Treasure of the Fire Kingdom (The Elemental Phases Book 4) (15 page)

He
spared the thin piece of silver and enamel a brief glance and then tossed it to
Zakkery.

The
man’s gray eyes gleamed as he caught it and held it up for inspection.  The bar
of metal twirled on the end of the chain.  It didn’t look powerful, but that
was
part of its power.  In the right hands, the necklace could do many incredible,
impossible things.  In the wrong ones, it could destroy whole worlds.

“I
can’t believe you’d trade that for a woman.”  Galen probably had no idea what
the necklace even did, but he still shook his head like Kingu was the biggest fool
in the universe.  “You could have asked for
anything
and you pick that
human female?”

Zakkery
ignored that and glanced at Kingu.  “I might have some questions on how the
necklace works.  My client wants the power channeled in a very specific way.”

For
the first time, Kingu felt a moment’s doubt about handing the pendant over.  It
wasn’t like he cared what Zakkery and his unseen boss planned to do with Kay’s
necklace, but bartering for Hope increased the sensation of being tainted.

He
was
buying
Hope from the Phases.

They
didn’t care what he did to her.  Didn’t care that she was innocent and he had
locked her inside a fortress.  Galen apparently thought that Kingu was about to
start raping the girl and he was okay with that.  Hope could be chained to a
wall and no one would give a shit.

Memories
of being trapped inside his mother’s house came flooding back.  Decade after
decade of mindless servitude and unrelenting pain, knowing that no one would
ever come to save him.  The rage and isolation.  And then, finally, a
resignation so deep that he couldn’t even hate Kay anymore.  Or maybe he just
hated her so deeply that he became numb to it.

Kingu
had been a shell, his entire being compressed into some tiny, hidden place in
his mind.  He’d only survived by clinging to the hopeless dreams of his
unattainable woman and nursing his secret desires to see his mother’s plans
fail.

Oh,
how he’d wanted Kay to fail.

He’d
nodded dutifully when she called for revenge against the universe and
complained bitterly about the how the Air Phases were screwing up her brilliant
schemes with their ineptitude.  But, deep inside, Kingu had
loved
seeing
her stymied at finding the Tablets of Fate.

Kingu
suddenly felt the same way about these Elementals.

He
didn’t want either of them to succeed in their plans.

Galen
was a power hungry little twerp who maintained his status by imprisoning anyone
strong enough to stand against him and oppressing the rest.  And Zakkery
couldn’t possibly have trusted Kingu to take care of Hope.  Why would anyone
trust Kingu,
at all
, let alone with something so delicate?  He’d handed
an innocent girl into the clutches of a primordial god without a flickering of
remorse.

What
if Kingu
had
been intent of harming Hope?  Or what if some other man
with a trinket Zakkery desired demanded her first and he’d taken her against
her will?  Who have would’ve helped her?  Not these damn Phases, that much was
clear.  They’d
sold
her.  To
Kingu
, of all beings.

He
was enraged on her behalf.

Terrified
over what might have happened if he’d been a different kind of monster.

Galen
would
never
get near Hope and Zakkery was out of his smoke filled mind
if he thought Kingu would conduct some kind of “how to” seminar on working
Kay’s pendant for maximum evil destruction.  They could both go to hell.

Kingu
stepped back from the doorway.  “You wanna learn how to use that necklace, try
Google.  I’m busy.”

“That
woman could be planning to destroy all of us…”

Kingu
slammed the door, cutting off Galen’s outraged protest.

Dickhead.

Kingu
shook his head in disgust, annoyed that he’d been called away from Hope to deal
with those idiots.  He turned back towards the stairs.

Instantly,
it occurred to him that he’d made a big mistake.  He should have considered the
fact that Hope would never do what she was told and stay in her room.  He
should have locked her in the damn bedchamber, because now everything was
ruined.

Hope
stood on top step, an appalled expression on her beautiful face.  “What have
you done?”  She gasped like he really was a monster.  “How could you possibly
help the Banished Phases?  What kind of man are you?”

And, alas,
with dust.... No useful product could ever be made to come forth

from such
chaotic elements.

Anthony
Trollope- “The Claverings”

Lansing,
of the Dust House had once believed.

He’d
believed in the Reprisal.  Believed that they could make a difference. 
Believed that they’d have vengeance for all the people who had perished in the
Fall.  Believed they would wipe out every fucking Air Phase who’d ever fouled
the universe.  Believed that Chason, of the Magnet House was the leader who
would finally bring them justice.

Now,
he knew he’d been wrong.

Chason
wasn’t the same man who’d stood at Mara’s funeral and vowed to fight.  That had
been the commander who Lansing followed and trusted.  Someone even their
enemies admired for his ruthless commitment to his goals.

This
Chason
was an unstable lunatic. 
This
Chason no longer cared about killing the
Air Phases or accomplishing anything else that mattered.  Once Parald died, he’d
lost interest in ridding the world of the rest of their kind.

All
Chason focused on now was finding his dead Match.

When
the barriers between the kingdoms fell, someone had broken into the Magnetland
and defiled Mara’s crypt.  They stole her body from her coffin and carried it
off to Gaia-knew-where.

Before
the grave-robbery, Chason’s mental health had been shaky.  Even Lansing had to
admit that the guy tended towards explosive rages and unpredictable weirdness. 
Still, once Mara’s corpse vanished, Chason got five hundred times worse.  He
didn’t sleep, forgot to eat, couldn’t concentrate on anything but finding her.

It
was all Mara, all the time.

Lansing
admired Chason.  Or he used to, anyway.  But, there came a time when one man
needed to fall for the good of the many.  When the leader had to step aside so
the mission could succeed.  Lansing still believed in the mission.  Since his
family died, the only stability in his life came from killing Air Phases and
other traitors to the cause.

No
one would take that away.

Not
even Chason.

Lansing’s
hand fingered the hilt of his sword as he watched the Magnet King pour over
ancient documents, for the thousandth time.  The entire office was filled with
clues and research that only Chason understood.

Chason
had his back to Lansing, his body leaning forward over his desk as he worked. 
It would be so simple.  And painless.  One well-placed slice and Chason would
be decapitated before he even felt the blade.

In
a way, it was the most humane way to deal with the man, now.  The loss of his
Match caused irreversible damage that had been festering for years.  Mara’s
body being stolen was just the final straw on a sagging camel.  Chason would be
better off dead.  He’d be reunited with his Match in the next world.

…And
the Reprisal would be better off with a leader with focus and drive.  Someone
like Lansing.  Chason’s death would have been the best solution for everyone,
really.  Except for one problem.  One huge, bald, precognitive problem with a
broadsword strapped to his back.

Raiden,
of the Radiation House.

That
crazy son-of-a-bitch would never go along with Lansing’s euthanasia plan.  No
way in hell.  For a guy with a death sentence on his head, Raiden was pretty
damn reluctant to color outside the lines.  He had all kinds of bullshit rules
that
he
not only followed… he expected
other people
to follow,
too.  And if they didn’t, he’d food-process them into piles of red mush with
his swords.

The
guy was serious sociopath.  Even crazier than Chason.

And
worse still, Raiden was psychic.

Lansing
didn’t know what Raiden saw exactly, but the guy had some kind of ESP crap
going on.  That was one of the reasons the Radiation House tried to behead him
during the Fall.  The guy scored off the charts on Lansing’s creepy-meter, with
his gamma-ray green eyes that stared right through you and his prophetic
warnings that never made much sense until after you were already knee deep in
shit.

As
far as Lansing was concerned, Raiden could be put down, too.  They’d all be
better off.  Unfortunately, killing a clairvoyant took work.  Raiden had always
been protective of Chason and now he rarely let the Magnet King out of his
sight.  As if he already knew that Lansing was planning a change in management.

Lansing’s
eyes drifted over to where the Radiation Phase stood.  As usual, Raiden stayed
in the shadows, his gigantic body blending into the darkness.  But, Lansing
could still feel that neon gaze trained on him.  Waiting.

Yeah,
Raiden was going to be a problem.

Lansing
eased his hand off the hilt of his sword and blew out an agitated breath.

Chason
didn’t notice the byplay.  “Whoever took her, they were also the ones who
dropped the barriers.  They had to have used incredible power to do that.  No
one has that much power on their own.”

“Job
might.”  Lansing felt compelled to point out.  He’d grown to hate Job.  The man
held more energy than any Phase in the universe and he was a pussy.

“Job
didn’t drop the barriers.”  Raiden said in a definite, rasping tone.  “And he
sure didn’t touch Mara.”  His voice always sounded hoarse.  It was souvenir of
his partial beheading.  Not for the first time, Lansing thought it was a crying
shame that the bastard’s execution hadn’t succeeded.

Lansing
glowered over at him.  “You said yourself that you can’t see who did it.  How
would you know if it was Job or not?  Can you be sure?”

“Yes.” 
Raiden looked right at him.  “Because, I’m not an idiot.”

“Did
you just call me an idiot, you bastard?”  Lansing took a menacing step towards
him.

Raiden
didn’t bother to move, except for a sort of slow-mo smirk.

Chason
glanced up from his work long enough to scowl at them both.  “Concentrate! 
Mara must be found.  We don’t have time for bickering.”

Yeah,
if we don’t hurry, she might get even deader.
  The words burned
Lansing’s tongue in an effort to escape.  He backed down with a resentful glare
in Raiden’s direction.

Raiden
arched one dark brow in response.

“The
only thing that could have knocked those barriers down --and I mean the
only
thing--
is the Tablets of Fate.”  Chason continued fiercely.  “Somebody
found the Liberty box and the used it to steal my Match.”

Until
very, very recently the Tablets of Fate had been nothing but an Elemental Bigfoot
sighting. 
Liberty,
Health, Love,
Happiness, Compassion, Justice, Valor, Peace, and Reason;
the nine small boxes supposedly could control the fate of the world.
 
Neither good nor bad, each one on its own
had individual powers.  But, put together, the Tablets were the greatest force
in the universe.

Or so the legend went.

No rational person had believed that
they really existed.  Not until the dumbshit Air Phases started using them.  Now
the rest of the Elemental were scrambling to find them all.  The Tablets were
sealed into boxes and only the Quintessence could open them, but, even sealed,
they could achieve all kinds of badness.  Or, depending on your point of view,
goodness
. 
The Tablets could change the world.  Reshape things just how their masters
willed it.

Lansing had been thinking about that
quite a bit, recently.

So far three boxes were in Elemental
hands:  The Earth House had the Health Tablet, the Water House had the Love
Tablet, and Chason had the Justice Tablet.  Nobody else was going to be able to
get them.  Not with Job, Gion, and Chason protecting the damn things.

But,
someone
out there had the
Liberty box and it was capable of changing all sorts of odds.

“The Justice Box has writing on it.”  Chason was
mainly talking to himself.  Lansing could tell from the tone of his voice and
the fact he was repeating the same gibberish he’d been spouting for days. 
“Archaic symbols.  It has to mean something.  If we could read it, maybe we
could use it to find the Liberty box.  Like the --What’s that human thing?--  Rosetta
Stone.”  He frowned, his eyes darting back and forth in some kind of manic
thought.  “Where did they come from?  Where did…?”  He trailed off, heading
over to the dry erase board he had leaning haphazardly against the wall of his
cluttered office.  “Something so familiar about that writing.”

Before he lost his mind, Chason had been a
neat-freak.  Not a pencil out of place on his blotter, not a hair out of place
on his head.  Now, his desk looked like a library exploded all over it and his
hair had grown so long that it touched the collar of his crookedly buttoned
shirt.

It was a disgrace.

“Rosetta Stone.”  Chason spoke the word out loud as he
scrawled it on the board.  His handwriting was still copybook perfect, despite
his fractured mind.  All over the whiteboard, he’d written words that only
seemed to mean something to him, connecting them with arrows and circles and
crossed out lines.  He stepped back to squint at the red lettering.  “Symbols. 
Symbols that are so beautiful, but you can’t understand…  They won’t let you
understand…”  He trailed off again, his head tilting to one side.  “Mara.”

Lansing pinched the bridge of his nose.

Jesus, why was he surrounded by lunatics?

As much as he despised Raiden, Lansing still found
himself rolling his eyes over in the Radiation Phase’s direction.  He couldn’t
be the only one who noticed that Chason was turning into friggin’ Howard
Hughes.

If he couldn’t kill Chason with Raiden standing guard,
maybe the best way to proceed
was
to get the assassin on his team.  Raiden’s
twisted morality aside, he wasn’t a moron.  Anyone could see Chason was a
candidate for a rubber room.

Raiden met Lansing’s sideways smirk with a blank
stare.  The son-of-a-bitch’s stare was always blank.  He didn’t even watch
Chason’s muttering and pacing in front of the whiteboard.  His whole attention
was fixed on Lansing.  Radiation Phases could see through all sorts of
objects.  Lansing was never completely sure that Raiden couldn’t see right
through
him
.

Creepy bastard.

“Holy…
fuck
.”  Chason suddenly crossed over to
a series of printouts he had taped up in a row.  Apparently, he’d Xeroxed the
sides of the Justice Tablet earlier in the day, so he could enlarge the
writing.  The symbols were his newest obsession.  Last week it had been maps.

Chason ripped one of the pages off the wall and headed
over to where Raiden stood.  “You see this?”  He tapped the paper hard enough
to bend it in the center.  “What does that look like to you?”

“Ink spot.”

“Bullshit.”  Chason held it closer to his face.  “Look
at it!”

Raiden’s neon green eyes flicked to Chason for a long
beat.  The color of them perfectly matched the chartreuse streak that used to
be at his temple.  Raiden was the only Phase Lansing ever knew who shaved his
head rather than wear the mark of his House.  The guy was a freak… And he
didn’t respond well to orders.  Honestly, he didn’t respond well to anything.

Chason didn’t back down.  “
What does it look like
to you?!
”

Raiden let out a sound that, on someone who
wasn’t
an emotionless robot, would have classified as a frustrated sigh.  He glanced
down at the printout, jerking it out of Chason’s hand.

“Fine.”  He studied it for a moment and then grunted. 
“Alright.  I see your point.”  He handed the page back to Chason.  “But, you
can’t know that it has anything to do with…”

He stopped short as Chason jumped out of the Magnet
Kingdom, leaving him talking to thin air.

“He’s getting worse.”  Lansing pointed out grimly. 
“The guy’s falling apart, right in front of us.  At this rate, he’ll end up self-destructing
by the end of week.”  And it was already Friday.

“Chason will survive.”  Raiden pushed himself away
from the wall.  “I’ll make sure of it.  He’s the only hope for our world.”

“Then
we’re all totally screwed.”

Raiden ignored that dour prediction.  He headed over
to collect the other printouts of the Justice Tablet from the wall, folding
them and shoving them in his pockets.  Chason didn’t let anyone else see the
box and apparently Raiden was going to take things one step further.

He was even confiscating pictures of it.

“Chason isn’t the same man.”  Lansing pressed.  “You
see that, too.  I know you do.  Since Parald died, he’s changed.”

“He just needs his Match back.”

“Finding Mara’s body isn’t gonna do a damn thing for
his sanity.  He’s snapped.  How can he lead the men like this?”