Perfect Hell Book 2

By C. A. Caster

Her mother had changed the entire world and made excruciating sacrifices. Today, she lived in a utopian peace where beauty and creativity reined and Pheonix was free of worry and fear....But, wow. She was so freakin bored.
Her mother's heavy mantle had been slipping onto her shoulders since she was young and she did her duty just as she had been taught. She pushed the fire from her chest and sent it questing into the morning light every day. It made her hard.
Nixie was taught to close herself off from the horror that happened on the other end of the serpentine tongues of flame, but she knew. The avenging fire mercilessly stripped the flesh off the bones of any person, anywhere in the world, that dared commit a heinous crime.
But in 20 years without evil, people had become complacent and disgustingly bright and cheerful....it was gross.
Jamming her fists into her jeans with a scowl, she pushed through the crowds, a dot of black in a sea of cheerful colors. Making it NOT boring was gonna be her next mission 'cause this sucked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. A. Caster
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780992427610

Book preview

Perfect Hell

Book 2

By C.A. Caster

Copyright © 2014, By Cassandra A. Caster.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, which is me.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-0-9924276-1-0

    Her mother had changed the entire world and made excruciating sacrifices.  Today, she lived in a utopian peace where beauty and creativity reined and Pheonix was free of worry and fear....But, wow. She was so freakin bored.

    Her mother's heavy mantle had been slipping onto her shoulders since she was young and she did her duty just as she had been taught.  She pushed the fire from her chest and sent it questing into the morning light every day. It made her hard.

    Nixie was taught to close herself off from the horror that happened on the other end of the serpentine tongues of flame, but she knew.  The avenging fire mercilessly stripped the flesh off the bones of any person, anywhere in the world, that dared commit a heinous crime.  

  But in 20 years without evil, people had  become complacent and disgustingly bright and cheerful....it was gross.  

    Jamming her fists into her jeans with a scowl, she pushed through the crowds, a dot of black in a sea of cheerful colors.  Making it NOT boring was gonna be her next mission 'cause this sucked.

For my husband who spoils me, 

my girls who make me proud, my family whom I respect, 

and my friends,

my life is better with you cheering me on.

 I love you all!

Chapter 1 - Dancing with fire

Chapter 2 - Creating 

Chapter 3 - Fighting 

Chapter 4 - Molding 

Chapter 5 - Learning 

Chapter 6 - Purging 

Chapter 7 - Dreaming 

Chapter 8 - Shagging 

Chapter 9 - Knowing 

Chapter 10 - Sick 

Chapter 11 - Friends 

Chapter 12 - Avenging 

Chapter 13 - Planning 

Chapter 14 - Making up 

Chapter 15 - Plotting 

Chapter 16 - Twisted 

Chapter 17 - Daring 

Chapter 18 - Smiling 

Chapter 19 - Awing 

Chapter 20 - Seeking 

Chapter 21 - Tearing 

Chapter 22 - Veneance 

Chapter 23 - Finishing with fire

Chapter 1

    Footsteps sound loud and lonely at 3:34 in the morning.

    She liked having the city to herself.  The rhythm of her footsteps conjured music in her head and her shadow danced and stretched, mysteriously vanishing only to reappear in an illogical place, like a psychotic game of hide and seek. 

    She stopped and lit her cigarette from a small flame that emanated from her palm.  She let the flame grow and swirled her hand in a complicated pattern. She never tired of watching the flames. They seemed alive.  She hung her smoke from her lip and stretched out her arms, producing an identical flame in her other hand, squinting one eye away from the smoke.

    She stomped her feet, slapping out a rhythm on the pavement, bouncing her head to a tribal beat.  Her hands and arms started to move, sinuous and undulating. The snaking fire flickered, wavering her shadows on the walls of the buildings, making them dance madly.

    She let it go and danced dervishly to the music in her head, her flames lengthening and growing till they were long ribbons, trailing the swirling of her arms. The entire alleyway was lit as bright as day by the flames and her quickening steps clattered, ringing, the streamers of flame snapping and roaring. 

    The fire and her stomping made an alien and raw music. The white noise roar of the fire was punctuated by a bull whip crack as she flicked the ribbons behind her, and then thrust her arms forward. As the tempo smoothed out, she let the rope of fire tickle over a runnel of water that trickled down the middle of the alley, as the fire hit the water it steamed, hissing. As more and more of the fire slid into the water, the ssss grew louder and louder, building a wall of steam that diffused the light of the fire so that it created an orange fog in the alley.

    She sped up her smooth steps to a quicker and quicker tempo. The roar of one streamer snapping and the sizzling of the other built to a crescendo until, abruptly, the fire vanished from her hands. There was a quivering silence as the music echoed down the alley into the dark and disappeared. She lunged forward to a crouch, one leg behind her, and blasted a final cord of fire down the alley and pulled it back with her fingertips like snapping a whip.

    She froze there in the crouch, arms stretched forward and fingers back, face on her arms. Her cigarette was long gone. This was what it was all about. The creation of her music was like creating a living thing.  It was a view into her soul. This is what she had in her, what she had to give of herself and yet she gave it to the night city.

    What the fuck is going on down there? The man threw opened his window and looked down to see a girl with a mohawk crouched in the gutter.  She stood slowly and casually lit a cigarette.

    You alright? He peered down at her warily.  He hadn't seen anyone smoking in a long time, nobody suffered from addictions of any kind nowdays, nor had he seen one dressed like her in nearly, what? 20 years? The days of punk and emo fashion were long gone.

    About 20 years ago the world he lived in had changed.  A beautiful girl had appeared and bitch slapped all the bad people and showed the rest a way to become better.  He could still remember the day he first saw her on TV.

    Traffic had stopped his cab and strands of flame were whipping through the sky all over the city.  He thought that it was a freak lightening storm, but the television in the window of the electronics store was showing a girl with brown hair floating around her, her body jerked as fire poured out of her chest.  People were screaming and running past him.  It was all so confusing.  That night at the bar, a couple of the regulars were conspicuously absent.  The word was spreading.  'Don't do anything bad 'cause the consequences were real.'  Since that day, the line between good and evil was crystal clear.  

    The girl, Jenika, had been used as a tool by entities from another plane of existence, to build a utopia on earth.  Unbelievers quickly became believers when the skin was sizzled off their bones. That was 20 years ago, today, she was revered as the mother of the new world.

    In this new world, people turned to various art forms to enter into an alternate way of life, even farming had become an art form, in the last 20 years, the world had become a more beautiful, more vibrant place.  

    He had written a book about his experiences in his cab, it did ok enough for him to buy his apartment and settle down.  In his opinion, life was better now, even though 98 % of the people out there had taken goodness to the extreme and it was now the fashion to be REALLY cheerful and happy.  To him, the way people acted felt false and he kept to his white collar shirt instead of the latest trend of bright garish colors, and he made sure when he smiled, it was a genuine smile.

    He saw her mohawk nod, he couldn't see her eyes in the darkness.  Good, then knock off the fucking racket. He slammed down the window.  He didn't feel so much like smiling at almost four in the morning. 

    She turned and slowly walked down the alley, as if nothing happened.

Chapter 2

     Home was a one bedroom apartment with a huge central living space, a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom.  Antique concert posters decorated the walls. Black Flag and the Dead Kennedy's.  They were rare and not at all valuable in todays market. The posters were the only sign of any personality other than the sculptures in various stages of completion that stood in the place of any furniture.  The rest was merely functional. This is where she slept, when she did.

    Phoenix used her fire in a unique way to earn her living.  She found, as a teenager, that her fire could melt or burn almost any substance in the most interesting ways.  Some of her sculptures were by commission, and some of them were pure experimentation.  

    At the moment, she was experimenting with tempered sheet glass.  She couldn't fit her latest trial into her apartment, so it had been lifted up to the roof.  She was pleased with the effect on the glass when she smashed one side with one whack from a sledge hammer.  The glass held together, but the spider web cracks created an interesting design.  She played with adjusting the temperature of her fire, and it was beginning to look like something that drew her to want to touch the material, which was her ultimate goal.  She wanted all of her art to facilitate an irresistable need to reach out and touch the piece.  She felt there was something sensual about the soft rolled edges of melted glass and metal, like a womans curves.

    She stood over the bathroom sink staring at the water running down her face and inspected her 'hawk. Still standing. Thank god for clear gelatin, better than any hair gel out there.  She ran a razor over the stubble on the side of her head, sharpening the demarcation.

     Sliding her suspenders off her shoulders, she pulled off the tank top beneath and dropped  it in into the hamper. She stood, naked from the waist up in front of the long mirror and rubbed some lotion on the tattoo that curled up out of the low waist of her rolled up jeans, up one side of her back and onto the opposite shoulder. The fire dragon rested his head on her shoulder in utter contentment. It's clawed hands reached around under her arms and cupped the bottom half of her full breasts. She closed her eyes and massaged the lotion in.  She'd better hurry, the sun would be up soon.

    She made some peanut butter toast and a cup of tea and padded barefoot into hallway, closing her apartment door behind her. Wearing only men's pajama bottoms and a tank top, she climbed the stairs to the roof access door where she took the hidden key from above the door jamb and let herself