Ignite the Fire: Incendiary

by Karen Chance

  And for grabbing my arm and trying to pull me away from Marco, who was now wading into the fray with me still tucked securely under his bicep.

  Since said bicep was as the size of a baby’s head, I wasn’t going anywhere. Which was bad, because pretty soon, Hilde would be using something a lot more powerful than old lady strength. Only, for once, that didn’t happen.

  “Damn it, you walking mountain!” Hilde snapped. “I said put. Her. Down!”

  “In a minute—”

  “We don’t have a minute! She’s phasing!”

  The unfamiliar word must have gotten Marco’s attention, because the next second, my butt hit the floor again. Repeatedly. I stuttered through a half dozen smack downs, like a glitching video game character, and kind of felt like one, too. Before the craziness stopped and I fell back against the carpet.

  I lay there, watching the people above me zoom about as if I’d put time on fast forward. And then abruptly freeze, dead still, with the rabbit/goat thing stuck halfway through an arc in the air above me. I’d almost forgotten about him, despite the fact that he’d been the whole point of our trip, but it looked like I’d successfully brought him back, too.

  And he was pissed about it.

  Or maybe that was because someone had thrown him, although I couldn’t see who. I couldn’t see much of anything, since I could no longer turn my head or even blink my eyes. It felt like somebody had stopped time, although I didn’t think that was what was happening here. I could pull out of a time stoppage, even one thrown by another Pythia. But this . . .

  I didn’t know this.

  The rabbit/goat was looking a little worse for the wear, I noticed, with his coat torn and his pantaloons splattered with blood. It didn’t look like the blood was his, since more deep crimson was dripping off of the seriously elongated fangs in the snarling little maw. But the golden eyes had a contrasting expression, and the square pupils stared bewilderedly into mine, as if asking “do you know what the hell?”

  I stared mutely back.

  I did not know what the hell.

  Time abruptly snapped back to normal, the rabbit/goat sailed off and hit the floor, and then scrambled up and ran in a panic for the door. Mircea and Pritkin raced after him, with Pritkin pausing long enough to look at me oddly. “Are you—”

  “Go,” Hilde barked, kneeling by my side.

  Pritkin’s green eyes continued to look at me, because he did not take orders from Hilde. Of course, he didn’t take them from me all that often, either, but this was one of the rare exceptions. I managed a slight nod and off he went.

  “What is it?” Marco asked, kneeling on my other side.

  And continuing to do so, in a stuttering motion that made me want to close my eyes or look away, but it was almost impossible to do either. Damn it! What the hell was wrong with me?

  “Ph-ph-ph-ph-ph-ph-phasing,” Hilde said, and then time normalized again and she snapped her fingers at someone behind me. “My case. In the corner of my etagere—”

  “I know it.” I heard the breathless voice of my heir, Rhea, and then her running footsteps. Out of my room and down the hall she flew, almost noiseless on the subtle beige carpeting. She could have just shifted, but Rhea was kind of new to all this.

  I could sympathize.

  “Yeah, heard you the first time,” Marco was saying. “Doesn’t tell me much.”

  “She’s stuck in transition,” Hilde said. “The shift did not complete, leaving her simultaneously occupying numerous times, all at once.”

  “And that’s bad?” Marco said, his voice making it clear that he already knew the answer.

  “If we don’t get her out, it could tear her apart.”

  Yeah, I thought, staring up into Hilde’s concerned brown eyes.

  Bad.

  Her hand was gripping mine tightly enough to bleach the color from her fingers. It should have been excruciating, since that was, with my usual luck, the hand with the arrow wound in it. Yet I didn’t feel a thing.

  Really bad, I decided, just before we were flocked by a bunch of old dames in white. They were my acolytes, although it mostly felt like they were Hilde’s acolytes, since they were all old friends of hers. And I do mean old.

  There wasn’t one under a hundred, with many being almost double that, and most of them had known each other for longer than I’d been alive. I frequently felt ganged up on as a result, not that they were trying, but they had a bad habit of talking things out with each other before “bothering” their Pythia. Meaning that they already had the defense prepared before I even knew what was going on.

  But putting them in their place was harder than it sounds. For one thing, they really did mean well, and had been a huge help around court. I hadn’t realized how much we’d needed them until they arrived, and everything seemed to magically sort itself out. Tami, my rather frazzled major domo, had been walking around with a smile on her face lately, and the little initiates were noticeably better behaved with a bunch of powerful grandmas around to keep us all in line.

  Not that they were the martinet type. They left that to Hilde, who seemed perfectly happy to play the bad guy when needed. Like now, I thought, as she squeezed my hand, and this time, it was hard enough to hurt.

  “Ow-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w—"

  Another spasm hit and the room juddered, along with my thoughts. I vaguely heard Hilde yelling for the acolytes to help anchor me, but it didn’t feel like they were successful. Suddenly, I couldn’t feel her grip on my hand at all anymore, not like she’d let go, but as if her fingers had simply dissolved into mist.

  Or that mine had.

  The room went hazy, as if my eyes were dissolving, too, and I couldn’t feel anything anymore. Not the carpet below me, or the air around me, or anything but the mad thudding of my heart. But I could hear, not Hilde anymore, but someone else.

  “There you are,” a voice said, seemingly coming from all directions at once.

  I blinked, and was no longer in my bedroom, with its dim lighting and subtle, blue, sand and cream color scheme. I was somewhere with dazzling light and pale blue skies and stacked white clouds. But I could only see them as vague impressions out of the corners of my eyes.

  Because looking up . . .

  Was overwhelming.

  Not just because of the brightness, which surpassed the sun’s cheerful yellow to venture into blazing white. But because of a feeling of power, so much and so awe-inspiring, that I couldn’t look at it or even speak. I couldn’t do anything but lay there, prone and helpless and scared out of my mind.

  “Ah, you see me, too, don’t you?” the voice mused. It might have been a man’s—it was deep enough—but there was a hint of many voices, some male and some female, all talking at once, that confused my mind. The others were just echoes, barely-there vibrations on the edge of his words, but enough to make me unsure about who was speaking.

  “You know who is speaking, little Pythia,” the voice said, sending vibrations through me. “But you do not know what I can do. It seems only fair that you should, and that we meet before you get in over your head.”

  I’m always in over my head, I thought, and heard the voice chuckle. And strangely, it was a pleasant sound, even as it shivered through my body with the same strength as the words. It made me want to quake in fear, and yet to raise my head, too, like a beaten dog still hungry for its master’s approval.

  That made me furious with myself, even before the laughter came again.

  “Yes, you do see. That is good. Greater souls than yours have bowed before me, and found peace.”

  And this time, along with the words came more than power. For an instant, I was suffused with the most wonderful feeling I’d ever known, like warm arms engulfing me, like the world itself embracing me. It was all I’d ever longed for: home, family, love, joy, and yes, peace. A pure, unending flood of it, turning my bones liquid with relief.

  I hadn’t realized just how much of a burden I’d been carrying these last six month
s. Hadn’t known how heavy it had all been, ever since this terrible war started, or seen how close I’d come to cracking. But all of it hit now that I no longer had to carry the load anymore: the desperate fear that I wouldn’t be good enough; the agonizing pain of friends lost; the creeping suspicion that I was going to get even more people killed, perhaps all of them, all of those who had trusted in me, who had dared to believe . . .

  When I didn’t believe in myself.

  That was the terror that had kept me up at nights, and the dread that had shadowed my feet during the day. We’d won victory after victory, but no one knew as well as I did how close most of those battles had been. One little change, one tiny alteration, and they could have gone the other way. And what had made the difference?

  Not me. I’d spent most of my time running to catch up—on all the training I’d never had, on all the politics I didn’t understand, on all the things a normal Pythia would have grown up with, but which didn’t come so easily to someone plucked out of the gutter. It had been a trial by fire, and I’d spent most of my time trying not to get burned. And those victories?

  They belonged to the people around me, and some very fortunate, last minute, Hail Mary passes that had somehow made it to the in-zone. I was a secretary who read Tarot in a bar; I had no right to be here, to be doing this, to be leading people to their doom, and the supernatural community off a cliff. I was a fool—

  No! I cried out as all the doubts, the fears, and the inadequacies I’d fought so hard against for months, and which I’d thought I’d finally put behind me, came flooding back. No, I hadn’t done everything on my own, not even close. I wasn’t some kind of superhero, striding in to save the day. But I had helped. And these thoughts were a lie, because I knew I had—

  “Yes, you fought courageously,” the voice said. “You are so frail, so small, so human. I was surprised to see you come so far. But you must have known you couldn’t win. Not alone—”

  “I’m not alone!” I tried to reach out to Mircea and Pritkin through our bond. The spell that tied us together us was called Lover’s Knot, and was a powerful enchantment. It allowed me to see through their eyes, and to use their powers as my own. But right now, I couldn’t even feel them.

  I couldn’t feel anything.

  Except fear.

  The warm glow of a second ago was gone as abruptly as it had come, replaced by a harsh chill. Like the voice, when it came again. It had lost its previous charm, and was now as warm as ice.

  “Others have resisted, and known only exile, pain and loss,” it said. “I would not have you make the same mistake.”

  With the words, the world shifted, showing me the other side of the coin. A cold wind swept across bare, desolate cities, stretching as far as the eyes could see. It was a blighted world I saw, a desert world, where nothing moved but the wind. It ruffled the decaying clothes on what looked like acres of corpses, which were now no more than skeletons, bleached white by the merciless sun.

  I had done this, the more panicked part of me thought, staring around in horror. I had wrought this. I was a fool and should have never started what I couldn’t finish—

  “It’s not too late,” the voice whispered. “There is a choice, Pythia. A decision that only you can make. Forgiveness is still possible, for the penitent. But for the stubborn, the willful, the proud, there is only death, and not just yours. Will you gamble with your world? Will you?”

  The wind seemed to ask the same question, with a howling, haunting cry, like the voices of millions of ghosts rushing out of the desolate cities, screaming across the sands, headed straight at me. I screamed myself and ducked, with my arms over my head, but still they came, merging with the swirling, leaping sands. Shades with dark pits for eyes and elongated, open mouths, and bodies that battered me as they passed, yelling things in a thousand tongues that I didn’t know, and didn’t need to.

  I knew what they said, knew what I’d done. But whenever I tried to explain, to apologize, to beg, all that emerged were more screams. Until even those were cut off by a river of sand, pouring down my throat, into my eyes and ears, as if they would bury me alive, all those vengeful shades. As if they would draw me down with them, until there was nothing anymore. No world, no time, no suffering, just hopeless howls.

  And endless darkness because I had failed.

  Chapter Four

  L ight hit my eyes, making me blink. And wonder what was going on, because the curtains in my room were usually drawn to accommodate the vamps. The ones I lived with were plenty strong enough to endure the day, but direct sunlight gave them a headache. Like that moment in the clouds—

  Had for me.

  I sat up, abruptly enough to send the coverlet that had been slung over me sliding to the floor. It wasn’t one of the blue ones that matched my room, because this wasn’t my room. The sun pouring in through the old, sashed window was striping the fallen eider down, the planks of a worn wooden floor, and a washstand, its blue and white pitcher gleaming cheerfully in what looked like morning light. The rest of the room matched the highlighted areas: an old-fashioned wardrobe; an equally old-fashioned, fourposter bed; a weird looking copper bathtub. And a faded painting of droopy tulips on the wall, their once vibrant hues now a washed out mauve.

  I stared at them for a moment, then slowly lay back against the large bolster behind me. I was in Edwardian London, at the court of a previous Pythia named Gertie, who had been clandestinely training me. Clandestinely because Pythias weren’t supposed to meet, in case one let something slip about her era, and thus screwed up time. And training because I desperately needed it, and the only person who can really train a Pythia is another one.

  What I didn’t know was what I was doing here, and there was only one way to find out.

  Yet I stayed where I was for a moment, clutching a blanket, and listening to my heart pound. I’d had a lot of practice at not freaking out these past six months, to the point that you’d think I’d be better at it. You would be wrong.

  Or maybe freaking out was the appropriate response here. Even for me, it wasn’t every day that I talked to a god, or to a being who thought he was one. And who kind of had the preponderance of evidence on his side.

  The supernatural community was at war against creatures out of legend, the kind that had been memorable enough to hold their own even in the modern mental landscape: Apollo, the shining, charming sun god; Ares, the cruel, overwhelming personification of war; Artemis, the brilliant huntress, although the jury was still out as to which side she was on. And now . . . what? Zeus?

  Had I really just spoken to the All-Father, to use his Scandinavian alias? The gods were known by a hundred different names, but the archetypes were the same, no matter where in the world their memories persisted. Zeus/Odin was always a crafty old man who knew more than he should, and who often used others to fight his battles for him. I knew that because I’d been brushing up on my mythology, since it was suddenly less about stories in children’s books and more about an existential threat to mankind.

  I hadn’t enjoyed it.

  Pouring over dusty tomes of esoteric knowledge was Pritkin’s thing, not mine. It still seemed strange to be dating a guy who had guns and books in about equal numbers cluttering up his rooms. But Pritkin had learned a long time ago that knowledge was also a weapon, and right now, it was the best one we had.

  Yet it still wasn’t enough.

  I’d been told—I’d been promised—that I didn’t have to worry about facing Zeus himself. I’d been assured that his surrogate, Aeslinn, a king of the light fey and the guy whose castle we’d probably just burgled, was our real target. He was a Zeus-loving son of a gun, exactly the sort of patsy the All-Father used to do his dirty work.

  And Aeslinn was working hard. He was trying to bring back the gods, AKA ancient creatures from another universe, because they’d once ruled Faerie and had favored his family above all others. And Zeus seemed happy to leave him to it.

  Aeslinn, I’d been told, was l
ike Paris, the prince of Troy whom Zeus had once saddled with the task of choosing which of three powerful goddesses was the most beautiful. The story went that Eris, goddess of discord, had thrown a golden apple into a wedding party that she’d failed to be invited to, and which was inscribed “to the fairest.” Three goddesses had immediately reached for it: Aphrodite, the goddess of love; Hera, the powerful and vengeful queen of the gods; and Athena, the goddess of war and strategy. And, of course, an argument had broken out over who deserved it more.

  The three had turned to Zeus to settle the score.

  Not being a fool, Zeus had pointed out that he was hardly good looking enough to be an arbiter of beauty, and so chose Paris, a famously handsome prince, to take the hit for him. Each of the goddesses subsequently tried to bribe Paris, with Aphrodite promising him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, as his bride. Paris accepted her offer and ran off with Helen, who was already married to the king of Sparta, thus causing the Trojan War.

  Paris had ended up dead, and by some accounts, so had Helen, who was hanged by a vengeful widow whose husband had died in the conflict. But Zeus? He’d adroitly sidestepped a potential problem and got off scot-free.

  He was supposed to be trying the same trick on Aeslinn. Let the fey king and his people die for the cause of the gods’ return. If he was successful, maybe throw him a bone and allow him to rule Faerie while Zeus and the rest of the pantheon swept into Earth, their real target, since it was the gateway to the hell regions beyond. There, they could feast on fat demon lords full of centuries of accumulated power, while the fey and whatever humans they had left alive slaved to serve them.

  And if Aeslinn failed? Well, Zeus hadn’t shed any tears over Paris, and likely wouldn’t again. There were always other power-hungry patsies out there. I ought to know; I’d battled more than a few of them myself.

  That was the problem: our side had too many enemies willing to sell out Earth for whatever crumbs of power the gods offered them. And while we had to win every time, they only had to get it right once. Once and they bypassed the barrier that Artemis had thrown up millennia ago to protect Earth from Zeus and his divine buddies, after she kicked them out of this realm. Whether that move had been altruistic, as the magical community believed, or a bid to keep this rich honeypot all to herself was an open question.