Hearts of Fire (2 page)
Norgard took the small brass spyglass and raised it to his eye. “Fascinating.”
Brand shrugged. He ran his finger through a drop of aquavit and painted swirls on the bar. He had been just a fledgling when his father had designed the Deadglass.
“What does it do?” asked Nell.
“The spirit world is all around us,” Norgard said, “but we don’t see it, because the mind distorts reality based on our prejudices and expectations. The Deadglass strips away those illusions to expose the truth.”
“It’s a looking glass to see the dead,” Brand clarified. His tone didn’t betray the sharp pang beneath his breastbone, but Norgard heard it anyway.
“Your father was a brilliant artist, but weak.” Norgard adjusted the focal gears. “Most artists court madness, but to lose it over a woman is such a waste of the gift.”
Brand let the barb glance off him. He’d had centuries to get over it. His father had designed the Deadglass to search for his mother’s ghost. He’d faded from the living world as surely as she had, even if his body was still hale and hearty. He gave no thought to the child his lover had given him. If Brand were ever so lucky, he wouldn’t squander his gift. Dragon offspring were rare.
Nell leaned on the bar. “Might be a waste, but hardly unusual.” Her eyes rested heavily on the loud fellow, who became increasingly vulgar as his luck dwindled. “Women. Drink. Cards. Plenty of ways to lose your head.”
“And I’m sure you take advantage of it,” Norgard said. “As you should. But Brand’s father was a particularly brilliant glass artist. Not just anyone could design an instrument like this.” The loud fellow stood up suddenly, knocking over his chair. Norgard’s brows furrowed. “Let’s see if it works, shall we?” He pulled the silver pistol from his side and shot the man through the ear. Blood and brains sprayed the table. The man slumped to the floor. The Maiden across from him screamed, cutting off the music. Silence fell, heavy and brooding. Brand swallowed his shock.
“Please!” Nell said. “No violence on this consecrated ground.”
Norgard waved her off. “So re-consecrate it. Send me the bill.” He adjusted the gears on the Deadglass and studied the body. Blood continued to ooze from the body’s head and puddle on the floor.
Brand looked away. His stomach twisted. He’d seen his share of violence, but Norgard’s callousness unnerved him. He needed to remember this. It was easy to think of Norgard and feel that gratitude again. But Norgard had rescued him from Stockholm for his own ends. He didn’t do anything for free.
“Interesting. The spirit is peeling itself from the body. It looks ... confused,” Norgard said. “Another drink?”
“Perhaps later.” Brand needed to put some space between himself and the Drekar Regent. He didn’t trust Norgard’s methods. He didn’t like being in the dark regarding his plans. But he owed Norgard a debt, and a debt he would pay.
“You can replicate this?” Norgard asked. He handed the Deadglass back to Brand.
“Keep it. I have my father’s designs. I watched him make it.”
“Good.” Norgard pocketed the glass. “I trust you found your new workshop to be adequate?”
Brand nodded.
“You can start work immediately then.”
“I’ll need your measurements.” Brand would make a Deadglass monocle for Norgard as he had been hired to do, and then he would set his skills to a better use. Fire could destroy, but it could also create. This was a new land, and he intended to make a fresh start. He didn’t need the ghosts of the past chaining him down.
That night he dreamed of tawny, violet-ringed eyes. He didn’t need to cast runes to determine the portent of those dreams. He wouldn’t sit around letting Norgard determine his future. He would seek it out, starting with a raven-haired woman.
Alice made plans. She wasn’t one to wait on her heels for destiny to come to her; it wasn’t the Kivati way. She dropped hints to her father until he came up with the brilliant idea to throw a welcome ball. It would be his chance to show the newcomers that Seattle wasn’t some backwater town, that they had their own elegance and style that could rival any ballroom in fashionable New York.
“Someday soon, Ali girl, Seattle will knock New York off the map,” her father said. “Artists will flock here for music and industry and culture. Seattle will be the place to see and be seen.” He craved respectability in the eyes of the rest of the world, for he knew how they were viewed: a frontier town with nothing to recommend it, except to the poor and industrious looking to build a new life. It had its own honor about it, she thought, but her father just wanted to hear the jingle of gold in his pockets and know who pulled the strings.
Preparations for a ball gave her plenty of excuses to visit the shops in town, and if the handsome stranger happened to haunt those same shops, so much the better. She and Hattie found him at Potter’s General Store one afternoon. He’d ducked inside to shelter from the rain. He had elegant hands. Perfectly manicured without a scratch, though he wore no gloves. Unblemished, they would have marked him as a useless aristocrat. But he used those hands like an artist, running his fingertips over the curve of a glass goblet, feeling the grain of the wood counter, cupping an apple in his hands as if he could taste it through his skin.
She wondered what it would be like to have those hands on her.
He opened his eyes and found her watching him.
“Is it to your satisfaction?” she asked. Behind her, Hattie gave a little gasp.
He tossed the apple in the air and caught it. His blue eyes flickered down her body and back to her face. He brought the apple to his lips. “
Ja
,” he said. His accent was Swedish. His voice a rich tenor. The sound struck a chord low in her belly. His white teeth flashed as he took a bite.
Ja
,” he said. His accent was Swedish. His voice a rich tenor. The sound struck a chord low in her belly. His white teeth flashed as he took a bite.
Mrs. Potter returned to the front of the shop with her bolt of poplin. “Here we are, miss. Latest shipment in from New York. Will this be working for you?”
Alice reached out to touch the fabric. She hardly saw the amber roses festooned with small violet leaves, perfect to match her eyes. Excitement fluttered through her breast. The air in the shop tingled with unspent energy. “Yes. This will work quite well.” She heard a crunch as he took another bite. She imagined the juice of the apple wetting his firm, broad lips.
“It is a lovely color,” he told the shopkeeper, motioning to the fabric.
“Thank you kindly.” Mrs. Potter preened. “I am stocking the latest styles and patterns from New York, London, and Paris. Not last year’s fashions, mind you.”
“That fast? Incredible.”
Alice stifled a laugh. Seattle might be at the uncharted edge of the map, but the Kivati hadn’t been completely secluded away. Thunderbirds, with their great strength and massive wings, had always scouted politics and culture from other parts of the globe. Kivati informants were stationed in the great cities of the world, and crows brought back the news in a semi-regular fashion.
“We have our ways,” Mrs. Potter said.
“The mysteries of fashion,” he said easily. He set a penny on the counter to pay for the apple. “And ripe apples in June, what a marvelous place this is. Good day, ladies.”
When the shop bell tingled behind him, Hattie grabbed her sleeve. “A jaguar. I’m sure of it. Look at that feline grace. And did you see his eyes? When he looked at you, his pupils slit like a cat.”
“Did they?” Alice feigned indifference, while inside a whoop of joy fought to escape. A shape-shifter! “I don’t think jaguars are native to Scandinavia.”
“Fair point. Maybe a lynx.” Hattie nudged her in the ribs.
Alice grinned and paid for the fabric.
The stranger had a lazy way about him, like he had all the time in the world to walk down the street and meant to take his time doing it. With those rolling hips and muscled thighs, she could watch him all day. Strolling, exactly as Hattie said, like a big cat. But his eyes were cooler than a feline, and when he caught her looking, the dark hunger in his gaze sent some primitive part of her running for safety.
A cat she could handle. He was something else.
Chapter 2
“A ball. How quaint,” Norgard drawled. In his left eye, he wore the Deadglass monocle Brand had finished that morning. With one eye a smattering of gears and glass, and the other a pitiless blue, he seemed more heartless machine than man.
Brand wouldn’t disagree outwardly about the ball, but he found the unbridled enthusiasm of the locals refreshing. He’d left behind the fashionable ennui. The tired positioning. The sneer at anything that smacked of true interest or affection. This backwater town overflowed with promise, and the inhabitants knew it. No one was too proud to show it. Even the local elite, with a few exceptions, seemed welcoming and legitimately honest in their affection. He didn’t understand Norgard’s dislike, because it was more than a distain for the provincial. Norgard seemed eager, somehow, to hoodwink the Kivati into accepting their damned kind, and more eager to banish their open ideals and stick the sordid truth to them. To jade them. To tarnish that innocent regard and make them as black and rotted as he was.
An innocent was only a cynic waiting to be discovered.
Brand refused to let Norgard’s attitude detract from his night. He would see her again. All week he’d loitered in town waiting for a glimpse of her. With luck, maybe he could steal a dance.
The Kivati’s new wooden palace ruled a central spot on Front Street. The wide boardwalk saved a man’s boots from the thick mud of the street. The sky was almost cloudless, for once, and his spirits lifted. Perhaps Freya, the Norse goddess of love, was indeed smiling on him, because the Kivati chief himself welcomed them to the party with his beautiful daughter at his side.
He barely heard Norgard’s pleasantries, or Halian Corbette’s response. She was a vision, plucked from the deepest recesses of his dreams. She stood tall and strong, with wide cheekbones, a proud nose, and a lush mouth perpetually curved in a secretive smile. Her jet-black hair curled artfully around her oval face. Her tawny eyes were ringed with the slight purple edge that marked a Kivati shape-shifter. He could fall into those eyes. There was a promise there. Delight and passion and a soul unwearied by the world. Unlike his comrades. Unlike the crowded society he’d left behind. Unlike his own.
“My daughter,” the Kivati leader said. “Lady Alice.”
Alice. The world held its breath on that one name. It whirred around his mind like a trapped hummingbird. Wanted out. Wanted to caress his lips, but the dragon swallowed her name down to hide it and keep it for his very own. He would jealously guard that treasure.
Now he knew how the poets felt. Felled by an arrow straight from Cupid’s bow. Stars aligned for this moment. A lifetime of misadventure and broken roads all leading to this single spot, this introduction, this portent. A woman. He took her hand. Such a little thing. He’d done it countless times before. He had touched bosoms and naked flesh more scandalous than a simple gloved hand. But his heart had never beat so fast. His lungs had never felt so raw. Four fingers and a thumb in soft kidskin, light as a bird’s wing, and he was quivering like a boy at his first sight of a turned ankle.
Damned though he was, Freya had sent him an angel.
The little curve of her mouth said he was wrong—there was more knowledge in those deep eyes than any innocent should have—but that didn’t dissuade him that some greater power was at work. The dark, frozen place where his soul should have been was lit and toasty with one smile from her divine lips.
At his side, Norgard cleared his throat. “Forgive my bumbling companion, mademoiselle. Let me introduce Brand Haldor. He is but another poor soul caught in the web of your great beauty.”
She pinked slightly across her wide cheekbones. But unlike most women, who melted at Norgard’s seductive words, her eyes didn’t even flicker to the Regent. She held the connection between her and Brand. An entire conversation was conveyed in that look. With only a hand’s touch, he felt scorched. His skin prickled. He was rooted to the floor, petrified as the Deadglass.
“Haldor,” Norgard said. Sharp. A command from his Regent.
Unwillingly, Brand forced his fingers to let go. Her hand fluttered down, only to be picked up again by Norgard, who oozed charming nonsense over it, followed by the heightened scent of iron and cinnamon. The Drekar’s musk relaxed the body and stimulated the erogenous core. It seduced the nose while their pleasing appearance seduced the eye, all calculated to draw in their prey.
Lady Alice would not be Norgard’s prey.
Brand heard a low rumble. He looked up to see the narrowed gaze of Lady Alice’s father, and knew the man was looking back at Brand’s own slitted pupils.
Norgard released Lady Alice’s hand and shooed him along. “Don’t be a fool,” Norgard hissed when they’d moved out of earshot. “They don’t know what we are yet. See to it that it stays that way.”
“How long can you keep that cat in the bag?” Brand asked.
“Until I have collateral,” Norgard snapped. “I’m not going anywhere. I have plans here.”
The Kivati had good musicians. Brand had listened to many a ballroom orchestra, but this one played with the carefree exuberance that he’d noticed in all aspects of this strange frontier town. It was as if the train that brought him to Seattle had run clear over the desperation of the prairie and into the promised land of milk and honey. He watched Lady Alice open the ball with a lanky boy on the cusp of manhood. Her brother, Brand thought. The future ruler of the Kivati. The boy had sharp features and a large hawkish nose he would hopefully grow into. The shape of his eyes and his straight black hair he shared with Alice. But his scowl was so different from her open, pixie expression that Brand could almost think they were a separate species entirely.
Alice moved like the music inhabited her bones. Brand was unfamiliar with the dance. More rhythm, more seductive swaying of her hips than he’d ever seen in a proper ballroom. It was the drums, he thought, that called to the animal inside him. She danced like she felt it too: the beat of the drums and the tap of her feet and the pulse in her veins and the beating of the great heart deep within the earth. He wanted to dance with her. He’d never been much for the bowing and scraping of polite society, but here, now, there was nothing he’d like to do more than hold her hand again and sweep her about the room.
The Kivati leader seemed to have invited the entire territory. Some were human: strong, hardened industrialists, railroad and lumber barons, newspaper men and bankers. At least half were not; they moved with animal grace and had strangely colored pupils. Brand was surprised at how many there were. And Norgard thought to plant his stake among them? When they didn’t know what he was? Brand had never spent much time with another supernatural culture. Drekar were solitary by nature. They hid away in the shadowed corners of the world.
Brand was tired of hiding who and what he was.
But would Lady Alice welcome the darkness if she knew?
Then she was in front of him and he forgot the old urge to run. She was all that mattered. She looked on him with wide, sparkling eyes and a welcoming smile. She had to know what he was. She was the same, wasn’t she? And here was a place ruled by nonhumans where she belonged. He could belong too.
He realized she was waiting. He cleared his throat. “May I have the pleasure of this dance?” His voice was husky. She cast him such a brilliant smile he was sure the sun had risen again in the middle of the night, and he forgot his tongue entirely. Mutely, he accepted her hand. Her hand! Ye gods, the shock of sensation even through his gloves and her own. What would happen if he actually touched her naked skin? Surely he would ignite, burned clear through to ash, leaving nothing left of the dragon who had burned countless battlefields but never known fire’s painful embrace. Not till now.
The music changed to a waltz. He wasn’t sure whether to thank Freya or curse her for this opportunity to draw Alice close. To put his hand on her warm waist. He could imagine it all too clearly—beneath the silk of her pink gown to her stays and chemise and down to the heat of her feminine curves—and had to look away.
Think of something else
, he ordered himself. The forge he’d finished just this morning. The sand waiting for him to craft into glass. The iron and ore that would shoot through his art in red and green.
, he ordered himself. The forge he’d finished just this morning. The sand waiting for him to craft into glass. The iron and ore that would shoot through his art in red and green.
The beheading Alice’s father would surely plan for him if he caught wind of the base, prurient thoughts running through Brand’s head like a steam train.
This waltz was not one he knew. The drums started in after the first stanza, and the beat took hold of his legs and his arms. Faster than any proper ballroom tune. Seductive. It would be scandalous to any London ballroom packed elbow to elbow with humans, but to his animal heart it was freeing. He felt the blood beat in his veins. Imagined his wings pulsing in the wind. Heard the rapid breathing of his prey racing across the forest floor. He knew his eyes had slit. Knew the dragon showed, old and capricious and more dangerous still. His human appearance cracked, and the old fear sparked in his belly. Who had seen? Who this time would hoist their pitchforks in the night?
But he looked down and saw Alice. It was like looking into a mirror. In the drums, she heard the beating of prey beneath the dark foliage too, and was excited by it. She whirled around the dance floor to that beat. Round and round. Sweat beading on the perfect curve of her milky breasts. A rapid flutter beneath the delicate skin of her throat. Those eyes to match his own. Inhuman. Excited. Purple-edged looked into catlike slits.
“Let’s get some air,” she yelled up to him over the cacophony of the ballroom. She pointed toward the double French doors. He twirled her through the crush and out into the cool gaze of the starry sky.
She broke away, laughing.
“Do you find me so humorous?” Him, bumbling through a simple thing like a dance, when he’d danced with far prettier women in far more elegant ballrooms. At the moment, he couldn’t name a single one.
“You look so shocked. So surprised at our little party? What did you expect to find here at the edge of the map? A cold swamp and unclothed natives?”
“Well, there is a lot of mud.”
“We winged folk are not bound by the months of hard travel that usually inhibit trade and culture and thought.”
It was the first time she had called out her Otherness. He felt quicksand beneath his boots. Was it so simple that they could be open here? It was more than he’d hoped when he’d set out on Norgard’s mad behest.
“Wings. I’m not surprised.” He’d thought her an angel on first sight.
“Devil wings, more like,” she said, laughing again.
“You see right through me.” It was like she had her very own Deadglass specially for him. A Brandglass. Stripping the falsehoods and shadows, the mask from his skin, to expose the truth of what lay beneath. The dead who walked among the living. The man who suddenly felt very much alive.
The wide cedar porch opened onto a view of Puget Sound with a garden styled after the great houses of London. But unlike London, the lawn’s manicure wouldn’t hold. Plants dipped their roots into this fertile soil and became wild things, green and lush and overgrown. Roses grew like weeds. Weeds, like some monstrous hydra.
He wrapped his hands around the balustrade to prevent himself from reaching for her.
She turned her face to the night sky and twirled, her poplin skirts spinning out. Wisps of her hair had come down. One stuck to her neck. The dance had exerted her also. He could too easily imagine the sweat on her skin from an entirely different activity. Her flushed cheeks. Her loose hair. The laughing glint in her eye and the knowledge therein, knowing that he had placed it there.
Swallowing hard, he counted the growth rings in the cedar planks beneath his feet. He had a sneaking suspicion that the outcome of that entanglement would put a greater knowledge in his own eyes. What would it be like to sample her glowing soul? To take a part of her inside himself to warm his black heart? She would taste like a bit of starlight, he was sure. Heaven’s fire.
Salvation.
Alice couldn’t believe Brand Haldor was on the terrace with her. The dance still rang in her ears, and she twirled as much for her own benefit as for his. She could dance all night if he would only dance with her. She wanted to escape the press of bodies and fly away with him, to dance with wings beneath the grinning stars over the churning sea.
Hattie had been wrong. Brand moved with feral grace, but his other form wasn’t feline. The drums had shown her. In the whirl and heat she had caught a sense of Aether about him. Wings, she was almost sure of it. The phantom wings stretched over his human form. Not feathers precisely. And the eyes slit in emotion. In anger they would be enough to knock the breath out of a man and make him roll over and pray for death. But there in the ballroom, with Brand’s hands on her waist and his body a hairbreadth from her own, with the heat and the musk of him saturating her underclothes and shooting straight to the secret heart of her, his inhuman irises were slit in some other fierce emotion.
Their connection thrummed with the beat of the drum and the fast riff of the fiddle. She’d needed a moment to breathe out here on the porch, but even without that touch burning hot fire, she felt their connection like a living river of Aether.
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