Master of Fire (33 page)

Smoke shook himself hard in an effort to banish the psychic scar of his darkest memory. His fur floated in the air with the violence of the movement, but it didn’t help.

Once again something else was coming to kill innocents under his protection. These two pretty children would end up lying in their own blood, eyes empty and staring while he suffered the memory of their deaths all the rest of his immortal, pointless life.

No. Gods and devils, not this time.
This time he would not fail. He would die if that’s what it took, but these children would live.

Smoke drove his mind into the core of the Mageverse where his purest power lay coiled and waiting. Power he’d walled away all those centuries ago.

Now he tore that wall down with a single fierce thrust of will. The magic came shrieking back, a cyclone whirl of energy that shredded his cat guise like rice paper in a gale.

It
burned
. The pain blazed mercilessly along every neuron and cell, until his brain seemed to ignite like a bonfire in his skull.

Andy and Heather screamed, high, startled shrieks that barely rose over the thunderclap sonic boom of his transformation. In that moment, he went from seven-pound house cat to his true guise—a tall, broadly built Sidhe warrior, clad in enchanted plate armor, a battle-axe in one hand. The only sign of the cat he’d been was the V-shaped silver stripes running through his long black hair.

For half a beat, the children just blinked at him. “What . . . Where did you . . . ?” Heather stammered, rolling off the couch and backing away.

Smart child.

“You have pointed ears!” Andy blurted.

“There’s no time for that.” He cast a spell, quick and ruthless, ensuring he’d get neither argument nor questions from his charges until they were safely elsewhere. “Come.”

Drawing again on his power, he prepared to cast a gate to Avalon. Once there, they’d . . .

It was like punching his fist into a wall of solid steel. The energy of his gate slammed into a force barrier that bounced it back on him. He barely managed to dissolve the spell in time to keep from being incinerated by his own creation.

You go nowhere, godling.
The voice hissed in his mind like a nest of snakes, its writhing mental touch making him recoil.

Smoke snarled a curse in a language that hadn’t been spoken in millennia. Grabbing Heather’s upper arm in one hand, he gave Andy a light push down the hall. “We’ve got to get out of here. Quickly. Get to the garage.”

Firmly under his spell, neither child questioned him as he hustled them along. The skin between his shoulder blades tightened and itched in warning dread with every step they took.

The sense of menace became a sickening presence. Claws scraped on the wooden floor.

Smoke jerked around.

The creature that had gated in behind them was nearly nine feet tall, with fur as thick and white as a polar bear’s. His eyes glowed orange, and his muzzle was wolfish, a match for the erect ears and bushy tail. A fluffy mane flared around his head to run down his chest all the way to his sex. Gold glinted against pale fur: a medallion engraved with intricate runes that matched the wide rings on each clawed finger.

Magic boiled around the creature like a hurricane front, a seething, glowing cloud, flavored with malevolence.

This had to be Warlock, the sorcerer werewolf Guinevere had warned him about in her psychic message.

The Dire Wolf smiled, thin black lips framing very white teeth. “There you are.”

Heather screamed, the sound piercing with an instinctive terror even Smoke’s calming spell couldn’t suppress.

“Get the car and get out,” Smoke told the children, giving them a shove down the hall. “Run.”

As they sprinted away, he faced the werewolf, lifted his war axe, and prepared to buy the children time to escape.

“I have dreamed of finding something like you,” Warlock said, moving closer with an odd, stalking grace, studying him with pleased interest. “I can pull a great deal of power from my clans, of course, but you—the power I’ll get from you would increase that by an order of . . .”

Smoke didn’t let him finish, lunging to swing the axe in a hard diagonal arc. The blade struck some kind of magical shield and bounced away, the pain of the abortive strike jarring his arm to the elbow.

He didn’t pause, rotating the axe’s three-foot-long shaft in both hands as if it were a quarterstaff. Mentally, Smoke cursed. The walls of the hall were too damned close together to swing the axe properly.

Luckily, he had thousands of years of combat experience, and he knew how to compensate for the problem. Sending a spell shimmering down the handle, he swung the axe with all his strength. The enchanted weapon passed through Sheetrock and studs like a ghost, going solid as it shot at the Dire Wolf’s grinning muzzle. The sorcerer’s magical shield flared gold . . . and the axe slid through it, too, solidifying the instant before it . . .

Warlock jerked his head back as the blade flashed past, missing his nose by a cat’s whisker. Smoke spun to add to the axe’s momentum, roaring a battle cry as he aimed for the beast’s chest. Again the Dire Wolf danced away at the last possible instant.

And in the kitchen down the hall, the children screamed. And something laughed, a rumbling evil chuckle.

Smoke whirled to throw himself into a plunging run down the hall.

He had to get to the children.

“Where are you going?” Warlock called, outraged. “You’re fighting
me.
The humans are not your concern!” The floor shook as the creature pounded after him, footsteps like thunder rolling under the children’s shrieks.

Heather screamed again
over the bang of a screen door. Smoke shot through the kitchen entry, jumped across an overturned chair, raced to the other side of the room, and hit the screen door so hard it flew off its hinges. The splintered door banged into the garage wall and tumbled into his path again. He fended it off with a forearm and ran past the Joneses’ white Saturn into the moonlit front yard.

The bastards had backed a dark blue van into the curving paved driveway, parking at an angle so the bulk of the vehicle hid their actions from curious neighbors.

Heather hung limp and unconscious over the brawny shoulder of a female werewolf, while a male with black fur handed Andy up to a mortal human crouched in the van’s open rear door. Yelling, the boy struggled hard, legs kicking, fists swinging. The man cursed and backhanded him, a single vicious slap. Andy clutched his head and started crying, gulping sobs of pain and fear.

Smoke snarled, conjured a knife as he ran, and threw it with a hard, skillful flick of his wrist. It thunked into the human kidnapper’s shoulder, and the man fell back, yelping in pain and clawing at the weapon.

The female Dire Wolf whirled toward Smoke, her eyes going wide in her red-furred face. She grabbed Heather’s jaw in a clawed hand that engulfed the teen’s entire head. “Back off, or I’ll break this little bitch’s neck.”

He conjured another blade, preparing to launch it with an extra kick of magic to give it greater speed. The Direkind might be resistant to magical blast attacks, but steel was steel. And one could still use a spell to add kinetic energy to any weapon.

But in the instant before he launched the knife, he sensed a blast boiling toward him. Smoke ducked, but the powerful bolt caught his shoulder, spinning him off his feet and into the air. Even as he tumbled, he curled his body, trying to roll with the bolt—only to slam into a bubble of energy that sucked him in with a pop. The bubble instantly clamped down on him like a vise. Pain tore a gritted curse from his compressing lungs.

Growling in fury, Smoke tried to blast free from his prison, but the globe only drank his magic down and tightened still more. His ribs creaked from the vicious pressure until he couldn’t draw breath to scream.

“Ah, better. Much better,” the white Dire Wolf said in his deep, oily voice. “Let me attend to the hostages, and then we can get down to business.”

 

 

Andy Jones stared
in numb fear at the elf man, who writhed five feet off the ground, his darkening face contorted in pain. Without even glancing at him, the giant white werewolf strolled over to the van, big head tilted in casual interest. He looked like something out of one of Andy’s video games, walking on legs curved like a dog’s, a big white monster with orange eyes and a whole lot of teeth.

Andy froze, not even daring to breathe. They’d cuffed his hands behind his back, and he felt sick and helpless.

“Take your hostages and go,” the white werewolf told his captors. “I will be busy with the godling for quite some time.”

“As you wish.” The black monster ducked his head in a kind of bow.

The white one turned and walked back to the elf, moving quickly on his big paws, like he couldn’t wait to do whatever horrible thing he had planned.

The wolfgirl handed Heather up to the black werewolf. He flopped her over one furry knee to handcuff her wrists behind her back.

“I’m bleeding!” the regular guy whined, clutching the knife buried in his shoulder. “I need to go to the emergency room!”

“Shut up,” the black werewolf snapped without looking around. He added to the wolfgirl, “Change back and drive.”

“To the target?”

“Not yet. We need time to prepare. Just find someplace to park out of sight.”

She nodded and closed the van door. A minute later, the engine started and the van lurched, backing up. It got really dark and quiet, except for the guy making kind of sobbing sounds of pain as he breathed.

The monster’s breath gusted against Andy’s arm, smelling like blood and raw meat. Andy did not want to imagine why. He’d probably start screaming again, and he had the feeling he needed to be really quiet.

The van stopped and accelerated forward. Andy braced his shoulder against the metal wall behind him and huddled on the carpeted floor next to his unconscious sister. His bruised face ached, and the handcuffs hurt. He wanted his mother.

Had the white werewolf killed the elf?

The regular guy spoke from the bench seat against the opposite wall. “If you think I’m gonna be able to rig the devices with my shoulder like this, you’re nuts.”

“You’ll find you can do whatever I tell you to do,” the werewolf said. “Because you won’t like the consequences if you don’t.”

Devices? What kind of devices?

He didn’t dare ask.

Smoke’s ribs ached
as he struggled to suck in a breath against the crushing weight of the Dire Wolf’s magic.

“They say you were a god once.” Blazing orange eyes regarded him through the energy globe. “You certainly have a lot of power.” Black lips stretched into a grin. “At least, for the moment. I’m going to take it all away.”

Sheer rage helped him draw a breath. “Fuck . . . you.”

Warlock laughed. “Have a little dignity. That is no way for a god to talk.”

Smoke could only snarl in reply.
I must get out of this thing. Gods knows what those furry bastards are doing to the children.

As desperation clawed at him, he scanned the trap that held him, seeking some flaw he could use to break the thing open and escape. Unfortunately, the globe was as smooth and featureless as a titanium egg. And every bit as strong.

So maybe he could
create
a weakness. Smoke picked a spot on the field between his feet and stared at it, concentrating fiercely as he focused his magic into a white-hot beam, bright and fierce as a laser. Then he shot that beam of a spell straight down into the globe’s bottom.

Which promptly sucked it up like a sponge.

Smoke curled his lip and kept trying, drawing more power, then still more, bearing down to force the spell into the tightest point he could manage.

“Oh, yes,” Warlock purred. “Give me more, godling.”

Smoke jerked his head up to meet the creature’s orange eyes. Eyes that glowed brighter as the spell burned hotter.

Gods and demons, the globe is feeding him my power.
Cursing silently, Smoke shut down his spell.

“Don’t stop,” the Dire Wolf said. “I still hunger.”

Smoke called him a few choice words, rolling syllables of rage in a language that hadn’t been spoken in millennia.

“I have no idea what you just said, but somehow I suspect it wasn’t very nice.” His grin mocking, the monster walked up to the globe as Smoke glared at him. “Never mind. I’ll be able to translate it myself once I have finished draining you.” The werewolf slid his ringed fingers into the globe as the medallion around his neck began to glow. So did the rings.