Fire and Fantasy: a Limited Edition Collection of Epic and Urban Fantasy

by CK Dawn

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  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000

  Edited by Camille R. Lofters

  Undertow: The Complete Novel

  A world born of merged realities, turbulent and jagged and overrun with monsters...a woman infected with unruly magic, unknowingly using her soul to find love...

  Without warning, the magical realms of dreams and nightmares collapsed upon us, shredding our safe existence. A violent civil war erupted between a ruthless queen seeking revenge and a dark prince collecting power, leaving a broken world of stunted magic, fantastical creatures, chaos, and a drug called Undertow.

  Dragon was sold by her mother to a shady clinic that altered her, leaving her mostly human and able to fix the flaws in people. Her “gift” infuses her with life-changing confidence as well as an unnatural euphoria…but also is literally killing her, slicing her soul bit by bit to nourish her fixes. Worse, the power fueling these transformations appears to be overtaking Dragon's body, turning her thoughts and actions towards savagery and murder.

  When she meets Fel, a banished fae warrior suffering from PTSD, she’s instantly drawn to him, the one man who doesn’t need her to fix him. Is it his addiction to Undertow, or is it something else? Whatever the answer, Dragon dives right into a steamy affair—love optional…or so she thinks.

  But all is not what it seems with Dragon’s adoptive family. When she chooses Fel, the love and acceptance she’s found in this patchwork household is threatened, unleashing a devastating secret that could deliver Dragon into the hands of the two most powerful and deadly creatures in the world.

  As betrayal from friends and frenemies alike dog their every step, Fel and Dragon find themselves in the middle of a centuries-old blood feud that will change the course of their lives, bringing them closer to love—and death—than they ever imagined.

  Part One

  Rock Bottom

  Prologue

  One minute the world was fine. No, not fine. But it spun, churned and hummed in a familiar way that, while not terribly comforting, was at least predictable, like maggots devouring the dead: unsettling to watch, but the way of things. The next, a crack of pistol fire started the games, and the earth rattled like it was nothing more than a snow globe being shook by a child. It seemed like support beams splintered and broke, for an ominous creak and groan heralded a worldwide whoosh before something fell on top and blew out windows everywhere. Screams echoed from one corner of the globe to the next and back again. When the dust settled, the damage was extensive and purely unfathomable—for who could’ve known that reality should’ve been pluralized all this time?

  Layered one on top of the other like an infinite skyscraper, there were worlds upon worlds. Worlds of sin and myth, anthropomorphized worlds, worlds of discarded creatures, mechanical innovation, lawless power, and perilous beauty. This miscellany of truths, we surmised rather desperately, must be the extent of what fell on top of ours. Though to look upon the world now, it was clear that it only felt as if a great weight flopped on top of us, taking our breath away. The reality—the new reality—was these worlds had merged with ours, and not always harmoniously. As we crept back to our lives, making do with scraps of our past grafted onto the supremely unruly magic—and god only knew what else—of our present, we hoped this was all there was.

  Many rejoiced in this cosmic co-mingling, the veracity of their long-held beliefs finally realized. Most huddled close to their familiar ways, terrified of the magic that stitched the earth in intention-rich couture, and convinced that it, like a fad, would fade. A few discovered mystically surgical procedures to incorporate elements of these realities into their bodies. For those, the way was often sordid, bought or traded with flesh, and had unforeseen consequences.

  There was nothing to be gained by taking a baby to a shady clinic and letting the proprietors have their way with her for a carton of cigarettes, for example. The young are the future. Bring them here and see that future magically secured! The advertisements trumpeting a favorable outcome of this kind of snake oil were everywhere. Taking out this and that and inserting the other never ended well. Though many hopeless souls tried and much money, as well as cigarettes, was dispensed, the babies usually left dying.

  Dragon, however, lived.

  One

  The F train shook the ground as it thundered beneath Dragon’s house and she stopped in the side-entrance doorway to brace herself against the stone molding. During K’Davrah, the most significant war since the Great Unveiling (calling it a collapse, it had been deemed after years of petitions, protests and finally a war, was definitively politically incorrect), a group of AWOL soldiers from both sides woke a Lambton worm as they fled. It had burrowed a tunnel starting on the Upper East Side, snaking its way under the park to the West Side and directly under La Salon Neuf, the legendary restaurant where Dragon lived.

  She clung to the wall, closing her eyes against the shower of dust and plaster that eleven subway cars trekking over slime-hardened rubble caused. More than one hundred years later the new reality the Unveiling had started, and K'Davrah finished, affected the rechristened Halo City in the most ridiculous ways. Armageddon could hit and there’d still be alternate side of the street parking, one comedian had quipped years before humans knew their nightmares really existed.

  More like myth created a problem and magic made a way through, Dragon thought as the last echoes of the F faded away. She walked through her front gate and locked it behind her, staring at the iron casting of two lions mated for life. She sent a prayer to every deity she could think of, begging that this attempt to fix someone would finally do the trick and save her soul.

  Her first, most epic failure, Ryan Todd Ellis Murray, had been a wrong-side-of-the-tracks charmer in her high school that she’d been tasked with making good. Desperate to be on the inside looking out for once, Dragon had promised the moon, despite her gift’s insistence that a jerk was who he was meant to be. Instinct said let it go, but being a star in a world where she’d previously enjoyed anonymity beckoned like gold at the end of a rainbow.

  Pariahs, she’d learned quickly, had rotten eggs and bags of steaming shit thrown at them. Yet three more tries and twelve years later, Ryan had become the irredeemable man she’d first seen when she agreed to examine his potential all those years ago.

  “Fourth time’s the charm. Come on, Dragon. Think good thoughts.”

  She struggled to name one, a frustrated breath gusting from her when the most important aspect of her relationship with Ryan came to mind: lately, forcing her gift to show her the few crumbs of potential he had left her in a twelve-hour stupor that defied all remedy. No booze-fueled bender had ever been so incapacitating. Not even the few drugs she’d experimented with, both human and mystical, had affected her this immediately, this thoroughly and, as it turns out, this irrevocably. And the next day, the hangover was just all-consuming.

  A brand-new development barely eight weeks old, just a glimpse of Ryan’s potential had brought her so low she’d wondered if a bottle of vodka and a handful of painkillers could be a cure for all that ailed her. Even seeing his potential was no longer child’s play. Effort had to be made. Muscle straining, bone wrenching, fever-inducing effort. And the
fix to make all she’d seen a reality? No longer at her fingertips. Sure, for her own fixes, it had always been so—disastrous results that left her heartbroken was all it took for her to get the point—but everyone else’s? Shit. A year ago, all she had to do was fart and her neighbor’s latest squeeze was fixed up brand new, and the hit of bliss that was Dragon’s reward, all but guaranteed. Since bumping into Ryan, all she had to her name were increasingly erroneous forecasts and attempts to fix that ended in no significant change, and provided as much bliss as a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of chocolate. And in Ryan’s case, soul-sucking damage, a debilitating side effect that didn’t diminish the ever-present need to fix. It laughed in her face, that need did, thriving in spite of her pain. Even now, as close to fixing Ryan for good as she ever was, a header into Jasper’s well-kept bar seemed like just the thing.

  She’d discovered her ability and fixed her first client at the same time when she was only nine. One of her mother’s abusive boyfriends—the umpteenth in a long line. He used to watch Dragon like she was a bit of rare, dark nourishment. One night Katie left Dragon alone with him, and on that night he came at her. As he clawed at her clothing, instead of wishing him gone or stopped somehow, she wished him better.

  Make him good, she repeated over and over, with her eyes squeezed shut.

  He’d manacled her hands with one of his own, she remembered that much, but after that she must have blacked out because all there was, was a feeling of being soothed, hushed as if her fears were silly and easily conquered.

  And then a sly kind of strength proposed a bargain.

  Not with any language she’d ever heard or even words, but the sense of a blood-soaked lure dangling in front of her like she was a swarm of hungry Stymphalian butterflies was unmistakable. One bite and she’d be saved. One bite and she’d be strong. One bite and she’d have power.

  “Yes,” she’d whispered without a moment’s hesitation—she was only nine and terrified besides.

  A warm, seemingly domesticated glow eased from her fists, sliding through the wiry hairs on the back of his hand before coating his body in a sibilant wave.

  He had reared off of her then, his body rimmed by an undulating blue flame, cursing as he patted the smoldering embers cackling knowingly on his shirt.

  Dragon sat up and scuttled away, her gaze riveted by the gloss that polished this man new. Gone were his missing teeth, gaunt body and glassy eyes. In his place stood a better version of him: clean shaven, immaculately dressed, a plain wedding band on one hand, and a stethoscope peeking out of his suit pocket. He even smelled good.

  The cheap wall clock over the hot plate ticked loudly, and before she could blink, the new man disappeared, leaving a confused and shaken lowlife surrounded by a fading halo of luminous promise.

  He never came after her again. Miracle of miracles, he took care of her as if he was a new, overprotective parent and she was his eagerly awaited daughter.

  She wanted him to stay forever.

  He left shortly after that. Not quite the man she had glimpsed that unforgettable night, but only two or three steps behind that vision and still glowing with the balm she’d given him.

  That experience, though profound, hadn’t made the kind of impact that her broken heart did when she was dumped by her first boyfriend in college and The One who walked out on her right after graduation. Fixed up new, both had left for greener pastures.

  The bargain she’d made as a child used to fulfill her. It bolstered her in the face of her mother’s crushing abuse and kept her company when first her mother and then her grandmother abandoned her. In those early days her successes sent her ego soaring. It seemed there was no wrong she could do, no one she couldn’t redeem. And Shiva knew it made her feel good. As long as she did her part, she would get hours of her world going all soft and downy in payment. Hours of blissful illusions to lose herself in. Hours of sensory ecstasy that made a bite of apple decadently sweet and sip of tap water the finest wine.

  She’d made her bones by being a fixer. Gained a bit of celebrity with them that took the time to find out—at least, she did during high school. She’d kept a low profile after, but her knack for seeing promise and making it real was her thing. The je ne sais quoi that made her desirable and envied. See, Save, Soar: The three Ss were the superpower that lifted her up when the rest of her life was swirling down the drain, which seemed like all the fucking time. Even still, she’d had her share of failures. Four, to be exact.

  The others she’d come to terms with. She’d seen how fucked up they would become, had tried to do something to help and failed. No change in the subject and no high for her. Worse, the urge to run right out and fix someone, anyone, was just unbearable. Sure, there’d been times when she fixed someone, gotten her high and felt replete for days, weeks even. And there’d also been times when her reward had been replaced by an immediate itch to try her hand with someone else, but that was just a hankering, energy easily diverted by taking a walk or gossiping with friends. Energy that was well within her control.

  These failures were a first, inspiring a kind of unholy need that left her curled in a ball, twitching and shaking as she fought the urge to fix a known pedophile who squatted a few doors down from the Salon. Too dumbfounded to try again, she’d left those three botched attempts to their fate, excusing her sudden ineptitude as a blip on an otherwise stellar record. Everyone’s allowed to have a bad day or two, right? But Ryan was different.

  He was the cold case she couldn’t forget, which partly explained why she couldn’t let him go as she had with the others. He’d merely been a bad boy in high school. Fascinating in the way that the best bad boys were: beat-up leather jacket (check), swoonworthy (check and mate), vintage motorcycle that he’d fix up new himself, which made him smell faintly of gasoline, freshly cut grass and open highways. And he had the requisite penchant for disregarding the rules and making it look like the coolest thing since loaves of bread started growing on trees, which accounted for the rest of his appeal and the crush she’d held onto far past its expiration date.

  He claimed to be able to control the errant magic that plagued the world since the Unveiling, and had even been able to do a few tricks to back up that bit of bullshit. Mostly sleight of hand, but enough to turn heads, the head cheerleader’s in particular. Their forbidden relationship had been the talk of school, giving them both Unbearably Popular status. Like any super couple, they had an entourage of envying jocks, giggling cheerleaders and hangers-on, all hoping to profit from the luminescent dust that trailed in their wake.

  And then one gray day, in the midst of their celebrity downpour, the head cheerleader herself plunked her books down at the library table hidden in the stacks that only Dragon used because no one had invited her to share the more accessible ones. Magic had changed the human landscape conclusively, and with the kind of finality that made resentments soar. Being adopted into a household of war-torn and powerless creatures at only eight years old had forced Dragon’s stock—negligible to begin with—into a nosedive she could never recover from.

  “I’m pregnant,” the golden girl had admitted without preamble, making Dragon’s teenaged heart thump with joy, relief and a million thank-yous to every god and goddess who’d revealed themselves after the Unveiling. She knew what was coming. She’d been waiting—hoping—for it.

  Fix him. Make him love me forever and you’ll finally be In.

  Done and done, Dragon had said, but when she discreetly touched Ryan, seen the artist he could be hidden in a soup of disappointments, bad luck and criminal choices, and instructed her balm to smooth all his rough edges, the oddest thing had happened. Not only did he become worse, using drugs, screwing every member of the entourage and turning up his nose at his girlfriend’s unmistakable pregnancy, but Dragon had still profited from the botched attempt. She’d received bliss—her usual payment for fixing—plus a bonus. Instead of days of things going her way, she got months. Months of feeling like she was on top of the world
. Months of being able to complete every task with unprecedented ease and unerring accuracy. Months of feeling like a winner.

  When she’d surfaced from that high, it only took her a few days to notice that feeling like a winner had done nothing to change her loser status. If anything, she was more hated than ever. Deservedly so, she'd thought, barely able to look at Ryan who had become such an asshole. And so after that final year of high school, when her failure had ensured that she reigned undisputed as resident pariah, she tried again to pull a good-boy rabbit from a bad-boy hat. She made a third attempt with increasingly depressing results that she bemoaned once she’d surfaced from her lucrative payment.

  But then this fourth try had come along and, in addition to seeing who he could be, Dragon had thrown up. As her sight had delved into him to evaluate his potential, a squeezing pressure slowed her heart and weakness suffused her as if her soul was being divided into cuts and sold off piece by piece. Stupor had been bypassed by Hangover, which quickly morphed into pain.

  A wake-up call if ever there was one, and enough to force Dragon to contemplate going to Jasper, revealing every humiliating detail of this secret part of her life, and begging him for help.

  Reveal to her dad that everything she’d ever accomplished, every accolade and every award should be credited solely to bliss. Reveal that six years ago she’d learned to prioritize the most irredeemable clientele—the lower the life, the bigger the soaring payoff. Reveal that she recently discovered that fucking her fixes intensified that slithering, irresistible high.

  She was a fraud, and his pride in her—in the woman she’d become—and all that he’d sacrificed for her was for shit.

  He’d stepped into the role of father twenty years ago and hadn’t wiped off his shoe. In the old days, he would’ve loved the turmoil Dragon now suffered. Would’ve rolled in it like the dog he used to be able to shapeshift into. He’d denied sixty thousand years of instinct to keep her safe. He denied sixty thousand years of instinct to be her father and love her with all his dark, mischievous heart.