Dancer's Flame (Grace Bloods Book 2) Read online

  Gus made a thoughtful sound. At the door of Azrael’s quarters, Gus deposited the bag. Isela made her way into the kitchen slowly. She’d forgotten Gus was there until the woman spoke.

  “Gregor is right; you are not a fighter,” Gus said. “But I have never seen anyone dance like that. Learn to dance with your blades, and he will eat his words.”

  She might have a point, Gold murmured when she was gone.

  “Ugh, not you too.” Isela groaned.

  In any case, are you ready?

  “For what?”

  I need to take you out of your body, Gold said. I thought it best to wait until you were someplace warm. But we have to go soon. I have to show you something.

  Chill raced through Isela though the room was warm enough. “I don’t think—”

  You need to see this, Gold insisted, and we don’t have time to argue.

  Isela staggered backward, but there was nowhere to escape to. She felt herself sinking into the chair behind her, the sensation already distant.

  Close your eyes; it will be easier.

  When she opened them again, she found her senses wholly inadequate for orienting herself in the space. She’d been in the In Between before, the night Azrael fought Róisín to stop her from raising an angel. The space had taken on the shape of the underground tomb around them, grounding her. This time vast emptiness closed in on her. Her stomach dropped at the sense of being suspended without the weight of her body. She thrashed, trying to right herself, but every direction was simultaneously right and wrong. Her vision began to go dark.

  Strong hands closed on hers, grounding her.

  “Open your eyes, Issy,” Gold said. “It’s safe now. I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  Isela opened her eyes again, and this time the In Between was grounded over Azrael’s quarters. She recognized familiar shapes of furniture and fixtures in the overlay, and her stomach righted itself. Before her stood a woman washed in gold. Her features were as indistinguishable as those of an old sculpture, worn by time, but her wings, the black and orange of a monarch butterfly and folded around her shoulders like a cloak, were too vivid to be real.

  “You like it,” Gold asked, and Isela had the sense of her smiling shyly. “It’s my avatar, for when I appear to humans. I have a male version too. Would you prefer—”

  “No.” Isela cut her off. “No, this is… which god? That is…”

  “I am only a small god,” Gold admitted. “I helped ferry the dead on to the next plane. I got to know humans and, I suppose, love them in my way. But I know what the gods know, and when they wanted to watch you destroy yourselves, I knew I had to act…”

  “You betrayed your kind to help us.”

  Gold nodded solemnly. “Others overlooked me because I am not as old or powerful. I chose. We had our turn. We gave up the physical world to evolve. It belonged to your kind.”

  Questions crowded Isela’s mind, fighting for precedence and rendering her speechless.

  “We can’t stay long,” Gold said, tugging on her urgently. “The others will be alerted to the opening of a portal. But this can’t wait. Something’s happened. Come.”

  Gold led her from the apartment, through the gardens. They moved through walls and trees with only the slightest tug of resistance as she passed.

  “What did you just do?” Isela breathed.

  “You’re a physical creature,” Gold explained as they ran toward the edge of the garden. “Your mind depends on the sensations of your body to stay grounded. We have none, so we dispense with the boundaries created by your natural laws. Necromancers try, some of them get quite good at it, but most are still human enough to need a recognizable place.”

  “Human enough,” Isela breathed. “Does that mean they are part gods, like Azrael said?”

  “Azrael is wise.” Gold smiled mysteriously. “But he only has pieces of the puzzle. And now we have more pressing matters than looking backward. Ready?”

  “For what?”

  “To jump!” Gold said, and her cloak unfurled itself as she sprang off the turf.

  Isela moved without thinking, her body flying into the grand jetè that it knew from years of performing.

  Gold grasped her hands from above. When she looked up, all she could see were wings, magnificently impossible wings beating impossibly fast.

  They landed in a tumble in a place that was dark and colder than any human space. Gold was a bright glow against the blackness as she landed beside Isela. Her enormous wings folded, becoming as draping cloth once again over her shoulders and cascading to the ground. Isela could not look at her directly. The god dimmed.

  “I am sorry, Isela,” she said. “I am bad at this. But I will learn, I promise.”

  The tremor in her voice made Isela uneasy. Gold was a god. If she was afraid, what chance did they have? They were in a deep canyon, the walls rising black and jagged around them. She shuddered in the cold wind, and flakes of something like snow began to fall. In spite of the dark, each flake held the vivid tones of a multifaceted jewel. She held out her palm and collected a ruby, a sapphire, and an opal. They weighed nothing and did not melt at the touch of her skin. Instead, her skin began to glow as colored threads in each shade raced down along her veins and disappeared into her body. Isela felt them as they reached her heart, pumped out with each beat to the rest of her body. Each burned with a cool tingle.

  When she looked up, Gold watched her with a knowing smile on her featureless face. “I knew you were special. It’s called to you.”

  “What is this place?” Isela turned a circle as more jewel flakes gathered, swirling around her like her own miniature whirlwind.

  “It is nowhere and everywhere,” Gold said, glancing around them. “It is a representation of what is real but also the reality. This is the only way I could think of to show you what you need to see.”

  At last Isela had absorbed so much of the jewel glow she began to glow around the edges. She felt stronger, and the nausea of disorientation faded. Whatever the flakes were, they made her feel as though she belonged here as opposed to intruding. Gold took her hand, lacing their fingers together.

  “This will be easier now.” She smiled, and this time when she brightened it didn’t hurt Isela’s eyes at all. “See.”

  Before them rippled a reflective surface, a still pond rather than a mirror. Gold light poured from her features, framing her in illumination.

  “Now look.” Gold turned her around. Isela gasped.

  Beyond them, the canyon was blocked by a wall. It reminded her of cobblestones snugged against one another, but it lacked the substance of stone. With a rhythm that reminded her of breath, it swelled and released. As she and Gold brightened, shining light on it, it reflected back all the colors of the rainbow and the shades between.

  “This is the covenant,” Gold said. “When the necromancers allied with one another against the gods, this is what they built.”

  Isela moved forward, her sense of something restless moving beyond startling her back a step before she approached again. “How is this possible?”

  “It shouldn’t have been,” Gold said sensibly. “Necromancers have powers that come to them from the gods. And when they learned that humans could lure us through dance, they used it. Róisín called for a great parlay. Your allegiance and ours. There was much dissension on our side. Some wanted to be done with humans once and for all. The eldest of us chose to leave this world altogether, and only the squabbling, greedy ones bent on destruction remained. Then Róisín tricked them. She lured them to the In Between. And she and the others created the wall, barring them from the physical world.”

  “So the wall doesn’t keep the gods out?”

  “The shepherd has two ways to protect the flock,” Gold said. “Guard them or fence them in. Róisín chose the second.”

  “And you,” Isela asked.

  “I chose to remain with the sheep,” Gold said, the tone in her voice suggesting retreat, or fear, “rather than take my chances
among the wolves.” She flinched, dimming. “I’m sorry, that was a terrible analogy. I don’t think of you as—”

  “It’s okay, go on.” Isela glanced at the breathing, pulsing wall, wanting suddenly to be very far away from it.

  Gold confirmed her instinctive fear with her next words. “It is safer for me here. When they learned what I’d done… Well, even gods can be killed, Isela.”

  “And when Róisín killed Luther?”

  “I didn’t count on that.” Gold sighed. “I had to hide so that necromancers couldn’t find me. And then you came.” She brightened. “And you were something different. There has never been another quite like you, Isela Vogel. Many dancers have the blood of witches in their veins. But you also contain that which enables transformation. Change.”

  “The wolf blood,” Isela breathed.

  “That is one way it manifests.” Gold nodded. “And perhaps because I am only a small god, you and I are compatible.”

  Isela looked to the wall again. She recognized Azrael’s power when she looked, the threads of emerald running along the sapphire of his mentor, Róisín. So she had used his power too to create this wall. He was part of it. Was this the beginnings of his becoming a monster? Something about the wall tugged at her; she scanned it more closely, squinting her eyes though it wasn’t necessary to see in the end.

  “What is that?”

  “You can see it,” Gold breathed. Relief and dread warred in her sigh.

  A blight formed a ragged tear near one edge. “What happened?”

  “Can’t tell what side it started on,” Gold said, edging closer to Isela. “But something’s trying to get through.”

  The wall buckled and the tear widened for a moment. A flash of something large and scaled brushed against the gap. She jumped back, bumping into Gold, and for a moment they just stood together, leaning on one another. Gold trembled, and the light of her face had dimmed.

  “What do you mean, what side it started on?” Isela murmured.

  “Do you remember what the phoenix said in the square?” Gold whispered, though Isela sensed her gaze was still fixed on the tear. Her voice assumed a perfect mimicry of the transformed creature. “‘You will not be the only one.’ Why transform a phoenix to a human, stripping it of its magic, if not as some kind of test?”

  “You think a necromancer is doing this.”

  “Perhaps not all were satisfied with Azrael’s threats about their interference,” Gold said. “And what better way to fight one god than with another?”

  Isela, too, dimmed as the fear set in her bones. For the first time she felt the cold. She shook her head. “But it’s impossible, right? No one even knows why I can contain you without being burned out, never mind how we joined in the first place.”

  “Many things were judged impossible before they happened,” Gold said grimly. “But Isela, gods don’t obey or submit. And if they come, it won’t be to answer the whim of a necromancer. It will be for revenge.”

  Chapter Ten

  They drove all night and into the next day, stopping to refill the tank from the drums strapped to the Rover’s flanks.

  “It’s best if we approach the village in the morning.” Lysippe pulled up to what could barely be called a shed. In the vast wasteland of white and brown, it was a change in elevation.

  She parked the Land Cruiser in a lean-to beside the shed, and they all helped drag the thatch doors closed.

  “Traders and nomads use this as a waypoint,” she said, grunting as she dumped the two black bags on the ground to dig out kindling for a fire and a small camp. “Mary. What did you pack, a bazooka?”

  Azrael canted his brow at Gregor. “My question exactly.”

  Gregor took them both in with an expression of ferocious boredom before stalking into the shed. The look Azrael gave his first brought to mind the night of the French wine and the conversation, as if laying the fault for Gregor exactly where it was owed.

  “You said yes.” She shrugged, gesturing him to precede her inside. “Clothes are in there.”

  Gregor’s voice came right on cue. “What the fuck is this?”

  Azrael remained inside the small building, which reeked of grease smoke, sheep, and human funk, only long enough to change before retreating outside. Gregor and Lysippe, passing a bottle of something that had already killed their olfactory senses, made room for him around the campfire. Their cover was that of university professor and students doing an ethnography study of the remote villages. It was the same story they’d been using for a hundred years, alternating roles as appropriate. Their cots had been laid out with credentials and clothes—dressing like an academic doing fieldwork did not appeal to Gregor.

  Gregor hunched in his parka and fur hood, sipping petulantly from the earthenware bottle when it came back to him. Azrael made himself comfortable and stoked the fire, his brow furrowed. Gregor swung the bottle his direction.

  Azrael took it and gritted his teeth at the bitter tang that filled his mouth before passing it on to Lysippe. She chuckled.

  “We’ve drunk worse rotgut than this,” she said, taking a pull. “And you rather enjoyed it at the time.”

  “What can I say.” He grimaced as the liquid burned a path down his esophagus. “I was young and foolish. Tell me about Stary.”

  “It’s a thin place,” Lysippe said, the human word for a place gods had crossed over many times, weakening the barrier between worlds. “Otherwise unremarkable, though it was once a major stop on the overland trade routes and suffered a mining disaster before the godswar.”

  “The mine collapsed?” Gregor said.

  She nodded. “The company blamed it on poor tunneling, but the villagers swore they had angered the guardian of the mountain and caused the collapse. The company tried again, but they found no new veins. And the expense of importing workers was too great. Operations shut down—until two months ago.”

  The fine hairs rose on the back of Azrael’s neck.

  “A company started exploring the mining site,” Lysippe said. “I had my team track it down. It’s a shell company—”

  “Vanka’s?” he asked.

  They both looked at Gregor. He seemed to be occupied in making a dense study of the wood cracking in the pit before them. His gaze rose lazily. “Too good to be a coincidence.”

  “Too good,” Azrael mused. “Gregor—”

  “Are you going offer to relieve me too?” he said sharply. “The dancer’s made you soft, Azrael. Two hundred years ago you never would have asked—”

  The dancer. Had he ever referred to Isela by name?

  “I’m not offering,” Azrael said quietly, but he noted that all the droll humor and vague disinterest that was Gregor’s way had vanished, replaced by an iron focus. “But she has made me understand that the well-being of those you care for must be seen to, regularly.”

  Gregor looked away, his jaw tight. Lysippe busied herself with locating another clay jug.

  “I am not afraid of that redheaded termagant,” Gregor snarled finally, rising.

  Lysippe offered the jug as he passed. Gregor stalked off into the night, Azrael’s eyes following the shape of his hunched shoulders until he vanished into the darkness.

  “There’s a word I haven’t heard in a hundred years.” Lysippe shook the jar in Azrael’s direction with a sigh. “He’s not a child anymore.”

  “I am aware.”

  “We are the shield you raise against the world, necromancer,” she said, her eyes meeting his in challenge as she spoke the ancient words of their covenant. “We absorb the blows meant for you and hold off the sword that you may make a killing strike.”

  He stared into the fire, willing it higher, as though he could somehow reach Gregor with warmth, wherever he’d disappeared to.

  “You are also my family, of a kind,” he said at last. “And a shield that takes a blow it cannot hold will break.”

  At dawn, Azrael stood on the far side of their camp and watched the sun creep up over the frostbi
tten plain.

  Home.

  He tried to remember if the migrations would have taken his people this far west, but the memory escaped him. So much had changed. Even the land itself had been altered by time. It had been two thousand years after all. The tricky part about eternity—the details started to slip.

  But his body remembered. If he squinted, he could see the herds moving in the distance. When he closed his eyes, the sensation cut clean through to his core. He could almost smell it—cold wind bearing the musk of animals and the smoke of cook fires. The combination of grasses and distant trees, even the scent of the frozen earth, sang to him.

  He crouched, using a combination of heat and strength to pull a handful of earth away from the hard ground. It steamed and crumbled in his grip, sifting through his fingers and leaving runnels of mud behind as the water vaporized. He brought it to his nose, inhaled. Touched it to his tongue.

  The memories came back.

  He remembered the story of his mother’s parentage—his grandmother had been taken defending the elders and children from foreign raiders. Generations later, they still told stories about those invaders—tall, pale men with deep, rough voices and dense, unkempt hair on their faces and arms—intending to scare children into behaving.

  She was assumed dead or worse, a captive. She returned months later, swollen with child and leading a string of fine horses, carrying the spear of her captor. Some of her rivals muttered of magic and demon’s bargains.

  The rumors worsened for her final child. Azrael’s mother had been taller than most women, the pale skin and eyes a contrast to those of her people. Some said it was the influence of her mixed blood that caused her wandering. She would disappear for weeks at a time, leaving her children among her relatives.

  Some said she returned to her father’s lands. Others that she performed strange magic in an unknown lair in the hills. They advised the elders to find her another mate, but she would look on no man. Still, there must have been someone—she had been alone for three years with five children by the time he thickened her body.