Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Blank Page

  Chapter One - A Doozy

  Chapter Two - Happy Place

  Chapter Three - OCD

  Chapter Four - About That Crazy

  Chapter Five - Touche

  Chapter Six - Geas

  Chapter Seven - Emo Prom

  Chapter Eight - Renaissance Fair

  Chapter Nine - Mistress Jillian

  Chapter Ten - The Coming Storm

  Chapter Eleven - Dangerous Backup

  Chapter Twelve - Witch-Hag's Lair

  Chapter Thirteen - Forsworn

  Chapter Fourteen - The Sun's Orbit

  Chapter Fifteen - Last Word

  Chapter Sixteen - Familiar Nightmares

  Chapter Seventeen - Blood-Oath

  Chapter Eighteen - The Element of Fire

  Chapter Nineteen - Too Much Dough For A Super-Nerd

  Chapter Twenty - Spiked Drink

  Chapter Twenty-One - That's Siobhan

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Wouldn't Know Functional

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Battle Charge

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Battle Dance

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Death Spell

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Badass Supermodels

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Barbie And Buffy

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Best Friend/Arch Nemesis

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Old Buddies

  Chapter Thirty - The Grove

  Chapter Thirty-One - The Pictures

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Touchy Subject

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Mimic

  Chapter Thirty-Four - See You Next Tuesday

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Torst

  Chapter Thirty-Six - You People and Your Special Weapons

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - The Bitter Pill

  Chapter Thirty-Eight - I Still Think You're A Bastard

  Chapter Thirty-Nine - Infamous

  Chapter Forty - The Return

  Chapter Forty-One - Reflections

  Chapter Forty-Two - Epilogue

  Breathing Fire

  Rebecca K. Lilley

  Copyright © 2012 Rebecca K. Lilley

  All rights reserved.

  This book is dedicated to my mom, Linda, and my sister, April, for making me want to write the kinds of books we love to read.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Doozy

  Day 1

  My day had already gone to shit when two angry druids stormed into my shop. My blood went cold. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. My palms itched to hold the handle of a weapon. The presence of druids in my shop was bad. Very bad. Their presence made the rest of my day seem pleasant in comparison, and it’d been a doozy so far.

  I’d gotten exactly two hours of sleep the night before, thanks to some new scheme concocted by my best friend/arch-nemesis, Christian. He’d taken me on a police stakeout, claiming to need my help. I’d only gone along because he’d claimed it was an emergency, and I owed him a favor, or ten. By the end of the long, eventless evening, I was more than a little suspicious that he’d dragged me out just for the company. We’d spent hours in a crowded night club, bullshitting until four in the morning, before I’d realized I’d been duped. When I’d confronted the mischievous Christian, he’d only shrugged, saying, “I was bored. It’s not like you had a date.” I’d gone home in a rage, which hadn’t helped me get to sleep any faster.

  I’d still managed to stumble into my shop relatively close to opening time. Even at seven a.m., the day had already been a scorcher. Just being outside, even at that early hour, felt a lot like being assaulted by nature’s biggest hair-dryer. My dark t-shirt and jeans were wrinkled (but hopefully clean?), my blond ponytail was messy, I hadn’t had even one cup of coffee, and I was in a dark mood, but it was my only day to open the shop, so by the gods, I could manage to at least get there somewhere approaching the right time.

  I was none-too-pleased to run into cops and a busted lock as I approached the back entrance of the used bookstore/coffee shop I co-owned with my sister. I came to the obvious, and correct, assumption that our shop had been robbed, yet again. We were located in a questionable area of town. Though admittedly, in Vegas, every area was at least a little bit questionable. Even posh areas in Vegas got robbed. Vegas criminals were equal opportunity employers.

  I’d cursed with gusto when I saw the full extent of the robbery. The robbers hadn’t gone straight for the safe, as they had the last few times. The place was trashed, top to bottom. Why would anyone rob a used bookstore? I had no idea. There was never a lot of cash in the safe, not ever. Pickings must be slim indeed for our little shop to be the target of no less than four robberies in the last nine months. My naturally paranoid mind had worked with the statistics busily. It was not a good sign, I’d concluded. It was starting to look like a good time to move on from our comfy old bookstore. It had been aiming in that direction, anyways. The growing popularity of e-books would have closed us down soon enough. Business had been far from booming, and we had stayed in one place long enough.

  We moved often, my sister and I. We were runaways by nature. Drifters by necessity. And we were adaptable. It was our greatest ability, as far as I was concerned. We changed houses, jobs, cars, and cities on a regular basis. We’d lived in several countries, and we acclimated to other cultures well. That was, perhaps, why the states had suited us so well for so long. And the transient population in a place like Las Vegas was a particularly good fit. What better place for two accomplished runaways to fade into the background?

  I dealt with the police, sending them quickly on their way, and began the annoying and time-consuming process of cleaning up my mess of a shop. By nine a.m., both of our full-time employees had called out sick. This meant that on top of repairing the whole shop from it’s assault, I had to run both the cafe and book portion of the store. On a weekend. Grrr. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t in my best mood come opening time. I didn’t even bother to hide it from the customers.

  My sister, Lynn, still didn’t answer when I called her for the fourth time. ‘Personal Jesus’ played as the background music for her phone. She had an unhealthy obsession with that song. “Bastard,” I said at the beep, and hung up. She was, in fact, a bastard, but she was about as sensitive about it as I was.

  I went back to work still cursing her. One of our regulars walked in, looking around the still messed up shop. He gave me a sort of dazed, questioning look.

  I just shrugged at him. “If I tell ya, I hafta kill ya,” I told him, straight-faced. I made a cutting motion across my throat. He rolled his eyes at me, and headed to the mystery section. So I’m only funny to myself. It’s really the least of my problems.

  The morning rush wound down, and for once I was happy to have an empty shop come early afternoon. I was repairing one of the few bookshelves that was still busted. I was rather proud that I’d managed to get things back together so quickly. I was mentally patting myself on the back when the entrance bell chimed. Twice. “I’ll be right with you,” I shouted from where I was working in the horror section at the back of the store. I didn’t mean it. I was going to keep working on what I was doing until the customers either; a. Came and asked me for help, or b. Asked me to check them out. Customer service had never been my strong point.

  Was that the lock clicking? I wondered, seconds before someone cleared their throat behind me. I straightened, turning, and dusting my hands off on my jeans as I did so. Every part of my body tensed in frozen panic when I saw the two men standing in my shop. I was using the term ‘men’ loosely. For all intents and purposes, though, they looked like clean-cut bu
sinessmen in uniform three-piece suits. Even their ties were a matching conservative gray. Most wouldn’t notice the guns they carried under their jackets. And almost no one would feel the power radiating off of their skin like steam.

  Druids had long held the responsibility of governing the supernatural community in both the U.S and Europe. They guarded the secrets of their own race quite obsessively from the outside world. This, I guessed, was why they felt they had to help keep the rest of us hidden. Help was the wrong word. That made it sound as though any of us had a choice in the matter. We didn’t.

  The staying hidden from the outside world part had never been a problem for me. The part where they made us submit all of our personal information into their infamous rosters, well, that part had never sat well with me. We had been scamming their system for as long as I could remember, sometimes more effectively than others. My history with the druids was long, sordid, tempestuous, complicated, and ugly. And that was putting it mildly.

  Having two druids walk into my shop was a disaster no matter how you looked at it. The fact that I happened to recognize these two in particular was much worse than just bad. It was an outright cluster-fuck. And, of course, it didn’t help that they both just happened to hate my guts. My palms itched badly. My hands just ached to hold a weapon at that moment. I liked guns. Okay, I loved guns. They just felt right in my hands, the heavy weight of infinite comfort to me. Even the weight of one in a holster at my hip, back, or ankle just felt good to me. And firing one. Mmm, I loved that, too. The recoil was like an old friend. But they weren’t my favorite.

  If it had been socially acceptable, or more importantly, legal, I would have had a two-handed axe strapped to my back, or even a two-handed sword. Ahh, but an axe was my favorite. A sword could behead, but an axe was made for it. And chances were, if I needed a weapon to kill something, that something needed to lose it’s head in order to die. I had a gun at my ankle, but with two angry druids invading my domain, what I longed for was an axe. I had one somewhat close by. It was strapped to the bottom of my desk, because paranoia could be called a religion to some of us. But going for it was really just a wistful fancy at this point. I couldn’t kill these druids. One did not kill a druid if one wanted to stay off the radar. A druid’s death would not go unnoticed or unexplored. And it would never go unavenged. Even those at the very bottom of the druid food chain were protected. It was a fact that if you were born supernatural, in any way, you wanted to be born druid. I had wished for the privilege more than once, even though I hated most of them.

  I couldn’t decide if it was good or bad that they seemed to be as surprised to see me as I was to see them. One thing was for certain. It was damned unlucky.

  Michael was the first to recover, cursing fluently. He was relatively short for a druid, no more than six feet tall. His coarse, light-brown hair was cut into a harsh buzz-cut, as though he wanted to fuss with it as little as possible. He pushed black shades to the top of his head, pinning me with his angry dark-brown eyes.

  The other one, Mav, didn’t say a word. He just turned, punching a hole into the nearest wall. I was tempted to tell him he’d have to pay for that, but I really didn’t want to bother.

  Mav was a few inches taller than his partner, but shared the same coloring. I seemed to recall that they were distant cousins.

  “We could kill her now. We could just bury her in the desert,” Mav said to Michael, his back still to me. “No one ever has to know. We could just eliminate this can of worms, once and for all.”

  I flashed a half-sneer at Michael, who’d never taken his malevolent gaze off of my face. “I’d love to see you try,” I told them both. I knew they’d never kill me. That kind of disobedience just didn’t happen in the druid world. And there was an order from higher up that I was not to be killed. Not to mention the little detail that they had no clue in the world how to actually get the deed accomplished. Taking all of that into consideration, I suddenly had an idea. Admittedly, it was not a great idea, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. Actually, the more I worked out the details in my head, I realized that it was a borderline terrible idea, but I was certain it would buy me some time. And time was what I needed. I would be the first to admit that I was a shameless runner, though even I knew that was nothing to be proud of. But running like a coward meant that I had developed some pretty extensive evasive skills over the years. I could work wonders with a head start. And no one knew better than I did that sometimes a head start had a price.

  Michael was shaking his head at me slowly. “No, we won’t kill you-“ he began, but Mav interrupted him.

  “Do you have any idea what he was like when you left?” Mav asked me, his eyes scary. “He was a mad thing for months. Did you hear what he did in the arena? No one even knew he had that in him. You made him into that! And when he gave up looking for you, he turned bitter, and we all suffered. We all had to pay because of your fucking games!” His voice was a growl by the end. I was taken aback when I saw that his eyes weren’t human any longer. I had always thought that Mav’s powers were limited to far below the level of the beastcall. “Are you even sorry for what you did?” he asked. I couldn’t help but notice that he’d given me a better opening than I could have maneuvered for myself. That was helpful.

  I shrugged, giving him a pointedly bored look. “He got over it,” I told him. “I hear he’s doing more than fine. You’ve never had a younger Arch-“

  Before I could finish, he was across the room, backhanding me. The blow knocked me off my feet. “Whore!” His voice was nearly a howl.

  It took a lot more self-control than I cared to admit not to retaliate to both the blow and the word, but I made myself at least appear calm. “I hear he’s interviewing applicants to replace me nightly,” I dared to say, standing up to face him again. I saw the punch coming, and braced myself. The back of my head hit the wall at the back of the room. I saw stars.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Happy Place

  Not fighting back was much harder than I had thought it would be. My nails dug so hard into my palms that I felt the skin split. My plan would be much more effective, though, if I didn’t leave a scratch on either one of them. I repeated this to myself, over and over again.

  I thought that watching me fly across the room actually made Mav feel better. He was noticeably calmer when he said, “You and your sister haven’t registered with us for over five years.” Actually, it was closer to seven, but I wasn’t going to correct him. He continued, “I know I don’t have to tell you the kind of trouble I could give you for that. In addition, you were both registered as weather-witches. You’re gonna have to do better than that this time. You don’t have a high-ranking boyfriend to protect you anymore.” He was downright smug by the end of his little spiel.

  “Are you implying that I’m not a weather-witch?” I asked him. I wasn’t, of course. Not even close.

  “Don’t push me,” he snarled.

  I tried to smile pleasantly at him, but knew I fell far from the mark. “Would you like me to go make it rain? Or better yet, I could make it about a hundred and ten degrees outside, with no humidity. That one’s my specialty.” Yes, it was a bad Vegas weather joke. They didn’t laugh, either.

  I got a hard punch in the stomach for the comment. I spit out a large mouthful of blood.

  “You are going to give us some straight answers, Jillian, or we will be making you very sorry,” Michael threatened.

  “In that case, I should tell you that my name hasn’t been Jillian for years.” He slapped me for that comment.

  “You’re going to tell me what you really are, or I swear I’ll make you sorry,” Mav said.

  “I’m not telling you a damn thing. You couldn’t beat it out of me. I doubt you could even hold me down long enough to try,” I said, and it was a dare that I knew these knuckleheads couldn’t resist. I’d learned a long time ago that if you suggested something to someone, if it was something they had already wanted to do, someth
ing they were already considering, they would almost always take you up on it. This was especially true if you were dealing with idiots.

  “Hold her,” Mav told Michael. They were cooperating faster than I could have anticipated. They were really stupid. Which was good. I had kind of been counting on it, though I couldn’t exactly get excited about having the shit beat out of me.

  Michael gripped my wrists from behind, more tightly than he needed to. All the better, I told myself, though the feeling made me want to fight harder. I let myself struggle against the hold, just hard enough to guarantee that my wrists would be bruised.

  “What the fuck are you? And how old are you, anyways? I heard that you met Dom when he was just fourteen! That was fifty years ago…”

  I definitely wasn’t going near that one. My age was a touchy subject, to say the least. Physically, I could have passed for being anywhere between twenty-five to thirty-five, but that was no reflection of my actual age. My kind did not age physically. Or die of natural causes, for that matter.

  Mav proceeded to batter me up. There could be no doubt that he relished the opportunity. Sadistic bastard. He landed a solid punch every time I answered one of his questions with an impassioned, “Go fuck yourself!”

  It hurt. God, did it hurt bad. And I’d been through some pretty rough stuff. I’d been alive for a very long time, and my life had never been easy, or painless. Nevertheless, getting the shit beat of you never failed to suck. I tried to take my mind elsewhere. I thought of other places, better places. Nope. The beating still sucked royally. I tried to make my mind go to a happy place. Did my mind have a happy place? Apparently not.

  “Damn,” Mav said at one point. “Dom told me about this. He told me that your hair and eyes shifted color during sex. I never realized it’d be so pretty. Does this mean you’re turned on?” he asked, leering at me.

  I spit in his face. He punched me in the jaw, hard.

  “I think it means she’s pissed,” Michael answered for me.