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

by CK Dawn

  “The Sun has that kind of power. Always had, even through that Pan bullshit.”

  “Shade too,” Charlemagne said.

  “Doque wouldn’t—”

  “He would,” Charlie said. “That and more and you friggin’ know it.” He placed a heavy hand on Fel’s shoulder. “Let it go, buddy. He’s not your friend.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Flannacán. He’s got a realm to think of. That trumps friendship every single time. Besides, he and Mahb have been at each other’s throats almost since the beginning of fae. You honestly believe he loves you more than he hates her?”

  Fel gave Charlie and Jeff his back. “No,” he muttered. “I stopped believing that a long time ago. Remember that facility in South Kudzu?” Fel faced Charlie with a grim smile. “Filled to the brim with Shades from peons to bigwigs. All of them ready to be experimented on. Doque signed the bill of sale for the lot. In blood.”

  “‘Needed money to fund our efforts,’ he said. A few thousand lives sacrificed to save millions. That’s fair.” Charlie sneered at the memory.

  “I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. What’s relevant here,” Fel shrugged off the lingering sting of that particular betrayal, “is someone with serious juice is pulling Gemma’s strings to get to me.

  “Why am I still so important, Charlie? I left Mahb’s court to put a stop to all the speculation and machinations. ‘Will Mahb choose him to rule over her own children?’ It was all bullshit. So I left. I broke her heart,” he said visualizing Mahb’s face harden and cracking like overcooked pottery when he aligned himself with Doque. “Man, I used to call her Mom ߴ’cause she was more of a mother to me than my own and I broke her for the good of the realm and became a soldier for the good of all fae.

  “I haven’t been home in so long just thinking about the green fields of the Sun and the complex jungles of the Shade hurts like a gut punch. No one in their right mind thinks I have any influence over the Blazing Sun or Welcoming Shade. Why am I still so fucking important? Why was I ever so important?”

  “Uh, I’m kinda on the clock here,” Jeff said, throwing his hands up in surrender at the angry glares leveled at him. “I’m sorry to interrupt the healing, but I’ve got papers to grade and an anniversary gift to pick up.”

  “You’re married?” Charlie’s voice was disbelieving.

  “Engaged. It’s only been a couple months, but I want to celebrate every moment before I smoke her organs and make jerky out of her flesh. Been feeding her concentrated doses of mesquite roasted jalapenos to give her more fla—”

  Charlemagne’s sword was a blur as it cleanly cut through the demon’s neck.

  Both men watched disinterestedly as Jeff’s head rolled about four feet away from the rest of his slowly crumpling body.

  “Sanitation’ll get that,” Charlie said.

  Fel ignored the dead demon and started pacing. “I wanna run, Charlie. I wanna grab Dragon and just disappear.”

  Charlie wiped his sword on the demon’s wife-beater. “If the Sun’s really behind all this, she’d find you. She’s got your blood on file, right?” He continued at Fel’s curt nod. “And you’ll recall I warned you not to volunteer any fluids to Doque.”

  “You gave too.”

  “Only because you did,” Charlie argued.

  “I pledged service and fealty. You were the one who got carried away and personally collected blood from our entire platoon.”

  Charlemagne’s posture was sheepish. “He had that call-to-arms music playing all fucking day and what with the speeches and the cheering and that amazing potato salad—what can I say? I got caught up.” Charlie tried to butch up by straightening his shoulders and flexing his pecs. “Anyway, they both got a direct line to you and unless you can change your blood, there’s really no hiding from them.”

  “My strategy of disappointing everyone who ever cared about me was as close as I’ve ever come to being anonymous in the world of fae.”

  “As close as anyone, buddy. You’re a true legend among the escaped prisoner set. What I’m getting at is maybe it’s time for a bit less bullshit and a few more answers.” Charlie resheathed his sword and stashed it in his duffel. “Know any oracles? Hell, a ha’penny psychic would be better than what we got now.”

  Fel nodded pensively and looked at the sky, valiantly resisting the saturated blue of midnight. “Dawn’s coming,” he said. “Paperboy who does my house will be delivering soon.”

  “So?”

  “Boy hit puberty early and came into some hellacious psychic powers. All natural and fully realized. Kid’s a savant or something.”

  “So, the answers we seek and the subsequent fate of the world rests on whether or not you’ve got cookies and milk in your kitchen?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Charlie met Fel’s eyes, his lips twitching. “Life’s a funny old dog,” he said, chuckling. He ran a hand over his buzz cut and gave in to his laughter.

  Fel joined him. “Isn’t it?” Still laughing he started walking towards his house.

  “How much you wanna bet, when people pinpoint the exact moment the world started going to shit, you’ll be blamed for it all because your fucking pantry was bare?”

  “Think we should stop at Knights and Rooks? I do have a hankering for some lapisberry caramel crunch.”

  “Sissy,” Charlie said, breaking into a slow jog.

  Fel increased his pace to keep up, encouraged when his heart only pounded with exertion instead of pain from the last leg of the DTs. “I’ll buy you some lollipop swirl,” he enticed.

  At that Charlie stopped, his face devoid of all humor. “You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone about that.”

  “I haven’t said a word. I’m still traumatized from watching you down three gallons of that crap in one sitting.”

  “I was just coming off a bad breakup,” Charlie started to explain then stopped at Fel’s twinkling eyes and grin. “Fuck you, man.”

  Eighteen

  They walked up the unobtrusive walkway of Fel’s rental just as dawn gained a substantial influence over evening.

  The pair of crouching stone gargoyles in Fel’s yard acknowledged the two miscellus warriors with a crumbling stretch of their intricately carved wings.

  “Wow,” Charlie said. “Talk about your fixer-upper.”

  Fel eyed the mustard aluminum siding of the three-bedroom ranch objectively. He’d updated the windows and changed out the front and back door safe-as-houses charms with newer ones. Granted they were fifty-fifty charms (fifty percent homegrown, fifty percent synthetic materials used to construct the charm), but they still worked most of the time.

  “The plumbing’s solid,” he said with a shrug. “The plan was to flip it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Selling houses takes too long. My vices required more immediate attention.”

  Charlie hummed noncommittally. “Got a key?”

  Fel nodded and approached the gargoyle on the left. “Eclipse,” he said. Upon hearing the password, the statue emitted a plaintive shriek before lifting its right foot.

  Fel snatched the key from under the raised stone claw. He strode up the walkway, pulled open the battered screen door and keyed open the metal front one. The hinges moaned like vengeful ghosts were on the other side—a standard-issue, prefab safe-as-houses charm. A single phantom escaped, its frantic movements dissipating with a pop when it hit the night air.

  “That’s supposed to repel a thief?” Charlie said.

  “Home invasion is sixty-seven percent more likely than robbery, adolescent mayhem and some drunk driving into your living room. Getting the full package would’ve cost a thousand vens, plus the monthly subscription price. I got home invasion.”

  “You weren’t living there so why bother to protect those who were?”

  “Exactly. You coming in or what?”

  “Hear that?” Charlie said, turning to face the cratered sidewalk and the approaching thirty-six
-inch-rim bicycle decorated with aces and kings in its spokes; a click-clacking herald of its unassuming rider.

  “Looks like your prophet is here. Heads up,” Charlie warned.

  Fel ducked to dodge the flying tube of Rapture. “Robynne!” he called when the delivery boy would’ve continued on his route.

  The jean-clad preteen skidded to a stop and hopped off his bike.

  “Did I hear a Y in that name?” Charlie said.

  “A Y, two Ns and an E,” Fel confirmed.

  “Wow. Romance novels?”

  “Soap fan.”

  “Too bad. Single mothers who read do it to me.”

  “Anything female does it to you.”

  “Hey, Mr. Fel,” a towheaded boy said, walking his bike back towards Fel’s front stoop. “My mom says hey and that she thinks you’re totally hot. I heard her and my Aunt Rachel say that they wouldn’t mind a nice, long stiff one from you.”

  Accustomed to women using him as some sort of life-sized Prozac or stand-in boyfriend, Fel simply smiled and said, “Thanks, kid. Tell your mom I said hey.” He glanced at Charlie, his tired eyes conveying his fill of being a local sex symbol. “I was wondering if you could give me some news. There’d be chow in it for you.” Fel held up the burlap sack from Rooks containing bee honey, raisin, and caramel chip ice cream; a gallon of organic apis’ milk; and sweet cream cookies. “And a couple of vens to warm your pocket.”

  “Okay,” the boy said hesitantly. “Just don’t tell my mom. She’s afraid the city’ll put me in the system like they did to magic bearers before the war. I keep telling her that stuff doesn’t happen anymore, but she worries, you know.”

  Fel nodded and motioned the boy inside, watching as Robynne chained his bike to a snarling gargoyle’s leg before bounding into the house.

  Once inside, Fel closed the door, threw the bag containing all his earthly belongings onto a padded ottoman that served as a coffee table and collapsed on one of the generic leather couches he picked up at a discount store when he decided to list his rental as furnished.

  Charlemagne eased onto the other one with an audible sigh and Robynne perched on the edge of the ottoman.

  “I need at least an inch of dirt, about this wide.” Robynne held his hands out about nine inches apart. “Helps me stay grounded. My gym teacher says most oracles use crystals, but I only got a hundred vens saved up. Besides, dirt works just as good.”

  Fel levered himself up and headed to the pantry. A rusted meat-loaf pan sat forlornly on the bottom shelf, and half a bag’s worth of topsoil was tucked away in the cabinet under the sink. He transferred a few handfuls to the baking pan and returned to the living room to find Charlemagne conducting a sex-ed class.

  “Start with a finger fuck—index finger first, like I showed you—then include middle and ring as needed. This will soften her up for—”

  “Charlie, save that shit for later.”

  “I just think the kid could use a few lessons. Keep some unsuspecting young thing from having a bad experience.”

  “I don’t disagree, just do it later.” He handed the pan of dirt to Robynne and sat on the couch again.

  “What do you want to know?” Robynne said. He placed one hand in the pan, glanced anxiously at Fel, then Charlemagne and, having apparently received some kind of answer from their polite stares, began picking his nose with the other.

  “Can you tell me,” Fel began then broke off distracted when Robynne retrieved a hunk of treasure and popped it into his mouth.

  “Dude,” Charlemagne whispered, horrified. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Mom says there are things you do in private and things that men do together in locker rooms or low-rent strip clubs. This isn’t a locker room or a strip club, but I figured it wasn’t the place that was important.”

  “Eating boogers is not something men do,” Charlie said.

  “Unless you’re Carlos and then you store them in a jar in the fridge until there’s enough to sauté with butter and garlic.”

  “Jesus. No wonder Goat always shows up at that battered women’s shelter on Prospect.”

  “Robynne, buddy, while you’re here do you think you can keep your fingers out of your nose? If you’re hungry I got cookies and ice cream.” Fel picked up the bag of food at his feet and handed it to the boy.

  “Can you tell me,” Fel tried again, watching as Robynne used the same hand that went up his nose to dig into the half-gallon of ice cream. “Why I generate so much interest?”

  “You’re less than half done,” Robynne said with a shrug. He gobbled down the ice cream in his palm and licked his fingers before reaching for more. “I meant to ask you about it when I first met you, but my mom was really laying it on about being polite to people, so I forgot.”

  “Half done?” Fel met Charlemagne’s confused gaze.

  “Less,” the boy corrected. “Way less.”

  “You mean like undercooked?”

  “More like one of them giant 3-D puzzles of the city library—the way it is now, not how it used to look. It’s practically done except for a few pieces lying next to it on the table. You? You’re the few missing pieces—not enough to screw up the whole puzzle, but totally different from each other, so you can’t try and make something new with just them. Each piece only makes sense with the puzzle, not without it. But the mostly finished part of the puzzle is awesome! It’s got a giant dome and elephant sentries wearing spiked helmets and battle armor, just like the new library.”

  “Except I have the missing the pieces?” Fel said bewildered. “I still don’t understand why being half done makes me the focus of so much attention.”

  “Less than half,” Robynne chirped, scooping out another palmful of ice cream.

  “Wouldn’t that make you easily ignored?” Charlie answered Fel.

  “Mrs. Hurwitz down the street says knowledge is power. If that’s true then the library’s the most powerful place in the world.”

  Robynne put the ice cream container on the ottoman and looked at Fel, his summer sky eyes taking on an intensity too wise for such a young boy. “You were once too.”

  Fel stifled to urge to scoff at the boy who channeled knowledge that many seasoned oracles found too unwieldy.

  At Fel’s best, his magic was never that potent, and he never commanded the kind of attention and fear that fae more powerful than he had.

  “Are you sure, buddy?” Fel asked and glanced at Charlie whose perplexed frown mirrored his own. “I’ve always known my limits,” he directed at Charlie. “Doing more than I was capable of always left me with the worst...hangover is the only word to describe it.”

  “Remember that ambush in the mountains of New Kabal?” Charlie said. “RUFO on our ass, a whole lot of nowhere to hide on either side of us and limestone cliffs in front. The drop to the valley below was what? Two thousand feet?”

  “Easily,” Fel agreed.

  “And you were trying to get our whole platoon down in a controlled descent and shield us from RUFO’s rain of fucking fire at the same time.”

  “I got us twelve hundred feet past the overhang—”

  “—The shielding had given out after about one hundred feet.”

  Fel nodded. “Then I passed out. Next thing I know, it’s three weeks later, we’re in Russia and most of the squad is dead.”

  “Those that could scaled down,” Charlie explained. “Some of us piled on the ledge you, by the grace of God, landed on. The rest, well, Mungo said he used the last of our emergency charms to make the fall go faster.”

  “Really?”

  “Who the fuck knows,” Charlie muttered bitterly. “Dead in ten seconds versus dead in five is still dead.”

  Guilt overwhelmed Fel and he lowered his gaze. This was one of many traumas that led to the sad-sack life he enjoyed now.

  “You did what you could.” Charlie’s platitude was automatic and a bit well-worn. He and Fel had been through their war service before, determined that they were fucked up because of it
and went off to cope as best they could. Charlie lost himself in wine and women and so did Fel. After a fashion.

  “Which wasn’t fucking much,” Fel said bitterly. “And definitely wasn’t all powerful.”

  “You were merely a vessel,” Robynne continued his voice low and discordantly melodic. “A vault teaming with miraculous and bloody intentions. You did not have the key, Flannacán map Cinid ocus Barita seirbhíseach Mahb Tóisech.”

  Time seemed hindered by that pronouncement; the second hand on the functional wall clock visibly struggling to move forward and ricocheting violently back every other tock.

  When Robynne sneezed several times in quick succession, the pause lifted and the oracle in the room became a boy eating ice cream again.

  Fel met Charlemagne’s astonished, frightened stare and looked away when his best friend crossed himself as if to ward against Fel.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Charlie said as soon as his hand finished making the motion that helped him unify his kingdom. “Old habits.”

  Fel nodded, but a bit of his soul withered at the thought that this man, his brother, could be afraid of him.

  “Who had the key?” Fel asked.

  “And who filled up the vessel in the first place?” Charlie said.

  The boy shrugged and dove in the sack for a handful of cookies.

  “Let’s get at this from another direction,” Fel said. “You say, I was once the most powerful person in the world, but not anymore?” Fel continued at Robynne’s nod. “Because I’m missing pieces.”

  “A bunch of pieces,” the boy confirmed. “Like maybe a thousand million. No, a thousand billion.”

  “Okay,” Fel murmured, though he understood nothing. “Where’s the rest of me?”

  “That girl has it,” Robynne said, pulling his hand out of the pan of dirt and rooting in the grocery bag for the cookies and milk.

  “That girl?” Charlie scoffed. “Are you talking about love?” He grinned then started to chuckle. “Next we’ll be getting you one of those two halves of a heart necklace,” he said to Fel. “One for you and one for your cross-eyed girlfriend.”