Ignite the Fire: Incendiary

by Karen Chance

  “Auuggghhhh!” I yelled, finally getting my breath back, as we plunged over the edge and into darkness.

  Well, almost. I found myself on my hands and knees, my body jolting and sending pain signals everywhere, and my eyes staring down at a blinding circle of light. I appeared to be straddling it, I didn’t know why. Until my vision adjusted, and my confused brain finally figured out that I was looking through a round opening in the castle floor, below which was a huge drop that ended in the rushing river and a lot of rocks.

  And a lot of bones.

  The river curved about the castle here, creating a fairly sharp turn, and allowing anything dumped below to pile up. And the bones had done exactly that, washing up onto the riverbank in heaps of rotting ribcages, dirty clavicles, shattered femurs, and a few skulls, one of them alarmingly outsized. Its features looked more human than animal, with green, trailing slime for hair and eye sockets that must have been as big as my head. The river was pouring through them, making the giant skull look like it was weeping—

  For us, probably, I thought, snapping out of it, as a fey hit the floor in front of me.

  Mircea pulled me up, and I received a brief glimpse of a small, roofless room; of a long-decayed sheep’s head, its tongue lolling from a perch by a door; of a bunch of empty meat hooks, originally plain wood like the tables scattered about, but stained dark from years’ worth of dried blood; and of more bones, most of them near the opening in the floor, because we were in the castle abattoir, weren’t we? It was on the edge of the structure, probably so the animals could be butchered and their unwanted bits chucked down the hole for the river to sort out.

  Fitting, I thought, as Mircea grabbed a cleaver.

  The fey in front of me went staggering back with his head bisected down to the neck and flopping to the sides, spilling his brains out. My gorge rose, but I swallowed it back where it belonged because more fey were sliding down the steeply sloped roof, some shooting as they came. Thankfully, the little room had once had a thatched covering, some decayed bits of which still clung to the stones and acted as an arrow trap.

  But not enough of one.

  A shaft took me through the hand, I screamed, Mircea swore, and then the bastards were on us.

  And really wished they weren’t.

  An enraged master vampire is a terrible and strangely beautiful sight, what you can see of him. Which wasn’t much in this case, because Mircea was little more than a blur against the gray stone walls. But then, I didn’t have to see him move.

  I saw the results.

  Fey warriors suddenly appeared, writhing, on those no-longer-empty meat hooks, as abruptly as if I’d shifted them there. Others disappeared down the well, tripped or thrown, one with the aforementioned cleaver sticking out of his forehead, right between his surprised looking eyes. The fey in our time had fought an army of master vamps recently and gotten their asses handed to them, but these hadn’t. I wondered if they’d have been so gung-ho to follow us if they’d realized what they were getting into.

  But what they lacked in vamp-killing ability, they made up for in numbers. I had no idea what they were doing here—they weren’t supposed even to be on Earth in this era—but they were flooding down the roof like the water tumbling over the stones below, and just as deadly. And just as impossible for us to kill, because we were in the past, damn it!

  I grabbed for Mircea as he streaked by, and somehow managed to snare an arm. “You can’t kill them! We’ll destroy the time line!”

  He paused to stare at me as if I was mad, a fey in each hand. “Then what would you have me do?”

  “Run?”

  He looked vaguely offended. I half expected him to remind me that the great Mircea Basarab did not run. But then a dozen arrows slammed into him, into the wall, into a still writhing fey body on a hook, and into the remains of my updo.

  And, a second later, he had knocked his prisoners unconscious, scooped me up, and we were pelting through a series of storerooms full of half frozen, hanging carcasses.

  Chapter Two

  M eaty thud, thud, thuds punctuated the air, as arrows hit flesh that was thankfully far beyond feeling it. I was not beyond feeling it, and my hand burned like somebody had shoved a red-hot poker through it. But worse than that was not knowing what was happening to—

  Pritkin, I thought, as the scene skewed around me. My eyes blinked and I was suddenly looking at another corridor, this one full of old stones and torchlight, and a bunch of screaming, running fey. They were chasing not one, not ten, but maybe a hundred Pritkins, who were racing through side corridors and down cross-tunnels and into rooms where what sounded like major battles were going on.

  It was like some kind of slapstick sketch—Monty Python in a dungeon—but it wasn't funny. Because that particular spell was exhausting, and normally used as a last resort, since there wouldn’t be enough magic left for many more after it. I stared around, looking frantically for the real Pritkin, before abruptly realizing: he was me.

  The hand clutching the stone of a doorway in front of my face was a familiar one. It didn’t match the blunt instrument that Pritkin often pretended to be, looking more like something that should belong to a pianist or an artist. Sun bronzed and slender, with just a smattering of fine golden hairs that caught the light of the fey’s torches, it was like the rest of the man—surprising.

  And dead, if he didn’t get out of there. The fey were running his copies through left and right, although some of them were holding their own. A handful of crazy-haired mages had banded together and were ambushing individual fey, lobbing spells and stabbing them wildly—and further screwing up time.

  “No!” I thought, horrified, and all the Pritkins looked up.

  The one whose eyes I was currently seeing through started, and then cursed inventively. “What are you doing in my head?” he demanded.

  “Looking for you?” I said, confused at the fury in his voice, and then the implication hit. I wasn’t a telepath; I couldn’t do this.

  But someone else could.

  “Son of a bitch!” we said together, before the scene suddenly popped.

  “Damn it, Mircea!” I glared up at the vaguely harried looking vamp, although whether that was because we were still dodging arrows or because he’d just seen the same thing I had, I wasn’t sure. But I was sure about something. “I’m borrowing your abilities, aren’t I?”

  Mircea had set the rows of carcasses swinging behind us, throwing off the fey’s aim, but it wasn’t enough. A couple of arrows slammed into the dead deer we’d just dodged behind, and another took off one of my fake dog ears. Mircea’s hand grabbed my exposed head and tucked it closer into his chest.

  “Perhaps we could discuss this another time, dulceață?”

  “Don’t dulceață me! You know full well—”

  He threw open a door at the end of the room and ducked inside.

  “—that we had a deal!”

  “One I am perfectly willing to uphold,” he said, slamming the door and smashing his arrow-riddled back against it. The abrupt motion caused the pointy tips of the weapons to suddenly erupt from his torso, ruining the fine lawn of the shirt he wore under all that velvet. He winced but otherwise didn’t seem to notice. “Once we are finished here,” he added.

  “It looks like we’re finished now!”

  We were in a long hall that resembled the one that Pritkin had been in, except that it had a line of Romanesque arched windows looking over the stunning view. I could see pale, blue-gray sky, fir covered mountains, and craggy heights, but couldn’t really appreciate it considering that the door was already thudding like there was a giant on the other side. Or a heck of a lot of fey.

  And I guessed Mircea didn’t like our odds against their arrows in an open corridor, because he pointed at the wall. “If you would be so good as to hand me a spear?”

  I looked behind me to find that the side of the hall opposite the windows was decorated with numerous lethal looking weapons, arrayed in pretty
formations. The nearest group contained a bunch of spears with thick wooden shafts. I started to jerk one off the wall, had my hand scream bloody murder at me, and swore.

  And then jerked the arrow out of it, because I didn’t have a choice, and immediately went swimmy headed from the pain.

  The arrow head had broken off at some point, but just removing the wooden shaft was horrible. Why had I done that? Why the hell had I done that?

  Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea.

  Even worse, the wound did not immediately close up, as I’d half expected since I was currently channeling the power of a master vampire. It didn’t look like there were any bones broken, the head having sliced cleanly through the middle of two of them. But the pain was horrible and the red, gaping mouth looked like it was laughing at me—

  “Cassie!”

  I snapped out of it, belatedly remembering that we were still in battle. Get a grip, I told myself savagely, or you’re about to have a lot more wounds courtesy of a lot more fey. I grabbed the spear and tossed it to Mircea.

  He caught it mid-air and used it to brace the door.

  It did not appear to help much.

  “The deal was that you take the spell off,” I reminded him shakily, refusing to get side tracked. “And once we’ve found this guy you want—”

  “This fey I want,” he corrected, motioning for more spears.

  “—then that’s it. You don’t do this again—”

  “Exactly so.”

  “But you’re doing it now!” I tossed him the rest of the thick shafts, one at a time, using my good hand as much as possible. “You never removed it!”

  “I did, in fact.”

  I looked at him.

  “And then I had it reapplied,” he admitted.

  “Why?”

  “That’s why,” he said, right before the door, now braced by no fewer than six huge spears, nonetheless blew inward.

  The blow, which simply had to be magically enhanced, caught Mircea as well as the door, shooting them both almost halfway down the hall. And leaving me facing the mass of fey muscling in with no magic and no time. But thanks to Mircea being a bastard, and my current terrible mood, I did have one advantage.

  “I hate it when you’re right,” I muttered, and slammed a heavy shield into the nearest fey’s face, hard enough to send him and the three immediately behind him staggering.

  “I heard that!” A distant voice said.

  “Shut up and help me!” I yelled, and for once, Mircea did as he was told.

  A bunch of spears machine gunned through the air, thrown hard enough to blow the vanguard off their feet, and to affix them to the wall like bugs on a pin. It was the sort of thing that would normally merit a double take or two, but not now. I was too busy lobbing every weapon I could find at the fey while walking backward down the hallway.

  Using my own strength, I’d have had trouble even lifting many of the heavy maces, war hammers and flails, much less rapid-firing them with devastating effect. But I wasn’t using my strength; I was using Mircea’s. And he didn’t have any problem at all.

  The initial barrage paused some of the feys’ forward momentum, and the second—half a dozen of the heavy shields—stopped it altogether. The iron banded disks slid across the stone floor, hard enough to cause sparks to fly up, before tumbling the fey like bowling pins. And before they could react to that, Mircea was running at them carrying the heavy oak door.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded as he blew past. “The hinges are broken!”

  “Then make me some new ones!”

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer. He just waded into the fey, half of whom were already back on their feet, completely defenseless except for the door he was holding in front of him. I had no idea what the hell he thought he was doing.

  “Why don’t I ever fall for sane men?” I said, and grabbed some swords.

  “Your life . . . would drive them mad . . . soon enough,” Mircea informed me, while using the door as a club to beat back the fey. “It is easier to start out that way.”

  I opened my mouth to make a response to that, realized I didn’t have one, and started throwing swords. Because the fey had surrounded him now and ex or not, I didn’t want him dead! Not until I get the chance to kill him myself, I thought, slamming swords through fey bodies hard enough to pin them to the floor.

  It was amazingly easy. The steel felt feather light, as if I was holding a needle and was stitching them to the stone like embroidery. If embroidery writhed and bled and tried to stitch you back. I dodged a barrage of fey weapons with liquid speed and grabbed another shield, but I didn’t use it for protection. I threw it like a frisbee, and watched the heavy, iron rimmed edges mow half a dozen bodies down.

  I don’t know how I got here, I thought blankly, my stunned brain finally catching up to my actions.

  “You are Lady Cassandra, Pythia and guardian of the Pythian Court,” Mircea told me, reading my mind. He was regarding me out of dark, flashing eyes while holding the door shut, which he’d somehow gotten back in place. “And a damned fine one!”

  I stared at him for a moment, because I didn’t get a lot of compliments these days, not since I’d started talking back to him and the other vamps. They’d wanted a good, docile little Pythia, and were perfectly happy to pat me on the head and to protect me, as long as I was doing their will. A hard headed, willful little Pythia, on the other hand, who felt like the power had come to her and she should have a say in how it was used, was something else altogether.

  Which might explain why I just stood there for a second, until Mircea yelled. “Any time now, dulceață!”

  I blinked, and realized that the same thing that had happened before was about to happen again. The door was going to blow in, assuming that the fey left in the room didn’t kill us first, and we’d be overrun. But I still didn’t know what Mircea had meant about—and then I did, when he snatched a sword out of a fey’s body, used it to run another through, and then kept on going, jamming the bloody blade through the door and burying it deep into the stone of the wall.

  New hinges, I thought, and grabbed a bunch more swords, short spears, and anything else that might work.

  A moment later, I had finished ensuring that a certain door would never open again, and Mircea had a fey in either hand, clearly intending to throw them out the windows.

  “Don’t kill them!” I reminded him, which earned me an eyeroll, probably because of our body count. Which didn’t mean we needed to kill any more! Mircea compromised by battering their two, helmet clad heads together.

  I wasn’t sure that that was an improvement, as I distinctly heard a sound like cracking eggs, but before I could point that out, the room went dark. At the same time, there was a terrific whooshing noise paired with a sucking sensation, and then a bellow of what felt like air but hit like a fist, sending me stumbling back against the wall. I hit, bounced off, and spun back around—

  In time to see something flash by the windows, going up. Something black and huge, but moving so swiftly that I blinked and it was gone, before I could identify it. And it didn’t look like Mircea had had any better luck.

  Even more worrying, the fey had stopped pounding on the door.

  “What—” I asked him, but he shook his head.

  He cautiously approached the line of windows, gesturing for me to stay back. Which made no sense. If the fey were planning to flank us, and climb around the building and come in through the openings, then we were both about to be—

  “Don’t stick your head out!” I said, hurrying over as he did just that. An arrow through the brain could sideline even a master for a few moments, and with the fey, that might be enough.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said, glancing around the gray expanse of mountains, sky and wall. There was nowhere for anyone to hide, not even behind the vine that had scrawled up the castle’s side and died, leaving only withered fingers clawing at the stone.

  I felt myself relax sli
ghtly.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get out of here, find Pritkin, and—”

  And then I was flying.

  It took me a moment to realize what had happened. All I saw for a dizzying second was a swirl of gray and something huge and black that appeared and disappeared in flashes. I caught the latter out of a corner of my eye, but couldn’t see it too well, because I’d been caught by one leg, leaving my skirts falling into my face. And before I could fix that, I was interrupted again.

  By another vision.

  “Got him!” Pritkin’s voice said triumphantly.

  My eyes blinked in sudden darkness. A torch somewhere nearby was splashing dark stone with honeyed light, which was also reflecting off the eyes of a very strange looking creature. It looked like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, with its fur covered body dressed in old timey clothes—if the rabbit had been a really messed up goat with savage looking horns and a maw of razor-sharp teeth that it was using to snap at me. It made me worry that I—or rather, Pritkin—was holding the creature only by the neck.

  “Cassie! Did you hear me?” Pritkin demanded. “I’ve got him; we can go!”

  “Yes, I—I heard you. But I’m kind of busy right now—”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m not . . . entirely sure—”

  “What do you mean you’re not sure? What’s going on? Where’s that bastard Basarab?”

  I never knew whether it was Pritkin calling out his name, or Mircea himself deciding to interrupt our conversation, but suddenly I was seeing through a different pair of eyes. Ones that were looking at a small, pink balloon being borne aloft by—

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Is that you?” Pritkin’s voice demanded accusingly. “Tell me that’s not you!”

  “Um—”

  Pritkin said something very rude, right before the goat thing jumped him. Damn it! And then Mircea was talking very fast and very loud in my head. “Cassie, listen to me. You need to bring the creature back this way, do you understand? I can try to get in its head, but it’s too far away and I don’t have a connection with it—”