Fire Kin

by M. J. Scott

  A thousand questions. Though it seemed so far that he was willing to let those questions go unanswered and fulfill the promises he had made to the Templars.

  Which I couldn’t be displeased about even though I didn’t want him around. I was hoping that he would have disappeared into the bowels of the Brother House and that I would be able to make my way back to St. Giles without having to speak to him again. But no, he waited for me just inside the door to the main entrance, staring up at the giant carved cross that hung on the wall, all his attention seemingly focused on it. But I wasn’t fooled and he, at least, didn’t try to keep up the pretense once I crossed the threshold.

  “Have they left?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. They haven’t tried to enter, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “I’d rather they left. I have things to do and I’d rather not dodge my cousin and his friends around the City.”

  “Why don’t you want to go back with them?” I asked.

  His gaze sharpened. “Why didn’t you want to go with your uncle?” he countered.

  “I don’t have time for court politics right now,” I said.

  “Nor do I,” he said. “And I can’t be sure that there aren’t those in the court who wouldn’t wish my head to be separated from my shoulders. I’m fond of my head.” He smiled then, suddenly hitting me with some of that fatal charm. “You were fond of it once too.”

  “I’m sure you have plenty of people to admire your head,” I said tartly. “And I’ve outgrown many foolish things I liked when you knew me.”

  He feigned a pained expression. “She wounds,” he said dramatically.

  I shook my head. “I don’t have time for your games, Asharic. I’ve been up all night.”

  The playfulness in his face evaporated. “Patients from the fire?”

  “What do you know of the fire?”

  “I sensed it.”

  It was my turn to look askance at him. “From so far a distance? Here in the City?” Exactly how strong had he become?

  “I saw it,” he said before I could ask a further question. “I couldn’t sleep. I was up on the roof of the Brother House and I saw the commotion. And before you ask, yes, I did what I could to help, but from the distance, as you say, that wasn’t much.”

  “You still work with fire, then?”

  “Amongst other things. But, yes, I still have a little skill with fire. Were there many wounded?”

  I figured he had a right to know when he was going to be joining the City’s defenses. Last night’s encounter had to be factored into any strategy he and the Templars were formulating. So I reeled off the facts and figures about the victims of the fire for him.

  “Idiots,” he said softly as I finished.

  “Young men often are,” I shot back, and then wished I had bitten my tongue as I heard the bitter undertone to my words. I didn’t want him to think that I still harbored any hurt over his leaving. That would only encourage him in whatever ridiculous fantasies he had been spinning for himself about there being a chance for anything to ever grow between us again.

  “Sometimes they learn,” he said softly. “Sometimes they regret.” His eyes seemed very gray in the shadowed hallway, the color of deep water.

  Or deep trouble. I took a breath. He was beautiful. He’d always been beautiful. And he’d always been trouble. I doubted that that had changed. And I’d learned too.

  “Sometimes it’s too late,” I said. “I have to go.”

  He drew back then, bowed crisply. “As you like. Keep running. It works. For a time. But, Bryony?”

  I turned back. I couldn’t help it. “Yes?”

  “Eventually you have to stop and face what you’re running from.”

  “I’m not running from anything,” I snapped. Technically true. If I chose to misunderstand what we were discussing. Which I did. I turned again and this time he didn’t call me back. I ignored the little pang in my heart that found this troubling.

  ASH

  I watched Bryony walk away. I wanted to follow, but this clearly wasn’t the moment. I had thirty years of distance to overcome. That was going to take some time. But first there was work to be done. So I went in search of Rhian.

  I found her, somewhat unsurprisingly, in the stables, tending to her horse, an unassuming-looking gray gelding whom she doted on. With good reason. He would win no prizes for his beauty, but he moved like lightning when he wanted to. And I’d seen him kill a man with a well-timed kick on the battlefield.

  Rhian’s kind of horse.

  I clucked my tongue at him over the stable door, digging into my pockets for sugar cubes.

  Rhian looked up from her brushing. “Morning. You look tired.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She started to work on the horse again, brushing his neck with long, sure strokes. “Did you spend your night howling at the moon and mooning over that Fae lady?”

  She didn’t miss much. Damn it. “There was no howling. Or mooning.”

  Rhian snorted. So did the horse, which made Rhian laugh. “I saw you going after her last night. Haven’t seen you look at another woman like that. Is she the one you left behind?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  She pointed the brush at me. “It always is. Best approach is to grovel. If you were thinking of mooning, that is. Groveling always works well.”

  I was sure Rhian had had many, many men groveling at her boots in her day. She should be an expert on the subject. I wasn’t sure there was enough abasement in the world to get me back into Bryony’s good graces, however. “Thanks for the advice. How did you get along with Brother Liam last night?”

  She grinned at my change of subject and set back to work, the muscles in her tanned arms rippling under her tattoos. “Too pretty to be a knight, that one.”

  “Well, he is a knight. Bound to his God. So try not to break his heart.”

  “Templars aren’t celibate.”

  I couldn’t deny that. “No, but he’s very young.”

  “Not that young. Not after whatever did that to his arm.”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  She hitched a shoulder, ran a hand down the gelding’s neck as though testing if his hide was smooth enough for her satisfaction. “Didn’t ask. He’ll tell me if he wants to.”

  I’d seen Liam with his shirt off just once while we’d traveled to the City. There was a jagged scar made up of four parallel lines across his torso, angling down from his missing arm. If I were any judge, it was a Beast who’d torn him up, but I’d let Rhian discover that for herself.

  “Is there anything you need me to decide right now?” I cast my mind back over the stream of details she and Charles had spouted at me earlier. “We need to get the billeting worked out today.”

  Rhian ducked around the gray and started work on his other side. “You need to think about where you want them. There are some empty buildings nearer to the border we can take over for lodgings and supplies if we need them.” She twisted her head toward me. “Not sure how close you want to be to the front line, so to speak. There are other options. The Brother House has room to house a few patrols we could rotate through. And Liam was going to show me through their storerooms today, see what room there is for our supplies and figure out what extras need to be laid in.”

  If it came down to outright war, then being camped right near the edge of human territory wasn’t the smartest move. Then again, the Templars were paying us for a show of force. And inside the City was safer than camped on the outskirts. We hadn’t had any trouble yet, but if the Night World chose to go on the offensive, then sleeping in open space at night would just make my men sitting ducks.

  “Put half the men near the border,” I said. “Enough not to make them an easy target. We’ll rotate through the patrols there and at the Brother House and wherever else they can put us.”

  Bryony had mentioned tunnels to the hospital. If the humans were smart, they would’ve built extra rooms a
nd storage when they laid the tunnels. “There may be room at St. Giles,” I added.

  “Near your pretty friend?” She smirked at me. “Convenient.”

  I rolled my eyes at her. “Don’t let Lady Bryony hear you say that. She might turn you into a frog.”

  Rhian’s eyebrows shot up. “Can she do that?”

  I grinned. “She’s a healer. They can make bodies do all sorts of interesting things.” Wait—that sounded wrong.

  Rhian obviously agreed, her smirk returning. “Well, now, I’m sure I wouldn’t know about that. But apparently you do.”

  “Remind me again why I keep you on?”

  “Because I’m better at my job than any of the others,” she said. “Plus, I’m more decorative than Charles.” She held out a hand, squinted down at the pattern spiraling across the back of it with a considering eye. “This needs more work.”

  “There are sigilers in the City.”

  “Good ones?”

  “Ask around. You’ll find out. When I was here last, there were definitely some sigilers from the Silk Provinces working here.”

  Her eyes lit up. “They do good work.”

  “That’s your department. Just don’t do anything that’s going to put you out of action. The situation around here is chancy. It’s going to go up in flames at some point, despite what the humans want. We need to be ready.”

  “Liam said the Blood lord gaining power is bad news.”

  “Blood lords often are.” I’d never led a campaign against the Blood before. The odd rogue Beast Kind, and definitely some other strange beasts, including a truly unnerving battle against a cadre of mad bokors down in the Voodoo Territories, but not vampires. When I left the City, the Blood had been firmly under Lord Lucius’ control and I’d had no desire to cross paths with him. In truth, I hadn’t often left Summerdale back then. I’d been too busy having a good time in the court and, once I’d met Bryony, with her to venture too far from home.

  But now, from what Guy had told me and from what I could read of the mood of the City—and, yes, a city in trouble has a distinct atmosphere; I’d learned that well in thirty years of war—whoever this Ignatius Grey was who was leading the Blood now, he was at least as bad as Lucius. Perhaps worse. He was younger, for one thing, and that meant inexperienced. He was obviously ruthless to have won control over the Blood at such a young age. But whether he was clever and strong enough to keep it was something yet to be proved. Certainly he was reckless to break the treaty that had kept the Blood somewhat protected over the years despite their preying on humans.

  Obviously he thought he could succeed.

  I was here to see that he failed.

  That meant our paths were bound to cross.

  I felt my power stir at the thought. The Blood were easily killed by fire. One word from the Templars and I could send an inferno raging through the Blood territories that would solve the problem once and for all.

  But not without a terrible cost.

  A price the Templars and the humans weren’t willing to pay. Not yet.

  I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I wasn’t sure I could bear to pay that price either. I’d used fire a few times early on in my mercenary career and caused things that still sometimes haunted my dreams. As I’d grown more skilled in war, I turned to other tactics where I could avoid using my powers. Safer all round.

  I was skilled with fire, true, but the fire, once it reached a certain point, inevitably grew too large for even my control. In a city as big as this one, that point would come sooner rather than later. And an out-of-control inferno would kill more than just vampires.

  “Was there something else you actually wanted, boss?” Rhian said, amusement dancing in her eyes. The gray snorted again, turning to nudge her pocket, and she gave him sugar while she grinned at me.

  “Just keep your eyes and ears open.” The Templars were being open with their information, but nothing was better than intelligence gathered by people I knew.

  “We’re going to go look at the buildings near the border. Do you want to join us?” She turned to stow the brush in the leather saddlebag hanging on the wall with several bridles.

  “Yes,” I said. I needed to get the lay of the land.

  I wondered whether Tomar and his companions had left the City limits yet. I didn’t want to cross paths with him again so soon, but I couldn’t hide in the Brother House forever. There were things to do, and, as always, the stone walls were starting to feel restrictive. Or maybe that was all the iron. Whatever the reason, the Brother House felt heavy around me. Its walls were old and went deep, whispering of time and duty and stability.

  All the things I wasn’t good at.

  Growing up in Summerdale—where nothing stays the same for very long and where, if you’re bored and strong enough, you can change the land to suit yourself—wasn’t a good training ground for the type of settling in one spot that the humans went for. Nor was the life of a mercenary.

  Rhian nodded as she came back to the stall door. “I need to talk to the stable master about how many horses he has space for as well. And how many other liveries there are in the City.”

  “There are parks too.”

  “Liveries are easier to guard at night,” Rhian said.

  True. But whether the humans had enough spare stable space for all our horses was doubtful. We might just have to use the parks and take our chances. We could ward them and set guards. The parks I knew of were well within the human boroughs. If the Blood and Beasts got far enough in to attack our horses without being challenged or stopped, then we had bigger problems than worrying about our mounts.

  “I’ll get Aric saddled,” I said. We had pushed the horses to get here fast but not enough that they needed days of rest. Extra rations, yes, and a few days of not doing too much, but they were used to traveling, so some gentle exercise wouldn’t hurt.

  “Liam should be here soon.”

  I nodded and went down a few stalls to saddle Aric. His name meant “light” in the Fae tongue, which was a misnomer, given that he was so dark a brown as to be nearly black and mean-tempered with it. But he’d had the name before I’d acquired him and I wasn’t about to change it.

  It wasn’t long at all before Liam arrived, Guy DuCaine with him as well as another of the Templar brothers called Patrick whom I’d met briefly the night before.

  Shortly after the Templars appeared, three of Rhian’s squad turned up as well.

  Seven—eight counting me—seemed like an excessive number for a daylight trip to a destination within the human boroughs but apparently the Templars didn’t believe in taking chances. They were the ones who best understood the situation, so I didn’t say anything.

  Plus, a few more bodies around wouldn’t hurt if we did come across any more Fae looking to an extend an invitation for me to return to Summerdale.

  • • •

  Rhian hadn’t been joking about how close to the front line the buildings were. From where I sat on Aric’s back, I could see down the unusually quiet street—deserted apart from us—a few hundred yards to a crossroads marked by a tall metal lamppost on one corner. From it swung one of the sunlamps that marked the border between the humans’ world and the Night World.

  It swayed gently in the breeze, looking innocuous at this time of day. But it was a symbol of why we were here. And how much effort the humans were putting into maintaining their safety.

  Sunlamps were fueled by the power of the sunmages, and only the strongest of them could call sunlight at night. The City had a fair cadre of sunmages, but powering the sunlamps left them weakened for other tasks. Like healing. Or fighting.

  Most sunmages chose one of those two paths. Most to the former, true, like Simon DuCaine, but some chose the Templars. Liam was one of those. Or had been, given his injury. Which, at least, did leave him free to power some of the lamps. But both skills were ones that would be sorely needed if we did have to fight the Blood directly. If it came to that, we might have to choose between s
afe borders and survival.

  It hadn’t yet come to that. I frowned and turned my attention back to the buildings.

  Rhian and Guy and the others were climbing down from their horses and leading them toward a narrow metal gate between two of the tall brick structures. I followed their lead, still scanning the surrounds as I passed through the gate. Both the buildings were four stories high, solid looking, judging by the depth of the openings in the walls that had both bars and glass for windows. Not as thick as the granite blocks that the Brother House was constructed from, but they were strong. A point in their favor to make up for their location.

  The bricks fairly buzzed with wards too. I extended a tendril of my power and let it slide into the human magic, studying the protections, looking for weaknesses. Whoever had set the wards had done a good job, but there were a few more layers that I and some of my Fae could add.

  Wards took strength to renew too, though they could be anchored down into the earth and stone, which would take the brunt of them. Still, we would all have to spare a little power to check and strengthen them each day.

  Nothing like what the sunmages would be giving up for the signal lamps.

  The gateway opened into a narrow lane that divided the two buildings and ended in a doubled courtyard between them. There was stabling of a sort, enough for a few horses but not a full patrol’s worth.

  Liam opened the thick wooden door into the building, showed us down to the storage cellars, and then through the kitchens and up to the floors above where long, empty rooms smelled faintly of the wool and spices that must have been stored here once—easy to convert to sleeping quarters with the use of our cots and tents made into screens to give the men some illusion of privacy.

  “It’ll do,” I said, leaning to look out of one of the windows. We’d reached the top floor and it gave an interesting perspective across the City, being one of the taller buildings in the immediate area. I looked down and across to the crossroads and the lamp.

  The street where the lamp stood, previously deserted, now had an occupant. A man standing on the Night World side, staring back at the very building we occupied.