Master of Smoke

body and hair, as if she’d bathed in it. Her blue eyes stared out of the gory mask of her face, pale and insane.
    “How could you do this?” he whispered, disbelief and betrayal a ball of cold lead in his chest. “How could you murder our people?”
    “Our people?” She curled her lips—the lips he’d once kissed with such delicious greed. “Your people. They loved you, not me. Yet you would be nothing without me! They would be nothing without me.” She smiled viciously, spreading her arms to indicate the carnage. “And now that’s exactly what they are. Nothing.”
    Fury replaced the grief and shock with a blinding red haze. He threw up a hand and sent a roiling blast of magic right at her murderous face.

    “David! ” Eva’s alarmed shout snapped him out of the dream.
    He was kneeling on the bed, hand still lifted just as it had been in the nightmare. Across the room, one of Eva’s figurines lay in smoking fragments.
    “You blew up Batman.” Eva stared at the remains of the statuette. “How the hell did you blow up Batman?”
    “I have no idea.” He fell back against the pillow, his mind still reverberating with grief and rage from the remains of the dream.
    “That must have been one nasty dream.”
    He stared blindly at the ceiling. “It was. Gods, it was.”

    Warlock jolted up on the thick pile of cushions and silk. His heart pounded in his furry chest as he bounded out of his sleeping pit to stand there panting, fighting his fear, his clawed hands shaking.
    For a moment, the Demigod had taken some of his power and memories back. Warlock had felt them being dragged away, had felt the ruthless strength of the immortal’s mind.
    He’d felt himself weaken.
    His shaking morphed from fear to rage. Weakness was unacceptable. Merlin had chosen him to become the wizard werewolf because he was the strongest, the most worthy of his Saxon race. And Merlin had needed someone like him to make sure Arthur’s knights didn’t turn on humanity.
    For centuries, the Direkind had followed him in his quest. Even those who had no idea of his existence—which was most of them—had followed the Chosen he led. The Chosen, who were the aristocratic descendents of those Merlin had personally selected to become Direkind. Most of the rest were Bitten—transformed by the magic of a werewolf’s bite.
    The Direkind, unlike the Magekind—or him, for that matter—were not immortal. Another thing that gave him power.
    He’d taken the strength Merlin had given him and built it. Now, with Smoke’s added magic, he had become stronger yet. Strong enough to meet the hated Celt king’s power, even with all the witches Arthur could command.
    Always, always he’d feared failing his people—going against Arthur only to be defeated by the overwhelming magic of the Magekind. That fear had become an obsession, eating at him for centuries, until he’d known he could let nothing stop him in his quest for power. Even if it meant doing the necessary but distasteful. Even if Merlin would not have approved.
    Merlin, after all, was gone. Warlock was the one left to clean up the Celt’s mess—unnecessary wars that could have been prevented, starving children, racial and religious hate boiling over into violence. If the Celt had only had the balls to use the power at his disposal, so many lives could have been saved. But Arthur didn’t have the stomach for the job.
    Warlock did.
    He just had to get Arthur out of the way so he could do it.
    So he’d fathered sons, attempting to create magic-using partners, but one by one they’d become a threat, and he’d had to eliminate them all. More recently, he’d gotten a daughter on a woman of the Chosen, reasoning that since she was a female, she could be no real threat.
    The grandsons she’d give him would not have the talent to be true competition, while still providing the magical assistance he’d need to go up against Arthur’s witches. It would take decades to put such a plan in motion, but since he was immortal, he had all the time he needed.
    Now he’d suddenly acquired the power he’d craved for so many centuries. And it was everything he’d ever dreamed of, as intoxicating as any drug.
    It was delicious being a god.
    As for the alien memories that came with that power, he’d realized he needed them. Otherwise he wouldn’t have the experience to shape all that wild magic.
    I’m not going to give this up. Not any of it.
    The Demigod had to die before he could take