A Fistful of Fire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 2)

by Rebecca Chastain

  “Hurry,” she trilled. With a squeal of protesting wood, followed by the crack of stone smashing into stone, the gargoyle leapt from the balcony to the sidewalk ten feet below. Wincing, I raced down the porch steps after her, praying to be out of sight before Ms. Zuberrie investigated the racket.

  By the time I reached the sidewalk, the gargoyle had almost a block lead on me, moving unexpectedly fast for such a small creature made of stone. In wing-assisted leaps, she bounded into the darkness. I sprinted headlong down the center of the deserted street, chasing the sporadic glimpses of panther-shaped dumortierite in the puddles of lamplight. The baby gargoyle kept me in sight, but only just. My lungs and legs burned after the first five blocks. My vision tunneled to the broken asphalt and gargoyle in front of me. I didn’t notice when the lamps ended, only that the dark blue gargoyle was harder to see, and by the time I did take in my surroundings, we were deep in the blight and I was lost.

  2

  The blight was the oldest part of the city long since abandoned by the wealthy and middle class, left to crumble and rot, and with it its impoverished residents. It was a seedbed for crime and a haven for the immoral. Doorways glowed with protection spells and menacing traps. Unseen eyes tracked me from the shadows.

  Alarm skittered through my body, giving me fresh energy. Ms. Zuberrie’s neighborhood was on the fringes of the blight—holding it at bay, according to my landlady—and her endless repertoire of blight tales gave me nightmares. To be here, at night, alone, was sheer insanity.

  A high-pitched sound, like an animal being gutted alive, echoed through the hulking shadows of old warehouse buildings, setting my neck hair on end. I slowed, having lost sight of the gargoyle. Menacing shapes loomed in the darkness to either side of the desolate road. I identified each item as I jogged past—empty trailer, rubble of a collapsed wall, enormous splintered wooden ward—trying to reassure myself.

  Someone rounded the far corner of the warehouse at a sprint, coming right for me. There wasn’t time to hide. I crouched, heart in throat. Before I could gather my magic, the wide-eyed, scrawny boy tore past me. He glanced once over his shoulder, but it wasn’t at me. I watched until the darkness swallowed him, then turned with new dread back in the direction he had come—and the direction the gargoyle had disappeared.

  Voices bounced and echoed from the warehouse walls, footsteps following. I sprinted for a pile of rusty barrels and crouched behind their bulk. Seconds later a horse-size fireball blazed down the street, scorching the pavement and casting sinister light on the graffiti-crusted buildings. I tucked into a tight ball, shielding my face from the heat and my body from visibility.

  The fire hit a stone wall at the end of the street and burned out. I blinked to clear the flaming afterimage, blinded. Whooping and shouting echoed against the metal walls.

  “Enough! Save it for the splinter-heads.”

  I peeked between the barrels. Five guys rounded the corner, a dozen fist-size glowballs darting chaotically around their heads. Three men followed. No, more. A whole gang. They milled together less than ten feet from where I hid, body-slamming each other and loosing war cries, all caught up in the same high. In the dizzying, erratic light, I could make out two important details: Every single one of them was dressed in bright orange Fire Eater gang colors, and all of them were linked with a potent amplification spell.

  Easing back to my heels, I curled into the tightest ball possible. Fire Eaters ruled half of the blight, and updates of the city guard’s ongoing attempts to contain their violent tactics featured prominently in the headlines of the Terra Haven Chronicle. From the size of that fireball and the amount of magic resonating among the men, I could predict tomorrow’s feature story.

  I didn’t even think about touching my magic, fearing they would sense it. I didn’t breathe. I maintained my cramped huddle until the men rounded the far bend in the street. Only then did I let out my breath and suck in a new one. I waited until I could no longer hear even an echo of their voices before I uncurled.

  “Hurry!”

  I jumped and clutched my heart. The gargoyle leapt from the rooftop above me and raced around the warehouse wall where the Fire Eaters had emerged. I shouldn’t be here, I told myself. This is a horrible, horrible mistake. But I’d promised the baby gargoyle I’d help. I couldn’t turn back now.

  I rounded the corner and froze.

  Moonlight bathed the expansive loading dock, illuminating an elaborate chalk pentagram the likes of which I’d never seen before. Someone had drawn five pentagrams, one atop the other, each skewed a few degrees so that every point had five points. In the center was a small lump of rock. The dock was empty of people. The tiny gargoyle paced the edge of the mutated pentagram’s circle.

  I edged forward, squinting at the focal lump in the center of the pentagram. My toes kicked something small, sending it clanging into the warehouse’s collapsed metal roof. I spun, checking my surroundings. I was still alone. I scanned the shadowed ground. Focus talismans—candles, rocks, glass, wooden carvings, crude fans—were scattered in every direction. There were enough for fifteen people, not the traditional five. If I hadn’t just seen a mob of Fire Eaters with the power of linked FSPPs, I wouldn’t have believed this mutated pentagram was anything other than graffiti.

  I wove a standard five-element test sphere. It popped into existence in front of me, then flattened to a pentagram the size of my palm, each side glowing with the magic of its specific element. If any harmful magic remained, especially a trap, it would alert me before I blundered into it.

  I floated the glowing pentagram safely across the chalk twice before I let the small star dissipate. I crept toward the lump. In the moonlight, it was impossible to make out its form. Kneeling, I grabbed fire, forming a ball of light. A small sun burst into existence above my head. I gawked.

  Light was the most basic fire spell, one I used every day. My glowballs were never larger than my cupped hands—any bigger and they were too weak to produce light. Yet the sun above me was larger than my head, and I could see molten flames arc within it, twisting and turning hypnotically. It was like I’d jumped from mildly talented to FSPP.

  “Impossible,” I breathed. The chalk pentagram was bathed in daylight. Was this strange design the reason for my enhanced powers? Had the Fire Eaters’ spell left charged fire elemental magic I couldn’t detect within the circle?

  The lump of rock moved. I stumbled backward, tripping and landing on my butt. The sun cast sharp shadows across the rock, the flickering fire within it making the rock look like it quivered. Slowing my breathing, I extinguished the sun and replaced it with a manageable ball of soft light, keeping an eye on the rock. When I realized what I was seeing, I scrambled forward again.

  The rock opened his toucan-shaped mouth and released a high-pitched cry that wrenched my heart. The baby gargoyle didn’t look to have the strength to lift his thick neck, and his long, spindly tail lay lifeless.

  “Can you save him?”

  I jumped, having forgotten all about the gargoyle panther. She pawed at the chalk circle, careful not to cross it.

  My caution morphed to horror when I realized the significance of the hatchling’s placement. Using a magical creature as a pentagram focus drained the creature of its own magic and its life. Rumors said the average magical creature doubled a person’s power when used as a focus, but gargoyles were natural elemental enhancers when they chose; a scumbag who used a gargoyle as a focus would get a far greater boost. The idea was repulsive in theory, enraging in reality. It was black magic, punishable by nullification.

  I examined the injured gargoyle closer. Unlike the panther-shaped hatchling, this one’s body was mostly rose quartz, with sporadic coils of blue dumortierite. Jagged patches marred his otherwise smooth sides, and his entire stomach looked like raw, unpolished crystal. Acting on instinct, I reached for earth energy, refined it to resonate with quartz, and probed the baby gargoyle as if I planned to work the quartz. The s
ensation was like trying to capture an echo. The gargoyle was quartz, but he was also so much more: He was alive. I twined fire around the earth magic and trickled wood, air, and water into the mix until I had the right magical resonance. I pressed the mixture into the hatchling. A backlash of pain and fear ricocheted through the magic—not from my actions, but from the horror the gargoyle had already endured. The gargoyle’s feet and wings ended in acid-eaten, eroded lumps. Gasping for breath, I eased my magic out of the hatchling. My stomach heaved, but there was nothing to vomit up.

  When I glanced up, I met the healthy gargoyle’s eyes, seeing her anguish and anger. “I don’t know what to do,” I said, swiping at wet cheeks.

  “You have to help him.”

  “I don’t know how.” Helplessly, I stared at the suffering gargoyle. His movements were weak. He was dying, drained of magic and in so much pain.

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  Acknowledgments

  A Fistful of Fire would not exist without you. Thank you for reading—and liking!—A Fistful of Evil, and giving me a reason to spend more time playing in Madison’s world. I’ve enjoyed myself immensely, and I hope you have, too. Also, to those of you who are wonderful newsletter subscribers, thank you for voting on Madison’s middle name: your responses were overwhelming and almost unanimous, and now I can’t imagine Madison’s middle name as anything but Amelia.

  Without my editors, this book would have been a paltry shadow of itself. Thank you, Laura Anne Gilman, for your superb edits and suggestions for ways to strengthen this novel—and for calling me on it when I phoned in a major scene. Carrie Andrews, thank you for making the final draft shine and for allowing me to publish with confidence.

  Kate Abbott, thank you for being available for support and advice at the drop of a text. I continue to be inspired by you—your writing, your bravery, your pursuit and achievement of so many wonderful things—and consider myself amazingly fortunate to have you in my corner.

  For your patience with my plot rambling and enthusiastic marketing idea monologues, thank you, Sara. You’re a wonderful friend and a better sister.

  Thank you, Mom, for all your support and encouragement. You’re the captain of my cheering squad and my secret publicity weapon all rolled into one, and I couldn’t have found the strength to achieve my dream without you.

  Dad, thank you for being proud of me, even though my novels are neither scary nor about golf.

  For your pep talks and sanity support, for plot analysis and brainstorming sessions, for endless hours of Photoshop work on my “quick and easy” ideas, for all the gentle reminders that my entire life is not my writing, for being my best friend, and for trusting me with your heart—I can never thank you enough, Cody, but I’ll spend every day trying.

  REBECCA CHASTAIN has found seven four-leaf clovers to date, won a purebred Arabian horse in a drawing, and once tamed a blackbird for a day. She has been employed as a VHS rental clerk, bookshelf straightener, government pseudo-employee, professional finder of lost sporting goods, and strategy guide wrangler in the video game industry. Dreaming up the absurd and writing stories designed to amuse and entertain has been her passion since she was eleven years old. She lives in Roseville, California, with her wonderful husband and two bossy cats.

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