Monsters & Empire, page 1
MONSTERS & EMPIRE
URBAN MAGICK & FOLKLORE
BOOK FIVE
C. GOCKEL
WWW.CGOCKELWRITES.COM
CONTENTS
About the Book
Get sneak peeks and exclusive content
Also by C. Gockel
Acknowledgments
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part II
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part III
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Contact Information
ABOUT THE BOOK
GRENDEL NEVER BELIEVED LOVE COULD CONQUER ALL. SHE’D BETTER BE WRONG.
Beowulf’s brother, the Dragon King, has found an unstoppable weapon, and that weapon is Beowulf. With Beowulf’s Magick, the Dragon King is creating an army capable of destroying all in its path.
Can Grendel convince herself love is a force strong enough to break down the most powerful walls … the ones inside?
Can she convince Beowulf she is not the enemy, or will Beowulf follow the path of his namesake, and let pride and a thirst for vengeance destroy Grendel’s homeland and himself?
Grendel’s faith and Beowulf’s choice will decide the fate of monsters and empires, human and non-humans, the living and the dead.
Copyright © 2023 C. Gockel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, subject “Attention: Permissions,” at the email address below:
cgockel@cgockelwrites.com
Print ISBN: 9798865375319
Created with Vellum
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ALSO BY C. GOCKEL
URBAN MAGICK & FOLKLORE
Snow So White
Blood So Red
Grendel & Beowulf
Mother of Monsters
Monsters & Empire
I BRING THE FIRE (A LOKI SERIES)
Wolves: I Bring the Fire Part I (free ebook!)
Monsters: I Bring the Fire Part II
Chaos: I Bring the Fire Part III
In the Balance: I Bring the Fire Part 3.5
Fates: I Bring the Fire Part IV
The Slip: A Short Story (mostly) from Sleipnir’s Point of Smell
Warriors: I Bring the Fire Part V
Ragnarok: I Bring the Fire Part VI
The Fire Bringers: An I Bring the Fire Short Story
Atomic: A Short Story
Magic After Midnight: A Short Story
Rush: A Short Story
Take My Monsters: A Short Story
Soul Marked: I Bring the Fire Part VII
Magic After Midnight I Bring the Fire Part VIII
Last Wish: A Short Story
THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT
Archangel Down (free ebook!)
Noa's Ark
Heretic
Carl Sagan's Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe: A Short Story
Starship Waking
Darkness Rising
The Defiant
Android General 1
Admiral Wolf
Supernova
Mech
OTHER WORKS
Murphy’s Star: A Sci-fi Short Story
Friendly Fire: A Sci-fi Short Story
Let There Be Light: A Sci-fi Short Story
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Knives get sharper and more polished against a whetstone. My books become better with the feedback of my beta readers. Grendel & Beowulf was sharpened and polished with the feedback of Sarah Easterly, Elizabeth Morris, and Amy Eberhedt. All of them read my digital pages before they’d been grammar edited, enduring massive eye twitches when I managed to spell names that I created wrong … multiple ways, over and over again. They caught plot problems, hats that came off more than once, point of view shifts, and helped me keep my characters in character.
Erin Zarro did the first pass for grammar, cleaning up the detritus of my dyslexic mind and suffered mightily for it.
Writing can be a lonely business, but writing this book wasn’t thanks to the Morning Sprinters group. Thanks to all the regulars there for keeping me on task: Christine, Yasmine, Lilith, Kelley, and many drop-in guests.
My family had a role in this book, too. My husband was the one who convinced me to publish. He doesn’t bat an eye between releases when earnings become thin. Also, he puts up with my daydreaming writer’s brain, as do my children (though they have less of a choice in the matter).
Special shout out to all the Facebook followers who helped me name one of my minor characters in this book: Dr. Verity Dodgson. Her name was suggested all or in part by: Rachel Mulvey, Richard Perkins, Patrick Cumby, Sean Murphy, Krista B. Fontenot, Lesley Duke, Amy Laura Halsall, Shavonte Jackson, Travis Russell, Dan Jones, Emma-Jane Wilkinson, and Eric Walters. Coming up for names after twenty books is quite a chore! Thank you for making it fun and easy.
This book wouldn’t have come to pass without all my readers. Thank you for reading, thank you for buying (and borrowing!) Thank you for reviewing and all your kind emails and posts on Facebook. I’ll try to keep writing as long as you keep reading and listening.
Lastly, special mention must be given to Naomi Novik. If she had continued the series of splendid fairy tale retellings she began with Uprooted and Spinning Silver I might never have felt the need to write Urban Magick & Folklore.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The corpse’s stench overpowered the sickly sweet taste of Magick on Bayo’s tongue. The man was so decomposed, Bayo almost didn't recognize him…
Dr. Turban, a Magickal surgeon and Bayo’s assistant, bent over the body. Turban’s Magick flared, and it “tasted” the way corpses stank. It all but smothered the omnipresent, faint Magickal flavor of honeysuckle that clung to Bayo’s tongue. Turban whispered, “This body has a story to tell, deeper than what I read in its smell.”
Bayo's skin prickled at the rhyme and Turban’s need to make it. Turban would call it a “spell.” Magickals of lesser talent used them to “focus” their Magick.
Turban’s eyelids fluttered closed. “He’s been dead for two months.” He waved a hand over the body. “Ah …his relatives kept him in a stasis spell for half that time. You’ve revived worse.”
“No,” Bayo said.
Turban straightened. “The Ice Makers last week. The Waterworker the week before—”
“I’m not reviving this one,” Bayo snarled. The steel table beneath the corpse reflected the overhead lights with blinding intensity. Bayo felt a headache coming on.
“But—” protested Turban.
Spinning from the table, Bayo strode past the humming tanks that kept the ambient Ember in the room as high as … as high as … Bayo’s mind drew a blank. He shook his head. An image of a train car at night flashed through his mind. He stumbled.
Turban cried, “Wait—”
Bayo didn’t hear the rest. He stormed out of the Revivery. Bursting into the sunlight of the desert at noon, he blinked against the glare. Revived guards on either side of the door snapped to salute. Men and women Bayo had revived earlier in the day marched toward a troop transport. They’d go through military training and then integrate with regular Magickal units. The Revived had no say in this. They also had no feelings about the matter. They had no feelings at all.
Bayo’s brother, Theo, the Prime of the United Magickal States, the UMS’s ultimate leader, said they were the best troops the UMS had. Ember animated the Revived, and as long as they had access to Ember, any wound they had would heal and their body parts could be reattached. The only way to incapacitate them was to remove their heads or burn them to ash. They were like Vampires. Bayo’s skin crawled. He took a deep breath of clean, dry, desert air, his eyes lifting to the distance and the scrub-covered Franklin Mountains.
Built on the capital’s outskirts, the Revivery was far from the prying eyes of the press and those hoping Bayo would resurrect their dead.
If they could see the Revived marching in the courtyard, eyes vacant, moves mechanical, would they want that for the ones they loved? Bayo wouldn’t want it for his worst e
“Do you want a car?” Dr. Turban asked, emerging from the building.
“No.”
“But—”
“Call one for yourself!” Bayo shouted, approaching his Suncruiser Embercycle, a gift from his brother. The bike was new, and Ember hadn’t made its way into its gears to give it loyalty or personality. Bayo preferred a machine he got along with, rather than a machine he’d have absolute control over. An Ember machine bonded to you would steer for you if you had to stake a Vampire. Individualism in a machine drained the Ember tank faster, but could be the difference between success and failure, life and death.
The machine had a tracking device installed. Theo would know Bayo was coming. And if he was in a bad mood, he’d chew Bayo out through one of the bike’s side mirrors.
Bayo had ignored the tracking device so far. They were standard in the Order of Ember, the elite Vampire hunting force Bayo had belonged to from age seven to just a few months ago. He’d followed more than one Magickal tracker on a hunt when a member of his Order had gone missing in pursuit of a bloodsucker. They were a safety measure.
Bayo wasn’t in the Order anymore. He wasn’t hunting Vampiric vermin. He was going to visit his brother. Unscrewing the Ember tank cap, he reached through the rubber flap that prevented leakage during fill ups. Heedless of the Ember seeping out, Bayo felt around until he found the bug. It had dug itself into the inside of the flap. Encircling it with his fingers, Bayo yanked. Enriched by the tank’s Ember, the bug clung with more strength than its eight paperclip thin legs should have allowed. Taking a deep inhale of the leaking Ember, Bayo gave Magickal power to his sinews and tendons of his hand, yanked harder, and the bug popped free. Bayo screwed the cap back on and checked if Turban had noticed. The man had not. He was giving orders to a Revived to bring a car around. Bayo dropped the device into the hot Sunland sand and crushed it under his heel.
Bayo had a head start and finding him in mirrors without the tracker would be difficult. Especially since Bayo was taking a shortcut.
Jumping onto the bike, he hit the power and checked the Ember levels. Low, but enough. He hit the accelerator, slowing slightly when he reached the gate. The Revived guards opened it for Bayo without greetings or questions, despite it being before his departure time. That lack of questioning was what his brother was depending on. Theo was a fool.
Theo was in a meeting when Bayo reached the Keep. Approaching Theo’s office, Bayo could feel the attendee’s desperation and anger in the Ember. When he got closer, he recognized the attendee’s muffled voice echoing into the corridor. That shouldn’t happen. The Keep must have settled. Drawing to a halt, he blinked down at a crack beneath Theo's door. Bayo needed to tell Theo to soundproof the thing. Later. After he heard the conclusion to this interview.
“I know you believe that someone has to take her out!” Eclason, Bayo’s friend and member of Bayo’s former Order declared.
“Maybe that’s not true anymore.” Theo’s quiet, hesitant reply was at odds with his nickname, the “Dragon King.” “My army—”
“The Queen’s army wasn’t enough,” Eclason countered.
Bayo’s nostrils flared. Grendel. They were talking about Grendel, the most dangerous Vampire to rise from the dead. Before Bayo’s birth, Grendel had been the catalyst for a civil war and murdered the Queen. Only months ago, she had murdered Aion, Gareth, and Gil, members of Bayo’s Order. Trent, another member of Bayo’s Order, had faced her and consequently gone insane and wandered off, never to be seen again. Grendel was a tool of the UMS’s greatest enemy, the monster lovers of the Alliance to the North.
Once, Bayo had almost killed Grendel by tracking her to her luxurious underground home in Chicago. The Vampire had designed it to look like St. Petersburg Station in Russia. Remembering the gleam of gilt columns and chandeliers, marble ceilings and floors, and the soft shuffle of her human slave-hosts … It felt like a dream. Someone else’s dream. Bayo touched his temple. The headache he thought he’d left behind was coming back with a vengeance.
Beyond the door, Eclason continued, “She’s too dangerous to ignore, you know that.”
“I’ve already lost Aion, Trent, Gil, and Gareth. I nearly lost Gray and Kurt,” Theo replied. Under his breath, he muttered, “I nearly lost my brother.”
Bayo’s jaw hardened at his brother's exaggeration. Bayo had experienced issues since his meeting with Grendel—not due to Grendel herself, but due to her Fae accomplices. The Fae had twisted his memories and made them hazy and unreliable. “Fae Shocked,” they called it. But his memories would come back, and Bayo had gotten more from Grendel than she’d taken. Bayo had dragged the Vampire from her extravagant sarcophagus. He’d forced her to reveal a secret backdoor into the Smoky Mountain Mine. Grendel had been supplying the mine with slaves for decades, and—
Bayo’s headache intensified. Gritting his teeth, he flinched and tried to recall the details of her capture. He’d pinned her to the floor, and her blonde hair had spilled out beneath her. She’d ineffectually raked at him with black shellacked nails. Her too-pale blue eyes had glinted wickedly, and her crimson painted lips had curled into a sneer. Even contorted in rage, she’d been beautiful. All Vampires were, once they de-aged: to better attract the unsuspecting. Even Vampire hunters weren’t immune to their beauty and yet …
Bayo’s shoulders sagged. There was no emotion attached to that vision—no rage, lust, or sense of waste that a creature so beautiful could be so evil—there was nothing.
He had another memory that was exquisitely clear. A Magickal force knocked him down and left him concussed during his liberation of the mine... He’d woken and found two older women leaning over him, both worried, one with hair so white it was like a halo and eyes so pale they almost glowed behind her spectacles. Despite her age, she’d been lovely, and he’d wanted to kiss her. He felt that wanting even now. He couldn’t remember her name. Maybe he never knew it.
“Send me to Chicago,” Eclason entreated beyond the door. “Send me after Grendel.”
Theo did not directly control the Order, but Order missions outside the UMS had to be approved by him.
Bayo wanted to rush in and demand, “Send me!” but didn’t. He’d already made the demand too many times. Theo needed him here. The people of the United Magickal States needed him here.
Bayo’s lip curled, thinking of the corpse on the table—the scent still lingered in his nostrils and coated his tongue. His frustration boiled over, and he burst into Theo’s office before the guards could stop him.
Since becoming Prime, Theo had “redecorated” his office, tearing down walls to make it three times the size it once was, lifting the ceiling by opening the chamber to the one above and stretching the windows two stories high. Carved columns with graceful arches maintained the structural integrity. Steel, poisonous to Fae, and paler silver, toxic to Vampires, glinted on every surface, even between the tiles of the dark obsidian floor.
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