The Fire King Read Online Free PDF Page B

village surrounded by the remains of an ancient crumbling wall. The streets were twisting, narrow, made of dirt; and the homes, built seamlessly together, had been crafted of stone and wood and clay. It looked remote, felt remote, and the children who lingered around the car when she stumbled out, bleary-eyed, squealed with delight when she spoke to them in their native language.
    Khalkha dialect. Mongolian. Not quite to the border between that country and China, but close enough to taste grit in the air from the Gobi Desert. One of the boys, no older than eight, had asked immediately if she’d come about the bleeding soldiers. This question invited a hard shove from one of the older girls, who called him stupid and said that Soria
surely
had arrived to see the giant white man who had been hauled away from the military truck, ass first, unconscious.
    Well, Soria had just seen the giant white man—nearly seven feet of him, if she had to guess. All muscle, all frustration, and definitely not human. She could believe that he had killed ten men. She would have believed he had killed twenty, with his bare hands, if Serena had said so.
    Hello,
he had rasped, from behind his mask.
Hello,
in a language that was utterly unfamiliar to Soria, in a voice that sounded like the very definition of pain.
    It had been so startling to hear him. Soria still felt chills, though she was not certain why the memory of his voice haunted her. Perhaps because it was so very human. Perhaps because hearing him speak made him real to her in ways that merely looking at him had not.
    He was real to you before,
she chided herself.
He was real.
    Yet it was different, hearing him. Without a face to be an anchor, a body was only a fragment, an echo of a person’s existence. A body said too little about personality, or character. And the shape-shifter’s eyes had barely been visible inside the shadows of the hood. But his voice …
    Soria tugged at her empty sleeve, breathing through gritted teeth.
Enough,
she thought angrily.
Voices mean nothing. You have to go deeper.
    If she was allowed to. This whole operation stank.
    The shape-shifter led Soria up a narrow flight of stairs, directly into another small room made of stone. Unlike the cell, this was aboveground. A sliver of light pushed through a small window set near the ceiling. The air smelled musty, and everything was covered in a thin layer of dust. Northern China suffered from sandstorms blown in from the Gobi Desert. Years ago, Soria had spent time in Beijing, helping another agent investigate a kidnapping. She still remembered how impossible it had been to keep things clean inside the little apartment they shared.
    A slender young Chinese man sat at a long wooden table watching a row of security monitors. Soria saw the door of the room she had just left, and on another screen, the captive shape-shifter. She leaned in, studying him, seeing him remotely—bound and hooded in iron which made him seem even more alien and strange. Far more so than she had felt sitting beside him on the floor, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do.
    Serena’s hand was human again. The shape-shifter placed it on the young Chinese man’s shoulder as she bent to whisper in his ear. His expression never changed, but a faint flush stained his cheeks as he dragged a laptop close and typed on the keyboard. The screen darkened, revealing a frozen image from what appeared to be another security tape.
    Not security,
Soria realized, noting the eye-level angle of the picture, and the presence of color.
A handheld camera.
    “Watch carefully,” Serena said, as the young man hit another key.
    No sound. Just film. Scattered men were holding flashlights, moving slowly down a long, rocky tunnel that gave the impression of being underground. It was hard to make out details. Images kept jumping. Soria felt as though she were watching some amateurish indie flick, a
Blair Witch
wannabe. It nauseated her, and she leaned back,