Ignite the Fire: Incendiary

by Karen Chance

And, man, had he picked the worst possible venue for said ass-kicking.

  As demonstrated when my power grabbed him, even before I could clearly see a body, and threw him at the half-built warehouse. Then reversed time around it, so that the structure threw up a wall that hadn’t been there a second ago. A wall on which some asshole went splat.

  I backed time up and did it a couple more times, because why not? Throwing things using the Pythian power was the latest skill that Gertie had taught me, and I needed the practice. Plus, I wanted to get a better look at him. The slamming motion blurred things a little, but it was a him, and I suspected I knew which one. But I wasn’t sure, so when he finally staggered off the wall and into the path of a nearby sapling, I sped things up—

  And the tiny tree abruptly became a mighty oak.

  Very abruptly.

  Limbs speared his flesh as they shot skyward, ripping great gouges into his body—a very familiar, overly elongated body, with a head of flowing, silver-white hair and a mouth screaming what were probably profanities in whatever language the fey spoke. Because he was a fey and, unless I was very much mistaken, was named Aeslinn. And what the hell?

  “Who is that?” Agnes demanded, catching up.

  “A king of the light fey.”

  “What is he doing here?”

  “Beats the shit out of me.”

  Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, as they usually did when I uttered some strange, futuristic vulgarity. But then she surprised me. “I’d rather do it to him.”

  And that’s how I ended up tag-teaming an ancient fey warrior with the biggest badass I knew. Except for one. “Where’s Gertie?” I asked, while Aeslinn writhed and twisted as the tree did its best to rip him apart.

  “Keeping us in phase. He can’t be allowed to enter real time, or everything he does becomes history.”

  “And it doesn’t now?”

  Agnes looked annoyed. “Didn’t you listen to anything Lady Herophile said? We’re in transition. We’re all just potentials at this point. Nothing is real until we land.”

  “We take him here, then.”

  “Agreed. We need—”

  But I didn’t find out what we needed. Because Aeslinn suddenly tore himself off of the still growing tree, ripping through flesh, cracking through bone, and essentially doing our job for us. While raining enough blood and gore and viscera onto the ground that there were literal puddles in the dirt.

  I wasn’t nearly as squeamish as I’d been when first starting this job, but I still had to swallow hard. And then do it again for an entirely different reason a few seconds later. Because the hunk of torn flesh and busted sinew that fell into the blood puddles didn’t stay there—and didn’t stay mangled.

  I stared, because while I knew that the fey healed fast, even they don’t close gaping wounds in seconds. But Aeslinn did, fixing a gash in his thigh that ran from groin to knee as easily as zipping up a jacket. And then tearing a tree branch, complete with a profusion of bright green leaves, out of the middle of his torso, which immediately closed up, too.

  He was still covered in blood, there was a star shaped, silver scar on his chest from the branch, and his fine black clothing was in tatters. But the man himself was fine. He must have been missing half of his intestines, judging by what lay coiled on the ground at his feet, and basically all of his blood, yet he was fine.

  And had a curl to his lip and a fire in the storm-colored eyes that promised pain for somebody.

  “Shit,” I said succinctly, and it looked like Agnes agreed. But before she could comment, we had to throw ourselves to either side, to avoid a bolt of something that looked like lightning that he threw out of one hand.

  It felt like lightning, too, blinding me and searing my skin, despite not having touched me. I shifted immediately, landing on the opposite side of the tree, where I tried to send Aeslinn back onto his living torture device by reversing time. But it looked like he’d discovered what I already knew from dealing with another king of the fey: time spells had a limited effect on their royal houses.

  Really limited.

  Which was why Aeslinn almost immediately tore out of it, spinning and raising an arm—

  And I shifted blindly, because there was no time for anything else. I landed on the far side of the now completed warehouse, my eyes struggling to see anything past the aftereffects of another lightning bolt, one that had almost ended this fight really fast. And I do mean almost.

  My hair was all standing on end, my heart was trying to decide whether to beat or not, and my hands were shaking like I was holding a pair of maracas. And when I tried to move, my limbs all went in different directions and I fell to the ground. Hard.

  I stayed there, gripping dirt, unsure what to do for a minute. I could barely see anything, and all I could smell was smoke—which I belatedly realized was coming from me. Fuck!

  I tore off the now burning coat and rolled to put out any remaining fire, wishing I had the war mage outerwear that Pritkin had given me, and which was flame retardant. But I hadn’t exactly been prepared for this, which could be the byline of my life at this point, I thought viciously, as my elbow went up in flames. I shoved it into the dirt, and I must have been fast enough, since the rest of me didn’t ignite. But not roasting to death took a moment, and by the time I staggered back to my feet—

  Shit.

  I lurched around the side of the warehouse, following the sound of shrieking, and remembering that I’d left Agnes battling a god all on her own. Only to stop dead at more evidence of why she was Gertie’s heir. She’d learned from my mistake, realizing that time spells didn’t work properly on Aeslinn, but that they did work on everything else.

  And that those things worked on him just fine.

  Which was why a massive cloud of seagulls were stuttering around his head, to the point that I couldn’t even see it any more, while a tangle of roots had shot out of the ground, wrapping around his limbs, and dragging him down to earth, stabbing him repeatedly in the process.

  Unfortunately, along with souped up healing, Aeslinn seemed to have acquired souped up strength. Or maybe the fey were just that strong naturally; I didn’t know. I just knew that he grabbed a handful of the animated vines and jerked them out of his flesh like huge, writhing, blood covered snakes.

  And then flung a lightning bolt at Agnes large enough to have turned her to ash, only she was no longer there.

  Reflexes, I thought blankly, and shifted a barge.

  I hadn’t meant to, because that would be stupid. I couldn’t move a barge, with its thick wooden sides and heavy metal smokestack, much less one that was also pulling several flat, raft-style boats like cars on a train. The very idea was absurd.

  I’d planned to shift some of the cargo, but Agnes had been right: through my link to Mircea, I was mainlining something a lot stronger than the Tears of Apollo. I was also watching another lightning bolt scorch half of the waterfront, sending a line of boats flying upward in flames and freaking me out. So, I shifted a barge.

  A whole one.

  On top of Aeslinn.

  Only, that wasn’t the best part. The best part was something that I hadn’t intended or even thought about, because I’d only vaguely noticed the heavily laden barges making their way up and down the Thames. They were as much a fixture of life in Edwardian London as the seagulls that constantly wheeled overhead, chugging along and carrying everything from wool and timber to cement and cheese.

  And coal.

  Lots of coal.

  Huge mountains of it, in fact, to light all the fires and run all the factories around London.

  And guess which barge I’d grabbed?

  I’d always thought of coal as more of a smoldering thing than an exploding thing, but I guess it’s not supposed to be lit by lighting. Or maybe some volatile gasses had gotten trapped under those black mountains. Because, hell yeah, it exploded.

  No, that’s wrong. It EXPLODED, loudly enough to destroy my hearing and with a blast strong enough to
threaten to rip me apart, only I’d just shifted back behind the warehouse. Which . . . hadn’t been my best move.

  I rematerialized in a world on fire, with the warehouse falling to pieces and a whirlwind of ash and smoke swirling everywhere. I couldn’t see anything but fiery smears across my vision; I couldn’t breathe at all, having sucked in some of the burning ash; and I was pretty sure I was going to die. And then flaming nuggets of coal, like blazing hail, started pelting down, and I knew I was.

  But somebody took that moment to grab me, a soft hand reaching out of the hellscape, one with a surprisingly strong grip. Rhea, I thought, grabbing her back. And the next minute, I found myself kneeling in freezing water and trying to cough up my lungs.

  She’d shifted me somewhere, but I had no idea where. I still couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, and my ears—well, they weren’t even bothering to ring anymore; they’d just cut right out. Leaving me with the taste of ashes and the smell of fire as my only senses. And the feel of someone shaking my shoulders, with a grip far less gentle than Rhea’s had been, although I was too busy choking to death to protest.

  Somebody started slapping me on my back, hard and repeatedly, and I didn’t have the strength to tell them that it wasn’t working. Until it did, and I coughed up a huge wad of something I couldn’t see—thankfully—but which allowed me to get my first good breath in minutes. Which I used to vomit up breakfast.

  All of it.

  I didn’t care about that, either. I didn’t care about anything but sucking in whatever oxygen I could get in between my stomach’s eruptions. Which finally finished, leaving me kneeling in freezing water with half-digested pie on my face and gulping in breath after cold, wonderful breath, as if my lungs couldn’t get enough.

  It was the most amazing feeling in the world.

  And then my ears popped, and I heard Rhea’s voice saying: “I’ll go.”

  “You will not!” That was Gertie, sounding as grim as I’d ever heard her. “You wouldn’t last a moment against that thing.”

  “I have to try!”

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  “You can’t! You’re Pythia! If you die, the timeline will be irretrievable altered—”

  “And what do you think is about to happen now, hm?”

  “What’s . . . what’s about to happen now?” I croaked, staring blindly about. “What are you . . . talking about?”

  “Aeslinn, Lady,” Rhea breathed.

  “But . . . I killed him. I just—didn’t I?”

  My vision took that moment to clear slightly, enough for me to get my answer without her needing to say a word. We were back across the Thames and down a bit, on the other side from the world’s biggest bonfire. Which was currently backlighting the world’s biggest what-the-fuck, heading our way.

  It was huge, at least nine stories tall, and maybe more. It was black, but shedding pieces of burnt, crispy skin on the air behind it, to reveal blood red flesh underneath. It was man shaped, and judging by the way it grabbed a passing barge and threw it at Agnes, it was pissed.

  Aeslinn, I realized, or what was left of him. Only what was left was now a towering giant and how was that fair? How was that possible?

  I didn’t know, but it made the contest ridiculously one-sided. As if it hadn’t already been, because that explosion shouldn’t just have killed him; it should have obliterated him. It had almost killed me, and I’d been a good distance from the epicenter and behind a solid brick building.

  So, what the hell were we supposed to do with this?

  I didn’t know that, either, but he wasn’t daunting Agnes. And she was fast—so goddamned fast I couldn’t believe it, letting me know that she’d been taking it easier on Rhea than I’d thought. I could barely keep up with her as she shifted around, skipping from boat to shore to barge, and sending everything possible at the hideous specter in between.

  And she could preach to me all she liked, but no way wasn’t she hopped up on something. Because a stream of objects hit their target from three directions at once. What looked like tracer fire slammed into the creature’s back, as she summoned burning coal, bricks and pieces of glass from the bonfire behind him. From above, thousands of birds swirled around his head, caught in a time loop that they couldn’t escape, and unleashing a hurricane of biting, clawing, and dive-bombing frustration on Aeslinn. And from below, some long-buried artifacts out of London’s eventful history were being called forth to protect its people.

  Old, pockmarked cannonballs sped through the air, trailing ropes of green slime; a surprising number of algae-covered harpoons tore into the giant at vulnerable points; and every kind of trash imaginable—an old ball and chain from what looked like the Tudor period, a hail of Roman-era rooftiles and pottery shards, and pieces of sunken ships from a huge swath of time—all left a mark.

  But nothing stopped him.

  I glanced at Gertie, and saw that her hand was extended, somehow helping Agnes while also maintaining the transition, which explained the strength of the defense. But it wasn’t enough. Battered, bruised, and with parts of him still on fire—he was coming.

  And when he got here, he was going to kill us all.

  Unless . . .

  “What are you doing?” Rhea said, when I staggered to my feet, my filthy, wet skirts wrapping around my legs and threatening to trip me.

  I didn’t give her an answer, because I didn’t have time, and because she wouldn’t have liked it anyway. I didn’t like it, either, but if I was going down, I was going down fighting. And I had one last trick up my sleeve.

  Or, rather, Pritkin did.

  “Take Gertie out of here,” I rasped. “Take her now.”

  “You will do no such—” Gertie began.

  And then they were gone.

  It wouldn’t take Gertie long to overpower Rhea and return, but I didn’t need long. This would work or it wouldn’t, and if it didn’t, it was going to be a short fight. Very short, I thought, and lifted an arm.

  There was no time to panic, which I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anyway, because I was all out of adrenaline. My bones felt like liquid, my vision was still blurry, and all I could taste was bile. But I could still feel, and what I felt was a flood of power surging across the water toward me, unlike anything I’d ever known. There were no more questions about what I was facing. I didn’t understand it, but that wasn’t just a king of the fey striding this way, pushing boats aside with the force of his passing.

  That was a god.

  It didn’t look like one because it wasn’t corporeal at the moment. Aeslinn was, but the being surrounding him was pure energy, like the gods of old, who could take human form when they wished, but didn’t have to. They could appear as geese, or showers of golden rain, or oversized bulls—or like what was encircling Aeslinn in a sparkling cloud.

  The halo of the old stories was real, only it was body sized and didn’t indicate holiness, or anything like it. It indicated power, splashing around beyond the confines of Aeslinn’s body, because the gods fought using themselves. The same energy that made them up was also their greatest weapon, and right now, it was everywhere.

  I stared at it, while a little part of my brain reminded me that I was nobody; I was a runaway, a street kid, a secretary who read Tarot in a bar. Zeus had said it himself; I was so frail, so small, so human.

  But a human with a lover who was more than he seemed.

  Which was why I didn’t crumble under all that power. Or fall back to my knees, or cry out in terror, or whatever else the gods expected from us mere mortals. I embraced it instead, called it closer, and took it—

  For myself.

  Because John Pritkin wasn’t just a mage. His mother had been mostly human, but his father was Rosier, Prince of the Incubi, and he’d passed on part of his nature to his son. The part that allowed him to feed as the demons did, as the gods did, as Zeus had when he’d swallowed his wife and child . . .

  And as I now did to him.

  A punch of
power hit my outstretched hand, hard enough to stagger me, but not to make me go down. It felt like it fried every hair on my body, assuming that I had any left, but it didn’t hurt, because I didn’t keep it. I sent it to Mircea, merging it with the huge pool of energy his family possessed, and which acted like a battery pack for the whole clan.

  And then I took some more.

  A lot more, also sending it to Mircea through our bond, sucking it down. And, this time, Aeslinn noticed. He had just put his foot through a barge that Agnes had been standing on a second before, but at that he looked up.

  And just that quickly, she was forgotten.

  It looked like she’d done all she could for me anyway. The massive bird cloud was shredded, with tiny bodies floating on the water everywhere. The streams of fire and junk had also petered out to a few random pieces burning brightly against the gloom. And when I spotted her on the opposite bank, where she’d just rematerialized, she looked exhausted. Her body was slumped, and while I couldn’t see her face, I had the impression of despair—and apology.

  She was spent, having given the fight everything she had.

  Fair enough; channeling the power of a god can be exhausting. So why did I feel fine? Why did I feel amazing?

  Because I wasn’t channeling Aeslinn’s energy, like I did with the Pythian power. I was consuming it. I’d been sending most of it to Mircea, in an attempt to drain my opponent’s strength, but some had spilled over.

  And it tasted wonderful.

  Better than the best meal ever, and suddenly, I was starving. I pulled again, and this time, I didn’t send it on. This time, I kept it. And watched as my skin lit up with a golden glow, as warmth and sparkling energy coursed through my body, as the hair blowing around my face turned from sweaty, dull strands to glistening gold that rivalled sunlight, and as laughter—effervescent, joyous, and slightly mad—spilled from my lips.

  Yes! Yes! This was what I’d been craving, this was what I wanted. Ambrosia, I thought, the nectar of the gods—from a god.

  And then I pulled again, and this time, I didn’t stop.

  But Aeslinn did. He paused, with that huge body in the shallows, almost close enough to bring one of those massive feet down on my head. But he just stood there instead, looking more confused than anything, as if he didn’t understand what was happening.