Fire Marked

by Val St. Crowe

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “The big, bright white light,” he said. “What the hell was that?”

  “Uh…” I didn’t know if I should tell him about the whiteflame. He definitely shouldn’t know about the blood bond, because then he’d know I wasn’t a vampire, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to spin this.

  “Did you do that?” said Jackal.

  Lachlan coughed. “Let me stand up, Presley.”

  I sighed. “You’re hurt.”

  He glared at me.

  So, I lowered him to the ground and allowed him to stand up.

  He was a little bit shaky, but he kept his balance. “We did it together.”

  “How?” said Jackal.

  Lachlan shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe it’s the reason the rogues keep following us, though.”

  If the first rogue hadn’t attacked me when Lachlan wasn’t around, I would have associated their attacks with the blood bond. But because I knew that I was the common denominator, I had dismissed that theory.

  “Huh,” said Jackal.

  “Speaking of rogues,” said Lachlan, “there’s a dragon corpse in the woods. It’s all yours.”

  Jackal raised his eyebrows. “You took out a dragon together? No weapons? Just… magic?”

  Lachlan nodded.

  Jackal leaned close. “What kind of blood you two drinking, huh? Or is it a talisman?”

  “We don’t know,” said Lachlan in a low voice. “We can’t control it very well either.”

  Jackal pulled back, considering this. “Well, listen, if the two of you are so all-fired powerful, then I think I want her along on the mission.”

  “The mission?” I said.

  “To take down the Drake Cobras,” said Jackal. “You know, the deal we struck? Well, I’m expanding it. Not just you, Hawk, but your girl too.”

  “Hey,” said Hawk. “You can’t just go changing the terms—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’d rather be there, anyway.” I glanced at Lachlan. “We’re a team, right?”

  He hesitated. And then he nodded. “Right.”

  “Good,” said Jackal. “Now, whereabouts did you say this dead dragon was?”

  * * *

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Lachlan as he stumbled back into the camper. He was covered in blood.

  “You need to lie down,” I said. “You need blood.”

  “No more of yours,” he said, clutching the wall to stay upright. “You need to save your strength.”

  “Fine.” I got him a bottle of blood from the fridge.

  He took a long drink. “I don’t want you on this raid. I never wanted you on it. You gotta let me talk to him. I can convince him you shouldn’t be there.”

  “Why don’t you want me there?” I said. “I can handle myself. Even against crazy drakes.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just… everything you’ve seen me do thus far, it’s been hard on you. It’s been hard on us. And doing this… I don’t want you there. I don’t want you watching.”

  “Because we’re going to be hurting people? It’s not as if they’re exactly innocent, you know. They’re just as bad as the Bryant clan. They probably deserve to be hurt.”

  He took a long drink of blood. “Because we have to pretend to enjoy it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. I took him by the arm. “We have to take you to bed.”

  He shook me off. “And using the whiteflame against them? That’s insane. They might deserve a lot of things, but that stuff reduces people to cinders, and—”

  “We won’t,” I said. “No whiteflame. Not unless we’re desperate. Only to save our own lives.”

  “But Jackal is going to want it,” said Lachlan. “He asked you to come specifically—”

  “You told him we couldn’t control it,” I said. “We’ll just say we can’t.”

  He sighed. “I really wish you weren’t coming. Before going on these things, Jackal always wants to dose up on all kinds of drugs, and I don’t like you watching me—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It upset me before, but I don’t care now.” Something had changed when I saw Lachlan walk out of that lake after killing Phelan. I was ready to do whatever it took now.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded. “But I can’t take anything. I can’t hurt the baby.”

  “We can spin that,” he said. “I’ll work on that.”

  “But why would he want you to do that, anyway?” I said. “It seems like he’d want you clear-headed.”

  “It’s because if you’re really fucked up, everything seems unreal. It’s not like you’re actually killing someone, it’s just like a really realistic video game or something. It’s because altering your mind turns off your inhibitions, makes you suggestible. It’s…” He looked up at me. “Actually, I’m glad you’re going to be there. You’ll keep me grounded.”

  I squeezed his hand. “I will.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The raid on the drakes was happening two nights from now. I needed to shift into dragon form before that if I wanted to keep my magic charged up. Between Lachlan drinking my blood and fighting the rogue, I was getting tapped out.

  There was a body of water nearby, so that was handy.

  But I was also camped right next to a whole clan of people who would be willing to shoot a dragon on sight. So, I had to be careful. And that was not to mention the fact that I could blow my cover.

  I waited until the middle of the night and had Lachlan run lookout for me, and I managed it, barely. I didn’t fly around or anything. Just dipped down into the water, shifted, waited, and then shifted right back and swam to shore. That was that.

  The next evening, we all crammed into Jackal’s RV to get ready for the raid.

  Inside Jackal’s space was cluttered. The inside was sort of put together piecemeal. None of the furniture matched. The sink and stove were too big for the kitchen. Everything was covered in tapestries. There was a beaded curtain separating the bedroom from the rest of the living space. Every available surface was covered in empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays.

  There were eight of us, counting Lachlan, Jackal, and me. We all tried to fit into Jackal’s living room area, but several of the guys had to stand.

  Lachlan was right. There were lots of drugs, not all of them magical. Things were being smoked and snorted and swallowed left and right. But in all the chaos, it was actually easy to hide the fact that I wasn’t taking anything. No one was paying attention to me, they were all simply thinking about their next hit.

  Lachlan wasn’t as lucky. At first, he was able to duck out of several things offered him by accepting them and then passing them on to someone else without partaking.

  But then Jackal put his arm around him and began handing him all kinds of different things to take. Under Jackal’s watchful eye, there was no way Lachlan could refuse.

  I watched him as his breath began to pick up speed, as he started to fidget and twitch. He gritted his teeth and looked up at the ceiling. He looked everywhere except at me.

  I wanted to grab him and hold him and reassure him that this would be okay, that I was here, that we could do this together. But I knew I couldn’t do that. Hawk wouldn’t take kindly to his girl showing his weaknesses to other people. So I just sat and watched everyone get blitzed out of their mind.

  I was starting to get worried.

  I knew that Lachlan had said the thing about inhibitions and all that, and I got that. I did. I understood it. But I didn’t think this was the best way to prepare for fighting people.

  I was starting to get worried that we would lose.

  Jackal got to his feet, a can of beer in one hand. He drained it, and then crushed the can with one hand. He let out a belch. “All right, boys, here’s the plan.”

  I wasn’t a boy, but I wasn’t going to point that out, either.

  “We want to take over this little group, so the best way to do that is to knock o
ver the leadership,” said Jackal. “That’s where we’re going. We happen to know that everyone who’s top brass in this gang is going to be at one address tonight. Plan is to go in hot. No one gets out alive.”

  We were just going in and killing them, then? I gulped. I really didn’t like this. Sure, I’d killed before. I’d killed vampires who had threatened my life. And I’d even killed feral drakes. But this was different, and I knew it.

  Still, now was not the time to back out. I was stuck now, and unless I wanted to ruin everything, I had to keep moving forward.

  They’re not good people, I told myself.

  And it was true. They headed up a gang that distributed dragon flesh to dealers. They bought dead dragon bodies from slayers. They were part of the system that preyed on my kind. I could hate them easily.

  I would hate them.

  I would kill them.

  I sucked in a deep breath.

  Lachlan looked over at me for the first time. His eyes were bloodshot, his pupils dilated.

  I shuddered. He hardly looked like himself.

  Lachlan rolled his head on his shoulders and then turned to Jackal. “That’s not much of a plan, man.”

  Jackal laughed. “You just twist their heads off, huh?”

  All of the guys laughed too, nodding at Lachlan. A few toasted him with their beer cans.

  “And if things go south?” said Lachlan.

  “Things go south, then you whip out that big, white beam of whatever it is the two of you have,” said Jackal.

  Lachlan laughed too, but there was an edge to it. He took a swig of beer. He leaned close to me, his lips at my ear. “You, me, and the baby. Everyone else goes to hell.”

  I nodded, just enough that he could see.

  He looked back up at Jackal. “Well, then, let’s rock and roll, man.”

  Jackal chortled. “Hell, yeah.”

  The other guys all started to chorus, “Hell, yeah! Hell, yeah!” Each yell got louder and they were snickering and lighting cigarettes and pouring beer down their throats.

  It felt to me like the music was getting louder. It had been only in the background before, but I felt like it was seeping through the cracks in our conversation, that it was taking over us.

  Damn. And I hadn’t even taken any of the drugs.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” said Jackal, getting to his feet. “Where the fuck is Selah?” He pointed at Lachlan. “You’re whispering shit to your girl. Where’s my goddamn girlfriend?” He threw back his head and roared. “Selah!”

  I wondered if it was the same Selah who’d come to the grocery store with me. I figured it must be. I twisted around, looking for her.

  She didn’t come out of the bedroom.

  Jackal pushed his way out of the living room, away from the other men and the smoke and the music and tore through the RV, yelling for Selah. He threw open the door and screamed her name.

  She was nowhere to be found.

  “Isn’t even here to see me off,” he said, shaking his head. He picked up another beer and guzzled it. “That bitch. That fucking bitch.”

  * * *

  We sat in the back of the RV while Jackal drove, something that didn’t make me feel particularly safe at all. I didn’t think he was good to drive. He had consumed way too many substances.

  The other guys kept right on partying in the back, passing around lit rolls of something that smelled fragrant as it burned, drinking more beer, snorting more lines of white powder or crushed pills off the coffee table.

  Lachlan sat next to me on the couch, staring at the ceiling, his fingers drumming against his thigh in some kind of anxious rhythm.

  Once he turned to me. He ran his tongue over his teeth, and his expression looked half-mad.

  I wanted to shrink from him, but I grabbed his hand instead. I interlaced my fingers with his.

  He looked away, and he pulled his hand out of my grasp. He didn’t look at me again.

  I was beginning to feel terrified. The fear was bubbling up in me like boiling oil, ready to spatter and burn and maim.

  What the hell had we gotten ourselves into?

  Eventually, the RV lurched to a stop.

  The other men whooped. They tumbled out the door onto the street, screaming and carrying on like they were outside a Beatles concert. Lachlan and I brought up the rear.

  We were in a suburban neighborhood. It was a little rundown. The houses were small and sagging air conditioners were hanging out of the windows. Some were surrounded by tall, chain link fences.

  But it still wasn’t what I had expected. I didn’t know where it was exactly that I thought gangs lived. Maybe in old, abandoned buildings like in the “Beat It” video.

  This seemed so… domestic.

  Hell, there was a kid sitting on the porch across the street. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. He was playing with toy cars, not even paying attention to us.

  But when I saw him, my gut tightened. My own little boy was growing inside me. I was doing this to protect him, but if he ever found out about it, would he understand that?

  Lachlan was looking around, wide-eyed.

  Jackal was already leading the rest of the men across the square of grass that constituted a lawn of a house across the street from the little boy.

  Lachlan and I took off after them.

  Jackal was laughing—a strange, high-pitched hysterical sound like a crazed hyena.

  The other men were pumping their fists in the air or screaming or laughing too.

  I felt like I had been transported to some kind of demented upside-down world. I tried to stay close to Lachlan.

  He was saying something, but I couldn’t make it out over the din of the other men.

  I drew closer.

  “Easy now,” he was saying, his eyes the size of saucers. “Easy now. Easy.”

  Lachlan was crazy too. We were all crazy. What the hell were we doing?

  A gunshot.

  One of the men with us toppled to the ground, a look of surprise on his face. His entire skull seemed to have erupted. There was blood pouring out of one of his eyes. I wasn’t sure even a vampire could heal that. Even if he could, it wouldn’t be soon.

  Lachlan grabbed me and threw me to the ground, covering my body with his.

  I struggled to see the house we were approaching. There were drakes in the windows, all carrying guns. Big shotguns and tiny pistols.

  A volley of gunfire, sweeping over everything.

  Two more of our men were hit.

  Jackal caught a bullet in the shoulder. I saw blood explode out of his upper arm. His laughs turned to shrieks. He fell to his knees, and he turned his gaze on us. “Blast them,” he said. “Blast the fuckers.”

  I reached for Lachlan’s hand, ready to do as he said, to summon our magic.

  But Lachlan just shook his head at him. “We can’t. It’s not working. I told you we can’t control it.”

  Right. Right. We weren’t going to use whiteflame against the drakes. But they had guns.

  Jackal reached under his shirt and pulled out a pistol. He began firing at the house, shrieking and laughing and swearing.

  I summoned my own magic, my dragon magic. I reached out for all the guns, and then… I felt Lachlan, even though we weren’t using the whiteflame, we were touching, we were connected. Our magic combined. It strengthened. I remembered the first time he had drunk my blood, the way we’d plucked bullets out of the air.

  We did it again, stopping the bullets where they were, knocking them harmlessly to the ground.

  We reached out for the guns, and we pulled the guns from their hands.

  Jackal was still shooting, still hitting the drakes. Several slumped out of the windows, hit. He turned back to us, grinning widely. “Nice. Let’s get inside.”

  “Let’s go,” said Lachlan. “They obviously knew we were coming. This is bad news, man.”

  Jackal shook his head. He reloaded his pistol and sprinted toward the house.

  Lac
hlan swore under his breath and went after him.

  I followed him.

  Jackal pounded up the steps to the porch of the house. He tugged open the door.

  It was pitch black inside.

  Lachlan hesitated. “Stay here,” he said to me in a quiet voice.

  “No,” I said. I had to come along. He needed me. I needed him. I wasn’t going to stand out here all by myself in this neighborhood while—

  Gunfire from inside.

  The sound of Jackal, hooting in triumph or amusement or general intoxication.

  “Shit,” muttered Lachlan and lurched forward.

  I was right behind him.

  We stepped inside the house. It was too dark to see anything, and I grabbed onto Lachlan’s shirt to try to keep my bearings.

  Jackal laughed again.

  There was a flash, a lighter being ignited, and Jackal’s face was illuminated, across the room, along with some stained, flowered wallpaper. He was grinning. He had flicked on the lighter.

  Immediately, bullets began ripping through the air, guns going off like rapid-fire cannons, one after another.

  Still gripping Lachlan, I turned as best I could, trying to see where the bullets were coming from, but I couldn’t see anything.

  The lighter that Jackal was using went out.

  Guns were still going off. I could hear bullets striking the walls, the floor, and even glancing off something metallic—a sink maybe, or even a metal table. I couldn’t be sure.

  Lachlan and I tried to reach out to stop the bullets. But now, we couldn’t. There were too many, and we couldn’t see them. It was impossible to focus.

  I felt something whiz past my neck and sink into the door behind me with a splintering crunch.

  I screamed.

  “What?” said Lachlan, turning to me, his voice full of fear.

  “Grazed me,” I whispered.

  He roared anyway, and I could feel our power surging to life. The whiteflame burst out of us.

  Now the interior of the house was bright, and we could see that we were in a kitchen—peeling linoleum on the floor, empty bottles and food wrappers on the counters. Drakes were in the doorway, their scales glinting in the light of the whiteflame. They were all armed.

  The burst of white power cut a swath through three or four of them. It kept going, disintegrating the wall behind it, and then another wall, and then a window burst as it cut through the glass.