Inside the Flame (Elemental Mages Book 2)

by Rose O'Brien

  He was proud of himself for not outwardly reacting to her. And he was shocked at his internal reaction. And angry at her for trying to use him like that. Mostly, he just felt dirty.

  The sheets rustled as Jen climbed into bed. The lamp clicked off and the glow he could see through his lids disappeared. There was more rustling as she settled in. When it was silent, he spoke.

  “Jen, don’t ever touch me like that again.”

  He heard her breath catch, but she didn’t answer.

  Chapter 7

  As Jen woke the next morning, she pushed the tangled black mess of hair out of her eyes and was momentarily disoriented.

  As she looked over all the white marble and gold accents, her gaze landed on Theron’s sleeping form. And it all came rushing back.

  Don’t ever touch me like that again.

  The anger in his voice had been tangible. She’d crossed a line.

  Oh, god. She flushed and pulled the covers over her head. What in the fucking hell had she been thinking last night? If she was being honest with herself, she hadn’t been. At least, she hadn’t been thinking straight. It was never a good idea to formulate plans on too little sleep and most of the way through eight ounces of premium whisky.

  Slowly lowering the covers from her face, she looked up to find Theron’s blue eyes staring at her and she almost jerked in surprise.

  “Morning, sunshine,” he said sharply. That scowl was back.

  “Morning,” she said levelly.

  Swinging his legs off the couch, he rose to his feet.

  “Get yourself ready. I want to make Ramadi by nightfall.”

  Jen once again walked slowly to the bathroom under his withering glare.

  She’d worn a pair of cotton panties and a T-shirt that barely covered her ass to bed last night. This had been her only option. She’d have never been able to sleep if she’d worn the khakis.

  Holding her head high, she wrapped her pride around herself and walked to the bathroom, feeling Theron’s icy eyes on her the whole way. She kept herself from running across the huge room by pretending her T-shirt and panties were a ball gown and that it was Theron who was standing in his underwear. It sort of worked.

  Shutting herself in the bathroom, she broke land speed records getting dressed, brushing her teeth and running a comb through her hair.

  When she came out, her clothes were in the duffle and she scooped up her messenger bag. Theron motioned for the door.

  At her look of confusion, he said. “I took care of things while you were getting your beauty sleep, princess.”

  At her glare, he said, “Let’s get on the road.”

  “Aye aye, Cap.”

  His sigh of annoyance was a beautiful sound.

  ***

  Hours later, they were back on Highway 1 and crawling along at thirty-five miles per hour. Theron kept to the snail’s pace out of fear of hitting a roadside bomb. The explosives still littered the roads around Iraq, and he didn’t want to risk hitting one.

  As a fire mage, he might be able to control and redirect a blast, but he didn’t want to bank on his reflexes being fast enough. He was good, but why take the risk?

  His eyes were constantly scanning the roadside, looking for telltale triggers and markers of the homemade devices, and it left his lids tired and itchy. The music was cranked in an effort to discourage conversation and Metallica’s Unforgiven was blaring through the speakers.

  Jen was staring out the passenger window, watching the empty, flat landscape roll by. They hadn’t said a word since they’d said goodbye to Jaan this morning.

  The old king of the djinn had restocked some of their supplies. He’d provided them with paperwork that would get them past any Iraqi Army checkpoint. He couldn’t do anything about the ISIS blockades or the bandits, though, and told them to be careful. Most importantly, he’d given them some official looking documents that would help them get past the border guards and into Syria.

  As he’d shaken Jaan’s hand in farewell, the djinn had leaned in and whispered, “Take care of her, Theron. Everything may depend on it.”

  He’d met the eyes of the ancient being and nodded. Jaan’s words were still echoing in his head.

  Jen’s voice invaded his thoughts and he jerked in surprise, not catching her words. He turned the music down.

  “What?” he asked her, shooting her a look.

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you pull that shit last night?”

  “I—”

  “You know what,” he interrupted. “I know exactly why you did it. And it was a cynical, ugly thing to do. What I honestly don’t understand is why you are so hell bent on escaping and getting yourself captured by some of the scariest bastards in this or any other dimension.”

  She was silent for a long time and when he glanced over, her hands were folded in her lap, her head down, her eyes closed.

  Finally, she spoke. “My life was ripped away from me once.”

  Her voice was a little sad, but mostly it was flat.

  “It was a life I’d worked so hard to create for myself. Everything was perfect. And then, because of other people’s actions that were out of my control, that life disappeared. I tried so hard to get it back, and I was left with nothing and no one. So I started bouncing around war zones, and I told myself I was deliberately not building a life. I could pack up and leave it all behind at a moment’s notice.”

  After a pause and a deep breath, she continued. “And then those guys came along, and you came along, and I’m realizing that I had built a life. It wasn’t much of one, but I want it back. I have stories to write and deadlines. But once again, I’m not in control of my own life, and it’s all being ripped away. I swore that would never happen again.”

  Jeez, he felt lower than dog shit. He’d understood that she wasn’t happy about coming with him, but he didn’t realize that he was hurting her like this. She was trying hard to hide it, but there was pain and fear in her voice.

  He hit the brakes and pulled to the side of the road. Grabbing her hand, palm to palm, he couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Not physically,” he said. “I was focused on the mission, and I didn’t think about things from your point of view.”

  What had he taken her away from? Was there a boyfriend back in Baghdad that was worried sick about her? Parents that couldn’t reach her? Siblings that were calling every twenty minutes trying to get her to pick up? Suddenly, he realized how much he didn’t know about her.

  “Is there someone missing you right now?”

  He stared at her small hand, with its slender pale fingers.

  “Nope. I have no family left. I haven’t spoken to my friends in more than five years, which I’m pretty sure means they’re not my friends anymore.”

  “No one?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “There are going to be some editors back in the States wondering where my articles are in about two weeks,” she said finally.

  He breathed a sigh of relief, tension uncoiling in his stomach.

  “I’m sorry I ruined your life, Jen.”

  “I’m sorry I came on to you in order to catch you off guard long enough to knock you out. We’re even.”

  He looked up and she flashed him a little smile. It was close-mouthed, just one corner turning up ever so slightly, but it transformed her expression from harsh into almost playful. Something in his chest started to flutter at the sight and he rubbed absently at the skin above the spot.

  Easing off the brake, he pulled them back onto the road.

  Silence stretched between them for several minutes, and Theron began to wonder. What had happened to her? How had her life been ripped away? What had turned her into the hard, cynical creature with armor a mile thick? He was rarely curious about people, but with her, he was dying to find out more.

  “Cont
rol is an illusion,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  “I had a therapist tell me that once. I think it’s bullshit,” she said. “I make the decisions that affect my life. I don’t always know the outcome, but they’re still my decisions. It was my decision to go to the bomb site. It was my decision to talk to that spirit. It was my decision to go home. I may not be entirely in control of what happens next, but I can affect the outcome.”

  He just hoped that the outcome was her safe in the Citadel.

  “It’s in the quest for control that you lose it because the quest starts to control you,” he told her softly, his father’s words spoken in Theron’s voice.

  Her eyes narrowed and her brows lowered for a moment. She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it, sitting in silence for a long time.

  “Damn, Cap, that’s deep,” she said finally.

  “Just call me Yoda,” he replied.

  She snorted. She actually snorted. And he smiled.

  ***

  Hours later, Ozzy was singing about Iron Man, and Jen was asking questions. A lot of questions.

  “What are vampires like? Do they really burst into flames in sunlight?”

  If she was going to join the world of the shadow races, as Theron called them, she was going to need to know as much as possible.

  “Of course not. You’d hear about a lot more cases of spontaneous human combustion if that was true,” he told her. “They evolved as nocturnal predators, though, and they tend to avoid the sun. Their skin can get seriously burned pretty quickly in direct sunlight and it hurts their eyes. But some of them just cover up and wear sunscreen and sunglasses.”

  He glanced her way and continued, a small smile touching his mouth, “You’ve probably met several and never even knew it.”

  “They can pass for human?”

  “They are human. Just a different subspecies. Same with shape shifters and mages.”

  She took a minute to process that. Theron had explained that there were more branches of human evolution than sapiens—that’s what the shadow races called all the other humans—knew about.

  “Do vampires drink blood?”

  “Yeah,” he said, quickly adding, “but it’s always from willing donors. We’ve had laws about that for hundreds of years. There’s elements in sapien blood they can’t live without. But they eat regular food, too. These days, most of them get their blood delivered in bags.”

  Jen couldn’t help it, she made a disgusted face at the thought of drinking blood.

  “Can they turn huma—I mean sapiens—into vampires?”

  “Yeah, they can turn humans, but they have to get permission, and that almost never happens. They also have live births. Contrary to your folklore, they’re not undead. And they’re not immortal, they just live a really long time, like hundreds of years.”

  “Do mages live a really long time?” she asked.

  A bitter laugh escaped from him.

  “Normally, we live about as long as sapiens, a little longer.” His voice was harsh with a touch of sarcasm. At her confused look, he continued. “Most mages have a short shelf life. We’re the cops and soldiers of the shadow world. We’re lucky if we make it to forty before we meet a violent end. Some mages are healers, librarians, teachers. They live longer.”

  Jen frowned. To her, he seemed like some kind of superhero. He was faster and stronger than anything she’d seen. And then there was that whole controlling fire thing. It hadn’t occurred to her that he probably bled like everyone else.

  HIs iPhone picked that minute to switch songs to Rob Zombie’s More Human than Human. Fucking apropos.

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” she said.

  “Fair doesn’t come into it,” he responded. “A thousand plus years ago, the shadow races formed the Council. Someone decided that the mages, because we could most easily pass for sapien, would serve as the buffer, enforce the laws and punish those who broke them. So ever since then, mage children are taken from their parents at age seven and sent to the Academy. Attendance is mandatory. Obedience is absolute. Mages serve or die. All rogues are hunted down and eliminated.”

  “That sounds barbaric,” she said, anger at the thought of a little seven-year-old blonde boy being taken from his parents.

  “It’s what’s required to keep everyone safe,” he said.

  The world she was being dragged into was a dangerous and harsh one, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep going.

  “Why hide from the sapiens? If everyone lived together, it wouldn’t fall on the mages alone to protect everyone.”

  He shot her a “really?” look.

  “Because sapiens have such a great track record of treating those who are different with unconditional love and kindness? You people kill each other by the millions over differences of opinion. What do you think they’d do to us? The shadow races are just one percent of the population. We’re vastly outnumbered. Does the phrase ‘torches and pitchforks’ mean anything to you?”

  Jen shrank back in her seat. The man had a point, and she felt like an idiot. It was so easy to see oneself and one’s people as the good guys. After all the war zones she’d been in over the last five years, she knew that better than most. And yet, she’d fallen into that trap.

  She kept her mouth shut, afraid to say something else that would make her sound like more of an idiot.

  “Sorry, that was harsh,” he said, his voice quiet. “But I’ve lost friends and family in the fight to protect sapiens from rogue shadows and protect the shadows from being discovered by the sapiens.”

  As usual, she’d pushed too far with her questions. It wasn’t uncommon, a side effect of her job. When you asked questions for a living, it was hard to turn that off. Sometimes she walked into conversational back alleys and caught a knife in the ribs.

  She nodded at him, briefly meeting his eyes, but kept her mouth shut. Turning, she watched the desolate desert landscape slide slowly by outside her window.

  Theron’s deep voice broke the silence.

  “So, on chicken farms,” he said. “Do you think the chickens that get fed an all vegan diet act all superior to the chickens that don’t?”

  The question caught her so much by surprise that a laugh bubbled out of her throat. Her eyes widening, she clamped a hand over her mouth, but it was already out, like a bird slipping from an open cage door.

  It hit her suddenly that she was laughing a lot around this man. Not a sarcastic or a derisive laugh, but one of genuine amusement. Her surprised gaze met Theron’s and she saw his mouth turn up at the corner. Another laugh slipped past her fingers, feeling like an alien thing in her throat and causing her mouth to stretch into a smile against her hand.

  Taking her hand away from her face, she said, “Speaking as someone from LA, I can predict that vegan smugness is universal, even across species.”

  His smile widened as he turned his eyes back to the road. “Thought so,” he said. “These are just the questions that pop into my head when it’s too quiet.”

  “I better start talking then,” she said, the smile refusing to leave her face. “Wouldn’t want you to strain yourself.”

  ***

  An hour later, Theron could see Ramadi in the distance, silhouetted by the setting sun to the west.

  He’d gotten Jen talking about her time in the Middle East. She’d landed in Baghdad a little over five years ago after “shit blew up stateside.”

  She deftly steered the conversation away from her life before then, but was willing to talk about the places she’d been and the stories she’d covered since. She’d arrived in Iraq at the height of the US military occupation. As a freelancer she’d been unable to afford a translator, so she’d started out by embedding with a unit of Marines.

  They’d treated her like a little sister. She’d picked up enough Arabic from the veterans of multiple tours to get a conversational grasp on the language. As someone who’d had to learn that language, Theron knew how hard it could be to pick
it up.

  That had also been where she’d picked up the vicious fighting skills she’d used on him back at her hotel. There had been a lot of downtime during her weeks with the Marines, and they’d taken it upon themselves to make sure Jen could keep herself safe.

  They’d taught her their dirtiest, bone-breaking moves, and she’d taken to it like a fish to water. She’d let slip that she never would have considered something like that in her former life back in LA. That left Theron wondering what she’d been like before she’d landed in this hellhole.

  The woman sitting beside him was a hard, jaded survivor with a mountainous intellect and no compunctions about eliminating all obstacles in her path. Somewhere along the way, she’d left behind the ability to look on the bright side and had forgotten how to laugh.

  But she knew how to tell one heck of a story.

  “So, there I am in the middle of this huge protest, hundreds of thousands of people crowding the streets. Word starts making its way through the crowd that the president, who was a total dictator, has stepped down, and the crowd erupts.”

  The only time Theron had seen her open up was when she was telling a story about some place she’d been or some interview she’d done or some article she’d written. He’d take it. For now.

  “People are dancing, there’s music, screaming, cheering, crying. I’m trying to take pictures, and all of a sudden this guy grabs me. The crowd was so crazy that no one realized the guy was trying to drag me off to god knows where.”

  She must have been terrified, but she didn’t show that in the retelling.

  “I fight back, kicking and punching. I swing my backpack at the guy and catch him across the face. I tried to run, but the next thing I know I can’t breathe, and my side is on fire. I look down, and there’s a knife sticking out of my shirt, just below my ribs. I scream, stumble back and get swept up in the crowd.”

  Jesus. He’d never have guessed at some of the stuff she’d been through.

  “These three women saw the blood and the knife. Luckily, one of them was a nurse and she was able to keep me from bleeding out until we could get to a hospital.”