The Angel's Fire Read online

  The Masters of Maria Series:

  The Demigod’s Legacy

  The Angel’s Hunger

  The Wolf’s Joy (holiday novella)

  The Coyote’s Chance

  The Coyote’s Cowboy

  The Coyote’s Bride

  The Coyote’s Comfort (holiday novella)

  The Angel’s Fire

  The Angel’s Desire

  SUMMARY

  In sixteenth century Central America, the goddess La Bella Dama witnessed the explosion of a slave ship off the coast. A rare moment of softness to the benefit of some of the nearly dead compelled her to make a deal with the devilish fallen angel responsible for the disaster.

  Four hundred years on, she and Tarik still get along like fire and gasoline, but he’s the only creature she’s ever encountered who can make her heart race.

  While they may be uniquely equipped to withstand each other’s heat, she’s in no position to commit to such a dangerous being. She learned her lesson well enough already.

  The last time she was humiliated by a lover, she created an entire race of shapeshifters out of spite. But it may be too late. She’s created something even more personal with Tarik—something that can turn her life upside down…and something that shouldn’t be possible.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me…”

  —Olaudah Equiano

  1537

  Yucatán Peninsula

  She walked every night without fail, planting the soles of her feet along the boundaries of her lands, watching the tides change and pondering who would next appear over the world’s edge.

  So many vessels. More than last year. Many times more than the year before that.

  Massive vessels carrying unknown cargo and manned by an unseen complement.

  Silent and ominous.

  Dangerous, probably.

  During her wanderings, she’d learned little about their origins. They came over the horizon and went north and south. She didn’t know who moved them, but the owners must have been powerful to have such vessels as that.

  Her people didn’t need massive ships to navigate their rivers and didn’t look to the horizon for opportunities.

  Her people rarely went so far from home anymore. Their warring days were mostly in the past, for the most part they kept to their own villages.

  She couldn’t blame them for that. Her busy brain wouldn’t let her be still, though. Her disquietude kept her wandering.

  She climbed rocks and dragged her bare feet through the sand. The texture was subtly different in every place she went. No one else noticed. No one else walked as much as her. No one else needed to.

  Unlike her, they weren’t trying to be forgotten. If she kept still, people would see her, remember her. They’d tell others and make her name known in every hut, every hovel, every house.

  They’d ask for favors from their inscrutable benefactress again.

  They’d pray for her to improve their circumstances in spite of the fact that the circumstances hadn’t been of her making.

  No, she didn’t interact with humankind anymore. Her kind—those that called themselves gods—had all but retreated to their safe places. Their deep lakes. Their bottomless caves. Their high mountains.

  So many were content with existing in a state of perpetual slumber, only waking when someone or something had caused them offense. After all, they still recognized their names.

  She no longer had a name to respond to. She’d discarded it like spoiled nixtamal when she’d destroyed the last of her temples. Although fire was her essence, she was a cold thing, not worthy of praise or worship.

  So she walked.

  The Yucatán wasn’t her place, but that didn’t matter. She went everywhere the land connected and watched people forget her.

  Anonymity soothed her guilt about not being enough.

  Of never having been enough.

  She had not enough hands. Not enough hearts.

  The night was balmy, but a welcome breeze cooled the coast. The moon was high and full, and she smiled, thinking of how her twin had always teased that he could pull it down and shake it.

  Perhaps he could have.

  She and Shadow no longer spoke so she’d never know.

  Her smile receded just like the breeze.

  Creatures such as her didn’t get to keep each other. They didn’t cling to their families the way humans did. Too often, they let themselves forget who their people were. Forgetting made feeling justified in destroying the foundations of what each other had made much easier.

  She’d never known her mother. Her name was forgotten, too. Her father had been like so many other gods of the Mixtec—so ancient that he’d had no choice but to come apart at his seams to feed his power to the newer gods the people wanted to worship.

  She had always assumed that one day, her fate would be the same. She expected that one day, she would step aside and let the youngest of her kind reckon with the unceasing cries of the humans. What little empathy they’d been born with would wane a bit more with each passing day, because empathetic gods didn’t last. They went crazy from all the misery. They went numb from having their hands bound and not being able to truly fix anything.

  According to her son, the nameless one had gone numb a long time ago.

  Heavyhearted, she climbed onto a rock as tall as she was and pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders. The action had become a reflex. No matter how hot the fire of magic inside her blazed, there was ice in her chest, her belly. She hadn’t always been that way. Once, she’d been free and hot as sunshine.

  She sat, crossing her legs, arranging her skirt over her feet, huddling beneath the warmth of her woven shawl.

  Staring at the water.

  She felt no discomfort there. It didn’t matter that the sun rose and then set again twice. Didn’t matter that gulls landed on her knees and flitted away. Didn’t matter that rain pelted her face and soaked through her clothes. She was detached from those sensations. Nothing that happened to that body mattered. She could make another if she had to, but that one was familiar. It was the one she didn’t have to work hard to present.

  It was the form that all of her kind ignored her in, and that suited her.

  At some point she must have closed her eyes, because she forced them open when she heard the unnatural blast.

  She scrambled to her feet on the rock and peered out to the water. She hadn’t heard a wretched sound like that since the last time one of her kind had sacrificed himself, but there was something different about the noise. She didn’t feel a disturbance in the invisible net that connected all of their kind or sense any would-be replacements rushing in to sup on the remnants of the power.

  The gods hadn’t made that din, and neither had the earth.

  Logic said that men must have made the sound.

  A plume of black smoke billowed in the near distance, and through the murk she made out the carcass of one of those powerful ships.

  Not so powerful, then, she mused.

  She crouched low, squinting through the smoke and saw figures moving. Practically ant sized.

  They jumped into the water. She couldn’t tell if they resurfaced. They were so far from shore that they may not have survived, anyway.

  She found herself abandoning her shawl to the rock and moving closer to the waves. When she closed her eyes and turned her ear to the distance, she could hear the screaming—not from the waves but from inside the massive boat.

  She waded in shin-deep and scooped the bottoms of her braids out of the water, winding the coils hastily together.

  When she saw the bodies floating face-down, she swam.

  There was little she could do—the problem wasn’t
one of her making, and her kind made oaths not to interfere—but humans deserved dignity in death. Her people thought a death in water would mean a promise of a comfortable afterlife, but getting closer, she confirmed easily that the people weren’t hers.

  Their skin was black and hair short and coarse. Not cargo, but strangers to her edge of the world.

  Letting out a gasp at the eerie sound of groaning wood and screams from within the ship, she got her arms beneath a barely alive woman and pulled her to shore. She turned her to the side and left her to expel water, if she could, and swam back in for another.

  She could move faster if she could use her magic to port them from spot to spot, but the water dampened her power. Water and fire were not the most compatible of mates. She would have to move the victims the human way.

  So slow. So inefficient.

  She did what she could and didn’t stop to fret over the fact that the women she pulled to shore weren’t moving. Their skin didn’t look quite right. Were they supposed to be that blue? She didn’t know their tones, but she did know that their heartbeats were faint.

  They weren’t going to make it. She could bless them and send them on, and intended to, but had to go back for one more first.

  She’d seen one blink while sinking, too tired to struggle. The chains about her neck and limbs rendered her too heavy to float.

  Maybe that one had a chance. And maybe the nameless one would not be accused of interfering if all she did was help her find the shore.

  She waded in yet again, girding herself as she swam toward the rapidly sinking vessel, closing her gaze to the hopeless ones whose bones would rest eternally at the bottom of the gulf.

  She dove and pulled the weary woman up to the air. Her eyes were closed now, lips parted.

  There was water in her. Maybe they could get it out.

  She pulled her back slowly, her clothes heavily sodden and impeding, anger weighing her limbs, but at least the nameless one was warm. Finally warm again.

  Looking back at the burning wreck, she caught a flash of what looked to be golden ore, but metal wasn’t supposed to move, and even molten gold obeyed the forces of nature. The unfamiliar apparition set everything it touched on fire.

  What is that?

  Some god she didn’t know? One from another edge of the earth?

  Her focus was half on the blue women and half on the gold that stayed atop the water even as the fire went out and the charred remnants of the boat disappeared.

  She pulled the woman with the chains into her arms and closed her eyes.

  She was gone. Nothing to be done for her. The others were close to following her.

  The nameless one wanted to send them home, wherever that was. She thought that people should die where their kind was, so their children’s children would remember them.

  Perhaps they didn’t have children, but that didn’t matter.

  She crawled to the next and closed her eyes, too, singing softly to her. Telling her that she was sorry, because what could she do?

  When she reached the third, so did the moving ore.

  The nameless one tensed fleetingly at its looming form and recommitted herself to her duty. She couldn’t deprive Death of its quarry. Death fed Life, and Life was always starving.

  The ore edged in closer and she thought it was watching her.

  She didn’t care. She had a task.

  Pausing, she turned slowly to the thing in her midst, impossible to behold, fire that moved on water and land.

  Perhaps it was Death and Death wondered why she was there.

  Death could leave her alone to work. She wouldn’t need long.

  The woman she pulled into her arms next was barely a woman at all. As her breath left her, the nameless one whispered to her the name of the place where she’d landed because she should know. She doubted she knew.

  The ore spoke to her. Deep, thunderous—alarming as an explosion.

  She didn’t understand its words. Didn’t know what it wanted.

  Didn’t care.

  “Do you have a mother to miss you?” she whispered to the next. The woman wouldn’t understand her tongue. There were too many tongues. People moved and took little bits of their languages with them, mincing and reshaping them as they found new homes. She didn’t know what words sounded like on other edges of the earth. She’d never thought to leave hers.

  “I speak a blessing for you and for your mother if she still lives,” she whispered.

  The ore suddenly knelt beside her and reached out an arm.

  She pulled away, taking the woman with her.

  It spoke again, this time in a language she knew, the tones so deep and resonant that the insides of her ears itched. “She is not dead yet.”

  “She…will die,” she informed it—him. The energy he put off was unmistakably masculine.

  But of course it was. Only a male could emerge from the center of such a disaster and immediately think that he should state the obvious to her.

  “You can rouse her,” he said.

  “I will not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I do not interfere.”

  “I do.”

  She looked up, startled, at the stranger, trying to make sense of him and his words. Trying to understand what he was. She wasn’t certain he could be understood. Never before had she seen anything like him.

  One of those golden arms inched closer.

  She moved again, taking the young woman with her.

  “If you care so much, why not redeem her?” he asked. “If you care so very much, plant her back on her feet and let her root here in this strange place.”

  “This is not her place to root.”

  He pulled his arm away and seemed to be considering her words. For long minutes, he was quiet and staring at the girls.

  At least, she thought he was. If he had eyes somewhere in that golden fire, she couldn’t see them. Or perhaps she didn’t wish to find them. Eyes were often too telling, and she didn’t want to know his secrets. She had no use for them.

  “They were dead inside long before I found them,” he said.

  She realized then that there was no coincidence in his presence there and the disaster. He was the disaster.

  All those poor souls, drifting.

  He’d interfered.

  “What did you do?” she spat, balling her hands into fists.

  His head, or what must have counted for one, tilted. “What needed to be done. If you think their mothers are wailing now, then imagine the din in the cargo holds in ships such as theirs. They did not choose the misery. I relieved them of it.”

  “And did they ask for this relief?”

  He leaned in closer—close enough for her to feel that he had no breath—but she did not move. She would not cede one more inch to him. He could have his water. The land was hers.

  “They begged for it,” he whispered. “Do you know where they were going?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps one day I will tell you.”

  “Save your words.”

  He made some sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. Cynical, but nonthreatening.

  The nameless one risked a glance at him as her fingertips made a soothing circuit around the young woman’s face. The was barely an ember left in her, but at least she had no fear. The nameless one was saddened when gentle people died with fear.

  The ore was vaguely man-shaped, but far too large to be from any tribe she’d ever encountered. She knew all the ones in her land, going as far north as the Ute lands and south to the bottom edge of the world where the Mapuche reigned. They weren’t so large, and they also weren’t made of fiery ore.

  And his shape wasn’t quite right. Too much bulk at the back of him but held in close the same way eagles pulled in their wings.

  Wings.

  As though he were in her mind, sifting restlessly through her thoughts, the oddly shaped pile on his back gave a distinctive shudder that lifted the protuberances from his body and con
firmed his shape.

  He was some kind of bird man—some kind of god from some other place. Perhaps the same place as the fading women.

  “You breathe life,” he said accusingly.

  “I respect death,” she said, looking away.

  “So respect it.” He grunted and eased in closer. His giant hand splayed over the girl’s face.

  Her eyes, bloodshot, opened slowly and pinned them both in her focus.

  Suddenly, panic surged in her body, and she attempted to writhe, but she had no strength to do much but to breathe out a watery, startled cry.

  “You can respect your gruesome friend Death and still give aid,” he said.

  “The two are not compatible.”

  “Are they not?”

  She huffed. If she had some of that mysterious black powder she’d heard of the white men having, she could probably blast him away. She wouldn’t need to use her magic for that, and an explosion would probably be more effective than setting him on fire, anyway. He obviously didn’t have any fear of flames.

  “They’re slipping.” He gestured to the one on her lap and the others. “Fading. You pulled them out of the water. Why?”

  She kept her mouth firmly shut because she had no answer. Age had muddled her instincts so long ago that she could no longer tell when she was being cruel and when she was being kind.

  She usually didn’t care about being kind. No one expected kindness of her anymore. As long as they got what they wanted, the manner in which she delivered the favors didn’t matter.

  “Leave me,” she told the creature. “Go away. Find some other thing to destroy.”

  “You can give them some time.” His voice had taken on a purring quality. Unsettling. Dangerous. More dread-inspiring than any big cat she’d ever coddled. She wasn’t afraid of those. They flocked to her like birds to freshly turned soil. They were hers to call as she saw fit.

  This creature, however, had fangs of a different sort. She didn’t know what he could do or what he was capable of. Unlike with most powerful entities she encountered, she couldn’t even fathom a guess.

  She knew she shouldn’t trust him, but she was curious about what he was proposing. Curious if he’d hint at his capacity and give her some framework for understanding what he was.