King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1)

by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

  He was real.

  The dream was real.

  Shit.

  “What is wrong?” Lyon asked. “I assure you, it is a metaphorical fall from your world into Under. It is not meant literally.”

  Aon had warned her. If she told anyone about him, they’d kill her. But how did she know that was true? How could Lydia be sure the freak in her dreams didn’t simply want to kill her personally instead? In a world of monsters, who did you trust?

  A metaphorical fall. Lydia wasn’t exactly up on her biblical mythology, but everyone knew that one. But as troubling as that was, it wasn’t why she had gone wide-eyed. Should she tell him about the man she had seen? Who had stalked her then rammed his metal hand into her ribcage?

  “Are you quite all right?” Lyon asked.

  “Y-yeah.” She looked down and sipped her tea again. “Sorry. It’s just a lot to take in.” It was a roll of the dice, taking a shadowy nightmare’s word over trusting the morose tea-making vampire across the table from her, but she didn’t exactly want to volunteer to put her head on a chopping block.

  Lydia tried to change the subject back to the topic at hand. The Fall. “So, you…throw us into a Pool of Ancients—”

  Lyon chuckled. “You walk in, I assure you. And it is the Pool of the Ancients.”

  “Sure.” It was all the same to her. “Do we all come out looking the same? I mean, mostly, you look human…give or take.”

  “Some, yes. Some…no,” he admitted.

  The graspling. It had understood English and heard what Lydia had said. Fear yanked at her again. “That thing in the hallway.”

  “Yes.”

  Lydia was starting to put it all together, and she wasn’t happy over the picture the puzzle was beginning to form. She put her head in her hands and took a moment. They were going to pitch them into a pool, and they were going to come out as…as monsters. Human or inhuman. Oh, god, don’t let her turn into a graspling like that thing!

  “No. Please, just let me go home…”

  “I cannot. You were chosen by the Ancients. The mark upon your arm—which appears upon all of those we now claim—shows you are destined for this. Not even Master Edu can go against the wishes of the Ancients.”

  He pulled her hands away from her face and held them gently in his cold grasp. Lyon was trying his best to console her, and somehow, in some weird way, it was working.

  “What…what’ll I turn into?” she asked.

  “I do not know. None of us know the path the Ancients have chosen for you.”

  Myths and monsters. Demons and ancient gods. The fact that everything here ate people—and if they didn’t die when they were consumed? Oh. Oh, that was no good. “Are you all food for those creatures? Is that what we’re supposed to become?”

  “This is a matter you will find upsetting,” Lyon advised—trying to pull her back from the brink of terror once more. “It is complex. Wait and see what you will become before you judge how you may feel.”

  “How complex can it get, you damn pansy?” a male voice said from behind her. “They hunt, they eat, we die, we come back. We hunt them, we eat, they die, they come back. And so on. Done. Simple.”

  Lydia turned a little too quickly on the stool to face the source of the voice and nearly wound up on the ground. It teetered up onto two legs before she could grab the edge of the counter and steady herself.

  The man who stood there had dark hair swept up and back, carefully gelled into place. He was wearing a red t-shirt under a black leather coat with loud silver zippers. His shirt was shoved into jeans. If anything, the guy looked like he walked off a stage production of Grease.

  “Hey, toots,” he said to her. The man grinned, a lopsided, not altogether friendly expression. Smack in the middle of his left cheek was a red ink mark. It looked like the same writing as, well, everything else.

  “Tim,” Lyon said with a heavy sigh, “leave her be.”

  “I ain’t here for her, Priest,” Tim said and walked up to the counter next to her and leaned on it heavily with both arms. He was unimpressed by Lyon, if not unimpressed by everything around him. He scooted closer to her and winked and pointedly went from looking at her, down her shirt, then back to her. “Or maybe I’ll change my mind.”

  Lydia put her hand on his arm and pushed him the other direction. “Back off, douchebag.”

  Tim let out a bah of laughter and did as he was told, moving back without an argument. “Spunky. Maybe you’ll end up in our house.”

  “House?” she asked. Aon had mentioned the House of Words in her dream, but Lydia still had no idea what that meant.

  Tim ignored her. “Anyway, Priest, Edu sent me here to tell you to get on with it already.”

  Lyon stood from the counter. “There are only a few gathered yet. When last he ruled over the Ceremonies, he was quick to denounce our methods over the number of them he was required to attend.”

  “I don’t ask questions.” Tim shrugged and reached over the counter to grab a handful of the not-grapes and started popping them into his mouth, not hesitating to speak while chewing. “He said, ‘Tell him to begin now,’ and so, here I am, telling you to begin now.”

  Lyon sighed heavily, clearly irritated but attempting to take it all in stride. He pulled on the bottom of his long white coat. “Very well. Then, Tim, since I now have much to do in short order, I ask you to return the young lady to the chamber with the others.”

  “Gladly,” Tim said with another grin at her.

  Lyon’s voice was quiet and stern as he spoke. “I will remind you, they are not to be touched until after the Fall. Desecrating the collected before they are cast is—”

  “Punishable by true death,” Tim finished for him. “I get it. I get it. Ruin my fun. C’mon, toots.”

  With that, Lydia was ushered out. There wasn’t any point in running—or complaining—as she walked beside Tim down the hallway back the way she had come earlier with the Priest. “He said you couldn’t die. So what good is punishment by death?” she asked, finally breaking the silence.

  Tim slowed to walk next to her and was smirking. He was far more expressive than Lyon. Everything about Tim screamed that he was from the forties, so she didn’t even need to ask Tim from when or where he hailed. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather coat. He reminded her way too much out of something from West Side Story. “Oh, we can die for real. Nobody’s ever born here, so if you can manage real murder, it’s a huge crime.”

  Lydia was silent for a moment, watching him—wondering. Nobody was ever born here, and real death was complicated. One more thing was bugging her, though. One more thing she didn’t understand. “What’s with the facial tattoos and the masks?”

  “Class system,” Tim answered bluntly. Lyon was all flowery, philosophical expoundings. Tim was not so complicated. “Everybody’s got these marks.” He pulled the collar of his shirt away from his neck so that she could see the symbols and etchings that were written on his skin in red ink.

  “Okay, I’ll need more than that. What’s a mark for?” she asked with a roll of her eyes.

  “Marks are power. The more marks, the more powerful the person. This,” he pointed at his face, “is called a soulmark. Everyone has at least one. Doesn’t matter. If you’re super special, you get to cover it with a mask.”

  “The more soulmarks you have,” she said and hovered over the words, not honestly believing what she was saying. It sounded so stupid in her head, and saying it aloud made it worse. “The bigger the mask to cover them?”

  “Not bad, toots!” Tim said with a grin. “And they say the cute ones are dumb.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Eh. Nah, don’t think I will,” Tim said with the same cheeky expression. “So, you know if you see somebody with a mask, they’re somebody important. Those of us without them, they call us servants.”

  “Why cover the soulmarks, though?” she asked. Tim was far more direct than Lyon, and she appreciated how casual he was, if noth
ing else.

  “A couple reasons. First, it’s how you really kill us. Take these off, then we’re as good as human again. Second…” Tim trailed off, trying to figure out how to explain it. “Second, it’s like seeing someone’s soul. Which’s why they call it that. If you could read it, you could read everything you’d ever need to know about the person.”

  “What’re the different colors for?” she asked.

  “Different houses. There are six houses. Blue, black, purple, white, green, and red, like mine. Just designates where your power comes from and how it manifests. We all tend toward different things,” Tim answered as if it were no big deal.

  Sure, why not? White belonged to priests who were actually vampires, and as far as she could tell, red made you kind of a dick. Lydia decided not to voice that last part. “Can you read them?”

  “Nah. Nobody can.” Tim shrugged. “But besides as a kind of armor, it’s a tradition. There’re a lot of stupid traditions here. You’ll get used to it. But people’d rather be naked around here than take off their masks. Trust me. People love to be naked around here,” he said leadingly and grinned with the sudden innuendo.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She cringed and walked a step farther away from him, which made him laugh again.

  “It means nobody here can ever get sick or die. That nobody here can get pregnant. That people here don’t age, are basically immortal, and get really bored. Maybe it’s ’cuz I’m in the House of Flames, but we spend a lot of time amusing each other, if you get my drift.”

  Lydia tried not to make a face but failed and shook her head. “So you’re a bunch of perverts.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a grin. “Yeah, we are.”

  “That wasn’t a compliment.”

  “I know.”

  Lydia put her hand over her eyes and sighed. This man was impossible. But she was having a healthy, human conversation with him, and something about it was disarming. It made her not so terrified of the shadows that clung to them as they walked.

  The candles were still doing that creepy only-lit-when-they-were-near thing, and the hallway, although less foreign than the first time she saw it, was no less unnerving. “Red is the House of Flames? What’re the other colors called?”

  “Aren’t you just brim full of questions?” Tim said with another grin.

  “I’m a prisoner in a world of monsters, so sue me if I have questions.”

  “Right, fine, but what’ll you give me in return?” There was that innuendo again. “Pay up, or I shut up, toots.”

  “Literally nothing,” she said, pointedly shooting him down.

  He let out another loud laugh and shrugged and called her bluff. It seemed like the explanations were going to stop there unless she paid up, and she wasn’t, under any circumstances, going to do anything of the sort.

  Polished marble hallways turned to rough-hewn stone. Before long, Tim was pushing open the large wooden door to the chamber they were all kept within. “See ya later, babe,” he said with another wink as she walked past him.

  “Yeah, bye, dickwad,” she muttered under her breath as she walked into the cavern. All conversation had ceased as the door had opened, and all eyes were turned on her. She felt like she was just thrust out onto a stage without knowing any of her lines.

  She cleared her throat and tucked her hands into her pockets. Ducking her head, she walked toward the wall where Nick, Gary, and the Asian girl had been—Kaori, that was her name—before she had struck off on an adventure.

  “Oh, goodness!” the British man greeted her as he shot to his feet and stepped toward her. His hands fell on her shoulders. “We were so worried.”

  “I wasn’t,” Nick complained from the floor.

  “Oh, god, Nick, are you okay?” Lydia said, pushing away from Gary to face her friend. Nick was sitting against a rock. One of his pant legs was rolled up with a cloth tied around his calf. Kaori was seated next to him, still curled into a ball. She wondered if Kaori had even moved while she was gone.

  “I’m fine. Cut up. But fine. There were demon-dogs. They fucking chased me, Lyd.”

  “I’m sorry?” Why did she feel guilty? Why the hell was Nick glaring at her like this was her fault? She hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “I’m not going out there again,” he grumped as he folded his arms across his chest. Oh. Lydia got it now. He was pissy because he’d been roughed up. Nick got like this when he felt like he was being dealt a lousy hand. He’d get over it.

  “So what happened to you?” Gary asked, prying desperately for any news. And, oh boy, did she have a story to tell him. Too bad everything she’d learned turned out to be too little, too late.

  “Well—” she began before she was interrupted by the sound of ringing in the background. It sounded like large church bells, muffled and far away. It was more of a vibration in the stone walls than anything else.

  Lydia was the only one in the room who knew what it meant. For as little as she understood, about what this place meant or about who these people were, the Ceremony of the Fall was starting.

  Chapter Nine

  Everything was a flurry of motion.

  As it turned out, groups of people didn’t like to be abducted, herded into a room, left in the dark about what was happening, and then rounded up like cattle. They kinda took offense to that and didn’t react too politely about the whole scenario.

  Figures in white filed into the room, led by a painfully thin old woman in a birdlike white half mask. Behind them came a small horde of…oh. Those would be the Hounds, then. Lydia had yet to see any of them herself, but judging by Gary’s and Nick’s reactions, that was what they were. The monsters walked on all fours, backs hunched and covered in damp, scraggly fur. They had odd, bone-like faces with teeth that were far too long for their jaws. On one side of their faces, they had four eyes, and on the other, only two.

  They were snapping their massive jaws in excitement, almost chittering them together in rapid succession. It made a horrible clicking noise as they chattered.

  The monsters of Under had come prepared for a reluctant bunch of prisoners. The Hounds were moving around the edges of the rooms, climbing over the rocks and up onto the walls, clinging to the stone surfaces as though they had every business in the world defying gravity as they were currently doing.

  They almost looked like vultures with their bald heads and what looked like fur, or feathers, bushing out from their shoulders and down their hunched bodies. After a moment, it became clear what they were trying to do. The Hounds were circling the room then moving inward—herding them all into the center.

  Kaori was weeping quietly, still huddling against Nick like she had known him all her life. Nick was holding her, trying to console the woman as they were pushed away from the walls by the monsters pushing them toward each other to avoid the beasts.

  Gary was holding onto Lydia’s arm like a kid in a haunted house.

  “Where are they taking us?” Nick asked her. Any annoyance he had in Lydia’s direction was gone the moment a real threat appeared.

  The monsters were starting to push them closer to the door, getting them together and ensuring there were no strays. They were dogs herding sheep.

  “This world collects people,” she tried to sum up quietly. “They can turn us into monsters like them. They’re going to add us to their ranks,” she said, realizing she didn’t have an excellent understanding of it either. Just what she’d briefly been told by Lyon and Tim, for what good it had done. She had answers, but she was trapped here with them all the same.

  “It is time!” the woman in the bird mask announced, gesturing broadly with her thin, frail hands. The robes hung loosely off her skeletal frame. Seeing her up close, the woman’s face was cracked and wrinkled. “We will now welcome you all to our world. We will welcome you all home.”

  Lydia was sure she was trying to sound reassuring. But all her words did was set off a panic in the crowd, and they pressed back toward the Ho
unds, who snapped and slashed at them, driving them back into each other in a muddled and tangled mess.

  The woman in the mask whirled and walked from the room, long, flowing robes trailing behind her. That was their cue to move, and nobody wanted to do so of their own accord. Someone behind her screamed as one of the dogs jumped forward, driving them closer to the door.

  A few of the brave in the group decided to plod after the woman in white, processing past others in white clothing who were standing to either side. Lydia, personally, was just sick of getting shoved and being so shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone. It wasn’t bravery, it was a growing sense of claustrophobia that drove her forward.

  Gary was still clinging to her arm and walked beside and behind her a step. “They’re going to make us like them? Immortal, powerful creatures?”

  “Well…yeah, I guess?” Lydia blinked at Gary’s optimistic view of the situation.

  “How exciting!” Gary declared in an enthusiastic whisper, and when she looked at him agog, he stammered, “I mean, that’s not…I don’t mean that I feel we…I mean—”

  “Oh, stop,” she said through a faint laugh. “You love this.”

  “It’s…I live a very dull life, alone in my flat, with my two cats and no one else. I fear very little interesting happened to me, until now,” he murmured and looked sheepish for a moment. “Never did I think anything like this would ever happen to me. Even if they mean to kill us, this is all terribly, well, thrilling,” he finished.

  Lydia shook her head with a grin. She liked this guy and would love to have sat down and listened to him rant on some topic or another over coffee. But that wouldn’t likely ever happen now. “I would have liked to have been your friend, Gary.”

  “And I you, Lydia,” he said with a faint, sad smile, even as he was still clutching her arm like a monster was going to come leaping out of a shadow to terrorize them at any moment.

  Well, maybe one would.

  She decided not to tell Gary about the graspling.

  Minutes passed, with them being herded down the hallway. Lydia hadn’t come down this way with Lyon; she had no idea where they were. Glancing back over her shoulder, Nick was still walking with Kaori huddled against his chest, her head lowered and a hand over her eyes. Poor thing must be exhausted, spending this entire time on the razor’s edge of panic.