Flame's Embrace

by Pillar, Amanda

  “Middle class,” Cee summarized.

  “Then,” said Vrayn, “There’s me. I’m part of the courts.” She was visibly proud of it too. “The lords of the underworld know my name. They send me on important missions.”

  “That sounds great.” Cee clapped her hands. “You want to tell me how that concerns me exactly?”

  Vrayn’s pointed fangs flashed. “It took me a hundred years to drag my butt out of the ghetto and into the palaces. A hundred years, child. And since then, for the past three hundred years, I’ve served our lords. I have never bowed to a mortal. I never will.”

  Cee couldn’t wrap her head around it. The demon thought Cee was high on the pyramid of hell. Which was insane. ”You’re still not telling me why you’re trying to kill me.”

  Vrayn spat on the ground at her feet. “Because you’re a hellwitch.” The last word sounded like a curse.

  Cee would have laughed if she could. Hellwitches didn’t exist. They were like unicorns and the Loch Ness Monster: just legends.

  “There’s no such thing as a hellwitch.”

  Now the demon was laughing. “Of course there isn’t. We kill them all before they can come into their power. And mark my words, child, another demon will replace me. If you kill them, a dozen will come. You won’t ascend. You’ll never live long enough.”

  Cee’s brain was starting to hurt given how many questions were dancing in her mind. Besides, she was probably low on oxygen after the fire thing.

  If she needed oxygen.

  She was starting to understand a few things. One of which was that this demon couldn’t get away. Vrayn would follow her trail and try to kill her at another time if she let her.

  So Cee did what she had to do. She called to the flames and watched as they engulfed the screaming woman.

  Then she looked at the forest around them. In the distance, the sky was fire and ice, bursting in an array of colors, but everything at her feet was black, for miles and miles and miles.

  Cee returned to her knees and planted her hands in the earth one more time. This time, instead of taking, she gave. She pulsed strength into the ground, bestowing whatever energy she could spare. She knew how to recognize her limits. To her surprise, it was a long while before she felt dizzy and weak.

  By the time she was done, the trees weren’t charred anymore; some of them even flowered. There was grass and moss on the ground. She couldn’t do anything for the foxes and rabbits, mountain lions and squirrels that had lost their lives because of one carless pyro, but those who’d survived long enough, she’d healed as well as she could. Life would go on in these woods.

  She got to her car, feeling dazed. Rather than driving off, she took a moment to collect her thoughts.

  Her handbag was on the passenger seat. She grabbed it and checked its contents. A wad of cash, her plane ticket, two passports.

  She couldn’t go to Australia, not now. It would be easy to follow her trail, and she knew some people were going to follow. If Vrayn hadn’t lied about it, there probably was a price on her head in hell. And she certainly couldn’t stay here either.

  What now?

  Suddenly inspired, Cee smiled, digging out her passports—both of them.

  Cee’s mother had been Italian. At her mother’s insistence, Cee had applied for dual nationality and she had a second passport, valid for another couple of years. Her name was different on this document—her mom had spelled it Camilla and included her maiden name.

  Thanks to that dual nationality, she could move to Europe. That would muddy her trail. Make it harder to follow. Whoever wanted her would have to check out two locations on opposite sides of the globe.

  Cee pulled out her phone and booked herself another flight online.

  She’d get away. For a time. She wasn’t foolish enough to think that escaping hell would be easy.

  She started the car and drove away from everything she’d ever known as the wind blew ashes and smoke away.

  *

  The sound of steps rushing through the dark marble hall alerted him to the intruder before the door flew open. No one ran in the Underworld. They had all of eternity to suffer and relish their sins. The door slammed into the wall as Abaddon, Lord of Ruin, one of the twelve kings, strode into the room.

  “We have one.”

  Slowly, Belial lifted his eyes away from the stack of paperwork he’d been reading. One didn’t rule the land of perdition without a fair bit of administration.

  “One what, pray, tell?”

  He couldn’t conceive of what could possibly ruffle the feathers of the most stoic, blithe demon he knew.

  “A hellwitch.”

  Belial stared at him, lowering his favorite quill. He stood, moving to an elegantly carved wardrobe painted red and gold. Inside, he discarded the velvet and silk frocks, selecting one old, well-worn leather duster.

  It looked like he had a queen to hunt.

  The End

  If you enjoyed Set it Ablaze, look for May Sage to continue Cee’s story in 2021. <3

  About May

  May Sage is a USA Today Bestselling romance writer dabbling in different genres.

  When she isn’t writing, she spends her time with her German Shepherd and her two Savannahs. She loves reading, ballet, running, and cake. Mostly, cake.

  May Sage also writes fantasy romance as Alexi Blake.

  Love In The Last Days Of A Doomed World

  Seanan McGuire

  1

  Her hair tastes like strawberry shampoo, chemical and sweet and repulsive and perfect. Perfect because it’s hers; perfect because she’s here, here, here, tangled in my sheets, cradled in my arms. She is my extinction event, my beautiful comet hurtling through space toward the unthinking dinosaurs of my past. She’s perfect. She’s flawed and fallible and perfect and her hair is in my mouth and if I didn’t know that the habits and hubris of biology won’t allow it, I would stay here with her, just like this, until we died. Let them find our bones tangled together like an ossuary from IKEA. Let them never know how close they came.

  But we can’t lie here and sweetly starve to death. Our bodies will scream for food and water and visits to the toilet, will start to ache and stink and suffer, and they’ll steal the strawberry from my mouth and the smile from the corners of her lips and we’ll get up. Inevitably, we’ll get up. We’re living things, after all. Living things struggle for their own survival. They can’t help it.

  But they can refuse to see the comet coming. They never see the comet coming. Even when the sky is midday-bright in the middle of the night, they call it pretty, call it remarkable, call it anything but what it really is.

  Call it anything but over.

  2

  This matters, even if it seems like it doesn’t. Everything matters, even if it seems like it doesn’t.

  My brother, sitting on the living room floor, cross-legged and concentrating on the funny books in front of him. His own little four-color world. Sometimes Dad comes home from work with bags full of them, and he’ll sit on the floor with Adam for hours, both of them engrossed in the adventures of men who wore their underwear on the outside of their clothes, like that’s enough to give them the power of flight, super-strength, justice. Sometimes Dad puts on a deep, plummy voice, like something from the news, and says, “Justice isn’t just-us, it’s everyone,” and he and Adam will laugh and laugh and laugh, and I’m sitting on the outside, always on the outside, watching them, not sure where the entrance is, the door that leads me into their cozy little world where twenty pages is enough to save the day.

  It’s not because I’m a girl. It’s not. Sometimes I wish it were: sometimes I wish my father didn’t bring me funny books because he thought they were just for boys, and not because he thought they were beneath me, because he thought I would look at them with disdain before going back to my physics books and my equations. Adam and I are the same age, but he’s the one who gets a childhood, while I get the endless
weight of expectations. “Our little star,” Dad calls me, when other people are watching, and “my little supernova,” he calls me, when no one is watching, and “I don’t know what we’re going to do, Sharon, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he says, when it’s just him and Mom and he thinks I’m tucked away safe in bed, not sitting in the hallway outside his bedroom door, eyes closed, listening to him worry about the future.

  I’m not a good girl. I’m a good kid, but I’m not a good girl, and my parents are conservative enough to be worried about what that’s going to mean for me. They’ll have years and years and years to get more worried still, years to watch me blossom into the brilliant woman they always knew I was going to be, years to realize that I’m never going to meet a man and settle down, that my path forward is more complicated than they could ever have suspected. Right now, though, that’s the future, and the present is my brother on the living room floor, reading about a man in blue tights who can fly and lift trains over his head with one hand, who came to Earth to save us, last son of a doomed world.

  “He’s from Krypton,” Adam says, wonder and awe in his voice. Another world! Far away and impossibly foreign, even if the artists who create it, one line at a time, are working, of necessity, from their own understanding of the world. What would the air smell like, on Krypton? What would the wind feel like? Everything would be different there, even if convergent evolution somehow gave us strong-jawed, black-haired men with smiles like pancakes on a Sunday morning.

  “How did he get here?” I love my brother, I do. We don’t have much in common. We never will. When the future comes, when I’m tangled in a swirl of sheets with the taste of strawberry shampoo on my tongue, he’ll be living with his wife and three children somewhere in the middle of Ohio, in a farmhouse I’ve only seen in pictures posted on Facebook, denying that anything’s wrong with every word that leaves his mouth. Climate change is a hoax and; we need to close the borders and; it’s not that we hate the gays—I love you, you’re my sister, I’d kill anyone who said you weren’t good enough—it’s just that most gays aren’t like you, they’re not safe around children, they’re not safe around normal people. And still I love him, because he’s my brother, and the habits of biology are almost impossible to break.

  (I’m getting the past and the future tangled together like two ends of the same ball of string, and I guess that’s fine: I guess that’s to be expected. You are who you were who you will become, all at the same time. You can’t have a future without a past.)

  “His parents put him in a rocket ship and shot him off into space.” Andy makes a “pew” sound, like the firing of a laser gun, and forms a rocket with his hand, miming the moment when his comic book hero was launched into orbit by his loving parents. The awe in his face is even stronger now, thinking about loving someone so much that you’d send them off into the stars.

  “Why?”

  He looks at me gravely and says, “The world was ending. The sun was about to go nova and destroy everything, just eat Krypton right out of the sky, and his parents knew, but no one would believe them. So they built a rocket and they put their son in the rocket and they sent him away to save him. It was the only way to save him.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “That’s stupid. If the sun was going nova, they would have seen the signs. A sun doesn’t die in an instant. They would have known. They would have seen. I don’t care if you want to read about a man who can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes and have bulletproof skin, but that’s just stupid. No one could stand at the end of the world and pretend that it’s not happening.”

  My brother looks at me, misery and anger and disappointment in his face. “But it happened,” he says. “It happened. Krypton isn’t there anymore.”

  That’s when I finally lose my last scrap of interest in four-color fantasies. No one would pretend the world wasn’t ending when the sun swelled to fill the sky. No one would be that stupid, or that willfully ignorant.

  It’s not realistic.

  It’s not real.

  3

  She stirs in her sleep, and the motion is enough to pull her hair out of my mouth. I smack my lips, relieved to have them to myself again, already distantly missing the taste of chemical strawberry. She makes a noise, snuggles closer, and I hold her as tightly as I dare, as tightly as I can without waking her.

  This is a stolen moment, a stolen hour, and the comet is coming; time is so short now.

  Time has always been short. Eighty years, the first ten spent learning and the last ten spent losing, isn’t nearly as long as it sounds; eighty years is nothing when set against the long dance of days on Earth, the slow rise and fall of empires. A person is born, lives, dies, all in less than the blinking of a geological eye.

  I am forty years old. There was a time when I would have called that impossibly ancient, and all I can call it now is not old enough. I’m barely a baby, and she’s two years younger than I am, and it took us this long to find each other. We wasted so much time. I never got to see her with adolescent acne on the bridge of her nose, burning alive with hormones and confusion, and I’ll never get to see her sweetly seamed with wrinkles, hands shaking as she pours her morning coffee. We missed so much, and there’s so little time, and so much left to do.

  I bury my face in her hair again, chasing the scent of strawberries, chemical and sweet and temporary, like everything else about us, like everything else in the world.

  4

  This is what the funny books never told my brother about living in the last days of Krypton:

  That it wasn’t only the baby hero’s parents who noticed, who knew, who sounded the alarms and rang the bells and tried to speak, to speak, when everyone around them cried for silence. That people cared, yes, people cared and people cried, but that money and inertia spoke louder than any voices could have done. People with empty bellies have trouble caring much about whether or not the sky is falling, yes, but people whose bellies are overly full—people whose bellies have never been empty, who have lived their whole lives in the fear that one day the many will notice how much is wasted by the few, notice and rise up and cast them down—those people don’t care about the sky, either. They care about themselves. They care about having more than everyone else, and meter “more” according to a scale that only they can see.

  When the first instabilities appeared in Krypton’s sun, the ones whose bellies weren’t empty but who still remembered hunger stood up. They said “we need to move,” and no one wanted to hear them, because the ones with nothing to lose had nothing left to give, and the ones with everything to lose had no interest in giving ground. This isn’t in the comics, but it’s in human nature, and the flying man is alien and human at the same time, shaped by the human hands that drew him. They stood up. They raised their voices as loud as they would go. And they were silenced, shut out, shut down, ignored, labeled hysterical, undermined, discredited, convinced to be quiet. Convinced that things would be better if they stopped, that someone, somewhere, had a secret plan.

  Maybe most of them believed that, convinced themselves of its quiet inevitability, because what else were they supposed to do? One angry voice can’t save a world. One broken heart can’t heal a star. They could yell until the sky burned and not change a single thing, or they could sit back and enjoy what time remained to them before it was all over. Some of them must have fallen into quiet, everyday despair. That’s the side of the superhero we never saw. The people drinking themselves to death in their Kryptonian living rooms, eyes turned toward the hostile sky, waiting for the end.

  Maybe the rest of them built rockets. Maybe it wasn’t just one baby hurled out into the void, destined for an alien planet, a place where he would never be normal, but where at least he could be. Maybe it was dozens, entire families, crying children, teens and infants and everything in-between. Gravity is unforgiving. Physics shows no favoritism. For one baby to crash to Earth, safe and sound and ready to thrive, how many did they have to laun
ch? The rocket was hope, either for survival or for a quicker, cleaner death.

  I hope that somewhere, someone is building rockets. I hope that somewhere, someone is about to do the unthinkable for the sake of the impossible, to avoid the unimaginable.

  I hope that we’re as good as the people of Krypton. We invented them, after all.

  We should live up to their example.

  5

  “Why did you let me sleep this long?” she asks, bleary, rolling over to look at me. Her eyes are gummy with sleep, lashes sticking together, and there are creases in her cheek from where her face was pressed into the pillow, and she’s beautiful, she’s so beautiful, and I love her more than I have ever loved anything. This love is a weight, a rock suspended in my chest in defiance of physics and biology both, and I suddenly understand so many things I never understood before.

  “I want to build a rocket,” I blurt.

  She laughs, reaching out to cup my cheek with one hand, like I’ve just said the funniest thing she’s ever heard. “A rocket,” she says. “Really. To where?”

  “Krypton,” I say.

  She doesn’t laugh this time.

  She kisses me, and even though we both need to brush our teeth, her mouth is sweeter than her hair. She kisses me, and I know she understands, know she would get into the rocket if she could, let me hurl her out into the void, past the shimmering sparkle of our gravity, into the hope that waits beyond. This isn’t a comic book. She’d die there, breathless and freezing, and maybe that would still be kinder. She kisses me, and everything is hot and cold at the same time, and for a little while, we commit the final sin of Krypton. For a little while, we forget.