Fire and Blood Part 6: 'Well Done' (Patreon)

And at last, here is the sixth (and so far final) part to this little narrative of Fire and Blood, wherein Bill and Niyati go out for a nice meal and talk shop. This week's drabble still needs a bit of a polish, so it and the drabble suggestion thread will be up this afternoon/evening. Hope you've all enjoyed this storyline!

Part 6:

Niyati, Bill was finding, was an expert on the city’s best steakhouses. The private eye liked his steak medium well, but his companion preferred it a great deal bloodier. She was fond of red meat and could go through enough to shame any participant in any redneck restaurant’s eating contest. He’d once asked if her people ever got colon cancer. She just stared at him in the special way she had. The ‘oh, the cute little human is trying to be clever’ look. And, Bill had to admit, it was a dumb question. Niyati was probably the oldest living thing on the planet. Even that bristlecone pine in Utah was a sprout compared to her. Her people didn’t get sick. Or at least, not often. In fact, the biggest outbreak of disease they’d ever had was… not something that Bill ever wanted to see. Niyati had told him more than enough.

Outside, the clouds churned, lightning flashing back and forth through the atmosphere. Another heat storm. There was no rain. When there was, it was warm and evaporated almost as soon as it hit the ground. The heat wave still hadn’t broken; if anything, the temperature seemed to be climbing.

Inside the steakhouse, an industrial strength air conditioner whirred and chugged, giving the customers some relief from conditions outside, though there weren’t many people here. It seemed that during a heat wave, not many people had a craving for flame-grilled steaks.

Bill was only halfway through his twelve-ouncer. Niyati had torn through one twenty-ounce already, seasoning, steak sauce and blood all over her hands. She wasn’t normally a messy eater. Kingsley watched as she licked her fingers clean. Under her false human guise, he could see the golden glint of her true eyes. There were small cracks and lines at the corners of her eyes, where the masquerade was slipping. She wasn’t usually that careless.

“What is it?” Niyati asked.

“What’s what?”

“You’re staring,” she pointed out, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her chin resting on the backs of her hands. 

Bill reached up to his own eyes, tapping where Niyati’s masque was decaying. She blinked, then touched her own fingers to her face.  A few seconds later, the cracks in her false skin filled, the lines smoothing out. She dipped her head in thanks.

Kingsley took another drink from of ice water, holding the glass between his sweating palms. The condensation felt good. His perspiration had nothing to do with the heat outside.

Every day he had the urge to fill the flask in his jacket with something other than water or fruit juice, and every day he suppressed it. He needed a clear head. “It’s getting harder for you, isn’t it?” he asked, looking down at the glass in his hands, the fluorescent lights reflecting off the steadily melting ice.

Niyati didn’t answer right away. She blinked slowly, then nodded. “Yes.”

“The forecast is still calling for temperatures over 95 all this week.”

She nodded happily. Her people loved the heat. Niyati had once told him that her people believed their gods had forged them from ‘the flame primordial’. Fire and heat couldn’t hurt them, whether it was grabbing a dish straight from the oven, or basking in an inferno that could melt steel. The weather that was choking this city, triggering violence, overloading power grids and killing people was a balm to her. She either didn’t notice, or didn’t care about the effects it was having on the humans around her. To be fair, it wasn’t like she was responsible for the climate, so she might as well enjoy this once-in-a-century heat wave.

Bill hesitated. He’d been having nightmares about this for the past week. He finally raised his eyes from his drink to Niyati’s face. “You told me once that the heat could trigger a… cycle in your people.”

Niyati nodded again, though her good-natured expression was somewhat dampened now.

He asked the question, the one that had been on his mind for days. He’d been noticing too many changes in her behaviour. The vigilantism, the unusual giddiness and distraction. He might not know her terribly well, but he could tell she wasn’t herself. “You’re going into heat, aren’t you?”

She stared at him, her expression unreadable and he knew he’d asked one of those questions that he wasn’t supposed to, but he didn’t care.

“Yes,” she told him, her voice cracking.

Loss of rationality, Bill remembered her telling him. Atavistic urges dominate our thought processes. Propensity for arson. We start killing and fucking and burning until the need passes. “I… don’t suppose you’ve found someone,” he said.

“No.”

“And I guess that asshole who popped into my apartment isn’t-” Bill tried to keep talking, but the words froze in his throat. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.

Across the table, Niyati had made a gesture with her left hand. She had never been the most talented of bloodweavers and that skill had atrophied even more over the centuries, but she still retained a little of that ability and in the past few weeks, more of it had been coming back to her. With a word, she could start pulling the blood from her companion’s body, freeze his heart or something equally as unpleasant. “No,” she told the human. “Never. Do you understand me? I’d sooner die than let him touch me.”

Bill sagged in the booth, gasping as Niyati released her hold on him. He propped himself up. “You bitch,” he growled. “Yeah, I understand.”

There was an awkward silence as the waitress cleared away Niyati’s plate and brought her the rest of her order, a little goggle-eyed at how a slim blonde woman could put away so much food. Bill watched the drake dig into the larger cut of beef with even more ferocity than she’d shown to the twenty-ouncer.

“Then what do we do?” he asked.

“You don’t do anything,” she growled around a mouthful of meat. “This is my concern.”

“Until you snap and burn half of LA to the ground,” he countered. “I was a police officer for almost twenty years and I spent another three working the streets as a private eye. I think I have a say in what happens here.”

“Then go back to being a detective,” she snapped. Blood and sauce dripped over her lips. A tongue, longer than a human’s and split at the end, lapped it away. “You’ve said you don’t want to participate in any of this, so why are you still here?”

“You know why,” Bill told her.

That seemed to deflate Niyati’s sense of righteousness and she slumped down a little. “Yes,” she admitted. “I suppose so.” Grief was something she knew. So were rage and vengeance. Her people had once ruled Earth. Now they were a scattered handful, dwindling every year as the White Court hunted them down. After Bill had accepted the very strong suggestion that he take early retirement, Andy had come with him when he’d hung out his shingle as a private dick. The two of them had worked meandering little cases of cheating spouses, paranoid neighbours and parents wondering what their children were up to right up until they’d fallen across a centuries-long war between supernatural monsters and human supremacist zealots and Andrew had become one more victim of that conflict.

If there was one thing Niyati understood, it was the desire for revenge. Bill sometimes wondered if that was why she tolerated him. Maybe the idea of watching a human hunt her enemies amused her. Or maybe… maybe she didn’t really enjoy her isolation as much as she said she did. The Court didn’t just kill fireborn; their human allies were marked for death too. She’d only ever hinted at it before, but Bill could read between the lines. The few humans that Niyati took as friends, confidantes or lovers fared badly if the White Court tracked them down. Just being around her could be a death sentence… but the Court had already passed that judgement when Bill and Andrew had gone a little too far down the rabbit hole. What were they going to do now that he was helping one of their enemies? Double-kill him?

Another two bites of steak vanished with shockingly rapidity. If they hadn’t been in public, Bill suspected Niyati would have foregone the cutlery entirely. “You’re still staring,” she told him as she disassembled her meal. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“The Court. They must know what’s happening with you. Or they’ll have guessed it. You have to be more careful.”

She growled, her teeth shearing through the red meat she’d speared on her fork. “If they come for me, I’ll kill them. I’ve done it before.”

“You know better than that,” he told her. The sweat on his back was turning cold. Niyati hadn’t survived thousands of years by being stupid, incautious or needlessly belligerent. Whatever she was going through was starting to affect her judgement. It had only gotten worse when ‘du Noir’ arrived. If she made a mistake, got them exposed before they could find the Court… well, all their plans would end very badly and very abruptly.

She paused, then tipped her head in acknowledging him. She stopped her feeding frenzy, to look at him. “I want to be free,” she said earnestly. “I want to be. I’ve been hunted for centuries and I’m so tired of it, Bill. I don’t want to be the last of my kind. I want. I… need.” She touched the corners of her eyes. Her disguise had started to crack again and she smoothed it out.

“I understand,” Bill said, reaching across the table. “Let me help you.”

There was a warning growl from her and he shook his head. “Not like that. But there has to be something that can help with your… condition. Something to help you get more under control. Baiting the Court is one thing. Getting distracted when you’re doing it can get us both killed.”

Niyati made a ssss of agreement.

“All right,” Bill said. He took another drink of water. His throat was so dry. “So what’s next? If that asshole isn’t an option, is there anyone else that you know about that could… help?” He didn’t suggest leaving the city. He knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t. Not yet, anyways.

She ate in silence for several moments. She’d always been coy with any information about her own people. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t be forced to reveal. “I don’t know where any other males are,” she admitted at last. “My last… companion from my people was several decades ago. She was young, only a few centuries old. We spent a year and a half together, but she wanted to go north. She loved the snow, wanted to know more about it and the humans that lived there. I didn’t. Things ended good between us, though. When she left, she said she’d find something to bring back to me. Something that would surprise even an old soul like me.”

“You didn’t keep in touch?”

“We don’t do that,” Niyati said. “If we’re not physically together, we don’t communicate that much. It’s too dangerous.”

Bill felt a flash of guilt. Of course. If the Court tracked down one of them, they could find the other. Even the simple pleasure of staying in contact with a distant lover or friend had been taken from them by centuries of relentless persecution. “Okay,” he said. “So no eligible drakes. What does that leave?”

“Not much.” The second steak was nearly three-quarters gone. “Blood and sex,” she told him. “That’s about it. The less we get of the latter, the more we need of the former.”

“Not much,” Bill mused. “Great.” He was having visions of a city in flames, overturned cars, burning buildings and ashen corpses littering the streets, Niyati’s bullet-ridden body in front of him, a gun aimed at his head and just beyond the barrel of the weapon was Akram’s punchable, smirking face.

Not the ending he wanted.

“Well then,” he said. “I’ll just have to work something out.”

Niyati snorted. “You go ahead and try.”

Bill returned to his dinner. Looking for revenge against a centuries-old religious cabal, studying the legends and myths surrounding the fireborn and now he had to find a way to keep an increasingly violent and horny drake from burning Los Angeles to the ground.

Outside, lightning continued to flash between the clouds. Rain started to fall on the city, but it provided no relief, only hinting at the possibility.