Monster Born (Northern Creatures Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  How did she get so far ahead? I might not be agile, but I was fast, at least when moving in a straight line. But Akeyla was already disappearing into the grove.

  She couldn’t get far. We might be on the outskirts of Alfheim, but we were still within its borders, and the buildings here were dense enough that she could not vanish.

  I hoped.

  But if I didn’t hurry, I would lose her in the brambles.

  Marcus Aurelius barked. “Stay with her!” I yelled. He would. He was a good dog.

  Akeyla screamed again.

  The birch tree directly in my path caught fire.

  The entire thing, from its paper-white trunk to its drying yellow leaves, burst into flames like Moses’s bush. Burst into a hot, blistering fireball not unlike the one that had rolled out of the café moments before.

  Heat slapped my flesh and singed my eyes. I breathed in the crackle of exploding sap. And fire took over my senses.

  Full fire. Real fire. Chaos and death and heat.

  I do not do well when my skin reminds me that it is, in fact, alive. That I was not the corpse I thought myself to be. That I could die in a fire the way I lost the one friend I’d managed to make after my father fashioned me—the kind, blind man who had not understood the true monstrosity of my birth.

  He had screamed like Akeyla screamed now.

  I bellowed and blocked the flames with my arms.

  The tree burned. The café burned. What if Maura died? What if Akeyla screamed until she was nothing more than a tiny elf-shaped cinder? Akeyla, my niece. The little girl I considered family. What if she lost her glamour forever?

  My unsettled soul roiled. It boiled with the heat and it turned into a cauldron. I backed away. “Akeyla!” I yelled.

  Somewhere on the other side of the fire, Marcus Aurelius barked. I couldn’t… I couldn’t get through. I couldn’t walk through a wall of flame. No one could. No one.

  A hand gripped my shoulder. “Frank!”

  Arne Odinsson looked up at my face. Magic protected him. Magic stood between him and the chaotic flaming destruction in front of us.

  Magic would save Akeyla.

  “Did you put a tracer on my granddaughter?” he asked.

  Flames whipped up into the air and took what little collected thought I had with them.

  “Frank!” Arne checked my arm tattoos. “Did you at least see which way she went?”

  “Marcus Aurelius is with her,” I stammered. “They went up the hill.”

  Arne pushed me toward the lot. “Help Maura. I’ll get Akeyla.”

  He dashed into the flames.

  He dashed in, and I backed away.

  Arne held Akeyla against his chest. She tucked her head against his neck and sucked her thumb.

  He held her because only he had the magic to glamour not only his own elfness, but also hers.

  The fire department arrived within minutes, quickly extinguishing both the café fire and the tree. The café, the investigator was telling Arne, appeared to have had a gas leak in the kitchen. The blast had moved outward from the back of the building like a bubble bursting. Lara’s cook had been in the walk-in refrigerator at the time and had come out of the ordeal in fine shape. The owner and two other customers were awake, talking, and in stable condition. Everyone was on their way to Alfheim’s hospital to be more fully checked out. No one died. Everyone was expected to make a full recovery, Maura included, who the EMTs had taken in with the mundanes.

  She’d saved the owner and gotten a bad burn on her arm while I ran away.

  I leaned against my truck’s not-so-glossy dark red fender. The exploding window had peppered my vehicle with shards of glass. If the emperor and I hadn’t been behind the door, we would have been peppered, as well.

  Marcus Aurelius sat on the passenger seat, his head down and his hound eyes wide. He’d led Arne to Akeyla.

  She’d set fire to the tree. Simple magic swirled around its burned corpse like leaves blowing in the wind. The same magic flickered around the café. Akeyla’s fire spirit side rained down on the parking lot like ash from a volcano.

  Arne said nothing to the mundane firefighters or to Eduardo Martinez, Alfheim’s sheriff. Of the first responders, only Ed had any real knowledge of magic.

  Arne held his granddaughter and the mundane fire department saw a normal-looking, middle-aged, balding man in khakis and a buttoned-down shirt holding a clinging, frightened child. Arne’s day-to-day glamour did nothing to disguise his broad shoulders and large arms, but it did make a mundane believe that he was past his peak. His days of fights and brawling looked to be long gone, but he somehow managed to hold onto his overall fitness as he aged.

  Retired, Arne was not. Nor was he past his peak. No, Arne was King.

  Akeyla was his wayward daughter’s precious little girl who melted Arne’s town-father heart. Sometimes I wondered if his displays of affection for his granddaughter were calculated to maximize public perception.

  If they were, would it matter? He obviously loved her, no matter how he used her for political gain, or protected her from investigations.

  I rubbed the sole of my boot through the parking lot’s gravel, wondering if my ghosts were here to remind me of my weaknesses. I couldn’t run around a burning tree to save her, or to help her deal with what had just happened.

  The ghosts left no traces. Arne sensed no magic beyond Akeyla’s young fire. I saw nothing. My tracers pointed toward the elves, but nothing else.

  Perhaps I was simply seeing things.

  Ed walked over. Alfheim County Sheriff’s Department patrolled outside of town, and supported Alfheim’s small internal police force. Ed was the de facto head of policing for the entire area, and everyone treated him as such, except for a few of the more annoying mundanes.

  “Akeyla’s safe,” he said as he flipped through his notebook. “So is your dog.” Ed was a good foot shorter than me, maybe a bit more. Almost all the elves were taller than him as well, though most of the wolves looked him in the eye. He was stout and wide-shouldered, and did not have an ounce of fat on him.

  In many ways, he was a more-handsome, scaled-down, fatherly, Hispanic version of me. He, though, had only one scar and did not wear his hair elf-style, preferring the standard short cut of every cop everywhere.

  I nodded.

  “We’re tracking down those two tourists.” Ed nodded toward the road.

  They had cell phones. Everyone had cell phones. The elves had to be careful.

  “They ran off pretty fast,” I said. As witnesses, they should have stuck around.

  Ed sniffed as if reading my mind. He closed his notebook and tucked it into his pocket. “Tell me again what you saw.”

  Ed was one of the few people who credited my “seeing” magic, probably because he was a mundane. He did not wield magic, nor could he see it as I did. But he knew a lot about its effects.

  Back in Texas, he’d had a run-in with a vampire serial killer, a nasty piece of work who enthralled victims so thoroughly that the elves’ magic could not break the spell. I knew some of the story, mostly Arne’s heroic tale of how he and three of the werewolves had gone down to help.

  Because of its thrall, visually perceiving the evil thing had been nearly impossible, and hitting it with magic only made it more powerful.

  Ed killed it. Not Arne or Remy. Ed, the mundane officer who was too good at his job to be wasting away here as sheriff, staked the vamp bastard and got the hamburger-like scar on his neck as his reward.

  The putting away of his notebook said that he wanted to talk magic.

  Should I tell him about the ghosts? Were they part of this or were they all me?

  I didn’t know.

  “A ghost,” I said.

  Ed frowned. “What kind of ghost?” There were many. “What did it do? Did it use magic?”

  It used fire, I thought, but I didn’t say that to Ed. He knew. Maura knew. Arne knew, which was why he went up the hill to rescue Akeyla. They all knew fire was
my weakness.

  The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that ghosts were mine and mine alone, and were here to teach me a lesson.

  “Nothing noticeable, or traceable.” I shook my head. “I don’t know, Ed. I don’t know if the ghost is relevant to anyone other than me. My enchantments didn’t consider the other ghost I saw this morning worth tracing.” I held out my arm.

  “Other ghost?”

  “Both were people important to me a long time ago.” Lizzy was as much a person as Marcus Aurelius. They were simple dog people.

  “This was the second ghost you’ve seen today?” His frown deepened. “Do you think they’re malevolent?”

  “I don’t know.” Lizzy, no. But my father?

  How much of my remembered rage from my newborn years colored how I saw my father? If he were alive and I met him now, would I have more empathy for his misguided attempts to control life? I’ve long wondered, if he had been older and less rash, would he have thought through his experiments instead of blundering into the misshapen pain that was me?

  Or not. He did frame me for the murder of his fiancée, Elizabeth.

  I have blundered, but I have never murdered.

  My father’s ghost could have been a warning. He could have been a haunting. Or he could have been malevolent.

  The explosion could have been an Akeyla-caused gas leak. From the way Arne glamoured Akeyla, I suspected Arne thought so.

  I traced out in the air the hand movements of my father’s ghost. “He could have been telling me to attend to the fireball.”

  Or my weaknesses.

  “This is the time of year when ghosts show up,” Ed said absently. “Though they’re a bit early, no?”

  I didn’t chuckle. I wasn’t in a chuckling mood.

  Or perhaps Ivan was correct: Now was the time of boundaries crossed. Of magicks mixed. Of forces that do not usually tangle suddenly knotting into fiery explosions.

  My ghosts could be a tangential side effect of something very different.

  Ghosts. Fire. Bouquets. “I can’t help but wonder if Akeyla’s father has something to do with all this.”

  Ed watched Arne rock Akeyla. “Yeah. Me too.”

  “I picked up a sense of geometry with the second ghost,” I told Ed. “No actual magic. No overt malevolence.” I had no idea how overtly Hawaiian magic swam with arcs and angles.

  I glanced at my truck. Perhaps Rose’s vanished magic held hints.

  Arne rubbed Akeyla’s back and she closed her eyes, but continued to suck her thumb even though she was eight. Even though I hadn’t seen her revert to such self-soothing the entire time she’d lived in Alfheim.

  The fire inspector nodded and walked off, leaving Alfheim’s chief elf alone with his fire starter granddaughter.

  Akeyla would know what the adults thought of her. She picked up on everyone’s attitude. Akeyla always picked up on subtle energy that everyone else missed.

  Sort of like me.

  Ed adjusted his hat. “Her father’s a fire spirit, correct?” Ed rubbed his cheek.

  An edge to his voice added a hint of accusation to his words.

  “He can’t leave his island,” I said. “Neither Akeyla nor her father had anything to do with the explosion, Ed. It was a gas leak. She’s frightened. That’s all.”

  He straightened his belt. “I hope you’re right.”

  So did I. But what, exactly, was my father’s ghost trying to tell me?

  “Do you want me to come by your place?” Ed asked. “To look at the brambles?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, Ed.”

  Ed nodded. “If you have any trouble, call it in, okay?”

  “I will.” Most of his deputies were mundanes who had no clue about Alfheim’s true natures. A few did. One was a werewolf. We all knew who to call if we needed police help.

  I watched as Ed walked over to Arne.

  Arne Odinsson, the true Alpha of the elves, werewolves, and other creatures who lived in Alfheim, myself included.

  Ed pointed at the burned tree. Arne raised his hand. “We’ll deal with it,” he said. We, meaning the elves.

  Ed did not look happy.

  “I’ll take her to see her mother,” Arne said, and turned his back not only on Ed, but also on me.

  Arne Odinsson, the elf whom in many ways I considered my adoptive father, turned his back and walked away with my niece in his arms.

  Chapter 8

  Lizzy’s cairn glowed in the evening sun. Reds and bold oranges caught in the agate, and golds warmed the gray lakeshore stones.

  I ran my finger over the marker’s granite base. “What were you trying to tell me, girl?”

  Weakness, I thought. Unsettled and monstrous weakness.

  Two hundred years ago, my father called me “demon.” My father, a man of lesser morals and tainted ethics, dropped at my feet those two syllables of truth in which I now wrap myself.

  Two hundred years ago, we stood on opposite sides of a widening crack in the Arctic ice. He yelled his slur from a face buried deep within his wolf-trimmed hood. He clenched his fists and stomped his black seal-skin boots.

  His eyes gleamed inside the shadows under the fur, like blue jewels forged in the fires of Hell itself.

  The slick ice rocked under our feet. My dogs howled; his lay as a dead, broken heap of cooling meat. The floe groaned and the wind ground across my exposed flesh more like burning nettles than the shimmering, swirling snow it was.

  We both breathed in the air at the dawn of the Industrial Age, my father and I. We both inhaled the crisp, shattered cold and we both exhaled the soot of our souls. He breathed by virtue of birth. Me, by an unholy gift I still do not comprehend.

  “Demon!” my father shouted as he pointed his finger at my chest.

  My father, the man who made my savage body and forged the equally savage geometry of my soul.

  The cold bothered me little, though it tore and cracked my dogs’ paws, Lizzy’s included. My skin had already proven itself both tough and near-indestructible.

  Perhaps I was a demon. My father demanded that I cinch that word tight around my neck. Perhaps he was correct.

  Perhaps the trail of death left in our wake was more caused by me than him, as he claimed. Perhaps I had no reason to lay chase when he fled across the frozen waste of the North. Perhaps his feigned innocence was not feigned.

  I bellowed and slammed my foot into the shattering ice, and between my father and I, the Arctic Ocean welted as slushy, slow, iron-gray waves. My dogs backed away, and carried my sled with them.

  The berg under my father’s feet tipped. Shock sparked his blue eyes. He swung his arms to hold his balance, but the ice found no reason to agree.

  My father fell hard on his arse. My dogs barked.

  I took his immaculate word of strangulation, that label of demon, from my father. I allowed it to boil. I was rage. I was pain.

  And I allowed it to make me little more than the demon he claimed.

  My ice floated away, but my anger did not. My father turned tail and ran.

  My dogs growled, as did I.

  I gripped my sled’s reins. The dogs did not care if I bled hellfire; they only wished to run.

  We drifted along the ice after that, a demon and his four-legged hounds, out in the biting air and under the blistered, gray-blue sky.

  My father’s threats and insults vanished into the screams of the Arctic wind. He all but disappeared into the haze.

  I had vowed vengeance. Instead, I found a colony of elves in the center of a far-flung continent. I buried my Lizzy. Within a decade, the elves found evidence of my father’s befitting death in the slums of London. And I learned to organize the chaos of my soul.

  But now I wondered if my chaos and my demonic nature called up ghosts.

  Two hundred years into my immortal life and I should know better than to allow such thoughts and memories to cloud my mind. I had se
en my share of death. I’d fought alongside Union soldiers during the Civil War. I’d seen villages burn. I understood hauntings.

  Most ghosts manifested out of rage, or love, or shock. They were the final geometry of a soul, its final alignment with the universe, and they tended to sort order from the chaotic intensity of a final, emotional moment.

  Hauntings weren’t about good and evil. They weren’t about a future beyond learning from your past.

  I rubbed my forehead. My past was littered with lessons, but which ones applied to my future? The ghostly ones of Lizzy and my father?

  Or, perhaps, the hidden ones of magicks mixed and boundaries crossed, and of the other kind of ghost I carried.

  The tracers on my arms came from the elves, Dagrun in particular. The protection enchantments on my scalp, from Arne. I carried their enchantments for a reason.

  A witch reason.

  Not all witches walked the world with a black heart. Some started pure. Some fought the blackness with their last, dying breath.

  Rose had been a witch with a pure-but-chaotic soul. She’d also been family.

  Adoptive family, but not like the elves.

  I found Rose and three other children in a Louisiana bayou shack surrounded by snakes and alligators. I’d been a soldier for close to five years at that point, and had fought many Union battles that had murdered better men than I. I flinched a lot. I think my mind wanted me dead, but my immortal body kept walking anyway.

  In the bayou, the witch who’d kidnapped the children cackled under a full moon, and spewed a fountain of corrupted magic high into the air.

  I fought her, I think, out of dread more than any other reason. Dread that I had survived the Civil War and so many others had not. Dread that I could no longer ignore the immortality of my body, or what it meant. Dread that I knew I needed to return to the elves and ask Arne for the same help with living that he gave the werewolves.

  That witch, in that bayou under that full moon, had been meant to be my suicide by magic.

  Instead, the witch took three of the four children with her into oblivion. I snatched Rose up and placed her on my hip. And together, we walked the banks of the Mississippi until we wandered, once again, into Alfheim, Minnesota.