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

by CK Dawn

  Almost.

  He’d clawed his way to his current position by being outspoken and by using his razor-sharp wit to amuse the most powerful denizens of this shadowland, especially its prince. He’d also employed the most passive-aggressive techniques to backstab the lovers, friends and family he’d stepped on to achieve the rarified air he now breathed, though to hear him tell it, it was he who’d been thrown under the bus for simply trying to help. He who was declared innocent even though he held a bloody dagger—literally speaking in some instances.

  There was no chance Fish missed the serrated-edged foreboding that filled the room but, particularly during these last few years, he’d become confident that Doque could not do without him. This was a mistake of ticking time bomb proportions, and many bets were laid in the darkest corners of the back nine as to when it would explode in his face.

  In this instance, Fish employed a smile of tempered enthusiasm and filled his slanted eyes with innocent good will.

  Quill thought the role of excited ingénue was ill-fitting, distasteful, especially given Fish’s gastronomical preferences, but Doque, well…

  “Forgive me, Father,” Fish said, making Quill roll her eyes. Doque liked to think of himself as some sort of savior to all fae, but no one else did. Those who called him Father did so in an attempt to curry favor. Everyone knew this, including Doque, who was nevertheless charmed by the affectation.

  “I spoke thoughtlessly,” Fish continued. “It’s just—after all this time, things are finally starting to fall into place.” He bit his lower lip as if to contain his anticipation, his exposed canines doing little to make him seem repentant in Quill’s opinion.

  Doque chuckled, took the length of printed Egyptian cloth from Fish and wrapped it around his waist.

  With a long-suffering sigh, and in a gesture that spoke of considerable intimacy, Fish unwound the long cloth, shook it out and rewrapped it expertly about his master. “There.” He grinned up at Doque, his paw-like hands still resting on Doque’s hips.

  Doque’s eyes were lit in wish-filled midnight as he regarded his servant and he chuckled again, a warm sound that made Quill almost wish that the world was different and that this handsome prince was hers. Almost.

  “Finish here, then ring the gate and see if Quillya came through,” Doque said, and sauntered off in the direction of the bathroom.

  “Of course.”

  Quill watched impatiently as Fish straightened the room, taking several minutes to roll in Doque’s bed like the man’s linens were woven with catnip.

  Straining to push his laden laundry cart, the servant finally left and Quill sighed in relief then waited an extra minute or two before leaving her hiding place.

  Slowly she drew the curtain aside and blinked into Doque’s pleasantly composed face, the height of the sill making them see eye to eye.

  He lowered his mouth to her and kissed her, his need appearing to grow as he deepened their connection and tangled his tongue with hers.

  Quill knew better, but was still unprepared for the revulsion that hit her like a post-traumatic memory, and the longing for more that overwhelmed reason and instinct. To her horror, she wound her arms around his neck and moaned. Making you crave your abuse was only one of Doque’s many expertise.

  Finally he broke away and licked his lips with a satisfied hum. “Very nice,” he said then batted his nose over hers. “Hello, sweetheart.”

  “My liege.”

  “How’s life treating you?”

  “Not bad,” she said, deciding not to beg for mercy despite the torment of his kiss. “You?”

  Tiring of their game he said, “Your report, Quill, and make it good. You’re going to be here awhile regardless, but if you speak quickly I’ll let you enjoy some of that time.” He grinned, knowing that everyone ultimately enjoyed his touch. The rub was that they didn’t want to. “Maybe.”

  “Dragon has taken up with Flannacán map Cinid ocus Barita seirbhíseach Mahb Tóisech,” Quill said in a rush, happy to throw Fel into the fire to save Dragon.

  “You lie.” He grabbed her upper arms and Quill struggled not to cry out.

  “I swear. She brought him home this very evening. Jasper was furious.”

  His black eyes hardened, flattening to an unsettling matte, and he stepped away from her with a growl.

  Quill watched him run frustrated fingers over his hair before she realized that her meager report was apparently earth-shattering enough to occupy him for some time.

  Without bothering to analyze why and as nonchalantly as she could, she stepped off the sill and made her way to the chamber’s doors.

  “Where you going?” he said, grabbing her braid and dragging her closer to him. “Don’t rush off yet. I haven’t had dessert.”

  He flung her to the floor and retrieved a whip coiled on a long wooden table.

  He flicked it in her direction, making Quill hiss and clutch her burning thigh.

  If this is all there is, I’ll be okay, Quill thought, mentally inventorying the Salon’s pantry for herbs that dulled pain and promoted healing.

  But that wasn’t all there was.

  Doque strode to one of three ivory and brass drawer pulls protruding from the gold-leaf covered wall.

  Quill had always thought they were an odd quirk of Doque’s decorator and watched as he pulled open a large drawer, its contents apparent from the smell of rotting corpse that hit Quill like a ton of bricks.

  “No!” she yelled, getting to her feet and looking frantically from the door to the window for an escape route.

  “Richard here has been jonesing for a bit of trim, and after all he’s done for me,” Doque’s black eyes pierced Quill, “I think he deserves nothing but the best.”

  At his name, Richard sat up and flopped to the floor. At least five hundred pounds, Quill followed a baby roach’s progress as it emerged from the outer corner of the corpse’s eye, traversed the slick, milky ball and disappeared down the inner corner.

  “I’ve been faithful!” Quill screamed. “I don’t deserve this!”

  Standing in front his suite’s doors, Doque’s eyes were hungry and his smile cruel as he watched the surprisingly nimble corpse stalk Quill. “But you’ll love it; I’ll make sure of it. You’ll dream about it for years to come and wake still throbbing with sopping wet panties. Then you’ll scream. That I deserve.”

  “Fuck you,” Quill said, yielding to the zombie, knowing she had no choice and praying that it would be quick.

  Doque wanted her humiliation? He wanted her screams? Quill was once the moon and had dominion over all who ventured in her light. She had the strength of twenty thousand lifetimes within her. She hoped he could wait.

  Part Two

  Breaking the Surface

  Thirteen

  Fel stood in front of the Launch Pad clammy and shivering, though a heatwave had Halo City PD’s arrests for public nudity at an all-time high.

  The dim light of a flickering street lamp made the clientele entering the Pad look dead before their time. Shadowed eyes, hollow with longing and gangly stop-motion limbs, these were the Pad’s elite.

  A prostitute and his intoxicated John approached the abandoned ten-story office building. The former headquarters of Judas County’s power company, Halo Lighting and Power started losing revenue soon after the collapse. After the war, the power company couldn’t keep up with the hundreds of legitimate and bogus remedies for power flooding the market. When the CEO’s attempt to burn the building and collect the insurance failed, an unfulfilled demolition order and terminal neglect helped the Launch Pad to be born and raised it to the premier drug house in Halo City.

  The hooker blinked at Fel in confusion then laughed. “I thought you was a cop,” he said, fingering the hem of his tight belly-shirt.

  “Police?” the John slurred, the moon glinting off his balding head.

  “No, baby. Just one of my work colleagues,” the pro laughed.

  Maybe fifteen, the hooker didn’t blink a
heavily-lined eye when his John roughly palmed his genitals through his very short cut-offs.

  “You sinking, sweetheart?” the hooker asked Fel. His gaze sympathetic as he took in Fel, shivering and sweating at the same time and scratching at his scalp and skin like he had a jerk weed rash. “Oh, you are.” He covered his heart with a limp hand. “You poor motherfucker. Well, go on in before you collapse!”

  Fel clenched his teeth against his tremors. “Can’t.” He thought of Dragon and staggered away from the burnt-out drug den.

  “Sure you can, baby—oh, you ain’t got no money, do you?” the prostitute pointed at Fel then covered his mouth with his fluttering fingertips as if being unable to afford illegal drugs was a sin. “Jimmy—that’s my boo—will give you an advance for forty percent of your daily take.” His eyes widened as an idea came to him and he nodded happily. “I’ll just dash inside and find him for you, ‘kay?”

  “Jesus! Help me, please,” the John cried out, startling the exquisitely-dressed couple stepping carefully over a pile of what looked like rags fitted with size twelve boots as they made their way into the Pad.

  “I will, baby, I promise. Just lemme find Jimmy first.”

  “Please, Jesus. Please,” the middle-aged accountant (or insurance salesman or federal employee) begged, falling to his knees in front of the hooker. “Don’t leave me.”

  Jesus sighed as if servicing this John was akin to solving world famine, and unzipped his shorts and pulled out his surprisingly enormous cock. “I would never leave you, baby. Here you go.” He fed the bulbous head of his penis into his client’s mouth. “Have some of this. Ahh,” he moaned when the man engulfed his entire length. “That’s it, baby.”

  Fel turned from the scene that was too much like a crystal ball and sprinted east to the Yorktown.

  The doorman in the faded coat with drooping epaulets smirked at Fel’s condition and opened the door with an elaborate hand flourish.

  Muhammad watched from the front desk as Fel staggered to the elevator and, remembering Fel’s anger days before, refrained from questioning him about Chiuya’s unexplained absence from this morning’s maintenance duties.

  Doug, the regular elevator operator, raked the grated elevator door open, drove Fel to the fifth floor and watched him lurch off without a word about his condition.

  Feather boa in five-oh-three watched the crashing fae try to fit a scrap of metal in a tiny hole compassionately. She knew from experience that the DTs were bad enough without the intrusion of a familiar stranger.

  Having slid the key into its slot with a level of triumph akin to walking after paralysis, Fel burst into his shabby home with a relieved groan and headed for the sample of homemade undertow he’d picked up from Carlos and Goat.

  “I flushed it,” an easy contralto said from her perch on his bed.

  Fel pulled the drawer open anyway and tore through it like a madman.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind. I mean, I’d never actually let an addict take me for every ven I’ve got. And you promised to get clean.”

  Fel swung around and gazed at Dragon incredulously. The urge to kill her was so strong the image of his hands around her neck was actually calming.

  “You fucking bitch!” he screamed and tackled her to the bed. He wrapped his fingers around her neck and squeezed. She didn’t struggle, she didn’t cry out, she didn’t move, only watched him, her eyes filled with patience, compassion and something else. Something Fel couldn’t quite identify, something that extinguished his rage and left him humbled.

  “Dragon, help me,” he murmured, not caring that he sounded like Jesus’ strung-out John.

  He rested his sweating forehead on hers and ground his teeth together in a futile attempt to stop the seismic tremors that shook his body.

  “Shhh,” she said, seeming not to mind the shaking, uncertain mass lying on top of her. She ran her fingers through his soaking hair and stroked his trembling body. “Hush, baby,” she said. “Never mind. You’re okay. You’re okay now.”

  Fel wanted to take some comfort from Dragon’s ministrations, he honestly did, but detoxing from undertow inhabited him in a way that his yearning for her could not match. With strength he didn’t know he had, he rolled off of her and curled into a ball near the edge of the bed. He felt it dip as she got up then gave in to the dizzying pain the rough-hewn magic leaving his body caused.

  What felt like years later, a bright spotlight blinding first one eye then the other pierced his misery and he blinked a few times, applied a few seconds trying to determine how long he’d been out, then gave up when a growling male voice did it for him.

  “How long has he been like this?” the voice asked.

  “Two days.” Dragon’s worry made the words hitch.

  The voice tsked and said irritably, “You should’ve gotten hold of me as soon as he started to sink.”

  The condescension in the man’s tone must have pricked Dragon’s temper because she said, “A, not only is your clinic in the ghetto, it is the ghetto. Four of the city’s homicides reported last month happened steps away from your office. That one guy used your stethoscope as a murder weapon.”

  Fel visualized Dragon, stylishly outfitted in something fashionable, yet sexy, pointing an irate finger at Doctor Death. For only Deittinsky—the doctor the still-hopeful, yet terminally ill went to when every other physician in the city had turned them away—induced normally calm folk to bouts of anger and irrationality.

  “And B, carrier fucking buzzard is no way to conduct a business’s communications. They stop and pick at any bit of garbage, making any messages, urgent or not, late. Everyone knows this, which is why no one uses them. No one.”

  “Hulu Oil, Unified Dating, Desalinate Water & Treatment,” Doctor Death listed the companies successfully using the inefficient mode of communication.

  “Whatever!”

  At that outburst, Fel cracked open one eye, hoping to see that Dragon’s frustration had induced her to stomp her foot or shake her fist or engage in some other bit of delightful physicality that made her full breasts jiggle.

  He sighed unhappily at the fraying, oversized gray pajama pants she’d paired with a shapeless bleach-stained t-shirt. The two long pigtails she’d plaited her hair into completed the picture of unshowered adolescence and made him feel like a deviant drooling at a boisterously full playground.

  “Be that as it may,” Death said, “anything I do now may be less effective.” He tied a tourniquet around Fel’s upper arm and stuck his own koi-shaped syringe filled with a biologic that distributed a genetically enhanced version of belladonna to Fel’s spasming cells.

  The effect was almost instantaneous, calming shakes, quieting the tear-inducing urge to vomit, easing the pain that felt like a thousand quick jabs of a dagger and equalizing his body’s temperature. Slowly Fel uncurled his body and stretched until his fingertips brushed over the peeling paint of the wall above his head and his feet and shins hung off the end of the bed.

  He sighed in relief and peered at the man that sat next to his hip, taking in his red hair in need of a cut, his incongruously and meticulously groomed goatee and tired light brown eyes.

  “Hey, Bobby,” Fel rasped before wracking coughs overwhelmed him.

  Bobby, Doctor Death, waved away the light green wisps of undertow that Fel’s lungs struggled to expel. “Hey, Fel,” he said, rubbing his knuckles over Fel’s heaving chest. The technique was normally used to revive patients slipping into unconsciousness. Now it was simply the unthinking instinct of a healer to soothe. “You remember what I told you I would do when you finally hit bottom?”

  “You said you’d finally ask that hot nurse of yours out? What was her name? Anne? Annie?”

  “Selena, and no that wasn’t what—wait.” He blinked, confused. “Damn, I did say that, didn’t I?”

  “You pledged to ‘fuck the shit out of her’,” Fel said. “Told the bartender at Alchemy that you deserved it after all you did.”

  The
good doctor smiled, his chagrin apparent in his hunched shoulders.

  An infectious disease physician whose clinic provided him with enough research to maintain his county-funded grant to find a cure for HIV, Bobby, or Doctor Death as he’d named himself, was terminally lonely and alone. “If someone refers you to me, it was too late three doctors ago,” he’d said once to a group of sympathetic oncologists at a conference.

  With his healthiest patient being an HIV positive, bipolar, heroin-addicted woman in her early twenties, raped at twelve, sex worker by fourteen, most women found Bobby, the work he did and the hours he kept, unpalatable.

  “Shame,” one of his patient’s had said minutes before she succumbed to the cancer eating away at her reproductive organs, “’cause you’s real cute, too.”

  “The shot’ll see him through the worst of it,” he said to Dragon as he got to his feet. “He’ll be able to shower.” He raised a speaking eyebrow at Fel who grimaced, sat up slowly then tried to stand.

  “And see to his needs,” Bobby continued. “He’ll take a little broth now, then something light, but substantial as the drug leaves his system. Send word if you need me.” He repacked his doctor’s bag, deliberately including Fel’s fishy drug gear. “Use Fearless Parcel Services. They train their birds to feed from the hands of their handlers only. No layovers.” His mouth hitched up in a tired half-smile as he looked at Dragon.

  She nodded, her eyes trained on Fel.

  “Fel,” the physician said and he opened the hotel room door and left.

  “Bobby,” Fel said as he headed for the bathroom on unsteady, but working legs. He closed the bathroom door and leaned against it, glad to shut out Dragon, her compassionate dark eyes and endearingly frumpy attire.

  This was not how he’d intended to follow up his spectacular seduction of a few days ago. Him trembling like life had been scared right out of him, vomiting and unable to control his bladder was so far removed from the oft-imitated strategies of Mr. Fel, celebrated lothario and best kept secret of Judas County as to be laughable.