by Aiden Bates
Ashes And Flame
Dragon Magic: Book 3
Jill Haven
Aiden Bates
Contents
1. Rez
2. Daniel
3. Rez
4. Daniel
5. Rez
6. Daniel
7. Rez
8. Daniel
9. Rez
10. Daniel
11. Rez
12. Daniel
13. Rez
14. Daniel
15. Rez
16. Daniel
17. Rez
18. Daniel
19. Rez
20. Daniel
21. Rez
22. Daniel
23. Rez
24. Daniel
25. Rez
26. Rez
27. Daniel
28. Daniel
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Ashes And Flame
1
Rez
“It’s been four hours,” I murmured.
Nix Emberin, newly appointed leader of the Emberwood Weyr and my oldest friend, shot me an irritated look. “I know.”
I paced the living room. “Is that normal?”
He spread his hands. “What’s normal about going to the underworld and strolling around, Rez?”
Fair enough. Mikhail, his mate, was a necromancer. Who the fuck knew how they worked? Nix probably knew more than anyone who wasn’t a mage, but he still professed ignorance to most of Mikhail’s art. Still, four hours seemed excessive. The last time Mikhail had been ‘out’, it didn’t take this long. There was the one time when he’d been out for three days, but the way I understood it, he wasn’t really in the underworld proper, just… in the backyard?
Like I said, who knows how it works?
“This feels like a really long time, Nix,” I insisted.
He sighed. “When he’s back, you can tell him that.”
“You’ve got to be worried out of your mind, too,” I pressed. “Can’t we just wake him up? Isn’t there a rip cord or—”
Nix gave a quiet, warning growl. “Rez, he’s my mate. Obviously, I’m worried to death and you aren’t helping at all. I trust Mikhail to know his limits. He’s experienced and intelligent and knows how to handle himself. Now sit the fuck down, please, because I’m going to lose my fucking mind if you don’t stop pacing.”
My gut twisted at the admission. Nix was open enough with me about his feelings, but it wasn’t often he admitted to being scared. I sat down, and wished that Mikhail allowed us to sit with him while he did this.
I liked Mikhail. Mostly, that was because I loved Nix like a brother and his mate was, by extension, my brother—but Mikhail had shown himself to be a truly good person, worthy of my respect and appreciation. He’d saved our weyr, saved Nix’s life, and helped coordinate a monumental effort to bring Emberwood back into the world after a seventy-year hiatus where we didn’t so much as exchange letters with any but a handful of officials in weyrs outside our territory.
Emberwood had a rough history with everyone, but especially mages. It was a big deal that Mikhail had come at all, that he’d done what he’d done for us, and that Nix had ultimately taken him as a mate—even if it was supposedly accidental.
I didn’t quite believe that. Nix had a type, and Mikhail fit it to a tee; but he nonetheless insisted that he had claimed Mikhail in the heat of the moment.
Not that I’m judging. They were good together. Picking a mate had never really been my thing; I was more the ‘having fun’ type and preferred to keep things casual. But I was happy for them. For them, it seemed right.
And after all that; after Mikhail had saved the weyr, saved my best friend, helped us all gain some degree of acceptance by at least one of the mage cabals and one other weyr, he wasn’t even done helping. That very moment, he was risking his life and his soul to go find information that was very possibly of importance to the entire world.
So, you know—like a really good guy.
All of Nix and Mikhail’s furniture was brand new. Nix had cleared out the Emberin house once he took over. Everything here had reminded him of a pretty nasty childhood. Which I totally understood. But a new couch didn’t have the same comforting embrace as a well-worn piece of furniture, and maybe it was just my own anxiety but it was uncomfortable to sit for too long. I started to stand again but Nix shot me a glare that made my ass drop right back onto the couch.
I groaned. “If I knew it was going to be this long, I would have picked up some—”
We both heard the sound of someone gasping for air, as if they’d been under water for several minutes. Nix was on his feet just a half second before I was, and we both went to the basement door. Nix opened it wide. “Mikhail?”
“I am back,” Mikhail called irritably. “A moment, please. I will be up soon.”
Nix descended into the basement anyway. I stayed up top, and tuned my ears away so that they could have their moment in private. I could at least relax. Mikhail made it back, Nix hadn’t lost his mate like some lover in a Greek tragedy, and all would be right with the world until Mikhail went back down.
It had become a weekly occurrence. One that Nix had initially argued against, and I had sided with him. Mikhail, though, needed answers that could only be gotten in one place. And he didn’t trust anyone else, even his own master—who was a much more experienced necromancer—to get them.
Why that was, I wasn’t entirely sure. I had met Phillip Laryn once, when he came to the weyr to help Mikhail defeat his brother, Ivan, who had come back from the dead to terrorize the people who had killed him. Our people, in fact. Ten years ago. I had thought there was something a little… off… about the old mage, but then again he was a necromancer, after all. Spending much time with the dead had to make a person a little strange.
No offense to Mikhail, of course.
When Mikhail went to the underworld to retrieve Nix’s soul, which Ivan had run off with, apparently Ivan had said some things about a ‘new order’ coming soon to a world near us. And on top of that, Ivan had told Nix about his obsession with something he called the ‘first language’. Mikhail knew that Ivan had stolen some kind of very dangerous book of magic from Custodes Lunae, the cabal they’d both come up in. He thought it was all connected, but when he spoke to Laryn about it, apparently the old mage was evasive in a way that got his scales ruffled.
Unwilling to risk calling the wrong kind of attention on the problem, Mikhail took it on himself to investigate. For a month, he’d been retracing Ivan’s steps, and found that his brother had amassed a small cadre of supporters. Most of them were dead, of course but, well—that just made them easier for a necromancer to hunt down. So far, none of them had anything useful to say, but Mikhail had a list of them—one that he was nearing the end of.
After about ten minutes, they both came up the stairs. Mikhail looked pale, wan. A lot like he’d recently been dead, which was apparently not far off the mark. “Hey,” I said, relieved when I finally saw them, “everything okay? How did it go?”
Mikhail and Nix exchanged a worried look before Mikhail answered. “It is possible that I have found something.”
The way he said it sounded like that wasn’t a good thing. “How fucked are we?”
“Not as fucked as we could be,” Mikhail answered, spreading his hands. “But… also not entirely unfucked.”
Nix urged Mikhail toward the couch to sit, and I followed them as Mikhail related what he’d learned. “It took some searching, but I met a soul in the third level of Tartarus who had heard a rumor of a young woman claiming that her master would soon come to collect her. This woman was still deep
er, in a place reserved for… well, it does not matter. She has been attempting to amass more followers for Ivan’s cause. I found her, and what she had to say was somewhat alarming.”
He rubbed the side of his neck, grimacing slightly. “She confirmed that there is a book. No one else was able to speak of it because Ivan only allowed a small group to know of it. He found a young man, Daniel Stroud, who has some particular affinity for this tome. The way that she described it, it is not a normal book. It is almost like a living thing, and does not easily yield up its secrets. It did not yield them to Ivan, certainly. Why this person— why Daniel specifically—she did not know. He was one of many that Ivan tested.”
“What happened to the ones that failed?” Nix wondered.
Mikhail shook his head, grim. “Nothing pleasant.”
“So, what now?” I asked. “Is this Stroud guy… you know, down there?”
“He is not dead,” Mikhail said. “Not as far as I was able to discern. This woman, Natalia, died only five years ago, in an accident caused by Daniel. Ivan tasked her and three others with watching over him, to ensure that he was able to complete his work. When Ivan died the first time, they moved him to a remote location to continue his work.”
“Where is he now then?” Nix asked. “Did she have any idea?”
“Unfortunately, she did not,” Mikhail said. “However, he may not be impossible to find. Natalia and the other three who were tasked with watching over him all died in the accident. It seems Daniel is an elementalist with an affinity for fire. When Ivan found him, he was on the run—he is a glitcher.”
Nix exhaled a sharp breath. “Shit.”
I frowned at both of them. “Glitcher?”
“His magic is unstable,” Mikhail explained. “It is a rare condition. Sometimes a mage’s magic does not awaken in childhood, but remains latent until later in life. However, this is dangerous, because the new pathways created by the flow of magic cannot settle into an energy system that has already matured. As a consequence, control is very difficult. It has to do with where the pathways ultimately establish themselves. In anyone who is older than perhaps fourteen or fifteen, it will be in the emotional body, which remains plastic for far longer.”
I didn’t understand about half of that, but I nodded along. “Okay… so…?”
“So he starts fires when he gets upset,” Nix said.
“In essence,” Mikhail agreed. “This makes him very dangerous. To himself, to his surroundings—and to anyone who goes to find him.”
“Anyone who can be burned,” Nix said. He eyed me with one eyebrow raised.
I grunted, smiling. “Well, then it’s a good thing we have friends who—oh, you mean me, don’t you?” My smile melted.
Nix nodded. “It’s got to be someone who knows what we’re after. Someone we trust. I want to believe I can trust everyone in the weyr—and, I do on a basic level—but this is too important to mess up.”
I stood from the couch and paced away before I turned, incredulous. “I’ve lived my whole life in the weyr,” I argued. “How am I supposed to… I mean, how would I even find him? I don’t have a scent, and even if I did, he could be anywhere.”
“Not anywhere,” Mikhail pointed out. “As a glitcher, he cannot afford to register with the government. Without registration, he cannot pass the borders of the US. Perhaps with the help of a portal mage, but they are rare and portal activity is monitored by the cabals and the FDPA. There is a very high likelihood that he is in the country.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” I muttered.
Nix sighed, and stood to approach me and put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll have Basri look into it before you go. I mean… the guy starts fires when he gets nervous. If he’s been around the last five years, and no one has recovered this book yet, well—chances are he’s been on the run. He’ll have a trail if that’s the case. And you know Basri.”
“Liana will help as well,” Mikhail put in. “Chief of security at Blackstone. Vance and Tam trust her, and I trust Vance’s judgment without question.”
I supposed it was easy to trust the character assessment of an esper. They could read minds, after all. “So then, what,” I asked, looking from my friend to his mate and back, “I just go out there and get him? Look, I’m not saying I won’t—I know how important this is. But… what do I do if he puts up a fight? I might be fireproof, but that doesn’t mean everything around me will be.”
Nix patted me. “Then you improvise, Rez. You improvise.”
Somehow, that advice was not comforting.
2
Daniel
The motel clerk eyed my driver’s license with some suspicion. Which made sense. It was a fake. But it had worked plenty of times before, and the person in the photo could easily be mistaken for me at a glance. Granted, no one had bothered to scrutinize it so closely before.
Maybe the only reason this lady—who didn’t even wear a name tag, because this wasn’t the sort of motel that was especially big on names by the look of the place—gave it so much attention now was because I looked like the kind of person who might inconvenience her later on by overdosing in a room or having a mental breakdown and wrecking the place. Like I was only here because some kind stranger dropped twenty bucks in my cup and told me to get myself a warm bed and shower for the night.
In fairness, none of that was entirely inaccurate. I didn’t really blame her.
She handed it back to me after almost a full minute of consideration. “It’s five per hour or thirty for the night.”
Steep for a motel that probably had a slab of cement for a mattress. I considered just walking away. Thirty bucks was enough to feed me for a couple of weeks the way I ate. But being overly exhausted was dangerous, and I could always come up with more money. I fished some crumpled bills from my satchel, careful to keep the flap down as I dug around blindly with my fingers, and deposited three fives, a ten, a few dollar bills and finally a handful of quarters and nickels that I counted out. Just about everything I’d managed to collect over the last week.
She took them from the counter, picked through the bills like I might have spread some sickness to them, and then gave a shrug when it counted up to the thirty she’d asked for. Without comment, though, she turned and plucked a key attached to a red plastic diamond with a faded room number printed on it. “Checkout is at 8:00 a.m.”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t stayed at a motel before. That was early. But I didn’t argue with her; and I would probably be gone before then, anyway. Staying in place for too long right now was a bad idea.
“Thanks,” I said. “I promise I won’t make a mess.”
Her lips pressed into a tight line, pinching with probably forty years of smoker’s lines that deepened into either judgment or sympathy. It was hard to tell for sure. “Just be out by eight.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured, and gave her as gracious a smile as I could manage before I turned to scurry out of the office.
The place was a dump. Literally, there was a landfill right across the street and even my human nose couldn’t ignore it. The Starlight Motel was all one level, each door painted an awful, dingy yellow probably around thirty years ago. The brick was overrun with lichen so that the walls of the place were patchy with white and light green that made it almost look sick with something. Which I was sure wasn’t far off when I opened the door to my room.
Hourly motels were something I’d gotten used to over the past few years. They all have a few things in common. One is the crinkle of a plastic sheet underneath the bedding. I put my bag on the little table—which had just one plastic folding chair as a companion—and sat down on the corner of the bed to finally get off my feet for even a few minutes, and was oddly comforted by the sound. It meant that for at least a few hours I could sleep without worrying that someone would stab my while I rested, or without clutching my messenger bag against my chest like a very hard pillow.
My gaze drifted to the bag as I savored the moment. From ins
ide, I felt the pull. The reminder that I had a job to do that was a long way from being done. The thing inside the bag wasn’t intelligent, exactly, but it did have a will. And it always seemed to know when I was in as safe a place as any place could be for me now. It knew that I had some time on my hands, and that I had only one use for that time.
But the pull wasn’t painful yet. So I locked the door, and took a chunk of black chalk from my pocket and began the process of keeping house. I’d scrawled the sigils so many times now that I barely had to look at or check them anymore. Three around the doorknob, one at each corner of the door. Eight for the upper and lower corners of the room itself. One on the wall behind the bed and on the ceiling above it. One on the carpet beneath the bed, which was always the hardest because I had to really work the chalk into it to make sure the sigil was whole and not accidentally separated by some gap in the fibers. Three more to complete a kind of cube with three lines intersecting in the center.
Geometry had always been something I was good at, ever since I was a kid. The figure was as close to exact as I could get without surveyor’s equipment or something, and I had done it enough now that I could feel the way the primal symbols tugged on the world, urging magic to fall into place the same way that a river naturally follows the path that was carved out for it over the ages.
Was I safe in this place, after all that work? There was no way to be entirely sure, and I was realistic about that. The reality was for me there was no longer any such thing as really ‘safe’. There was just an occasional moment to breathe.
