It’d be difficult enough keeping my nose clean and staying in favor with the dean and college when I was on the fast track for rejoining the lowest caste, no matter what education level I achieved. I sighed, headed out the front doors of the main building, and hunted down one of the uniformed police officers.
I chose the first one who looked human. He was an older man with graying hair and a bullet scar streaking across one of his cheeks. At my approach, he frowned.
“The dean wants me to prescreen people, Officer. I’ve been told to coordinate with you.”
“Well, you’re already ahead of the other bloke,” he replied, snorting his disgust. Were the dae imports from Britain? I was starting to think so, considering their accents and tendency to use odd slang. “Come along, then. We already had a station set up, but he was about as useful as a bloody sack of rocks.”
I wondered who could manage to irritate so many people; I had no idea what working for the dean was actually like, but he didn’t seem too bad, as far as the elite went. Strict expectations and a tendency to overlook good performance was pretty normal, as were harsh crackdowns for failure to perform as expected.
Then again, the dean seemed to get along with Kenneth, which put the man in the worst-of-the-worst category by default. The type of men who got along with my drug-dealing boss were usually the type who viewed those in the lower castes as stepping stones and little else.
The cop led me to the far end of the campus close to the main gate, which was a noisy bustle of people—and shifted dae—all desperate for their one chance to break out of their set lot in life. So many people were shouting I could barely hear myself think, which didn’t bode well for me screening anyone.
I narrowed my eyes at the sturdy wooden table set up within a stone’s throw of the gate before turning in a slow circle. I had no idea what the nearby three-storied brick and stone building was for, but it was fringed with trees offering shade and would offer some shelter from the noise—and a place to isolate people for screening.
“If you move the table over there, it’ll be easier to screen people—and control the flow of the crowd. Let in a couple dozen at a time, line them up, and once it’s clear, let in a new batch,” I suggested, pointing at the largest of the trees flanking the building. “The rejects you can take to one of the other gates while the good ones can be escorted to the administration building.”
The cop stared at me, turned his attention to the table serving as a desk, and glanced over his shoulder at the crowd. When he chuckled, his expression softened, his frown making way for a friendly grin. “Good thinking,” he replied, snapping his fingers at several of the cops near the gate, recruiting them to the task of moving the heavy table and its chair, neither of which were really meant to be outdoors in the first place.
When the table was in position, I tossed my stack of papers to the side, flipping them upside down so no one would see the list of names. I scowled at the spreadsheet someone had rigged for the screening process. While I could make it work, it was clunky, and it’d be easy to make mistakes entering data.
I hated when someone else set me up to fail, but there was nothing I could to about it. I could code a form, but it’d take time—time I didn’t have. Sighing, I reviewed what little information I’d been given, created a list of questions, and memorized them.
I braced myself for a living hell and signaled to one of the police officers, who let in the first wave of hopefuls looking to take advantage of an offer the President never should have made in the first place.
There wasn’t a single human in the first batch of people the police escorted to my table. I counted six werewolves, with and without wings, one dragon, and a flock of geese with human faces.
None of them seemed capable of figuring out how to form a line without intervention, which didn’t give me much hope of finding someone useful or interesting. “Werewolves first, line up,” I ordered, filling out the spreadsheet with what information I could while waiting for them to get their acts together.
It didn’t take them too long, and once satisfied they weren’t going to mob me all at once, I pointed at the first in line. Unlike the other werewolves I had seen, who had legs similar to a human’s, his were long and gangly, and his entire body bobbed as he loped to me. His nostrils flared, and he lowered his head, snuffling.
“Your name?” I asked, keeping my attention on the computer.
“Gerald,” he growled.
“Surname?”
Like me, he had an unusual last name; instead of even bothering to pronounce it, he spelled it. Asians weren’t common in Baltimore, and I wondered what had brought the man overseas—and how he had managed to get a visa in the first place.
“Age?”
“Fifty-three.”
I paused, glancing up from the screen. As a werewolf, there were no signs of him being an older man. His brown and black fur was free of gray. Maybe werewolves didn’t age in the same way as dogs? I noted his age in the spreadsheet, added a column for comments, and noted his lack of aging.
Elite were always looking for ways to extend their lifespans.
“Address and occupation.”
As expected, Gerald lived within the fringe, and before the dae had showed up, he had been a shipyard worker. At his age, I had the feeling he was close to outliving his usefulness.
I understood desperate. After all, I worked for Kenneth Smith.
“Can you shift to human?” I asked, careful to keep my eyes locked on the screen.
“Yes,” he snarled, “but I don’t want to.”
“Shifters who can’t shift don’t see the dean; his orders,” I replied, risking a glance upward. “If you want to see the dean, you need to demonstrate you have skills suitable for the elite caste.”
I hated the words coming out of my mouth, but if I didn’t show my authority, it’d be taken away from me, and like the person before me, I’d be proven useless in short order.
“I can shift,” the werewolf whined before he glanced over his shoulder, sighed, and began to transform.
Accepting men could turn into beasts and dealing with the consequences of such a drastic change in our reality with so little time to adapt was one thing, but watching the process was another entirely. Fur didn’t sprout from human skin under normal circumstances, and I learned something rather gross about the dae in less than thirty seconds.
Werewolf dae had a lot of extra bits compared to humans, and in order to shift between forms, they had to get rid of the excess. It surprised me the scientific laws of conversion of matter seemed to apply to the dae. In Gerald’s case, what didn’t quite match human anatomy ended up on the ground around his feet. Bones shifted, cracked, and sloughed off the excess, and while Gerald had easily been eight to nine feet tall when fully erect, he was shorter than I was as a man.
To make matters worse, judging from the way Gerald’s expression contorted, it hurt like hell. By the time it was over, he was gasping for air and shaking.
His clothes, at least, went with him, though even watching, I had no idea how his jeans and denim work shirt survived the transformation without so much as a single bloodstain.
Magic, I decided, was alive and well on Earth, because science had no way to explain the process.
I swallowed several times so I wouldn’t throw up and made another note on my laptop. For a fifty-three year old, Gerald looked younger than I did. I cleared my throat and asked, “May I see your identification card, please?”
He pulled out a worn wallet from his back pocket and tossed the whole thing to me. I caught it, dug out the card, and verified his age. I offered the wallet back, made a final note commenting on his youthful appearance, and gestured for one of the police.
“Please send him to the administration building,” I said, and watching him go, I wondered which one of us was the bigger, badder monster: him for transforming into a wolf, or me for sending him to the elite, knowing they’d be far more interested in Gerald’s apparent yo
uth than in his well-being.
I lost track of time while sorting through the endless stream of dae. The police seemed determined to send in all of the shifters first, and I was so accustomed to talking to humanoid animals that when the first human approached my desk, I gawked, at a total loss of what to say or do. She was a middle-aged woman with pale blond hair and blue eyes a match for the autumn sky.
She was so normal I wondered if she was like me, trying to figure out how to survive in a world turned upside down, where science made way for magic, and no one was quite what they appeared to be—except for me.
The standard list of questions spared me from acting too much like an imbecile, although I stammered when I asked for her name.
“Claudia Hampshire,” she stated, and her voice crackled as though flames burned within her, ready to burst out of her mouth at any moment.
I’d already been singed once by an overenthusiastic fire-breathing werewolf with no ability to control himself. I sighed, hoping the table between us would provide enough distance to keep me from being scorched. I asked for her other details, and when finished, I braced for the inevitable demonstration.
“If you’re a fire-breather, please limit how much damage you do. Skill and finesse are desired in addition to strength,” I said, wondering whether or not I should close the laptop and move it somewhere safe—preferably on the other side of the campus. While I was mostly telling the truth, it was more for my benefit than the college’s. I didn’t want to get burned again.
“I’m a fire-breather,” she confirmed, smiling at me. “Most people don’t notice. How curious.”
I didn’t tell her I had already met a wide assortment of creatures capable of breathing fire. Most of them smelled like smoke or had their fire in their eyes, but if she couldn’t hear the crackle-pop of burning wood in her voice, I wasn’t going to enlighten her.
I’d let someone who could withstand her potential temper tantrum inform her she wasn’t all that difficult to identify.
Those close enough to hear our conversation backed away, and I didn’t blame them. I wanted to take shelter, too, but I wasn’t in a position to go run and hide, unlike them.
“What is your demonstration going to be?” I asked, careful to keep my tone even. Sounding bored was a good way to provoke people, and Claudia was no different. Her eyes blazed from blue to orange.
“I will control fire,” she replied, and with an offended sniff, she held out her hand.
Most of those I had seen breathed fire out of their mouths. I hadn’t quite figured out how it worked, but most of the dae who could do it had glands in their throats or mouths, and they spit some substance that ignited with contact with the air. I hadn’t figured out how they did it without burning themselves, but I guessed magic played a role somehow.
Claudia’s attention focused on her open palm. Beads of sweat formed, and with a hiss, combusted. Fire danced over her skin. My eyes widened as it crawled up her arm, burning over her clothes without consuming them.
Most just spit flames, and the really dangerous ones had the equivalent of napalm gushing out of their mouths. Those few I had sent to the dean, figuring they were too much of a risk to send back onto the streets in disappointment. Dae who functioned as cigarette lighters didn’t exactly frighten me—or anyone else, for that matter.
Claudia, however, was in a class entirely her own, and the line of waiting dae recoiled from her as she stood, enveloped in flames of her own making. One figure didn’t budge, not even an inch, and his stillness drew my eye away from Claudia’s demonstration.
I should have known Rob would show up. At least he wasn’t Kenneth, who would have tried to interfere again. I didn’t know what the dae’s game was, but the sight of him made my blood boil. Like the others, his attention was focused on Claudia. Why was he among those seeking elevation? He looked—and acted—the part of the elite already.
The subtle widening of his eyes warned me something was wrong, and I jerked my attention back to Claudia in time to watch her burst into a pillar of flame. Heat washed over me, and over the crackling roar of the fire, someone screamed.
Chapter Eight
Paper had a relatively low ignition point, and Kenneth’s list of names reached it in the time it took me to slap my hand on the laptop’s lid, slam it closed, and snatch the device up to save it. I fell off my chair, twisted around, and rolled, cradling the machine and its precious information before coming to a halt on one knee. I tensed and turned towards Claudia.
Claudia burned, and dancing in the heart of her flames, she laughed. The fire swirled in a vortex around her.
From my crouch, I got a good look at her legs; her clothes had, for the most part, remained intact, but her shoes smoked, and black streaks leeched into the blue-white fires surrounding her body and darkened the yellow and orange of the twister stretching upward.
Claudia’s sneakers melted, revealing her pale skin beneath. Gray streaks appeared on the tops of her feet, and over the roar of the fire, there was a faint crackle.
The gray darkened to charcoal, and a webbing of lines shot up her legs. Lost in her jubilation, the woman didn’t notice the way her skin cracked. Instead of flesh, bone, and blood, molten stone flowed beneath her skin, and beginning with her feet, it oozed out to immolate anything it touched.
Swaying to some rhythm only she heard, Claudia danced, and her conflagration burned all the brighter, its heat tightening my skin.
“You might want to move,” Rob announced.
Enthralled with the way Claudia burned, I hadn’t noticed his approach, let alone him standing over me. Part of me agreed with him; the heat hurt, but I couldn’t force myself to rise.
If I even blinked, the moment would end, and Claudia’s joy and passion radiated from her and her fire.
Rob grabbed hold of my elbow, pulled me to my feet, and hauled me away. “You really don’t want to be too close.”
My body moved of its own volition. My attention remained fixed on Claudia.
In the heart of her fire, she had turned black with cracks of blue-white, perfect flames spilling out of her. She no longer laughed. A gust of wind, cold on my agitated skin, drew a hiss out of me. My face ached the worst, having been caught in the full brunt of her display without any protection from my clothes.
“Miss Daegberht,” Rob snapped, giving my arm a shake. I flinched as his grip tightened on me. “I do not like when my property is damaged.”
His words cut through the fog in my head, and my irritation burned hotter than the dae. I turned on him, jerking my arm in an effort to free myself from his grasp. He sidestepped, putting himself between me and Claudia, and when I could no longer see her, I trembled. I scrambled away from Rob, and he pursued me several steps without releasing my arm.
“That should be far enough.”
He let me go and stood aside. I clutched my aching arm to my chest. I hurt, but it was the pain of a sunburn, not the itching sear of an allergic reaction. I’d worry about what Rob’s touch did—and didn’t—do to me once I finished my job, which was to grade Claudia.
So far, she was by far the strongest fire-breather I’d ever seen, and she frightened the hell out of me. I held my breath, afraid the heated air would scorch my lungs, if it hadn’t already.
Watching bonfires was common in the winter in the fringe, and like a disintegrating log, Claudia’s inferno consumed her. The crack-pop of wood heralded her crumbling to embers, which the winds captured and carried upward. She spiraled to the sky, and as she cooled, she drifted to the ground in a pale ash.
With nothing left to burn, the pure flames snuffed out, leaving behind wafting smoke in its wake and blackened ground where a woman had stood.
My breath caught in my throat. Little remained of Claudia. The gathered dae stared at where she had burned. I shook my head, turning my attention to my desk.
It was as charred as the ground she had stood on, and in a circle twenty feet across, the grass had likewise turned gray and w
as smoking.
Rob sighed and shook his head. “Really. Can’t you take care of yourself for even a few minutes?”
Securing my hold on the laptop with one hand, I balled the other in a fist, and threw a punch at the smug dae’s face. He caught my hand in his, and laughing at me, he worked his fingers between mine, squeezing until I made a pained noise and my fingers splayed.
I don’t know how he did it, but he stole my glove. Stepping out of my reach, he spun around and waved my glove at me in farewell, striding off in the direction of the administration buildings. I glared at his departing back, torn between chasing after him and giving him a piece of my mind and getting as far away from him as possible. Shuddering, I spun around, staring at the destruction and wondering how I was going to explain what had happened.
A woman had died trying to prove she was worthy of becoming an elite, and if it hadn’t been for Rob, I’d have a lot more than a few singes and overheated skin to show for witnessing her fiery demise.
Word of Claudia’s death spread fast, but I was too busy scrambling to prepare for the resumption of interviews to listen to the muttered gossip. The laptop had been spared—mostly—from the heat of her flames. The casing had melted, but one of the college’s techies managed to salvage all of the data and give me a new system in less than half an hour, which was how long it took the police to calm everyone down.
While I was waiting for the police to organize the next batch of hopefuls to try to squeeze out a few more runs before curfew, I inventoried my injuries.
I had gotten lucky; I had a few new burns to add to my growing collection, but I otherwise emerged reasonably unscathed. At least I didn’t have to pay for the treatment or the ointments to heal them without scarring.
The Dawn of Dae (Dae Portals Book 1) Page 8
