Arise: Legacy of Flames Book 2 (Paperback)

“If you can’t take the heat, stay away from the enraged dragon.”

It was with those words that I addressed the giant tentacled monster that had wrapped itself around a middle-aged woman carrying a shopping bag and was slowly squeezing the life out of her. 

“Help!” screamed the woman, clinging onto a lamp post with both hands as she attempted to climb to safety. “The shadows are eating me!”

A few years ago, uttering that phrase in the middle of London would have resulted in raised eyebrows and the assumption that one was drunk or confused, but the majority of London’s human population had seen their worldview upended since an army of invaders from the fae realm had steamrollered through the city and brought all manner of impossible creatures out of hiding. Two years on, supernaturals like me were now able to live out in the open without concealing ourselves from our human neighbours, but man-eating monsters were as common a sight as pigeons in Trafalgar Square and with significantly more claws and teeth. This one had neither but instead resembled a shadowy mass of tentacles with a habit of spitting ambulant slime to paralyse its victims. Lovely.

I reached for my knife. Iron or steel was always a sure bet when faced with any kind of fae beast, but I’d have to be careful to avoid hurting the victim while I took it down. On the woman’s other side, Becks stood in wait, ready to transform into a cat, if need be. Will had taken the job of watching over Cori, my sister, who’d been unconscious since we’d rescued her from the Orion League’s prison two weeks ago. As a result of trading shifts on watch duty, we had to fight monsters as a two-person team rather than three.

Knife in hand, I swiped at a tentacle. Despite its semi-transparency, the iron sliced straight through, and the severed tentacle dropped into the road. Becks cut in with a knife in each hand—kitchen knives, but they’d do the job—and severed another tentacle, but the monster had at least twenty and the woman was running out of oxygen fast.

Taking careful aim, I stabbed at the tentacle wrapped around her back. Shadow shrivelled to grey ash as the iron took effect. The woman wriggled free, and I seized the chance to aim at the pulsing mass visible beneath the tentacles.

The creature spat at me, a wad of viscous black slime that hit the pavement and reared up like a fast-growing plant in an attempt to grab my ankles. As I backtracked, Becks reached the monster’s exposed core. Her twin knives struck home, and the creature collapsed into a mass that shrank inward until nothing was left but a greyish stain on the pavement.

The woman screamed again. Her arms were lifted above her head, and from the angle of her body, something invisible had grabbed her.

Ah, shit. Even shifters didn’t have the Sight—the ability to see through faerie glamour—and neither Becks nor I had seen the monster had brought backup. 

I left the tentacled creature lying in a heap and aimed at the new target, but my knife passed through empty air. Becks shouted a warning as a burst of light revealed a spindly fae creature, its hook-like hands releasing the woman and reaching for my throat.

I raised my own hands in defence—hands now turned into red-scaled claws—and caught the creature’s hand before it reached my neck. My claws ripped through its stick-like form, and it collapsed into two halves upon the pavement.

The woman pointed at my claws, her mouth hanging open like a drawbridge. Ah, dammit. I’d been doing my level best to fly under the radar—pun intended—since I’d been all over the local news a few weeks ago. A dragon on the front page tends to stick in the mind.  

I sheepishly hid my hands behind my back and put on an unconvincing smile. “Just a new spell my witch friend is working on.”

In fairness, Will probably could manufacture a spell that conjured up scaled gloves if the mood took him, but he’d spent the best part of the past fortnight rebuilding his supplies after his shop had been trashed by the very people responsible for forcing me to expose my dragon side to the world. Funny how the papers had never mentioned that part.

Instead, I’d since been replaced with the usual stories, like gargoyle gangs brawling in Soho, a kraken in the Thames, and a chimera in Green Park. But not a peep about the Orion League. No mention of the sinister underground prison in which they’d experimented on shifters and turned us against one another. Not a word of how they’d kidnapped my sister, and my friends and I had rescued her from certain death. The only allusion to the League’s leader, Malkin, had been an anonymous account of how my friends and I had trashed his fancy house in our bid to rescue Cori.

The fact that Cori had been in a coma ever since her rescue had thrown a bucket of icy water over our victory, and my constant state of nervousness about her plight did nothing to help my intention to keep my dragon side under wraps. I concentrated for several seconds before my claws turned back into regular human hands and I was able to help Becks pull out the bin bags she’d brought to transport the dead monster back to the local clean-up unit. 

That was what we did for a living these days: killed monsters for a pittance. And for the added security of knowing one fewer human-eating menace was loose on the street, I supposed. It beat starving on the streets, but I’d be willing to endure worse if only my sister were at my side. Leaving her at home dug into my conscience like a rusty nail in my shoe, but staying at her comatose side brought out my temper in a worse way, and the others had grown tired enough of my agitated hovering to drag me out of the house whenever possible.

“Delightful creatures.” Becks stashed her knives away and lifted a bin bag to dispose of the hook-handed fae first. She was an unassuming sight in her human form, maybe five feet tall with deep tanned skin and hair striped in an ombre black-brown effect that matched the markings on her cat form. “Now let’s get that tentacled thing out of here.”

Easier said than done. Shoving a mass of tentacles and dead skin into a bin bag while avoiding the slime it had left on the pavement was like wrestling a giant slug, and the revolting ooze soon covered both of us from head to toe. When we’d finally sealed the bag on our revolting haul, the woman handed a ten-pound note to Becks. “For your trouble.”

She avoided my eyes, probably still unsettled by my claws. I tried not to feel too insulted. At least she hadn’t tried to hit me over the head with a fire extinguisher like one of our previous clients had. And she’d given us a tip, too.

Becks and I split the bags between us and began the long and torturous task of hauling our cargo down the street. Being Londoners who’d spent most of our lives in hiding, none of my friends could drive, and taking dead faeries on public transport or in taxis was frowned upon, for obvious reasons. The local pickup was a good half-hour away made longer depending on how many bags of dead monster we had to haul. What the mercenaries’ clean-up crew did with the bodies, I absolutely did not want to know.

“What do you want to spend the extra tenner on?” asked Becks. “We can split it four ways or buy something all of us will use.”

“What, like weapons? Or decent food for once?” It’s not like Cori’s awake to enjoy it, said a cynical voice in my head which had been getting increasingly hard to ignore in recent days. “If you ask me, the guild ought to pay us twice over for bagging two monsters and not one.”

“Buy one monster, get one free,” Becks quipped. “I bet they’ll pull out some bullshit rule on us again that cheats us out of half the money.”

“That’s what we get for going official.” We’d scraped together a living for the last two years through taking on odd jobs, since our former lives had gone up in smoke along with half the city. After our last independent mission had led the hunters right to our doorstep, we’d signed up with the local mercenary unit to lessen the odds of someone trying to knife us in the back. Except the monsters we hunted, that is.

Most people would pick a less hazardous way to make a living, but shifters had possibly even less chance of being hired than other supernaturals did, for the depressing reason that some of us were easily mistaken for the shape-changing beasts who’d invaded the Earth. The only way to prove ourselves trustworthy was to fight against the faeries who’d caused so much damage to the world. And try not to get eaten in the process.

My arms were numb by the time we reached the pickup spot, an old warehouse covered in laminated posters advertising employment at the local guild of mercenaries. The term ‘guild’ was self-appointed and half the time wasn’t even spelled right on the posters, for all their proclamations of being proudly in line with the Mage Lords’ long-term plan to clean up London’s streets so people could leave their houses without being eaten alive. 

Becks rolled her eyes at the posters. “I notice nobody’s put a bounty on the League members yet, even though they’re the ones who set a giant robot on the loose in the city.”

“Malkin never showed himself in person, though,” I reminded her. “A lot of the others wore masks. I guess it’s kinda hard to put out arrest warrants on people who all look identical.”

That, and I’d roasted half of them alive when they’d cornered me in Magic Avenue. There was a good reason I’d been avoiding the place for two weeks. Turning into a dragon in front of one’s neighbours makes for some awkward conversations.

“Where in the world is the pickup crew?” Becks said, depositing the bin bag in the designated area by the warehouse with a revolted look on her face. There were already a sizeable number of equally disgusting bags and sacks in the vicinity. “It looks like nobody’s been here in a week.”

“No clue.” I didn’t particularly want to go into the warehouse, because it smelled like a troll had curled up and died in it and then been left to rot for a week. Eyes watering from the stench, I backed away from the revolting pile of monster parts and turned to Becks. “I’m going to report this to old Harwood. He’ll bitch at me, but honestly. I know watching a bunch of decomposing faeries isn’t a nice job, but if they stay there much longer, they’ll attract a horde of redcaps and worse.”

“True.” Becks gave the warehouse one last look of disgust and turned away.

It took a further fifteen minutes to reach the office of the local mercenary unit, but at least we weren’t carrying a sack of tentacles this time around. Such places had sprung up all over the city when it had become clear that the monsters who’d accompanied the invading Sidhe were here to stay and not at all picky about their taste in cuisine.

The office had once been a bank, but someone had stripped down the signs and replaced them with a crooked handmade plaque declaring this to be the “Mersenerry Gild.” I hadn’t wanted to get on the wrong foot with our new employer by pointing out the errors, but old Harwood wasn’t exactly known for attention to detail.

We found the boss at his usual place behind a crooked desk. He was a middle-aged guy with pasty skin that looked like he’d never seen the sun and thinning brown hair laced with grey. For some reason, the mercenary units attracted people who’d survived the invasion by sheer luck and didn’t want to risk their necks, so they’d taken on admin positions to make other people risk their necks instead. They were almost always unpleasant. Old Harwood wasn’t the worst boss I’d had, but his current expression was more akin to a manager about to fire us than someone greeting two employees who’d completed a successful project. 

“Hey.” I gave him a smile, which he didn’t return. “We just dropped off the dead faeries at the warehouse. There were two of them, did you know?”

“No,” he said. A lie, no doubt. “What was your name again?”

“Caroline,” I said, using my current alias. My auburn hair was now jet black, thanks to hair dye, which made me a little less recognisable than before, and it was lucky the cameras which had snapped dozens of photos of me in dragon form hadn’t recorded what I looked like as a human.

“Surname?”

“Hicks. Why?”

“New policy.” His gaze shifted to Becks. “Alice, is it?”

“Yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “What policy?”

“We need to see official ID from all employees,” he said. “Passport, driving licence…”

“I don’t drive and I’ve never left the country.” Oh, shit.

“Do you have your birth certificate?”

“Who carries their birth certificate around? Besides, I lost it when my house was destroyed two years ago. There’s nothing left.”

A lie. I’d never had a birth certificate. The notebook I’d arrived in London with listed the eleventh of March as my date of birth and I assumed it was accurate, because I had no memories before I was twelve and Cori was five. The only other information the notebook had given me was a guide on how to survive as a dragon shifter in a world that wanted me dead.

“Then apply for a new one,” said Old Harwood. “There’s a waiting list. Until then, you’re not permitted to take on work from this guild. There are too many people out to take the money and scarper. We’re running a business here.”

Dammit. What had brought this on? Maybe the mages had given them a shakedown for their lax approach to security, but even they should know that most people had lost everything two years ago and were lucky to have their lives, let alone anything else.

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll go somewhere else. Can we have the payment for today?”

“As I said.” He crossed his arms. “We’re only hiring registered individuals.”

I ground my back teeth. “You said there’s a waiting list. We already did the work. We need the money today.” 

I wasn’t kidding. We were running low on supplies, and Will hadn’t replenished his stock of witch ingredients enough to consider re-opening his shop, which left mercenary work as our only source of income. Yes, the mages had given us a cash reward after Will had pointed them to a lawbreaking witch—the same guy who’d already turned us in to the hunters and kickstarted the current shit show that was our lives—but that had only gone so far. There had been a lot of shifters left destitute after we’d rescued them from the Orion Stronghold and the thought of not offering them help after they’d suffered so badly at the hunters’ hands had been out of the question.

“Too bad,” said old Harwood. “You’ll know for next time.”

I ground my back teeth. “Who ordered this? The Mage Lords?”

Please say yes. The mages weren’t fans of shifters, but they didn’t want us dead. Unlike the hunters, who’d have very good reason to have our names and addresses on public record.

“The authorities,” said Old Harwood. “Get out. I have work to do.”

“Work like moving those dead faeries?” asked Becks. “Why are there so many outside the warehouse? Aren’t they supposed to have been removed by now?”

He rose from his seat so that he loomed over us. “Get out.”

“But we did the bloody job!” Becks stood her ground, outrage flashing in her eyes.

“And you’re unregistered. If you show up here with ID, you’ll get your payment.”

“That’s such bullshit,” she exploded. “You should have told us not to take the job if you didn’t plan to pay us. We nearly got killed.”

“You know what you signed up for.”

“Leave it,” I muttered to Becks. “It’s not worth it.” Anything we did to draw attention to ourselves would only come back to bite us.

We’d deliberately picked this outpost of the city’s mercenaries because it was as far from our previous haunts as possible. Applying for official ID documents was out of the question. I could think of a few people who would be delighted to find a database listing everyone who was supernatural. I didn’t need to make the League’s job any easier.

Becks huffed but followed me outside. A few drops of rain fell, and I heaved a sigh at the thought of the long walk home. The bus was an option, but the only cash we had was the tenner the woman had given us, and we were both covered in slime besides. Meanwhile, nobody had cleaned the ghosts out of the Underground yet, so the trains were on pause while necromancers took care of the rampant undead problem.

London had a lot of rebuilding to do. So did the world.

“Bullshit,” Becks growled to herself. “Who the hell makes those regulations?”

“It’s gotta be the Mage Lords,” I said, burying my hands in my pockets. “They can trace their ancestry back for a thousand years or more. They assume all supernaturals are the same and have nothing to hide.”

“They’ve never had to live in the shadows like we have. Though they sure are being elusive. I haven’t seen a mage in weeks, and they’re meant to be cleaning up this.” She waved a hand at the street, on which the mercenary unit was the only building still intact. The road had been cleared of broken glass and debris, but nobody had made any effort to restore the collapsed roofs and shattered windows and a thick layer of neglect smothered everything like low-hanging clouds.

“It really doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The mercs have got to know half or more of their recruits are supernaturals. Most humans wouldn’t sign up to go on monster-catching duty except out of desperation.” 

“What are they doing, creating a supernatural registry?”

“Bloody hope not.” Rain fell, soaking my hair and sliding down the back of my neck. I growled in annoyance. “Wish we could go back underground.”

““Me too,” Becks said, with feeling.

We’d rarely used our tunnels in the past two weeks. The hunters might not have resurfaced, but the memories of the Stronghold were fresh in all our minds, and the knowledge that they knew all our best hiding places made the risks outweigh the benefits. Most of the time. Dragons didn’t like water, and the curtains of rain masking my vision only served to make me more pissed off at the world in general. For all I knew, the hunters were now the ones hiding below the ground. 

Yeah, right. They always found it easy to blend in.

Anger churned inside me, tinged with the helplessness I’d become all too accustomed to lately. I’d been counting on today’s payment to put towards trying another potion to wake Cori. I’d thought she was suffering from exhaustion or the aftereffects of being drugged when we’d first brought her home, but she hadn’t so much as opened an eye since her rescue. The potions we used to keep her alive didn’t come cheap, and if not for Will’s connections with other witches, we’d have already run out of options.

The galling part was that none of this would have been a problem if not for Malkin’s irrational hatred of all supernaturals, especially shifters, and his habit of brainwashing his followers into believing we were pure evil. Some members had had the sense to walk away, like Giselle, who’d been tortured at the League’s hands, and Astor, who… well, the less I thought about him the better.

“What now?” Becks said. “We can’t go back there. We’ll also have to come up with new names, and I’ve had enough of keeping track of aliases as it is.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to look at the local job centre.”

“I thought we said nothing local.”

“We probably won’t be sticking around for much longer,” I said. “The neighbours are already starting to ask questions. I’m sure they know about our other guest, too.”

The guest in question was a half-faerie named Kit who spent half his time shrieking at the wall and the other half muttering to himself in languages none of us knew. He’d been held captive and tortured in the Stronghold for an unknown amount of time and had barely spoken a coherent word to us since we’d got him out.

A shadow flickered in the corner of my eye, and a blurred reflection passed through the nearest window, a short distance behind us.

“Becks,” I whispered. “I think we’re being followed.”

“You’re shitting me.”

I jerked my head towards the window of the shop we’d just passed. A crack split the glass in two, but the blurred image of a figure clad in black was unmistakeable.

Great. Looks like we’re getting into another unpaid fight after all.

My claws itched to come out, but I rested a hand on the knife at my belt instead. The figure disappeared from sight as soon as I tried to get a closer look at his reflection in the glass. He was male—I thought—but surely a hunter would have attacked openly. Playing peekaboo in the pouring rain wasn’t their typical style.

“Who’s there?” I called out.

No reply. A suspicion latched onto me, and I pushed sodden hair out of my eyes, anger burning brighter than ever. Straightening my shoulders, I began walking again, at speed.

“What’re you doing?” Becks asked. “I bet we can corner that guy.”

“I can’t be arsed, frankly.” I surreptitiously peeked at each window we passed, catching the occasional flash of black in the glass but no glimpse of his face. Not that I needed to see any more to identify our pursuer. 

Why the hell is he following us? 

Or rather, why not just talk to me openly? It wasn’t like we’d parted on bad terms. At least, I hadn’t thought so. It was anyone’s guess as to what was going on in his head.

“He’s still behind us,” Becks muttered as we picked up the pace again.

“I know.”

“Why not ask what he wants?”

“Clearly he’s in assassin mode and doesn’t want to talk in public.”

He also shouldn’t be able to easily keep pace with a pair of shifters, but the highest rank of hunters known as the Elites had been given advantages over regular humans via tattoos that Malkin had gleefully confirmed to be magical in nature. To say Astor hadn’t taken that revelation well was an understatement, and I could only assume that was why he’d spent the past fortnight avoiding me. 

I unlocked the door, my wet hands fumbling the key as footsteps sounded behind me. Then I turned to see Astor—the man who’d tried to kill me, saved my life more times than I could count and literally taken a bullet for me—and then, after sharing a bone-melting kiss, had vanished off the face of the earth. 

I didn’t know what I expected him to say. An apology, maybe. A ‘nice to see you’.

What he said instead was “I know how to wake your sister.”