Prince in the Tower

by Stephan Morse

  My hands were human again. Rough, calloused, and streaked with dried blood. A few hours ago one had been engulfed in flame and clawed like a demon made of scales and bone. I’d called fire to my fist and swung it like a set of brass knuckles.

  It wasn’t entirely off. These brass knuckles had lit people on fire. Fire that was somehow Boss Wylde, or a portion of her, and it talked. As if any of that made sense.

  I’d known, demanded, and received a portion of her power. Part of me certainly knew what I’d been demanding. I even knew who, I just hadn’t managed to reconcile that bit of knowledge with the rest of my life.

  And I’d done it before, too. Not a full bonfire, but something smaller. I’d yanked out one of Kahina’s bodyguards by their face and left a permanent scar.

  It was part of the gifts of elements. They were mine, to an extent, to use. They gave me power. I breathed fire because ages gone by, my race had struck deals with the primordial elements.

  How the hell would I explain that to anyone? Much less the current embodiment of fire being Wylde from Bottom Pit? I flashed to the past and let the memory fill in some blanks.

  I could drive myself crazy thinking about all the random shit to pop up in my life during these last few months. Hints were all over, sure, but it was still a mess of epic proportions to sort the different events.

  Fire was a gift. The gift came from elementals like Boss Wylde. Elementals were a goddamned race like vampires, wolves, humans, elves, and all the other shit I’d been dealing with. That wasn’t even a good name for them, since they came in all shapes. Or they did in theory. I’d never found any others besides Lacey Wylde.

  Far out from shore, the ocean rippled. It could have been caused by an undercurrent but hadn’t. The real enemy, one worthy of fighting, curled in a listless sleep. Even the slightest curl of its huge body caused the water to thrash.

  I wanted to fight it. Yet, the timing wasn’t right. I needed air to breathe. Going to it now would end up with me being snapped out of the sky like a seagull fighting an alligator.

  Rest. Soon, cry for the enemy. Murder him. No threats.

  All well and good impulses, but none of it helped me with the actual defeating a monster part. In my other form, I could be bigger than a two-story house, depending on if I’d taken a breath or puffed up. Wingspan meant a lot. But that creature could crush submarines in its coils.

  I walked back to the camp slowly, my legs unsteady from a dozen nicks and bruises. Some from the people I’d fought, others from a reckless disregard of personal safety. The blood would have set off every vampire on the island, but most were out cold or hiding. Even feral wolves knew better.

  In that brief moment, my mind slipped to the past.

  “Magic is dying in this world,” a woman said, her words stern as she walked in clicking heels.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Before we were otherwise engaged. You asked why there weren’t more of us. Magic is dying. Or dead. Or less. I haven’t figured out which.”

  She only wore heels. I couldn’t remember when she’d stopped taking off clothes, but at some point I’d been unable to hold myself back.

  I shook my head and kept walking through the island. Memories of Boss Wylde were attractive and all, but otherwise out of place. We’d had an off and on relationship prior to me committing to Kahina. I needed to compartmentalize my life and stop thinking about useless bits of the past.

  Ahead, Leo snored. Brand paced. She faced the rising sun and let it bake her skin. I felt the warmth, even from here, miles away. Far fewer people were in the woods which reduced the ants-on-skin feeling I’d been dealing with for days.

  Teeth playfully nipped my ear. The sensation of very feminine curves pressed against my back. Silk sheets lay around us and heat poured out of a fireplace.

  “I don’t understand what you see in her,” Boss Wylde whispered. “She’s half dead already. You’ve seen the way she cringes whenever I walk into the room. Yet this girl thinks you’ll be swayed by her?”

  Women were strange creatures. Boss Wylde wasn’t possessive of me. Not as long as she got a piece. But a simple lay and a life mate were extremely different levels of the relationship spectrum.

  “That’s what Julianne says.”

  “You can’t tell me you actually want to find a girl, have a few babies, and be a father?”

  Was that so wrong? I couldn’t explain the strange desire to settle down. Somewhere during my early twenties I’d hit a wall, where simple lust meant nothing. My father’s words didn’t have an explanation for what amounted to a second puberty.

  “What are you going to do when she’s not strong enough? What are you going to do when you choose this, mate, and she becomes too dangerous for the Hunters to let live?”

  “Shut up,” I said, slamming my fist into a tree. It cracked under the sudden pressure. The past fuzzed for a moment and I limped further.

  Even using Wylde’s flame as a crutch wasn’t a perfect solution to the loss of energy. Hours of late night chasing had left me drained. That was why memories of her were flooding in, I was too physically damaged to keep myself mentally stable.

  I passed by a tree, and there she was again. This time in a chair, spinning around. She wore the red dress. Years had passed since we’d called off our relationship.

  Lacey smiled at me. Her teeth were shaved down to points and a tuft of hair spun with fire. I could feel the heat that beckoned me. She was surely naked under those clothes.

  “All those powers. All that fire. Like a candle sputtering in the winds of time. What good does it do anyone? You’re running away from the very woman you swore was your heart.”

  I said nothing, because speaking at all would admit she’d been right.

  “And now you want Muni to help you. Fantastic. My little raven, muddling about in your mind. To keep her safe.” Lacey’s eyes rolled unkindly. She rubbed a table top made of pure, polished obsidian.

  “How do you know?”

  “Anything under the sun I can listen to. Anyone speaking by a fire at night is within my sight. You know this. Your gifts came from my kind. A melding of elements and the oldest creatures upon earth.”

  I tuned her out. Lacey knew a lot but her knowledge came from a different place than my own. Her gifts stretched further than my own. That was the price for melding together four different elements.

  My knowledge was far more convoluted and less useful. Only some moments had memories and those weren’t my own. I tried to separate out now and then but failed. Why I could remember words from my father, who existed in another timeline or something screwy, but not other faces, was beyond me.

  The voice of my father’s words threatened to tip me over. Other parts of the past jumbled along a dozen different moments before I managed to right myself. I stood at the camp facing Agent Brand.

  Her face pinched with a frown and head hung to a side.

  “You done with your dick measuring contest?” she asked.

  Stacy, a giant wolf, was sitting near the fire with Deborah snoring next to her. Her ear twitched then settled.

  I didn’t want to deal with her, any more than I wanted to deal with the rest of my life. The allure of crawling into a pit and sleeping for years hit me strongly. If it weren’t for those few people near me I’d do just that.

  So, straight to the point. “Brand,” I said with false calmness. “How do we get that creature to shore? I’m going to kill it.” Or die trying.

  The others stirred.

  “You want to do what?”

  “Kill the giant sea monster that’s being doped by Western Sector’s prison system. Kill it for sure and secure my worth as a pet monster they won’t be able to do without.”

  “Pretty sure you can’t,” she responded.

  I felt like a broken record for thinking it, but my memories didn’t care in the slightest about repeating themselves. Daniel’s stupid words. To him, it was about keeping humanity safe.

  “I’ll figu
re it out.”

  Brand yawned while stretching inside the loose shirt. Leo blushed and turned away. Stacy growled quietly, but it sounded way too pleased.

  So, they were fully awake and busy walking around to straighten up the makeshift camp. Agent Brand kept talking as if the answer didn’t really bother her.

  “Top of the tower, one of the Wardens lives there. He has equipment and watches the sea through filtered lenses. When it starts rolling too much, he’ll sound the alarm. Then it plays all over the island.”

  Strange. I hadn’t felt anyone up there when my senses were going wild. They were more honed now, and I certainly felt better about owning the island, especially after hunting all across it last night.

  It was hard to reconcile the sense of ownership not being needed, versus the illusion I had to feel a connection. Objects helped, for certain. Maybe Daniel had been lying, or my nature had been unclear. It was also possible young me simply believed he owned everything.

  Stacy walked up shaking her head. “Not this again. You can’t kill it. It’s too big. That’s the whole point of this stupid hellhole. You either work with people and survive, or go out on your own and die. You heard that creepy vampire’s warning like the rest of us.”

  “I can kill it,” I said.

  “Right,” Stacy said.

  Agent Brand shook her head while walking to the fire. She poked around searching for food in leftover cans I hadn’t noticed before. They must be from the food drops Warden Bennett’s message mentioned. Daylight and fewer people walking around made it easier to notice the small things.

  She said, “They tried to use dynamite on it about sixty years ago. Didn’t work. They thought about a nuke, but couldn’t get it to sit still long enough to fire one down its gullet. The thing doesn’t care about biological warfare. I mean, the file says they try a new virus or something every other year.”

  “Everything has a weakness,” I said.

  “So far it ignores anything that isn’t lethal doses of hemlock,” Agent Brand said. She plopped down with a can and munched out of it without any regard for the quality of food. “Even that only slows it down. Like, I guess, hippies on too much weed. Lazy and lethargic.”

  Now that she wasn’t screaming about Muni every five breaths, Brand was actually helpful. I didn’t have a lot of ideas on how to defeat it myself aside from brute force. It was just wrong something out there had more size and strength than me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Agent Brand’s eyes rolled as her head shook. “Let me get this straight. I just said its weakness is something that kills normal people quickly, but you still want to summon the sea monster to shore, murder it, then leave Atlas Island like nothing happened?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “You realize that’s insane.”

  We turned into giant flying creatures. It was a giant sea serpent that’d been feeding on heavily sedated people for hundreds of years. Insane clearly didn’t reach the right levels of description.

  “And why do you need to kill it to escape?” Agent Brand asked. “You could survive forever out here. At least according to the others who said you went on a rampage last night. You’re worse than the two cats.”

  I didn’t know where Don and Dee, Agent Brand’s twin bodyguards had gone to. They could have run out after us, or might be filing paperwork somewhere. They hadn’t been included in last night’s adventures.

  “Because it’ll snap us out of the air if we fly over?” I answered her question.

  Agent Brand rolled her eyes. “That’s only on this side. It wouldn’t snatch anything out on the other side. That’s how helicopters fly in, or boats with supplies. It’s smart enough to know food gets brought in from that side.”

  Great. We were dealing with an intelligent sea serpent with size, strength, and the terrain on its side. Nothing could go wrong.

  “You’re sanctioned. You can get away with flying back somehow. I’m fairly sure they’d shoot my leathery ass down and my cover story is—” I didn’t know where the hell Daniel was. He’d been missing during this entire stupid adventure.

  “Being a Fenghuang doesn’t make me immune to bullets,” Agent Brand said. “It makes it worse. You saw what happens, a trigger-happy agent who isn’t in the know fills me with lead like an old gangster movie, I die, and come back even younger. Then I can outlive my grandchildren. I can’t begin to explain how awkward it is to be murdered by some off the grid monster, then show up four years younger and fight it a second time. I lost ten years to this four-armed ape and by the end I looked like my children.”

  Self-depressive nonsense wasn’t interesting. I focused on the next concern. Knowledge would help me learn more about what sort of creature the agent turned into.

  “What’s a fang hang?” I asked.

  “Fenghuang. You really don’t know anything?”

  It sounded like a word from the Eastern Sectors.

  “I live under a rock,” I responded dryly. It was fairly close to true. My actual basement home was below ground level so there were probably rocks nearby that qualified.

  “Do you even know what you are?”

  “No,” I responded.

  If she’d been awake last night, instead of sleeping, she might have known. Daniel had never found a name for my species. The elves simply called me Lord, or our kind Rulers. A vague description meant little.

  It wasn’t like we’d gone up to elves and demanded a different name. Daniel wanted to avoid them.

  “How have you survived without a classification or a name? They gave me, Don and Dee, a simple ultimatum. Register and join, or die.”

  “I’ve got friends in high places,” I mumbled quietly. Daniel and his father must have kept me out of the system. They kept Roy and the others out as well, since none of them were directly working with Western Sector.

  Apparently it depended on who caught us. My mind replayed a dozen memories from my past, attempting to reconcile my prior perceptions against Agent Brand’s reality. They were quashed.

  “Why does the damn thing need to eat a human to be sedated or whatever?” Leo demanded.

  “Because it likes people. The other pink meat.”

  “Is that a useful stratagem?” Deborah asked. “For this enemy you can’t kill? Drugging them is dishonorable, but if the sizes are unequal, then you use all resources.”

  The four of them mulled it over. I searched my memories for ways to get stronger, even if only temporarily. Deborah was right though, if we couldn’t overpower it, then bringing it down to our level would help. Well, down to my level.

  Brand’s form didn’t seem fight worthy. She had claws but nothing else. There wasn’t enough strength in her body to pull that creature out of the water and we’d all be pulled under. That might happen to me anyway, but I could get out easier once waterlogged. Bird feathers probably couldn’t.

  “We could drug me and dose the thing to slow it down,” Brand offered. “But I’m not doing it for free.”

  “Fantastic,” I said while rolling my eyes.

  She’d want to pin down Muni. Muni wanted her brother. I didn’t have time to solve either problem.

  “If we survive I’ll get you Muni. You hurt her and I’ll tear you limb from limb until you’re a toddler,” I said.

  “I don’t want to hurt her, I want her help!” she shouted.

  “Great. Pin that until we kill the giant sea serpent. Otherwise none of this matters.”

  “Or we could just avoid it,” Agent Brand said angrily. I didn’t know why she was upset toward me. “Hell, I’ll put in a transfer request for you and your friends. Then no one’s at risk.”

  That was a really good idea. Why hadn’t she offered earlier? She should have suggested transferring them out prior to talking about dosing herself in poison. Maybe she valued her life so little that dying felt like a natural answer.

  “I will not run from a fight,” Deborah said.

  “It’s not running. It’s survival,” Leo
said.

  Deborah’s face twisted in disgust. “You’re pathetic.”

  Leo exploded. “What, you’re going to accuse me of not being a warrior? I already knew that! I failed the test. I failed the goddamn test.”

  “Then you are just as pathetic as I’ve suspected since we met!” she responded while looming over Leo.

  He sat on the ground angry and bunched. His head shook as the young man vented.

  “Why?” he asked. “Because I didn’t fight you, either? Go fuck yourself. I don’t want anything to do with this nonsense. I never did. I’ve already taken steps. I’m not going to kill the woman I love when she gives birth. I’m not going to do what my dad and every other stupid man in our tribe has done.”

  Deborah glanced down at Leo’s crotch then back up. If it was possible, the look of revulsion on her face ratcheted up another notch.

  “You gelded yourself?”

  Leo’s lips tightened. Stacy’s head shook slowly but she wore a different look. Her jaw had dropped slightly and eyes watered.

  Deborah shook, visibly shook. Her normally calm composure had gone out the window and I watched through my other sight as her energy swung around. She was torn between striking Leo for his effrontery or fleeing.

  She chose to walk off in slow stomping steps.

  Agent Brand sighed. “Don’t let her get you down. If I had known what I know now, I would have done the same thing. Three daughters. Seven granddaughters. Each of them at risk because of what I am.”

  Stacy shifted into a wolf and padded after Deborah. We watched them go.

  Agent Brand said, “So, no on the legal route out? Because that way, no one’s at risk. You have a lawyer, right? I’m sure we could find some clever way to work together and get everyone home safely. Then you call Muni and everyone ends this happily?”

  But then I wouldn’t get to fight a giant sea serpent in an epic battle of monster versus monster. It would keep everyone safe, and my main goal in life was to do that. That’s what I’d hidden my memories for. That was why I’d walked into the stupid Order of Merlin compound. Wanting to keep the people near me secure was the first impulse, always.