Death Kissed
Page 20
She’d begun calling him “my love” what felt like centuries ago. Strangely, it satisfied a craving he did not realize he had. Or, more accurately, a hunger that up until now had never been sated.
He did not argue. How could he argue with the round, blonde vampire whose touch fulfilled all his small hungers?
He hit the ceiling of their tunnel and the tip of the pike broke into air.
Sweet air. Fresh air. Cold air.
Snow drifted down through the hole.
“Oh!” Anthea said. “This is definitely not Las Vegas!” She jumped to get a better look. “Lift me up, love,” she said as the dress flowed over her hand. “Gloves, you know.”
He lifted her up so she could peer through the hole. She grinned.
Then she stuck her fingers through and into the air.
“Is it night?” he asked. She wasn’t a vampire who could walk in daylight. He probably wasn’t either, though he couldn’t remember that any more than he could remember his name.
She pulled back her hand. “It is!” She kissed his dusty forehead. “We’re home!”
He set her down and peered up at the hole. More snow dusted his face. He shook it from his eyes and laughed.
Parts of him remembered snow. Scandinavian fjord snow. Ural snow. Flakes dropping through Black Forest trees. Snows high up in the Pyrenees.
All the snows from all the times and the places.
He blinked and rubbed his cheek. These flashes would be his undoing.
A few more pokes with the head of the pike and the roof of their tunnel collapsed. Fresh air flowed in and moonlight laid down a beautiful, clean, silver sheen.
Anthea laughed and clapped her hands. And the dress…
The dress inhaled the world above and exhaled out all their burrowing dust. The shimmers that had been muted obsidian became gleaming black glass. The reflections that had been covered with dirt now danced with the refractions of crow feathers.
The dress wasn’t alive. Not in the living way of bugs and beetles, or birds and bats. It responded, and it processed, and it did what it wanted, but it was something more than life. Or something less. It was a force all by itself.
And it wanted back into the mundane world even more than he did.
He lifted Anthea up far enough that she could pull herself through the hole. He attached the pike to the harness on his back that he’d fashioned from his armor’s plating. Then he dusted his hands and gripped the edges of the hole.
The giant who did not remember his name, the huge man with the bolt scar on the side of his face and the inert magical armor on his body, pulled himself back into the world of people.
Anthea sat on a rock only a few paces away. She stared out over a lake as a halo of blonde curls surrounded by wave after wave of all the types of blackness.
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “There you are,” she said.
“How long have you been waiting?” he asked.
She shrugged again. “An hour. Maybe a bit more.”
And yet their pit had strung time along like his synchronous and asynchronous mind.
She tilted her head as she often did when she read his thoughts from the pulls and pushes of his face. “We moved through a veil,” she said, as if that was enough to explain the strangeness of the missing hour, maybe a bit more.
She stood and flowed toward him. “We were chosen, remember? The dress wants us to do good now.”
She’d spoken many times about being a “bad” capable of “good” and that’s why the dress chose her. Why all the dresses chose who they chose.
But he was not the wearer of a dress. He was just an eight-foot man with a broken pike and no memory of why he had hungers.
The dress fed them somehow, but they were still there, powerful and deep down in his bloods. Strong. Every single soul whipping around inside his chest wanted to feed, except for him.
He rubbed his ear. He confused himself as much as Anthea confused him about “kingdoms” and “power” and there always being a kernel of good. Always. Otherwise there wasn’t a circuit to exchange energy. And without the circuit, and the exchange, there was no life.
That’s how all the magicals came about, she’d said. That kernel called out and power rubbed up against power. Sparks followed, and energy flowed. And then the chaotic destruction of the universe coiled itself up into something that gave enough of a damn to regulate the flow.
Thus began what Anthea called the Universals: Turbulence, Injection, Deletion, and Entropy.
He walked over to her rock. A thin layer of ice had formed over most of the lake and reflected the volcano at the end of the valley.
She pointed at the lake. “This is not the land of the valkyries.”
He’d seen images of that mountain before, of its snow-capped symmetrical cone and its steep sides. Of the plateau of clouds that formed around her peak. Of the valley that now framed the view.
“Where are we?” he asked. He remembered images drawn on rice paper traded from faraway lands, and later photographs. Silk armor, too, and swords so sharp they severed limbs with ease.
“I think that’s Mount Fuji,” Anthea said.
Were they in… Japan? Nippon, he thought.
Her eyes widened and she pressed up against his side. “There are oni here,” she breathed. “Oni who have taken the attributes of vampires.”
She pointed.
The fox sat on the shore of the lake grooming the black tips of her ears as if she were a cat. She wiggled her fox snout. Then she stretched forward and shook her red fur from her head to her tails.
One, he thought, as he watched. And then it was three. Then seven.
And when she stretched her back legs and shifted her body forward, her front legs becoming arms and her head becoming human, he counted nine.
Then she became a radiant woman, beautiful beyond words with the silkiest, blackest hair and perfect porcelain skin. She dressed in flowing traditional robes in primary colors, in patterns that screamed imperial.
He blinked. Anthea inhaled.
The kitsune stood directly in front of them.
“Well, well,” she said. “What do we have here?” She cocked her head to the side at a painful angle and poked him in the chest. “Is that a dragon I see on your armor, my dear huge warrior?”
He looked down at the crest on his dull and lifeless armor. “Perhaps,” he said. The insignia was stylized, so he did not know for sure what it represented. A dragon was certainly possible.
The kitsune clapped once. “It is!”
Anthea looked up at his face, then at the kitsune, then back up at him. She opened her mouth, but then pinched her lips shut.
The kitsune grabbed Anthea’s jaw. “This gift.” She swirled her hand near the dress. “Is precious beyond all the magic in the world, my Lord!” She laughed. “We thank you!”
She stuck her fist into the blackness of the dress.
“Do not touch!” Anthea screamed.
“Why?” the kitsune said. “You are the sacrifice here, are you not? The gift to those from whom the Master of Vampires would demand tribute?” She reached for the dress again. “He knows the truth. I am a more worthy host.”
The dress recoiled and ballooned out like a sail to keep the kitsune from touching it.
The kitsune frowned. Her nostrils flared and she waved her hand at the wider world. “Why do you fret so? Your sibling has been busy with the mundanes, has it not? So, so busy.” She tsked. “Do you not wish to ride again?”
“You have no idea what I am,” Anthea said. She blinked as if suddenly aware that she hadn’t said the words that had come out of her mouth.
The kitsune shrugged dismissively. “Is that so?” She laughed melodically as if Anthea had said the silliest thing. “You are four. That is all that matters.”
“Leave her alone,” he said. This creature made his skin crawl as if that part of him who remembered the prison, and the sun, and the fresh sea air understood what it was looki
ng at.
The kitsune covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers as if to stifle a giggle. “Come now. You must be famished. I am.” She cocked her head to the side again, kissed those fingers, and reached out as if to set that kiss on his lips.
He grabbed her wrist. “How dare you touch me, minuscule worthless fox,” he growled. But he hadn’t said those words any more than Anthea had said You have no idea what I am.
She’d been correct; he had no idea who he was. What he was. How he carried so much magic—he felt it coiling around his body, and Anthea’s, and this horrid little vermin’s. But this part of him in control—the part that responded to the world so mundanely—it couldn’t access that magic.
But he could.
“I have a brother.” He remembered a bolt of lightning. Old magic, and a fool named Victor Frankenstein. And a… bride. A woman.
He looked up at the moon as it gleamed off the shoulder of Mount Fuji. This land was a paradise mundanes did not deserve.
Nor did the kami and their yoked demons.
The armor once manifested by the most willful of his parts lifted off his skin. It puffed into its constituent ash like a shroud of visible magic. Then it settled back onto his shoulders as the exquisitely tailored suit he preferred.
The pike, though, would need extra care. For now, it remained broken and on his back.
Anthea gasped. “We need to leave,” she said, but not to him, or to the kitsune. She said it to the dress.
“Go,” he said. He’d give her this boon. It was she, after all, who had drawn this snack to him. For a moment, he thought of sharing his spoils, but thought better of it. Anthea was not a vampire who would respond well to carrying the power of such a kitsune in her blood.
The dress coiled around Anthea’s plump body and up into her blonde curls. The kitsune hissed.
Anthea and the dress vanished.
“The Emperor will not be happy,” the kitsune snarled.
She fidgeted and shook and clearly did not understand the threat he posed. Which seemed interesting, since she was the most magical of kitsunes. And so, so naughty.
“Whatever,” Brother said. He snapped his fingers. “Where are my manners? My last turn was in the States.” He adjusted his cuffs. “Tell me, is there a Japanese equivalent to an irreverent American eye roll?”
The kitsune hissed.
No, she had no idea who was now in charge of his body.
“Dear Anthea was correct. You have no idea what you let into your beautiful country.” He snatched the kitsune around the neck and lifted her into the air.
She spit in his eye.
Brother chuckled. “No idea at all.”
How long had it been since he’d felt the satisfying pressure in his jaw as his fangs extended? Or the sating flow of warm, rich blood over his tongue? He slammed his mouth against the kitsune’s neck. And the taste of such magic and power!
He dropped the fox’s hollow corpse onto the frozen shore of a pristine Japanese lake. Slowly, carefully, he ran a finger around his lips. Best not to waste a drop of something so precious as the blood of a nine-tailed kitsune.
Why let his parts fight each other? Why settle for simply being the original vampire, the King of a long-dead Eastern European hovel and the pretender to the world’s throne, when he could be more than the sum of his parts?
He understood now the old magic in his blood that made his memories synchronous and asynchronous, current and serial, local and global. Why he had allowed that dress—and he knew exactly what that dress was, and what she meant for the world—to be the bait needed to draw in the worst, tastiest monsters of this lovely island.
He squatted next to the kitsune’s body. Such moments required reverence. “I thank you, my dear,” he said. Then he stood and rolled his shoulders.
He had not been a part of this world’s events for … how long? He gazed at the moon. “I do believe we are still some time from Samhain,” he muttered. So, a week, perhaps. Now he had returned, fully capable and flush with such power. This island truly was a paradise.
Where else would a god make his new home?
God Forsaken
When Lollipop comes looking to call in Frank’s debts, Frank and Wrenn find themselves in Tokyo and embroiled in a Frankenstein family reunion neither of them wanted—nor thought possible.
The Vampire God formerly known as Brother has escaped his prison. Add angry kami, needy mate magic, a language neither Frank nor Wrenn understands, fragile international magical diplomacy, and… well, culture really can be a shock.
* * *
GOD FORSAKEN, Northern Creatures #7, available June 10th!
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The Worlds of
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Smart Urban Fantasy:
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Northern Creatures
Monster Born
Vampire Cursed
Elf Raised
Wolf Hunted
Fae Touched
Death Kissed
God Forsaken
Magic Scorned (coming soon)
Genre-bending Science Fiction about
love, family, and dragons:
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World on Fire
Series one
Fate Fire Shifter Dragon
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
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Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories
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Series Two
Witch of the Midnight Blade
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Three
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Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series
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Series Three
World on Fire
Call of the Dragonslayer (coming soon)
Hot Contemporary Romance:
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Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul
Thomas’s Need
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About the Author
Kris’s Science Fiction universe, World on Fire, brings her descriptive touch to the fantastic. Her Urban Fantasy series, Northern Creatures, sets her magic free. She’s traversed many storytelling worlds including dabbles in film and comic books, spent time as a talent agent and a textbook photo coordinator, as well written nonfiction. But she craved narrative and richly-textured worlds—and unexpected, true love.
Kris lives in Minnesota with one husband, two daughters, and three cats.
For more information
www.krisaustenradcliffe.com