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

by CK Dawn

  Or he could when he had his power. Like all miscellus, his abilities were reduced by war, so the rumor mill said.

  The main structure, instead of growing up, had simply swelled like a trumpet player’s cheeks, adding an extra eighteen thousand feet to the already spacious building. From the underside of each of the many rounded protrusions grew legs. Pigeon legs on one small bulge and sheep’s hooves under another. To aid in supporting the additional weight was the most logical conclusion, though why the limestone centipede legs of the east wing twitched occasionally was still a mystery.

  The thirty-foot stone gargoyles at the palace’s front entrance followed Quill’s approach, the left one silently easing in front of the great doors as nimbly as if it were flesh and blood. The other hissed from behind her, its fetid breath smelling of thousand-year-old death.

  Angry at the terror these guards provoked after so many years and more late-night reports and summons than she could remember, Quill changed direction and walked stiffly to the servants’ entrance in the back of the building and knocked.

  A one-armed Bogle opened the door with a smirk, stepping aside and waving Quill in with a jeering bow.

  Ignoring him, Quill stepped into the dimly lit mudroom and was unprepared for the punch that jerked her head back and rang her ears.

  “Learn your fuckin’ place,” Doque’s cook, a bog troll, snarled punctuating each word with a slap.

  Quill caught the troll’s hand as it descended towards her again and squeezed until she felt the cook’s bones snap. Even then, Quill kept squeezing until the cook’s pus-yellow tears drooled to the stone floor in long strings.

  “Please, lady,” the troll begged, its round pot belly jerking as it sobbed.

  Quill dropped the cook’s hand and walked to the fountain that gurgled down one wall and into a copper basin, tarnishing the wall in chalk-blue stripes. She cupped her shaking hands under the icy flow, drank a bit, and splashed her heated face repeatedly.

  There were very few who lived comfortably in this place: Doque, his first circle, a few influential others. The rest watched their backs, covered their asses and kept their noses clean as though such things were the only prayers keeping them out of the Devil’s grasping clutches. As a result, folk in this shadowed place took advantage of all opportunities to dominate, no matter how small.

  Quill knew this, had done it a time or two herself. Her reaction to the cook was over the top—a portrait of her own inability to accept her changed status.

  She turned back to the troll and the bogle, crouched on the sill of a four-foot window. “Patty, I’m sorry.” She smiled half-heartedly at the cook.

  “No worries, chère.” The cook sniffled. They both watched as a kitsune darted through the mudroom door from the kitchen, the creature’s nine tails—some long haired and fluffy, others short and sleek—all standing tall at the prospect of a treat. With a wary look up at Quill, the foxlike beast crouched beside the small puddle of Patty’s tears and lapped at them.

  “C’est la vie,” the bogle said, unbending his ultra-long body from his perch. The curved hump of his back was exaggerated by the pegs of his spine, and his ribs and the frantic beat of his heart were clearly visible through his dull skin.

  She met the bogle’s bulging eyes, clouded with rheumatism, wickedness and age, and nearly wept at the compassion she saw there.

  Slaves all of them.

  That she worked the house and they the fields was the moth-eaten curtain that separated them.

  Apologies were rare in this world, and dangerous besides; regret was as much of a disability as a shot to the groin.

  Quill made amends nonetheless, determined to remain the sincere person she’d become in Jasper’s patchwork household, and stubbornly convinced that unlike the slaves of the Shade, she’d be able to slough off her duplicitous existence and keep her brand-new skin in the end.

  “The Thorned Wood is blossoming,” she offered as part of her apology. “I saw ripe raspberries and naseberries as I passed.”

  “The harpies will be out then,” the bogle said.

  Quill suppressed a shudder at the thought of the giant crows with bald human heads who patrolled that wood for prey lured by warm, fragrant fruit. “Guinep fruit pie,” Quill mused. “Might be worth it.”

  “Duppy Soursop’s in season,” the bogle—Thorston—said with a grin.

  Patty grinned back, mopping her face with her stained apron. “Let me just fetch my crossbow.”

  “I’ll get the wheelbarrow from the beryl mine entrance,” he said and took off down a nearly black corridor, his odd shuffle-limp beating a hollow rhythm.

  Quill followed Patty through the large kitchen that the war, or Doque, had transformed from granite and stainless steel to a dank cavern covered in stalactites of raw, red carnelian or mother-of-pearl or newly formed amber, still sticky and containing a frozen Jack or two. The center islands, once well-worn maple and wheeled for convenience, were now blocks of solid snowflake obsidian, and the sinks were grooved depressions in light-green jade, as if someone had simply scooped out handfuls of gemstone. A set of heavy, two-foot thick, textured glass doors covered the entrance to the freezer, the first twenty feet or so of which was dedicated to food storage. A bullwhip and an elephant prod were available for the rest which went on endlessly as far as Quill knew, a jagged landscape containing monsters indigenous only to it.

  “He’s in a good mood,” Patty said as they left the kitchen and passed through the laundry and sewing rooms. “Just ate.”

  “Pan’s Feast must be an ordeal for such a big household. What did you serve?”

  “Not me, cher. Viktor put on one hell of a job fair down at the library. Surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

  Oh, Quill’d heard. Mama Neck Tie had teased her about it, making Quill wonder anxiously how much the zombie really knew about her.

  “Picked a bushel of ripe nightberries for the master. That Viktor! One look and bam, he knows your flavor.” The cook chortled and imitated Viktor’s guttural accent as she pointed to imaginary produce. “Sweet! Sour! Creamy! Spicy! Gotta said she’d never seen so many applicants.”

  “I imagine not,” Quill murmured, thinking of Viktor’s shy assistant, a duendes elf Viktor found at one of his “job fairs” just after the ceasefire. Her promotion from nightberry to assistant had taken decades of work under Viktor’s sadistic supervision before she was allowed out of his pleasure chamber. Nicknamed Gotta because she started most of her sentences that way (“Gotta get back, Gotta feed Viktor, Gotta…”), her patience yielded her privacy—her own rooms, a small salary and a berry or two of her own whenever she hankered.

  “Viktor took ’em all. Fat, skinny, black to white, ugly, beautiful. There’s use for them all in the Dark.” Patty nodded and stopped in front of an ancient sequoia, easily four hundred feet tall, though no part of it was visible from outside the palace. A set of stairs wound around its thirty-foot diameter trunk leading to Doque’s private rooms and higher to the palace’s formal rooms, torture chambers, pleasure aviaries, residences and guest chambers.

  “You good?” said Patty, stopping at the foot of the stairs, clearly anxious to be off.

  “Don’t let me keep you.” Quill watched the cook trot off to the armory and slowly made her way up the stairs, staying well away from the nests of golden parakeets that hung from the sequoia’s branches like large Chinese lanterns. Scavengers of the dead, golden parakeets had been known to flock to the living if dead meat was scarce.

  About thirty feet above the main floor, she stepped off the stairs onto a thick branch that led to Doque’s apartments to avoid the descending gryphon a flight above her, its talons clacking loudly as they hit each step.

  Quill ignored the beast as it shrieked at her and concentrated on quickly crossing the branch while sidestepping knots and twigs and the army of fist-sized black ants that marched to a red ant stronghold.

  She reached Doque’s unobtrusive door—glossy black with a plain bras
s knocker—lit by a tiny phoenix trapped in a hurricane lamp.

  Quill eased through the door—already slightly ajar—and took in the wreckage before lowering her eyes deferentially.

  Naked, Doque slouched in an embroidered croissant couch, his head resting on its high back. Built like few fae Quill had ever seen, either light or dark, Doque was not simply tall, close to seven feet, but solid, perhaps two hundred and seventy pounds. He’d cut his hair since she’d last seen him, and she wondered how the court’s PR machine would spin the new person this deceptively simple change had wrought.

  A “gentle giant” was one way the media routinely referred to him. “Accepting of all creatures great and small” was another, and despite the singular color of his hair—Scottish man’s red—the length softened everything about him from his body, hard with the muscle of a runner, to his face—wide jaw; subtly cleft chin; broad, agile mouth that smiled often; straight, immaculate nose; and eyes that drooped a bit at the corners like a hound’s. A good face, handsome though not uncomfortably so. An artist’s face, compassionate and empathetic, and the hair the color of sunset at its middling point and waving past his shoulders reinforced that image.

  His eyes, unfortunately, blew it to smithereens.

  A hard reflective black, nothing differentiated pupil from iris and only an abnormally small amount of sclera kept his eye socket from looking empty. They appeared to be devoid of his soul; only your own image was reflected there. At times, signifying everything and nothing at all, they were tinged with deep, sea blue, as if all that infinite black were covered by another, transparent lid.

  In front of company, Doque had a way of averting his gaze or looking through strands of hair that made most humans believe him good and kind. Many were easily charmed by the image of a large introvert that he patented and agreed to whatever business he proposed. Many sighed and wished for such a man in their beds and by their sides.

  Who knew hair could do so much? Quill thought, and peeked at the dark prince again.

  Ruthlessly cut to a stylized Mohawk, the sides of his hair were layered close to his skull so that it whorled towards the inch-long, pitched crest at his crown. The result revealed him thoroughly. A beautiful, brutal monster drowsed on that odd couch, his chest expanding as he let loose a gusty sigh. All hard lines, steep angles and pale gold skin—only a fool would continue to describe him as shy, so potent was the sociopathic practicality that radiated from him like a pheromone.

  “Fish?” he murmured, his gravelly baritone empirically seductive.

  Suddenly leery, Quill stepped onto the low sill of a high, arched window and flicked heavy platinum drapes over her. Peering through the eyeleted fabric, she watched Fish, a scion of Irusan and Doque’s personal assistant, slink into the room, his cat-like features perfectly composed despite the room’s erotic disarray.

  Bodies of all shapes, colors, sizes and genders lay on the floor, some panting heavily, some covered in sweat, all leaking blood.

  “Another berry?” Fish asked.

  “Water, Fish. Just water.” Doque cupped his genitals tenderly and added, “And maybe an ice pack.”

  Gliding to an alcove that led to a fully stocked bar, Fish returned with a glass of water, a half of a blood orange and a terry cloth towel bulging with ice. He handed the pack to Doque and then examined the closest body with a frown before moving to another. With a brief smile at his find, he picked up the unconscious human’s hand, picked away the scabs that had begun to form on the man’s wrist and milked it until the glass of water swirled a deep red. He added a few squeezes of the orange and handed the glass to his master.

  Doque placed the cool glass on his forehead before sipping from it, his weary gemstone eyes following Fish as the servant loaded berries into a large laundry cart.

  “Have we heard anything from the search committee, Fish?”

  “They’ve narrowed their selection to three candidates.”

  At Doque’s nod Fish continued. “There’s Nestor Lebedev, miscellus, though he declined to reveal his race or ethnic origin.”

  “A surgeon?”

  “Self-taught,” Fish said, upending a groaning heavyset human woman into his cart. “But his CV is three hundred pages long.”

  “Impressive,” Doque set his ice pack aside and examined his genitals with a frown.

  “Shall I summon Clarice?”

  Quill grinned, visualizing the healer’s stinger poised over Doque’s cock.

  He ignored Fish with a scowl. “Next.”

  “Dr. Andrew Morris, human. Is being considered for head of cardiothoracic surgery at the Temple-White Clinic and would—” Fish cocked his head to one side as if remembering. “Ah yes—‘Would welcome the opportunity to direct such a momentous dissection.’ He would be willing to assist or simply observe if we settle on another candidate.”

  “Eager,” Doque commented. “Generally I’d find that appealing, but in this case one wrong cut could destroy everything I’ve worked for.”

  “Zeal does not always replace experience,” Fish said. “Lastly is Bertram Kaminsky, a local butcher who made a name for himself by being able to de-vein anything with little to no damage inflicted on the muscle.”

  “Human? Miscellus?”

  “That area of his application was left curiously blank.”

  “Find out. And wrap up the interviews as soon as possible. There’s no predicting how much longer Dragon will hold together.” Doque scrubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know what I was thinking storing that much power in a human.”

  “My lord,” Fish said his voice tinged with exasperation. “When are you going to forgive yourself for not being able to anticipate every turn of the globe?” He ran a hand over Doque’s hair and along his jaw, tipping up the prince’s bowed head and bussing his brow. “You siphoned power that was carefully hidden for months before—” he broke off at Doque’s almost comical glower. “You know who,” he continued, “caught on. Finding the right vessel for it was always part of the plan. Having to shove it in a human infant was simply,” he shrugged his shoulders, “a brilliant piece of last-minute innovation.”

  “Delicately put.” Doque chuckled, sobering with a regretful shake of his head. “I was lucky to get as much as I did—”

  “There are mere crumbs left in the original vessel. I’d say that a bit more than luck was involved in pulling off the biggest heist since the beginning of time,” Fish enthused with religious fervor.

  “You are good for this old sinner’s heart.” Doque grinned, covering Fish’s hand with his own. “I want no loose ends once the extraction is complete,” he murmured. “See to it personally, will you?”

  Fish’s rejoinder fading into nothing, Quill covered her mouth with one hand to keep her fear for Dragon from spilling out. She frantically went over every report she’d made to Doque and tried to reconcile them with an eventuality that had Dragon on a table, bound, gagged while some hack sliced through muscle and bone looking for Shiva only knew what.

  Forcing her fear aside, Quill gazed through the heavily embroidered holes in the curtains and waited for more details of her child’s fate.

  “Virgins for the next summit,” Doque was saying. “Utterly untouched and ignorant, if such a thing exists in this day and age.”

  “Of course,” Fish said. “Though the tenor of the event will depend entirely on whether you are simply the Shade or are The Shade.” At Doque’s blank look he clarified, “Imbued with the magic you harvest from the girl.”

  “You overstep yourself, Fish,” Doque said, softly his mood shifting without warning. “You know nothing of my intentions.” His accent, a subtle mixture of a forgotten emerald world and millennia of experience, was full of breath-stealing menace.

  Having been on the receiving end of Doque’s lightning-quick mood changes more times than she could count, Quill almost felt sorry for the avatar.

  Almost.

  He’d clawed his way to his current position by being outspoken and by
using his razor-sharp wit to amuse the most powerful denizens of this shadowland, especially its prince. He’d also employed the most passive-aggressive techniques to backstab the lovers, friends and family he’d stepped on to achieve the rarified air he now breathed, though to hear him tell it, it was he who’d been thrown under the bus for simply trying to help. He who was declared innocent even though he held a bloody dagger—literally speaking in some instances.

  There was no chance Fish missed the serrated-edged foreboding that filled the room but, particularly during these last few years, he’d become confident that Doque could not do without him. This was a mistake of ticking time bomb proportions, and many bets were laid in the darkest corners of the back nine as to when it would explode in his face.

  In this instance, Fish employed a smile of tempered enthusiasm and filled his slanted eyes with innocent good will.

  Quill thought the role of excited ingénue was ill-fitting, distasteful, especially given Fish’s gastronomical preferences, but Doque, well…

  “Forgive me, Father,” Fish said, making Quill roll her eyes. Doque liked to think of himself as some sort of savior to all fae, but no one else did. Those who called him Father did so in an attempt to curry favor. Everyone knew this, including Doque, who was nevertheless charmed by the affectation.

  “I spoke thoughtlessly,” Fish continued. “It’s just—after all this time, things are finally starting to fall into place.” He bit his lower lip as if to contain his anticipation, his exposed canines doing little to make him seem repentant in Quill’s opinion.

  Doque chuckled, took the length of printed Egyptian cloth from Fish and wrapped it around his waist.

  With a long-suffering sigh, and in a gesture that spoke of considerable intimacy, Fish unwound the long cloth, shook it out and rewrapped it expertly about his master. “There.” He grinned up at Doque, his paw-like hands still resting on Doque’s hips.