Ignite the Fire: Incendiary

by Karen Chance

  I sighed, just as Gertie shifted onto the landing beside me.

  “She’s getting better, your girl,” Gertie said. She looked a lot like her sister, Hilde, only younger. But they had the same . . . hearty . . . figure and cap of curls, although in Gertie’s case, the latter were purple with gray roots instead of silver white.

  I’d wondered about the hair color, which hadn’t seemed normal for the Edwardian age—or for the Victorian either, which is when we’d first met. But I’d since learned that the silver nitrate used as hair dye in this period often resulted in purple tones with prolonged use. I didn’t know what color Gertie had been going for originally, but the pale lavender she’d ended up with had become her signature look.

  Gertie was a hippy before they were cool.

  The hair clashed a bit with the fashionable mustard-colored frock she was wearing, with black silk fringe tacked on at odd places, because she’d lived most of her life in an era where more was more. And because Pythias didn’t have to wear the crap they foisted onto their subordinates. But it complemented the amethysts set in gold and shaped like ancient amphorae in her ears and winking from a pin at her breast. Gertie liked fashion, and she had the money to show it off.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, watching the girls go at each other.

  “Watch,” was all she said.

  I watched. And was quickly reminded that Rhea had been stashed with the covens by her mother when she was really young, to avoid having anyone guess that the resemblance between them might be more than coincidence. The result was that she didn’t just know Pythian magic; she knew coven as well. Which explained why Agnes was determinedly holding her wand hand against the floor.

  Or she was until Rhea shifted the small piece of wood into her opposite grip and—

  “Nice one!” I called, as a blast set Agnes’ hair on fire.

  A snarled word from Agnes put it out, and then the wand disappeared, shifted who-knew-where. Rhea didn’t like that, and jumped her again. The wrestling continued.

  “She’s learning to trust herself,” Gertie said. “Confidence was the main thing she lacked. Skill can be taught, but without belief in oneself, all the skill in the world is useless.”

  There was nothing pointed in Gertie’s tone, and she didn’t so much as glance at me. But I recognized the growing feeling in my gut. The squirmy, half-ashamed, half-angry feeling that I often got in the middle of one of her lessons.

  “Are you trying to make a point?” I asked.

  That got me a glance, at least. “You talk in your sleep.”

  “I do not.”

  “You mumble in your sleep. Enough, in any case.”

  “Enough for what?”

  Gertie winced, maybe because the fight had just descended into hair pulling. “Let’s breakfast in the garden.”

  The back of the London court was its own enclosed world, seemingly miles away from the busy streets outside. A tall, red brick wall enclosed a sizeable space made less so by the presence of a huge oak in the middle. The hoary old roots had shoved some of the flagstones trying to form a patio out of the way, but there was still enough room under the spreading branches for a small, wrought iron table and a couple of chairs.

  The chairs weren’t very comfortable, but Gertie was an adherent of the Victorian belief in pain being good for the soul, or at least the spine. My spine was feeling a little bruised, like the rest of me. But a rotund woman in a maid’s black and whites was already bustling over with a tray, and my mood was perking up.

  “I don’t think I have ever seen anyone as fond of food as you,” Gertie said, as the woman put the tray down onto the little table.

  It covered most of it, but that was fine, because I still had room for a teacup, leaving my unbandaged hand free for a cherry turnover. The sweet pies hadn’t survived transit, unfortunately, so this was dessert. And a good one, at that.

  The pastry was flaky and homemade, and stuffed with huge, fat fruits that were just slightly sour, their taste offset by a heavy swath of icing. To make things even better, the turnover was still warm, as if the cook had taken it out of the oven just before popping it into its little silver basket. I inhaled it and was halfway through number two before I looked up.

  “Does you court feed you at all?” Gertie demanded.

  “When they can,” I said, around a mouthful of pastry. “I’m away a lot.”

  “So I heard.”

  “I do not talk in my sleep.”

  “Then perhaps I had a vision.” Gertie sipped tea. “Or perhaps you came screaming past me at a hundred miles an hour, untethered in time and chased by your desperate heir, and I had to catch you.”

  I stopped chewing. “Is that what happened?”

  “Well, why did you think you were here?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t think that the truth—that so many strange things had happened to me in the last six months that I’d learned to just roll with them—would go down well. Gertie tended not to understand answers like that.

  Maybe because her court was what a Pythian home base was supposed to be. I glanced around enviously. A few autumn leaves blew across the paving stones, rustling softly, like the skirts of several white gowned acolytes walking serenely by. Autumn roses, in vivid orange and red, bloomed from a trellis by the wall, and the tree overhead produced an even more impressive swirl of color.

  It must have been used for some kind of lesson for the initiates, because the hoary old oak was looking a bit strange. The trunk was a twist of variegated patterns: frost covered bark fading into mossy green, which in turn transitioned into the clean, bare wood of summer, and finally into a riotous scrawl of bright yellow leaves from an autumn vine. The canopy above reflected the same seasonal confusion, with branches heavy with new green leaves sitting cheek by jowl with ones loaded with a multicolored profusion, and still more that were completely bare, hung only with new fallen snow.

  The snow appeared to be melting, and had just dropped a dollop onto the head of a plump red squirrel. It had been gathering some of the acorns shed by the fall-colored limbs, but at that it started and looked around. But unlike us humans, who had stumbled into the magical world and mostly remained confused by it, the little creature soon shrugged it off and went back to work.

  Everything just flowed here, I thought, staring up at the sun sifting through the living artwork above. It contrasted uncomfortably with my home base, where we just tried to corral the chaos. The court reflected the Pythia, or so I’d always heard.

  Yeah.

  That was about right.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?” Gertie asked, watching me.

  “Rhea didn’t?”

  “Rhea is loyal to her Pythia.”

  Translation, Rhea considered this to be my problem, which . . . fair enough. So, I told Gertie what I could, in between bites. I shouldn’t have, but she and I had long since passed the stage of strict rule adherence, which neither of us was very good at anyway. And I needed some advice.

  And just like always, she skipped over the splashier stuff to zero in on the main issue.

  “Why would Zeus want to talk to you?”

  “That’s what I hoped you’d tell me.”

  Of course, Gertie did not tell me. That wasn’t how Gertie rolled. She liked me to figure things out for myself.

  Only that didn’t seem to be working today.

  “He threatened me,” I said, trying to puzzle it out. “Showed me images of a desolate world, implied that if I didn’t stop fighting him, that’s what Earth would look like.”

  “You think he was trying to intimidate you?”

  “Maybe.” But that didn’t ring true, even to me. In order to intimidate someone, you had to make them believe that there was safety in doing what you wanted. That you’d spare their life, or the lives of those they cared about, if only they did certain things. But I was under no such delusion.

  The gods weren’t going to spare Earth. It was their gateway into this new unive
rse they’d found, and the world that had blocked them from it. They wanted it subjugated, especially the magical community, which had been fueling Artemis’s spell since her death. No way were any magical humans surviving their return, and I doubted that the non-magical world would do much better.

  It was said about the Romans that they created a wasteland and called it peace.

  I had a feeling that I knew where they got that tactic.

  As for me, my mother had been the goddess who’d kicked the rest of the pantheon off Earth in the first place. I had afterward personally fought against and helped to kill two gods. If they ever returned, I was most definitely on their shit list, and I’d have to be a fool not to know it.

  Of course, maybe Zeus thought I was a fool. The gods had never had much regard for humans, and I was underestimated a lot. It came with the territory when you looked like a Kewpie doll and frequently stumbled over your own two feet.

  “But?” Gertie prompted, picking up on the disbelief in my tone.

  “Why would Zeus care if I fought or not?” I asked. “I’m nothing to him. I’m . . . I’m like that beetle over there—”

  “Where?”

  “Right there, by your shoe—”

  I broke off because Gertie took that moment to strike. She stabbed down with a cane I hadn’t noticed her carrying, right on top of the poor beetle. Gertie liked things tidy, and I guessed it had offended her, trundling across her picturesque courtyard.

  I heard the shell crack, and watched it squirm for a second. It stopped and I pushed the remains of pastry number two away in sympathy—and an odd feeling of solidarity. I’d felt like that, these last six months, more times than I could count. Like a tiny thing just bumbling through life, trying to get more stuff right than wrong, when suddenly—crack.

  “You were saying?” Gertie prompted, while scraping the remains of Mr. Beetle onto the stones.

  I looked away. “He’s king of the gods. He shouldn’t have bothered with me at all.”

  “Apollo bothered with you.”

  “Apollo knew I was a brand-new Pythia with no idea what I was doing. He thought he could manipulate me into helping him get past Artemis’s spell before I figured it out. But I’m not brand-new anymore.”

  “You’ve been at this for six months,” Gertie said dryly. “You’re new.”

  I looked back at her and frowned, something which she failed to notice since she was also frowning, regarding the stones at her feet thoughtfully. I knew better than to interrupt when she looked like that, so I contented myself with adding some milk to my tea. I used to take it with lemon, but Pritkin had been so horrified at the idea that I’d adopted his version instead. It wasn’t bad.

  “I don’t even understand how he was able to contact me,” I said, a minute later, after Gertie shook her head and refilled her own tea cup. “The gods are supposed to be cut off from us.”

  “You said Apollo managed it—”

  “Because the Pythian power once belonged to him. It gave him a conduit that the other gods didn’t have. Some part of him that still resided in this world.”

  “And Ares?”

  Her voice had acquired an edge. Maybe because we’d fought the god of war together, if by fight you mean run around in stark terror and try not to wet ourselves. Or maybe that had just been me.

  But even so, seeing a skyscraper-sized, blood-red god tearing his way through space-time, coming to murder you and everyone that you love, does tend to stick with a person. I strongly suspected that it was the main reason that Gertie was helping me. Unlike her heir, she frequently bent the rules, but not to this degree.

  Only, where the gods were concerned, there didn’t seem to be any rules.

  “Ares did talk to me once—sort of,” I admitted.

  “How?”

  “Kind of the same way that Apollo did. Apollo shaved off some of his power, binding it to the Pythian Court. Ares did the same with certain weapons and pieces of armor, infusing them with part of his energy, and leaving them behind when the gods were kicked off of Earth. So, a part of him remined here, and was able to possess whoever used the weapons or wore the armor.”

  “And you wore the armor,” Gertie guessed.

  “Not . . . exactly.” I shivered slightly, recalling the feeling of having my soul ripped and shredded, as merely a tiny part of a god went on the attack.

  It had been during a battle that our side was losing, and where I’d made a desperate, last-ditch attempt to turn the tide. The Pythian ability to possess people was meant to allow us to shift in spirit, rather than body. That meant we could travel farther in time, as the load was lighter, and avoid getting a plague while we were there. I’d never used it much, since the whole concept skeeved me out, but I’d made an exception in this case.

  And used the gift to possess the other side’s leader.

  Possession was a tricky business, and I’d known that any control I acquired probably wouldn’t last long. But then, I hadn’t needed it to. I’d planned to have him order his men to stand down, thereby giving the cavalry in the form of the Silver Circle, who were already on the way, time to rescue our sorry asses. Only it hadn’t worked out that way.

  As soon as I forced my way inside, I had found somebody else already in residence. Namely Ares, who’d possessed the guy—who did own a piece of that armor—before I had the chance. And three was most definitely a crowd.

  He would have ripped me to pieces and feasted on my soul, except that Mircea had come to my aid. He hadn’t even been at the battle, but he’d used his mental powers to take on a god, distracting him just long enough for me to flee, because nobody had ever called Mircea a coward. I’d gotten away, although it had been a damned close call and one that still gave me nightmares, despite the fact that Ares was now dead.

  But someone else wasn’t.

  “You think Zeus tried the same ruse?” Gertie asked, after I explained. “Leaving something infused with his power behind?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and drank tea.

  “Or that he is planning an assault like Ares?”

  It took everything I had not to yell that I didn’t know that, either! And then to storm off and lick my wounds in private—the ones from today, from the past six months, from this whole crazy war. But I stayed put.

  We were past the point where running helped anything at all.

  “Zeus can’t kill me; he isn’t here,” I said instead, my voice surprisingly steady. “Apollo managed to get through Artemis’s barrier, half frying himself in the process, and came after me for revenge. For his part, Ares attacked me because he planned on returning to Earth in the past, when no one would be expecting him, and needed to kill off the only time traveler who might warn anyone. But otherwise, he could have given a crap about me.” I looked at her. “So why does Zeus?”

  Gertie drank tea. “That, my dear, is what we must determine.”

  Chapter Six

  I don’t like this,” Rhea said, as the wind tossed her still unbound hair around.

  Join the club, I didn’t say, because I was Pythia. I was supposed to be fearless, calm and resolute. A daunting leader for the ages.

  Or to fake it ‘til I made it, only making it was taking a while.

  We were standing on the banks of the Thames, on a blustery fall morning that should have warmed up by now, but the sun was barely a pale smear behind some gloomy looking clouds. I was reminded that Britain was on the same latitude as Newfoundland in Canada, but felt warmer because of the Gulf Stream. But you couldn’t tell it today.

  I half expected a moose to trot by.

  “Shall we begin?” Gertie asked, as a frigid wind off the water made our scarves flap, and even Agnes shiver under her smart, red and green tartan cloak. Or maybe that was something else. Maybe she didn’t like being bait any more than I did.

  Of course, Agnes wasn’t actually the bait. She was one of the fishermen here to save the bait once the fish spied it. I was the little worm writhing on the end of
a hook, wondering how I’d gotten talked into this. Which wasn’t going to work anyway.

  “Even if some part of Zeus remains on Earth, he wouldn’t be looking for me here,” I pointed out. “He’s not a time traveler—”

  “And yet you were attacked whilst returning from the seventeenth century,” Gertie said mildly.

  I frowned. “That wasn’t an attack. And it happened after I got back—”

  “No, it happened on the way back. You never entirely arrived.”

  “—so the reasonable thing would be to go home and see if—”

  “Can you?” Gertie asked, adjusting her own cloak, a plush, black sable lined number that matched her smart, fur edged hat. It was perfectly still in spite of the breeze, like maybe even the wind was intimidated.

  “Can I what?” I asked, confused.

  “Go home. What if you’re attacked on the way?”

  “I wasn’t attacked—”

  “And this time, I might not be able to catch you. I strongly suspect that Hilde aimed you at me when she was unable to hold onto you herself. Otherwise, the odds of you flying right by me are . . . well, frankly impossible. But what if she isn’t there this time? Or what if you don’t make it all the way back to court before you’re attacked again?”

  “I’ll make it back—”

  “Not if it is Zeus attacking you—”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “Saying what?”

  “I haven’t been attacked by the king of the gods!” I wasn’t even sure that I’d spoken with him. The more I thought about it, the stranger the whole thing seemed. Probably some trick by the other side in the war, to freak me out.

  Which, thanks to her, it was damned well doing!

  Gertie popped an eyebrow. “Then what would you call it?”

  I didn’t give her an answer, because I didn’t have one, but Rhea came to my aid.

  She’d been fiddling nervously with her own coat, which was a lighter shade of blue than the navy number I’d borrowed from an acolyte. It had a matching woolen ruffle around the high collar, which added to the overall joy of wearing these awful dresses, and little bows on the pockets that made her look even younger than she was. But there’d been no help for it.