Runebreaker

by Alex R. Kahler

  But there were subtler drawbacks of magic. Case in point: Trevor, who—whenever he used Water—became a mopey pile of emotional rubbish. Aidan knew that his co-commander was drowning in a dozen emotions. Worrying what the others would think. Terrified he’d fail Glasgow’s—and the rest of Scotland’s—population. Wondering if maybe he was the reason Vincent was dead, and maybe it was he who should be executed, rather than Aidan. Trevor felt personally responsible for every bad thing that happened within the Guild.

  It was a vicious cycle Aidan knew all too well.

  And so, he used it to his full advantage.

  “Without me, Glasgow will crumble in a week.” Aidan took a step forward, letting the low cinder of his words fill the space between them. “The soldiers love me. They would die for me. If you kill me, they’ll lose trust. They’ll lose fear. And an army that doesn’t trust and fear its commander is an army destroyed. Would you really let the last hope this country has of survival die out because of one accident?”

  Aidan felt his lip curl in victory, even before he let his final words hammer home: “Kill me, and you won’t just have my blood on your hands. You’ll have executed your entire country.”

  Trevor swallowed. Hard. And Aidan crossed his arms over his chest. He knew Trevor. He’d be angry and sad and confused, but he would never kill unless absolutely necessary. He would never kill someone he loved.

  No. Trevor wasn’t a threat. Aidan just had to let this blow over, so he could figure out what had actually happened in his bedroom that morning. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to question why Fire had done what it had. He didn’t want to mistrust the only thing he had faith in—himself.

  But there, lingering in the corners of memory, were traces of a dream that made his breath catch and his heart hammer with fear and need. He knew, somehow, that the two were connected.

  Not that he would place any weight in dreams.

  “You’re right,” Trevor whispered, breaking Aidan from his thoughts. “I can’t kill you.”

  Aidan smiled. He began to turn. He needed to go find a new bedroom, and clothes that didn’t smell like smoke and burnt Vincent.

  “But I can’t let you stay.”

  Aidan stopped. Confidence flickered.

  “You’re dangerous, Aidan,” Trevor said, looking up. “It’s safer for...for everyone if you left.”

  “What?”

  “I’m exiling you. Leave Glasgow. Leave Scotland.” He made eye contact, and even though Water boiled in Trevor’s gut, his next words were hard as steel and harsh as flame. “If I see you again, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I am.”

  High-pitched ringing filled Aidan’s ears, and with it, a burn in his chest. Fire wanted to open. Fire wanted to burn this room—no, this whole damn Guild—to the ground. To prove that no one denied Aidan Belmont.

  “I gave my life to this Guild, to this bloody country!” The words didn’t feel like his. They were too weak. Too pathetic. “You can’t just force me away.”

  “You should have thought of that before murdering a comrade,” Trevor replied. Sadly.

  The ringing increased. Fire opened in his chest then, and flames curled around his hands, burned against his knuckles. His mouth opened, but he didn’t hear what he said. He couldn’t hear anything against the ringing, against the char and the burn. He couldn’t feel anything besides anger, the need to make someone pay.

  And then, strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders. Jerked him around.

  “Aidan,” Kianna said. Or maybe mouthed. “Get a hold of yourself.”

  He wanted to kill. He wanted to burn Trevor to cinders.

  But he couldn’t kill Kianna. Would never.

  He shoved her aside and fled.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Aidan wanted blood.

  Howl or human, it didn’t fucking matter at this point. He didn’t just want blood, he needed it, needed to make someone or something hurt, needed someone else’s pain to feed the rage burning inside of him, the venom that made his limbs shake and his chest burn as he ran down the darkened subway tunnel. He needed to make someone scream the words stuck in his own throat.

  Thankfully, in this new, broken world, there was always a victim on whom he could enact his vengeance.

  He heard her crying as she ran. Stumbling and sloshing, her gasps echoing down the earth-and-concrete tube. He didn’t know if they were actual tears, or if she thought it would grant her mercy. If the latter, she was about to face a rude awakening. Flames danced around his clenched fists, burning jagged shadows on the walls. With the Sphere of Fire raging in his chest, he felt alive. He felt alive, and he felt her life, too. The warm, flickering spark of her half-humanness. His spark reminding him that he was mortal. He would one day burn out. And he would burn as hot and as bright as he could, while he could, and burn the whole world with him, until that day came.

  Aidan hunted, and Fire raged, and the monster before him fled. Just as everything should be.

  He could end her right now. One big burst of flame filling the tunnel. Burn her alive in moments. Or he could raise the temperature, singe the air from her lungs, make her screams immolate her throat. He could already feel it, the imagined tendrils of flame smoking through the tunnel like serpents, hissing for flesh as he guided their hunger. A thousand potential ends for her, a thousand ways to appease Fire’s hunger, to offer her life at its devouring altar.

  But that was too fast. Too fast. He smiled at the sound of her stumbled splash. He ran faster.

  You’re dangerous, Trevor had said. It’s safer for everyone if you left.

  The words sent flames spiraling around Aidan and acid boiling in his chest. His veins were fire, fire and anger, and he lost track of whether the Sphere fueled his fury or the other way around.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled.

  Leave.

  Leave!?

  “Who the hell do you think I am?”

  He lashed out, a curl of flame snapping from the whorl around him, turning the memory of his co-commander’s charge to ash.

  “I’ll show you,” he growled through gritted teeth. He barely heard his words through the incendiary roar of Fire. “I’ll show all of you!”

  Another lance of fire, this one spearing straight through the tunnel, turning the walls orange and making the waters hiss with heat.

  The woman screamed. A splash.

  He reached her in moments, everything inside him burning—his breath, his throat, his chest, his veins. His vision hazed red or maybe it was the flames that swarmed him, their heat a comfort, a hymn. He looked at her and felt nothing.

  She was pretty.

  He registered that, in the far-off corner of his rational mind. Even though her clothes were charred from his wrath, even though her skin was pallid and thin as rice paper. He towered above her, flames flickering off the disgusting water pooled around her, magical in its way—her watery, glittering halo. Magical if not for the fear in her bloodshot eyes.

  “What was your name?” His words trembled with anger. He didn’t normally ask this of those he was about to kill. But he wanted to draw it out. Fire hissed its agreement in his ear. Make her suffer. Make her pay.

  “Laura,” she said. Her voice trembled. Hunger? Fear? Did it matter? Her accent was thick, rolling through her mouth like clotted blood. L-ow-rah. Glaswegian. Once.

  “I’m Aidan,” he replied. “And I am going to kill you.”

  Her eyes narrowed, as though this was anything but inevitable. As though she had a chance if she chose to fight.

  “And do you know why I’m going to kill you?”

  She pushed herself up to a crouch, but he pointed at her. No dagger in hand. Just the flames wreathing his arm in a sheath.

  “No. Stay down. I asked you a bloody question.”


  Laura didn’t answer. Her lip pulled back in a sneer, revealing teeth filed to points and black gums. Even her nails were sharpened, clenched in clawed fists at her sides. Bloodlings—Howls pulled from Water—delighted in torturing their victims while drawing blood. Not that it would do her any good.

  He could feel it, that tremor in her heart, that pulse of frantic life. The Sphere of Fire was life and heat and vitality. And it knew when it was about to be extinguished.

  “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a bloodling.” He practically spat the word. “Not because you’re in my city, hunting my people.” He leaned in, poured more heat and anger into his voice, made the flames around him blue with rage to burn out the lie: this city wasn’t his, not anymore. “I’m going to kill you because I’m pissed. Because you are in the wrong place at the wrong damn time. Which means your death is meaningless.”

  “I’m not meaningless,” she hissed. “Not as meaningless as you.”

  “Everything about you is meaningless!” he yelled, and Fire raged in his chest.

  Flames snapped out from his hand as he reached for her, and grabbed her by the throat. She couldn’t scream, not from the heat burning the breath from her lungs, not from the pressure on her larynx. He squeezed, and he looked into her eyes as they widened, as more capillaries burst. She clawed at him, tried to relieve the pressure on her throat. Even she knew it was hopeless.

  “I’m going to make you suffer,” he hissed. “Not because you’ve made your prey suffer. But because I want to make this hurt.”

  She did scream then, as he loosened his grip and sent a wave of flame billowing from his skin to hers, searing the pale white flesh, burning through her sodden clothing. The tunnel filled with the stench of hair as follicle after follicle curled and crisped and disintegrated. He grimaced against the smell, but he didn’t let go of the power, didn’t let up on the heat.

  Didn’t look away from her eyes.

  Yes, a voice inside him whispered, feminine and cool as the deepest ocean, and just as unforgiving. Make her suffer. Bring her to me. Bring her...

  Laura jerked.

  Her eyes widened. Rolled back in her head.

  Laura went limp as her inner flame flickered out.

  No! No no no no what the—

  “Howls are not free therapy.”

  He jerked up and nearly lashed out, fire billowing around him in rage.

  Kianna stood beside him, a katana pointed straight at his chest. “Drop it,” she commanded. Like he was a bloody dog.

  He dropped the bloodling, let her corpse splash unceremoniously to the filth. That’s when he noticed the tip of the dagger sticking through the bloodling’s sternum.

  “No,” Kianna growled. Her voice lowered in warning. “Drop it.”

  Fire raged in his chest, screamed a thousand curses in his ears. His breath was hot and there was no way in hell he would release this. He was a god. A god! Who was she to make him bow?

  “Don’t make me kill you, love,” she said, almost soothing. “Not like this.”

  Some small, straining voice in the back of his mind knew she would follow through. Told him that this was ridiculous. Kianna was a friend. Potentially the only one he had left. And she would kill him if she thought he was a threat.

  He was a threat.

  He should let her kill him. It would be better than—

  No, Fire raged. Fire wouldn’t be extinguished. Not yet. Not until he’d made the whole world burn. He couldn’t do that if Kianna killed him first.

  He took a deep breath. Tried to calm the anger, the hatred, the shame. It felt like smothering an inferno with a teacup in his chest, but he pressed harder, willed the Sphere of Fire into submission. It fought against him. Burn her. Burn them all! But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Anyone else, but never her. He forced the frenzy down.

  His Sphere winked out.

  Cold snapped through his body the moment Fire subsided, cold and darkness and a disgust so deep all life left his limbs in a heartbeat. He dropped to the floor and his head swam, the darkness spinning, spinning, as he cried out in pain and cold. His body convulsed with shivers and he squeezed tight into himself, trying to curl around that tiny pinprick of warmth in his chest. He couldn’t find it.

  Instead, the darkness closed in around him, pressed to his skin.

  And in that darkness, he heard the voice, the woman, oceanic and terrible, beguiling him to come, come, succumb.

  “Aidan, come on.” Kianna’s voice floated through the darkness.

  Dimly, he noticed the black get lighter. But he couldn’t open his eyes. Couldn’t force down the shaking that kept him from moving a voluntary muscle. Couldn’t hold back the tears.

  What had he done?

  “Jesus,” Kianna muttered. “Pull yourself together.”

  A hand on his shoulder, strong and heavy. Kianna shook him. Roughly.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath as the despair and fear washed off him in a wave. Opened his eyes.

  Found himself staring straight into the open, bloodshot gaze of the Howl he’d murdered. Despite himself, Aidan cried out, sloshed backward as he tried to get as far away from the creature as he could. But his limbs still weren’t his own—he didn’t get very far.

  Kianna stepped between him and the Howl, knelt down, and looked him in the eyes. He shuddered. He could still smell the Howl’s blood. That was the curse of Fire—under its influence, you were a god. The moment it left you, you were nothing more than a husk of rapidly decaying meat. Against that warmth of immortality, regular life was a cold, terrible shell.

  “Aidan,” she said, softer this time. Calming. “Are your tits calm now?”

  Well, her brand of calming.

  He stared up at her, shivering, taking in the way the lamp at her waist played off her dark features—the sharp lines of her jaw, the folds of her leather jacket, the long pink-and-black locs. The pink that matched the pink skull T-shirt beneath her bomber, the black that matched her torn denim jeans. She was tall and imposing, Amazonian in those bloody platform boots he always told her she’d nicked from a goth teenager. Tall and imposing and a bitch to the core.

  In other words, the only person in this damnable country he got along with.

  The question was, why was she here after what he had done?

  “Aye,” he muttered. He forced down the last bit of weakness. At least the aftershock of Fire didn’t take long to wear off. The lows were just as sharp and short as the highs. “I think so.”

  He reached up and took her hand. She helped him to standing and didn’t say a word when he collapsed against her. She held him there, not saying a word, as the feeling came back to his legs with a wash of needling pinpricks. He kept his eyes open, even though he wanted to close them, wanted to sleep.

  He didn’t want to see the stare waiting for him in the darkness.

  “How did... How’d you find me?” he asked as she helped him limp down the tunnel. He kept his eyes up as they passed the Howl.

  Laura. Her name was Laura.

  Guilt attempted to curl through him once more. He fed it to the muted flames before it could germinate, the seed of doubt burnt to ash in a heartbeat.

  “Glasgow’s Underground’s a circle, love. And you were literally on fire. Not that hard to find.”

  His next words came out as a choked whisper. “What did you hear?”

  “Enough to scare me,” she replied. “If I could get scared, that is.”

  He didn’t mean what he said in the tunnels.

  Neither of them did.

  They walked in silence for a bit, sloshing through the puddles, light glinting off subway rails that hadn’t been used in three years. Glasgow’s singular tunnel had been abandoned in the early days of the Resurrection—it was a miracle it hadn’t flooded in the aftermath. Hell, it was a miracle the wh
ole country hadn’t sunk. Though there was always the chance tomorrow.

  She helped hoist him up to the platform. He tried pushing himself to his feet, but he still couldn’t move, not really, not when all of his muscles were busy shivering. She leaped up beside him, landing silently. In spite of the ridiculous boots.

  “Those are ridiculous boots,” he muttered.

  “What was that?” she asked as she picked him up, slinging his arm over her shoulder. Her sword was sheathed again. Clearly she no longer saw him as a threat. He shivered and stumbled. Yeah. Clearly not a threat. “You say you want to sleep down here? Or was that a, ‘Thanks Kianna, love, you’re the best mate a guy could ask for’?”

  “Definitely the latter,” he said. His teeth chattered violently, slamming against his lip ring.

  Something cracked in his mouth.

  No bloody way.

  Kianna stopped and looked sideways at him. “Did you just chip a tooth?”

  He spat out the shard in answer. Well, tried to. It drooled down his lips and dribbled to the ground.

  “Disgusting,” she replied. “You have a problem.”

  “Aye,” Aidan said. “Scotland’s dental system hasn’t improved since the Resurrection.”

  Kianna howled with laughter. Her voice echoed in the tunnels behind them, too loud. But there was nothing else out here. No one else. At least her laughter kept her from laying into him again. If anything, though, she was good at reading the mood. She knew that now was clearly not the time to lecture him on his addiction to magic.

  They walked slowly up the stairs that led to the exit, their feet slipping up the smooth stones that were slimed over with moss and mold. At least he didn’t hear any rain.

  His kingdom for a full day of sunshine.

  They stepped out and paused for Kianna to turn off her lamp. Above them, the arched plexiglass entrance to the Underground loomed like bruised ribs, the structure beaten and shattered by magic and miscreants. Beaten and shattered. Pretty much Glasgow in a nutshell.

  Fog lay heavy on the ground, the once-crowded boulevard of Buchanan Street sloping up before them. Sooty sandstone and glass buildings scratched up through the haze, their forms obscured in mist. What was left of their forms, at least. Once, this place had been filled with shops and restaurants, the wide avenue crowded with people jostling bags or buskers playing flaming bagpipes. Magical. Luminous. Now the place was empty. Buildings toppled to bare bones, stone facades nothing more than battered skin. He stared at the wrecked memories and inhaled the scent of the place, the soot and the dampness and a tang his American senses could never quite place, something like stone, like sharp earth.