Fire and Fantasy: A Limited Edition Collection of Urban and Epic Fantasy

by CK Dawn

  Had it really been that long since she’d actually wanted someone, not for the unnatural high fixing them could bring her, but for the simple pleasure of how that person made her feel?

  Had she ever really felt the pull of genuine attraction or had she always just fulfilled this other need?

  “This inhuman need,” she said out loud, remembering the gloating voice’s boast in Junior’s.

  Refusing to acknowledge the rabbit hole the question represented and all incoherent voices in general, she glared at the frowning woman in the mirror. “There’s nothing about him that needs fixing, Wilhelmina,” she gritted out instead. “Well, there is, but he’s too far gone for you to do any good.” Or get any benefit out of him, an insidious voice reminded her.

  Ignoring the last, she lathered the cracked bar of soap over her wet underwear, trying not to think of all the ways she could make him like new again. It would only make her hungry for a meal he couldn’t provide, she decided. She glanced in the mirror again, waiting for her reflection to make her see reason.

  “Why do you think he can do magic?” she asked. She picked up the tarnished spoon and thought of the leanest year she and Jasper had ever experienced.

  Undertow.

  Hungry and homeless, they’d been caught squatting in her school’s unused audio/visual room. The principal had found them and lectured them both. Organizations he could call that would give them aid, he’d said after droning on for a good half an hour. Jasper had thanked him and excused himself, grabbing Dragon’s hand.

  He’d pulled her out of the man’s office and the building not speaking until they reached a run-down park near the school, a chain-link fence the only thing that separated it from an alley overwhelmed by trash bins. Jasper hushed Dragon before he made a hasty transaction with the smelly, emaciated creature that emerged from the shadows then hauled her to a secluded park bench where they both stared at the three lumps of calcified undertow in a small plastic bag.

  “I didn’t know it would be green,” he’d said.

  “I don’t want you to do this.” Dragon pulled the bag out of his hand and looked for a trash bin.

  He snatched it back. “Are you hungry? Because I’m friggin’ starving.”

  Dragon grabbed for the bag and missed. “Give it,” she said, reaching for it again.

  Jasper held his arm away. “If I take this we eat.”

  “Jasper!”

  “If I take this, I get my magic back and I can build us a home. And when did I stop being ‘Daddy’?”

  “If you take that, you maybe get a fraction of your magic back temporarily—for like five fucking minutes—”

  “Language, sweetheart,” he murmured, holding the bag up to the sun.

  “—and you’ll become an addict. That Trewski guy wrote an op-ed piece on it. It’s instantly addictive!”

  “Is it?”

  They both stared at the lime-green rocks he held.

  “Daddy,” she said.

  Jasper had smiled faintly at her attempt to placate him.

  With a defeated sigh, she slumped against the slatted back of the park bench, plucking unhappily at her long johns showing through the hole in a pair of worsted-wool second-hands. “I need you, Dad.” She took a deep breath and turned toward him. “I’m so grateful to you.” She grabbed his hand when he shook his head and plunged on. “When she left—”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Phyllis,” she corrected; that woman stopped being her grandmother a long time ago. “You didn’t have to…help me, you’re not even really built for that, but you did and now you’re my family. My only family.”

  He stared at her for a minute before slinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing her close. They both watched as a herd of kindergarteners streamed out of the nearby elementary school and attached themselves to a rusted jungle gym like prickly burrs.

  “Where’d you get the money for that sh—stuff anyway?” Dragon said, mesmerized by a pigtailed girl playing patty-cake as she hung upside down.

  “Worked a quick-and-dirty no-see-um spell for Goat. Carlos’s been stalking her pretty hard, horny bastard.”

  “Goat? But she’s an actual goat.” She held up a staying hand. “I don’t want to know. Can we sell it?” She’d smiled into Jasper’s crayon-blue eyes, then laughed when they lit up greedily.

  Fel had that look Trewski had described: starving, standing in line at a buffet, but on his best behavior because a queen, a prince, a president, a chairman and his boss stood in front of him. Elegantly desperate, Trewski had written. He went on to detail the drug’s effect on the miscellus population—the only beings it worked on—and its particular popularity with war vets.

  “The euphoria they experience is akin to having the use of a limb again that had been lost years before,” he’d written, quoting a strung-out naga demon in rehab for the third time. “In addition, there is a sense of weightlessness one achieves when the drug is taken intravenously.”

  Dragon stopped scrubbing her underwear, dried her hands and opened the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. The usual things populated it: shaving cream, razors, after-shave lotion. On the second shelf was a leather shaving case and a sleek hand-blown koi fish, balancing on the tips of its exaggerated feather-like fins and tail. Each appendage seemed to be caught in the midst of flowing with an easy current.

  Dragon picked it up gently and peered down its mouth wondering who in the world would have crafted a hollow glass fish when she noticed the screw pattern on the inside of the figure’s frowning fishy mouth. Wanting to confirm her suspicion, she carefully placed the fish back on the shelf and reached for the case, unzipping it quickly.

  Her sigh was unsurprised as she took out the needle, screwed it into the fish’s mouth and threaded the depressor through the hole in the koi’s tail.

  “Lovely.” She grimaced at the fanciful syringe, dismantled it and put it back in the medicine chest. She swung the door closed, flicked a finger at the tarnished spoon in his toothbrush holder, watching it swing before she sighed at her reflection. “See? Told ya. Nothing worth saving.” She wrung out her panties and hung them to dry on an empty towel rack. “Therefore you do not want him; therefore you can take a shower.” She took off her clothes, stood in the tub, her hand on the shower knob, and thought of the glimpse of his starkly defined abdominals framed by his pelvic bones. “So he’s cute. So what? You can still take a shower. A long, nonchalant, unaffected, proper shower.”

  She settled for quickly washing up in the heavy stream the tub’s faucet produced.

  “Everything okay?” Fel called as she dried herself.

  “Sure,” she yelled back, struggling into her bra. She pulled on her blouse and skirt, then picked up her damp panties. After a quick internal debate, she put them on, breathing a sigh of relief when the cold, wet crotch touched hers, still aching from Ryan’s…

  “Rape?” Dragon questioned the mirror. “But I said yes. I more than said yes. Possession,” she offered, slipping into her heels. “I didn’t say yes that much.” She buttoned the last button on her blouse. “Selfishness.” Whatever it was, she hadn’t seen it coming. That he’d leave her, maybe. That he would require a parting gift was a first.

  She peered at her reflection, examining the details of her forehead to see if somehow the word loser was etched there. The mirror bloated and contracted and she fancied she could see the word desperate undulating over her head like a mirage.

  “When are you going to learn?” she muttered, soaking a bit of tissue and wiping away the melted smears of her eye make-up. “You can’t fix a man, you can’t mold a man and you certainly can’t glue decency and responsibility to him and think that will make him Prince Charming.”

  And yet that’s exactly what she’d tried to do her entire dating career. Every lesson she learned from one failed relationship, she applied to the next, hoping to change history like some frantic time-traveler, trying to rewrite the devastation of one event.

 
; “Every woman since the beginning of time has done this,” Saras had said once during one of their infamous all-carbs-all-weekend festivals. “I got six hundred years on you, girlfriend, so I know from whence I speak,” she’d said, piling a scoop of chocolate-chunk ice cream on a potato chip and inhaling it.

  Dragon hadn’t bothered to answer, the siren call of mashed potato and bacon pizza occupying her full attention.

  Besides, Dragon’s problem wasn’t that she didn’t want to put the work in. It was that good old fashioned work wasn’t enough for her. She knew the Prince existed. Most women had faith that they’d find the one, but Dragon knew firsthand that she could coax one into being. The fact that her ability was unpredictable when it came to her own love life was of no consequence. She had twenty-nine years of practical experience that told her that love was a formula, and that all that one need to do to have a gorgeous cake was tweak a few of the original ingredients.

  Her real problem was the enormity of bliss. Indistinguishable from hope, it seduced her, luring her back into the back-alley throes of this destructive cycle with a few words of how simple it would be to encourage her latest project this way or that and how the reward would change her life. Who had time for love when this kind of seductive magic was only a thought or two away?

  True love may be every girl’s fairy tale, but bliss was irresistible and, like a weak fool, she danced to whatever tune it thought to play.

  “Just like an addict,” she voiced her worst fear out loud for the first time. She pulled the mirror open and stared at the unassuming black case and flamboyant syringe.

  “Definitely not worth saving. Or loving,” she said. She closed the mirror and confronted her reflection. “Maybe you aren’t either.”

  Putting her latest failure and all her doubts out of her mind, she opened the bathroom door. The next hour or two belonged to her. “It’s about damn time,” she muttered to herself.

  “Hey there.” Fel stood up from leaning against the plain bureau.

  “Hey.” She stepped out of the bathroom tentatively. Her eyes searched the air surrounding his body for the shimmery beginnings of his potential and she felt her power—low vibrations that suffused her body like the last bubbles of a cooling hot tub—rev then stall. She took a deep breath and squinted at him, hoping to force the image of who he could be, but nothing happened.

  “Feel better?” He cocked his head at her in question, but said nothing as he guided her toward the table.

  “Much, yes. Thank you,” she murmured. Her ability wasn’t much, not like Jasper’s in his heyday, but she’d taken for granted that it would always work, especially when she was in proximity of a real fixer-upper. The ability to see usually worked on everyone, human and miscellus alike.

  She tried to see Fel again and was further nonplussed by his…blankness.

  “Hop up.” He patted the massage table.

  “Oh. Right.” She perched one buttock on the table, the sweet, cool peace she felt in Fel’s presence making her forget about her uncertainty, the bliss and his questionability. “Should I?” she motioned to her clothes then thought better. “Can you just do my feet?”

  “The consultation gives you considerably more,” he said with a compassionate smile.

  “So maybe I could have the rest as a credit?” she hedged more uncomfortable with not having her usual advantage than being naked.

  He chuckled, grabbed her about the waist and hauled her onto the table. He pulled off her heels and tossed them to the floor then pushed the hem of her skirt above her knees.

  “Those are very expensive,” she admonished, halting his hands from raising her skirt any further.

  “Lie down,” he instructed, exasperated. He raised her left foot high startling her onto her back.

  “Okay then,” she joked, nervously staring at the ceiling. He sat on a wheeled stool, and she heard a high-pitched squeak as he maneuvered it to the end of the table. She gasped as his thumb feathered over the ball of her foot, then dug hard, dead center. All thoughts of her offline power and Fel’s blankness left her.

  “How does that feel?” He pressed the spot again.

  She squeezed her eyes closed at the sensation, her breath huffing through her parted lips. “I…It feels—” She flexed the foot in his hand. “I dunno. It feels—” Her back arched a little and a moan escaped before she could collar it. “It—”

  “Hurts?”

  She writhed then stilled self-consciously as he pressed his thumbs into the ligaments.

  “Feel good?”

  “I think. Yeah. Not really. Maybe.”

  He returned to the spot on the ball of her foot and ground the blunt tip of his thumb there relentlessly. “How does it feel?” His voice deepened to a gravel.

  She ground her teeth together and squeezed her eyes shut. “God,” she sighed, clenching and unclenching her fists. It felt like she’d been bending all day, bending and lifting and finally had a bed in her sights, the perfect bed, a bed engineered by the gods. And when she lay on it, slowly easing her back down vertebra by vertebra, a sharp pain, like muscles resisting a good stretch, forced her to arch her lower back away, but she prevailed and bent her knees, pressing her spine into the mattress, biting her tongue against the strange pain that pierced her, though not enough for her to want to escape it by rolling to her side. Just enough for her to flirt with the ache a bit before easing into it and welcoming the way it radiated outward before dissipating into groaning relief in stages, like an echo. Then she would arch her relieved back and bow it experimentally, wishing for a bit more of that delicious sting.

  That’s what his hands felt like.

  “It’s…good. Maybe.” Her sex swelled. The pain his thumbs inflicted on her foot battled with her arousal and she resisted the urge to slide her fingers between her legs or pull her foot away.

  “You sure?

  She laughed shakily. “I have no idea.” Smile fading, she asked, “This is the truth, right? No magic?”

  He hummed neutrally and kneaded her calves. His touch was casual compared to before and she felt her arousal cool until he moved to her other foot. He just held it, his fingers warm against the rounded top of her foot. The calloused palm rasped along the side.

  Her skin prickled in anticipation and she opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. Walnut crown-molding in the shape of curly-haired cherub heads smiled beneficently down at her. She met the eyes of a frowning one and ignored it when it gave her the finger.

  She wiggled her toes.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, aching to feel that strange carnality again.

  “Nope.”

  She raised her head and squinted at him.

  His eyes were closed, her foot in his hand. He looks like he’s praying, she thought. His dark hair fell over one closed lid and the detailed curve of his mouth seemed exaggerated, even succulent, now that it was still. He was beautiful.

  She relaxed her head on the massage table, exhaling a frustrated breath and rolled her eyes at the irrepressible ceiling, alternately mooning, flashing, and sticking its tongues out at her.

  One hand cupped her heel delicately, like it was old, fragile and from the Ming dynasty, and she had to tell herself not to get up, thank him for his time and walk the hell out of there. There was a brief internal debate about the veracity of leaving regardless, which her libido squelched.

  Without warning both of his thumbs dug into her foot and the need for bliss hit her like a gut punch. She tried to contain it, but she lost that fight absolutely. She managed to clap a hand over her mouth before she begged him to fuck her, the request reduced to a plaintive moan. She forced her eyes open, a last ditch attempt to maintain control, and groaned at the wasted effort. Her other foot pushed restlessly into his chest and he allowed it, using one hand to smooth a deliberate line up that calf. His knuckles rolled over the sensitive underside of her knee and brushed along her inner thigh, asking for them to open as the other hand tormented her foot knowingly.
/>   “Okay?” he asked, his fingers tickling between her legs like seaweed.

  She turned her face away from the ceiling and shut her eyes. She rolled her pelvis once, restlessly and again like a beggar when she felt the light pressure of his fingertips.

  He pressed his thumb into her foot, maintaining acute pressure even as his other hand courted entrance into her body.

  Her nipples tightened at the delicious bite and she covered her closed eyes with a shaking hand. “Why?” she asked, twisting her head back and forth, unable to articulate her question. She wondered how it was she didn’t know of this eroticism. The whole of her life it existed and only now…only now. “Shiva,” she called unable to stop herself from giving voice to this foreign pleasure.

  Ultimately she couldn’t stop her hands from seeking a path to her waist. Her fingers slid under her skirt, reaching ruthlessly.

  “Jesus,” Fel breathed raggedly. His fingertips landed lightly on the damp crotch of her panties. “Dragon,” he pleaded.

  She raised her head and met his eyes, gray and needy.

  “Yes?” His fingers trembled at one seam.

  A single word and they would delve inside her. A single word and he would know that she was wet for him, her underwear’s damp state truly accounted for. A single word and she could complete this dark bliss.

  “Yes,” she whispered and dragged her skirt’s hem up over her hips. She drew her free leg away from his chest, placed it on the table near her buttocks and let it fall open for just a minute, she told herself.

  Two of his fingers slipped over the wet folds of her sex then stilled when Dragon undulated her hips, slowly dragging her aching flesh up towards the tips and down to his knuckles and back again.

  He spread those fingers, catching her swollen clit between them on a downstroke and squeezing them closed as her hips rolled upwards. His other hand still manipulated her foot ruthlessly. He allowed her two more hungry strokes before he pulled his hand out of her underwear.