Branded

by Rob Cornell

  The tingling swelled for a moment, then quickly stopped. I dropped the few inches I had been floating above the street, my shoes knocking against the pavement as I landed. All at once I felt the night’s humidity surround me. Which was nothing compared to the blast of heat the dragon shot from his snout when he stopped laughing.

  “Oh, shit,” I said for the third time that night.

  The dragon reared back, opened his mouth, and flame poured forth.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I dove sideways right before the dragon exhaled. A heat like none I had felt before blazed behind me as I sailed to the ground. A pair of small trees on the median disintegrated in the dragon’s blaze.

  I landed awkwardly on my side. The impact knocked the brand from my grasp and it clanked away. I didn’t waste time chasing after it. I knew another shot of fire was coming my way, and the brand wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to my ashes.

  I scrambled to my feet and sprinted blindly forward.

  The roar of fire chased me.

  I reached the bumper of a van and ducked behind the vehicle just in time to avoid the fiery gout the dragon had blasted at me. The side of the van turned to slag. It occurred to me that I was getting a little taste of my own medicine. I never thought I would feel sorry for any demons I put down with my own fire bolts, but I almost did right then.

  I had no illusions that the van could provide any significant cover. I couldn’t outrun a dragon. And I could only dodge so many blasts of fire. He would tire, but not before I did. I had to stop him somehow. Had to fight him.

  But I was a sorcerer without enough magic to light a match, let alone go up against a dragon. And fire wouldn’t harm him anyway. I would have to hit him with something else. None of which mattered, because the only juice I had left was what was keeping me from turning into a vampire.

  The thump of the dragon’s feet on the ground echoed in the night.

  I chanced a peek around the half-melted van to find him coming my way, no anger or urgency in his stride anymore. He had me and he knew it.

  So I was left with two options.

  Let him burn me to nothing, or use my magic to stop him, but allow myself to turn into a vampire in the process.

  Either way, technically I was dead. Undead was just a different kind of dead.

  Could I sacrifice my soul merely to save my flesh? Would becoming a vampire be any better than disintegration?

  Toft seemed to do okay. He was one of the “tame” vamps, as we called them. I could be a friendly vampire. I didn’t have to turn into an evil, blood-sucking monster. Just a nice, neighborly blood-sucking monster.

  Cold comfort.

  I heard the familiar gurgle of the dragon drawing in a breath to spew forth more flame. So I made my decision on instinct. Misguided survival instinct. I jumped to my feet, scanned my surrounding, and spotted the crushed car the dragon had stepped on. Nothing but a useless chunk of metal now. But a pretty good weapon. And since lifting a car had worked for me recently, why not give it another go?

  The dragon chuffed hesitantly when he saw me come out from behind the van. He hadn’t expected me to face off with him. The hesitation gave me the few seconds I needed to focus my power and gain control of the air around the demolished vehicle. The moment I redistributed the power, I felt the infection rush through me like crude oil in my veins. Cold, thick, and nauseating. I did my best to ignore it as I flung the car up into the air, directed its arc, then drew it down directly onto the dragon’s skull.

  The sound of twisting metal and more shattering glass made my ears hurt. I winced, but I didn’t miss watching as the dragon’s head dropped under the car’s weight. His jaw landed hard on the concrete and audibly cracked. The car smashed down on his head like an ugly hat.

  I had to jump backward to avoid flying debris. Several of the dragon’s teeth were knocked loose on impact, and a twelve-inch incisor cut my cheek as it flew by.

  With a creak and groan, the car rolled off the side of the dragon’s head.

  The dragon’s eyes rolled backward, and the rest of his body collapsed with an echoing thud. He went still, except for a steady rise and fall from his breathing.

  I’d knocked him out cold.

  Word of the unconscious dragon outside the MGM Grand would travel quickly. The Ministry would show up and conduct damage control. They weren’t the Men in Black. They couldn’t erase memories. But they would get Kuan-Tin Chern off the street and do their best to concoct a story to explain it away to the civilians who’d witnessed his rampage. Movie studios had started doing a lot of filming in the Detroit area, which had provided the Ministry with convenient explanations for events like this in the recent past. Although I think they’d have a hard time convincing the injured here that the dragon was merely a special effect gone terribly wrong.

  In any case, that was the Ministry’s problem, not mine. And I wanted to be far away from this mess when they arrived.

  The adrenaline thrill from bashing the dragon with the car began to wear off. In its place, the vampire infection’s growing effects took hold. A terrible hunger filled my gut, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. My body had turned cold and impervious to the surrounding humidity. I looked down at my trembling hands. My nails had turned a sickly yellow.

  I had to get to Toft. Maybe it wasn’t too late to reverse the spreading effects. One thing was for sure, I didn’t have a lick of magic left in my body. I had nothing to fight off the infection with any longer.

  I was beginning to turn.

  I quickly recovered the brand. I scanned the cars parked along the street. Decided on an old station wagon that had probably belonged to someone’s great- great- great-grandfather, who would have been horrified to see the mismatched paint job between the hood, the doors, and the rest of the car’s body. I smashed the driver’s side window with my elbow, unlocked the door, brushed the glass off the seat, then ducked down and got to work on hot-wiring the wagon. Not a typical skill for a sorcerer, but I had gone through a rough patch during my teens when I hung around with a bad crowd of normals who taught me tricks like this, among others. It was one way young sorcerers rebelled, pretending to be a normal. Drove my parents nuts.

  Once I had the car running, I tossed the brand into the passenger seat, then climbed behind the wheel. I adjusted the rearview and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I’ll be damned if my reflection didn’t look faded. Fuzzy around the edges, and my facial features blurred.

  For the love of the gods, I was losing my reflection.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was well after hours for the Black Rose, but I had called Toft on the way over, and his troll bouncer met me at the door to let me in. I rushed past the big guy and sprinted for the back office. I found Kitchens standing off to the side. His desk had been pushed back against the wall. A circle of white powder—probably salt—took up the center of the room. A dark-skinned and wrinkly old man in a raggedy robe stood in the center of the circle mumbling something under his breath. On the floor in the center of the circle sat a metal bucket filled with flaming coals.

  The old man’s gaze turned up as I rushed in. Then he looked down to my hand that clutched the brand. His rheumy eyes widened. His tongue poked out of his mouth and swiped along his top lip. He looked…hungry.

  And I could relate. I felt famished. And the old man’s neck looked as tasty as anything.

  Toft gave me a once over and raised an eyebrow. “You’re almost there.”

  I shook the brand at him. “Let’s do this.”

  Toft turned to the old man. “Is there still time?”

  My stomach dropped as the old man took a century to contemplate the question. He stared me in the eyes. Finally, he nodded. “If he is as strong as you say, then yes.”

  “Are you?” Toft asked me.

  “Yes,” I pushed through my clenched teeth.

  The old man waved me over. “Enter the circle and give me the brand.”

  I stepped over the sal
t line and handed over the artifact, which the old man wrenched from my grasp like a child taking a present at his birthday party.

  He jammed the business end into the bucket of flames. “Take off your shirt.”

  I didn’t bother with the buttons. I ripped the shirt open and yanked it off of me as if it were full of fire ants. I tossed it outside the circle.

  The old man gazed into the fire, watching the end of the brand grow brighter and brighter as it absorbed the heat from the flames. The light flickered across his features, adding depth to his wrinkles and deep-set eyes. A small smile tugged at the corner of his weathered lips. “I am going to close the circle now,” he said, never taking his gaze from the fire. “Do not cross the salt. Do not throw anything beyond the circle.”

  “I know how a magic circle works,” I said.

  His grin widened. He jostled the end of the brand deeper into the coals. The hot stench of smoke filled the air and made my eyes water. Toft didn’t seem bothered by it. And while the old man’s eyes were bloodshot, he showed no outward sign of discomfort. Strangely, the smoke did not make it hard to breathe. These flames were not the same you’d find in your backyard barbeque pit, so it stood to reason the smoke it produced would possess different qualities as well. It didn’t smell like sulfur, so it wasn’t Hellfire—thank the gods. This area of magic wasn’t my specialty, so I couldn’t make a proper guess about the fire’s true nature. I didn’t much care either, because as each second ticked by, my body temperature dropped, and the craving for the iron taste of blood threatened to drive me insane.

  “Get on your knees,” the old mage said.

  I dropped without hesitation.

  The mage muttered something under his breath. A second later I felt a sudden pressure in my ears like what you feel when a plane takes off. The surrounding air took on an electric quality. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and my scalp prickled. He had closed the circle.

  “Something you should know,” Toft said. “About how this works.”

  I looked at him. “You waited until now to tell me?”

  “We’re in a hurry, no?”

  Despite his youthful looks, I saw the age in the vampire’s eyes, and an ancient wickedness. I realized, in my desperation, I had trusted him too easily. And now I was about to learn the cost of that trust.

  “The Brand of Gelding,” he said. “Gelding, as in neutering.”

  I clenched my jaw. I wanted to spit, to punch something. But I was more angry with myself than Toft. I had let that stupid word—gelding—slip right by without a thought.

  “Don’t give me that look.” Toft gave me a wounded look of his own, which came off as more petulant because of his little boy appearance. “I’m not betraying you. But you need to know some history so there are no surprises.”

  A liquid cold wormed through me. I found it more and more difficult to breathe. Yet I didn’t feel starved for breath either. I didn’t seem to need the air at all. “I don’t have time for a history lesson.”

  “I’ll be brief. The Brand of Gelding was once used to punish sorcerers for misuse of their power. Since you can’t take the magic out of one born with it naturally, the only way to keep a sorcerer from their power was to cut off its use.”

  I did not like the sound of where this was going.

  “The brand works as a sort of stopper to bottle up the power, locking away the punished one's access to it.”

  “How the hell is that going to help me here?”

  “The good mage here assures me he can make it so he creates a sort of partition to your power, saving a portion of it strictly for fighting off the infection, much as you have until now. In this case, however, you won’t have to worry about accidentally dipping into that reserve. In fact, you needn’t think of it at all. It will always be there, subconsciously keeping the infection from turning you.”

  I tried to wrap my head around what he was saying. It sort of made sense. Yet the deeper implication worried me. “How much?” I asked.

  Toft didn’t have to ask how much of what. He knew what I meant. “About half, from what my friend here tells me.”

  Half of my power? Cut off? Out of reach? Lost to me forever? Since you couldn’t measure magical power like you could electricity or gasoline, I couldn’t know how much weaker that would make me. I had a lot of natural power. My bloodline had assured me of that. Maybe half still wouldn’t be so bad. After all, I had never come close to my limits until these past few days.

  And I didn’t have much of a choice. I could either keep all of my power and lose my soul, or keep my soul and lose half of my power.

  I liked my soul too much to kiss it goodbye.

  “Fine,” I said. “Do it before I grow fucking fangs.”

  Toft nodded to the mage.

  The mage smiled, showing his teeth. The front two on top were gold. He pulled the brand from the fire. The end glowed bright orange. He circled around me until he stood at my back.

  I dipped my head down and clenched every muscle, anticipating the pain to come.

  The mage rattled off a string of Latin. I was better at reading Latin than listening to it. But I caught the gist. Something about my spirit, my power, and the unholy something or other inside of me.

  Then he hit me with the brand up on my right shoulder.

  The pain shot through me and straight down into my groin. My shoulder burned while I felt like someone had kicked me in the nuts, that oozy, nauseating pain twisting through my belly. I cried out. The edges of my vision closed in.

  The mage pushed the brand harder against me.

  A fresh blast of pain ripped down into my belly. The air filled with the smell of my cooking flesh. I could hear my skin sizzling. Then a white flash stole my vision. My surroundings turned to a white blur. Every organ inside of me felt as if it exploded. I threw my head back and howled.

  The white blur faded to blackness.

  Then I lost consciousness.

  When I woke up, I lay on a hard surface. I was pretty sure I had opened my eyes, but I couldn’t see anything. For a panicked moment I thought the branding ritual had blinded me.

  “Try to relax.”

  I recognized Toft’s little boy voice. I turned my head in the direction it had come from. I thought, maybe, I saw a shadow move in the darkness.

  “Where am I?”

  “Still in my office.”

  I felt along the surface underneath me and realized I lay on Toft’s desk. “I can’t see.”

  “That’s because all the lights are off,” he said with an amused lilt.

  I let out the breath I’d been unconsciously holding and lay still for a moment. “Did it work?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  As if on command, my stomach growled. “Starving.”

  “What are you in the mood for?”

  My mouth watered as I imagined biting into a crispy slice of Jet’s Detroit style pizza. I could have polished off a whole large by myself right then and there. And with that thought, I relaxed. I was hungry for people food, not blood.

  “It worked,” I said. I blinked a few times, but my eyes refused to adjust to the darkness. “Doesn’t your office have any windows for the gods’ sake?”

  Toft laughed. “I’m a vampire. And sometimes I have to work days.”

  “Right. So now what?”

  “That’s entirely up to you. When you’re feeling up to it, I can have Mortimer give you a lift home. I took the liberty of relocating the vehicle you stole to get here last night.”

  Last night? How long had I been out? “What time is it?”

  “Just past noon.”

  “You stayed with me all this time?”

  “I wasn’t going to leave you alone in my place of business and give you the chance to steal from the bar’s top shelf.”

  I laughed. “You were worried about me.”

  “I’m certain to have use for you one day. I simply needed to protect my investment. And since you seem all right, I’d l
ike to get some sleep. Dusk always seems to come too quickly, and I’m a terrible crank when I don’t get my rest.”

  I heard the faint rustle of fabric as he stood. “I’ll have Mortimer in a car waiting out front for you. But take your time. You’ve had a rough couple of days.”

  I didn’t hear footsteps or the sound of a door opening or closing. For all I knew, he still stood there watching me with his vampire night vision, making funny faces at me. The silence was unnerving. Almost as much as the complete darkness.

  I wanted nothing more than to stand in the sun and let it bake right through me.

  I swung my legs off the desk and slowly rose. My head spun a bit, but I otherwise felt fine. I noticed a tingling on my shoulder where the mage had pressed the brand. I was still shirtless. I reached back and traced the scared flesh with my fingertips. A subtle energy vibrated from the branded skin. Clearly something magical going on there. I turned my focus inward, seeking any power that remained within me. My rest had allowed my power a chance to recover, but I could clearly feel a…lacking. A piece of me was gone, like an amputated limb.

  I began to shiver. My throat closed. My heartbeat quickened, and my pulse thumped in my ears.

  What have I done? Dear gods, what did I let them do to me?

  I’d had no choice, I tried to convince myself. But a primal part of me stoked my growing panic. That part of me didn’t care about choices or consequences. It wanted its whole self back. It wanted it now.

  I did my best to take calming breaths. All I’d gone through, I wasn’t about to have a fucking heart attack over it and die anyway.

  So I had lost some power? I had also kept myself from turning into a vampire. I didn’t have to worry about that anymore. I could go to the Ministry, clear things up. They would revoke the contract, and Anda would have to suck it up and let me live.

  Meanwhile, I could get my life back in order, get back to work, and set up a second date with Fiona. And a third. And hopefully a whole lot more.

  Things were good.

  Right?

  When I managed to stave off the panic attack, I took Mortimer the troll up on his offered ride and had him take me to the MGM so I could retrieve my own car. Not surprisingly, the casino was closed, but I was able to recover my car from valet parking on my own.