Ignite the Fire: Incendiary by Karen Chance

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Meaty 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 slightly.

“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—”

“Bring it back?”

“—and therefore must be closer in order to—”

“How the hell do you expect me to bring it back?”

Considering that I was currently dangling from the giant paw of a massive black dragon, I thought that was a fair question. But then Mircea sent me his plan, which had me uttering some of Pritkin’s best verbal explosions, not that anybody could hear them. And then grabbing the damned skirts and using vamp strength to rip them off, giving me a free field of vision.

Which I could have really done without.

A huge expanse of black scales gleamed above me in the weak sunlight. They weren’t smooth like a snake’s but ridged, each having a little mountain in the middle of it, like an alligator’s hide only pointier. It made the creature look like it was bristling all over and would shred any skin that it came into contact with. And I was pretty sure that I wasn’t able to borrow Mircea’s healing abilities, since my hand was still on fire.

This was really going to suck.

“You can’t overpower that thing!” Pritkin yelled, as if hearing my thoughts, and maybe he could. “Use magic!”

“I don’t have my magic—”

“You don’t need yours. You have mine!” And the next second, he sent me a spell so strong and so compelling, that I felt my lips forming the words before I could stop them.

A massive ball of blue flame erupted out of nowhere and shot straight up the monstrous body, as if the creature had been doused in propane. It hit mid-way on the chest, as if I’d just lobbed a bomb into the middle of a 747, and ran over the gnarled old scales like water. In seconds, the entire top half of the creature was burning.

Only no, not burning, I realized sickly.

Because the tough old dragon hide seemed impervious to fire, including the magical variety. Even the great, leathery wings, which were the thinnest and thereby most vulnerable part of the beast, sloughed off the flames like water from a tarp. Huge, burning blue droplets cascaded backward and tumbled off the slick surface, almost hitting me in a few cases, despite my position dangling from a back paw. But most sailed over my head, leaving a trail of blue flame streaming out behind us that I stared back at in confusion.

Not at the visual, although it was impressive enough, but at the thought that we were supposed to be parked in the middle of a ley line. We had been since we passed through the portcullis, taking us who knew how far away from the outer world. So how were we flying off into the sky? How had we gotten back out again? Or had we, because a quick attempt to shift did nothing, my power being as locked away from me as ever.

I stared around at the landscape, seen through the rain of strange, blue fire, and felt my stomach tilt and whirl even more than it had when I’d first been snatched away. Because this looked like Earth, smelled like Earth, felt like Earth, except for the great, fiery dragon flapping through the sky above me. But it couldn’t be Earth, or I’d have been able to shift out of this already.

What if that portcullis hadn’t been a doorway to a stationary bubble, as I’d initially thought? What if we’d gone much further than that? What if the reason my power didn’t work was because we weren’t in a bubble at all, but had stepped through some kind of portal, all the way to—

“Faerie!” I screamed through the link at both men. “We’re in Faerie!”

I didn’t get a reply, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the sound of the dragon suddenly screeching overhead, an awful, tearing metal sound that maybe indicated that the fire was doing something, after all. The terrible shriek certainly was, namely rupturing my eardrums, not that it mattered. Corpses don’t need ears, which is what I was about to be, because the creature had just opened its paw.

And the difference between being carried and being dropped was like a shock of cold water to the face. Or a slap of cold air, as the enveloping cave of flesh fell away, and I started to plummet to my death. The old Cassie would have dropped the thirty or so stories to her doom, probably screaming the whole way.

The new Cassie reacted a little differently, because this wasn’t the first time that I’d been dropped from a height. Pritkin had done it at least a dozen times in training, to help me learn to use the Pythian power even under duress, although he’d always been there to catch me. Nobody was there now, but I didn’t need the help. Not with borrowed vampire reflexes allowing me to snare one of the great claws a split second later.

I held on for dear life, my hands sliding on the thick, horn-like surface, while my body twisted and turned in the freezing air.

The screaming part was, however, was pretty much the same.

I couldn’t hear myself; I couldn’t hear anything but dragon screeches. But I felt every one of those screams, which kept going on and on because the dragon was writhing now, turning and twisting, as if trying to shake me off. Or as if trying to shake someone else off, I realized, finally glimpsing the colossal battle being waged in the skies above me.

For a moment, in spite of everything, I just stared. Because that is what you do when your ex-boyfriend is darting through the air, battling a massive dragon in the middle of the sky. What the hell?

I blinked a couple of times, the cold air forcing tears from my eyes, or maybe that was due to them not believing what they were seeing. Mircea looked like a dark angel, I thought in shock. Or the opposite type of creature, because the wings he was currently using to batter the air were huge and black and leathery, growing out of his back near his shoulder blades, and he held in each hand a wicked looking spear tipped with more of that strange, blue fire.

“—the joints!” Pritkin’s voice was yelling in my head, but I didn’t think he was talking to me. His voice was dimmer, farther away, and harder to make out because of the wind in my ears. “Where the wings attach to the body. Strike there!”

Mircea struck there.

The words were still echoing in my head when he dove, the wings he shouldn’t have had tucked close to his body, the two glowing spears held together and out in front of him, forming his whole being into a sleek projectile that screamed through the air, hitting the huge beast exactly where Pritkin had advised.

And the advice had been good.

I felt the thud of the blow shiver through the great body, almost hard enough to throw me off. And then the beast reacted, and if I’d thought it had been writhing before, it was nothing to this. It thrashed in mid-air, while a spew of red and gold erupted from the huge maw, turning the world above us into a canopy of contrasting fire, and blocking out my view of—

“Mircea!” I screamed, my throat raw, but I didn’t hear anything back. Or maybe, as before, my ears were too full of dragon screeches to hear anything.

“Where is he?” Pritkin asked, his mental voice now loud in my head.

I looked everywhere, feeling my heart pounding against my ribcage, threatening to beat out of my chest. But I couldn’t see him. Billowing black smoke and leaping blue and red flames blocked my view, while the twisting of the great beast was slinging me about so hard that even vampire strength was being tested. I couldn’t see him.

“Cassie!” Pritkin’s voice had turned urgent.

“I don’t know; I don’t know!”

The tears streaming out of my eyes were from a different source now. I’d only recently lost a dear friend to this war, the wound still bright and sharp and burning. I couldn’t lose Mircea, too. I couldn’t.

And then the great beast gyrated, so abruptly that my body slung out behind me, and I lost part of my grip. Leaving me dangling by one hand as it spun in mid-air and started back for the castle, I didn’t know why. Until I saw them: a whole phalanx of fey spread out along the ramparts, and nocking arrows.

I stared at them, at the fairy tale castle behind them, at the colorful pennants snapping in the breeze, and my brain went blank. Humans are great adaptors, but not this fast. All I could think of for a second was: “how pretty.”

But I snapped out of it, because I’ve never believed in going quietly into that good night. I tried to remember the fireball spell, which hadn’t worked so well on dragon flesh but might do better against fey. But my brain was occupied by rushing white noise, my hand was slipping on the slick, horn-like material of the claw, and my stomach was threatening revolt despite the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything today.

Nothing remotely resembling a spell made it out of my mouth.

Which was why it was surprising to see the line of fey go up like birthday candles, nonetheless.

“Silent spell casting,” Pritkin yelled in my ear, before I could ask. I received a brief, one second flash of him running through the now virtually deserted halls of the castle, with something tucked under his arm. “Anything you can see, I can burn!”

Good to know, I thought, and lost my grip.

It seemed less of a deliberate thing than a reflex as the great beast realigned its legs, preparing to land. Or to crash, which was more likely to be the case here. But that was less of a concern to me than to the burning, panicked fey, because this time, I was falling.

Until, suddenly, I wasn’t.

I looked up, gasping at two shocks in as many seconds, and saw Mircea’s face backlit by the light through huge, leathery wings. “Hold on!” he yelled, clutching me tight.

I held on.

Yet I couldn’t help wondering why we were following the dragon straight down into—

“Heeeeeeellllllll!” I screamed, and Mircea’s grip tightened even more.

But he didn’t let go, or change course. What he did do was to follow the dragon straight back through the side of the castle. Which promptly ceased to be a castle and became a burst of flying blocks larger than my body, of tiny, shrapnel-like pieces as big as my fist, and of dust and screams and blood and arrows, because some of the crazed fey appeared to be trying to shoot the dragon.

This did not work, any more than shooting an out-of-control jumbo jet would have. And like anyone foolish enough to try, the fey ended up getting mowed the hell down. Or slammed against whatever remained of this part of the castle. Or kicked away from us by Mircea, who was still right on the dragon’s tail for some reason.

Maybe that reason, I thought, as we burst out of the shattered building and back into the courtyard where we’d first come in, and where still more fey—did they respawn or something, I wondered dizzily—were rushing to form up.

Only one does not form up before a dragon.

One gets the hell out of the way of a dragon, or one wishes one has.

It was a fact these fey were learning quickly, with the pretty, pretty lines, so shiny and smart, scattering and flying and, in some cases, getting ground into the stones of the courtyard beneath the great belly.

And then continuing to be so as the wounded beast thrashed around, giving me a brief, confused view of leather sheets blocking the sun, of great claws scrabbling at the ground I was trying to run over after Mircea touched down, of the feys’ silver hair streaming like banners in the wind, while we ducked and dodged and tried to avoid the churning caldron of dust and death that the once orderly forecourt had become.

And avoid it we did, because somebody had opened the portcullis, not that I could see it from here. But I could hear it clang, clang, clanging upwards, and more importantly, I could feel it. A blinding, shimmering tide of the Pythian power surged through the opening, as if it had been bunched up on the other side, collecting into a mighty wall as it struggled to reach me, but was denied.

It wasn’t denied now, and it didn’t grab me so much as snatch me up and throw me through the gate, where Pritkin was waiting on the other side, because of course he’d gotten the portcullis open; of course, he had. I snatched him up, too, on my way past, getting rewarded with a flash of brilliant green eyes in a bloodied face, and a triumphant yell as the portal released us and another power took us. My power.

And then we were gone.