King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1) Read online

  King of

  FLAMES

  The Masks of Under

  Book One

  By Kathryn Ann Kingsley

  King of Flames

  Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Ann Kingsley.

  All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: February 2019

  Limitless Publishing, LLC

  Kailua, HI 96734

  www.limitlesspublishing.com

  Formatting: Limitless Publishing

  ISBN-13: 978-1-64034-534-8

  ISBN-10: 1-64034-534-5

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  First and foremost, to my wonderful and patient husband for putting up with me while I wrote this monstrosity.

  To Sylvia, Caleb, and all my other amazing readers and fans for cheering me on, catching typos, and helping me stay motivated to finish this series. I am nothing without an audience, and you guys kept me going. Not only that, but it’s been your interest and involvement that inspired me to polish the series and seek publication. Without you guys, this would not have happened. Thank you.

  To my parents, without whom I never would have had the gall to try to write something at all.

  And lastly—Kristin? I still blame you for this.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Houses of Under

  House of Flames

  Ruled by King Edu. They are marked in red. They are the conquering force. They are warriors, fighters, and believe in the right of might above all else. In Edu’s absence, Elder Oanr rules. King Edu reigns as the story begins.

  House of Shadows

  Ruled by King Aon. They are marked in black. Their oversight is learning to wield the marks bestowed on them by the Ancients and tapping into their power to wield magic. In Aon’s absence, Elder Navaa rules. As the story begins, Aon is asleep in his crypt.

  House of Fate

  Ruled by Queen Ini, who slumbers in her crypt. They are marked in blue. They are given visions by the Ancients and do what they can to guide the direction of Under to match their will. In Ini’s absence, Elder Ziza rules. Ziza is also the Oracle of the Ancients, responsible for conveying visions and relaying their will.

  House of Words

  Ruled by Queen Vjo, who slumbers in her crypt. They are marked in purple. They are scientists and historians. They study all that can be known of Under that does not pertain to the marks on their skin, as that is the purview of the House of Shadows. In Vjo’s absence, Elder Maverick rules.

  House of Blood

  Ruled by King Rxa, who slumbers in his crypt. They are marked in white. They are the vampiric caretakers of the Ancients where they slumber in their prison. They both worship them and yet are their wardens. In Rxa’s absence, Elder Otoi rules. Lyon, the Priest, was once elder of this house but sacrificed his title to wed Kamira, as those of equal station cannot otherwise do so.

  House of Moons

  Ruled by King Dtu, who slumbers in his crypt. They are marked in green. They are shapeshifters and creatures dedicated to the wild. In Dtu’s absence, Elder Kamira rules.

  Major Players:

  Lydia, a human. Twenty-eight years old. Worked as an autopsy forensic technician until her world was upended with the arrival of a tattoo she never intended to have. Went to school and currently lives in Boston.

  Nick, Lydia’s best friend. Thirty years old. Went to medical school with Lydia but became a security guard at the same lab where Lydia works.

  Evie, full name Evelyn. Belongs to the House of Words. Wound up in Edu’s jail for attempting to kill someone in her own house. Was taken from Montana in 1922. Wanted to be a movie star.

  Lyon. The Priest. Former elder of the House of Blood who gave up his title to marry Kamira. Born in 232 CE, in the region now known as France. Became a Roman legionnaire before being taken to Under after losing his wife and son in the Crisis of the Third Century.

  The Ancients

  The original creatures that embody Under. It is those seven gods from whom all the rest of the world originates. They are imprisoned inside the lake of blood beneath the Cathedral of the Ancients. If they were to die, Under would cease to be. There is one for each house of Under.

  Elders and Regents:

  Kamira. Elder of the House of Moons. Born in 22 BCE in south-western Spain (Tartessos). Married to Lyon.

  Maverick. Elder of the House of Words. Born in 1832, England. Known as the doctor. Married to Aria, who also lives within the House of Words.

  Ziza, Elder of the House of Fate. Born in Italy, 417. Also serves as Oracle to the Ancients and relays visions granted to her.

  Navaa, Elder of the House of Shadows. Born in Bunyoro (Modern day Uganda), 1377.

  Otoi, Elder of the House of Blood. Born in Bucharest, 1721.

  Oanr, Elder of the House of Flames. Born in Iceland, 544.

  Chapter One

  What do you do when you wake up with a tattoo you didn’t have the night before?

  Huh. Well, that’s odd, was the first thing that ran through Lydia’s mind as she looked down at the mark on her forearm.

  It looked like any old tattoo. It was small, about the size of a nickel, and done as if in a single pass with black ink from a needle. It was just a single symbol—archaic, strange, and nothing she recognized. After attacking it with rubbing alcohol and bleach, all she succeeded in doing was making her skin red. Slowly and reluctantly, Lydia concluded the ink really was under her skin.

  Or, at least, it looked like ink.

  She was pretty damn sure it wasn’t a spontaneously appearing black, thin-lined birthmark. One that looked like a backward N with a spiral cut through the middle. It really looked like tattoo ink.

  The problem was, it hadn’t been there last night. Lydia hadn’t been out drinking and hadn’t blacked out. Sleepwalking? No. She had gone to bed at about two in the morning after being up late playing video games—no tattoo parlor in the city would’ve been open. She didn’t know any tattoo artists with a sick sense of humor. Lydia had gone to bed, woken up, and—poof. Nickel-sized tattoo. Right there on her forearm, no missing it, no mistaking it.

  It was incredible how the human mind processed the seemingly impossible. After attempting to remove the thing for an hour, Lydia’s mind simply decided that it could not process the issue. The mystery was upended by the simple and much more approachable problem of being late to work. That one she could wrap her head around. That one she could solve.

  Instead of sinking into the panic of debating what the thing was on her arm, she just…went about her day. Lydia scrambled to get ready, threw on some eyeliner, and brushed her hair before rushing to the T. She didn’t know why she bothered. It wasn’t like her “coworkers” would notice. They weren’t the most sociable, chatty
, and observant people. Nothing against them—they couldn’t help it.

  They were dead, after all.

  Lydia was a forensic autopsy technician. With every person she ever met, she had to explain why her job was not like that thing they saw on CSI that one time. It was hardly that interesting. Her job was only to collect the data. Record the numbers. There were more important, better-paid, smarter people who sat at a desk and actually solved the crimes. She just stuck plastic sticks in dead people, cut bits and pieces out of them for various reasons, and took a whole lot of gross photos.

  Now, that wasn’t to say Lydia didn’t have real coworkers. It was just funnier to think about the people on the slab that way, to put them in a slightly humorous, if sardonic light. Otherwise, she’d have to take her job seriously, and that was no way to live. Her real coworkers were friendly, ordinary people with details in their lives about which she had no clue. They were all okay with it that way.

  Contrary to popular belief, nobody worked the night shift at a morgue, even if horror movies told you otherwise. She had a normal, nine-to-five, humdrum life, just like most people. Even if hers had to do with dead people. Well, hey, somebody had to do it. It did sometimes leave her with the scent of chemicals, though. She had to use mint shampoo because if she used anything floral, she just came off smelling like a funeral parlor.

  Leaning against the side of the train car, she looked down at her phone and flicked her thumb over whatever soup-du-jour game she had downloaded that week. The green line was late getting into South Station. Again.

  It was funny that in the city of Boston, you could hit the start of your workday by fifteen minutes in either direction, and honestly, nobody cared. Boston’s T was America’s oldest subway station, and it showed. At this point, she suspected if a pigeon shit on the rails, the train would have to wait twenty minutes for it to dry.

  She didn’t even want to think about what happened when it snowed.

  Lydia had come to enjoy Boston, if admittedly against her will. She’d moved out here from the New Hampshire countryside to go to college, got an internship, got hired, and got stuck. Now she had a typical life for a late-twenties single professional. Some houseplants, a job, some friends, some hobbies, and—a mark of personal progress in the city of Boston—a one-bedroom apartment to herself.

  Lydia’s pattern was, like most people, wake up, work, go home, fill some time, sleep, wake up, work, day after day. Every few days, she’d hang out with friends or catch a beer with her breathing coworkers. Smatter in a date or two, and life was good.

  That was a successful life, right?

  Lather, rinse, repeat.

  Each day wasn’t too different from the last. That also was most people’s opinion of a successful life. Just slowly wandering into the sunset, doing the same thing—predictable and routine.

  To be fair, today was just a little different than usual, though.

  Lydia kept scratching her arm over her sleeve. The heavy chemicals she used on her surprise tattoo were itching like mad. Maybe she shouldn’t have attacked it with a Brillo pad and bleach, but she had been frantic. Rolling up her sleeve, she tried to surreptitiously glance at it to see if it had magically disappeared. Maybe the bleach had done its trick. But no. There, surrounded by a red rash of her own doing, was the mark.

  It didn’t even hurt like she had expected a new tattoo probably should. It hadn’t felt like anything until she attacked it trying to get it off. It was like it had been there for years.

  She knew how tattoo ink on human skin should look. She knew how it got that slightly grayish, fuzzy edge to it, no matter how good of a job had been done by the artist. She didn’t have any ink of her own, but more of the bodies that ended up on her table had them than not.

  The thing on her arm wasn’t possible. It had no business being there. She should be rushing to the hospital, but what the hell would they say? Tell her not to do drugs, and maybe she wouldn’t wake up with a tattoo she didn’t remember? They wouldn’t believe her when she said she had a Diet Coke, played some PlayStation, and went to bed. They’d assume she either got drunk and didn’t remember it or got roofied at a bar.

  Either way, the cops would be called in, she’d fill out a report, and absolutely nothing would be done about it. Nobody was hurt, nobody had been killed, nothing had been stolen, and there was nowhere to start looking. Best case, they’d come to check out her apartment for signs of breaking and entering. She’d already looked; there weren’t any. The cops would be left to simply shrug at the situation and go.

  So what on earth was she going to do? Call out of work? Sit on her floor and sob uncontrollably? Call an exorcist?

  Lydia wasn’t the type to cry and panic. She considered herself a rational, reasonable, logical human being. In college and med school, she had worked as an entry-level EMT. She had learned the “act first, panic later” mantra from a few of the older, far more beautifully jaded and saltier Boston paramedics.

  They were a particular bunch.

  The method was clear—solve the problem, then have a breakdown if you had to. More than once Lydia had shown up to an accident where the person who had the original issue was just fine and the person who had made the call needed help because of a panic attack.

  Act first, panic later. Lydia kept repeating it to herself in her head to try and stave off the rising tide. She had a tattoo on her arm she didn’t remember getting, one that was impossible. But nothing was impossible, just momentarily unexplainable. Like stage magic, once you knew the secret, it was all a joke. Once she learned the trick, it’d seem obvious.

  All the way to work, she scratched absentmindedly at the spot on her arm. Now it was seriously burning. Like a mosquito bite, rubbing at it only made it worse. But like a mosquito bite, she couldn’t help it.

  Passing the front desk, she threw her bag onto the track of the x-ray machine. Government building, government security. It was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, after all, and it wasn’t exactly in the nicest part of town. Even if it was attached to the Boston Medical Center, it was a few blocks from the corrections center and in that no man’s land between the South End and I-93 where it came back out of the Big Dig.

  All sorts of people tried to wander in, some high, some nuts, most somewhere in between.

  “Hey, Nick,” she said to the security guard. He was younger than most of the other guards. He had initially been a Boston University intern with her almost six years ago. Nick had a penchant for not trying very hard unless he was really interested. Very little interested him, and so security was the perfect spot for him.

  “Hey, Lyd,” Nick said with a grin and looked up from his iPad. “Beer? Tonight?” The guy had an endearing, lopsided grin and scruffy brown hair. She figured he spent as little time as possible combing it without looking like a complete hobo. He was the kind of guy who always wore a t-shirt, over which he always wore either a hoodie or his uniform. That was pretty much all she’d ever seen him wear.

  Lydia and Nick had hit it off as good friends years ago, and they were still close. He was crass, and most people found him to be more than a little bit of an asshole. The issue was that Nick didn’t know how to communicate, even on the scale of people who dealt with the dead every day. He couldn’t help himself and not say what he thought at every possible moment. Lydia found the humor in it, and he put up with her weirdness, so here they were.

  “Sure,” Lydia agreed to after-work beers without really thinking about it. “Why not?” Screw it. She could use a drink. Maybe she could show Nick the mark on her arm and he might—might—not think she was crazy.

  “Cool,” he said and went back to his iPad, dismissing her from the conversation. Oh, Nick and his stellar lack of people skills.

  Lydia picked up her bag from the other side of the x-ray machine. Nick hadn’t even bothered to look at the screen; he never did. Lydia shouldered her pack and walked to the lab she shared with two other people. But as it was the week before Thanksgiving,
most people had taken an extended vacation. Shannon and Dan, her real officemates, were both out for the rest of the weekend.

  Today should be a dull day. But surprise tattoo chorused in Lydia’s mind. Fine, a slow workday. She sat down at her desk, flicked on her computer, and checked her email. She had a few cases to button up, boxes to click, photos to upload, and so on.

  Lydia scratched the mark on her arm and sighed. It was like a fly, buzzing around her head. Hey! Hey! It was making it very hard to focus now that she wasn’t moving. Idiot, you have a thing on your arm. You should panic. Hey! Hey, idiot!

  As she was in the room by herself, Lydia rolled up her sleeve and glared down at the mark. Sure enough, it was still there, under the skin that had now turned a pinkish-red with all her incessant scratching and previous chemical abuse.

  Lydia leaned back in the chair and held it up to look at in the light. It’d take a tattoo artist all of five minutes, if that, to put down. So some goon broke into her apartment and set up all his equipment and tattooed her. And the noise and the pain hadn’t woken her up somehow. They must have drugged her first, then.

  That seemed laughably like the most logical option. Lydia went to the bathroom and started searching herself for injection marks. She was good at finding them—that was her job, after all. Half an hour in the bathroom, using her phone on selfie mode, and no dice. Nothing to show for it except confirmation that looking at herself up the nose was never attractive, ever, and didn’t do anything for her self-esteem.

  She even checked for the classic serial killer trick and looked between her toes and under her nails. Lydia let out a low breath, took her long blonde hair out of her ponytail, and combed both her hands through the loose waves and tried to think. She scratched her scalp with her fingernails as she desperately tried to get her brain to work faster. It was required to keep her hair under a shower cap while working on a corpse, so Lydia always kept it tied up. But honestly, she preferred it down.