Fury's Kiss

by Karen Chance

  Only I glowed.

  I growled and grabbed it.

  Something gave a shriek, and the hand jerked back. And there was muscle behind it, oh yes there was. Not like the humans, two of whom jumped me a second later and forced me to release the hand in order to crack their skulls together. And by the time I threw them aside and turned back, the hand was gone.

  I growled.

  Something whimpered.

  Something else moved, and I caught a gleam again, like a candle behind a curtain.

  I jerked at the fluttering thing and it slithered easily through my fingers. Cloth; waxed. I pulled some more and something on the other side grabbed it and pulled back. But I was stronger, and when I gave a jerk, it came away in my hands.

  And the glow flooded the room.

  Golden light, like looking into the sun, spilled everywhere, so bright I wanted to shield my eyes. It made it hard to see features—hard to see anything. But features didn’t matter; I normally barely noticed them. Power I did.

  I went down on my haunches and reached for it, but something was in the way.

  Bars. Iron. New. I could still smell the solder. I pulled them aside and felt around in the box—why was it in a box?—and finally grasped it.

  It bit my hand.

  “No,” I told it. “Bad.”

  And then I snatched it out.

  I still couldn’t see it very well; in fact it was harder up close where the light hurt my eyes. But it smelled wrong. I pulled it close and sniffed it, mentally filtering out the stink of blood and urine and peppery fear radiating off it, but for once, scent didn’t help. I pawed at it, checking its limbs. It whimpered again, and the light flickered.

  “Hurt?” I demanded, because I couldn’t find any unclosed wounds.

  It didn’t reply.

  “Hurt!” I said again, louder, because maybe it was deaf. But no. It flinched; it had heard me. And then some gunfire hit the cage, sparking off the bars, and it flinched again. And kept doing it, in little motions that flickered against the canvas like firelight.

  Oh. It didn’t like the noise. I stood up and tucked it under an arm. I would take it away from the sounds, and then it would be better.

  I scanned the room.

  The humans were dead or as good as. The vampire, of course, was not. Injured, but not mortally so, which made it more dangerous. I narrowed my eyes at it. There was a faint tinge of pink around the blue now, blended by the currents of its power into mauve tendrils that smoked up from the surface of its skin.

  I kept the small thing close as I skirted the field of bodies. The vampire turned as we did, but made no forward movement. But the currents shivering through its veins increased, as its power surged.

  I growled a warning.

  The vampire was unhappy; I could feel it in the heat it suddenly gave off, in the way it charged the air with ozone. My nose wrinkled. I hated that smell. How humans lived in cities steeped in the scent of those who hunted them, I would never understand. How could they not know they were stalked, when every house reeked of the hunters? When every streetlight hummed like the stolen energy in their veins, making it almost impossible to tell the difference?

  I would take the small thing somewhere with no false lights. With nothing but trees and wind and scurrying things even smaller than it was. With sounds of the earth that would not make it shiver and mewl.

  The vampire hadn’t moved.

  I eyed it warily. Its power had faded, the silver current barely visible now, but it was only reined in. And its wounds were closing. The only serious one was on its stomach, where some potion had splattered and was eating through the flesh. But the vampire’s healing abilities were faster than the poison’s destructive ones. Soon it would be whole again. And if it fed from the few humans whose pulses still beat faintly, here and there, it would be back to full strength.

  If I was going to attack, it should be now.

  “Dory?” The vampire spoke, low and soft. The name wasn’t mine, but it was looking at me. The eyes were limned in silver, too, like the veins. They stared at me, deep and empty and awful.

  I growled and renewed my grip on the small thing, which was thrashing about. I would kill the vampire if forced, but I was injured, too, and would also need to protect the small one. This was a fight I would avoid if I could.

  “Dory—” It held out a hand.

  I backed up, jerking the small thing with me. “Mine,” I said, low and guttural, and the vampire started as if surprised.

  It probably was. They always assumed that I did not speak. That I could not. So many had plotted my death, discussed it, laughed about it, even while I was in the same room, because they assumed I was mindless. Like one of the failures of their kind, born mad.

  But I was not a failure. I was what I was supposed to be. I was dhampir.

  And they never lived to tell anyone they were wrong.

  “Mine!” I said, challenge in the tone this time. If it wanted a fight, so be it.

  But the vampire took several steps back, hands raised. “Oui—yes. Yours,” it agreed. The words meant nothing, because vampires lied, but it also changed color. The pink faded to blue, to gray, to black as it went dim and almost seemed to collapse into itself. Dark and small suddenly, instead of bright with power. I watched it narrowly.

  Unlike the young ones, those as old and strong as this could summon power in an instant, with little or no buildup required. It was backing down. It was refusing challenge.

  But vampires lied.

  My muscles tensed, adrenaline drowning my system, power and speed and—ripping, tearing, burning, yessss. The bloodlust flooded me as I prepared for fight not flight, always the preference, always the joy. And then I lunged—

  —at the door, slamming it shut a second before something crashed into the other side.

  The vampire jumped.

  “You did not feel them change?” I challenged, pushing against the clawed hand that was caught in the gap between the door and the wall. It was longer than a man’s, with huge, exaggerated knuckles under a covering of black hair, and thick yellowed talons that scored the heavy metal.

  “I was…distracted.”

  “That kind of distraction can get you killed, vampire.”

  “So I see.” It brought the butt end of a weapon down on the creature’s fingers, hard enough to sever several of them, and the rest withdrew with a howl. “Shifters.”

  “Yes. I smelled their musk when I awoke. Did you not?”

  “No.” The voice was clipped. “They scented as human to me.”

  “Pity.”

  That must have stung, because power flashed through its veins for a split second before being reined in again. “There are thirteen, two of them injured,” it said, showing off. “The odds are acceptable.”

  “Not with the small thing.”

  “The small—you mean the child?”

  I looked down. The little one had grabbed onto my leg with a grip I would have defied even the vampire to break. That was good. It left my hands free.

  “Child.” I used language so seldom, sometimes the words wouldn’t come. But this one…“Yes.”

  “I will protect her.”

  I didn’t answer. I was looking at the claw marks on the door. They had the same foul stench as the creatures—wrong, unnatural—and they were bubbling the green paint as they dripped down the surface. A moment later, the lock on the door began to sizzle, smoking as if a blowtorch was on the other side.

  I glanced up at the vampire. “You were saying?”

  It scowled. It did that a lot. But a moment later, I joined it when the room lurched hard to the right, like a ship on the seas, and ugly cracks ran up the walls. One split the ceiling all the way to the light, causing it to flame out in a shower of sparks. But more light speared through the cracks, crisscrossing the gloom in slivers of hellish orange.

  One lit on the bar of a cage, and the metal went as molten as in a furnace. But I had never seen a furnace turn a ba
r white-hot in an instant. Or boil it away to smoke in another.

  I did not bother to see what the rest of the rays were doing. My eyes lit on a turned-over table not far away. It was in poor condition, but it had wheels. It would do.

  I righted it and started piling things on top.

  “What are you doing?” the vampire demanded. It looked like it might have interfered, but the lock was now gone and its back was against the door, keeping it closed.

  More or less.

  “That will become apparent. Where are we?”

  “Nowhere. The dark mages who used this place folded over a piece of a ley line, creating a pocket in non-space—” It broke off with a disgusted sound. “There is no time for this! We have to—”

  “There is time,” I said, poking my nose into a large jar. Little round balls of greasy metal. I added it to the pile.

  The vampire made another displeased sound, but it answered. “A ley line is a river of great metaphysical power. Among other things, it separates worlds—”

  “I know what a ley line is.”

  “Then you know that they are meant to be traveled through very quickly—as when stepping through a portal. They are not designed to be used as a permanent residence!”

  “Yet someone has done so.”

  “Those with an extensive knowledge of magic and a pressing need to hide have used the trick for centuries, but it carries great risk. If the spell they used as an anchor fails, the shield bubble keeping out the ley line’s energy will fail, too, and in that case—” It gestured wildly at the room. “Do you understand?”

  I glanced up. In the few seconds I had worked, the scene had changed. It now looked as if the room were made of glass and someone had thrown a ball at it. The impact point was a solid heart of flame, with boiling orange-red energy radiating outward in jagged rays. They lit the remaining pieces of the room like the sun through stained glass, causing the gunpowder in the air to shimmer like gold dust.

  So much power.

  It was beautiful.

  I tore my eyes away. “I understand that we need to get out.”

  “Yes, yes! We need to get out! Therefore making a barrier will do us little—”

  “I am not making a barrier.”

  The vampire looked at the heavy pieces of trash I had gathered on the table. “Then what is that?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. “Open the door,” I said instead.

  “Efin!” It threw up its hands, and then had to lower them quickly as the door buckled behind it. “Yes, yes, d’accord. Now you and the child, you stay behind me, do you understand?”

  I looked at it. It liked to scowl, it liked to demand things, and it liked to talk. It reminded me of someone.

  “I understand.”

  “Good.” It took a breath. Then another, which made little sense as it did not breathe. And then it spun to the side.

  The door crashed open and a snarl of fur and unbridled savagery boiled into the room. And stopped, several yards in, slavering mouths agape. Which is what most creatures would do when faced with the solid field of flame the back half of the room had become.

  They would have recovered in a second. I didn’t give them one. I swung the table outward, putting all my strength behind it, and with the heaviness of the metal augmented by the tower of machinery on top. Machinery that spilled over when its base slammed into the shifters’ backs, or stomachs for those with slightly better reflexes, not that it mattered; not that anything mattered. Not with a thousand pounds of falling steel and iron and tiny rolling metal bits sweeping them toward their doom.

  And then I was jerked back by the vampire. Its teeth were out and its bloodlust was rising. But I did not think it was about to feed with the flames licking toward us. “Get on,” I told it impatiently, shoving the table at it.

  “You get on!” it snarled, and threw me and the small one onto the pitted tabletop. And then through the door. And then down a corridor, which was fast collapsing behind us.

  I twisted around in time to see that several of the shifters had somehow made it out also, but they were uninterested in attacking us. They barreled into two of their own who had stayed behind, and then attacked them in their panic to get out. They went down in balls of fur and thrashing limbs and the next second were consumed by the gaping maw of energy behind us.

  It was less like glass now, I thought, holding the whimpering small thing as the corridor curled up, concrete, brick and plaster, all the same. As if the scene were merely an image drawn on paper and held to a match.

  It was oddly unreal, like the expression on the vampire’s face as it ran, pushing us with inhuman speed, racing the impossible until fire lapped at its heels and I jerked it onto the table with us. The flames followed, crackling like lightning across the width of the tunnel, burning through the vampire’s jacket and searing a wound in its arm. Smoke, stinking of burnt flesh and fabric, flooded the air. The corridor bucked and buckled. Electricity lifted the hair on my arms and prickled at my exposed skin, the space left to us sizzling with it as we scrambled backward, as the tunnel flamed out around us, as beautiful death reached fiery hands out for us—

  —and missed.

  The floor bucked wildly one last time, and suddenly we were bouncing into darkness, the table smoking like a flare, the portal behind us burning not orange but bright, incandescent white for one brief instant. Before it exploded like a bomb, picking us up and throwing us through the air and into a large group of people who were rushing through what looked like a warehouse door.

  But they weren’t people; they were vampires. Dozens of them, some getting out of the way in time, others somersaulting along with us as we hit the ground, as we rolled toward a street, as I reached for the small one the impact had torn out of my arms and a knife at the same time, because the fight was not over yet. No, the fight was just beginning as I rolled to a stop and surged to my feet and—

  “NO!”

  The voice tore through me like a hundred knives, plucking me out of the air halfway through a leap and sending me crashing to the ground. My body twisted, but the power wouldn’t let me rise. Not the vampire’s—not this vampire’s. There was only one who could do this to me, and I looked up with no surprise at all to see the diffuse outline of a being made of moonlight, shimmering in the air above me.

  “No,” I told it. And “wait” and “child.”

  But it didn’t listen. It never listened.

  And then the glow faded, and there was nothing but darkness.

  Chapter Three

  Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. But when an earthquake is doing its best to shake your room apart, you don’t have much of a choice. I blinked open my lashes to find sunlight poking cheerful fingers into my eyes, a wannabe Pavarotti in bird form outside my window, and at least a 5.0 on the Richter scale.

  The jam jar of daisies on my dresser was dancing. Little puffs of plaster were sifting down from my ceiling. And my bed was slowly migrating across the worn wooden boards of my floor. I stared around in utter confusion because I was still half asleep, and because the pounding on the door almost exactly matched the pounding in my head. For a minute, I wasn’t sure if it was the room shaking or me.

  The room, I decided, when the jam jar danced to the edge of the dresser and leapt to its doom.

  “Crap,” I said, and fell out of bed.

  The earthquake stopped.

  A few seconds later, a gnarled, scarred hand, big as a bucket, squeezed around the doorframe. It was careful, because little things like solid oak doors are notoriously flimsy. But then it stopped without actually coming in.

  The pain in my head was fairly astonishing, but it didn’t stop me from recognizing the hand. It belonged to one of my roommates, because my living situation isn’t any more normal than the rest of my life. Ymsi, the donator of daisies, had the slight disadvantage of being a troll. Not that it was a disadvantage to him, by all appearances, but it did cause the rest of us problems from time to time
.

  Like when he decided to wake us up by gently knocking on a door.

  “Come in,” I croaked, only to have nothing happen.

  I hung my head. Of course not.

  Ymsi had the usual troll love of beauty, and for some reason, he had decided that I fit the bill. And although he and his twin brother, Sven, had been on earth for a while now, they were still getting their feet wet when it came to the odder facets of human culture. Like the whole privacy thing.

  This had resulted in my looking up in the middle of a bath one day to find Ymsi standing hunched in the doorway, staring at me with the same rapt look on his face that he used when encountering a new kind of flower. Or playing with the baby squirrel he had rescued from the backyard after a storm and kept as a pet. Or being introduced to the wonders of chocolate for the first time.

  Apparently, in troll terms, that sort of thing was considered endearing.

  Unfortunately for Ymsi, I am not a troll.

  And I guess my reaction had been memorable. Or maybe Olga, a friend who was also of the troll persuasion, had had a talk with him. Because he had suddenly acquired a Victorian-era level of prudery where women were concerned. These days, he wouldn’t dare to enter a lady’s bedroom, my heavens no. Meaning that if I wanted to know what the deal was, I was going to have to get to the door.

  Somehow.

  I ended up crawling through daisy runoff, because it just seemed easier. I thought about trying to pull myself up by the knob, to answer the door like a normal person, but who the hell was I kidding? I settled for kicking it open with a foot instead, only to be confronted by a solid mountain of…well, mountain.

  The acre or so of troll flesh not concealed by a tattered pair of shorts and a homespun shirt was greeny brown, with the consistency of caked earth if it had somehow petrified over time. I poked it—in the knee, which was as high as I could reach. The skin didn’t do anything as normal as dimple, but the mountain did shuffle back a few feet, allowing a huge head to peer in the doorway.

  It had floppy blond hair that fell over a prominent forehead, a nose the size and shape of a head of cauliflower, and small blue-pebble eyes. They squinted at me myopically.