A Fistful of Fire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 2)
Page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyrights
Also by Rebecca Chastain
Dedication
1 A Man Can Work from Sun to Sun, but a Woman’s Work Is Never Done
2 Your Ignorance Is Their Power
3 Late but Worth the Wait
4 If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention
5 Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover
6 My Family Tree Is Full of Nuts
7 Shop ’til You Drop
8 Don’t Believe Everything You Think
9 Trouble Has Me on Speed Dial
10 Laugh, and the World Laughs with You; Plan, and the World Laughs at You
11 Powered by Delusion
12 Never Do a Bad Job Well
13 Speak Softly and Carry a Big Gun
14 What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger
15 Baby on Board
16 Magic Happens
17 I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
18 Question Everything
19 Only You Can Prevent Wildfires
20 Dog Is My Copilot
21 Always Give 100%...Unless You’re Giving Blood
22 Betrayal Never Comes from Your Enemies
23 We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
24 Never Go to Bed Angry; Stay Up and Plot Revenge
25 Dogs Have Owners, Cats Have Staff
Current and Future Releases
Magic of the Gargoyles Excerpt
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Fistful of Fire
Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer
Rebecca Chastain
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, dialog, places, and incidents either are drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. Any resemblance to an actual cat is 100 percent intentional and approved by Mack Fu, who shamelessly insisted on being immortalized in the pages of this novel.
Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Chastain
Excerpt from Magic of the Gargoyles copyright © by Rebecca Chastain
Cover design by Damonza
Author photograph by Cody Watson
www.rebeccachastain.com
All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
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Mind Your Muse Books
PO Box 374
Rocklin, CA 95677
ISBN: 978-0-9906031-2-2
Also by Rebecca Chastain
Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer
A Fistful of Evil
A Fistful of Fire
Magic of the Gargoyles (novella)
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To Cody, who fans the flames of my creativity.
1
A Man Can Work from Sun to Sun, but a Woman’s Work Is Never Done
An inky puddle of atrum pooled in front of a storage closet beside the hotel elevators. Six fist-size imps bopped around in the atrum, their primordial ooze. In the time it took me to pull my collapsible wand of petrified wood from my back pocket and extend it, a chinchilla-shaped bubble swelled in the atrum, growing glassy ebony eyes, a mouthful of needle-like teeth, and tiny feet. Soundlessly, it sprang an inch into the air, disconnecting from the puddle and becoming a seventh fully formed imp.
I pushed lux lucis into the wand, filling the entire length with the white energy. The imps turned, attention snagged by the bright waving light. As one, they opened jaws as tall as their bodies, revealing rows of sharp black teeth and proving they were little more than brainless mouths. I slashed the thin wood through their insubstantial bodies, and the imps exploded into harmless black glitter. By the time the disintegrated atrum sifted to the floor, the flecks were as gray as the carpet.
I smiled and pressed the tip of the wand into my palm, collapsing the hollow segments like an old radio antenna until it was short enough to return to the back pocked of my jean.
A few days ago, this hotel had been coated top to bottom with atrum, thanks to a video game convention and the mobs of gamer geeks overflowing the event floor. Okay, technically, the nerd herd hadn’t been responsible for the evil, but they’d disseminated it as unwitting hosts. The real evil had been a demon camping in their midst, taking advantage of my newbie enforcer status and weak control of my region. Besting it had nearly killed me, but survival had firmed my resolve to stick to my new career path.
I’d been running cleanup here at ground zero and throughout my region ever since. Eventually I’d catch up and catch my breath.
I crouched next to the empty black puddle. Atrum was the insidious source from which basic evil creatures spawned and on which more complex evil creatures thrived. I found it repulsive and took great delight in destroying it. Though this patch was only two feet across, left alone, the atrum would continue to spawn imps and taint any people who stepped through it.
I gathered lux lucis in my palm. My soul glowed a soft butter white, but as the lux lucis collected in my hand, it brightened like a fluorescent light warming up. If I were using normal sight, a light as bright as my hand would have left a stain on my retina and cast shadows around my feet. But I wasn’t using normal sight; I was viewing the world in Primordium, and no matter how bright the lux lucis, it never cast a shadow. I liked to think of Primordium as soul sight, because Primordium afforded me a black-and-white morality-based view of the world. Living things fell in two categories: white and good, like plants and animals, and black and bad, like imps and their more intelligent cohorts, vervet. It sounded simplistic until humans were thrown into the mix. Normal people’s souls were a patchwork of stains representing a gray scale of unethical decisions.
The pure white souls of enforcers, mine included, were an exception and a necessity. My job was to fight evil, and my soul was my weapon.
I focused on my hand. Moving my body’s lux lucis was a relatively new experience for me. Shoving my soul’s energy into my pet wood wand or straight into an evil creature I could do without thinking, but manipulating the energy took more concentration.
I pushed lux lucis along the top of my hand to my fingertips, then pulled it back down my palm to my wrist, repeating the loop again and again until a seamless cycle of light zipped around my hand. I waited until the crest of lux lucis reached my fingertips, then gave it a flip. Lux lucis jumped from my fingers to the carpet and rolled through the smear of black atrum. White energy ate through dark, leaving the carpet a clean, inanimate gray.
Standing, I brushed my hands together with satisfaction and examined the hallway. Though I knew the carpet’s floral print swirled with pastel colors and the paintings nailed to the beige walls displayed ja
rringly colorful interpretations of the Sacramento Valley, in Primordium the walls, paintings, and carpet were all the same inanimate charcoal gray. Indirect illumination gave depth to the hall, but trying to determine the light’s source would give me a headache.
I mentally checked the floor off my list of areas to clean and turned to the elevator. An onyx shadow oozed through the seam between the door and the floor, fleshing out into a monkey’s paw tipped with lion claws. A second arm joined the first. Claws sank into the carpet and heaved, pulling the entire body through the paper-thin opening. It puffed into the shape of a vervet, and I shifted my weight to the balls of my feet.
Black as a demon’s soul from the tip of its scorpion tail to the crown of its spiked primate head and coated with the scales of a diseased fish, the vervet was a compact nightmare. I preferred imps. Both creatures spawned from atrum, but at least imps looked like chinchilla fluff balls. Plus, imps lacked any semblance of a brain.
The vervet spotted me and grinned, exposing jagged teeth long enough to spear my arm clean through. I lunged for it, missing when it sprang to the wall.
A door halfway down the hall opened, and a trio of middle-aged women exited their room, laughing and chatting. The vervet swung to look at them, hunger sparking in its dark eyes. I made another grab for it, but it leapt to the ceiling, then the opposite wall. A few more jumps widened the gap between us, then it galloped along the vertical surface as if gravity didn’t exist, its long black talons leaving no marks in the plaster. While I was still reaching for my wand, the vervet pounced on the nylon-clad calf of the lead lady, sinking a mouthful of fangs into her soul. Flecks of atrum replaced her soul’s lux lucis, one swallow at a time. Oblivious, the woman rifled through her purse.
The vervet clawed up her body to her stomach, each talon depositing a prick of atrum to tarnish her soul. Twisting, it took a bite from her companion’s chest. Whatever the host said made the women toss their heads back with fresh mirth. The vervet clambered over them, eating up the joy brightening their souls.
The juxtaposition of the women’s clueless happiness with the spawn of evil snacking on them twisted my stomach. Narrowing my sights on the vervet, I charged.
When the trio spotted me barreling toward them, they finally reacted, first with scowls at my audacity to run in the hallway, then with widening eyes when they spied the petrified wood I brandished fully extended. My badass enforcer vibe, which came across as loony-bin crazy to norms, plastered them against the wall.
When I was within arm’s reach of the vervet—and the woman it clung to—I made a grab for it. The vervet rocketed into the air and swung down the hallway, teeth wide in a silent laugh. The woman jerked and yelled, thinking I’d tried to punch her.
“Sorry!” I stumbled but didn’t slow.
“I’m reporting you to the manager!” one of the women shouted after me.
My shoulders hunched. This was exactly the kind of attention I was supposed to avoid. My job was strictly undercover. Getting arrested tended to hamper an enforcer’s ability to defend her region.
Finding the balance between doing my job and keeping a low profile was a struggle. I couldn’t let the vervet feast on the women. Atrum corrupted. In people who earned their atrum through immoral acts, it created a feedback loop, maintaining a person’s immoral nature—or enhancing it. For innocents like those women, it was possible they might shrug off planted atrum and restore their souls to their natural states, but it was just as likely the atrum would take root, influencing the women to make vile decisions that would spread evil further. Leaving the vervet on the trio could have resulted in a cascade of larger problems.
Plus, it galled me to see good people corrupted. If my tactics had been less than circumspect, so be it.
The hallway cut left at ninety degrees, and the vervet hurled out of sight. I slowed, clutching a cramp in my side. I’d been over this hotel a hundred times in the last two and a half days, and I knew that only ten or fifteen rooms lay beyond the bend before the hallway dead-ended. The vervet was trapped.
I rounded the corner at a jog. A maid’s cart cozied up to a doorway near the end of the hall, the maid absent. The vervet cannonballed into a stack of towels, then collapsed on its back. Lifting one arm, it extended a single dark digit—the middle one of three—sitting up enough to bare a cluttered row of sharp ebony teeth in a grin.
I lowered the pet wood to my side but held myself ready to strike.
“Back at you.” I flipped it off with a sweet smile of my own.
A young maid stepped out of the adjacent room into the crosshairs of my crude gesture. She gasped, crossed herself, and scuttled backward into the room, slamming the door before the vervet could react. A good thing, too. With her light gray soul, she was prime vervet-snack material.
Abashed, I tucked my offending hand behind my back. Frightening the staff would win me no points with my boss. I needed to finish this quickly before she called her manager.
“Hold still and let me kill you, you stupid little bugger.”
The lock slammed home against the other side of the door. Okay. Time to disappear before she called the cops.
I charged the vervet. It bounced to the ceiling at the last minute, but I anticipated the move. Slicing through the air with the wand, I cleaved the vervet in two, pulsing lux lucis into the mutated creature. It exploded. Harmless graying particles floated around my head and shoulders. Grimacing, I ducked aside, surreptitiously wiping my hair. I waited until I reached the empty stairwell before doing a heebie-jeebies dance. When my phone belted out “Hail to the Chief” from my back pocket, I jumped and swallowed a startled shriek.
I pulled my metallic-green cell phone from my pocket. It was my first cell phone ever, newly purchased for this job, and I’d named it Medusa. A week of being on call twenty-four-seven combined with a job that had no defined work hours, and my ardor for the new technology had cooled considerably. I swiped the screen and said hello to my boss.
“Come to the office,” Mr. Pitt said instead of a greeting.
“I’ve got the top two floors left.”
“They’ll wait.” The line went dead.
“Keep up the good work, Madison,” I said on his behalf, pocketing Medusa. “You’re the best.”
Grumpy was Mr. Pitt’s default, or it had been since he’d hired me. He’d wanted a fully trained illuminant enforcer. When my predecessor transferred to another region and no experienced enforcers applied for the job, he’d been forced to accept me. Since I’d spent the first twenty-five years of my life unaware that my ability to see souls was a weapon for fighting evil, I had a lot of catching up to do.
Mr. Pitt had hired Doris, a retired enforcer, to give me some last-minute training, and we squeezed in one packed night of lessons before she left for a family vacation. My boss and I both would have preferred I spend more time learning the ropes before jumping into field work, but the appearance of a demon in our region had necessitated immediate action. A week later, demon vanquished and region almost clean, I felt I deserved a pat on the back, if not a medal of valor. Apparently Mr. Pitt needed more proof of my competence than mere survival.
I clattered down the stairs and exited through the quiet lobby. With luck, whatever Mr. Pitt wanted wouldn’t take too much time. I was on a deadline. Tonight I had a date with Dr. Alex Love, the hottest vet in the state.
My stomach flip-flopped as I slid behind the wheel of my Civic and started the car. I’d lusted after the man for three years, and tonight I’d see if reality lived up to my fantasies. And I had plenty of fantasies, several of which I indulged in during the short drive to my office.
Cold November air slapped me back to the present when I slid out of my car a few minutes later. I tried to box up my excitement, but I ruined it by checking the time. Only six hours and fourteen minutes until my date.
I jogged across the parking lot and darted through the glass doors into the heated interior of the two-story office building. Rubbing the chill out
of my arms, I walked through the building’s lobby, past the restrooms and elevator, and down a hushed hall. As always, murmured confidential conversations and muted keyboard clacks emanated from the mortgage company, but the temp agency bustled with a louder, no-nonsense air. Passing that door made me smile. My aimless temp days had ended when Mr. Pitt offered me this job. Now I saved the world—or my portion of it—and got paid to do it.
Tucked at the end of the hallway, my region’s headquarters were humble and serene. No one would suspect Illumination Studios was anything other than the tiny bumper sticker company it claimed to be. If my job had entailed working within its confines, I would have been fitted for a straitjacket after three days.
Of course, the fact that I liked sprinting through the suburban neighborhoods of Roseville, California, engaging in skirmishes with evil creatures others couldn’t see, might mean I was already insane.
“Good morning, Sharon,” I sang.
The receptionist tracked my entrance with hard brown eyes, the rest of her body statue still at her tall wooden desk. Behind her, soft white lights glistened on the metallic letters of our fake company, but the same warm glow fell flat across Sharon’s shoulders, shadowing her eyes and thin mouth. I’d met tortoises with more expressive faces—and who were more cheerful.
Focusing on keeping my shoulders relaxed under the receptionist’s inscrutable stare, I strode past the glass-walled conference room—and stuttered to a halt.
Rows of empty, slender spray-topped glass vials lined the long conference table. Rose stood near one end, clutching a bottle in her hands, eyes closed. The Latina’s long dark hair was slicked back in a simple ponytail and she was barefoot. More shocking, she wore jeans and a men’s T-shirt two sizes too big. Since when did Rose swap out her figure-flattering dresses for clothes that could have come from my closet?