Blood and Fire: An Urban Fantasy (The Marked Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  Two piles of bones were on either side of the tip. Human bones, with skulls on top of each pile. My head heated as if someone had lit a fire in there. He’d taken the bones of my father—and his—and put them on the ground like that.

  “But while you never wanted to learn the truth about what really happened to them, I did. While you wasted your life getting drunk and running away, I spent my time preparing.”

  “Revenge isn’t going to bring him back,” I spit, so ready for it to be over. I’d heard enough. “Dumont, where the hell are you?” I whispered on the mic attached to my shirt. No answer.

  What the fuck?

  “On the contrary.” Marcus pulled his cloak to the sides so he could wave his hands at the pyramid. “Do you know what this is?”

  “An upside-down pyramid?” Not a difficult guess.

  “The first pyramid ever built,” he said, turning to me again. “An exact replica of it, built by Pharaoh Dosjer, long, long before our time. Before our magic’s time. It represents beginnings, and it represents ends.”

  “Whatever you’re trying to do here, Marcus, it’s over. It’s done. It’s best if you give yourself up, now.” I figured, it couldn’t hurt to try, but I did expect him to laugh at me.

  “Why would I do that?” he asked. “We’re almost the same, Ruby, but out of the two of us, I’m the one who’s going to see my father again.”

  What the… “Is that what this is all about?” I thought he was after revenge because all his father’s friends hadn’t helped him when he needed them, but apparently, I was wrong. “You think you can bring your father back from the dead?” Fuck, he was crazier than I thought.

  “I know I can,” he said with a proud nod. “And you’re going to watch all of it. The whole world will.”

  The next second, orange light burned at the tip of the pyramid, where it touched the floor, and then the runes engraved on the blocks began to light up from within.

  I didn’t think twice. I threw one of my chakris right at his face.

  But it couldn’t get through.

  It stopped when it was just a few inches away from Marcus and fell to the floor with a loud noise.

  “Dumont!” I called, terrified. What the hell was taking him so long?

  In fact, I hadn’t heard from him or Logan since I first entered the building. Could they…no. I wasn’t going there.

  I stepped closer to Marcus and the others sitting on the chairs, unconscious. If I could throw a chakri at him from close up, maybe he wouldn’t be able to stop it. He was so busy admiring the runes on the pyramid lighting up like a fucking Christmas tree, maybe I had a chance.

  “Don’t worry. Detective Dumont will be with us shortly,” Marcus said, stopping me in my tracks.

  He caught them. He caught Dumont and Logan. So why weren’t the soldiers coming in?

  “Can anyone hear me?” I shouted, pulling the mic from my shirt and shouting in it. “Come in, right now!”

  Nothing. Not even a sound from my earpiece. I threw the mic away.

  “Our fathers were looked down on by their own colleagues, their own friends, for being different, for being visionaries, for daring to cross limits everyone else was too afraid to cross,” said Marcus. He seemed to be enamored with the sound of his own voice. “I’ve been waiting for this night my whole life, Ruby. I’ve wanted to give up so many times, but now I see, it was all worth it.”

  “Marcus, listen to me. You can’t bring back the dead, not even with Egyptian runes. You can’t do this. You’re hurting these people,” I said, slowly stepping closer. The pyramid was almost lit up all the way now.

  “So what? They’ve hurt me, too. More than I can ever hurt them,” he said, looking down at Nana and the others like they were nothing but garbage to be thrown away.

  “Your father wouldn’t want you to do this, Marcus. Think about it,” I said, and when he met my eyes, I thought he was going to attack me.

  “Don’t you dare speak about my father as if you knew him,” he barked, his voice completely transformed by the end into a robotic sound. Damn it, I was terrified, but I kept going. Just a little closer, and I could pull whoever was sitting with their back to me away.

  “You can’t bring him back, Marcus. You just can’t. The dead are gone,” I tried again.

  “The dead are nothing but another realm for their god.” Marcus looked down at the others again. “Why should these people deserve to live and not my father? They don’t. Their lives mean far less than his, and that’s why they’re going to help me bring him back.”

  “How? How are they going to do that?” He was delusional, I got that, but if I could distract him, I could throw a chakri at his face and catch him off guard. One hit was all it would take, and I could get to him and kill him easily one-on-one.

  “This replica of the first Step Pyramid has been modified with a special set of runes, designed by my father,” Marcus said, admiring the pyramid with the glowing runes. I threw my chakri.

  It didn’t even reach as far as the first. Thank God I had a gun, too.

  He continued to speak as if I hadn’t just tried to kill him.

  “It’s placed like this, upside down, to bring the top to the bottom, and the bottom to the top. Life to the dead, and death to the living,” he said. I was pretty sure he’d rehearsed that speech a million times and had been dreaming of saying those words since forever. “This spell will borrow the life of all these people, whatever is left of it, some of the most powerful magians of their generation, and store it in my father’s bones.”

  “You’re a sick bastard, you know that?” I spit. I didn’t care how magnificent he thought he was—he was nothing but a monster. “I’m not going to let you go through with this.”

  “How are you going to stop me? With those little bracelets of yours?”

  The asshole. No one had ever insulted my chakris before. I pulled out the gun and shot at him—four times.

  All the bullets ended up on the floor.

  “Maybe not, but the people waiting right outside are going to come in here any minute now,” I reminded him. He had to know that there were soldiers out there. He had to have seen.

  But he didn’t care.

  “Hold that thought for a moment,” he said, holding his finger up at me, and turned around toward the end of the room.

  That’s where I looked, too. Never in a million years did I expect to see what I saw.

  Detective Ryan Dumont holding Christopher Ford by the arms, with a gun under his chin.

  To say I was shocked would be the understatement of the century.

  “Detective, so nice of you to join us,” said Marcus, smiling like he was seeing an old friend.

  But that couldn’t be true.

  “Dumont?” I asked in half a voice. This was wrong. Something was wrong. Dumont wasn’t a traitor.

  “Hey, Ruby,” Dumont said, smiling sneakily.

  Oh, hell.

  My eye moved to Christopher Ford, who was pale as a ghost, barely even walking. He looked at me and begged me for help.

  “Do something!” I shouted at him. Why the hell wasn’t he pushing Dumont away with his magic? He was supposed to be one of the strongest mages in the world!

  “Do you know how much energy it requires to create a Mirror with Egyptian runes for a normal mage, Ruby?” Marcus said. “The energy of today, tomorrow, and several days after that.”

  “No,” I whispered, shaking my head at Dumont, but he didn’t give a shit.

  “Oh, yes. It’s why he had to perform it before joining me because Mr. Ford was the only one I couldn’t get to by myself,” Marcus continued, while Dumont walked Ford to the only free chair in the circle and sat him in it.

  “Traitor,” I spit, but Dumont only smiled. The asshole. All of it made sense now. How he’d wanted me on his team, how he’d let me go around freely without arresting me, how he’d wanted us to go find Ford, and then practically made him do the spell. How he’d made us go in separated… “What the
hell did you do to Logan?”

  “Just knocked him out,” Dumont said with a shrug. “I owed him one, remember?”

  Tears in my eye. I thanked the heavens with all my heart. Logan wasn’t dead. “You fucking asshole. Why? Why the hell are you doing this?”

  He pointed both his hands at the upside-down pyramid. “Isn’t it obvious? Power, Ruby. Power to do the impossible. To reverse death. To make those who’ve wronged us pay.” He look at me and I saw a whole other person in the blue of his eyes, a tortured, desperate soul. “Logan was right, the system is corrupt. It doesn’t help the people—it breaks them. Well, it’s time to break them back.”

  I aimed my gun at him and fired the two bullets I had left, but he moved away before I could hit him. He pulled his own gun at me but didn’t fire.

  “It looks like the two of you had it all figured out from the very beginning,” I said, angry at myself for not seeing it sooner. All that bullshit Dumont fed us, and I hadn’t suspected a thing. “So why the hell did you bring me into this? Because Nana sure as hell didn’t send you to find me.”

  “Funny you should ask,” Marcus said. God, how I wished I could wipe that smile off his face for good. “Nana didn’t send me to find you, no, but I needed you for three things. To find the bones of your father, which I could have done myself, but it was fun to watch you try to figure it all out. To find Lee Collins, who, by the way, almost missed this party completely. He was smarter than I expected, didn’t even contact his family, something he never does.” He looked over at Lee Collins. “You know where we found him? Hiding with humans, the same ones his godparents sent him to do fish business with!” He laughed at himself like he’d just told the joke of the century.

  So that’s why Collins looked so fresh still. And that’s why Dumont had taken us to the fucking ogres. He didn’t want to find out where Marcus was because he already knew that. He was hoping to find out where Collins was hiding. And apparently, they’d figured it out.

  “And the third reason is pretty obvious.”

  What the hell did that mean? “Obvious?”

  “C’mon, Ruby. I know you can put it together,” Marcus said with a grin.

  Yes, it was pretty fucking obvious. “You needed someone to take the blame.”

  Marcus clapped his hands. “And you did so much better than I hoped! As if being a wanted criminal wasn’t enough, you were spotted at every single crime scene, and everyone knows it. See how easy it was? I almost wanted you to make this harder for me. I really did.”

  Bullshit. I’d only done what I thought was right. I’d tried to find Nana. I couldn’t let him get to me, not now. I couldn’t let him ruin the little control I had left. This night was made in hell, but I was going to see the end of it. I had to. So I got my shit together.

  “It doesn’t matter. The soldiers are going to come here any—”

  But Marcus didn’t let me finish.

  “Oh, get over it already. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers,” he mocked me. “You mean, these soldiers?”

  Time stood still, freezing me in place with it. Marcus raised his hands forward to what would be the front of the building, covered in broken shelves, and he began to whisper. His hands lit up bright orange, but there were no flames, and then that same light shot forward, growing bigger when it hit the shelves, and the large garage door with a deafening sound.

  The building groaned. I instinctively put my arms over my head as I watched the shelves move to the side, and the garage door bent backward like it was a piece of fucking paper. The cold night air filled the room, and we could see all the cars and the soldiers of the Magian Ministry, looking at us with eyes wide.

  The noise stopped. Nobody breathed for a long second.

  “Shoot him!” I shouted and ran toward Marcus the second the gunshots began.

  None of the bullets made it inside the warehouse, but I was confident that I would reach Marcus. He was too busy defending himself from the bullets to notice. My chakris were in my hand, and I was as ready as I was going to be when I hit something invisible, like a Guard made of solid concrete, and was thrown back. I flew and flew, then fell against the wall hard enough to break my ribs. I couldn’t breathe for an eternity, and when I tried to blink the confusion away, all I could see was the dog-like creatures running outside through the broken garage door to attack the soldiers. I’d hit the back of my head, too, so it took me a while to be able to check myself, to see if I’d really broken my ribs or not. It hurt to breathe, but I could move, so maybe I didn’t break them. Just cracked them. It would have to do.

  My chakris had fallen to the floor next to me, so I grabbed them again and held onto the wall to stand up. Whatever Marcus was trying to do, it had already begun, and he had an audience, just like he wanted. The dog creatures weren’t attacking the soldiers, just baring their teeth at them and growling. The soldiers had already figured out they couldn’t kill them with bullets, so they’d turned to magic, but nothing they did worked against Marcus’s Guard.

  Marcus himself had walked outside the circle of chairs and was standing right behind Christopher Ford, who no longer was awake. His eyes were closed and his body was limp. Marcus raised his hands to the pyramid and whispered to himself, while Dumont remained by his side with a smile on his face, looking at it all. I couldn’t believe it. I’d trusted that man with my life, and he’d betrayed me. He’d betrayed everyone. He’d played us all for fools, and none of us had even suspected a thing. I bet he was the reason why Nana’s disappearance had gone unnoticed by the MM and why the bodies of the students Marcus had killed had disappeared without a trace. It made me so angry, I could explode.

  The runes on the pyramid were burning even brighter as Marcus whispered. Nana wasn’t moving. None of the others were moving. They were going to just sit there while Marcus took their lives to bring back his father from the dead.

  And what the hell could I do about it?

  I’d already made a promise. I was going to kill Marcus, or I was going to die trying, so that’s how this was going to go. I was on death’s doorstep once, too. When I lost my eye, the mage that hit me had intended to kill me. The doctors were shocked that I’d survived, and nobody had tried to hide it from me. They said I was lucky to be alive, that that spell would have killed absolutely anyone it touched, yet I’d somehow made it. I’d thought maybe my parents had been watching after me from the skies, and that’s what I was going to believe in now. My father’s bones were already there, in the same place with me. And my mother, whoever she was, was smiling down on me. Watching out for me. And so was Avery.

  I was going to die this time for sure, but I wasn’t okay with sitting back and watching these lunatics kill these people. And that’s what Avery would have wanted me to do, too.

  “Here I go,” I whispered to her, and putting one of my chakris away, I untied the whip from my belt loops. I ran forward with no clear plan in mind because there was no time to plan properly. The light from the runes on the pyramid was beginning to extend outside it, like an orange glow, and I already knew that I couldn’t let that get to the people. So I pulled my arm back and threw it forward as I went down on my knees. As soon as the leather of my whip wrapped around the leg of one of the chairs, I pulled with all my strength. The chair slid back, taking whoever was sitting on it with, and the circle broke.

  I didn’t wait, I pulled back my whip and threw it at the next chair, and I pulled that, too, before a gun fired. I looked up to see Dumont aiming his gun at me, while Marcus looked at me, too, not bothering to hide his anger. But he’d stopped whispering, and the pyramid wasn’t glowing anymore, so I was counting that as a win. Until Dumont fired again.

  I made it to my feet and tried to get away, but the bullet caught me right in my back. I fell forward on my face on the dirty floor, once more struggling to breathe. This was getting old fast. I realized I’d have been in real trouble now if I hadn’t been wearing that bulletproof vest.

  But, damn, the vest did nothing to ease the
pain. I felt like I’d really been shot, and by the time it took me to turn over on my back, Dumont was already putting the second chair I’d pulled back in place, and Marcus was whispering his spell again.

  I was screwed. I couldn’t even think clearly from the pain. Think, think, think…

  “Ruby, can you hear me?”

  My heart stopped beating.

  Logan.

  “Yes,” I whispered, a second before I remembered that I’d thrown the microphone away. If I could have slapped myself right that second, I would have. Instead, I turned to the side to look for the small microphone. I’d thrown it somewhere, and…there! I could see it. It was just three feet away from me, so I started dragging myself closer.

  “Ruby, come in. Can you hear me, Ruby? Dumont knocked me out. Can you hear me?”

  It felt like a year passed as I dragged myself little by little to the microphone. I grabbed it and put it in front of my lips.

  “Logan, I’m here,” I breathed.

  “Thank God,” said Logan, his relief evident. “Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”

  “No, wait!” I said, my eyes on Dumont and Marcus, both staring at the glowing pyramid in awe. “Wait. You need to find the entrance through the side of the building. Marcus and Dumont are in the middle of the room.”

  “What do you mean, Marcus and Dumont?” Logan said.

  “No time. Try to stay hidden until you get behind them, and then take out Dumont from behind before he sees you. Can you do that?”

  “Okay. Okay, hang on. I’m coming,” Logan said, and I could hear him running.

  “Hurry up,” I said and put the microphone away to sit up. Nana was right in front of me, her body barely hanging on the chair. She looked so defeated, it shocked me all over again. I thought she was never going to die, that she would be the first and last person in the world to cheat death and get away with it.

  And now, here she was—all because some asshole thought he could bring his father back from the dead. Marcus whispered without stop, just like Christopher Ford had in that hotel room. It seemed Egyptian spells were never-ending.