Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  The heat of it almost singed the side of my face and I wasn’t certain if it was meant to protect us—but it created a barrier between us and the people who were firing at one another.

  I’ll take it.

  The new line of protection between us and the gun-fighters gave me the final push I needed to sprint toward the door and stumble into the building. Rafe and Coit were in front of and behind me, respectively. We landed inside the building, swinging through the open door and around behind its protective walls, panting and wheezing.

  Coit leaned over with his hands on his knees, gasping. “What the hell was that?”

  “No idea,” Rafe breathed.

  I was about to say something, when another male voice from outside answered us. “I did it. Can I join you?”

  “Depends on what you mean by join,” Rafe called out cautiously.

  I appreciated the caution.

  Still… a firestarter could be a good addition.

  “If he protected us from whoever’s firing out there, maybe we should let him come with us,” I suggested. “He’s got more firepower than I do. Even with my magic. Even with…” I paused, staring into Rafe’s eyes, neither of us having told Coit about our strange magic sharing incident. “Even with extra power,” I finished.

  Coit looked back and forth between us, confusion evident on his face—and maybe a little suspicion, as well.

  But he was nodding, and so was Rafe.

  “You can come in,” I called out, “but I have a spell ready to freeze you. And I mean literal freezing. I don’t think your fire-power, whatever its source, would like that.”

  “I’m coming in now.”

  The man who entered with his hands up was tall and fine-featured. His skin was dark, as was his hair, but his eyes were a strange tawny gold color, as if they were brown with fire dancing behind them.

  “I will not harm you.” His accent was unfamiliar to me—as were his powers.

  Most people on Tehar who had magical abilities—and that included all the mages born after the Rift appeared—had the kind of magic that enabled us to do what I did. Throw spells. Stop someone in place. Weave enough magic together to determine if someone was telling the truth or lying.

  There were legends of people in other parts of our world who had more magic. Those people, it was claimed, were able to fully control others, to lead armies to do their bidding, to change their appearance with a full glamour.

  Most Teharans dismissed these stories as either outright myth or tales of Rifters who only pretended to be native to this world.

  At least one of those stories involved a mage who could slice people in half with her power.

  Because neither Coit nor Rafe was from this world, I hadn’t bothered to mention that my slicing act on the werewolf during our first fight together shouldn’t have been able to happen.

  And if this guy could control magic well enough to create fire? Then either he was another anomaly—like the one I was beginning to fear I was—or he wasn’t from Tehar at all.

  Rafe had already quickly searched the man.

  The mage.

  Whatever he is, he doesn’t need weapons.

  “Why did you help us out there?” Coit asked.

  “What’s your name?” Rafe asked at the same time.

  “Azar,” the man said, presumably answering Rafe. “And I saw an opportunity to help, so I took it.”

  “What do you want in return?” Rafe’s deeply suspicious tone surprised me—it was nothing like anything I’d heard in any of my interactions with him.

  Azar’s gaze flicked toward me, and I found myself unexpectedly pulled into those fire-bright eyes.

  Without any conscious action on my part, my magic suddenly flared to life beside his. Even as I looked into his eyes, I could sense the magical realm surrounding me. To my right, Rafe stood cool and deep, oh well of power. Next to him was Coit, not a magical blank, as I had initially thought, but something thick and stolid, like rock.

  And in front of me, flames leapt and danced, their crackling like music to my mage enhanced senses. Azar stood as a pillar of flame and I reached out to embrace it. When I touched it, it leapt higher, swirling up into the sky where it threw out tiny sparks of gold.

  I blinked once and the vision was gone.

  But for the first time, I heard the Rift speak to me outside my dreams.

  Take the fire demon.

  “He’s coming with us,” I announced. “Rafe, get us out of here.”

  The werewolf frowned, but he didn’t complain. Instead, he turned and gestured us farther inside the ruined building.

  16

  Someone seem to have been maintaining this building, probably because it served as a passageway. As with the tunnel that led into the city, the walls here had been shored up when necessary and at least on this first floor, there were no holes open to the sky.

  Taking my arm and pulling me up to walk beside him, Rafe whispered fiercely into my ear. “Why did you invite him to come along?”

  With a sharp shrug, I tugged my forearm out of his grip. “For the same reason Coit and I came with you. It felt like the right thing to do.”

  He glanced behind us and his lips tightened. “We don’t know anything about him.”

  “We know he can throw fire at anyone who crosses us.”

  “Larkin, your eyes glowed orange when you looked at him.”

  “Really?” I knew he expected me to be stunned or maybe horrified by the statement, but mostly I was simply interested. “Have you ever seen them glow before?”

  He should’ve known that a terse nod would not be enough to satisfy my curiosity.

  “What? Where?” I clamped down on the other questions I wanted to ask. That was as good a place to start as any.

  “When you… When we were…” He stared at me intently as he nodded and rolled his hand as if willing me to understand what he meant.

  “Oh. When we had sex?”

  Rafe stumbled a little on some of the debris on the floor, caught his balance again, and shook his head as he kept walking. “Yes,” he said at a normal volume, “when we had sex.”

  “That’s interesting.” I drew the words out, trying to piece together something that niggled at the back of my mind, almost within touching distance, but not quite.

  “Interesting? I thought maybe it meant something.”

  “I’m sure it did. But I don’t know what yet.”

  Rafe led us around the corner and down a long hallway lined with doors. It didn’t occur to me that we might’ve been talking about two different kinds of ‘meant something’ until he sped up to take the lead again, leaving me to lag behind by several steps. His narrowed eyes and clenched teeth finally made me step outside my own all-consuming thoughts for a minute.

  He’s jealous, I realized.

  I almost laughed aloud. Jealousy was something I’d experienced before, of course—but I had never really seen sexual jealousy in action. Many Teharan marriages and family groups involved sexual cohorts. Brodric and I had grown up with two fathers and a mother, for example.

  My fathers had told me that in the early days of their marriage to Mother, they had suffered from something similar to jealousy as they jockeyed for Mother’s favor. I hadn’t thought about it in years.

  But I was willing to guess that on Rafe’s world, pairings were strictly one-to-one.

  I would have to discuss all of this with him more, I realized. If my slowly developing theory was right, I couldn’t afford for him to draw too far away from me.

  The Rift’s voice echoed my head again.

  Bind them all.

  If I was right, if in order to get Brodric back I would need to bond both Rafe and Azar to me, I would do it.

  I would do anything to get my brother back.

  Even if it meant tying myself to these two men forever.

  Assuming, of course, our firestarter wasn’t a compulsive killer. It didn’t seem likely since he had saved us without actually harming a
ny of the men who’d been shooting at one another, but I couldn’t be certain.

  Time to get to know him.

  I slowed down enough to walk beside Azar. Coit brought up the rear, watching the firestarter warily, one hand on a knife hilt in its sheath on his hip.

  “I’m Larkin,” I said quietly. “That’s Coit behind us and up there in the cranky lead is Rafe.”

  “It is pleasant to meet you.”

  I almost laughed aloud. “Brochan City is many things. I wouldn’t say nice is one of them.”

  Azar tilted his head in silent agreement.

  “Tell me how you came to join us,” I said as Rafe led us down a set of stairs. Until then, enough light and filtered through the windows to guide us. Now, however, Rafe turned on his flashlight. He shined it around, allowing us to see as far as possible down this new hallway, but the light was dimming, the batteries running down.

  “Let me help,” Azar said in his sing-song accent. With a flourish of one hand, he produced a flame that lit up the way forward brighter than any torch—and brighter than the flashlight, now.

  The fire danced and flickered bare inches above his palm and he carried it as easily as Rafe did the flashlight.

  The werewolf didn’t quite snarl, but he lifted one corner of his mouth far enough to flash a sharp canine at the newcomer.

  “Thank you, Azar,” I said pointedly. “We all appreciate it.”

  “Thanks, man,” Coit said.

  Rafe grunted and turned around to lead the way once again. I was glad he was here—after only a few changes in direction, I was completely turned around inside this warren of a building.

  “Were you on your way in or out of the city when you found us?” I asked Azar.

  “I have nowhere on this world to go.” His voice was sad, soft.

  “So you’re trying to get back to your own world?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Alas, I am unwanted in my homeland, banished to this land of eternal damnation.”

  “What did you do to catch a sentence like that?” Coit asked. I flashed him a look. Surely it wasn’t a polite question.

  Azar, however, acted as if it were perfectly natural. “I am banished for the crime of merely revealing what I am.”

  Rafe stopped in front of us and turned, his wide stance aggressive. “And what exactly are you, fire boy?”

  “He’s a fire demon,” I said.

  Azar blinked at me. “You know of others of my kind?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m sorry.”

  Coit’s eyes narrowed. “Then how did you know what he was?”

  The Rift told me.

  No, I couldn’t say that.

  “There are stories,” I said. “Old stories from before the Rift took over so much of this world.”

  “Is she right?” Rafe asked. “Demon doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.”

  Azar spread his arms out in an eloquent shrug. “It is the name the other inhabitants of my world give us. And if they catch us, they send us through the hellhole into our damnation, simply for being what we were born to be.”

  Rolling his eyes, Rafe turned to open a door.

  “You do realize this isn’t actually hell, right?” Coit asked Azar.

  Rafe led us up another set of stairs and into a wide, open room much like the lobby of the bank we had initially surfaced in, only this one was more functional and less elegant.

  With another flourish of his hand, Azar extinguished the fire he carried and glanced out one of the broken windows at the rubble surrounding the building. “Are you certain of that, my friend?”

  Coit didn’t answer but Rafe stared down at his own fisted hands. Slowly opening them, he revealed his half-shifted, long claws, along with the bloody holes they had dug into his palms. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

  “I’m not sure this isn’t hell.”

  17

  A strange, shuffling, whispering noise broke up our tableau. With a single jerk of his chin, Rafe pointed us all toward a hallway leading off the main corridor, where we crouched down and peered out into the lobby we’d just left.

  After several moments, a bearded man with curly, light brown hair ducked his head in from outside and quickly scanned the lobby. “Come on, hurry,” he said, waving one arm to usher someone in.

  A line of children, seven of them, darted inside. The eldest couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old, and the youngest was carried in the arms of a woman. As she stepped through the door, Rafe gave a sigh of relief and stepped out into full view of the strangers.

  Not having realized what he planned to do until it was too late, I was left scrabbling my hands after him, as if to physically hold him back from revealing himself to these people.

  “Damn,” I whispered. Turning to Coit and Azar, I said, “Cover us. If this goes badly, come get us.”

  “You don’t have to go with them, you know,” Coit said. “Just because you fu—”

  “Shut up, Coit,” I said absently as I watched the woman hug Rafe and introduce him to the man she traveled with. “I’ll call you to join us if it’s okay. Until then, hang back.”

  I stepped out into the open just in time to hear Rafe say, “…and I’m traveling with—”

  “Me,” I cut in smoothly. “I’m on a Rift-quest to find my brother. I met up with Rafe along the way and he’s acting as my guide.”

  Rafe’s eyes narrowed at the deception, but he went along with it. “This is Fatima. She’s one of the group I told you about, the ones who smuggle children out of the city before the slavers can get to them.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said, my gaze flickering toward the man Fatima traveled with.

  “This is Byron,” Fatima supplied. “Any news about the route?” She returned her gaze to Rafe.

  “Since her firefight outside the entrance at the other end,” he said pointing back the way we come. “Been going on for at least two days.”

  Byron pulled the kids aside and began passing out water and snacks—either because they were really necessary or as a way to keep the children busy while his partner and Rafe traded information.

  “How did you make it through?” she asked.

  “Last time we were there, they were more interested in shooting each other than in attacking us,” I jumped in, not wanting Rafe to say anything about the fire demon. I didn’t know why—only that I heard the insistent voice of the Rift inside me.

  Not yet not yet not yet.

  Rafe shot me a funny look, but he didn’t say anything about our other companions, either—and Coit and I had been working together long enough for him to know better than to jump out and join in the conversation.

  “What’s their story?” Rafe tilted his head toward Byron and the children.

  “I’m training By—he came through the Rift about a year ago from someplace that uses it as a means of punishment, even for the most minor infractions.”

  “I’ve heard of those,” I murmured. It was true, even if I’d only heard of it from Azar recently.

  “And the children?” Rafe asked. “New Rifter orphans or slaves?”

  “Some of each.” Fatima shrugged. “You know how it is. The little ones don’t fare as well as the adults, but sometimes it’s easier for them to slip away. But most of these are new arrivals.”

  I glanced at the children again, noticing for the first time that several of their faces sported tear-tracks through the grime. I tried to consider what it would have been like to be torn away from my mother and fathers when I was so young—to be tossed into another world where nothing made sense, where monsters tried to grab me and sell me.

  With a shudder, I looked away.

  Not that I didn’t want to help—I did.

  Maybe after I found my brother.

  And now the Rift was whispering to me again.

  Come to me.

  Make them yours. Take them and come to me.

  Terror flared in me for the length of a heartbeat as I feared the
Rift wanted the children.

  But then an image of the men I traveled with—Coit, Rafe, and Azar—flashed across my inner eye.

  Not the children.

  The men.

  Take them.

  Come to me.

  Reeling from the Rift’s influence, I turned away from Rafe and Fatima, planning to head back to the hallway where we’d left Coit and Azar. Halfway across the room, though, something glinted, catching my eye.

  “I’ll be right back,” I murmured to Rafe, but he and Fatima were so engrossed in discussing safe routes out of the city that I don’t think he even heard me.

  I stepped closer and the glint I’d seen disappeared, but I made my way to that side of the room, anyway, where a heap of rubble sat piled against one wall—the remains of part of the ceiling, caved in from the floor above some long time ago.

  As if in a trance, I squatted down next to it and began digging, pushing small rocks and chunks of building material out of my way to get to whatever it was I had seen.

  Dust flew up around me and I sneezed once but I didn’t stop digging. After a few moments, I realized I was angling more back than down. He wasn’t willing to change directions, however, so I followed my instincts.

  It didn’t take long to hit what I was looking for, though I hadn’t known what the object in my search was until I touched it.

  A glass bottle, miraculously unbroken and still corked.

  Even coated with dust, it was ornate, hints of gold peeking through the encrusted dirt.

  Still examining it, I turned back toward the rest of the room, only to find everyone there watching me.

  “It’s a bottle,” I offered lamely, holding it up for everyone to see.

  “How did you even know it was there?” Rafe asked. “It was buried 2 feet down but you went straight for it like you knew it was there.”

  “I think I saw the gold glinting in the sunlight.”

  Fatima stared at me suspiciously. “That wouldn’t have been possible, given where it was buried.”

  I stared down at it, bemused. “It’s just so beautiful. It’s like it was calling to me, telling me where it was.”