The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 758

Garrick Vail let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“Somewhere warm,” he said. “You’re threatening a fire magician with warmth.”

His own front room. Nine feet between them. The lamp turned low on the wall, the ashes cold in the grate.

“For people like me, kid, warm is nothing—warm is bathwater.” He clenched his fists, unleashing twin coils of fire around his hands.

“You’re right.” Alex nodded. “I should have been clearer. The invitation is to hell.”

Vail stopped smiling.

“They tell me it’s very hot down there,” Alex went on. “And you being what you are, I thought — well. At least he’ll have something to play with.”

“What do you want?”

“You spent tonight in a room above a restaurant arranging my death.” Alex stood up. “You commanded three hundred men to burn us. So of course I came here to kill you. What else did you think this was?”

Vail’s hand was already coming up.

Nineteen years as the strongest fire magician in the Arcanum State, and he did not hesitate, and he did not waste a word — the whole room went orange as it left his palm.

The chair by the fireplace disintegrated.

The wall behind it went with it.

…

Vail stood in the wreckage of his own front room breathing hard, and there was no body in front of him.

There was nothing in front of him at all.

“You just made a very big mistake,” Alex said, from behind him.

Vail spun.

He got halfway.

…

What came off Alexander’s hand was fire.

Not white. Not light. Fire — Red Tower work, the pure old form, the same art Vail had spent his life on and had taught to four thousand students and had believed, right up until that second, that no one alive did better than him.

It was better than his.

It was so much better than his that his last clear thought was not fear but something closer to insult.

It caught him across the chest and went up, and Garrick Vail burned in the middle of his own house with a heat that cracked the windows outward into the garden, and the light of it went up the lane and lit the hedges on both sides.

Alex watched until there was nothing worth watching.

“Play with fire,” he said, “and fire is what gets you.”

Then he walked out through the front door and left it open behind him.

…

By nine the next morning the United State of Magic had three bodies and no idea what to do with any of them.

The Minister of Magic, dead in a carriage accident on an empty street at one in the morning.

The chairman of Ferrowgate fell forty-one floors into the dark, leaving behind an empty balcony and an uncorked, irreplaceable vintage.

The elder of the Red Tower, burned to nothing in his own front room.

Three men who had eaten dinner together the night before.

The Knight Commander stood on the steps of the knight hall in a thin drizzle with forty press crystals pointed at him and said the only thing he could say.

“We are treating these as three separate matters until the evidence tells us otherwise. We will find whoever did this. And we will establish whether there is any connection between them.”

The story ran for about four hours.

Then it stopped, because something better happened.

A man walked up the steps of the knight hall in the middle of the afternoon briefing, pushed between two officers, and shouted into the press crystals.

“It was me. I killed all three of them.”

…

He was about sixty. He had string holding one boot together and he had not been near soap in some time, and he stood in front of the entire national press with his chin up like a man collecting a prize.

The hall went completely silent.

“I broke the Minister’s neck in his carriage,” he said. “Then I pushed Silas Kessler off his own balcony. Then I burned Garrick Vail in his front room.”

Nobody moved.

“And I’ll say this much.” The old man smiled with about half his teeth. “That last one was poetry. A man spends his whole life playing with fire, and look how he goes.”

A reporter got there first, half-climbing the rail.

“Why? Why did you kill them?”

…

The old man nodded slowly, like it was a fair question and he’d been hoping for it.

“Their faces,” he said.

“…Sorry?”

“I didn’t like their faces.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen all three of them in the papers for years. Every morning, those three faces. I hated them, so I killed them.”

Four million people watched that live.

Nobody in the country knew whether to laugh or be sick, and by evening a great many had done both.

Two knights came up the steps fast and took him by both arms, and he did not resist at all, and he was smiling in every picture on the way to the carriage.

The bulletins that night led with the same six words in every paper in the state.

The killer has been caught. Confessed.

…

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