Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  “Any suggestions for getting across that last open stretch?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Coit. “Don’t get shot.”

  I rolled my eyes, but nodded. “All at once, or one at a time?”

  Rafe shrugged. “We don’t have any way to cover each other, so we might as well go all at once on the count of three. But try to stay low and quiet if you can.”

  I frowned at him. “I could cover the two of you.” To illustrate I directed a tiny bit of magic at a pebble on the floor several yards away. The white-hot blast of energy hit it and it poofed away into a cloud of dust.

  “But we don’t have any way to reciprocate. It’s just as efficient for you to come with us and watch our asses.”

  I thought about his ass crossed my mind, but I refrain from actually saying anything allowed.

  Rafe whispered out a count, and we took off, ducking behind stones that had fallen into the street possibly years ago, their sides blasted black with firepower—either by a sorcerer’s magic or from one of the guns that sometimes fell through the Rift.

  We made it to the last building before our target without any incident and huddled behind the scant protection offered by the single wall still standing.

  I stared out across the expansive rubble between us and our destination. “Why that building in particular?” I asked.

  “We can cut through it to get to one of the main streets leading to the old Temple.”

  The Temple.

  People didn’t talk about it much anymore, but that was the center of the Rift’s incursion into this world.

  When objects began to fall through a hole in the world, the people of Tehar built a temple to surround it. And then they worshiped it. And it grew.

  Eventually, we learned to fear it. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a god? But by then it was too late—we had already invited it into our world, incorporated it into our lives, and given it the opening it needed to destroy us.

  Brochan City had been decimated before I was born, but every Teharan since its destruction had grown up with its cautionary tale and simple moral: treat new magic warily and with respect.

  I never thought I would see the Temple.

  Of course, that was before Brodric left.

  “Ready?” Rafe asked, bringing me back to the present.

  “Do we go over the rocks or around?” I gestured at the way the rubble spilled out into the street, covering the should have been an otherwise easy path.

  “Let’s skirt it unless something makes it necessary to cut across,” Rafe replied. “Coit? You good?”

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Coit said.

  Rafe did his counting to three thing again and I briefly wondered if that was something that was common on his world before we took off.

  We made it halfway to the building before they attacked us.

  Part II

  Fire and Air

  15

  They poured in from both sides of the street, small groups of men firing with their other-worldly weapons. As we ducked down behind a brick wall, little puffs of debris flew up from the ground wherever the bullets hit.

  It took me a while to figure out that they weren’t actually aiming at us, but at each other. There were ten or more on each side, each trying to destroy the other entirely.

  “Dammit,” Coit cursed.

  “At best,” Rafe agreed, peeking through an old window in the wall.

  Do you think they saw us?” I asked.

  I don’t see how they could have missed us.” Rafe glanced around the wall one more time. “But they seem to dealing with each other at the moment.”

  “We make a run for it?” But Coit was shaking his head even as he spoke. “Too likely to see us, I guess.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better now while they’re distracted with each other?” I asked.

  Rafe pursed his lips and tilted his head from side to side, as if he were a scale weighing various options.

  “It’s not that much ground to cover,” he said musingly.

  “Then I say we do it.” It might not work, but I was convinced that it had to be better than simply hiding behind these bricks, waiting to die.

  “Okay,” Rafe said. “On three.”

  He did that counting thing again—I really was going to have to ask him at some point if it was common in his world.

  Coit didn’t seem confused by it, so it had to be.

  Their two worlds, I reminded myself. Rafe didn’t seem nearly as freaked out as Coit about the discovery that they were not, in fact, from the same world. I understood Coit’s dismay, though. Part of him had believed—or at least wanted to believe—that if Rafe came from the same world, then the Rift must open up to it and give a passage to that world fairly often. The realization that that might not be true was absolutely devastating.

  We took off running, crouched low to the ground, not daring to look to the left or to the right, but keeping our eyes intently on our goal. Every pop of gunfire made me flinch, every tiny dust explosion acting as a reminder that we were in the middle of a gunfire battle.

  And then, out of nowhere as far as I could tell, an enormous blast of actual fire came out of the sky overhead and slightly behind us, scorching out a line between us and the combat.

  A wall of fire sprang up in the street, consuming things that as far as I could tell weren’t meant to be consumed by fire. Even the rocks seem to act as fuel.

  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 wor
ld.

  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 any 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. “The
n 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.