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

by CK Dawn

  The snakes perked up at that information. “I’ll send some bread out to you and be back to take your order in a sec,” Rhonda said and walked away.

  Fel watched her go, wondering if he could get a quick hundred vens out of her before he headed back to the salon to pick up where he left off with Dragon then dismissed the idea, finding his occasional practice of entertaining more than one client at the same time suddenly distasteful.

  “She dropped by for tea and crumpets. A little personal attention from the boss. You know how it is.” He shrugged at Charlemagne.

  “I don’t actually. Why don’t you explain it to me and while you’re doing that, why don’t you describe what part of ‘pay now or else’ necessitated you running to Gemma like a tattle-tailing little bitch?”

  “You’re one to talk,” Fel glared.

  “I mean did you really think going over my head would make things easier on you? How fuckin’ dumb can you be?” Charlie threw up his hands. “Look who the hell I’m talking to: the idiot who scooped the stuffing out of a turkey at Murg’s last dig so he could fuck it.”

  Fel flushed. “I’d had too much of those undertow drops Murgatroyd makes, which her lame-assed girlfriend laced with mesc, and thought the damn turkey was Goat.”

  “And this makes you smarter how?”

  “Can I bring you both something from the bar?” Rhonda interrupted like the ding of a heavyweight bout. Four of the twenty baby boas on her head bulged obscenely.

  “Scotch.”

  “Vodka. Straight up.”

  She nodded. “Julian will be over to prepare freshly grown vegetables and meats marinated to Vera’s exacting standards, the result of which is both exotic, yet home cooked, in just a sec.” She intoned the restaurant’s well-known ad without inflection.

  “I didn’t tell Gemma about our talk last night,” Charlie said when she’d left.

  “And I didn’t mention your name to her this afternoon.”

  Charlemagne blinked at him then squinted. “What the fuck?”

  “And why’s she so interest in my debt? She’s got satellite offices all over the city and about four hundred employees. Everyone knows she could run her whole operation on the revenue she gets from her monthly extortion of Halo Financial Consultants. Any money I squeak out of my Janes is barely pocket change.”

  “Yet she paid you a personal visit.”

  “And ordered me to drain a particular client dry,” Fel said, remembering the degrading way Gemma had emphasized her position on the matter. “That reminds me, Gem is doing undertow.”

  Charlie’s brow wrinkled. “You know as well as I do that she never touches the stuff.”

  “She is now.” Fel pointed at his healed neck. “Made her customary mincemeat out of my neck this morning.”

  “And aren’t you all shiny and new. You’d damn-near have to overdose to make that happen.”

  “And it was halfway healed before I cooked up the last of my stash.”

  “You don’t say? You manage that all by your lonesome?” Charlie said.

  “Think I’d still be here hanging out with you if I could work a bit of healing craft?”

  “No. No I don’t. So you’re saying Gem healed you?”

  “Yup.”

  “She ain’t exactly the considerate type, buddy,” Charlie said over the squeak of wheels as Julian pushed his cart in front of their table.

  “Hello, hello!” the oft-mentioned waiter said as he approached, wheeling a rusted hot plate and bowls of meats and veggies to their table. “Who’s ready for some fun?” His engaging smile resembled the toothy grin of a skeleton as he juggled a spatula, a cleaver and a zucchini.

  “Dude,” Charlemagne said to Julian with a compassionate grimace. “Let it go, okay? We’re just here to eat.”

  “Thank God.” Julian sighed, setting down his flying implements, pulling out his dentures and setting them to soak in a cabernet glass full of water.

  “She’s definitely not,” Fel said, returning to their earlier conversation, “yet here I am, practically fit and ready for war. Thanks, Gem.” He raised his glass in salute and took a sip. “What I don’t get is what Gem would want with Dragon?” he mused mostly to himself as he watched Julian work miracles well beyond the hot plate’s original function.

  “So that’s her name,” Charlie said, grabbing a handful of peanuts from the wooden bowl Julian slid in front of him.

  “Yeah, that’s her name.”

  “And you’re willing to go up against Gemma for her because?”

  Fel took a generous swallow of his drink before answering. “Because.”

  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Charlie. More that he didn’t trust his good fortune like a lottery winner might hold on to their disbelief until the money was burning a hole in their pocket.

  His resolute gaze met Charlie’s, the times they’d spent together, good and bad, lethal and comical passing between them like the meal they were about to share.

  “Okay,” Charlemagne conceded.

  “Can you—” Fel started to ask.

  “Probably not,” Charlie interrupted. “After Gem left you, she latched onto my femoral just for kicks.”

  “She healed me and leaves you limping?” Fel shook his head at the improbability of that statement.

  “That’s one helluva hard on she’s got for your girlfriend, buddy.”

  “She’ll be watching me closely now. Watching us both. Still drawing a blank as to why.”

  “I got one for you. Two hundred years ago when you convinced me that promising my services to Doque was not going to be the astronomically bad miscalculation it turned out to be, the Sun put a hit out on you and then set about trying to fulfill the contract herself.”

  Fel grimaced, remembering the flesh Mahb tore off his hide before Doque found him and gave him sanctuary. “Good times,” he said.

  “She never rescinded the order, which unless you want to die screaming leaves you here in this delightful urban enclave of washed-up monsters and no-account humans—”

  “Yourself excluded.”

  “I’m touched, buddy. Really. I may cry,” Charlie deadpanned and dug into the plate of food Julian put in front of him.

  “Your question?” Fel reminded him.

  “Right. Seeing as you ain’t shit in the world of fae, what’s tall, gorgeous and red hot—”

  “Charlemagne,” Fel said exasperated.

  “Alechi’s got legs up to her armpits, which is just my style. Okay, okay. What’s she doing accidentally-on-purpose running into you?” He pointed his fork at Fel for emphasis.

  “Hey! I’ve been told by them that know that I’m a good-looking guy,” Fel said trying to downplay how badly Alechi’s invitation had shaken him. Just the sight of her had induced a longing for home so acute his stomach had cramped.

  “Don’t con me, buddy. You damn-near swooned when she sang the way to her in your ear. And if I wasn’t standing next to you, you would have trotted after her like she was blowing on one of Vlad’s magic pipes.”

  Fel tucked into his meal, not bothering to comment on Charlemagne’s ramblings. No need to add to the truth.

  They ate in silence for a while, Julian filling up their plates when they went empty. “If I may,” the waiter said, his speech punctuated by smacks of toothless gums. “My lord,” he nodded deferentially at Fel, “Your name is well known here and in fae and the truth is, you’ve fallen in with criminals living in this city as you have. You want my advice, you get home lickety-split.”

  “That’s right,” Charlie said. “It’s way better to be torn to shreds in heaven than to live in hell.”

  “Exactly!” Julian beamed at Charlie, missing the sarcasm of his statement entirely. “Besides, chances are at least fifty-fifty they’d welcome you back with open arms. Came looking for you, didn’t they?” The colored lights of Vera’s chandeliers reflected off his wet gums as he grinned and wheeled his cart back to the kitchen.

  “You buy that?”

>   Fel snorted. “Trap’s still a trap no matter how dressed up this one is. Even if it is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in fifty years,” he finished. He shook his head and said, “So, you in?”

  “Deceive Gemma, figure out why the Sun finds you interesting after all these years, which incidentally, will be as easy as us giving birth. To triplets. Get the girl, and though things don’t seem that dire yet, I’m gonna go ahead and say save the world.”

  “Might as well cover all the bases,” Fel agreed.

  Charlemagne shrugged. “Sure, I got some time. Oh,” he said gravely. “Don’t count on me around the week of the fourteenth. I got some vacation time coming and—”

  “Shut the hell up,” Fel laughed using his fork to catapult a carrot wedge at him.

  Charlie caught the carrot in his mouth and managed to beam mischievously and chew at the same time. “You know,” he said suddenly serious. “This kind of gig...junkies need not apply.”

  Fel met his best friend’s hard gaze. There was hope there, though Charlie would probably die before he admitted it. Who could blame him after all I’ve put him through?

  “Way ahead of you, Sarge,” Fel promised.

  Charlie grunted, his attention returning to his meal.

  As they ate, an easy silence fell over them. The first in years.

  “So,” Charlie said, his mouth full of food. “Any part of your plan negotiable?”

  Fel’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “No and fuck you for asking.”

  “I’m not willing to die for some chick named Dragon. Sue me.”

  “Me neither,” Fel growled. “Hell, I barely know her. I mean, she’s cute and all, but a little too romantic for me—you know, picket fence and hearts and a dog. She might even be cross-eyed.”

  Charlie took in Fel’s too-innocent eyes and his own widened incredulously. “Jesus everlasting Christ! When the fuck did you have time to fall in love with her?”

  Fel leaned heavily against the booth’s backrest and laughed, not bothering to correct him. He hardly knew the truth himself and in the end it didn’t matter. After all he’d sacrificed for the victims of RUFO’s experiments, he was owed this oasis and now that he’d found it, he had no intention of giving it up.

  “When we get to the death part of our adventure, you and your cross-eyed girlfriend are on your own, you hear me?” Charlie leveled a hard look at Fel’s silly grin. “I mean it, Flannacán!”

  Contrary to Charlemagne’s immature hysterics, Fel did not love Dragon. He liked her. He definitely liked her, but love? Even now, some one hundred and fifty years after the veil that shielded humanity from the many worlds of miscellus was torn away, the idea of mixed-species couples was at the very least frowned on. At the other end of the spectrum, the concept engendered violence, though he’d only ever heard of incubi who summarily executed both the incubus and their human lover.

  It wasn’t just miscellus who frowned and stared when a lamia and her boyfriend walked down 2nd Avenue arm and arm. Humans were just as bad if not worse. Instead of bringing folk together, K'Davrah left every question it posed unanswered and threw out a dozen more. The majority of humans huddled together for comfort and disdained those outside their circle as if inadvertent contact would immediately summon a Sous demon.

  Before K'Davrah, Fel had taken humans to his bed, charmed by their eagerness and devotion, but it never occurred to him to let them into his heart or even his house until one of the court’s many Japanese émigrés and advisor to the queen, Aiko.

  Found herself a human preacher man and fell headfirst into love, which would’ve been unremarkable had she been quiet about it. Like most fools she couldn’t contain the urge to flaunt her love; brought him to one of Mahb’s intimate sit down’s and caused such a ruckus, she and her man ended up in Mahb’s playroom for three straight days. Without transfusions to sustain him through the queen’s play, the human had died, begging for his love.

  Aiko had been inconsolable. About once every hundred years or so, one of the more ancient fae felt a kind of ruthless ennui and left paradise to fade, and until Mahb’s furious order, none had watched the violent progression of it until Aiko. Her breasts leaked milk, then an unnamable clear fluid then blood until everything dried—lips, gums, eyeballs—to a lifeless husk. Her last word was her lover’s name, released in a billowing cloud like the dust from an emptied vacuum cleaner.

  Since the Unveiling, modernity had done little to lessen the sting of this kind of bigotry. Fel could count on one hand the number of Sun children who’d committed themselves to a human for the rest of their lovers’ lives. Two were permanently banished. Three left the Sun voluntarily after their lovers were continually stalked like a herd of wolpertinger upwind of a pride of lions. They now lived complicated lives in Halo City. Fel had stood up with Helena at her wedding to Stephen sixty years ago and occasionally surprised his friend’s husband at the rest home with a deck of cards or a game of chess.

  The four couples who made their home in the Sun did so one cautious step at a time, equal rights coming to human citizens of the fae only when the media took notice of the Sun’s continued bigotry. Having human eyes judge the movements of what were once myths and legends was a power no miscellus had anticipated nor was it one they could afford to discount now that Pan had leveled the playing field.

  So it was a good thing he didn’t love Dragon; the logistics of living such an emotion were just too hard. He needed to work her to keep Gemma off his back, but that wasn’t anything new. Women became his bread and butter soon after his first hit of undertow, and trying to stay two steps ahead of his ever-present debt was how he’d lived his life for the last thirty years. And sure, Dragon made him feel restored like a priceless painting brought back to life, but it was that he wanted her so damn much that spun him around, made him wish for things and fantasize about how it would be if he actually had them.

  “She’s been tapped,” he blurted out suddenly, relieved to have finally figured out why Dragon seemed so strange to him. Ticch demons sucked down a soul like it was a tequila shot. In fact, he’d seen a newly mated pair attach themselves to the jugular of a pimp, gulp down his soul and crawl off of the newly made sociopath they’d left behind to chase their meal with a wedge of lemon.

  “No, that can’t be right,” he said and stopped in the middle of evening rush foot traffic to scratch his head. Most blood drinkers kept at least one mature ticch as a pet, counting on those sixty or so seconds of disorientation after being de-souled to guarantee that night’s dinner.

  Dragon was clearly not dead and hardly a sociopath, so why couldn’t he shake the feeling that pieces of her soul had been chipped away somehow? There were terminus moths that fed on spiritual waste that had been known to gnaw on intact souls when nothing else was available, but they flourished once every seven years and were most likely found in clumps outside the offices of therapists. At the moment, Halo City was blessed to be in the middle of that cycle.

  More importantly, Dragon’s lack didn’t seem involuntary. There was an infinite kindness about her that didn’t jibe with a person shorted of part or all of their soul by miscellus means, which meant that she willingly gave her soul away, which meant that at least a sixteenth of her biological makeup consisted of inspirational blood, which was impossible.

  All nine muses were listed as KIA on CRA’s roster of dead and all nine had declared celibacy at the beginning of K'Davrah as a symbol of their dedication to the cause and held on to abstinence until the end to preserve the last bit of magic that remained within their very blood. There was no child or great-grandchild or great-great-grandchild, et cetera of a muse that wasn’t accounted for and that was under the age of one hundred.

  Furthermore, musekin were decidedly earthy-crunchy folk, less concerned with day-to-day practical matters as they were with the imagination inherent in the everyday.

  Dragon’s scent reminded him of gloaming in the Sun court when the sky knelt in deference to the first few rays of the m
oon, and when simple flowers wound their petals into fists to ward off the charisma of more complicated blooms that luxuriated during that middling hour. The other side of the world from patchouli.

  Fel shrugged away his thoughts as he strode down the street toward Elemental. At the end of the day it didn’t matter that Dragon was damaged or that he couldn’t explain her dysfunction. He would have her and she would have him even if that meant begging, conning or forcing her to stay by his side. Even if that meant going up against his demon boss and any two-bit thug she sent after him.

  Even if that meant going up against the white, hot stare of the Sun herself.

  Ten

  Dragon drew a wide-tooth comb through Sahar’s thick hair, pleased with the cinnamon highlights interspersed with Sahar’s natural brown hair.

  When Dragon saw Sahar’s name in her book, she’d anticipated a trim and a blowout, the former taking twenty minutes and the latter close to an hour. The woman had a lot of hair. Imagine Dragon’s surprise when Sahar briefly detailed her break up with the love of her life and his perusal of an “unworthy” coworker, and insisted that her waist-length hair be cut off.

  The adorable boy cut Dragon had created resembled Clark Kent’s neatly styled locks.

  “You like?” Dragon slowly spun her chair around to face the mirror and met Sahar’s anxious eyes.

  “Wow,” the young Iranian woman breathed. Her melodic accent made the colloquialism sound strangely pretentious and Dragon grinned in spite of the moment. The big reveal always gave her the worst case of butterflies even though, with her ability stacking the deck, she hadn’t made a styling misstep yet.

  “I look—” Sahar said turning her head slowly back and forth.

  “Sexy!” Sage finished from his station.

  Dragon nodded and grinned. The cut accentuated Sahar’s lush mouth and large almond-shaped eyes.

  “Out with the old, in with the brand fucking new,” Sahar muttered bitterly even as she admired her new ’do.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Dragon said, making a face. At Sahar’s raised eyebrows, she revised. “I mean, talk like that if you want to, but with your accent it’d be less jarring if you said something like, ‘This day’s labors have passed, thanks be to thee, Most High, and a new day has begun.’”