Fire and Fantasy: a Limited Edition Collection of Epic and Urban Fantasy

by CK Dawn

  It was a good question and she thought back to the last time it had happened. According to her knowledge of surface history, it had happened around the time Admiral Nelson fought for the British.

  “Our ways are… different than your own. Atlantis is big for an island but small for a country. Combined with our unique biological heritage, and inherent magical abilities, death from illness and accidents are few and far between. We have to carefully manage our bloodlines, and…”

  Wash shook his head, holding up his hand. “Manage your bloodlines? What does that mean?”

  Her link beeped at her again. She gave him an apologetic look before answering. “Hello?”

  “They’ll take the five-hundred thousand,” her sister practically growled in the phone.

  “See I knew they would be resona—”

  “They want it in cash and in person! Be at the Marina de Salinas by 3:00 AM with the money or they will cut off my ears.” She sounded a lot more angry than scared, but the line went dead before Caitlin could say anything else.

  “Your sister?” asked Wash. The car warned them of impending manual control, turning their seats back to face the road as the steering wheel slid out into position. Wash gripped the sewn leather cover just as the car jerked back over to manual.

  “Yes.” She gritted her teeth. How would she even get that kind of money in the middle of the night? In the morning she could walk into any bank and withdraw it, but she couldn’t pull a half-million from an ATM.

  And then there was the photo shoot. The marina she mentioned was an hour away. It was almost midnight now, leaving her only three hours to secure the money, complete her part of the shoot, and be there in time to collect her sister.

  Wash, to his credit, drove in silence, letting her think through the problem.

  As she thought, a pit formed in the bottom of her stomach. She only knew one person who kept that kind of money available in cash. He always traveled with it, to show off. Tipping generously—almost to the point of being ridiculous—was his favorite way of letting people know exactly how meaningless large sums of money were.

  Dirkshire.

  She bit her lip at the thought of asking him for help. They’d broken up. Now, she was going to have to go crawling back to him and ask for help. Worse, she knew he would do it too, if for no other reason than to have leverage on her.

  “Wash, I have an idea, but… do you trust me?”

  “Caitlin, do you really have to ask that at this point?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  He glanced over at her. “Then, yes. Absolutely.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder, running her fingers up until they pressed against his neck and up into his hair. No static, no dissonance, whatever he did when she cast only seemed to happen when she channeled magic. But she kept checking, just to test the theory.

  At least, that was her excuse.

  Caitlin had left Wash behind in the food services tent, with instructions to the staff to take care of him.

  As she walked away she turned to make sure he was okay, only to find him watching her go. Her heart leaped and she smiled at him while walking backward for a few seconds.

  Turning her back, she made for the business tent. Already, everything around her felt a little colder without him. She felt her back straightening as she walked, almost like she was putting on armor to head into battle.

  It kind of was armor, really. She had to be Strong Caitlin, now. Never embarrassed, or sad, or lonely, or in need of a hand to hold.

  Because that makes a woman weak. And she was not a weak woman. She was made out of metal. At least on the outside.

  But she’d need to be metal on the inside, too, if she was going to do what she was planning.

  Wash was certainly easy on the eyes, but so were a lot of men. Most without half his compassion and kindness. He was one in a hundred. Which is what made her next move all the more difficult.

  The shoot had four tents set up tonight. Food services, makeup, changing, and business. Caitlin and four other models were on the beach and she knew from experience that the head of the company would be here. What had ever possessed her to date this man? Wash was a bucket of cold water on her life that she desperately needed.

  Without another thought she slipped casually inside the tent, ducking beneath the flap.

  “Dirk, I need to ask you a…” she’d started talking before entering the tent. “Wow.” She stopped. Dirkshire, even in his late thirties was a handsome man with an athletic build. Salt and pepper hair, but just enough for him to seem wise, and dark blue eyes set into a well-angled face had always appealed to her.

  Currently, he was holding one of his assistants, their lips mere inches apart. The girl—no more than nineteen, if that—was breathless.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” Caitlin asked innocently.

  Dirkshire straightened himself, adjusting his tie and nodding for the girl to go who was more than happy to duck away, eyes on the sand as she walked past Caitlin.

  “You broke up with me, remember? You don’t get an opinion on who I move on with,” he said. The tent wasn’t much. Four walls, a door, two windows facing the water, his desk a chair and a commercial sized link. He moved around behind his desk and slid into his power chair with all the grace of a snake.

  “Listen,” she waved her hand through the air to end the fight before it started. “I don’t care. You want to make moves on your assistants, by all means. That isn’t why I’m here.” She noticed the conspicuous absence of a chair she could sit in while they spoke. Either he intended his guests to stand the whole time or sit in the sand. The usual power play stupidity she hated. Instead, she walked around his desk and sat on the corner close enough he had to lean back awkwardly to look her in the eye.

  He cleared his throat before looking up at her. She smiled back, just as friendly as ever. He really should know better than to play games with her. She always won.

  “Then why are you here? Besides your contract of course.”

  He expected her to renew and she hadn’t intended too. Modeling was fun like she told Wash, but she tired of the games and politics of it. If she could arrange it, this would be her last shoot. She had more important things to do.

  “I need a loan, short term—literally until the banks open. Only five-hundred thousand.”

  His face went white and his eyes bulged. “Five-hundred-thousand?”

  She nodded, waiting patiently for the answer she knew he would give.

  “No.” He composed himself, adjusting his tie like he did whenever he bought himself some time to think.

  “Dirk, it’s important. You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t.”

  “How important? Enough to renew your contract with us? Don’t look at me like that, legal says you haven’t returned their paperwork. Our relationship—”

  “Or lack thereof,” she interjected.

  “Our relationship aside, this is business. We need you, Caitlin. People love seeing you in the ads and in the AR. You’re not just a fashion model. You’re an icon. And our companies like having you as a brand.”

  She was good for business. The problem is, since she met Wash, things in her life had changed. A human who could hear spirits was far more important than the latest fashion or even her charities. If people could hear spirits, the world would change overnight.

  “Give me the five-hundred and I will seriously think about it. Right now, though, I have more on my mind than modeling.”

  He shook his head. “I know how you operate. Sign a new contract or no deal.”

  Caitlin balled her fist behind her back. He had her over a barrel and knew it. However, she had cards he wasn’t expecting her to play.

  “How about this, I do one shoot on Atlantis and we call it good?”

  The agency had tried forever to convince her to do a photoshoot on an Atlantean beach. The answer had always been no. It had to be. While tourists and visitors were allowed on the island, her dad would fre
ak out if she brought a fashion crew with her.

  “This year?” He narrowed his eyes at her as if he suspected some kind of trap.

  She nodded. “No tricks, one shoot, no more than one day, me or any other model you want.”

  This was really going to hurt her. Her parents would be furious. She doubted telling them it was for Daphne would make it any better. If it were up to her, they would never find out about Daphne’s little incident. She would just have to endure their anger.

  “Done,” he said reaching under his desk. A series of beeps sounded beneath him as he opened his traveling safe. Just as she knew he did, he plopped out a stack of neatly folded bills. When he was done there were ten stacks of fifty thousand each. She glanced around for something to put them in, a pink display bag with flowers and humming birds printed on it for this springs fashion sat next to the door awaiting final approval. She snatched it up and stuffed the money into its many pockets.

  “Don’t forget our deal,” he said as she finished packing everything in.

  “I won’t, and thank you.”

  She left without a backward glance if she hurried she could hand the cash off to Wash and be done with her photo shoot in an hour.

  If she were lucky.

  Six

  Wash glanced at the timer he’d opened in the AR as he flipped through the photos. The minutes ticked down showing him how many were left before they had to leave to drop off the cash. She’d returned to him a half-hour after they arrived and handed him a burgundy bag filled with cash, and told him to hang tight.

  The food services tent held six tables and a half-dozen people to take orders and hand out food. The aroma of honest-to-god steak caused a visceral reaction from his stomach. Apparently being Caitlin’s guest had its perks, within seven minutes of asking for one, a plate of sizzling corn-fed beef rested in front of him. He reduced it to gristle and bone within a few minutes.

  Now he was back looking through photos of Caitlin. If Milo was anything, he was thorough. The only thing he didn’t have were pictures of her in the shower, though probably not for lack of trying. After twenty minutes of flipping through the photos, Wash’s arm started to ache from the constant swiping left.

  He reconfigured the link to show him six at a time. They were smaller, less detailed images, but he could move through them faster. Really, all he was doing was looking for Daphne’s blonde hair or anything unusual.

  Then, he found it. Twenty-four hours after Caitlin’s arrival, a limousine showed up in Milo’s pics, and Daphne stepped out. At least, it looked like her. Wash closed his eyes and tried to remember the moment the elevator doors opened.

  She was an elf, obviously. With her hair up, it was easy to see her pointed ears. Like Caitlin, her eyes were slightly bigger than any human could naturally have had, which helped him understand the surgical trend a few years ago where women had been getting their eyes enlarged. He’d thought it was weird at the time. Well, he still thought it was weird—but now he knew the reason behind it.

  Daphne had curly blonde hair, blue eyes, and a dimple on her cheek. Beautiful, by any standard, but nothing that could hold a candle to Caitlin. At least, not in his eyes. He knew that blue-eyed, blonde thing was up a lot of people’s alley.

  There was something carefully curated and flawless about Daphne’s appearance, which was contrasted against the easy, chic comfort of the way Caitlin styled herself—at least on her own time. Most of the magazines seemed to lean towards a look he’d heard described as ‘fierce’ and ‘editorial’ for Caitlin.

  He swiped through several more photos until Milo had a good front shot of Caitlin, including a few the photographer had marked as his favorites. He checked the time stamp on it and it was taken the previous morning, not long before Caitlin found him.

  The stream of photos was interrupted with a video of the lobby. Wash played it at 4x speed. Four men walked through the lobby, past the subject of Milo’s video, which were a handful of bikini-clad models posing with tourists.

  The lobby was pretty full, and the only reason Milo was filming was because of a handful of bikini-clad models posing with tourists. The four men walking through could have been random strangers, but… a sense of familiarity gnawed at Wash.

  The men who kidnapped Daphne were masked, so there was no way to compare features. The man in front had gray at his temples, his shoulders set in a determined walk Wash recognized. The other three followed him closely.

  The large one in the back… he was an orc. Wash zoomed in. There, yellow tusks jutting out from behind his lower lip. He’d heard of them, but couldn’t recall ever having seen one. They were a pretty low percentage of the population. He hadn’t been in the elevator with the other three. Rear guard maybe?

  Still, there was something familiar about these guys.

  The video ended, and there was a sudden four-hour jump to the time stamp of the next photo. Abruptly, Wash was looking at a photo of his own ugly mug, staring wide-eyed and blank out the window of Caitlin’s Aston.

  There had to be a mistake. He flipped back through scanning the time stamps more carefully. If these guys were the kidnappers, and his gut and their clothes, told him they were, why would they show up four hours before they took Daphne? Were they casing it? It seemed a little last-minute for pros like these guys.

  He went back to the video of the four men, took a still shot, and sent it to Caitlin’s link.

  Another hour passed with no word from Caitlin. It was coming up on 1:30 pretty quickly. If they didn’t leave soon, they wouldn’t have time to make it to the drop-off. He went to the door of the foodservice tent and was considering venturing out in search of Caitlin when he saw her.

  His heart stopped. The photo shoot lights lit her up in front, with the silver light of the moon reflecting off the water behind her.

  They’d changed her into another outfit for the shoot—probably one of many. It was a dress made up of thin, bandage-like strips of material, gauzy and probably transparent, but layered on top of each other, they covered her up. The concealment didn’t make her any less gorgeous, it just enhanced her lines, cutting her out against the pale sand.

  He was sure of it, now. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. He watched her for the last segment of her shoot. The last thing they had her do was run through the water, splashing and laughing as they snapped away. Every other model there for the shoot was every bit as sexy, but she was magnetic.

  He shook his head free only to look around and see he wasn’t the only one she had the effect on. Everyone who wasn’t directly involved in the shoot had paused what they were doing to watch her. If it wasn’t magic he didn’t know what was.

  Wash was dreaming, floating in the air, passing buildings and clouds alike. Water cascaded beneath him… except it wasn’t water. It was hard and smelled of twenty years of fish guts. The buildings vanished in a few blinks of an eye replaced with crab cages and peeling paint.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. He felt groggy. Had he been drugged? He blinked hard several times. He was on a boat inside the pilot’s cabin. The rocking motion and lap of water against her hull was familiar, like an old friend, after how many years he had spent at sea.

  But… how had he gotten here?

  It came back to him in a rush. After the photo shoot, he’d driven Caitlin to the marina. She brought him along with her, carrying the pink bag with the money in it. They’d went down the docks and then…

  The tac-tac-tac of a Taser.

  He remembered it clearly. The pain of all his muscles convulsing at once, the falling forward, and… darkness.

  The marina had been a setup. But why? They had the money, and there wasn’t going to be anymore. Not if Caitlin were telling the truth about her parents.

  The rattle of a chain caught his attention. He was stuffed into a bunk, his hands duct taped in front of him and his feet to the bed. Whoever had taken him was outside. Duct tape was a poor restraint. He was glad it wasn’t zip-
ties or metal. He lifted his legs to his chest spreading his knees to reach the tape around his ankles. His cold, numb fingers slipped off the tape several times, and it took him a minute to rip up the side of the tape. It tore easily from there.

  “I still don’t know how he survived.” A loud voice, with a German accent, muffled by the walls but audible enough he could make out what the voice was saying.

  At least, Wash thought it was German. How long had been out? His heart leaped as he realized Caitlin wasn’t anywhere in the small cabin. He put his fingers to the spot behind his right ear—no link. They searched him then—not that they would’ve found anything significant. All he had were the clothes on his back and the link.

  “Doesn’t matter,” a different man spoke. His deep, guttural voice marred only by a lisp as if his mouth were full of something. Was that the orc? He’d seen one or two on the vids. They usually sounded like they were talking around something—which, he guessed, they were.

  “It’s a twofer, the elf, and the diver. Not to mention we get to keep the 500k,” the guttural voice said.

  “Still, it’s weird. You almost ready?”

  More chains rattled on the deck. The elf? Did they mean Daphne? No. They had Caitlin. But why kill her and not Daphne? Or had they already killed Daphne—something loud splashed into the water.

  Caitlin!

  Wash leaped out of the bunk, banging his aching head on the metal above. He didn’t care. The inside of the boat was tiny, barely big enough for two bunks and the bridge. The wooden door withered under his booted assault. Three men stood at the stern, watching Caitlin. Her hands were bound with duct tape and a chain wrapped around her ankles, rapidly fed into the ocean behind whatever heavy thing they’d thrown in. Her eyes opened, confusion on her face when the chain went taught. She screamed as her entire body jerked off the boat to splash into the depths.

  The men turned to face Wash, and he roared, charging at them. One of them lunged, and he ducked beneath the man’s swing. Weights for the crab cages were stacked on one side of the deck, and he grabbed one of the twenty-pounders. Something hit him in the back—a heavy blow that almost staggered him—but he kept running for the railing.