Ignite the Fire: Incendiary

by Karen Chance

  Finally, I felt myself relax back against the side of the bed in exhaustion.

  The floorboards were chilly, and the thin robe I was wearing shouldn’t have provided much warmth. But for some reason, I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel much of anything, my overtaxed body having mostly gone numb.

  My brain joined it for a while, zoning out, with a rushing white noise filling my ears. I stared at the dark room sightlessly, but eventually noticed that I was in the same position as this morning, only with no pie man to cheer me up. Someone had been in here, though.

  There was a splash of golden light among the silver, coming from the bedside table. A half-finished cup of tea with lipstick on the rim resided there, under the flickering light of a single, half burned candle. The straight-backed, wooden chair from the dressing table had also reappeared, and been pulled over near the bed.

  Rhea, I thought. The lipstick was her favorite shade of pinkish brown. She must have been keeping a vigil at my bedside, watching over me as she had during the fight.

  As she always did.

  “Let me through!” Rhea’s voice was shrill. “Damn it, let me through!”

  “Get her out of here.” The older woman said again, her voice an oasis of calm among the fluttering crowd. “Get them all out.”

  “No! You’ve no right! I’m staying—”

  “Knock her out of you have to.” The voice was curt now, and ice cold.

  “You’re not drugging me!” Rhea said, outraged.

  “Who said anything about drugging?” And okay, that was definitely Agnes. So, the older woman was probably Gertie. Gertie, I thought, latching onto the name. Help me—

  But nothing came out of my mouth but another mewling cry. The pain was savage and unrelenting, like a pack of wolves tearing at me all at once, refusing to let me speak. I struggled to find a position that didn’t hurt, or at least that hurt less, but there were none. My body was fire, my existence agony, my—

  A hand, reaching out of the darkness, gripped mine. It made me gasp, just that little touch, because with it . . . came relief. Not complete, not even close, but something. Enough that I was able to breathe again.

  I must have been breathing before, I thought in confusion, or else how could I have screamed? But it didn’t feel like it. My lungs creaked, as if long atrophied, when I took what felt like my first deep breath in hours. Agony poured through my body, but so did sweet, cold, life-giving oxygen. I gulped and gulped, and couldn’t seem to get enough.

  The healer, I thought vaguely.

  He must have come.

  Voices faded in and out and people came and went, but fewer now. Agnes was doing as instructed and clearing the room. Curtains were being drawn, leaving everything in twilight, letting a darker shade of gray fall over my closed eyelids.

  “Keep Rhea out; whatever you do,” Gertie said softly.

  “But if Cassie starts to fade . . .” Agnes’ voice.

  “Especially if she starts to fade.”

  Gertie sounded like that ‘if’ was actually a ‘when’, which was enough to panic me. But at the same time, someone else was murmuring reassurances into my ear, so softly that I couldn’t hear them. But I could feel them, resonating through my bones.

  And it wasn’t the healer.

  A wave of disorientation hit as the latest snippet of memory vanished, and with it went any pretense of numbness. My heart was pounding and my overloaded brain was threatening revolt. I recited the alphabet backwards, over and over, while refusing to think about anything else for a minute. It was a trick I’d learned while on the run from the vampire mobster who’d raised me, to avoid having a panic attack and ending up dead at the hands of his goons, but it only worked about half the time.

  Tonight, it was easy, as if I was too tired even to panic properly. My brain continued to scream in alarm, but my body wasn’t listening. The adrenaline rush sloughed away fast, as if I was mostly out of that particular hormone, leaving me shaking and vaguely nauseous, and feeling like I could fall asleep right there, hard floor and all. It was a strange mish-mash of reactions that had me staring at the darkness, caught in indecision.

  But in the end, I vetoed them both. I wanted to see the damage. I needed to.

  And for that, I had to get up.

  That turned out to be easier said than done. I tried twice the usual way, only to end up back on the floor, dizzy and angry and shocked that I couldn’t even do this, couldn’t walk across the room. Only I could; I would. Whether my body liked it or not.

  That was a not, but I finally managed to pull myself to my feet using the bedpost, and then just stood there, clutching it and wondering if my legs would hold. It honestly didn’t feel like it. Maybe I should have crawled—

  Fuck that! A sudden wave of anger overtook me at the very idea, I didn’t know why. I’d done plenty of crawling through the years, literally as well as figuratively, scurrying into whatever bolt hole I could find, pride be damned. Survival was more important.

  But it didn’t feel that way right now.

  It didn’t feel that way at all.

  I was sick of crawling.

  So, slowly, unsteadily, I put one foot in front of the other, and felt a ridiculous surge of pride when they held. I swayed like an old drunk, like a sailor on the high seas, like . . . like a woman who had battled a god and somehow lived to tell the tale. And walked across the room on my own two feet.

  The dressing table wedged in between the washstand and the wall boasted a large, square mirror, but the old, age spotted surface wasn’t great even in full light, having lost a third of its reflective coating to time. It was even less helpful in near darkness, showing me back only a pale, hazy figure, swaying back and forth in my gray dressing gown like some restless shade. I couldn’t make out much even when I bent closer, which . . . might be better, all things considered.

  But I needed to know how bad this was, and how much of a lie I was going to have to concoct for my court. I moved to the much smaller mirror on the washstand, and grabbed Rhea’s candle before peering at my face. And got a shock.

  I didn’t look that bad.

  Well, okay, that was a lie; I looked like crap. Limp blond hair, which had been drenched in Thames water and allowed to dry in clumps, straggled around my face. My eyes were shadowed with dark circles, ones I didn’t have the makeup to conceal, assuming it would have worked on those things. And there were strange hollows in my cheeks, as if I’d lost twenty pounds in the fight.

  But it could have been worse.

  It could have been much worse.

  So why wasn’t it?

  What I kept remembering felt like the aftermath of a war, where courageous medics fought to save a dying soldier, with the grim air of people who knew they were laboring in a lost cause. The frantic voices, the running feet, the excruciating pain had all said as much, even before Agnes’ harsh comment. Yet here I was, looking, if not normal, at least no worse than I had plenty of times before.

  What the hell had happened?

  It wasn’t a stranger’s hand that gripped mine, but one with a pattern of calluses so familiar that I could have mapped them in my sleep. But that couldn’t be right. I must be dreaming.

  You’re not real, are you? I thought, my fingers moving in that familiar hold. Just another of the tricks the brain plays on us as we lay dying. To smooth the transition—

  “You’re not going to die.”

  It wasn’t a whisper that time, and the voice was instantly familiar. And so loved, so wished for, that it made me doubt myself. “Pritkin?”

  There was no response, at least, not in language. But something was happening. The hand covering mine guided it downward, to where a wound on my hip was a searing white flame. We pressed into it, and it hurt, a blinding flash of agony like nothing I’d ever experienced—for a moment.

  But then it began to cool, and as it cooled, it contracted. I felt it shrink beneath my fingertips, growing smaller and smaller until it was gone. With nothing left behin
d but soft skin shivering under that familiar touch.

  The hand smoothed back and forth over my new flesh for a moment, as if in as much disbelief as I was. Then it moved upward again, guiding me to a line of deep burns down the middle of my stomach. They hurt, too, but not like before. The pain was distant now, a vague background noise, his touch acting like the best kind of drug.

  “Am I doing this right?” he asked, as rough, torn flesh knitted back together, smoothed out, and was made anew.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No. I’ve never done it before.”

  I frowned. “Then how are you doing it now?”

  “I’m borrowing an ability from the vampire. He knows how to heal.”

  “I didn’t think that worked for me. My hand—”

  “Not everything is automatic. Some abilities must be called for.”

  “And you know how to do that?”

  “I am learning.”

  I snapped out of another memory, my limbs shaking and my throat swallowing convulsively, because that hadn’t felt like one. I knew memories and I knew visions, and what I kept experiencing was something in between. As if someone was prompting me to remember, which . . . yeah.

  My breath, which had evened out again, sped back up, and my eyes darted around the darkened room. But this time, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The phantom people from earlier had disappeared as my brain slowly sorted itself out. Leaving just the usual suspects: the hulk of a wardrobe looming like a leviathan in the shadows, a spear of moonlight glinting off the side of the bathtub, the comparatively brightly lit window with winter moonlight spilling in, the buttery puddle of light around the candle . . .

  I gripped the side of the washstand to stay upright, and listened, but there was nothing to hear, either. Just a soft rain that had started to patter down outside, spotting the moonlight and strobing the faint wedge of light on the floor. A few creaks and groans from the old house, barely audible to my straining ears, as it had settled long ago. And the distant chiming of the grandfather clock on the floor below, striking eleven.

  But nothing else.

  There was no one here.

  I pulled Rhea’s chair over and sat down, feeling wobbly. And seriously confused. Instead of making things clearer my memories seemed to be doing the opposite, showing me things that seemed real, but couldn’t be.

  I found the place on my hip where the large wound had laid me open. It had been a burn, one deep enough to threaten the bone, the kind they called third degree. But all I felt now was smooth skin, perhaps a little slicker than the rest, with slight puckering at the edges. Fire’s kiss, I thought vaguely, and then shook my head.

  What was wrong with me? And why wasn’t more wrong with me? If I’d been that badly hurt, could even Mircea have healed me? And if he had, why was he doing it through Pritkin and from a century away? He could have just shifted here. And if Pritkin had come instead, where was he?

  Why was Rhea watching over me instead?

  I clasped my arms around myself, wishing they were Pritkin’s much stronger ones, hard and warm and reassuring. Nothing made sense, yet I didn’t want to go back to that place of pain and terror to find out more. I suddenly didn’t want to remember anything, not now, maybe not ever.

  So, of course, my jumbled brain decided that it was finally time to cough up an answer.

  “Lady! Lady!” A stranger’s voice popped in, although whether from the door or from shifting, I couldn’t tell. I wanted to open my eyes, but my lids were heavy, so heavy, as if they were made out of lead. I couldn’t do it. “The healer is downstairs, but the mages won’t let her through.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Agnes is arguing with them now. But they want to see you—”

  Gertie muttered something and got up. “Stay with her,” she snapped.

  But the girl didn’t stay. No sooner had Gertie left than she was gone, too, off chasing a wild idea planted in her mind, like the one that had prompted the argument a floor below. I could see it in my mind if I concentrated, although I didn’t know how. Likely by borrowing one of Mircea’s gifts. But there they were, standing in the imposing front hall with its gleaming marble and sparkling chandeliers: a small, dark-haired woman in a fur collared coat—the healer, I guessed; Agnes, her face livid under its coating of soot; and, finally, a chubby, purple haired woman, lashing out at five fearsome war mages, all of whom were suddenly convinced that the healer was a dangerous fugitive.

  “Illusion,” Pritkin’s voice said, before I could ask. “I cast a spell to confuse their minds, but it won’t hold.”

  No, I didn’t suppose so. The Circle’s operatives were specifically trained to shake off such things. They would slip the spell soon enough, and when they did—

  “They can’t save you, but they can stop me from doing so,” he agreed. “We must act quickly.”

  “How?”

  I tried to open my eyes again, wanting to see him. It still didn’t work, but there were other ways to see, weren’t there? I pulled back the mental eyes I’d been using to peer into the hall and looked up. And saw him gazing back down at me, his hands on either side of my face, long fingered like a musician’s, but callused like a warrior’s.

  Fitting, as he was both.

  But at the moment, it was the warrior I saw, his eyes blazing. They were emerald fire, so bright that they might have been twin lasers in his face. Until they darkened, like a flood of black ink had been dropped into water, taking over the light, obscuring even the whites of his eyes, until there was nothing left.

  Except for a field of stars.

  I stared at them, entranced by their beauty, and tried to raise a hand to cup his face, but it wouldn’t move. It was heavy, too. Why was everything so heavy?

  “I can heal you,” he said. “But I am going to need your help. It’s going to take all of us—everything we have. Do you understand?”

  No, I thought. I didn’t understand anything but the fire suddenly threatening to consume me again. I’d always thought that serious burns were less excruciating than other kinds of wounds, that they killed the nerve endings, allowing you to die in peace, at least. But these were different. Fresh agony bloomed in spots all over my body, as if to replace the pain we’d just silenced, making me moan.

  No, I didn’t understand anything.

  “Cassie! Cassie!” That was Rhea, darting back in as soon as the other girl left. And then giving a horrified gasp. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God—”

  For a second, I thought she was surprised to see Pritkin, although why she sounded so shocked, I didn’t know. But then my mental vision skewed, and I glimpsed myself through her eyes: charred skin, red and black and oozing; one side of my face a wobbly mess, like well-done fish ready to slide off the bone; and something that looked like silver lightning creeping up my arm, scrawling across my torso, and spreading along my thigh.

  The tiny filaments were as beautiful as their larger cousins, flashing across a midnight sky, except that they left nothing but destruction in their wake. Dead, blackened skin curled up around them, the smell of cooking meat filled the air, and red, raw flesh peeked out from the fissures they’d made.

  And, finally, I understood: the battle wasn’t over, was it?

  We’d just switched opponents.

  “You drank Zeus’s power,” Pritkin confirmed. “Turned it on his ally and won the field. But what remains of it now continues the fight in your body. We have to rid you of it—quickly.”

  “But . . . I used it,” I said. “It followed my commands—”

  “And now it follows his. The gods are energy beings, Cassie. That wasn’t free floating magic you absorbed; it was part of him. Once he realized that you still retained some of it, he was able to turn that power against you.”

  “And rip me apart from the inside,” I whispered, as a new fissure opened in my thigh.

  “Lady!” Rhea was sobbing, half choked, and as pale as a ghost. But she didn’t leave; didn’t run. Nor
did she seem to see the man above me. When I’d looked through her eyes, I’d been alone. “Do you want me to take you home? Do you want—”

  “No,” I said. And, suddenly, I couldn’t see her anymore, even with her tentative grip on my hand, like I couldn’t see myself. All that filled my vision were the eyes burning above me, so bright they were like twin suns.

  Black suns.

  “Are you sure?” Rhea sounded frantic. “They keep trying to separate us, and I don’t know if—”

  “I’m sure. Keep them out. Keep them all out.”

  “Lady?”

  “Just do it.”

  Chapter Ten

  I heard Rhea’s running footsteps, heard the bedroom door slam shut, heard strange enchantments going on outside. Magic swirled around the room, bright and peppery, tinged with her fear and distress. But that in no way limited its effectiveness. Unlike the bits and pieces that she had used with Agnes, this was the real thing: thick, strong, almost overwhelming.

  I didn’t know what she’d done to that door, but I was doubtful that it would ever open again.

  That was all right.

  There was nothing out there I needed.

  I saw relief on the familiar features above me, but I could conjure little for myself. In my mind’s eye, I could see those tiny, silver filaments crawling across my flesh, burning it, consuming it. Not from without, but from within.

  It reminded me of Ares, and that awful attack on the drag. It wasn’t an exact parallel, but the helplessness, the naked terror—they were the same. And, after everything, it was that thought that finally broke me, sending me into a full-on panic. I couldn’t die like this, not like this, not eaten alive—