Heroines and Hellions: a Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection

by Margo Bond Collins

  The jury was still out on whether that was a positive or negative.

  “Get your ass in here!” I heard a voice hiss through the crack in the door.

  “Veli!” I couldn’t believe my brother was still in the building. He very rarely stayed behind after closing unless one of us asked him to. Even then, getting him to give a shit about what we wanted was always a challenge.

  “Just get in here,” he whispered while opening the door wider for me.

  Unfortunately, the creature named Blake and my mother followed, and Veli let them enter with open arms.

  “Thanks, Veli. I didn’t want anyone seeing him in this form,” Mari said all while holding the knife to his throat and pushing him forward.

  Veli and I both stood there and watched our mother, who we hadn’t seen since the day of our Shift, push this alien being up against the bar with a force we never knew she possessed.

  “Tell me who is behind this,” she demanded, the knife no longer at the lizard’s throat, but instead pressed against the back of his… his skull, I supposed.

  A tongue slithered between his teeth like a snake, his words now a hissing sound throughout the dark, empty bar. “You’ll find out soon enough, mother of all nature.”

  “That’s not good enough,” she said with force, the knife now digging further into the scales along the back of his spine, a few sprinkles of bluish-red blood trickling out.

  He didn’t respond in his slithering, hissing words. Instead, he took a more human form… using Dean. The clothes were still what he wore before, but now they were torn and stretched after attempting to accommodate the reptilian form he was in just moments before.

  My mother heard me gasp and turned to give me a not now sort of look. She might’ve missed so much during our adolescence, but she sure as hell had that mother dearest look down like a pro.

  Regardless of the fact that this being wasn’t really Dean, I still had a really hard time watching her as the alien took the form of my best friend, especially since my mother still had a knife to the back of his head.

  “You will tell me what you know, or this won’t end well. You will die,” she said, her tone fully committed to follow through with her demands.

  “I’m not telling you shit, lady. Just get it over with,” he said, his voice identical to Dean’s aside from the menace that lie beneath the words.

  To my horror, she didn’t hesitate and brought the sharp knife around his body, slicing his throat in one swift move. Blood spurted out all across the bar, the bottles of liquor, the floor, the mirror… it was everywhere. And I damn near lost it, my mouth letting out a horrified scream without permission from my brain.

  I lunged forward, ready to attack the woman, needing her to step back from the body, needing her to save him in some way.

  I only got a few steps in before she held her arm out, a wall of heated wind stopping me in my tracks. The change in temperature and pressure made me cough, my ability to breathe severely compromised by her powers.

  Mari Ranta was the ruler of all elementals—and Mother Nature. She was the only being on the entire planet that possessed every single element, every single power that made up us five siblings. Water, Fire, Wind, Earth, and Heart. Only, there was something missing with her, and with all of us for that matter. Where her heart should’ve been laid a vacant hole in her chest, just like Veli. That hole is why we knew we never had a mother to begin with. It didn’t mean shit that she was blood. To us, she was a woman who left and never turned back until it was time to get rid of the only human witness we had.

  Our dad.

  While Dad clearly knew who Mari was, he still kept us children sheltered from her, taking care of us as best a mortali father could. Even though he never spoke badly about her, all of us siblings still built up a profound hatred for the woman. Powers be damned.

  And now, she had killed my friend.

  Frost still pooled at the edge of my eyelids, making it painful to wipe them away as icicles scraped on my sensitive skin. I watched helplessly as Dean bled out on the floor of my bar. To say I was devastated was the understatement of the year.

  I jumped as a pair of hands landed heavy on my shoulders. “It’s not really him, Kirsi,” Veli whispered. While he might’ve been telling me what I already knew, my mind was still playing cruel tricks on me, and I wondered if it was really Dean. I needed to know he was okay before I calmed the hell down.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew it wasn’t really Dean. But, from what I knew of an Echo, they needed a living body in order to connect, in order to take over as their form. What would happen if someone chose to kill the Echo while in that form was beyond my comprehension.

  I needed to know Dean was okay.

  Before I could yell at my mother and risk her seeing me frosting at the eyes, I watched, hypnotized, as the man I knew to be Dean twisted and writhed into the reptilian form again, only this time, the scales on his body were decaying, rotting to the point of no return—like he’d been dead for years.

  Still, even after seeing the man turn into a lizard, I still couldn’t help but think of what Dean’s ultimate outcome would be in this situation.

  Mari finally let her guard down, the shield she was holding up to keep me away falling like a wall of rain. I gasped as the heat and wind from the blast sucked the air from my lungs, my body bowing forward before finally catching my balance.

  I wanted to run to him, wanted to make sure he was okay, but the being that laid dead on The Relic Pub floor was no longer my friend… he was no longer Dean.

  Veli yelled the word “STOP!” before I could comprehend what was going on, my mind still a fog of emotion as I tried to put the puzzle pieces together and figure out what the hell was happening.

  I looked up at our mother just as she started a fire in her hands, her palms holding the fireball as if it were a simple potato, or in my case, a snowball.

  “If you set him on fire here in the pub, the alarms will go off and the fire department will be bursting through the doors in a heartbeat,” Veli said, stopping our mother in her tracks. He was right. The firehouse was just around the corner from our pub. The last thing we needed was a bunch of mortali firemen poking around while this reptile’s blood was plastered all over the place.

  I tried to calm my erratic heart while thinking about what we could do to get rid of the goddamn lizard decaying in my bar.

  “Veli, how long until the cleaning crew gets here?” I asked, not even knowing what time it was at that moment.

  He looked at his watch. “We have about four hours,” he said in a plain, nonchalant voice, per usual.

  Four hours… that meant it was only eleven at night. “What the hell is the bar doing closed this early?”

  “You’ve been gone for two days,” Veli deadpanned, his attitude filled with impatience. “I told the girls we should keep the business going while looking for you, but they all insisted on shutting down until they got you back. I couldn’t run the damn place on my own.”

  Two days? That didn’t make any sense.

  “Enough chit-chat,” Mari bellowed out. “Mortali or not, allowing a cleaning crew to see this is a big mistake, Kirsi.”

  “I know. I just needed to know how much time we have,” I said, my mind still a blur with the idea that I’d been gone for so long and the fact my mom was standing in front of my face right here in the pub. I pinched the brim of my nose and thought of what the hell to do, the feel of my glasses gone still foreign to me. “Do either of you know how much of him will still exist after burning?”

  My mom nodded. “Just like vamps, they disintegrate within a few seconds of fire touching their skin.”

  “Dumpster,” Veli blurted out. “All the places in this building use the same dumpster out back. It’s pretty hidden, but if anyone does happen to see the flames, they won’t be able to pinpoint it to us.”

  “Exactly. We also need to burn his blood somehow,” I said, hurrying past the mess toward the main storage closet where
we kept the buckets and chemicals. I also made sure to dig up some thick cleaning gloves.

  I didn’t waste any time to clean up the blood on our bottles, wishing I could just junk them after all this nasty got on them. But, thankfully, they were sealed tight and the splatter was minimal. The bar top was the worst, the bluish blood coagulating into a heap of a mess all over the surface.

  The water we used to clean was turning the color of the monster’s blood, a sickening shade of black, and the smell of his rotting body began to consume the whole room.

  We needed to hurry.

  We also still didn’t have any idea how we would move his decomposed limbs without the whole body turning into mush. He was turning to sludge faster than we could clean.

  And then, a thought popped into my head. Solids are much easier to pick up than nasty goo. Heavier, yes, but still easier.

  I didn’t bother asking for permission as I concentrated, seeking out moisture around me to accumulate on his decaying body parts. A sickening shiver ran up my spine when my senses ran across the bucket of bloody water. Even though I knew it was the quickest option, I still fought with myself every step of the way at the thought.

  Within seconds, his limbs and overall rankness was congealed into solid slates of ice. We didn’t have long before it melted, making the mess even messier.

  Thankfully, Veli and Mari didn’t question a goddamn thing.

  It took all the strength I could muster to keep from puking as we picked up rotting monster parts off our pub floor and tossed them into several large trash bags. I’d never had to do sancti cleanup before, and I could only hope I’d never have to do it again.

  I suddenly had a thought.

  “What day is it?” I asked Veli.

  He must’ve known what I was getting at because he responded and said, “They picked up the trash this morning. We don’t have to worry about it being full.”

  The whole time we picked Echo guts off the floor and walls, I kept my distance from Mari, who sat on a stool and observed us doing all the work instead of helping to clean up the mess she made. She had never been a mother to any of us, and I wasn’t going to bother being her daughter now after all these years. Hell, I was surprised she even bothered to stay long enough to watch us do all the dirty work.

  The entire time we cleaned, carried, and set fire to the awful being, I kept Dean in the back of my mind. I still had no idea what happened to an Echo’s source once dead. Were they just set free? Were they passed on to another Echo? It was something I had to find out sooner rather than later.

  Veli and I made the mistake of turning our backs on our mother as we watched the flames in the dumpster, making sure they went out quickly so as not to draw attention.

  When we finally turned around, she was gone.

  20

  A chill ran up my spine, and not one that was typically associated to me because of my cold blood. This was a chill brought on by a threat.

  Someone was nearby.

  I wasn’t sure if I could muster the strength to fight off another malus right then. Not only that, but I needed to get back to that church somehow and see what the hell that crystal was all about.

  Veli shook his head, probably in reaction to our mother vanishing at the drop of a hat the way she always did, and began walking toward the back door of the pub. I quickly followed.

  I needed answers. Then again, Veli wasn’t the type to care what others needed unless it dealt with day-to-day life.

  Without hesitation, I ran straight to the spot where I kept my phone under the bar.

  “Of course it’s dead,” I murmured. “Veli, is Sade upstairs?” I already knew the answer. I would’ve been able to feel her if she were up there. But I also needed to know where my sisters were… not to mention a phone charger.

  “Nah, she’s out looking for you. They all are. How the hell they think they’ll find you by gallivanting around town, I’ll never know.”

  “At least they care enough to try,” I said. I was over his heartless statements. Just because he didn’t love anyone or anything didn’t mean all of us had to shut our emotions off as well. I didn’t bother to make my way up to her apartment for a charger. Instead, I decided to head home with a dead phone. I couldn’t stand to be in the bar a moment longer. The Relic was becoming a place where I couldn’t trust anyone—a place I didn’t want to be.

  I took my walk slow, steady—never letting my guard down, but also not stressing myself out to the max like I had been the past few hours. After making my way through the city streets, keeping my guard up block by block, I finally began to breathe when I hit the woods near my house.

  And that’s when I noticed just how greasy my hair was. Running my fingers through my hair, I tried not to think about how long it had been since I washed it. I also tried desperately not to think about where I had been while unconscious.

  I rummaged through my pockets, finally finding a hair tie in my jacket, and quickly put my hair up into a messy bun on my head.

  First thing when I walk in the door tonight—shower.

  Yep. It was clear as crystal that I needed to defunctify myself. Hell, even with the leather jacket and the cool weather, I could smell myself. Moras weren’t exempt from the normal, human biological issues, especially when it came to hygiene. Considering we were half human, it made sense. Even then, some sancti lived in human form—essentially, they were humans with extra powers that set them apart from normal mortali. We all needed sleep, showers, and other biological consistencies… aside from the vampire and ghost freaks.

  Speaking of crystals. I seriously needed to get back to that church. But considering it was so late, I doubted their doors would still be open.

  Maybe Branton would be willing to head over there with me tomorrow sometime, even if he did have to wait outside.

  Speaking of the devil… it shouldn’t have surprised me to find him sitting on the stairs leading up to my porch, his head lulled to the side as he slept. I wanted him so badly, pain from his absence surged through me at the sight of him.

  He must’ve heard me coming. As soon as I came within a few feet of him, his head popped up and a smile spread across his face. He was clearly waiting for me, and I was so incredibly thankful I had someone who cared enough to sit and wait.

  Neither one of us hesitated, aches and pains be damned. He ran. I ran. And I was beyond happy he was there to catch me when I jumped into his arms, allowing him to envelop me into a bear hug so tight, I thought he would take the last breath from my lungs.

  My legs wrapped around his hips, his hands holding my ass so I didn’t fall. Not a moment was wasted as we kissed, our mouths meshing together so tight, one would’ve thought we were fused together for life.

  As stressful as my life was, he seemed to take it all away in that one moment. I needed the release. I needed something to go right for once when all hell was breaking loose around me.

  I hollered out when a burning sensation hit my chest, right between my boobs. Surprisingly, I didn’t want to hear a sizzle sound while making out with someone. I hissed in pain, backing away from him, looking down between us to see what was causing the pain in my cleavage.

  “Sorry,” he said with regret. Ahh, it was his amulet—the only thing protecting him from my crazy. I couldn’t blame him for being cautious of me. After all, I was a ticking time bomb when it came to my powers, especially with the feelings that would bubble up inside of me because of him.

  With one swift move, my legs still wrapped firmly around his waist, he flung the charm hanging around his neck to his back so it no longer came in contact with me. And that’s when he noticed…

  “Where are your glasses?”

  I shrugged while keeping my arms around his neck to hold me up and looking into his eyes as I spoke. “I’m not sure. I took them off when that Sarah creature approached me at the bar and somehow knocked me out. I haven’t seen them since.”

  “Sarah? She was the one who snagged you up?”

&nbs
p; I just nodded. I was surprised I even had the energy for that small move.

  “But, how?” he asked with shock.

  “She’s a sancti… or… was,” I said with a shrug. “And I just had to clean up a monstrous Echo’s body from the floor of my pub and I’m exhausted and sore and confused and I just want to go inside and be,” I blabbered.

  An exasperated sound escaped his throat, while a look of what I could only associate as pain crossed his face. “I’m so sorry, Kirsi. I should’ve been able to tell what she was… or who she was at least. The fact she was clearly evil to the core should’ve been obvious to me. But I sincerely thought she was human. I saw nothing special in her at all, other than her ability to kiss my ass every other second.” The last phrase was coupled with an overly dramatic eye roll.

  I paused to think about that and slowly made my way back to my feet. I needed to believe him. I wanted so badly to believe him. However, I couldn’t help but realize that, even though I was the worst at feeling out the various sancti in this city, even I knew immediately what she was.

  I turned from him and dug the key out of my pocket to unlock the front door, all while thinking about the night I was taken. I actually didn’t realize she was more than human until she tried to manipulate my mind while away from everyone else. Was it possible that no one else knew about her evil side, Branton included?

  He followed me into the house, a hush growing between us with each step we took.

  Finally, he broke the silence, his voice cautious and reserved. “Are you mad at me?”

  I shook my head, still not looking at him or saying anything. Frankly, I was just too goddamn tired to care.

  “I know it’s a lame excuse—I’ve never not been able to tell the difference between a human and our kind.” He sighed and I felt pity on him, finally turning and leaning up against the kitchen counter, looking at him expectantly. “I just don’t know how anyone let her get past their radars, me included.”

  “She was a glimmer, Branton. I’m sure part of her charm was pulling the wool over all eyes that landed on her,” I explained.