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

by CK Dawn

  “How do you do that?” Dragon asked.

  “I’ve always had the gift. My daddy had it and his daddy before him. My grandmother two hundred years ago laid a curse on her cheating husband and his line: Instead of feeling pain from their lies, their wives would find an unexpected pleasure.”

  “No shit,” Dragon said.

  “I’d love you even if you gained a hundred pounds,” he said.

  They both watched his penis elongate another four inches and swell until it resembled the green-tinged glass bottles Nelson the milkman delivered to the Salon every other day.

  “That’s just amazing,” Dragon conceded, eyeing the now ten-inch appendage. “I have no intention of sucking on it, but I offer my congratulations to any woman who manages to snag you. Or man,” she added diplomatically.

  “Woman,” he confirmed even as he eyed a buff, blond man in scrubs hurrying toward Halo City Hospital.

  “Well, I definitely appreciate all the effort, but I’m gonna have to say thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Jesus, I did all this work. A couple of licks. A suck or two, that’s all I’m asking.” He closed the distance between them, thrusting his pelvis invitingly.

  “Oh my God.” Dragon backed away.

  Soft fur rubbing against her calf distracted her and Dragon looked down into Buddha’s slanted hazel eyes.

  “Hey, baby boy! What are you doing here? No, no. That’s not treaties, Buddha Bear.” Dragon grabbed the gryphonita’s collar as the cat lunged for the parolee’s exposed flesh.

  Digging her heels in the sidewalk to counteract Buddha’s considerable strength, she grunted at the parolee, “Put it away or lose it.”

  “Way ahead of you, Ma.” He tucked himself into his jumpsuit and buttoned up as if his life depended on it.

  Dragon watched amused as his ultra-long dick quickly deflated, causing his prison issue to drape naturally again.

  “That your cat?” The parolee had put at least three yards of cracked sidewalk between them.

  “He lives with me.” Dragon released her death grip on Buddha’s collar knowing full well that his restraint had nothing to do with her jerking on the bit of red leather circling his neck.

  “City’s got leash laws, you know.”

  “Which you’ve clearly been ignoring.”

  The parolee scowled and grabbed his deflated genitals, casting the snarling gryphonita one last wary look before disappearing into a coin-operated peep show. The sign above the show boasted a disease-free glimpse of over-eighteen boys and girls of all races, with a one-night only special on all toothy, fanged, thorned or horned peeps.

  Across the street a pimp pulled one of his girls out of an alley by her hair and repeatedly punched her face until she fell on the ground, curling in a ball to protect herself. Twenty feet away a cop watched the violence disinterestedly until it was his turn at the Blown Away walk-up window. He flashed his badge to the bored cashier to his left then stood in front of the foam-lined hole cut out of the building’s brick façade. He grabbed the padded iron handles bolted in the building and stiffened as if electrocuted when the mechanical mouth and tongue latched onto his penis and performed its service.

  “It’s not safe for man or beast, Buddha Bear.” Dragon slid her fingers over the soft fur of his head. “Take me home.”

  The cat huffed his odd intermittent purr, flexed his wings ominously and lead the way to the Salon.

  The route he chose took them past the deafening bass of an underground club with a few underage partygoers vomiting in the rusted drum at the entrance and a domino game which seamlessly changed from a vociferous win to name-calling to stilettos like a portrait of man’s evolution.

  Dragon’s ears continued to ring from downtown’s nightlife as they approached their home’s menagerie-balustrade which had become downright haggard in the few days she’d bunked at Saras’s and one unforgettable night at Fel’s.

  The bunny’s drooping ears looked gnawed upon where they once puddled in artistic ennui. The stone seahorse lay exhausted on its side, and the precisely carved spider monkey smoked a factory-rolled cigarette where he once hopefully inspected the contents of his vest pocket.

  “What the hell happened?”

  The gryphonita yowled—a discordant sound that ended with a snarl—which Dragon interpreted as, Hell if I know.

  Using her key, she pushed open the side door and stood in the stone entryway, hoping to catch the gist of the raised voices coming from the living room.

  She crouched, sliding one arm around Buddha as he scented her a few times before sitting and carefully wrapping his shortened tail around his haunches.

  “I hear Quill.” Dragon cocked her head to the left. “And Dad of course.” She attributed the potent silence to Chi’in’s breathy murmurs, hoping he injected his usual logic into the conversation.

  Another voice bounced through the stone entryway like a ricocheting bullet. One given to long, exaggerated syllables and lazy vowels, and Dragon stood and searched the depths of the atrium’s tiny windowsill for the sharpened cleaver Jasper kept there, next to the book of matches and kerosene lamp for when Judas County Illuminating succumbed to periodic power drains.

  Clutching the sharp knife in one hand, she strode into the living room, Buddha hot on her heels.

  The brightly lit room blinded her after the gloom of the entryway and she stopped at the threshold to let her eyes adjust.

  “Hey there, Chicken,” Phyllis said from the silver settee. Her scarlet dress contrasted nicely with the shining velvet and rode up to the middle of her crossed thighs. Her strappy pewter sandal dangled from the vermilion-painted toes of one foot.

  Every hair on Buddha’s fifty-pound body stood on end, and the mythic cat roared, focusing his ire and an impressive showing of teeth at Phyllis, who uncrossed her legs and looked, presumably, for the closest exit.

  Dragon pointed the cleaver at her grandmother. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Wanted to invite you to lunch. I’m a free woman now.” Her smile was brilliant and reached her sparkling, unwrinkled eyes. “And I wanted to let Jasper know that we’d mended fences.”

  Dragon transferred her furious gaze from Phyllis to Jasper, lowering her cleaver. Her father was so angry he was unrecognizable, fury turning his eyes, whites and all, an awful flat blue. His mouth was a thin, brutal line, and his body seemed to take on additional bulk like a predator making itself look more intimidating. Dragon noted the similarities between the unpredictable gryphonita and Jasper before smiling tentatively at her dad.

  He did not smile back.

  She looked for Quill and found her seated stiffly in an oversized mahogany chair. Ch’in had taken it into his head to carve scales along the back and sides and talons at all four feet, making the once-plain chair look like a throne fit for a dragon king.

  It was an enraged goddess who gazed back at Dragon, eclipsing the only true mother she’d ever known despite her everyday garb of paint-splattered sweats and one of Jasper’s old shirts.

  Ch’in cut an equally forbidding figure even kneeling in a pair of loose jeans and perfectly pressed white T-shirt.

  “Do you need a moment or two more to assess the situation, or can we begin?” Jasper said, the mildly voiced query at odds with his appearance.

  “Take all the time you need, Wilhelmina,” Quill said, her breath a wispy puff of frost—testimony to her anger and her former strength. “We have been content to wait upon you these last thirty-six hours. What is another minute?”

  “Have you any idea what you’ve done!” Jasper bellowed just as Dragon had been about to accept that sixty-second reprieve, no matter how sarcastically offered.

  “Straight into it,” she muttered wryly, sounding exactly like her father—a fact that normally delighted her to no end. As a child she’d lost much sleep worrying that she’d inherit Katie’s irrational prejudices or Phyllis’s cheerful recklessness. Then one magical day as Jasper ordered her for the hundredth time to ma
ke her bed and then inquired into the state of her hearing, she’d shot back in even crisper tones than Jasper could manage, “Of course I heard you, Dad. I’m not stoooped, am I?”

  That bit of familiar impertinence had surprised a grin from them both, for who expected a girl to take after a phooka?

  The similarity did not sweeten Jasper as it had before, because he said, “You mock me, human?”

  At that, Dragon’s heart thudded painfully against her breastbone. Twice now she’d been referred to in impersonal terms.

  “No, Father.” She laid the cleaver on a small side table and bowed her head to show respect and to shield herself from his inhuman eyes.

  “Good Lord, Jasper. Lighten up.” Phyllis flashed a grin at him and recrossed her legs in his direction. “What’s with all the gloom and doom?” She cut her eyes briefly in Quill’s direction then said, “I remember you used to laugh all the time.”

  “It is odd the things one finds humorous when one is without family,” Quill remarked placidly. “But rearing a child is hard work.”

  “Yes, I know.” Phyllis bared her teeth at Quill.

  “A decent and loving child are perhaps appropriate qualifiers upon which to close this particular discussion,” Ch’in said, fingering the turquoise scales on his face, which had spread down his neck and beneath the collar of his shirt. A beautiful statement about the nature of his will, the only real power he—or any of the immortals in the room—had.

  Quill unbent enough to sketch a grateful nod at Ch’in.

  “Phooka,” he said, conceding the floor to Jasper, who had responded to Phyllis’s teasing by flaring his nostrils and licking his chops as if sighting easy prey.

  Far from being a fool, Phyllis pulled her dress demurely over her knees and attempted, it seemed to Dragon, to disappear into the sofa.

  “You will no doubt conclude from the presence of that creature,” Jasper pointed a claw, evidence of his shapeshifting abilities, at Phyllis. “That we have gained the notice of the Sun.” His ears lengthened into triangle-tipped points and were quickly covered with dense, black fur.

  “How are you doing that?” Dragon breathed. A certain amount of low-level magic was understandable. Everyone had it. Humans in the form of intuition, and miscellus—well, in some instances, evidence of their former selves was in their inhuman faces and bodies. For others it was only the dust billowing as their power sped off into the sunset.

  Though Jasper was murderously angry, he obviously controlled his change. Dragon remembered Gemma and what the demon stood to gain, and that she had attempted to rob the Sun’s queen.

  A fear that was almost painful slammed into her and she pushed away the hideous thought that caused her vision to double. She would not—could not—believe that her father would align himself with Mahb for any reason. Instead she blurted out the only other possibility, praying that she was right and cursing life’s capriciousness that put her in the position of hoping that her father merely took drugs.

  “You’re on undertow,” she stated, flinching when Jasper snarled at her, his canines at least two inches long and wickedly curved.

  “This life may have changed who I was. It may have beggared me and left me with responsibilities that most fae would easily walk away from, but it’s mine. I do what is necessary to keep what your carelessness has wrought.”

  Dragon said nothing and averted her eyes from the predator her father was becoming.

  Moving to stand behind Phyllis, Jasper said, “In the last day and a half, we have been visited by an agent of the Shade and a toy—”

  “Former,” Phyllis corrected, fluffing her hair.

  “I’m surprised you’re even here,” Dragon stalled Jasper’s tirade with a glare at her grandmother. “Thought you’d be on your knees somewhere, saving up first, last and a security deposit.” Dragon quickly cut her eyes to her father, noted his twitching lips and relaxed her shoulders a bit. A quick glance at Quill painted the picture of unapproachable serenity, except for the eyes which had the same agility as her mouth and, when amused, warmed to a chocolate-chip-cookie brown.

  It was Ch’in who reminded Jasper of his fury, likely because it mirrored his own. Ch’in’s appearance at Le Salon Neuf had been anticlimactic: an unexpected knock on the restaurant’s massive oak front doors nearly fifteen years ago, followed by a hushed dialogue that Jasper refused to disclose. A new boarder was all Jasper would say before hiding behind his paper, but the tension Ch’in’s appearance created lasted two years—well after Dragon rescued a certain gryphonita cub.

  “I defer to you of course,” Ch’in said, managing to look pissed off yet deferential without moving from his structured recline. “But there is still the matter of the Dragon’s behavior putting us in—what is the interesting phrase the human cleric at St. Augustine’s House uses all too frequently? Ah, yes. Danger that imperils our very souls. He is a recently confessed addict—rum,” he clarified at Phyllis’s inquiring look, “and an acknowledged hypochondriac and thus given to hyperbole, but his mantra has merit in this instance, I think.”

  Dragon pinched the flesh between her thumb and forefinger to help relieve her irritation and met Quill’s commiserating gaze. Ch’in was a master at innuendo, double entendre and the back-handed compliment. To challenge his title was an exercise in futility.

  “A Dark Child graced our doorstep?” Dragon asked, hoping to put off her interrogation a little longer.

  Jasper said nothing, walked over to the hutch and reached for a Cabernet balloon. “I was apprised of Doque’s longtime interest in our household by an acquaintance,” he said, receiving no resistance from the normally prickly piece of furniture.

  Quill uttered a low moan as if surprised. She covered her mouth with a shaking hand then, the rings on her fingers transforming the glow from the living room’s rebuilt chandelier to unending gold, veined turquoise and the winking rainbow of opal.

  “What is it?” Dragon stepped closer to her and placed a worried hand on the goddess’s shoulder.

  Reclaiming her mask of unearthly calm, Quill patted Dragon’s hand. “How long have you known?” she directed at Jasper.

  “For sure?” Jasper’s face was bleak as he stared into his empty glass. “About fifteen seconds.”

  “Known what?” Dragon faced her father and then Ch’in when Jasper remained silent. “For God’s sake! Known what?”

  “Well,” Phyllis interrupted, her tone snide. “If I had to guess, I’d say your babysitter’s been working for the Stained Court,” she said, referring to the Doque’s court in typical Sun terms.

  “You’re a fucking liar,” Dragon snarled, looking frantically from her father’s grim face to Ch’in’s furrowed brow to Quill’s lowered head.

  “I could’ve told you that one wasn’t worth a damn thing, Chicken. Her kind, they’re accustomed to everything bowing before them—even time. If the rumors about the Dark One are true, then her payment for spying has been a punishment.”

  At that Quill leapt from her chair and wrapped her hands around Phyllis’s neck. With very little effort Quill raised Phyllis out of the settee, shook her like a dog with a new bone and flung her against the far wall.

  Buddha, thinking it was playtime, raced to Phyllis’s inert form and, closing his wide mouth around her wrist, dragged her back to Quill’s feet and waited expectantly for Quill to toss her again.

  “Goddammit,” Phyllis moaned, rolling slowly to her back. “Somebody tell this throw rug that I am not some sort of chew toy.”

  Dragon stared dispassionately at Phyllis and then at Buddha who fair vibrated with excitement.

  “Come on, Buddha Bear,” she said and strode to the hutch, removed the lid of a porcelain soup tureen and pulled out a grapefruit-sized spinal joint treat made of liver, tuna and salmon. She held it out to the cat, who licked it carefully before accepting it and loping off to a dark corner.

  “Tell me what she’s saying is more of her usual bullshit,” Dragon said, blinking her eyes furiously t
o hold back tears.

  “Go on. Tell her,” Jasper insisted as Quill bowed her head in obvious shame.

  Her eyes were beseeching as she looked around the room. Finding no compassion from her family, Quill started from the beginning. “Doque invaded the Sun at the height of the war. Pulled me out of...my private quarters,” she settled on, “and dumped me in a dog cage in one of those prison camps of his. I was in that hell for so long, I think he forgot I existed. His hsigo guards didn’t though, and passed me around. My day started with a morning rape and ended with rape. Occasionally a night shift guard would donate his turn to an inexperienced hsigo or the son of a friend, and nerves would overrule the urge to rut and I’d get a bit of rest.

  “I wanted to die and wondered if anyone would cry for me if I did. And then one day I stopped wondering. Stopped caring. On that day Doque came for me. He loved me,” she admitted raggedly and Dragon suppressed a shudder and turned away.

  “I was so desperate for a hint of kindness. I would’ve done anything to be acknowledged. Doque gave me that, and even though it was the most chilling experience of my existence, I was absurdly grateful for it.”

  “So grateful you did anything he wanted,” Jasper said dully.

  “Yes.”

  “Including live with people you fought against, didn’t respect and hated.”

  She raised her head to argue, met Jasper’s hard blue eyes and simply said, “Yes.”

  “Better than having hsigos heave over you, I imagine.”

  Quill turned away from Jasper’s biting fury and Dragon jumped right in.

  “I found you on the curb outside of the house.” Dragon’s voice cracked with confusion. “Dad thought you were a bundle of bloody rags. He wanted to leave you for the next morning’s trash pickup.”

  Quill said nothing, and Jasper made a show out of opening the hutch’s cabinet doors, pulling out the first bottle his hand encountered—absinthe—and filled his Cabernet glass.

  As the silence lengthened, Dragon gave in to her grief and wilted to the floor. “Quill?” she prodded, begging the goddess to contradict what they all knew to be true.