What Gods Incite: The Frost Arcana, #3

By Clara Coulson

"The post-apocalypse was truly a wondrous era."

A month after the explosive end of his mission to the Divide, Vincent Whelan is spinning his wheels. He's struggling to rebuild his business, frustrated at his position as Tom Tildrum's "minion," and uneasy about the dangers the near future will bring.

So when a local spots a zombie prowling around one of Kinsale's biggest factories, Vince takes extra precautions before he goes hunting for a necromancer in the dregs of his beleaguered city.

Unfortunately for Vince, a straightforward case quickly morphs into a balancing act, when a familiar face pops in to drop a dangerous new quest on his head: Abarta has stolen a powerful tool from Manannán mac Lir, and to get it back, Vince will have to venture into the Otherworld yet again.

With his allies split on two fronts, and threats rising on both sides, Vince finds himself facing the most perilous trial of his entire life: the battle to preserve his own humanity.

What Gods Incite is the third novel of The Frost Arcana, an action-packed urban fantasy series set in a post-apocalyptic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knite and Day Publishing
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386359746

Clara Coulson

Clara Coulson was born and raised in backwoods Virginia, USA. She holds a degree in English and Finance from the College of William & Mary and recently retired from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC to return to the homeland and pick up the quiet writing life. Clara spends most of her time (when she's not writing) dreaming up new story ideas, studying Japanese, and slowly reading through the several-hundred-book backlog on her budding home library. If she's not occupied with any of those things, then you can probably find her playing with her two cats or lurking in the shadows of various social media websites. To stay up to date with Clara's books, please subscribe to the Firebolt Books newsletter: https://www.firebolt-books.com/newsletter

Book preview

Chapter One

Pettigrew was a rundown town that smelled like a dumpster fire. The stench probably had a lot to do with the blackened remains of the town’s northern half, which had been the victim of a drone strike by the US military after the town rebelled against the purge protocols. Several of the missiles struck a fertilizer plant, the town’s biggest employer, and the plant exploded with enough force to level every building within half a mile of the epicenter. It had been seven years since that catastrophe, seven years of driving rains and harsh snows and strong winds, yet the whole place still smelled like shit.

Amazing.

As I stood on the southern edge of town, nose wrinkled in disgust, I wished I had chosen anywhere else to scavenge today. But Pettigrew was over twenty miles from Kinsale, too far for most citizens to trek across the stretches, and as a consequence of the drone strike, the population had emptied out before the nukes fell. Which meant all the intact businesses on the south side hadn’t been completely looted during the collapse. There was a Kohl’s and a Macy’s, a Lowe’s and a Walmart, and even a Bed Bath & Beyond. I could have my pick of the lot. And I sorely needed it.

Because some dickwad blew up all my stock a month ago, along with my house.

Raiding what remained of the stores closer to Kinsale had only restored me to a third of my former inventory, because those stores had been picked over multiple times by the local mob’s scavenger packs, along with countless refugees who traveled the major highways leading into Kinsale. To get the good stuff nowadays, you had to head farther out, to the places where mundane humans refused to tread for fear of getting eaten by the wild things that roamed the land.

On the one hand, it was a pain in the ass to travel this far with no car. On the other hand, the stuff I could scavenge in Pettigrew would be good quality and would attract more customers to my new store, which I’d established a little closer to the market square than my last one. Thanks to the fact I’d blown most of my savings paying a witch to heal everyone who survived the cavern of nightmares, and the fact that I no longer had Mo swinging by with a big order once a month—he was in jail on a felony drug conviction—I needed my stuff store to pick up more interest with the good citizens of Kinsale.

So here I was, in a town that smelled like literal shit, with a list of things I needed to loot from a defunct Bed Bath & Beyond.

The post-apocalypse was truly a wondrous era.

I’d made good time getting here because the wintery weather had finally let up over the past two weeks, and the roads were fairly clear of ice and snow. This had allowed me to bring a large metal wagon along on my scavenging trips, so I could make fewer runs with more reward. The wagon, an industrial number covered with more than its fair share of rust, squeaked along behind me as I tugged it down the main street that led to Pettigrew’s version of downtown. A few blocks dotted with big-box stores, a few boutiques, and a smattering of townhouses. The growing town had apparently been in the middle of gentrifying when the collapse brought it to its knees.

I stumbled upon the Bed Bath & Beyond first, tucked into one side of what had once been a shiny new shopping center with a pretty fountain in the middle of a circular parking lot. The fountain was full of dirty water and dead bugs now, and the thin brick façades of the buildings had been heavily weathered by the continual winter storms. Someone had spent a great deal of money constructing this shopping center, only for it to end up the same way as all the other abandoned buildings in the world. By the time people no longer needed to live in the protected cities, this place would be nothing but husks and sunken foundations. What a waste.

Yanking my wagon onto the covered sidewalk of the shopping center, I headed around to the entrance of the Bed Bath & Beyond. The glass front doors were intact and appeared to be locked. Unless somebody had broken in through the back, the inventory should still be in good condition. Anyone who came by could break the glass with ease though, so I didn’t bother to try and pick a lock to preserve the building’s security. I punched through a pane with my gloved hand, waited for all the glass to settle, and then unlocked the door. Leaving my wagon on the sidewalk, I entered the building, tugging my list from my pocket as I passed the checkout area and entered the towering aisles.

The next forty minutes passed in a blur, and I kept an eye on my watch to make sure I didn’t spend too long searching for the softest towels or the prettiest comforters. I’d stripped my second glamour early on in my trek to put more pep in my step, but I was still going to have a long walk home. And with the ever-present cloud cover, it got dark pretty early in the day. Half fae I might’ve been, but even I wasn’t bold enough to traipse around the stretches at night. There were too many feral werewolves, too many flesh-hungry ghouls, and countless other predators that thrived under the cover of darkness. I could only fight off so many before one of them made a lucky strike.

Becoming something’s dinner was not on my to-do list.

Once I loaded my arms and shoulders and pockets with everything I could carry, I exited the store and neatly piled everything into my wagon. I ran through my list with a pen, checking off all the bedroom and bathroom supplies I’d been short on. What I’d collected today would be enough to last a few months, based on my current rate of sales. Satisfied, I grabbed the wagon handle and continued on around the circular sidewalk, searching my mental map for the location of the Lowe’s in relation to the Bed Bath & Beyond. It should’ve been the closest store to…

A line of smoke curled into the air three blocks to the east.

It hadn’t been there when I first went into the store, and judging by the height of the smoke, the fire beneath hadn’t been building for long. There was no way a fire could’ve started naturally in this soggy, cold environment, which meant someone had set it. I considered the possibility that some travelers, maybe refugees, had stopped in Pettigrew for the day, but the town was off the beaten path, the interstate four miles west. Some paranormals then? There were those who chose to live in the stretches despite the danger because they’d grown wary of living among humans after the purge. But they typically lived in well-defended enclaves and they didn’t venture out much.

I stripped off my first glamour with a quick whisper to heighten my senses, and listened. The town had been silent upon my arrival, except for the squeaking of my wagon and my footsteps, and as I focused on the area surrounding the fire, I didn’t hear any new sounds other than the crackle of something burning.

Campsites were loud. People talked. Pots and pans clanked. Tents rustled. So whatever the source of the fire, it wasn’t a group preparing to hunker down for the night.

Dread settled low in my gut.

I really needed to move on to the other stores and gather the rest of the supplies on my list, but it would be foolhardy to stay in a town with unknown elements. If there were paranormals hanging around, there was no guarantee they would play nice with a half-fae. A lot of paranormal communities didn’t like the idea of faerie rule any more than they did human rule. The sídhe were not kind and benevolent leaders handing out candy and rainbows. If you stepped on their toes, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill you. They ended the war and saved intelligent life on Earth as a matter of pragmatism, not compassion. There were practical benefits to keeping the planet habitable and preserving civilization.

What they’d gained from protecting this world was greater than the cost of their efforts.

A basic cost-benefit analysis. That was all that had saved us from the end.

What a comforting thought.

An even less comforting thought was that the source of the fire could loathe fae politics more than me, and could lump me in with the full-bloods if we ran into each other. I didn’t want to come to blows with someone over a slight difference of opinion. My plate was already full, and I didn’t want to add unnecessary fights and preventable injuries as a side dish. The iron wound in my shoulder was still healing, almost two months later, and it ached if I pushed myself too hard. My nasty gut wound had been healed by a witch, but the regenerated muscles had been extremely stiff and weak afterward, and I’d spent the last few weeks doing a new exercise regimen to strengthen them.

Adding another injury to that list would only make it harder for me to weather whatever Abarta threw at me next.

I debated what to do. Leave and make another trip to Pettigrew later in the week, hopefully after whoever was here had moved on? Or stay and gather the rest of my supplies so I could restock my store in time for Friday’s big sale that Christie had spent a great deal of time helping me plan so I could bring in more business in the long term and soothe my aching bank account? The first choice would make me feel safer now, but the second, if it didn’t end badly, would be better for my bottom line. The only alternative to raking in more revenue through my store was taking on more stretch jobs, and that wasn’t any less dangerous than what I was doing now.

Hm. Why don’t I take a quick peek and see if I can find out what I’m up against before I decide?

I parked the wagon against the window of what had once been a high-end hair salon and crept two blocks down the street before cutting through the parking lot of a bank. The column of smoke was one block over, so I would have a vantage point of the fire if I took the high ground here. Since my second glamour was already down, I jumped up to the roof of the bank and landed in a quiet roll, then crawled on my hands and knees to the opposite side, careful not to expose my head over the short rim of the flat roof. I listened for a few seconds, and when I heard nothing except the wind rattling something against a fence, I peeked over the lip.

A trashcan.

Someone had set a metal trashcan on fire.

It was sitting in the center of a McDonald’s parking lot, filled to the brim with papers and strips of cardboard. The lid of the trashcan had been left sitting a foot to the side, neatly in line with the trashcan itself, like someone had carefully placed it there. Besides the trashcan and lid, the parking lot was empty. No people loitered around the fire to warm themselves or cook food. And through the tinted windows of the nearby restaurant, no silhouettes moved about, clearing tables and cleaning floors. No makeshift camp was being set up inside to keep travelers out of the elements for the night. The trash fire had been set and abandoned.

Why would someone take the time to gather dry kindling to set a trashcan alight, only to do absolutely nothing with the resulting fire?

The dread in my gut grew ten times heavier. Wait a second…

They had done something with the fire. They’d used it to lure me here.

A presence flittered into existence behind me. Cold. Oppressive. Calculating. The hair on my neck rose, goose bumps racing down my arms. Alarms went off in my head as the unmistakable tendrils of bloodlust rippled through the air and snaked around my body, setting off a hundred chills. The creature behind me wasn’t human. Wasn’t even close.

The words to drop my third glamour and raise a shield formed on the tip of my tongue as I whirled around to face my adversary. But before I could loose the first syllable, before I could lift my arm into position, a hand shot forward and collided with my face. The impact tore me off my feet and drove me into the rooftop so hard it cracked. Pain exploded across the left side of my face, and I tasted blood where my teeth cut into my cheek, skin split wide open. My vision danced, seeing double, and my brain couldn’t detangle the confusing signals fast enough to get me moving before the assailant bent down and grabbed my collar.

He hoisted me up with one hand, as if I weighed no more than a feather, and drew me close to his face. The man was not broad or tall, but he was quite possibly the most terrifying creature I’d seen since I walked into the basement of Abarta’s base and came face to face with an old and angry god. His skin was pale in the sense that it almost had a silvery undertone, as if mercury had been injected into his veins and spread all the way to his pores. His irises were a dark and stormy blue, but from a distance, they would appear violet, the color thrown off by the crimson rings around his pupils. The man’s lips were pulled back into a sneer, flashing a canine too long to be anything but a fang, and the furious look betrayed his otherwise dapper appearance.

The man was a vampire in a nice suit. A ruthless killer with a blue silk tie.

And I was royally fucked.

Fear overpowered the pain in my face, and adrenaline rode through my system in a towering wave. I had to force myself to remain still instead of breaking out into a fruitless struggle to free myself from the vampire’s grip. My unglamoured strength, plus a dose of magic energy, might overpower his raw strength, depending on his age, but his speed was something I couldn’t compete with. Vampires were not only the fastest creatures on Earth, they were faster than most full-blooded sídhe, who often needed to use magic to make up the difference in combat.

That wasn’t to say a sídhe couldn’t crush a vampire with ease. They could. The two were equally hardy when it came to taking physical damage—that is, they healed fast—but the sídhe packed a far greater magic punch. A sídhe could take a vampire in a fight any day.

But I wasn’t a sídhe. I was half a sídhe, and that made all the difference.

In the time it took me to siphon magic into my arm and wrench the vampire’s vise-like fist from my shirt, the man could ram his other hand into my abdomen eighty times, fast enough to mimic a knife, and butcher me worse than the Spear of Lugh had last month. If I made a single wrong move, did anything to tempt this vampire to kill me, I’d be gutted or headless or both before I even saw the attack coming. Hell, I hadn’t even sensed the guy climbing onto the roof until he was already standing behind me. He’d moved so quick, my heightened senses had been caught completely unaware.

The man’s gaze roved over my face, and he sniffed loudly several times. His tongue flicked out, wetting his lips, and he said in an oil-slick voice, Half fae, not human. The scouts had you pegged wrong. A tiny grin crooked the corner of his mouth. You smell similar from a distance, so it’s an understandable mistake. Wouldn’t you agree?

I swallowed, throat dry as sand. Um, yes?

An irrelevant mistake as well. His grin widened, flashing that fang again. Half fae is human enough for us.

What—?

His other hand flew up and jabbed me in the neck, stunning my trachea. He then reeled me in, his breath ghosting across my ear, and whispered, You’ll do just fine for dinner this week.

Breathless, stars in my vision, I didn’t realize I was moving backward until my feet slipped over the rim of the rooftop. The vampire launched me from the roof of the bank, and I soared in a broad arc fifty feet through the air, over the burning trashcan, and crashed into the broad chest of someone waiting at the end of my trajectory. My right shoulder popped out of its socket, and I choked out a pained gasp as I rebounded off the second vampire, who didn’t even budge at the impact. I collapsed to the asphalt, spittle dripping off my lips as I coughed, lungs burning from a lack of oxygen, shoulder screaming.

The second man didn’t give me time to recover. Continuing the stun tactics, he hoisted me to my feet by my hair, pinned my arms behind my back with one meaty hand, and slapped his other hand over my eyes. You try to get away, he said, I snap your neck. Got it?

I wheezed out something that might’ve sounded like a yes.

The first vampire was in front of us in moments, nothing but a faint stirring of air to signal his arrival. Escort our new guest back home, will you, Leonard? he said with an edge of amusement. I’ll go on ahead and prepare his lofty accommodations.

Yes, Lord Vianu, said Leonard the brute, tightening his grip around my wrists.

A breath later, Vianu’s presence had vanished, and I was left in the care of Leonard, who roughly forced me to march forward and jarred my dislocated shoulder whenever I fumbled a step due to the hand blindfold. He chuckled at my hisses of pain, but otherwise didn’t say anything as he led me toward the slaughterhouse that was a vampire nest.

I took the opportunity of the slow march to get my thoughts in order, tamping down the shoulder pain and relegating it to the back of my head for the time being. Using my terrifying experiences of the past five minutes, I put together a rough mental outline of what the heck was happening to me:

A vampire coven had settled somewhere in Pettigrew. They were led by at least one elder vampire, Vianu; I knew this because only elders were given the title of Lord or Lady. A vampire counted as an elder only if they were over four hundred years old, and the older a vampire grew, the more powerful they became. Vianu would, at the very least, be fast as lightning, and strong enough to throw a tractor-trailer without using magic, which he possibly possessed. Being a vampire didn’t preclude being a magic practitioner. The strongest vampires in the world were also practitioners.

Long story short, there was no way I could beat Vianu in a fight. I’d be dead before I knew he’d struck me, and I’d wake up in the afterlife before my body hit the ground. Which meant I had to get the hell out of this town before Leonard dragged me to the nest. Vampires favored large, underground facilities that could house up to thirty vampires—the typical size of a coven—so they’d probably renovated some sort of industrial site to suit their needs, or maybe an office building. There were none of those situated near the shopping center, so this walk would be a good distance.

I had time to formulate a plan to escape from Leonard.

Which was the only good thing about this predicament.

It was clear to me now that the stores in Pettigrew hadn’t been left untouched by chance, as I’d assumed. They were a lure left out by the vampires. The coven was capturing people who happened to wander into town in search of supplies and using them as blood slaves until they expired. They probably didn’t get many direct hits, like me, but the interstate was also close enough to the town for the vampires to make frequent grocery runs. After all, who’d notice if a group of refugees heading to Kinsale went missing every now and again? It wasn’t as if anyone was keeping track of them.

I felt sick to my stomach.

Oh god. How many have they killed?

The answer, unfortunately, lay in the logic of the situation:

Before the collapse, vampires were a fractured society. Some factions practiced civilized rules. They didn’t drink to kill. They asked permission before they bit. They wrote up donor contracts with fair stipulations. They made under-the-table deals with blood banks so they could maintain emergency reserves.

But some vampires had stuck to the old ways, right up until the end of civilization. They were responsible for the glut of missing people in major cities. They were the reason mass graves were uncovered from time to time but no serial killers were ever found and punished. They took all the blood they wanted without a care in the world. Humans were nothing to them but cattle.

During the purge, steeped in the worst kind of irony, the civilized factions had suffered disproportionately—because they’d left a paper trail the government could follow. Meanwhile, the real threats to society hid in the shadows and laughed as their nicer counterparts were herded into corners like scared little mice and ruthlessly burned to their second deaths.

The result of this imbalance meant that any vampire you came across today was more likely to be the not-so-nice variety.

So how many people had this coven killed in the intervening years since moving into Pettigrew? The answer was as many as they had been able to get their hands on.

I have to report this to the fae leadership in Kinsale, I thought as a nervous sweat broke out across my forehead. Even if they won’t immediately intervene, they at least need to be aware a potential threat is living only twenty miles from the boundary. Faeries don’t like vampires any more than humans do, so the dullahan will monitor them heavily.

But in order to report the vampire coven to the relevant fae authorities, I first had to escape from Leonard and make it home before either he or Vianu caught up to me with their insane speed. That meant summoning a huge burst of magic without alerting Leonard before I lashed out at him—vampires could sense magic even if they couldn’t use it—and then running full speed through a neighborhood I wasn’t familiar with, all the way to the main road that cut through town, another twenty freaking miles across the stretches, which were populated with feral werewolf packs liable to attack me at any time, and finally back across the Kinsale barrier.

How the hell was I going to do that?

Chapter Two

The solution turned out to be a fainting spell.

A regular fainting spell, not the magic variety.

I hid the dissolution of my third glamour behind a cough and rebuffed my magic—which was angered by my capture—pushing it down into my soul even further than normal. This created a bubble of energy that grew stronger with each passing second, like a covered pot of water left to boil. It also gave me a sense of being vaguely off kilter. As if the world was tilting left and right in time with each of my stumbling steps. It was irritating to work through, but the resulting lack of balance would make my fainting routine seem genuine to Leonard, who was more muscle and less intellectual, and who probably left any whiff of strategy to Vianu and his other bosses.

My trick played out as a simple, three-step process:

First, I went limp in Leonard’s grasp. Pain shot through my dislocated shoulder at the added weight as my knees buckled and I sank toward the ground, but I caught the groan in my throat and refused to let it out. Leonard swore at me and shook me a couple times, trying to get me back up. But I hung there motionless until he finally let me go, at which point I collapsed with all the grace of a flour sack. I lay there with my eyes closed, breathing shallow, pretending as if the vampires had injured me more than intended and my fae blood wasn’t enough to make up the difference.

Aw, hell, Leonard muttered. You’re not dying, are you? He prodded me with his shoe, hard enough to hurt, but again, I feigned unconsciousness. Leonard swore and paced around me, debating what to do. He could try feeding me his own blood, which gave humans a healing boost, but he knew that didn’t always work with half-fae. Some types