Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

He sniffed, inhaling with a lift of his chin. “A maiden no longer, it seems,” he remarked, “but not gotten with child.”

“Cat,” said Rory, “your mouth is hanging open.”

The coach rocked as we bucked back into the winds. I grabbed at a strap to steady myself as I gaped. How could I ever forget that voice?

The amber gaze, so like mine, pinned me. “Tell me, Daughter. Whose blood shall feed me tonight? That of the girl who walks the path of dreams? Or some other? Son, open the shutters.”

Rory slid open the shutter of the door that opened into the mortal world. A tumult of wind and rain shook the coach. Raindrops iced as they spattered inside. A surly little voice hissed displeasure. A glitter of eyes winked on the door handle. With my sleeve, I wiped away a frosting of ice from the latch. Its gremlin face glowered briefly, but it seemed too intimidated to speak.

Rory leaned across and slid back the shutter on the door that opened into the spirit world. The hunt raced on the wind, tangling across the sky. Beasts clamored within the brawl of storm and surge. In their teeth I heard death: owls silent, snakes winding, hyenas cackling with laughter; the shrill of a hawk before it stoops, the pulse of fear that stops a beating heart, the festering that eats at flesh from within. If you are not to be killed then you must kill: That is the law of the hunt. Its drums sang in my heart, and the promise of blood tasted as sweet on my lips as a kiss.

I had that bastard Camjiata now.

“I know who it is, the power you sense rising.” I shouted to be heard above the din.

“Lead on, little cat,” said my sire, his cruel smile burning.

Expedition.

I leaned out the window to see the jetty lights burning and the masts in the harbor swaying in a blustering wind. Lights riddled the walls that ringed the old city. Sparks spun across twisting braids of smoke from the factories. Like tethered fish, the Taino airships that had spread out to occupy the city bobbed and tugged against the rising wind. We had come in so fast and unexpectedly that the airmen realized the danger too late; Taino sailors began hauling down the smallest airships in a belated attempt to stake them down and save them. The others bucked and rolled. A cable snapped. A stubby prow dipped, slicing across a building’s roof and jarring a cistern off its moorings. Water poured down the walls as people ran to escape the crumbling roof.

All across the city, people raced to shutter windows and tie netting over homes and roofs. Yet because of the speed of the storm, their efforts would not come quickly enough.

What must destroy the fleet would devastate the city.

So be it. Ice rimed my lips and chilled my heart. I was the hunter’s daughter.

But I was also Luce’s friend.

I would have grasped my sire’s hand like a supplicant, but I dared not touch him. “Promise me the hurricane will not come here, only the wind of our passing.”

He set a hand on the rim of the open window. “The hurricane will come someday, for the hurricane lives in this part of the world. But on this night the Angry Queen walks elsewhere. Then she will sleep until the season turns and the waters warm again.”

He leaned out to look. The coach circled the factory district, and one by one every factory engine stuttered and, with a collapsing hiss of steam, died. Gas lamps exploded. All the street lightning went out. A dull boom shook through the air.

He licked his lips with the precision of a cat. “Where is the dreamer? I cannot taste her.”

The maze of troll town glittered below, cutting through the chains of the magic he used to track his prey. I sought for her in my heart, and for a moment I caught her, but a mirror’s reflected light spun her image away and I lost her.

“I have hidden her from you!” I cried as my heart thrilled with triumph.

“So the little cat bites back.” His gaze on me could not be shed. He might have drained dry my spirit as easily as cut my throat to feast on my blood. “Where is the blood I’m owed this night?”

“I’m not sure how to find him.”

“Hunt down the threads that bind the world to find him, Daughter.”

Rory pressed fingers to my knee. “Scent is not only your nose, Cat. Who are you looking for? I can help you.”

“Let her sharpen the blade of her senses on her own,” said our sire. “How can she hone her steel if you do the work for her?”

My right hand I splayed over my breastbone. In the interstices that knit together the mortal world and the spirit world, I sought the ones I loved. Bee’s heart beat so close to mine it was as if my breath mingled with hers, even as mirrors shattered her image into a thousand shards. The locket tingled against my palm, and its warmth tugged me toward Vai’s bright spirit to the north. Rory was right here. I could even feel Bee’s little sisters, Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan, Luce and them at the boardinghouse, their lives like feathers tickling my skin. They were all safe.

I licked my lips, trying to taste the air as my sire tasted it, trying to sense the land as he sensed it. The mortal world was an impenetrable shadow, here and there pierced by essences I had no other word for except light. Scattered across the city and land below shone the spirits of mages strong enough to scent. Some flickered within the mortal shadow like comforting candlelight or gleamed with the steady purpose of gaslight. Others smoldered like half-buried coals. A few flared like pitch torches set alight. One I recognized: Drake simmered in the general’s town house, and at first look it was easy to see his magic as nothing more than a sullen red glow of no particular strength. But Vai had been right, of course. That smolder was merely a cap for a vast reservoir of molten power barely tamped down and ready to erupt.

I marked him. But I turned my heart toward the enemy I sought.

“General Camjiata. Lion of war. Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.”

I closed my left hand at my waist as if I held the hilt of the sword Camjiata had stolen from me. As at my command, my kinsmen bolted on the paths that net the world: loping wolves, baying hounds, rippling cats, silent sharks, winged raptors. From the smallest to the largest, they raced on the scent I envisioned more as a face and a figure and a presence than as a smell.

My senses slammed up against the border between Expedition and Taino country as against a spirit rope strung with amulets and charms. The Taino had woven a barrier around their kingdom not just with wealth and weapons but with what Vai’s grandmother might have called the nyama of their behiques. Yet it took me, half mortal as I was, only a moment’s negotiation a tear a rip in the spirit barrier. I slipped through, and the hunt poured through after me.

The island of Kiskeya slumbered, as yet unaware of this invasion, but her beating heart pulsed in the rhythm of the wedding areito. I heard its chant and rattle but I could not see the plaza or the ball courts; I couldn’t see the people celebrating. They were hidden from me because they were wreathed in shadow. I knew Camjiata was close, but I could not find him.

Yet the world was lit. Flames like gas lamps marked each behique, some burning fierce and strong while others simmered with a fire humble or frail. Yet in truth the presence of all those fire mages was difficult to distinguish against the brightest blaze. Most were like candles held next to a bonfire. The cacica’s magic burned so brightly that she almost blinded all else. How she did not kindle into an inferno I did not at first understand. She ought to be dead. The backlash of her power ought to have consumed her long since, but it had not. Nor was she surrounded by the charred corpses of her catch-fires. She was surrounded by a net of magic that shone as a dew-moistened spider’s web might when the rising sun catches in the filaments and breathes light over them.