Ignite the Fire: Incendiary by Karen Chance

Chapter Seventeen

 

 

My body informed me that my back was finally getting warm. I reached up and carefully tested the bath water with a pinkie. It was hot, but in the good way, not the scald-your-skin-off-and-end-your-life-screaming kind of way.

I turned off the heater, dropped the robe and climbed in.

And, okay, that was terrible, so terrible that I almost climbed right back out again, with all of my healing burns waking up to bitch at me. And then wonderful, when I persisted and they got tired of yelling and settled down. The tension in my body held for another minute, as if afraid to let up.

And then it released all at once, as if I was boneless.

It felt so good that I almost cried, and I hadn’t even added the soap yet.

I remedied that, but didn’t scrub down, because I didn’t want to wake up the burns again. There were a lot of them, although nothing like I had expected. The terrible silver scrawls were gone, and so too were the disturbing scars they had left behind. But Mircea must have run out of juice before he’d gotten to the rest of my collection, leaving me with pink polka dots all over my body from the rain of burning coal, as well as cuts and abrasions galore. I looked like I’d been in a fight, but not like I’d won.

“We are not winning.”

Shut up! I pushed the memory of what the incubus had said away, and lay back in the hot, hot, almost too hot water. And gave a deep, and heartfelt sigh.

This was nice, I thought drowsily. This was very nice. There was a little green oil slick on the water’s surface, probably from the awful salve. But it looked like somebody had sponged me off at some point, probably in order to tend to the wounds, so I hadn’t dirtied my bath too much.

Until I leaned back even more, and plunged my filthy hair into it, and got a shock.

I didn’t know where it had all been hiding, but so much dried mud, soot and grossness boiled off, as soon as I dunked my head underneath the surface, that it looked like I’d been mopping up the riverbed with my hair. There was even a small piece of seaweed in there, floating among the waves. Along with something that looked like—damn it!

I climbed out, immediately feeling cold again, and wrapped myself in a towel. And watched a tiny fish skeleton float around the now brown water. I cursed some more, let out the hot bath I’d waited forever for, and washed my filthy hair in cold. Because I wasn’t ruining another tub full, damn it!

By the time I finished, scrubbed the tub down with a towel, and heated up yet another bath, I was thoroughly chilled. And wondering if all this effort was even worth it. But the steam seduced me, and I climbed back in.

And, oh yeah.

Oh, yeah.

God, so worth it!

It would have been even better if I could have shut my brain off and just enjoyed it, but while my body felt tired and sleepy and sore, my brain was doing just fine. In fact, it was better than fine. It had woken up, thrown off the confusion, and was ready to rumble.

In retrospect, taking a bath was probably a mistake. Bath time was me time, when I took advantage of the brief solitude to look back over my day. It had become a habit to get reflective, and the fact that I didn’t want to do that right now didn’t seem to matter.

Cut it out, I said, querulously. I’d done enough thinking! I wanted to rest.

My brain did not cut it out. Instead, it brought up the problem of my love life again, making me want to throw something, only there wasn’t anything handy. Not even a loofa, which I guess wasn’t a thing in Edwardian London.

I sank down under the water, as far as I could go without drowning, but it didn’t help.  I wasn’t sure what would. But I wasn’t going with the incubus’s advice to just pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened.

I’d broken up with Mircea partly because he’d kept something from me—something huge. I couldn’t turn around and do the same thing to Pritkin. I had to tell him. But what if he didn’t understand? Or what if he did, but couldn’t get past it?

What if I lost him?

The demon had acted like I was silly for worrying about such a thing. We had a war to fight and here I was, freaking out over my relationship. But he didn’t get it: this wasn’t just about a relationship. It was about my ability to fight at all.

This war was a constant, daily slog that had been going on for months. And no, everyday wasn’t like this one. I’d have been crazy a long time ago if every day was like this one! But even on good days, when nothing was pressing and I could lay out by the pool at court, and watch the little initiates splash each other in the water, the war was always there.

I never really relaxed anymore. How could I? I never knew when the next hammer blow would fall, never knew who might come knocking at my door, never had any peace. I went to war council meetings in the morning, held sessions to judge the supernatural community in the afternoon, and tried to find time to manage the court’s business at night. But every moment of every day, the same clawing anxiety walked alongside me, turning down the edges of my mouth, causing my hands to shake at inopportune moments, and making me drop things or look up, startled, when someone entered a room, with a cry on my lips that shouldn’t have been there.

Except that it was always there—with one exception.

At night in Pritkin’s arms.

Then, for a few hours, I didn’t feel it. My anxiety vanished, to the point that it was hard to imagine it being there at all. There, for a little while, I laughed and giggled and talked and lived. Just for a while.

It kept me going. I sometimes thought it was the only thing that did. So, yeah, the incubus understood power, but he didn’t understand that it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t some kind of robot—plug her in and let her go. Or a Pythian Barbie: watch her defeat gods and fey kings and monsters galore. Now with a new accessory pack, a shiny golden whip!

I wasn’t either of those, or any of the other things that different groups wanted me to be. I was just me. And while I didn’t know what the gods were like, I got tired. I got discouraged. I got afraid and neurotic and had panic attacks and took far too many baths.

They didn’t help to calm me down much anymore, but at least I was clean.

But the point, and why an incubus of all creatures didn’t understand this was beyond me, was that it didn’t matter how powerful I was. Whatever strength I had wouldn’t help if I didn’t have the heart to wield it. And Pritkin, as irascible and crusty and annoying and occasionally rage-inducing as he could be, was my heart.

When we first met, I’d assumed that our relationship was a case of opposites attract. He was the smart, studious type, while books with tiny, medieval print gave me headaches. He was the planner, the type to lay everything out ahead of time and check and double check all possible outcomes, while I was busy running into traffic without looking both ways. Or, you know, either way. He was capable, skilled, and depended on a lifetime of experience to get him through crises. Whereas I . . . hoped for the best?

Sometimes, I looked at him and wondered what he saw in me. And then I remembered hearing him laugh for the first time, and how it had been accompanied by a look of surprise, like he couldn’t recall the last time he’d done that. Or watching him do magic tricks to amuse a bunch of giggling little girls. Or walking in on him making paper airplanes and arguing aerodynamics with Jesse and Jiao, the sole boys at my estrogen-filled court, so they wouldn’t feel left out.

All of which had made me start to think that maybe we weren’t so different, after all. We’d spent our whole lives wanting a home, a place we fit in, somewhere we could contribute something. Pritkin had joined the Corps hoping to do just that, after his wife betrayed him and his life fell apart. But the Corps wasn’t a home, and as useful as he might have been to them, he’d never fit in.

He did with me. We just worked; we always had. And yes, I’d brought a lot of chaos into his life, and even more problems; I didn’t deny that. But I hoped that I’d brought other things, too, good things.

Because he had, for me.

If I hadn’t just thrown them all away.

I drifted lower in the water, until just my nose was poking out, and felt the warmth surround me. It reminded me of Mircea’s arms, in that terrifying moment on the bed, when he’d first showed himself. I’d briefly thought that Zeus had found a new way of attacking me, or at least of imprisoning me, but I hadn’t really believed it.

I knew those arms.

Which brought up another problem I didn’t want to think about. A whole list of problems, in fact, like how good that embrace had felt, how much I had missed him, and how much the estrangement between us had hurt, even though it had been my idea.

Mircea and I didn’t work; we never had, no matter how much I had wanted us to. But part of me didn’t understand that. Part of me felt like an open wound, like I was missing something vital without him in my life.

Part of me still loved him, and had for almost as long as I could remember. He’d always been there: my first crush, my friend and confidant, my supporter and defender when nobody else cared. Loving him was my default setting, and the reason that long, silky hair on a man was my ideal, why brown velvet eyes always made me melt, why a Romanian accent, barely audible on the end of a syllable, caused my heart to skip a beat.

Like the mere mention of the word dulceață.

But there were problems with loving Mircea—a lot of them. Like the family, which he viewed me as being a part of. I suspected that was why he hadn’t put up more of a fight when I’d peeled off some of his masters recently, to help guard my court. In his mind, any resources I used was fair, as keeping me safe benefitted everyone.

But if I needed to be used as well, and my power co-opted to benefit that same family?

Well, that was fair, too.

We were a unit in his mind, Pythian neutrality be damned. And most of the time, that had turned out all right, since his position on the Vampire Senate meant that a lot of the favors that he wanted helped the war effort, too. I could give him what he asked, and feel good about it, because he was right: it benefitted all of us.

Except when it didn’t.

Like today, when the attack we’d barely survived was a direct outgrowth of my visit to old Romania. I never should have been there; never should have agreed to that. But I had, only not for the reason that Mircea probably thought.

Yes, I was afraid that he’d hijack my power and go on his own if I said no. And yes, I wanted my Mircea back, instead of the obsessed vampire he’d turned into. But I’d also done it simply because I loved him and wanted to help.

And that was the problem.

I’d put Mircea first, even above my responsibilities as Pythia. Agnes would have killed him for trying to joyride around the timeline, and probably Gertie, too. But I had helped him, because Mircea was a man obsessed with family. To have failed one member of it so completely as to let her die, and at the hands of his own brother? It was tearing him up inside, and had been for centuries.

Only, of course, his wife hadn’t died; we’d found that out on a previous trip. But she had been taken away, and by Aeslinn’s fey at that, and no one knew why. And I honestly thought that was worse for him, worse even than her death, which he’d long ago convinced himself that he would find a Pythia to help him undo. But to not know where she was, what had happened to her? What fate he had actually left her to?

Yeah, that was very much not working for him.

Another man would have descended into depression and just given up. Or fallen into self-destructive tendencies, raging and lashing out. Mircea was not another man. He was frighteningly intelligent, utterly determined, fiercely devoted and furious.

He wanted Aeslinn’s head on a pike. He wanted his wife back. He wanted his family made whole again and God help anybody who got in his way.

So, I hadn’t. I’d helped him instead. Because I understood his pain and was hoping that answers, whatever they were, would finally allow him some peace.

But no way would he return the favor.

No way would he put me first.

He loved me; I knew he did, but the family was paramount and always would be. I didn’t fault him for that; I cared about them, too. But it often felt like being part of the Borg—everything was for the collective.

Everyone outside was evaluated on what they could do for the family or what kind of threat they offered to it. And those of us inside were expected to be totally loyal, trusting the head of the clan to do what was best for us all. Being an impartial Pythia didn’t work in a situation like that, which was why I’d removed my court from his direct orbit.

And was another reason I’d removed myself from our relationship.

But Pritkin didn’t have a family, unless you counted Rosier, which I didn’t think he did. The two had made up, if grudging tolerance counted, but they weren’t close. Maybe as a result, Pritkin had never asked me to do anything for his people, or for him personally. In fact, he’d been furious any time I’d put myself in jeopardy to help him.

That didn’t make him better than Mircea; they were two different men in very different circumstances. But it made him better for me. I knew that, and I loved him, utterly and completely, but I loved Mircea, too, and it was a mess, I was a mess, and even more so lately, because there weren’t two men in my heart.

There were three.

Billy Joe had been the ghost of a riverboat gambler, who I’d managed to attract thanks to my dad’s type of necromancy. He was one of hundreds of spirits I’d interacted with through the years, only the others came and went, while Billy stuck around. To the point that it had started to feel like he was a part of me, a second, grumpy heartbeat, pounding in the middle of my chest, because that was where his necklace—a talisman that fed him power—had rested.

He’d acted like a second subconscious that piped up to offer advice, whether I wanted it or not. Or to cheer me up with one of his endless supply of terrible, dirty jokes. Or to distract me when my brain kept spinning around and around in worry, and I couldn’t turn it off.

Not until Billy tried to peek down my towel, that is, because perviness apparently survived the grave. Or sang me some old Irish ditty, making up more and more outrageous verses as he went along, until I was in stitches and he couldn’t hold a straight face anymore. Or beat me at cards, levitating them over the coffee table because he could touch things when he really wanted to.

But I couldn’t touch him.

My hand went to his necklace, which I still wore, despite it being hideously ugly and not even having a purpose anymore. A little chameleon tattoo on my wrist hid it from human eyes, and from most non-human ones, too. I could see it, though, and feel it, body-warm against my skin.

But it felt off these days; wrong. I couldn’t feel Billy, buzzing in the background. Even when he’d been sleeping, I’d always been able to feel him. Sometimes, I’d even been able to pick up on whatever he was dreaming about, which had mostly involved girls and booze, but still. I’d found it comforting.

I didn’t find it comforting now. It was an empty house that I dragged around with me because I couldn’t bear to take it off. Billy had passed on to whatever lay after death, transitioning after protecting me one last time, and I had known that I was going to miss him, but I hadn’t expected it to be like this. I missed him, every moment of every day, more than I’d ever thought possible . . .

And that, I realized, was why I was freaking out.

I’d already had part of my heart ripped out, stomped on, and lost, irrevocably and completely. I would never get Billy back, so I was terrified of losing even more. Of losing Mircea, as I almost had yesterday; of losing my court, who I was more and more fearful that I couldn’t protect against skyrocketing odds; of losing Pritkin . . .

An icy chill swept over me, even in the heat of the bath, because I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bear that. I knew it, as certainly as I’d ever known anything in my life.

The incubus thought I was panicking over a lover, but I wasn’t. If Pritkin never wanted to touch me again, I’d hate it, I’d hate everything about it, but I’d be okay. But if he didn’t care about me anymore, if he didn’t love me . . .

God! I just . . . I couldn’t . . . screw this! Screw all of this!

In desperation, I reached for a technique I’d learned in childhood, because growing up with a homicidal vampire teaches you things, even if those things count as mental disorders. But mental disorders can be useful at times, which is why the brain invents them in the first place. And was why, after a brief struggle, I was finally able to lock my worry and anxiety and sheer bloody terror into a nice little compartment in my brain.

And throw away the key.

It wouldn’t last—it never did these days—but it might give me time to finish my bath, to survive an interrogation by Gertie, and to go back to bed.

And, this time, not to dream.