Dez

 

Gold fire and crimson blood.

Gasping awake, my body arching off the bed, I twisted out of the bedsheets and scrambled to sit up. Flames were licking across my skin, splitting along the fresh scar on my left arm. Stars were crashing into a vast desert and shattering into a kaleidoscope of color.

Moving on lightning fast instincts, I reached for the glass of water on my nightstand and poured it over myself. Eyes burning, I tried to keep my breathing in check, even as sweat dripped down my face and my body shook. All I could do was grip my arm and wait for this to pass.

And slowly, it subsided, the bright colors of the dream scattering like dying embers.

Revealing a cold apartment swathed in the gray shadows of dawn.

Ordinary. Safe. Home.

Closing my eyes, I relished the relief as I let out a sigh. It was over.

Slowly, I lifted my hand and gazed down at the scar. A jagged line that curved from the inside of my elbow almost to my shoulder. One I’d gotten in the bowels of the Sierra Mountains, in a place called the Foundry, hidden under Bear Valley.

Around it were tattoos. Me, the guy who never wanted to get even a small sports insignia on his bicep, now had an entire sleeve. A swirl of tribal ink and animal print bordered by mantras and glyphs. It looked as though it had taken years to design.

In reality, it had been done in the course of one night.

While I appreciated the effort that had gone into it, the beauty was lost on me. It was too fresh, serving only as a reminder of that night. How my life had forever changed since coming into contact with the Order of Anubis and the growing threat of their enemy, the TLO.

Especially since the leader of the TLO, Lilian Frost, was the one who’d slashed open my arm.

“You can’t deny Frost paints with an interesting, if bloody brush,” my friend Beni had commented as the final two tattoo artists had finished up their work on my arm. He then whistled through his teeth as the first light of day lit upon the freshly inked design.

I’d been taking gulps of air in my relief. We’d accomplished the impossible.

I was alive.

The artists had said nothing. We were all silent, looking at the tattoo. I knew I should say thank you, but those words seemed so paltry compared to how overwhelmed with gratitude I felt.

Eva, a grinning older woman from Bangladesh, had finally broken the silence. “It is kingly.” Her wrinkled hands passed over it in wonder. “And perhaps the most important work I’ve ever done. It suits you well, Desmond.”

Letting out a nervous laugh, Lyrissi a young, serious eyed girl in a headscarf from Dubai, said, “It was my honor to lend my skills.” She paused and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “You are going to be okay, Desmond.”

“Otherwise, you’d be dead by now,” Beni commented.

Even this morning, weeks later, I still winced at his morbid joke. Beni had a dark sense of humor sometimes, one that seemed to fit this new world I’d been thrust into.

But I didn’t want to give into that side, to stand back and cynically smile. Not that I didn’t love Beni. I just didn’t want to be him.

Deciding it was pointless to go back to sleep, I stood and stretched. Then I hit the light, which bounced off something metallic, lying on its side on the bookshelf in front of me.

The Capitis Leonis.

Every morning I faced off with it. Reminded myself why I was doing what I was doing.

The snarling lion head with two prominent front teeth, one of which had pricked the fingers of Kazan women for decades. The other that had torn into my bicep and forever scarred me.

On the back of its head was a chamber for an elixir. Ironically, though an heirloom of that prominent shifter family, it was now in my possession. And the usual elixir had been swapped out for a new serum on the night when Frost had set upon me like a feral beast.

Sometimes I marveled at the seemingly inconsequential decisions that had both saved and irrevocably changed my life.

That serum was a prototype I’d been working on in secret, along with Baltsaros Kazan, Piper Weslark, and Beni, Benjamin Torres. Professor Torres was a Shifter of Anubis researcher and an old teacher of mine.

On one hand, we were trying to determine if there was something unique about the lion’s metal. But on the other, we were trying to understand why Frost had wanted it.

What we were missing.

Months before Bear Valley, on the Kazan family’s estate in Greece, Frost had pretended to disdain the heirloom. She’d claimed her formula for creating shifters had outshone the one her ancestors had given to the Kazans.

It was a convoluted and tragic story – how the Kazans of another time had once paid a good man named Igor Frost to recreate an ancient ritual to save their line – not realizing the innocents who would be lost in the years to come. Instead of the ancient ritual, though, he’d stumbled across something else – a way to ensure heirs of the Kazan’s were always born lion shifters.

Either way, the original ritual was still lost by all accounts.

De animalibus sacrosanctum. The Sacred Animals.

A way to turn an inanis, a non-shifter, into a shifter.

After Greece, Piper had wanted Kesari to try her hand at recreating it. Not to create shifters, but as a way to see how to unmake them. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps crucial to stopping Frost on her rampage.

But then Piper had sent Kesari to Bear Valley instead. And I’d taken over and reached out to Beni, as well as a few chemists who could help us concoct it. What we’d come up with seemed promising and harmless enough. Then I got called out to Bear Valley again.

I’d meant to ask Kesari to take a look at it, but the situation there was precarious. It had slipped my mind as I’d lent as much help as I could. Hybrids were everywhere it seemed and some hidden clock was winding down. You could feel it in the air.

Not until we were deep in the Foundry had I recalled the Capitis Leonis was in my pocket.

I’d been standing in the middle of a strange, shiny lab, hundreds of feet underground and asking Kesari to look at Frost’s work. She’d misplaced her glasses and seemed strangely young. But her gaze had been fearless. Staring at the equations and chemical structures on a glass board, I’d suddenly remembered and started.

My fingers had slid into my pocket and brushed along the Capitis Leonis. For better or worse, I’d become its new keeper. And I’d hoped that bringing it here wasn’t inviting bad karma.

As though hearing my thoughts, it was then Kesari and I had been forced to hide as Lilian Frost and her creepy, masked boss, Parasite, had entered the room. Thankfully, they remained unaware of us. But after they’d left and we’d gone to flee, Frost had abruptly returned.

She’d leaped for Kesari, not even seeing me. I hadn’t even thought of the fact that I was a non-shifter, an inanis and a possible test subject for Frost, I’d just reacted.

Hurling a chair at Frost as she attacked.

It had kind of worked. Only she’d gone after me, transforming into her hybrid state – neither shifter nor human any longer. A result of her experiments we were still trying to pin down.

All I remembered was a white face, burning eyes and the sprout of fangs. The flare of her nostrils and her eyes darting to my pocket.

“You’ve tainted my work,” she’d whispered at me as she pinned me down with incredible strength and I tried to fight back. “You’re going to pay for that.”

Before I could react, she’d reached into her pocket and pulled out a syringe.

What happened next was a blur of images. Gold flashing. Her white hand holding the Capitis Leonis. Its jaw had seemed to open as she dragged the left tooth along my arm.

A spiral of pain and heat had erupted through my body.

I lost my grip on reality for what seemed like an eternity until I’d slammed back into myself. Waking up with a gasp, I’d felt more alert, more aware, and stronger.

Frost was silent. Unconscious. Somehow Kesari had bested her.

Kesari, who’d crawled over to me with worried eyes.

And I held up a hand that was both coated with blood and what seemed liquid gold.

We’d run at that point. Somehow, though, I’d lost Kesari in the Foundry’s tunnels as we’d tried to escape. Whether I’d ran too fast or taken the wrong turn, she was gone.

When I’d finally made it out, up the fresh mountain air, I was met with more chaos. The ground had rumbled underfoot as a building we’d called the Cantina went up in flames.

No sooner had I taken a breath and gotten my bearings when something had attacked me. I’d slammed into it without thinking and it ran away, whimpering.

Instincts were waking up in me and I’d gazed at my hands.

She was right, I’d thought.

Without a moment to spare, I’d found Dara Seng, given her what I’d collected from the Foundry and headed for San Francisco. Beni had met me there and arranged a private plane to Morocco, his home country. I was filled with a mixture of cold logic and a hum of panic.

Eva and Lyrissi had met us at the airport. By that time, I was starting to feel ill. It was a miracle we’d managed to get through customs.

And then, a few hours later, I was lying in a circle of chalk in the desert and watching the stars. Feeling curiously indifferent to my fate.

Others had come and gone. I’d no idea how Beni managed to rally them so quickly. A pale, tall man with a dark beard, a sturdy young kid who reminded me of Kai Weslark, a woman as dark as me with gentle eyes, and a snappily dressed older Japanese man.

I’d only gotten his name – Kuwe. The rest had left too quickly.

I wish they hadn’t. All of them had come together to save a stranger’s life.

Frost had tried to rewrite me, make me into a creature like her. Or at least, I'd guessed as much. Perhaps she'd found out about my lineage and taken a risk to wake up those dormant genes.

For as I sat up in the desert, then got to my feet and looked around, I could sense the change.

Somehow, by some miracle or twist of fate, I was a shifter.

Then I’d clenched my fists as I thought about what she’d done.

To me, my friends, and countless other innocents. What she wanted to do.

I'd always been a scholar, not a warrior.

Yet in the light of that blinding dawn, breaking through dark clouds edged with crimson, I inhaled the dry smell of the desert and set my jaw. I couldn’t ignore these gifts.

“What are you going to do now?" Beni had ventured to ask, his cynicism slipping away into concern. “Whatever you want – we will, of course, support you.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I’d slowly smiled, one that did not meet my eyes.

It was the same expression on my face now. Leaving my bedroom, I crossed the living room and went into my office, pulling on a hoodie over my bare chest and closing the door behind me. Once the walls had been covered with cartoons and sports teams, but now they were filled with research, pictures, and maps.

And in the corner, piled carelessly, was the black gear of Anubis agents. Worn around the edges, maybe, but still got the job done.

I was going to beat Lilian Frost and the TLO at their own game.