Heatstroke Heartbeat Preview: Streets of Flame Quartet, #2.5

By Matt Weber

PLEASE NOTE: This is a preview of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT. The full novel is forthcoming in mid-2024!

 

Zaya Shearwater has found a dragon, a partner, and a cause. Her dragon is Bandit's Breath, stolen from her former employers in a moment of desperation, now her inseparable ally. Her partner in racing Bandit is her daughter, Vanako, as fierce and proud as ever but now committed to the family. And her cause is the legalization of yliaster, the substance that will protect her son — and tens of thousands of others like him, who are being slowly hunted by voracious entities that can't be killed.

 

But the fight isn't going well. Captains of industry want to see yliaster regulated for their own profit; everyday people are afraid of some of the things it can do. The police are dead set against it, and even Zaya's political allies are inconstant. And as she's throwing all her cash and time at a better world for the hunted tomorrow, every today could be her son's last.

 

That's where Zaya begins. But, as the election draws near, where will she go?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Weber
• Release date: Feb 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224411535

Book preview

Heatstroke Heartbeat Preview

Matt Weber

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Cobbler & Bard Press

Copyright © 2024 by Matt Weber

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

1.'Veraamaka navo': Or, How to Dogfight an Eldritch Horror and Still Hit the Finish Line First

2.Before you go

3.Chapter 1

4.About the author

'Veraamaka navo': Or, How to Dogfight an Eldritch Horror and Still Hit the Finish Line First

In a kinder world, this would have been a racing story.

There’s such a fine racing story here. There is. Struggle, defeat, grit, blood, victory, all punctuated by the flame-driven wingbeats of vast death chickens caroming like rubber balls off the stone and steel of this undeserving city. The sort of racing story so pure it’s hard to write about with any originality: The spear-straight surge of Shearwater’s Dawn Wyrm slaughtered Shanhoon Krait on the straightaway, thrusting straight up the middle of the lane with a kraitlike spearing that sheared away all doubt about the coming slaughter…

… and I did run this jewel by my editor, hoping to buy some time to breathe and bind my wounds, but no. Now she finally sees where this was all going from the start; now we are writing it my way. And so I wet a cloth and wipe away the thin crust of dried blood that has oozed from the seven stitches in my forehead and try to get my eyes to focus on the piles of documents, the scraps of paper scrawled with story beats, the dot-and-line net of connections spiderwebbing the sheet of map-sized paper from the top of the pile I stole from the cartographer I was fucking for a few weeks that one autumn. (It’s all right; that one ended badly; he won’t read this.)

None of it wants to resolve in my field of view. I should be sleeping. I should be healing.

But, reader, it is a rare treat you are in for. Breaking news is one thing; I’ve broken so much news my old paper bought me a golden hammer. (Gold-plated.) What breaks for you here, though, now, is—with all respect to the other reporters going without sleep this night, and I know they are legion—no mere news; this is a breaking feature, a bird whose rarity is without measure, a journalistic deed whose existence is only possible because the context for all this news is known to me in advance for what honestly amounts to no particular reason except: It felt like it might come to this. I did not predict this, but it did not surprise me: Every piece in its place and in its time, like a blacksmith’s puzzle where the shining ring slides over a knot of thick black steel the eye insists it cannot pass.

Fine, then. Now we are writing it my way. Here is why.

***

It was the kind of summer night—last night, that’s to say, as you read this, and the night that’s dissolving into grey and pink as I write it—the kind of night where the scent of jasmine hangs like a curtain in the thick, still air… but you can’t smell it, because the breeze has been shattered by the wake of a Dawn Wyrm the size of a healthy rhinoceros streaking overhead, and the scent of that crashing wake is sulphur.

On that Dawn Wyrm was the widow Zaya Shearwater, green-goggled and orca-jacketed, her hair a luminous azure that almost blended into the Dawn’s plumage. She was pressed belly-down to the Dawn like a baby sloth—but her daughter, Vanako, held her hands up to the wind in victory. Vanako’s head was turned towards the coal-feathered head of the Melanate Shrike gaining on them; if her hands were gesturing in some exultation of obscenity, I didn’t see it… but the Dawn’s nose crossed a healthy half-length before the Shrike’s, and a roar rose into the night along with its twin, a poleaxed grunt of chagrin, as Zaya and Vanako Shearwater clinched first place in the Basting Stitch.

I should, in this narrative, spend more time with Zaya and Vanako in their victory. They’re owed it, they’ve earned it. But my head is throbbing with a pain that whiskey won’t cure, or hasn’t anyway, and the rush of the crowd toward the winners and the bustle around the winners’ podium is nothing but noise in my memory, the crash of waves on the shore. I remember the characters I’d marked in my mind and in my notes, exemplars of competing tendencies in the crowd: A too-well-dressed Mrineen, whose cool features screamed disappointment; a pair of Mrineen men dressed almost like day-laborers and built like cops, whose screams of disappointment were much more literal; a gaggle of mixed bright-haired kids, mostly Kayalim, who threw popcorn and elated swear words and drew some calculating gazes from the men who were probably cops.

And I remember Kaana te-Tekko: A Kayalim woman built like a gourd, with a face that looked like some mean god had squashed it flat between a divine finger and thumb, her hair close-cropped and dyed a faded violet, smart in