted. Lucia raised her chin and stood away from the wall. She cleared her throat. “And she fucks like a goddess, is that right, Kai?” Lucia felt her face flame the color of her gown, but she glided down the staircase, swan-necked, shoulders back. Her etiquette teacher would be proud.

  Kai stared at the ground. Corbette swore. Will only gave her a stony look.

  “Go back to the ballroom, Lady Lucia,” Corbette ordered.

  “No.”

  One thick black eyebrow rose. It was all he usually had to do to send his minions cowering. She was done with that.

  “I have just as much right to know as you do,” she said. “I risked my life to defeat her. I have the right to know if I failed.”

  “It’s for your own good,” Corbette said. There was no trace of warmth in his voice. No hint that he’d once held any affection for her.

  “I’m not a child anymore.”

  His eyes briefly flicked down to her gown’s revealing neckline and hip-hugging skirts. “I can see that.”

  She swallowed the F-U on her tongue. “They are my people too.”

  “Silence.” He held his hand up. Kai and Will both stared at her like she’d grown an extra head. “You aren’t a warrior. You are a spiritual leader and your role is here.” He gestured back to the ballroom. “If Zetian is a threat, we will eliminate her. You are not to go—”

  “If there is a new threat, the Drekar and humans need to know about it,” she said.

  “Absolutely not. The Drekar had both Tiamat’s Heart and the Tablet of Destiny, and they lost both. This is their fault. We will contain it ourselves,” Corbette said.

  “After all that’s happened, how can you say that? Who fought Kingu? We can’t leave them unprotected.”

  “The soul-suckers would leave us in a heartbeat.”

  Lucia curled her hands into fists. She wished she could knock that arrogant look off his face. “The Drekar and humans fought when it mattered, to protect all of us. You were the one who stayed and hid like a yellow-bellied coward.”

  Aether crackled in the room. Lucia felt the hair on her arms and neck rise. Sweat beaded on her forehead. But she couldn’t back down. Corbette and the two Thunderbirds stood stock-still. They stared at her like she’d Changed into a dragon, scaled and soulless and damned. With all that power and testosterone in the room, she should be running for cover.

  “I forbid you—” Corbette growled, violet rings in his eyes expanding to cover the black.

  Fly! the Crane called inside her. She raised her chin. “I don’t think you have that right anymore, do you, Raven? Because Animals will only follow the strongest alpha, and I distinctly remember Kai knocking you down.”

  Kai’s mouth dropped. Will took a step forward, a thunderbolt beginning to form between his fingers.

  Corbette threw his hand out and pulled Will back. “Don’t touch her.”

  “You can’t let her—”

  “I’m still in charge here.” His eyes were completely violet. Grim lines set around his mouth. He fought for control. The Change rode him. Aether rippled over his skin.

  She’d never seen him so out of control, and it terrified her. All of his energy was focused on keeping himself in human form. She backed away slowly.

  “Corbette?” Will said. “Emory, are you all right?”

  Kai caught her eyes and nodded his head toward the door. She could stay and try to follow the original plan, or she could use Corbette’s brief spell to get a head start out the door.

  She chose the door, escaping down the front stairs and out into the stormy night. Grace Mercer, Queen Consort to the Drekar Regent, was her
friend. She had to be told about Tiamat. Grace deserved to have a fighting chance of what was coming after her, and her allies had proved themselves saving the city from Kingu. It was the right thing to do. Shaking, Lucia called the Aether to her. It buzzed over her face and down to her slippered toes, but her body didn’t Change. Her skin stayed human, her feathers nowhere to be seen. Lady be, she was a disgrace.

  But she couldn’t waste another minute. Corbette would return to his senses, and then he’d come after her. Running through the rain toward the front gate, she found one of the guard’s steam-powered bicycles idling and unattended as he spoke to another guard some ways off. Hiking up her skirt to her waist, she threw the bulk of the wet fabric over one arm, straddled the bike, and gunned the engine. The guard called after her, but she drove through the imposing iron gates, leaving him in a cloud of steam and smoke.

  The crows rose from the trees in a black mass to follow her. As if she didn’t know how to lose them. She’d been sneaking out since she was old enough to fly. Waterlogged leaves slipped beneath her tires as she drove west down to where the Interurban hugged the foot of Queen Anne. The old highway had been cleared after the Unraveling, and now it was the only major thoroughfare that bisected the city north to south. She hit it and turned south. The Needle Market sprang up on either side of the boulevard—stalls and tables and the tent city that grew like creeping moss to swallow neighboring blocks. It was hopping even at midnight. The curfew that had protected the city dusk till dawn was over now that Kingu and his wraith army had been defeated.

  She lost the crows in the crowd and joined a caravan down into the bowels of the ruined city. If anyone would tell her the real scoop about Tiamat, it was Grace. Even before the mercenary had married the Drekar Regent, Grace had had her ear to the ground for the latest supernatural happenings. Lucia hoped Grace was in her small tattoo parlor in Pioneer Square, and not at the Drekar Lair with her new husband. Pioneer Square was relatively neutral territory. There was brave and then there was stupid; venturing into the Drekar Lair to find Grace definitely fell into the latter category.

  Luckily, as she swerved into Flesh Alley, she saw Grace pulling the door shut. The short half-Asian woman with blue-black hair watched Lucia park with a wary look. “What’s wrong?” Grace asked.

  Lucia swung herself off the bike. She was drenched, her skirts stained with dirt and oil. “Tiamat.”

  “Tell me everything.” Grace opened her door again and ushered Lucia through. “But tell me as you change clothes. There was an alarm from the temple. We have to hurry.”

  Thank the Lady Grace didn’t tell her she would just get in the way. No-nonsense Grace never coddled her or told her to go back home; she was the only person Lucia knew who wasn’t afraid of Corbette. Grace saw her. Not a figurehead. Not a victim. Not a fiancée or a princess. Not a powerless little girl in need of protection.

  Grace showed her inside, handed her a towel, and lent her sweatpants and a T-shirt. The pant legs were too short, but the waist fit since she’d lost so much weight over the last year.

  “If Tiamat’s here, I want to fight,” Lucia told Grace as she dried off and dressed. “I didn’t sit back when Kingu attacked, and I’m not going to now. It’s like they’ve forgotten what happened less than a week ago. I was on that bloody field. I might not have made much of an impact, but—”

  “But you showed up and you brought warriors with you. You saved my ass, Lucy, and I thank you. But fighting isn’t the only way.”

  Lucia pulled her ruined slippers back on and paused. “It’s the only time I feel powerful. I matter in that moment.”

  Grace opened her black hoodie jacket to where her tools were nestled in pockets sewn into her black leather corset top. Sharpened iron railroad stakes to slow down aptrgangr—the walking dead—were next to the hollow silver needles she used to ink protection runes. A short running iron and a dagger hung from her waist. “Physical strength isn’t the only type of power. Neither is military authority or weapons or money. These weapons can slow down aptrgangr and banish the wraith back beyond the Gate, but they’re not my greatest tool, not by far.” She pulled a small brass spyglass from beneath her top. It spun on the chain, and light from the biodiesel lamps glinted off the gears and tempered glass. “This is. The Deadglass is soft power. It pulls back our preconceived notions of reality to let us see beyond the veil. It provides true wisdom, and wisdom, without throwing a single punch, can stop armies and end wars.”

  “Weak power.”

  “No. Violence is predictable. Violence begets violence begets violence, till the rivers run red. But the Deadglass disrupts our predictable actions by forcing us to look at the world in a whole new way. What is hidden becomes visible. What doesn’t exist suddenly exists. Don’t discount soft power when you’re trying to find your personal power again. You don’t need to seek out violence to have agency. Soft power is wisdom, compassion, intellect, spiritual guidance—”

  “All the virtues of the Crane.” Lucia swallowed the bitter note in her voice.

  “And don’t discount them.” Grace led the way out of the shop into the dusky twilight. Torches lit the strange storefronts down the alley—an apothecary and spell store, a weapons dealer, an occult bookshop, and a small turreted House of Ishtar where three of Ishtar’s Maidens practiced their “devotion” when they weren’t serving at the main temple. She pulled the chain over her head and handed the Deadglass to Lucia. “Take it. It’ll protect you a lot better than a knife.”

  Lucia slipped the chain over her head and followed Grace a few blocks east to the Drekar-owned temple of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, sex, and war. Grace and the Drekar might say they were more like geisha, but the Kivati called them high-class hookers. Their religious devotion to their art was all for the glory of their goddess. Wherever there was a significant Drekar population, there was a temple, because the human Maidens also provided souls for the Drekar to feed on.

  The rain had eased to a light drizzle by the time Lucia and Grace arrived at the temple. It occupied a historic brick mansion a few blocks east of Pioneer Square. Usually it glowed with welcoming gaslight, a bastion against the oppressive darkness, calling sailors to worship at the altar of sex. A barbaric fence made of human bone surrounded it. Tonight all the lights were out.

  “What would Tiamat want with the House of Ishtar?” Lucia asked.

  “How much do you know about the Babylonian creation myth?” Grace asked.

  “Only the basics.”

  “Tiamat and Apsu were soul mates, the primordial salt water and fresh. They birthed the first pantheon of gods, one of whom killed Apsu. Tiamat birthed a second pantheon of monsters—including dragon kind in her own image—to avenge her murdered husband and gave her lover, Kingu, the Tablet of Destiny to wage war against the gods. Using the Scepter of Death, Marduk killed her and her demon army, and cursed the Drekar to a soulless immortality. Because Tiamat had waged war in revenge of her husband, her heart was ripped out of her body and forced to roam the Land of the Living, forever parted from her mate.” Grace paused at the gate and traced one of the carved runes with her fingertip. “Her heart had her powers, but they were bound. I think she slipped through history searching for a way to undo the binding until she got trapped inside me.”

  “How did she get out?”

  “The old Regent, Norgard, found me right after she’d been trapped by my natural shields. He put the first rune on me,” Grace said. Lucia remembered the lines of blue-black ink that until recently had snaked across Grace’s skin. “I put more on, binding and unbinding and working so much magic to keep the thing from breaking out of me that the old binding broke down. Her heart was trapped inside me, but I didn’t know it until Kingu came looking for it.”

  “Norgard didn’t know either?”

  “I had pretty strong mental shields, and he only strengthened them.” Grace’s lips pressed together. “There isn’t a pit in hell deep enough for that fucker.”

  Lucia looked
away. She understood only too well. Rudrick belonged in that same pit. But Grace had kept fighting and moving forward, and now she was practically married to a soul-sucker. Lucia had always wished to be more like her, except the soul-sucker part. How could Grace tell her to find agency in weak power while she strolled the night brandishing an arsenal of weapons? She was so tired of being told how she should act as the prophesied Crane; she didn’t need to hear it from Grace too.

  “Don’t pity me,” Grace said, mistaking Lucia’s silence.

  “I got my revenge and my happily ever after. Who knows what would have happened if the universe had stuck me on a different path? Would I give up Leif if it meant I never had to crawl through hell to get here? Never in a million years.”

  “How sweet,” Lucia said, because there was really nothing else to say. There was only one man she’d ever wanted, and no matter how hard she tried to convince herself he was all wrong for her and mad besides, she’d have better luck joining a nunnery. She had to change the subject. “So Tiamat and Ishtar . . . ?”

  “Ishtar, being the Goddess of love and all, felt sorry for Tiamat and Apsu. After the battle, the Drekar were stripped of their souls and cursed to walk the earth forever craving the souls of others to survive. But Ishtar gave them a way out—if they can find their soul mate.”

  “You really bound yourself for eternity to Asgard?”

  Grace drew her bone knife and pushed through the gate. “Yup. Let’s go in the back.”

  The black windows looked foreboding in the gloom. Part of her wanted to be back in the warmth and safety of Kivati Hall, where the ball still twirled and her people still danced in ignorance of the new threat. What would it take to find permanent peace and freedom for her people? For herself?

  “Why here?” Lucia whispered.

  “Ishtar gave Tiamat her aid, both her army of the dead and her sacred courtesans. Makes sense that Tiamat would go to Ishtar’s temple for resources. She’ll be disappointed if she’s looking for the warrior maidens of old, though.” She put her finger to her lips and motioned for Lucia to follow. They crept around the house and in through the kitchen door. Inside, the house was black as the outside.