Fire and Blood, Part 4 (Patreon)

Wherein Bill continues his studies and brings some unwelcome news to Niyati. Also we find out that her (current) name is Niyati.

Part 4:

Niyati. Fate.

Niesha. Pure.

Necia. Fiery.

Najila. Eyes that Glisten.

She’d had many names over the millennia. Most of them were unremarkable; a few were not. Kingsley thumbed through the Du Puis Chronicle carefully, its yellowed pages crisp and brittle. It didn’t seem like much. Just an old book. Worth a pretty penny to a collector or antiquarian, but nothing to kill over, nothing to start a war over. Bill smiled to himself as he ran a finger over the text. He was getting better at reading Old English. The Latin, not so much. There were a few brown drops on the pages; Lamel’s blood. Another death Akram was responsible for.

He remembered the scene; a neat little hole through the front window of John Lamel’s Quality Antiques, matching the one in the little man’s head. It had been a small caliber round. No real mess at all. Despite himself, Bill managed a tight little smile. Akram had been arrogant; if he’d bothered to go into the shop, he would have found the book still clutched in Lamel’s hands. Instead, the Du Puis Chronicle had fallen into Bill and Andrew’s possession. At the time, they’d thought it was a hoax, or even a centuries-old Zombie Survival Guide. Certainly it couldn’t have been real. 

There was the Court, and there were the Chroniclers – who were now probably fewer in number than the objects of their study. They were humans who watched the Fireborn for centuries, recording their lives and struggles. Nos memor. We remember; the motto of the Chroniclers. They’d dedicated themselves to lives lived in secret as they’d followed the Fireborn throughout the world, the drakes unaware of the eyes on them.

The Chroniclers had somehow made themselves invisible to their subjects, a secret that the White Court had coveted and one that the Chroniclers had died to the last to protect when the two went to war. It was nothing history books would even notice; blades in dark alleys, a few more “witches” burned at the stake, heretics stretched on the rack. The outcome was as final as it was one-sided; the Court utterly destroyed their “heretical” brethren, but the secrets of the Chroniclers died with them. Treatises, compendiums, scrolls and books dating back to the first written words were burned to keep them out of the Court’s hands, the remaining Chroniclers scattering to the winds or taking their own lives lest the Court find them. In the end, nothing remained of them but rumours and the handful of artefacts the Court had confiscated.

The Du Puis Chronicle was not one of these. Penned by Giscard Du Puis, a French Chronicler from the 15th century, it was a compendium of dozens of works, plus Du Puis’s own observations, experiments and records as he’d wandered Europe, following the Fireborn. The volume dealt mostly with a young – only a few centuries old – female named Di giallo luminos Giscard had had something of a soft spot for the girl – if girl was the right word. She’d lived longer than any human ever had or ever would, but compared to Niyati, Giallo had still been a babe in arms. Du Puis had wrote of her: “a most inoffensive member of a race normally notable for its antipathy, antagonism and aggression in its dealings with our own.”

With Du Puis following her every step, the drake had spent most her time travelling Europe, Asia and Africa up until a White Court knight took her head.

Having seen what his companion was capable of, Bill found it hard to believe that a single man could ever take a drake in hand-to-hand combat, but he had to give credit where credit was due: the White Court knew what they were about. Du Puis wrote, in a shaking hand, of Giallo’s final stand. It was an ambush. The knight set hounds on her first; a pack of “frothing beasts, large as horses and red-eyed like demons”, his squires loosing arrows into her as she killed the dogs in “a craven’s stratagem, skulking in the shadows, whispering praise to God for every shriek of agony their arrows wrought from her, tattering her golden wings and sticking her like a javelinist preparing a bull for the arena’s butcher.”

The squires died next and with his distraction gone, the knight mounted his horse, lance in hand and rode her down. She tore the animal out from under him, “the steed shrieking a horrific death-cry as its belly spilled upon the ground”, but the Court’s man had landed favourably. Gravely wounded, the drake had faced off against the knight, nearly killing him more than once, but as Giscard had lamented, luck had favoured him and he managed to open her throat, delivering the killing blow as she had choked on her own blood. The next page was a prayer for Giallo’s soul.

It was an odd sensation to read a eulogy for something that every physical and natural law said would not, could not and should not exist. The Chroniclers had had many theories for their existence; they were the Nephilim, the children of the sons of God and daughters of men.

Next to the Chronicle, Kingsley kept a worn, dog-eared Bible, its pages bookmarked at only several sites, but only twice were Nephilim mentioned. Genesis 6: 1-4 and Numbers: 32-33. There wasn’t much about them to go on. Lamel had been the researcher; his notes – what little Bill and Andrew had saved from the fire – sat spread open on Kingsley’s desk, mostly incomprehensible.

There were other theories; not the children of heavenly angels, but sired by fallen ones. They were not true dragons, but the result of a mating between human and dragon, human and serpent, human and demon, heavenly angel and demon. Gorgons, children of pagan gods. The Chroniclers had never learned the truth and the closest they had was rumour, superstition and theories that were closer to wild guesses than anything approaching fact. The drakes themselves had never spoken of their origins to any human and their chosen name, ‘fireborn’ was equal parts cryptic, vague and useless. They were old. That was all the Chroniclers had known. They’d once had a civilization that had put Alexander’s empire to shame, thousands of years before the first human set stone upon stone. And then... it was gone, their race shattered into ever-dwindling fragments. Fratricide accounted for some of their losses since, but most died at the hands of humans and more ever since the White Court had been resurrected.

She might really be the last one left, Bill thought with a sudden solemnity. He set the Chronicle down, trying to understand that. To have lived so long and seen everything you knew crumble... to only rarely see others of your kind. Being hunted, moving from life to life, town to town, decade after decade. It would be enough to drive most people mad.

Pulling himself out of his maudlin mood, Bill smiled to himself as he thumbed carefully though the rest of the Chronicle, pausing as he always did at the painting Du Puis had had commissioned of Giallo. Even worn and folded into the pages of a book as it was, it was priceless. Lamel had spent a small fortune to restore and preserve it.... only to fold it back inside the Chronicle, afraid that anything more would catch the Court’s attention. 

Her eyes closed in repose, Giallo reached tenderly for the sun and sky above her, her golden skin agleam even as vines coiled around her other arm and legs, binding her to the earth. Behind her loomed the silhouette of a dragon, rearing mightily from the girl’s shadow.

Dragon. It felt... wrong to use that word on them. When he thought of dragons, he thought of great winged beasts. He’d once asked Niyati if dragons – real dragons – had ever existed. She’d just smiled. Tolerantly, like a teacher humouring one of the slower pupils in her class.

She was such a bitch.

~

The heat wave was in its fourth week now and showed no signs of breaking. Heat storms crashed and thundered on the few days that the sun wasn’t shining, but the pouring rains they brought steamed and sizzled against concrete and skin alike. Fifty-seven people had died so far just from the heat with dozens – perhaps hundreds – more hospitalized. That didn’t count the brushfire gang wars that flared up, nor the spike in the crime rate. Adding all those in, in the past four weeks, things got a lot worse. There were even threats of a police strike as overworked precincts struggled to keep order in neighbourhoods that seemed to be going mad.

Of course, she loved every moment of it. If she even noticed the troubles of the humans around her, she certainly didn’t care. She was too... Bill couldn’t think of the right word. Relaxed some moments, wired the next, she alternated between mellow and manic.

Today, she was the former, curled up in the middle of the Clementes’ king-sized bed. Naked, she had no masque and her red-gold skin glistened under the studio apartment’s lights, the pale gleam of fluorescence giving her skin an almost wet look. Even now, he still didn’t know if she was layered in scales, or if it was just the pattern on her body. Aside from that brief poke weeks ago, he’d never touched her actual body; always with a layer of false human skin.

It was... disorienting to look on her for too long, the rippling of red to gold with each movement and the apparent shifting patterns tugged at your eyes, making you look everywhere at once.

“What,” she drawled sleepily at his approach, her tail twitching idly. The only thing he’d seen more relaxed was his ex-wife’s cat whenever the spoiled little hairball found herself a window and a sunbeam. “Do you want?”

Bill took a breath, stepping closer. He reached into his jacket and took out the business card his visitor had given him. “Someone broke into my apartment a few nights ago.”

She made a sound that tried to convey both interest and sympathy, failing at both. That she’d made that much of an effort was strangely heartwarming. “It wasn’t the Court,” she surmised.

“No. Some well-dressed asshole. He wanted to talk to you.”

That got her attention and she lifted her head, looking over her shoulder at him. “Did he.”

“Yeah. He left a card. Said to give it to you.” He held it out to her.

She rolled over to face him, sitting up and wrapping her wings around herself. “Obsidian Exports,” she rolled the name down her tongue. “Owner, Vander Zwart. Funny.” She lifted her eyes, meeting Bill’s. “Who gave you this?”

Droplets of sweat beaded down the detective’s back. The rising temperature was only partially responsible. “He said that if you asked, to tell you his name was Du Noir.”

“Du Noir,” she said, very quietly. She was very still, save for the sudden spastic lashing of her tail, pounding against the bed, the blade on its tip ripping into the down sheets. Her wings trembled, shivering against her body. She stared at Bill for a long moment. “Get out.” It wasn’t a demand; it was a warning. A plea.

He all but ran for the door. He’d made it halfway to the elevator when he heard her scream, so loud that even through the walls, he had to clap his hand over his ears. It went on and on, rending the air, so visceral that Bill could feel it in his bones and the detective panted and stumbled, his mind numb, awash with impressions of hatred and fury and... and... and fear.

For the first time since he’d known her, she was afraid.

Bill stabbed at the down button, slumping against the wall as the elevator took him away from the penthouse, the sound of her despair fading away into silence.

~

She vomited, retching a bellyful of half-digested food onto the floor of the ruined apartment, her entire body trembling, shivering with adrenalin. Du Noir. A transliteration of a translation. Hate, rage, fear – they all warred for dominance, but she was too exhausted to give voice to them. Tears dripped from her eyes, drool and venom from her mouth.

Still alive. After all this time, another of her kind was alive and it was him. Thin wisps of reeking smoke filled her nostrils as her venom burned the expensive shag carpet. Her talons kneaded the fabric unconsciously, ripping out great fluffy clumps, scoring gouges in the floor beneath. 

Betrayer. Her mind hissed the ancient curse, one hand straying down to her belly. I know why you’re here. “You won’t,” she whispered. “You won’t have me. No. No no no.” She raised her head, staring her fractured reflection in a broken mirror. “No,” she growled, low and vicious. “No, you won’t. I’ll kill you.”

She straightened, no longer trembling. Steam vented from her mouth and she reached over, tracing a single talon along the edge of the shattered mirror. She looked up, meeting her own reflected gaze. 

“I’ll kill him.”