Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns

by Rhonda Parrish

Mike picked up speed, pulling ahead of Alastair as they followed the rest of the team.

  Narrowing his eyes behind his goggles, Alastair lengthened his stride and closed the gap.

  “Go at your own pace,” Mike hollered over to him. “We don’t want you having a heart attack out here.” The last part didn’t sound particularly convincing.

  “This is my pace,” Alastair shouted back.

  “Yeah? Then why weren’t you doing it before I . . .”

  “Guys, guys,” Ari yelled from ahead of them, her boss-voice barely audible over the howling wind. She and Gita had both stopped ahead of them. Her cheeks were vibrant pink with cold and her braids were two long icicles, but she shook her head and pointed forward, her disapproval clear.

  They made the trek back down together, falling into silence, and Alastair reminded himself what he was doing here. Above all else, he was a scholar. In this life, a scientist, and he would go where he was placed. He hadn’t enjoyed Brazil much either, but even in the worst places, he’d been able to scrounge up enough beauty to keep himself going.

  There was a terrible purity being inside a winter storm, with no room left in your mind for anything but your next breath and where to place your boots on the booming sheet of ice beneath your feet. And beneath that, against all odds, rivers of magma coursed like veins under the glacier.

  The storm ripped him open, hollowed him out, scrubbed his soul clean. And just for a moment, he felt strong and pure, the statue of an old man with a parka and a backpack, carved out of the same blue-grey ice as the glacier, with a molten heart.

  THEY REVIEWED WHAT data they’d managed to collect over steaming spoonfuls of fish stew at base, hunched over the small table as the storm battered the walls of the main trailer around them. The wooden bench had one leg slightly shorter than the rest, and each time Mike leaned forward to point at something on Ari’s screen, the resulting clunk beneath him was another sliver of irritation digging into Alastair’s mind.

  He’d had a palace once, all jet-black stone and torchlight and tall wrought-iron chairs that would never clunk. There’d been a job and he’d been damn good at it, and so they’d given him a palace and thirty-six beautifully competent legions to command. If you were a good environmental scientist, however, you got sent to the most desolate stretch of Iceland in the middle of winter.

  Some days he was sorrier than others that Heaven and Hell had closed their gates.

  Alastair glared at the back of Mike’s head as the bench clunked again. Mike was the kind of man people described as “aging well”. Just enough grey around the temples to signify his maturity, but with the body of an Olympic swimmer who probably spent twenty-six hours a day in the pool. Not that Alastair was upset with his own aging looks, he was described as “dapper” and “dashing” on a regular basis, but there was just a certain “Richard Gere in Pretty Woman” to Mike that made him want to puke.

  Ari sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, rubbing at the indent her goggles had left there. “Bad news: I think we froze our asses off for nothing today, folks.”

  Mike made a dumb, baffled face. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” she said, “Al, all your numbers are wonky. Check your equipment calibration tomorrow before you start.”

  Mike raised an eyebrow at him, leaning back so that the bench lurched under them yet again.

  “And Mike,” Ari continued, her voice turning sharp, “you didn’t even take half the readings I asked you to. If you spent half as much time on the job as you do trying to get a rise out of Al, you’d have the Nobel Prize by now.”

  Mike’s blue eyes narrowed, his mouth slanting in offense. “I’m not . . .”

  “And I’m on strike,” Gita piped up, breaking the sudden tension. When all eyes turned to her, the older woman smiled sweetly. “After the horrible, hurtful thing that Ari called me this morning.”

  “Ari?” Alastair asked, startled. “What did she . . . ?”

  “Grandmotherly,” Gita intoned. She mimed a dagger hitting her heart.

  Ari groaned and looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t! I said you reminded me of my grandma. Who, by the way, is spry and awesome.”

  “She’d probably go on strike if you called her that too,” Gita said.

  “Nobody’s on strike!” Ari said. In the resulting silence, the sides of the trailer warped and boomed in the wind, sleet pinging against the waterproofed material like pebbles against a drum. “Except maybe Vatnajökull.”

  “Old girl’s real angry tonight,” Gita agreed with a rueful smile. “We’ve still got a week before we meet up with the other teams. We’ll get the data, kid.”

  Ari nodded, shutting down the datascreen and polishing off the rest of her stew. “Everybody clean up and get some rest. Tomorrow, we get our shit together.”

  Outside, the wind screamed down the glacier onto the camp, although in agreement, protest, or signifying nothing at all, Alastair didn’t know.

  ALASTAIR WAS HALFWAY through cleaning up when everything came to a halt. Pulling off his boots and removing the melted icepacks meant to keep his feet from destroying the glacier as he walked on it, he came up with a handful of torn strands of thermal lining. He stared at it in confusion, felt inside again—almost all of the lining had been torn out of both of his boots. No wonder his numbers had been off. With every step he’d taken today, he’d been sinking a few inches into the surface of the glacier.

  Getting cold feet, old man?

  With a snarl, he hurled one of the boots hard enough at the wall that a map fell down. Grabbing the other one as evidence, he stalked out of his room to find Mike. This was more than just another one of the guy’s stupid university frat-boy pranks. It was a full day’s efforts wasted, a pair of boots ruined, and the closest Alastair had come to potentially being exposed in a very long time.

  He intended to use calm words and an austere tone, to summon up some of his old dignity and authority to show Mike how stupid and juvenile he was being.

  When he found the bastard in the communal washroom, Mike was whistling tunelessly, messing with something at the sink.

  Dignity went out the window: Alastair hurled the boot at Mike’s head. The other man ducked with a yelp and the boot struck the mirror behind him, cracking a corner off of it.

  “Whoa, man!” Mike exclaimed, whirling around.

  “What the hell’s your problem?” Alastair growled, closing the distance between them. “You sonofabitch, this needs to stop. I don’t know what you . . .”

  There was something green and white in Mike’s hand. Something that looked an awful lot like Alastair’s toothbrush.

  For the first time in over five hundred years, Alastair threw a punch at a human, with the full force of his strength behind it.

  And when his hand cracked the side of Mike’s face, there wasn’t even a moment to celebrate. The mountain of a man barely moved under the hit, but struck back, smacking Alastair’s fist aside and sinking a punch into his belly. Hard. The toothbrush dropped and Alastair had thrown himself back at Mike before it clattered to the floor. He grabbed at him, trying to drive him back, to bring him down, and Mike struck for his face, grazing his jaw with a fist that burned cold. White heat flared in Mike’s eyes, frosting over the blue of them, and to his shock, Alastair felt the hellfire flare of his own in response. His vision shimmered into hues of red and grey as the revelation slammed into him.

  The little shit was an angel.

  The moment hung in the air like a fog of frost, both men’s eyes locked in mirrored shock, realization dawning upon them.

  How the hell did I miss that?

  Time jolted both men back into the bathroom-ring. The broad angel was quicker to recover, and squared off first, his blue eyes burning with murderous intent. Alastair couldn’t fault him for lack of guts. The air above him shimmered and warped in the ghostly impression of wings.

  “You don’t want this fight,” Alastair warned, the old accent of hellspeak sliding into his words.
<
br />   Mike grinned, gleaming faintly with power. “Yeah, I do,” he said, “and now it makes sense why.”

  He lunged at Alastair, tackling him hard around the middle and driving them both back against the far wall with a crash. The entire trailer shuddered and Alastair scrambled to stay on his feet, striking blindly for Mike’s head. It was just an angel, just one lone angel, not even one who he remembered . . . If he could just get a hit in . . .

  Mike’s fist connected with the side of his head, and his vision exploded into fractured stars. He didn’t realize he’d fallen until his back smashed against the floor and Mike threw himself down on top of him, pinning one of his arms with a knee and driving punches into Alastair’s face. Alastair clawed at him with his free hands, raking his nails over Mike’s face. Thin lines of red blossomed up over white skin, steaming and blistering from Alastair’s unholy claws, but Mike didn’t stop, landing blow after clumsy blow, his face fixed in a rictus of anger.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Ari bellowed from the doorway. “Are you both out of your minds?!”

  Mike froze and Alastair threw him off, putting distance between them. There was blood dripping onto his shirt in a sluggish trickle and he was panting, his chest aching fiercely with each breath.

  Ari stalked into the washroom, Gita on her heels. “You two are grown-ass adults,” she barked, her voice shaking with anger. “I don’t care how late in the season it is or what the budget looks like. If you can’t act like the scientists they told me you were, I will send you both the fuck out of here! I need a research team, not this . . . this pissing match!”

  Neither of them said a word and neither of them looked up. Ari made a wordless noise of frustration, slapping her hands against her sides.

  “Just . . . just go to bed. Stay out of each other’s way. I have to phone HQ. This sort of shit gets reported,” she snapped, and left the trailer.

  Gita studied them for a long moment, frowning. She pointed to Mike. “Out,” she said.

  He slunk out past her, with Alastair’s blood still coating his knuckles. Alastair stared after him, furious and stunned. He couldn’t catch his breath and his hands were shaking. It should’ve been so easy . . .

  “Now you,” Gita told him, pointing at the door. “Let it go, Al. He’s not worth losing your job over.”

  Alastair pushed himself to his feet, meeting her eyes in disbelief. He felt like the heat of his anger was still blazing from him, but Gita didn’t back down, putting her hands on her hips.

  “Not worth it, Al,” she repeated slowly. “One of you has to be the bigger man here.”

  When Alastair slid out of the trailer past her, the frozen night wind didn’t even touch him.

  NEITHER OF US are men, he hissed in his mind, his thoughts still holding the sizzle of hellspeak.

  The lamp hit the wall with a satisfying crash, plunging the room into darkness and doing absolutely nothing to take the edge off his rage.

  He’d been a Duke. He’d had legions. They’d called him “my lord”. An invitation to dine with him was bragging rights for a decade. Alastair stalked, pacing the tiny area, feeling the walls close in around him. His room was too small to hold the size of his anger and disgust.

  Lazy, stupid, old fool . . .

  He’d gotten slow and soft, and dangerously complacent. To not notice an angel under his nose, locked in close quarters with the creature for weeks now? It was unforgivable, humiliating. There’d been so many signs; the bone-deep repulsion he felt when Mike was around, the instinctive way he’d made note of the guy entering the same room as him.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in the little hand mirror by the desk, saw the red gleam of his eyes highlighting the cuts and bruises on his face. The fat lip swelling above his beard. The blood at the side of his nose looked black in this light.

  Snarling, he let his form slip, flashing glimpses of charred ebony demon skin in the cuts on his face, and tore the mirror down with a hiss, crushing it under his foot.

  He’d been a Duke. Alastair sighed, feeling the past-tense of another life crash down on his shoulders. Sitting down, he put his face in his hands.

  His therapist, Leonard, had told him dissatisfaction was normal for a man his age. The solution: buy a red sports car and drive down the highway at two hundred kilometres per hour with the top down and a bombshell in the passenger seat. Instead, Alastair had come to Iceland.

  He hated it here, the cold and the close quarters and all the care he had to take on the glacier. But this place was his to lose, so was his job, and there was no way he was going to let some angelic little upstart take that away from him. He’d worked his way back up to some semblance of a reputation, starting from scratch on the plane of mortals. He’d suffered through humiliating internships, slogged through years of human academia from mentors under a century old . . .

  Shutting his eyes and steadying his breath, he mustered his strength and thrust his arm out, plunging it between realms and reaching into Hell.

  It was still there, and the comfort of the heat on the other side sang a siren-song to his blood, drawing him in, inviting him to stay. Foolish old creature, what are you doing living in the ice?

  His fingertips touched the handle of his scourge, locking around it, drawing it back. It was a balancing act, dragging the weapon between realms without toppling over that line himself. He found himself reaching for the ancient pulse of the volcanoes that boiled beneath the glaciers, the molten core of the island, the one part of this place that wasn’t alien to him. The fire in a land of ice.

  Steadily, with effort, he drew the full length of the scourge into the room with him, and the window to Hell snapped shut once more.

  The lashes of the scourge hung like dead snakes, black and limp, absent the hellfire that should have been crackling through them. His age-old weapon looked like something from a discount pirate costume, the onyx handle dull and grimy in his hand. It felt . . . too light.

  He raised his arm, wincing at the ache in his bruised shoulder, and cracked the scourge in an arc above him.

  Nothing. Not even a spark.

  Dismay rose like bile in his throat. He tried pressing his will into the coils, trying to dredge up some of the old power in him, and his knees immediately went so weak that he had to sit down. And yet . . . still nothing.

  Exhausted, and bruised in more ways than the physical, Alastair crammed the useless scourge into a spare backpack, and collapsed into bed.

  ARI KEPT THEM on tight leashes for the next few days, pairing Alastair with Gita and keeping her eye on Mike. They were never alone together anymore.

  It didn’t keep them from sizing each other up, circling around each other like prowling lions. Ari had more than a few muttered comments about testosterone and male egos, but all Alastair could think about was the dead weapon tucked away in his room.

  He was losing sleep, spending long nights obsessively working with the scourge, trying to coax fire back into the lashes. Kicking himself for letting himself get old and . . . human. Cursing himself for every leisurely cup of tea he’d drank, for every night spent reading novels, for every day wasted watching the sky change colour.

  Mike didn’t seem to be a prime angelic specimen either; he’d never seen such a sloppy attack from one of the warriors of Heaven. But it had still taken him down. It didn’t matter that they were both rusty. Alastair was rustier, and Mike was going to win.

  To Ari’s dismay, he started turning in work half completed, jotting down sloppy readings with exhaustion-clumsy hands. When he begged off fieldwork for a day (hoping to bring the scourge outside and test it in the open air while the humans were gone), she shook her head, looking sad.

  “Strike two, Al,” she sighed. “Be here or don’t. You don’t survive Vatnajökull with a half-assed effort.”

  Her disappointed words rang in his ears, echoing in his mind. A small part of him thought that he shouldn’t care about losing a human job in a place that he didn’t like anyway. The mu
ch larger part of him was devastated.

  He was staring in the broken bathroom mirror that night, dabbing ointment on the cuts that wouldn’t quite heal, when his anger finally broke and dissolved into a deep, dark pool of despair, and finally, tears. Subtle streaks of flame streaked down his cheeks, leaving a black trail of coal.

  “You’re too old for this,” he murmured. There were lines on his face that hadn’t been there before, and more white in his beard. His bones ached.

  “Bullshit,” came a voice from the shower stall.

  He jumped, wiping his cheeks and charring the cuffs of his nightshirt. But it was only Gita, stepping out with a towel wrapped around her, her feet bare on the icy plastic floor. She frowned at him, grey-streaked curls dripping, and he stared at her despite himself. There was so much fire in her that he often forgot the woman’s age. Her skin was a tapestry of wrinkles and stretchmarks, dotted with age spots and old scars; it hung soft and loose on her arms, above her knees, along her throat.

  Grandmotherly, he thought. And steel underneath.

  “Bullshit,” she repeated. “You’ve got as much right to be here as anyone, Al. You’ve got more degrees than Mike has fingers and, last I heard, you come with one hell of a recommendation from the Dean at Manoa. One of the best she’s met, I believe was the wording.”

  She stepped forward and tapped his forehead with a wet finger. “You’re here because you give a shit about the world. And because you’re good at your job. Maybe try remembering that for a change, huh?”

  HE COULDN’T GET Gita’s words out of his head. And when he sat down that night, twisting the lashes of his scourge over his fingers meditatively, he realized that now he was a scientist first, and a demon second. Because he was here as Dr. Alastair Duke, senior environmental researcher, not as Allocer, Great Duke of Hell. And as a scientist, he didn’t have to worry about defending himself from the wrath of angels, because he was doing nothing wrong.

  He was here because he’d been stationed here, and nothing more.