Steel Victory (Steel Empire Book 1)

by J. L. Gribble

  He nodded once, dragging his eyes away from the sky and ducking under the canvas. Before she could follow, Mikelos grabbed her again. Always a tug of war in this threesome. “Yes, love?”

  “I can’t sleep under there with you,” Mikelos said. “Not while he’s like that.”

  “I know,” she said. Not just a tug of war, but a never-ending process of soothing male egos. A hundred years later, it still wasn’t any easier. Pulling Mikelos behind her, she followed Asaron under the boat and settled herself into a corner. “Okay,” she said. Asaron had stolen the prime spot, lounging against one of the trees next to his belongings. She would have to be content with hunching over for this conversation. “Now for the real story. What the hell was that little escapade about?” Mikelos lay on his stomach, stretching his legs out of the covered area into the open air.

  “Did I tell you how much I appreciate this, daughter?” He tried to appear innocent. It failed, since his face was only about three feet from hers.

  She met his look full on, aware of how unsettling an intent look from her could be. Mikelos could meet a vampire’s eyes, but Asaron didn’t live with a companion who stared him down on a regular basis. No escape behind coyness this time. Not after dragging her who-knew-how-far away from the city on what was supposed to be a normal evening. “Don’t even try to pull that. I want to know why I just risked our lives to save your sorry old ass. Why the sudden trip home?”

  “Have some respect, girl. This sorry old ass can still whip yours. But I do appreciate the timing.”

  “So talk, then,” Mikelos said. “Why were you in the Roman colonies to begin with? Max said the Guild contract was sealed and wouldn’t give us any details. Then you disappeared last month, and we didn’t hear from you until Toria told us we needed to meet you at the customs house tonight.”

  “I should have taken the train instead of setting foot on that boat. But as for why—” Asaron pulled the second sword out from under the pack next to him and laid it in front of Victory.

  She unwrapped the cotton to reveal the hilt. “Toria’s rapier! I was wondering where it went.”

  “She also didn’t tell you that it broke.” He held up a hand before she could demand explanations. “It’s all better now. She asked me to get it fixed for her, and that’s what I did. I’m friends with a good smith down in the Grand Strand, so I figured that was the best place to take it.”

  “But why wouldn’t she tell me?”

  “She didn’t want you to be mad that she’d broken Jarimis’ sword.” Asaron took the blade back and rewrapped it. “I was actually about to head west to look into some deaths when I got quite the panicked message from her. Something to do with science and alloys.” The elder vampire made a face.

  Victory could commiserate. Like her sire, she’d never understood her daughter’s fascination with the modern.

  Asaron continued, “So since I wasn’t the only one looking into that case, I promised Toria I’d get it fixed. Then it showed up in my hotel room in two pieces. I figured magic had to be involved somewhere at that point.”

  “But why would she think that I’d be angry at her?” Victory said.

  “My fault,” Mikelos said. “I flipped out once when she let a friend play Connor’s cello. She is terrified of hurting the relics from those that we loved. And Jarimis was your progeny.”

  A guarded look crossed Asaron’s face. “I would have been gone longer, but there’s been news from the south. Bad news.”

  “Is there any other kind?” Victory said. “Let me guess: something about the secession of the new Emperor?”

  “Politics.” Mikelos snorted. “Romans are crazy. I grew up in the capital, and I still don’t understand them.”

  “Things have changed, but not that much. Since the Emperor didn’t have a son himself, the heir was chosen from his nephews,” Asaron said. “And who the senators approved wouldn’t have been my first choice.”

  Her sire paid more attention to global politics than she did these days, since he still made his living off warring factions. “Why?” Who wasn’t important, Victory knew, but rather the motives behind the choice.

  “Humans are beginning to forget about the war that created the Wasteland,” Asaron said. “The Romans weren’t involved, and the Senate in Roma wasn’t directly affected by the results. The imperialist faction won.”

  “So?” Mikelos said. “That’s always been the case on the continent. The colonies have spread as much as they can. The southern Wasteland is even more uninhabitable than ours.”

  Asaron shook his head. “There’s still north.”

  Victory froze. “But north is Limani.”

  “And that is where the Roman Army is currently marching.”

  Sun broke over the horizon. This was not the sort of news Victory needed when she wasn’t safe at home. Asaron would have to meet with the city council to share this information, and they’d need to start coordinating with Max Asher, head of the local branch of the Mercenary Guild. Mikelos squeezed her hand, and Victory realized she’d frozen in thought.

  “Is the army going to get here today?” Mikelos said. Asaron shook his head. “Then both of you sleep, and we’ll raise the alarm tonight.”

  Mikelos might be Victory’s best friend and lover, but daytime guardian was the daywalker’s original job description. She handed him her sword and he ducked out of the shelter to settle against another nearby tree.

  She curled up next to Asaron, entwining her fingers with his. Asaron completed her family, and with them, Limani could stand up to anything.

  Toria closed her eyes in brief dismay when thunder rolled through the apartment. That wasn’t supposed to happen. When the glassware in her impromptu laboratory stopped rattling on its shelves, she peered at the beaker and dagger in her hands. The silver solution coating the bottom and sides of the beaker had transformed into a black chalky substance. The blade didn’t look much better. Useless, now. She plunked both items back on the counter and pulled off her lab glasses.

  “What the hell?”

  At her partner’s query, the containment spell collapsed around her in sparkles of violet light. When the last vestiges faded, Toria waved her glasses at the doorway. “Hey.”

  Kane stepped into her lab—also known as the corner kitchen of their apartment—with an over-exaggerated hesitant expression. “Am I in danger of being blown up?”

  “Not today,” Toria said. She eyed the charred mark on the countertop. Yet another sample had proven a failure. She exchanged her glasses for the beaker and crossed to the other counter, making sure not to scuff the chalk lines on the tile floor with her feet.

  Kane stayed well away from her work area, choosing a stool from the sitting area of their open-concept apartment. “What happened to ‘I will not set things on fire without my partner present’?”

  Toria washed and rinsed the beaker, then brought a damp sponge back to the other counter to dab at the black soot mark. “You had plans. With a boy. So this is me entertaining myself while you’re out on hot dates.” Some hard scrubbing removed most of the mark.

  “You could have gone with Mikelos and Victory last night and stayed back at the house. Mikelos would have cooked for you this morning,” Kane said.

  “But then the whole sword thing would have come up,” Toria said. “It’s embarrassing.” Not only had she broken her sword and had to ask her grandfather to get it repaired, but the sword had been an antique that used to belong to one of Victory’s progeny. She wasn’t looking forward to her mother finding out. “So. Your date. Any good?”

  “He was okay,” Kane said, running a hand through his close-cropped black hair. “Really, really old-country British, so he freaked out when he figured out I was Victory’s foster son. In the middle of brunch. Also embarrassing.”

  “Sorry, hon,” Toria sai
d. She was, honest. Her partner was tall, dark, and drop-dead gorgeous. And still got more dates than she did, even considering his more limited dating pool. In a perfect world, she and Kane would have lived happily ever after together, but their relationship had been closer to that of siblings from day one. But no time to dwell, she had work to do. “The day is still young. Want to help?”

  Kane left his safe spot to come closer to her workspace, dragging the stool behind him. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist her latest chemistry project, even if he was often limited to note-taker and general observer. Still more interesting than hoity-toity British boys. “What are you up to now?” He eyed her neat row of vials containing different variations on the silver goop she’d just discarded.

  “Well, I figured out why my sword broke,” Toria said. “Simple, in the end, and I should have realized it a long time ago.” Any middle-school kid with a chemistry set knew the answer to that one. Or hobbyist jeweler. Or self-taught metallurgist. All of which she was, to one degree or another. “Why is silver mixed with copper in most jewelry?”

  “Umm . . .”

  He did this, acted the dunce to make her feel better. She loved him for it. “It’s mixed with copper to make the piece stronger. Silver on its own is too soft a metal to retain its shape against hard wear and tear,” she said, rearranging the vials on the counter again. She pulled her glasses back on, and gestured for Kane to grab his own pair hanging on the wall. “So what did I do that was so inordinately stupid?”

  “I was never clear on what you did in the first place.” After donning eye protection, he picked up one of the vials and watched the silver solution slide around inside. “Just that you converted part of the metal in your sword to silver.”

  Toria plucked the vial out of his hand and returned it to its original place. “Yeah, when we were young idiots, and I thought I knew what I was doing. Before I knew as much about chemistry and metallurgy as I do now. I analyzed one of the shards, and frankly, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.”

  “How so?”

  She pointed to a spot on the floor, and Kane moved his stool and then parked himself as instructed. “Because I had the damn proportions completely wrong.” She clenched her fist at her side. It would be a long time before she stopped berating herself for this. “I thought I could willy-nilly mess with the steel and that my magic would retain the strength of the blade. I was so stupid.”

  “No, you weren’t,” Kane said. “Just young. You said it yourself, you didn’t know as much as you do now. And I assume now you’re trying to fix the problem?”

  “Yeah.” She unstopped the vial at the end of the row to pour the silver solution into the clean beaker. “Grandpa took the hilt when he left. He said he’d take it to a smith he trusts and get a new blade forged for me.”

  “Then Asaron’ll bring it back good as new. And we’ll redo the spell we did in high school, but you’ll get the proportions right this time, and it’ll be your old sword again. No problem.”

  She could feel another tension headache coming on, despite her partner’s soothing presence. Toria scuffed both hands through her short hair. “You’re right. I should have gone with them to pick him up. What if the boat was late, and they got stranded during the day?”

  “Then it’s a good thing Mikelos is perfectly okay in the sun,” Kane said. “It’ll be okay, love.”

  She swirled the silver in the beaker. Damn his logic. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “They’ll bring him home. And your sword. Now show me what we’re going to do to make it even better than it was.”

  After being wrapped up in each other’s souls for ten years, he knew how to manipulate her. Not that it was difficult to make her talk about her true passion: mixing the two volatile sciences of chemistry and magic. “Well,” she held up the new beaker, “this is a formula I’m still attempting to perfect.” She gestured to the remaining vials. “Those are the latest variations I mixed up this morning.”

  “Do I want to know what’s in them?”

  Toria had banned him from helping her play with chemicals due to his incurable inability to measure with any precision. He was a terrible cook, too. “The new idea is that instead of weakening the steel of a blade by converting a percentage of it to silver, I should coat the blade with a microscopic layer of silver instead. Bond it to the steel so well it can’t even be scraped away.”

  “So what are we doing here, exactly?” Kane said.

  Toria picked up another small blade from the counter—a broken throwing knife, this time. “I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to bond the silver alloy to the steel of a blade.”

  “Magic?”

  “Of course.” Toria held the beaker out to Kane. “And I’ve gotten used to working with the extra magical properties the silver gives me. It takes too much concentration to pour the alloy on the blade and get it to cover evenly at the same time. So you pour, and I’ll spread.”

  Uncertainty clouded his face. “If you think so.”

  Her fascination with mixing chemistry and magic always left him a bit puzzled, similar to the way his own passion for literature made no sense to her. “You’ll be fine, hon,” she said. “Help me set up the containment spell, and then pour when I tell you to.”

  He grasped the beaker between thumb and forefinger and looked unsure how tight to hold the glass. She gave him an encouraging smile, and he relaxed. He would trust her. He always would.

  What she and Kane formed was unique in Limani—a warrior-mage pair. Before Kane, Toria was just a regular mage. A bit precocious for her age, but nothing special. Before Toria, Kane had zero magical ability, despite both of his parents being mages. But when they first grasped hands at age twelve, their energies meshed with such completeness that the jolt of power even activated Kane’s latent magical ability. Together, their power was so stable that they had control over their abilities that most mages took decades to achieve. Some bonded mages took advantage of that control to expand the reaches of their power, becoming legends in magical circles. Toria and Kane, on the other hand, had decided on the more traditional road of warrior-mages after bonding, focusing their extra time on martial arts, swordplay, and tactics and apprenticing themselves to Limani’s Mercenary Guild.

  With Kane helping her, she could place the load of the containment spell on him and concentrate on spreading the alloy. She shouldn’t have juggled both magical processes at the same time. Her lapse of mental control over the containment circle had resulted in the earlier thunder as her power echoed through her affinity element of storm. She didn’t have enough concentration for the circle while doing two other things requiring such physical dexterity.

  They locked gazes. Toria nudged the mental switch in her head that allowed the world around her to flare into real color. Every time she used her magesight to illuminate the world, she wondered how mundane humans could stand such bland surroundings. But now her silver vials glowed, and the beaker Kane held gained more depth of light and shadow than seemed possible. The knife in her open palms shimmered with electricity, the result of a charm she placed on all of their weapons to protect them from rust.

  Kane overshadowed every other magical object in the room. His fluid emerald aura enveloped him, shimmering over his deep brown skin and representing the powers of earth he aligned with. While both of them were mages, and all mages could affect the magical power inherent in the world to an extent, Kane’s true talents lay in growth and healing.

  She tuned out her own familiar aura by habit but knew Kane saw her body encased in a delicate crystalline structure glinting deep violet, deceptive in its strength. The power of her own element of storm reacted with the leftover electrical charge in the room, and she smiled when the hair on their arms stood on end. Her alignment with storm allowed her to manipulate the power that flowed through all people and objects, from the electri
cal power of a storm or a wall outlet to the bioelectricity in all living beings.

  Other mages aligned with air, water, and fire, rounding out the so-called circle of planetary life. Warrior-mages could come in any combination of the five elements, but Toria and Kane counted themselves lucky that storm and earth worked so complementarily with each other.

  Toria’s personal shields fractured, then spread out to form the framework of a globe around them, using the chalk circle on the floor as a guide. Kane’s fluid aura expanded to flow in and around the prismatic shapes of her shield.

  A small sigh escaped her lips, and Toria recognized the matching look of contentment on Kane’s face. She felt Kane pour more of his energies into the shield and took the weight of powering her half of it. She remained connected to the energy, but now it was Kane’s responsibility to maintain the containment spell. When they shared magic, they were as close as two hemispheres of a brain, working in harmony to accomplish one goal.

  She paused for Kane to regain his own internal equilibrium. He opened his eyes and held up the beaker. “Ready?”

  Toria grasped the knife’s hilt, holding the blade horizontal. Kane tipped the beaker, and her thick silver formula oozed toward the edge of the glass.

  Her entire being centered upon the point where liquid would meet metal. Toria felt her perception shift in a way she had not expected. Her vision tunneled, and the blade of the dagger magnified hundreds of times in her sight, more precise than a microscope. But it had depth, not the flat look of a sample smashed between two glass slides. The blade wavered in her hands, making the world appear as though it shook in a violent earthquake. A wave of dizziness passed over her.

  Everything stilled when the silver liquid touched the blade. Then a brilliant flash of pure white light left Toria blinking away shadowy negative images. Uncontrolled power surged through her. She heard the familiar sharp crack of thunder, and the world went black.