Inferno

by Nancey Cummings

She wobbled on her tiptoes before the silken material of her shoes slid in the mud, upending her.

  Pel and Mishal moved as one to catch her, their sure arms breaking her fall. The heat from them went straight through the layers of her clothes.

  “Hi,” she breathed, her gaze bouncing from him to Mishal and back. “Thanks.”

  Mishal stepped back, hands splayed as if he could not understand how he reacted so quickly to the female.

  Pel knew. His brother could deny the pull they felt for her, but he would not. He set her gently on her feet, a hand lingering on her back. “I am called Pel. That is Mishal, and he is Flin.”

  “Amber!” Another female trotted up, dark curls bouncing with every step. “Denise is insisting that the food storage building is too close to the hot springs, but I think if we build it too far out, animals will get in and eat our food. You need to tell her she’s wrong.”

  “That’s me,” she sighed before stepping back, attention already stolen by her needy human subordinates. Pel watched her listen as the two human females plead their case. The humans were different from the valos. Their forms smaller, their skin thin and exposed to the elements, but so much of them seemed designed for pleasure. Their eyes were bright with an internal fire, their faces so very expressive and their mouths soft. He wondered if they were soft all over.

  Mishal bumped Pel with his shoulder. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

  “Admiring the female who will be our mate.”

  Mishal snorted. “A Creator would never mate with a valo.”

  Asche grinned like a maniac. “Humans are not like the Creators,” he said. They had been told once before, but it bore repeating. “And that one is not like the other humans.”

  Yes. Amber was not like the other humans. She was his.

  Mishal

  Lust blinded his triad brother. Not that he could blame him. The female was extraordinary, and so much more appealing than the other two human females they had encountered. However, Mishal did not trust his own response. Every sensation was still new and examined. For all he knew, his body could simply be reacting to an attractive, unmated female. Every female meeting that criterion could generate the same response. It was foolish and shortsighted to claim a mate before he understood himself.

  Granted, there were other humans present in the village, all activity and chatter. Some were even female, if he had to guess. None caught his eye the way Amber did.

  Regardless, flirting over the lifeless body of his brother was not the way to begin courtship. Not that he agreed to court the human called Amber.

  “Do you have his heartstone?” Mishal asked Asche.

  “Yes, of course. It is in the Forge,” the Shaper said. Pel abandoned the cart and shouldered Flin. Asche led the way up the mountain.

  Pel had a spring in his step that had previously been missing. Mishal never noticed that his triad brother had the gait of a despairing male before now. No doubt Pel already envisioned mating the female, building her a comfortable home—Mishal liked the sound of that—and spending a lifetime sharing pleasure and joy with each other. His heartstone burned with the rightness of the idea.

  Sarsen met them at the entrance to the City in the Caldera. “The travelers return,” he said in greeting, echoing Asche’s words. He brushed a hand over Flin’s brow and stared down into his empty eyes. “You found the Ventos.”

  “With difficulty,” Pel said. Mishal nodded in agreement. They traveled over the river and into the east to the territory of the Ventos with only hazy memories to guide them. The landscape had changed. Fields once tilled by a living people were abandoned and reclaimed by dense forest. Herd animals that once grazed in the valley had grown into wild, fearsome beasts. Villages had long been erased by vegetation. Little remained of the people the valos had once been before the Creators arrived.

  “You would not believe our mate,” Asche babbled happily. “She is with child! She did not believe such a thing was possible and refused to acknowledge the truth in our words. Even so, her belly grows with our young.”

  Humans could breed with a valo? Immediately, Mishal had a vision of human Amber with a valo babe in her arms. It pleased him. He and Pel shared a look, the heartstone in his chest pulsing.

  They were agreed. Amber would be theirs.

  “So much has changed. Do you think Flin will react poorly to the humans? They resemble the Creators. Maar and Krenik had difficulty believing that the humans were not the return of the Creators,” Asche said.

  Shame sucked the air from him, turning his fires cool. How could he entertain the notion of taking a mate when his triad brother was neither dead nor alive? What could a broken triad offer a female such as Amber? First, they had to revive Flin. That remained his priority, and he would remind Pel if needed.

  As if sensing the shift in Mishal’s mood, Sarsen said, “Let us not waste time with idle words. Come to the Forge.”

  They traveled through the City with efficiency. The first thing he noticed was the stench. A foul odor hung in the air like a miasma. When he has been first revived, so much new information bombarded his senses that he failed to notice.

  “Has it always smelled like this?” he asked.

  “It has grown increasingly intolerable,” Asche answered. “The city’s maintenance system is failing. We are over run with broken equipment and ferix.”

  Reaching the rim of the City where it met the lake of lava below, the state of the causeway dismayed Mishal. Built to tower above the lava and protect the City’s inhabitants from flare-ups, the bubbling cauldron nearly topped the causeway.

  “This should not be,” he said. He should know. He built the barrier a millennium ago.

  “The lake rises,” Asche said.

  “Is it meant to do that?” Mishal asked, deferring to the other male’s experience. Perhaps the lava levels rose and fell with predictable frequency while he and Pel slept.

  Asche shrugged. “Who can say? I have not noticed it before, but much is changing. Why should the caldera be excluded?”

  “Another system failure?”

  “Undoubtably.”

  “If the caldera swallows the lower levels, that will make caring for the humans difficult.”

  “The humans will not be here for long. They complain about the heat and will not venture down to the lower levels. Their skin is too thin to live comfortably here, so we build new shelter for them in the old village.”

  “How many humans do you have now?”

  Asche smiled and his heartstone pulsed. “I just have the one, but there are six others. I’m sure you noticed at least one.”

  Mishal didn’t know he could blush. Huh.

  The Forge was unchanged but different than how he remembered. Fire beetles scattered as they entered. Mishal frowned at the infestation. The creatures were a type of ferix, a monstrous hybrid born of lava, the renewing fires, slag and whatever poor animal fell into the caldera. They were largely unthinking and dangerous. The insects were a nuisance.

  Three dozen Fire Valos sat in slumber, their forms tucked into alcoves. Before, when he had been a thrall to Sheenika, the protocols she put in place commanded him to return to the Forge and plunge himself into the renewing fires to restore his failing body. Back then, the Forge had been a dark place he loathed. To go into the renewing fires had been an agony that seared through his body. He did not want it, and every trip into the renewing fires prolonged his unnatural life. The longer he resisted that protocol, the colder his fires grew, until eventually he fell into a state resembling sleep.

  That was how he and Pel had been before Sarsen revived them with their heartstones. Since that time, Mishal had not felt the compulsion to return to the renewing fires.

  Pel lowered Flin to the floor near the pool of renewing fires, cradling the male’s head in his lap. Asche and Ertale entered. The large male placed himself on one side of Flin’s body, and the smaller on the other. They moved without consultation but with experience born of repetition. Mishal
briefly wondered why both had to be near Flin, then he understood that they were ready to restrain the male if the revival process went poorly. Experience born of repetition. Mishal’s own revival had been smooth, but he knew it had not been so with others.

  Sarsen retrieved a metal box and set it carefully on the work table. He opened it to reveal a dozen heartstones, all whole and faintly glowing. “These were the ones we could not match to those in the Forge.” A dozen heartstones for a dozen missing Fire Valos, lost somewhere on Sonhadra.

  “And them?” Mishal nodded to the still-sleeping Fire Valos.

  “Their heartstones fractured or were damaged.” Sarsen frowned. “I am working on a solution.”

  Mishal nodded. Sheenika had not endowed any of the Fire Valos with the knowledge of how to create a heartstone. “I will assist.”

  “Thank you,” Sarsen said. “You have not asked about the renewing fires yet.”

  Pel looked up sharply. “What should I ask?”

  “We were gone for two moons and have not needed to return to the renewing fires,” Mishal said. It was a long journey, longer than they had ever been able to resist the pull to return to the renewing fires, and the reason why they could not retrieve Flin until recently. Yet even knowing how far they were from the City in the Caldera and how long they had gone without, he did not feel the pull. “Why is that?”

  “So, you did notice,” Sarsen said. “The heartstones regulate the fires within us. They do not diminish, and we do not need to replenish except if we are injured.”

  Mishal looked at his hands. During their journey, he never injured himself or required care. The Fire Valos do not experience illness or disease. They could be cut or injured, but their skin was thick. The blow to injure them would have to be considerable. “Such a thing happened?”

  Ertale grumbled, his displeasure grinding like rocks tumbling to the ground.

  “Big and Grumpy was clumsy and didn’t listen to my expert instructions when we cleaned the fallen tower,” Asche said. “Falling stone crushed his arm, but the renewing fires restored him.”

  Mishal touched his heartstone, glad to be free of the renewing fires. “Flin is undamaged. The Ventos merely trapped him. They did not injure him.”

  Sarsen dipped his hand into the pool of renewing fires and hissed in pain. Mishal flinched in sympathy; the fires were never pleasant. With a cupped hand, he dribbled the excess into Flin’s empty heartstone socket. The molten fire absorbed into his skin quickly, spreading across his body in a fine network of webbing. It burned with a brief intensity before subsiding.

  “Does he require more?” Pel asked.

  Sarsen shook his head. “Too much and he’ll burn too hot, too fast.” He held a heartstone above Flin’s empty socket. The crystal remained cold. Setting that one aside, he repeated his actions with another. He cycled through five crystals until one responded to Flin with a weak glow. “This is his,” he said.

  “Be certain,” Pel said.

  “I managed to revive you. I am not entirely unskilled,” Sarsen replied. Ertale snorted, but his triad ignored his outburst. “However, there are risks,” he added.

  “What risks?” Mishal asked.

  “Some heartstones were damaged. This one looks intact, but it could fracture, perhaps crumble.” Sarsen held it up to the light as if searching for an imperfection. Mishal looked to Pel for his thoughts on how to proceed.

  “Do it,” Pel said without hesitation, eyes never leaving the crystal Sarsen held.

  Sarsen slid the crystal into place, twisting it until it clicked.

  Mishal leaned forward, his fire flaring and blazing in anticipation. The heartstone glowed. First with a weak, dingy yellow light that faded into a sickly orange, before finally growing brighter.

  “Something is not right,” Pel said, his hand reaching for the heartstone. Mishal snatched for his hand, knocking it away.

  “Do not,” he warned.

  The crack snapped through the air, bouncing off the stone walls.

  “What was that? What happened?” Pel demanded.

  Sarsen removed the heartstone and held it to the light. A crack ran through, still glowing a sickly orange. “I am sorry.”

  “Sorry? Sorry!” Pel sprang to his feet. “I did not walk across half of Sonhadra and carry my triad brother on my back for you to be sorry! Fix it!”

  Mishal did not miss the glance Asche gave Ertale, or the way the large male shifted on his feet. They expected this. Quickly, he counted the Fire Valos still sleeping in alcoves and compared that to the number of unclaimed heartstones in Sarsen’s metal box. The slumbering valos outnumbered the crystals. They’d had more failures than successes. Mishal placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Calm yourself. Control your fires. We knew the risk.”

  “We did not,” Pel hissed, turning on his brother, fury burning red in his eyes.

  “I told you the heartstone could fracture. It fractured.” Sarsen forced the crystal into Pel’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  Pel’s held the heartstone with a crushing grip, teeth grinding in frustration.

  Mishal took the crystal before Pel could damage it further. “Thank you for trying. What options do we have now?”

  Sarsen sighed and ran a hand over his face as if scrubbing away weariness. “Asche and I have searched for a way to repair the heartstones—”

  “Use the renewing fires,” Pel demanded. He snatched the heartstone from Mishal and moved to the pool. “Do it. Now.”

  “No,” Asche said, stepping between him and the pool of bubbling, liquid fire. “That was the first thing we tried. It damages the heartstones further.”

  Pel snarled, red-hot fury radiating from him. “Then what is the point?” He spied a crawling fire beetle and stomped on it. He shoved the heartstone into Mishal’s hands. Rage still unserviced, he punched the wall before storming out.

  Mishal stood in amazement, carefully holding the fractured heartstone. He had known Pel for more than a thousand years and had never witnessed such a fit of anger. “I should apologize for Pel—”

  “He has always handled disappointment poorly,” Sarsen said, dismissing any offense with a wave. “I would like to hear of your journey, when he is ready.”

  Mishal nodded. His own disappointment lodged in the back of his throat, uncomfortable and distressing. New emotions still clawed their way to the surface of his consciousness. He didn’t care for it at all.

  Chapter Four

  Amber

  She smacked a slipper against the wall, crushing the bug. It left a greasy streak of charcoal dust and embers.

  Ugh.

  Two years in prison and she had never so much as seen a creepy-crawly. She witnessed a lot of fucked up shit on the Concord—inmates who flung their own poo at the guards, guards who behaved worse than the inmates, and the stunning lack of humanity of everyone in the prison, staff, and inmates, alike—but she never had to deal with bugs. No lice. No roaches. Not even a bed bug. For all its faults, the Concord stayed clean. Of course, Amber heard a rumor that if a cell or wing got too funky, the staff would just vent it and let the vacuum of space sweep it clean. She didn’t believe it until she read the reports. She kept a clean-ish cell before. After, she was tidy as fuck.

  No way would she tolerate living with bugs, much less weird alien bugs that left embers instead of guts when she smashed it. Life was too short to have to shake out the sheets, watch where she stepped, or worry that a bug would cause a fire.

  The valos said the bugs were a symptom of the ancient city’s age. That she understood. Growing up, her mom couldn’t always afford the nicest places. Cheap rent meant cramped and run-down apartments, usually with bugs or mice.

  Amber put on the slippers and reminded herself that the valos were trying, which was more than the slum lords of her childhood ever did. They were nothing but kind and generous hosts who could very well have let her tiny group of humans weather out the winter in the forest on their own. The valos were building a village for
them, after all. They shared their food, provided clothes—maybe not practical, but clothes nonetheless—and opened their city without reservation and limit. Amber and her gang were free to wander about the empty city as they pleased. The valos asked nothing of the humans. Not a thing.

  Perhaps that was what made Amber uncomfortable; their one-sided relationship. The valos gave everything to the humans and wanted nothing in return. It was too good to be true.

  Well, maybe not nothing. Humans and valos could reproduce. Lucie and her swelling belly proved that. So far, the valos hadn’t mentioned their low population or the disproportionate number of human women to the one human man. Sex would come up. People were people, after all. Lucie and her triad already crossed that line. None of the other valos had approached the humans for sex—or mating, whatever they called it—but it was only a matter of time.

  People were people, no matter the planet. When people got together, people fucked. If they were lucky, the valos would ask and not demand or take.

  Amber felt like such a heel. She kept waiting for a catch, kept expecting the worst of their hosts. Everything in the City in the Caldera was too good to be true. There had to be a catch. Forced breeding with an alien seemed about right and aligned with her paranoia.

  Years on the Concord did that to a person, made you paranoid and unable to accept kindness and generosity at face value.

  She hated the direction her thoughts took because she liked the valos well enough and if they asked her nicely for sex, she wouldn’t say no. Her mind replaced a generic “they” with the two new guys who arrived with the injured man. They seemed… nice didn’t come close to describing the sparks that flew between them. Compelling. Tantalizing—Yeah, they were tantalizing, all right. If either of them expressed interest, she’d play.

  Or both of them.

  Amber blushed at the notion. The valos didn’t do things quite like back on Earth, but she’d be willing to give it a go.

  She climbed the stone steps to the upper gardens where the City grew its food. The fresh, mostly sulfur-free air made the gardens a popular hangout. Lucie tended her collection of native flora, usually with one or more of her harem. Crystal and Denise went all-in with learning how to grow their own food. Amber helped weed the garden beds and paid attention to what plants served as food and what plants went for medicine. She refused to starve again.