Mad, Bad & Dangerous

“Remember, if you see the shapeshifter, don’t kill it,” Albhar said as Bael started to sign off.

“I will if I fucking want to,” Bael replied, and cut the call dead.

***

Kett flew until she thought her wings would drop off, and came to land somewhere in the Vyishka mountains. The range was full of violent peaks, steep drops and gorges hundreds of feet deep. Kett turned herself into a mountain lion to cross the jagged collection of mountains, padding over rock and snow on weary paws.

It hurt, but not as much as the hurt inside her. You did the right thing, she told herself for the hundredth time. You don’t want a mate, you don’t need a mate. You’d have ended up being hurt by him, just like you have whenever you’ve become involved with anyone else.

If she’d never gotten married, he’d never have cheated on her and she’d never have gone to jail for nearly killing him. If she’d never joined the army and tried to channel her anger into something constructive, she’d never have come to the attention of Captain Cuntface and ended up getting flogged to within an inch of her life.

If she’d never met her father, she wouldn’t have tried to save him from that sorceress, and Kett wouldn’t have been killed. Neither would Tyrnan.

The Curse of Kett fell on everyone. Love caused pain and death and misery and anger. She was better off without it.

She was.

***

Bael flew, his dragon wings beating the air because the air itself offended him. His blood sang, every cell in his body screaming with rage.

He couldn’t remember ever being so angry but the worst part was, he didn’t know what he was really angry about. His own stupidity and humiliation? Or Kett’s hideous betrayal, at the same time carelessly impersonal and terribly, pointedly specific?

Howling with rage and misery, he incinerated a small wood and watched with feral enjoyment as the living trees crackled and burned. A village nestled in a valley nearby, and he considered it with detached cruelty. He could destroy the whole lot, burn houses, people and livestock. Let them fry in their own skin, watch flesh heat up until it boiled, bathe in their screams. He was miserable to the point of pain, why shouldn’t everyone else be?

The air full of screams, the scent of charred flesh, rivers of blood and pain and fear. He slaughtered them, he did it for fun, he massacred them…

With a jolt of revulsion, he shook himself out of it. Was this how Striker had become so terrible, so powerful and so dangerous? Was this why he’d rampaged through Euskara twenty years ago, murdering Magi and stealing their power, flattening cities, roasting people alive-just to mirror his own pain?

What the hell could have hurt such an inhuman man so badly?

He found himself on the ground, back in his human body, staring at the scryer in his palm. It glowed red then the face resolved into Striker’s visage.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

The same shock of fear and disgust ran through Bael, but far less powerfully than it had before. “Why did you do it?” he asked.

“Do what? Who are you?”

“Kett’s- I’m…a friend of Kett’s,” Bael said through the bad taste in his mouth.

“Oh yeah.” Striker’s mouth twisted cruelly. “You ran away.”

“You murdered hundreds of my people.”

Striker shrugged, as if he couldn’t see what the two things had to do with each other.

“Why did you do it? You flattened the city of Vaticano twenty years ago. You stole power and tortured innocent people. Why did you do it?”

Striker shrugged again. “What are you, a groupie? I did it ’cos I wanted to, kid. I enjoyed it. I’d do it again-”

“No, you bloody wouldn’t,” came a female voice, the voice of the brunette at Nuala’s house. Chalia. Chance’s mother…

Understanding stabbed Bael in the heart.

“You did it for her,” he said slowly. “Because she hurt you.” With every word he became more certain, the knowledge creeping into him like fog.

Striker’s face turned to granite.

“Because she did something to you,” Bael went on. “Because she hurt you so badly it screamed inside you, and all you wanted to do was make everyone else feel as much pain as you. To hurt and maim and burn and slash and kill, because that’s what she did to you. And she never stopped you. She stops you now but she didn’t then. And you went on sucking power out of people so you could destroy more and more, bigger and bigger, until you’d destroyed a city and killed thousands-”

A jolt of power suddenly surged through the scryer, like the shock from ungrounded metal, making Bael flinch and lose his thread.

The view on his scryer tilted, as if someone else had taken hold of the device, and Chalia’s face appeared, pale and shocked.

“It was you,” Bael said, and her lovely dark eyes swam with fear and guilt and pain.

“What did you do?” Bael asked her.

Her hand went to her throat, lovely and unlined even twenty years after Striker had burned and destroyed cities in her name.

“I got engaged to someone else,” she said distantly. “Who are you?”

“Baelvar.” The world had narrowed to the scryer in his hand and the anger pulsing through him.

Chalia regarded him through the scryer. “You’re Kett’s mate, yes? The Nasc. With power.”

Bael clenched his fist and looked away.

Striker laughed softly. “What did she do?”

“Someone else,” Bael said.

“Ah,” he said, but Chalia looked shocked.

“Kett? She’s not the cheating type. Is she? Why would she-you must have been mistaken,” she told Bael, who bristled.

“I saw her with him,” he said, “and unless she sat on a snake and he was sucking the poison out, then I don’t think I was mistaken about what they were doing.”

Striker started laughing.

“It’s not funny,” Bael said, and to his horror his throat swelled as if he was going to cry. “Look, she was just making a point. She doesn’t want to be mated to me. She never did.”

“Ain’t the sort of thing you can break, kid,” Striker said.

“Well, it is. She broke it,” Bael said. The tears were still threatening, so he added, “That’s all. I just wanted to know. Sorry to disturb you,” and let the scryer fall from his grasp, breaking the connection.

Striker’s laughter faded on the evening breeze.

All for the love of a woman. Striker had stolen power and killed thousands in anger because his woman had betrayed him. He’d become this vicious killer who gleefully committed genocide because he felt like it, and all because a woman had broken his heart.

Bael shook himself, trying to escape the specter of his own future, and flew on.

Chapter Fifteen

The lion had been a bad choice. Kett knew it, but she still kept on in the same shape, climbing over sheer, slippery rocks to cross the mountains.