Kindling the Darkness

by Jane Kindred

Theia smiled quizzically. “Sure. I’ll just take a little walk around the complex and give you guys some time together.”

  Lucy tried to look nonchalant as Theia stepped outside. “What’s up?”

  Lucien frowned. “Lu. This is me. What happened?”

  “What?” She gave him an irritated squint. “Nothing happened.”

  “Then why did I find a message from Fran on my phone when I arrived this morning?”

  Lucy groaned and dropped her head forward on her crossed arms on the table. “She swore she wasn’t going to tell you anything.”

  “She didn’t. But you just walked right into that one.”

  “I hate you, Lucien,” she said into her arms.

  “That sounds a little more like you, but it’s too little, too late. So out with it. Does whatever happened have something to do with your new look?”

  Lucy raised her head. “You don’t have any idea what you left me with, do you?”

  “What I left you with?”

  “The Smok legacy. Madeleine’s curse. For you, it was a onetime deal. This isn’t your true form in this plane. It’s only with Theia that you can walk around in human skin.”

  “It’s not exactly a party being a monster in the world of the living, babe.”

  She fixed him with a piercing look, letting her eyes shift. “You don’t say.”

  Lucien’s face registered surprise. “I thought Fran had you on a management regimen with the anti-transformative. Are you still shifting?”

  “She does, but it’s cyclical. Monthly, to be precise. And my hormones are all messed up, and I jumped a guy I barely knew, and he’s Darkrock, and I think...” She stopped just short of saying she thought he was the hell beast. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”

  “You...wait. You slept with the guy from Darkrock? The one who lives in Jerome?”

  Lucy growled in answer and lowered her head to her arms once more.

  “And what does this have to do with your hair?”

  She stayed silent for a moment until frustration hurled it out of her. “I hacked it all off because I’m a horrible person, Lucien, and it was less drastic than cutting myself.”

  “Lu.” His hand rested on her shoulder, and Lucy shook him off. “You are not a horrible person.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m the CFO of Smok International, and I’ve spent my life convincing people to sell their souls for some temporary peace, and I’m self-centered and arrogant, and I hate people. And they hate me.”

  “Lucy. That’s not true. You do not hate people.”

  An unexpected ripple of laughter escaped her. “You suck, Lucien.”

  “I know. It runs in the family. Will you please stop talking to the tabletop and look at me?”

  With a sigh, she straightened and met his eyes.

  “I know you want everyone to think you’re some cold, unapproachable bitch. That’s the persona you’ve built, and that’s fine. You don’t have to let people know you. But when you start buying into the fiction you project to everyone else, you’re not doing yourself any favors. Take it from me. I had everyone so convinced I was a lazy, arrogant asshole that I almost became one until Theia saw through my act. You and I didn’t exactly get a lot of positive reinforcement or affection growing up. But we are decent human beings—even if we aren’t entirely human.” Lucien sighed. “Look, I know I’m not going to convince you to like yourself with a little pep talk. But at least cut yourself some slack. And take your damn meds.”

  “Ha!”

  “And incidentally, I think the haircut looks great.”

  “Fran fixed it.”

  “Will you promise me something?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do anything Fran can’t fix.”

  Chapter 14

  Regardless of Lucy’s existential crisis, Oliver knew more than he was saying, and Lucy intended to get some answers out of him this morning. After Lucien and Theia departed, she took her time rebuilding the physical presentation of her “public persona.” Lucien was right that she needed to come off like a cold, unapproachable bitch. Given her age—and her sex—it was the only way to be taken seriously in her role, whether as corporate mogul, soul negotiator or infernal exterminator. To that end, she needed the proper attire. The sloppy jeans-and-T-shirt look had been an outward sign of her slipping control, and her tailored suits were the opposite.

  She’d been wearing them since her senior year in high school, refusing to wear the little pleated skirts and knee socks of her school uniform. She had also refused to buy women’s suits, because somehow when the word woman was added, it was no longer a business suit but a “pantsuit,” as if pants were understood to be a form of playing dress-up as a serious person—in other words, a man—and straying from the proper feminine attire in a way that wearing pants without a matching jacket wasn’t. Women’s suits also had useless pockets and cheap stitching and idiotic cuts. Instead, Lucy commissioned all her suits from a bespoke men’s tailor.

  Oliver wasn’t in when she arrived—some young blonde Lucy had never seen before was working the counter—and Lucy offered to wait. Her professional look evidently convinced the girl at the counter that whatever business she had with Oliver, Lucy must be too important to waste time sitting in a coffee shop waiting for him. Lucy was about to tell her not to worry about it when the girl told her where Oliver had gone.

  “He had some boxes he needed to drive out to his storage unit, if you want to try to catch him there. I’m not sure how long he’ll be or if he’s coming straight back.”

  “Is that the facility over on Dundee Lane? Where the fire was the other day?”

  “It must be. That’s the only one around, unless he has a unit in Cottonwood.”

  It seemed a little odd that Oliver would suddenly be spending time at the storage facility. He’d been acting peculiar when she saw him there, and it wasn’t just because she’d encountered him unexpectedly in firefighter mode.

  Lucy thanked the girl and drove down the side of the mountain toward Clarkdale, the autumn light gorgeous on the stacked-rock walls lining the road. At the storage facility, the attendant didn’t even balk at giving such an official-looking person a map to a customer’s unit. Lucy left her car parked in the lot in front of the office and walked to it. A pickup truck was parked outside it, and the roll-up door to the unit was half-raised, as if someone didn’t want passersby to see inside. What was Oliver hiding in there?

  She ducked quietly under the door, expecting to catch him bending over crates of black market weapons or drugs. It took her a moment to process the scene. Oliver was seated on the corner of a storage bin talking to a skinny kid eating a sandwich on a makeshift bed.

  Before she could even say Oliver’s name, the boy had leaped to his feet with a look of abject terror and scrambled toward the door, and as he ducked to scuttle under it, his appearance changed swiftly. A skinny boy in baggy hand-me-downs crawled under the door, but a half-starved juvenile white wolf with red-tipped ears loped away on the other side, leaving the clothing behind.

  “Colt, wait!” Oliver threw the door upward and ran after it, but the wolf had already scaled the wall and taken off into the hills. “Goddammit!” Oliver slammed his fist into the metal wall of the nearest unit and hissed another expletive as he wrung out his hand. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “Looks to me like I scared off a werewolf you’ve been protecting. How long have you been hiding him here?”

  “He’s a child, goddammit! And I swear to God, if you do anything to hurt that boy, I will hunt you down myself. Our working truce will be over.”

  “What the hell makes you think I would hurt a child?”

  “Because he’s not a human child, and to you, apparently, that makes him prey.”

  Too furious to respond, Lucy walked away from him.

  Oliver
pursued her. “Are you going to tell me you don’t think he’s a menace to decent human society? That he doesn’t need to be put down?”

  Lucy whirled on him. “How the hell would I know whether he’s a menace? You’ve been keeping him here like a pet. How long has he been here? You think keeping a child, human or otherwise, in a five-by-ten metal box is some kind of magnanimous gesture?”

  “Oh, so you’re just concerned about his welfare? Seems a little out of character for you and your vast experience. According to you, rogue werewolves are never benign. They only cause chaos and destruction.”

  Lucy opened her mouth and closed it again, thoroughly irritated to have her own words quoted back at her—and a bit impressed that he’d apparently memorized them.

  “Nothing to say to that, I see.”

  “This clearly isn’t a werewolf, and I doubt he’s gone rogue.”

  The angry heat in his eyes cooled for a moment. “What makes you think he isn’t a werewolf?”

  Lucy folded her arms. “Because he shifted at will, just like our killer wolf.”

  His outburst of laughter was genuine. “You think Colt is our killer wolf?”

  “Of course I don’t. He’s a boy.”

  “I see. So you think he’ll grow up to be the same thing. May as well just put him down now to save time, then, right?”

  “No, I think he’s a hellhound.”

  Something seemed to click behind his eyes. “And you’d know, I suppose.”

  “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, you’re Lucien Smok’s sister. And Lucien, as I understand it, is the head demon currently reigning in hell.”

  Prickling cold raced over her skin. She’d been extremely careful to control the flow of information about Lucien. “Who told you that?”

  “Are you going to deny it?”

  “I’m not obligated to confirm or deny any such absurdity to you. I want to know who’s spreading this rumor about my brother.”

  Oliver glared at her wordlessly and yanked down the door of the storage unit before turning to step up into his truck.

  “So you’re just not going to answer me.”

  Oliver slammed the truck door and started the engine. “I’m not obligated to confirm or deny where I heard it. Have a nice day.”

  * * *

  Oliver spent the better part of the day driving through the hills around Jerome and down into the valleys on either side looking for any sign of Colt, but the boy had obviously had plenty of practice avoiding humans in the time he’d been on the run. He hadn’t seen Colt shape-shift before today, but Lucy was right, he’d simply shifted from one form to the other as he ran, like a chameleon donning camouflage. Was Lucy also right about him being a hellhound? Goddamn, she was frustrating as hell.

  He laughed at the inadvertent pun. She was frustrating and infuriating and self-righteous, and it was a beautiful thing to behold. From one moment to the next, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to challenge her to a throw down in hand-to-hand combat or blurt out how goddamn much he wanted her, regardless of whether she was in cahoots with Darkrock or not—or in league with hell, for that matter. She made him feel like an inexperienced adolescent and an over-the-hill loser at the same time.

  He gave up and called it a day, heading back to the shop to relieve Kelly. She looked frazzled, and from the state of the tip jar, it had been a big tourist day in town. It always was around the holidays. Oliver emptied the jar and gave her the lot and told her he’d close up.

  As he emptied the espresso machine, the bell tinkled on the front door. Oliver groaned. It was five minutes until closing, and he’d hoped to get things cleaned up and shut down so he could get back out and search for Colt. He had a feeling he might find him in one of the old shafts after dark.

  He turned with a plastered-on welcoming smile and found Lucy staring back at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Did you find the kid?”

  “No. No thanks to you.”

  “I talked to my brother, the Prince of Hell, and he says the kid’s part of a missing pack. There are four of them altogether, all juveniles, and they’re not equipped to be on their own in our world.”

  “Four of them?” Oliver set down his cleaning rag on the counter. “So you’re admitting that Lucien is a demon.”

  “I’d like to keep that from becoming common knowledge, so if you wouldn’t mind telling me where you heard it—”

  “From a siren. She owns—”

  “Oh, I know all about Polly.” Lucy came toward the back of the shop, looking relieved. “I thought maybe Darkrock had figured it out.”

  “If they did, they didn’t say anything to me.”

  “But Polly did.” Lucy slid onto one of the stools at the counter and swiveled to face him, one leg crossed over the other, her elbows—in her expensive and very businesslike suit jacket—resting on the edge of the counter. “What brought you to Polly’s? Checking up on me?”

  “No, I went to see if I could find some kind of safe house for Colt.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. She said she wasn’t running an orphanage.”

  “So how did Lucien come up?”

  Oliver put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “She kind of guessed I was curious about you, I suppose.”

  “Oh, you’re curious about me?”

  “You are a bit of a puzzle.”

  “I’m not a puzzle. You’re just threatened by me.”

  Oliver’s jaw dropped. “I’m threatened by you?”

  “Oh, please. I kicked your ass the first time we met. And then I showed you up in front of your council with my knowledge of shape-shifters.”

  “You did not show me up. And you just caught me off guard that first night. I’m more than a match for you.”

  “Oh, really?” Lucy hopped off the stool and took off her jacket, tossing it on the counter. “You wanna go?”

  “Do I wanna go?” Oliver laughed in disbelief. “What the hell are you—” His breath cut off with a grunt as Lucy punched him lightly in the gut. “Goddammit, Lucy.”

  “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  “I’m not going to fight you.”

  Now she was rolling up her sleeves.

  “Lucy—”

  She ducked in toward him, her fist in a sharp extended-knuckle position, with a jab aimed at his right clavicle. Oliver stepped back with his right foot to avoid it and swung upward in a block with his left arm, but Lucy’s move had been a feint, and she hooked her foot around his front leg and yanked him off balance as she dropped low for a sweep. Oliver ducked and rolled instead, darting up to tackle her at the waist and take her down as she turned. He narrowly missed having his windpipe punched.

  Lucy rolled with him, using his weight to her advantage, and came up with one knee against his sternum as he landed on his back, her right arm poised for a strike. Instead of grabbing for it or blocking the punch, Oliver lowered his arms to the floor.

  Lucy paused. “What are you doing?”

  “Refusing to fight you. If you feel like punching me in the face to prove your point, go ahead.” It was like dealing with a weird school yard bully who insisted on picking a fight, and Oliver wasn’t having any of it. He voiced the thought that accompanied the image. “You’re like one of those kids in grade school who keeps punching girls in the arm because he likes them.”

  “It’s pretty weird to compare yourself to a defenseless schoolgirl.” Lucy scowled. “And I do not like you.”

  “Oh, you do so. You just can’t admit it without a fight first. And I don’t feel like fighting you.” He stretched his arms wide. “So have at it.”

  “What did you give Polly?”

  “What?” She’d thrown him again, only mentally this time. “I didn’t give Polly anything. What are you t
alking about? What does she even have to do with anything?”

  “She’s a siren. She never gives away anything for free. I just want to know what you gave her for the information.”

  Oliver was dumbfounded. Did all of this actually have something to do with the fact that he’d gone to the siren? “I didn’t give her anything. I mean, she asked for a kiss—”

  “You gave her a kiss?” Lucy’s pale eyes had darkened.

  Was she actually jealous? His head was spinning. “Yes, I gave her a kiss. It seemed like the polite thing to do.”

  “You very politely handed over a piece of your soul.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  Lucy moved her knee off his chest. “I’m not kidding.”

  Oliver sat up. “What would she do with a piece of my soul?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. She likes to keep her little ‘trinkets’ in case she needs them later. But that’s a pretty costly piece of information you bought.”

  “So that’s why you’ve been trying to beat me up? To get information out of me about what transpired between Polly and me? I already told you what I learned from her.”

  “She guessed that you wanted to know more about me, so she told you more about Lucien.”

  Oliver shrugged. “Which really doesn’t tell me anything about you—except she did mention that you guard the gates of hell. I guess that’s why you’ve been hunting this thing. It escaped from hell, like Colt.”

  Lucy straightened and stood. “Yes.”

  Oliver stared up at her. “I feel like that’s supposed to be significant, that you guard the gates of hell, but I really don’t get it.”

  “My brother rules hell because he has infernal blood.”

  He studied her for a moment. “And you...”

  “Have infernal blood.”

  Oliver got to his feet. “You’re telling me you’re a demon?”

  “A demi-demon, if you want to get technical.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Am I supposed to run screaming or something?”

  Lucy threw her hands in the air. “Well, a normal person would.”