Thea Harrison - Storm's Heart

You didn’t ignore a summons roared from the Lord of the Wyr in New York, since it usually heralded a disaster of some proportion. You especially didn’t ignore it if you were one of his sentinels.

Tiago strode out of the Starbucks located on the ground floor in Cuelebre Tower. He jogged up the north stairwell to the seventy-ninth floor. He could have taken the elevator, but he was feeling trapped and restless. He could have pushed out the coffee shop’s street exit, shifted into his Wyr form and flown to the roof of the Tower then gone down two flights, but frustration gnawed at his insides and he wanted to feel the burn of the climb in his muscles and lungs.

He didn’t like modern urban spaces. He was counting the minutes until he could get out of New York. A rainy, wet springtime had evaporated to sultry ninety-degree weather, bypassing mild early summer temps like they never existed. Now June felt like August. Exhaust fumes, construction detritus, trash, restaurant odors, dry cleaner chemicals and all the various other scents of modern humanity sizzled in the heat. The smells burned the back of his throat, leaving him feeling irritable and out of place.

He was one of the ancient Wyr who were so long-lived they were known as immortal. The old ones had either been formed in the creative fire from the birth of the solar system or had been born so long ago their origins were a mystery even to them. They had existed in their animal forms for millennia, but when the new species of humans burgeoned, the old Wyr learned how to shapeshift so they could walk in secret among humankind.

Civilization was a dance, and the ancient Wyr were late to the ball. They donned masks and slipped with silent predatory grace into the ballroom. They watched with sharp eyes that glittered deep in the shadows behind their assumed facades, recording and learning the twist and rhythm of the dance, the social mores, when to bow and press their lips to the back of the hand, how to smile and say good evening, please and thank you and yes, I shall take more sugar with my tea.

All the while they noted the pulse that fluttered at the base of the dancers’ necks, the scents of sweat and the quickened breath. They noted these things because they remembered they were animals playing a role. Primal was the first word they understood when they learned language, for that was what they were. Despite their smiling human masks, they were feral creatures who knew how to survive by the slash of tooth and claw. They remembered the gush of blood from the jugular as they crushed the life from their prey.

The ancients settled into their guises and grew comfortable with them, some with more charm, skill and enjoyment than others. But all of them carried that feral wildness at their core, the certain knowledge that they needed to roam the secret uncultivated magic places of the world.

Time and space had buckled when the Earth was formed. The buckling created dimensional pockets of Other land where magic pooled, time moved differently, modern technologies didn’t work and the sun shone with a different light. What came to be known as the Elder Races, the Wyrkind and the Elves, the Light and Dark Fae, the Demonkind, the Nightkind, human witches and all manner of monstrous creatures, tended to cluster in or around the Other lands.

Those of the ancient Wyr that chose to adapt to human civilization were driven from time to time to slip away from modern cities and towns. They would shake loose from their human facades and drench themselves in archaic argent sunlight as they lost themselves in flight, or in plunging deep into the magic-saturated green of the oldest of untamed forests. There was a fundamental difference between the old ones and the younger Wyr. The younger Wyr were born into civilization. They arrived at the ball already tamed.

Tiago was not tame. He was more feral than the majority of even the most ancient Wyr. He needed to be worked hard, to face tough challenges and to be let loose to roam free. It was not wise to hold him too long in a city.

Two and a half weeks had passed since Rune had called him back from South America. Dragos Cuelebre, Lord of the Wyrkind demesne, had been missing at the time. Tiago had just arrived back in the States when Dragos had reappeared with a strange woman. The tale they told was one of thievery, kidnapping, magic and murder.

A lot had happened since Tiago’s return and Dragos’s reappearance. Some of it had been fun, like tracking Dragos’s new mate when she had been kidnapped—again—and being in on the kill when Dragos had finally taken down his old enemy Urien, the Dark Fae King.

Vengeance, served hot. That had been Tiago’s kind of party.

Since then all he had been doing was cleanup and busywork. Make sure all involved Goblins were dead, check. Chase down and slaughter any Dark Fae that had been part of Urien’s party, check. Go to sleep with his thumb up his ass, check.

He smacked open the door that had the number 79 painted in a circle. His long legs ate up the distance as he strode down the marble-floored hall.

Cuelebre Enterprises was a multinational corporation that made an ungodly amount of money. Corporate employees and those involved in the governance of the Wyr demesne were compensated extremely well. Wyr sentinels had expense accounts that took care of clothes (the violent aspect to the sentinels’ lives made this a substantial perk), travel, food and weapons. What else did a guy need? Once in a while Tiago would double-check his escalating bank balance to make sure all the numbers added up, but otherwise, for the most part he ignored it.

He remembered when Cuelebre Tower had been built. The 1970s had seen the invention of the neutron bomb, the Three Mile Island disaster, the terrorist attack at Munich’s Olympic Games and the construction of Cuelebre Tower.

Yeah, staying far away from that project had been a good thing. He had been quite content to travel across the world to hunt down, depose and kill a dusty little sorcerer in South Africa who had acquired his own army and a penchant for the Power he could gain through human and Wyr sacrificial rites. When Tiago returned to New York—and he had been sure to take his own sweet time in doing so—Cuelebre Tower had erupted onto the landscape and forever changed the skyline of the city.

The outer surface of the Tower was sleek and gleaming, reflecting the changeable sky, while the interior had been decorated with an extravagance of gold-veined Turkish marble flooring, gleaming frosted glass lights and polished brass fixtures, along with strategically displayed, priceless works of art and sculpture. The entire skyscraper was a proclamation of the Wyr Lord Dragos Cuelebre’s wealth and power.

The achievement had more than architectural or economic significance. It made more than a political statement to the other Elder Races. The year of the Tower’s construction went down in recent Wyr folklore as a miracle of collective cooperation, personal dominance and merciless rule. Just as Dragos had dragged the recalcitrant, volatile Wyrkind under his reign so many centuries before, he bludgeoned them into modernity and forced them into compliance.

Although some of the Wyr bloodied each other during the highest-stress points of the Tower’s construction and the subsequent move of corporate and administrative offices, nobody actually dared to commit murder. They had been in the final stages of settling in when an amused Tiago had taken a tour of the skyscraper. All Wyr had been sent to their respective corners to settle ruffled fur or feathers, lick literal and metaphorical wounds, furnish their offices and unpack files. Now, without exception, anyone who had been involved in the creation of the Tower spoke of that time with pride and without the slightest comprehension of irony.