Treasure of the Fire Kingdom (The Elemental Phases Book 4)

by Cassandra Gannon

  “You kidnapped Nia, too?”

  “Abduction always seems like a good idea, at the time.” The boy clearly had a thousand more questions, but Chason didn’t have time to educate him on Elementals 101. He had a lot to accomplish before he killed himself. “I’d like to go, now. The next time I’m arrested, I’ll bring you some Elemental history books to read.”

  Sullivan exhaled a long breath and unlocked the cell. “Why do suddenly feel like you’re the only Cult member who isn’t crazy?”

  “Oh no. I’m very crazy.” Chason assured him. “How long ago did Ty leave?” He got to his feet, annoyed when the room titled under his feet. “Because, if Gion’s the one who’s come to bail me out, he’s snuck away from her and is back to kill me.” Especially if Chason had inadvertently “upset” Ty. “I’ll need to have my weapon returned.”

  Sullivan snorted. “If it was Gion out there, I’d gladly give ya back that Braveheart sword of yours and even explain to the jury at your murder trial why he deserved to be hacked apart. Sadly, Gion isn’t your bondsman, though.” He gestured Chason forward. “Come on.”

  The human hated Gion? Chason followed him out into the front office of the police station, losing what minimal interest he had in squashing Sullivan with one of the metal desks. They clearly had much in common.

  “Do you know a woman named Teja?” Sullivan asked after a moment.

  “Teja, of the Fire and Cold Houses? Everyone knows that lunatic.”

  Sullivan jaw ticked. “Do you know where she lives?”

  “In the Fire Kingdom, by the largest volcano. Her family’s fortress is covered in spikes and gargoyles. You can’t miss it.”

  “Right.” Sullivan said the word on a sigh. “Never mind.”

  Sullivan’s workspace was decorated with institutional furniture and stacks of files. All the chairs, potted plants and coffee mugs seemed very… breakable. Chason wasn’t used to being around breakable things anymore. He’d broken them all. Chason warily eyed the computers on the desktops as he passed them. Electronics and Magnet powers didn’t mix well.

  He needed to get out of there.

  And not just for the sake of Sullivan’s office supplies and digital recordkeeping. Ty was a sweet little thing. Sooner or later, she’d feel guilty and ensure his bail was posted. Chason would prefer not be there if she and her asshole Match showed up. Chason didn’t have time for another fight with Gion. He had to find Mara.

  I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time sang in his head, the notes sounding perfect and pure. Chason tilted his head. He stopped to stare up at a ceiling fixture. The light bulb flickered.

  Yes, he had to find her. How could they possibly dance if Mara was kidnapped?

  Why had he ever left her alone? Alive or dead, he should have been at Mara’s side. Why hadn’t he spent every moment with her? Everything else in the universe was… meaningless. Had he been going nuts back then, too, not to understand that?

  Without Mara’s light, the darkness would pull him under.

  “Here he is.” Sullivan told someone seated in a visitor’s chair. The man was the only other person in the station house. “God save the king.” He pointed at Chason, who was still hypnotized by the florescent bulb.

  “Yeaaah.” A male voice drawled out. “Is he okay?”

  “Nope.” Sullivan moved to look out the front window, pushing a green and red holly wreath out of the way. He made an annoyed face at whatever he saw outside. “Hey Hickok, what about Teja’s ‘nephew’ Alder? You know him?”

  “Unfortunately.” Like all Fire Phases, Alder was a sociopathic menace. He also shouted a lot. “The boy is no one you want to know.” Sullivan could mingle with a far nicer class of people. The Wood Phases were an honorable and heroic House. Parson would never want his only grandson consorting with the Elementals’ version of the mafia.

  Sullivan grunted. “Any idea how to get Alder to quit following me, then?”

  “Lock him in one of those cells.” Chason suggested. “The walls are Plexiglas. We can’t get out.”

  Sullivan glanced back at him. “Not even with the vanishing thing? That’s why you stayed here all night?”

  “Our powers don’t work with plastics. Even those zip-tie handcuffs restrain us.”

  Sullivan gave a slow smirk.

  “Great. We’re telling the human our weaknesses. Awesome plan.” The stranger edged closer to Chason and cleared his throat. “Are you done bonding or can we get out of here?”

  Chason finally glanced over at him and frowned. “You’re not Raiden.”

  The Radiation Phase had been the one Reprisal solider not to go AWOL after Parald’s death. Chason had expected Raiden to be the one to post his bail. They had a solid relationship built on soothsaying and craziness. Raiden insisted that his visions said he needed stay with Chason until Mara came home and Chason didn’t care enough to kick him out of the fortress. Truthfully, he liked that Raiden seemed certain that they’d find Mara’s body. Raiden could see the future, so his confidence boded well for the success of the mission.

  Still, if Raiden was supposed to be psychic, why wasn’t he here bailing Chason out?

  Who was this new person?

  Was he even “real?”

  Chason glanced around, looking for evidence that this was all happening inside his head. So long as he questioned everything, he figured that he wasn’t totally lost, yet. At least, he knew enough to know that he was delusional.

  “Noooo, I’m not Raiden. Good eye. Very astute.” The guy gave him a jaunty bulls-eye hand gesture with his thumb and forefinger, like a firing gun. “Yeah, I’m Zakkery, of the Smoke House. Hi there.”

  “You freaks really need to come up with better codenames.”

  Chason ignored Sullivan’s muttering. A Smoke Phase had sought him out? Why? Did this “Zakkery” plan to mug him or something?

  Like all of his kind, Zakkery had the face of a Byronic poet and a pastel lavender streak in his dark hair. Smoke Phases hated their pretty boy looks and their Easter egg colored House designation. They liked to compensate by being raging assholes in all other areas of their lives. Their homeland was a swamp in a constant state of anarchy, they all smoked three packs a day, and they were so utterly untrustworthy that even Matches were wary of each other.

  Their only possible career paths were thief, thug, or racketeer. Sometimes they were renaissance men and specialized in all of the above.

  Why would one of them want to bail Chason out of jail? He’d never consorted with lowlifes like the Smoke Phases before. The Smoke Kingdom was all about murder for hire and drug running, while the Magnet Phases had always been about strict discipline and moral respectability.

  Well, before their king went crazy and everyone moved away, anyhow.

  “Zakkery?” Chason repeated slowly, trying to recall ever hearing that name before. It did sound familiar, but it was too hard to remember why in his present state of hung over insanity.

  “Zakkery! That’s right! He’s got it now. He just had to focus.” Zakkery smiled, looking like a guy all set to talk someone else into paying his rent. “You’re a hard man to find, ya know that? Luckily, I’m a persistent guy, because I got the business proposition of a lifetime for you.”

  Chason had spent the 1980s working on a… something for his father. He no longer remembered what the “super-important-for-our-defenses-and-we-must-rush-to-complete-it-or risk-destruction-from-our-enemies” project was, but the damn thing had taken awhile. He’d missed most of the human fashion and culture changes for that decade.

  Still, he did recognize that fact that the Zakkery wore the kind of shredded denim and leather jacket with metal spikes that had been popular back then. His shoes were high tops decorated with the Union Jack and a bicycle chain was looped around his wrist like a bracelet. On his right hand, he wore a black, fingerless glove.

  Insane or not, Chason wasn’t stupid enough to make a deal with someone dressed like a hoodlum. He glanced over at Sullivan, thinking th
at maybe he was imagining how ridiculous this all was.

  “A business proposition?”

  The human arched a brow at him. “Some friendly advice from a commoner? I probably wouldn’t sign any legal documents with this guy until you sober up, Emperor Magnet.”

  Zakkery flashed the human a glare. “I’m not pulling a con on him. I just posted his bail, for Christ’s sake! I just need to show him something. Can I take him outta here?”

  “Well, I’d miss you both, but… sure.” Sullivan glanced over at Chason. “I’ll be wanting to take a formal statement from you about that Abel guy when you’re not still drunk, though. Also, I’m gonna ask Nia if she wants to press charges for the kidnapping you just confessed to.”

  “Great. Give her a call. Come on, Chase.” Zakkery seized hold of his arm and herded him toward the door. “You won’t believe…”

  “Get your hands off of me.” Chason yanked himself free.

  This was completely unacceptable. He might be a felonious, insane, suicidal, drunk, now, but he still had standards. Degenerate scumbags didn’t get to paw him and call him “Chase.” He’d always had a terrible temper, but it had gotten harder to control it since Mara died. His energy had grown stronger and darker, the instability of it feeding into his destructive rages. He didn’t want to destroy the police station, just because this kid pissed him off. But it was starting to get tempting.

  “I don’t know who the hell you are, but…”

  Zakkery interrupted him. “Hey, sorry. Look, backing up.” He held up his palms, but didn’t stop with the sales pitch. His kind had likely sold submerged acreage all over Florida, back in the day. “This is on the level. I just have something I think you might want and I’m willing to make a trade.”

  Chason scoffed. He didn’t want anything, except his Match and a peaceful death. If he somehow won the lottery today, he wouldn’t even bother to cash in the ticket. What could this boy possibly think to trade? “You have something I want?”

  “Yeah, I do. Now, right from the get go, understand that I’m really just an innocent bystander, here. That’s it. I swear to Gaia.” He held up a palm like a crooked defendant being sworn-in in front of a jury. “People just give me stuff.”

  Sullivan snorted. “Like car stereos?” He couldn’t have looked more bored. “Jesus, that’s it. I’m hiring a secretary to keep people like you out of here.”

  Zakkery ignored him. “I’m like a middleman, helping people reconnect with the things they’ve lost.” His smoky gray eyes fixed on Chason. Beneath the bad clothes and sleazy condescension lurked a kind of crafty intelligence. “Or things they’ve had taken from them.”

  Now he had Chason’s attention.

  Zakkery smirked knowingly. “Sometimes, I hear that somebody has been robbed, for instance, and I can’t rest until I return that lost item to where it rightfully belongs.” He paused. “And collect a small reward.”

  Chason’s chest swelled with long dead emotion. For one brief moment, his saw the world clearly and relief swamped him. The black edges of madness receded in his mind as he realized what Zakkery was saying. What the Smoke Phase wanted to trade.

  Mara.

  ***

  “Remember, this wasn’t my doing.” Zakkery stressed, as they made their way towards the smoldering shell of the Smoke Palace. The building had been burned down during the Fall, but the ruins continued to smolder. The odd grey stones glowed red deep inside, guiding their path. “So, don’t try to kill me the second you get her back or anything. I know you love all that vengeance shit.”

  Chason had no patience for his caveats. “Just know that she’d better be exactly the same when I see her.” He narrowly avoided stepping on some kind of skittering rodent. “If her dress is so much as wrinkled, I’ll be taking it out on you.”

  The Smokeland really was a swamp. Crooked reeds poked out of the knee deep water that spread off into the horizon. Chason had to follow just where Zakkery stepped to avoid sinking into the stagnant sludge. The spongy ground was hidden in fog and the whole Kingdom was shrouded in gloom, so he had no idea where they were going. Since the Smoke Phases engaged in a constant war of All Against All, he was also braced for some kind of ambush, aimed at either him or Zakkery or both.

  Over all, the whole place was only slightly less dank than the Magnetland.

  “Well, she’s not exactly the same, so prepare yourself.” Zakkery warned. “And I’m not the one who messed with her, either.” He paused. “Well, at least I didn’t start it. It’s not my fault she’s been… altered.”

  Chason’s teeth ground together. He couldn’t think about what might have happened to Mara’s body. Couldn’t ask for more details about who else was involved. Couldn’t consider why they might have done this.

  He just… couldn’t.

  Not if he wanted to hold it together long enough to get her back, again. If anything had happened to her, beheading Zakkery would come later. After the Smoke Phase showed Chason where Mara was and her body was safely returned to the crypt. Until then, it took everything in him just to stay in control. He couldn’t let anything distract him, not even the rage broiling inside his head. Retrieving Mara came before everything else.

  See?

  Very sane.

  Zakkery shot him a sideways look, obviously not trusting Chason’s silence. “We’re agreeing on the not killing me part, right? Because, unless I live long enough to collect my reward, this is all kinda moot, ya know?”

  “I agreed to the trade. The Justice box in exchange for my Match’s body.”

  “Yeah, well, things usually don’t go this smooth for me.” Zakkery muttered. “And you agreed to give up a potential universe destroying super-weapon awful easy. You haven’t even asked what I intend to do with it.”

  “I don’t care what you do with it.” Chason no longer cared about much of anything. “All I want is my Match returned to me. After that, you, the box, and the rest of the world can all sink into that marsh.” He gestured to the endless quagmire of the Smokeland with an indifferent flip of his wrist.

  “You’re probably gonna reconsider the world sinking part, in a second.”

  Zakkery stopped at a jagged, freestanding piece of the Smoke Palace’s wall. There was a nearly invisible a door in it and Chason realized there was no way he’d ever be able to find this perfectly ordinary looking rock, again. For all he knew Zakkery had been leading him in circles.

  “This way.” Zakkery tugged the door open, revealing a set of stairs leading down. Noxious smelling water from the seeping bog dripped onto porous stone steps. Zakkery reached over to the wall and clicked on a series of recessed halogen lights.

  Chason arched a brow.

  Zakkery shrugged. “Lazarus, the old king, liked human tech. Most of the kingdom’s been fucked back into the Dark Ages, but whatever’s left of the palace still even has wireless access. I think I’m the only one to notice.” He snorted. “But then, I was really motivated to look for some modern conveniences. You have no idea how hard it is to view porn without the internet. I mean –Shit!-- we did it for centuries, right?” He shook his head. “But, once you find those websites, you can never go back to just the magazines.”

  Chason made a disgusted face. Unbelievable that countless millennia of his pious, upstanding ancestors had all lived and died and contributed DNA so that the final king of the Magnet Kingdom could be here at this moment…

  Buying his dead bride back from a perverted lowlife.

  He looked up at the sky, although he had no idea why. He knew that there was no one up there to beseech. He had to get out of this world soon or he really would go crazy. He swept after Zakkery, resisting the urge to push the Smoke Phase right down the steps.

  “Are you working with the Light Phase?” Chason knew that somehow a Banished Light Phase was involved in Mara’s abduction, but he hadn’t found that man, yet. It was just a matter of time, though. When Chason focused on killing someone, they always wound up dead.

  “A Li
ght Phase? No. I hang out with a better class of criminal.”

  Under other circumstances, Chason might worry about this being a trap. His sword was still in that human’s evidence locker and Chason hadn’t taken the time to go get another one, so he was unarmed. But honestly, what possible difference could it make if Zakkery tried to attack him? Chason would either die. In which case, good. Or kill the Smoke Phase. In which case, better. Either way, having Mara back now was worth the risk.

  Why was this taking so long? Had Zakkery hidden her body in another goddamn realm?

  Chason could feel his temper edging into the red zone, again, as they descended. “Where. Is. My. Match?” He ground out, carefully spacing his words. His voice echoed in the damp chamber.

  “Chason! Is that you?”

  The desperate scream cut through him like a sword.

  For the first time in what seemed like forever, the phantom melody that endlessly played in his head… stopped.

  Chason felt his blood still and the pupils of his eyes dilate. He’d been hearing music for two years, but he’d never, ever hallucinated voices before.

  Especially not that voice.

  “Shit, here we go.” Zakkery groaned.

  Chason didn’t even process the complaint. He shoved passed the Smoke Phase, taking the steps four at a time. He burst through a door at the bottom, his wild gaze swinging around a room lined with jail cells. It looked eerily similar to the one he’d just left in Mayport Beach. Zakkery had been right. Lazarus must have been a big fan of human innovation, because they were all constructed of Plexiglas.

  And there on the left…

  “Chason!” A woman stood on the other side of the plastic, her palms flat on the clear partition separating them. “Oh, thank Gaia! Please, get me out of here!”

  Mara.

  At least, she looked like Mara.

  Exactly like Mara.