Ashes Of Memory

by Aiden Bates

  But it would take someone with a prodigiously rare talent to do it without leaving a trail.

  He was a kid. Vance’s nephew. I understood why he’d come here, why he’d ask me to take a risk like that.

  “Even if he was able,” Mikhail said somberly, “the cabal would never approve it. Especially not after last time. You’ve got to know that.”

  “I do,” Tam admitted. “That’s why... I’m asking for a favor.”

  I looked up at him. “Just like last time.”

  “It won’t be like that,” he said. “I promise. Just pick up the trail, and we’ll do the rest. We’ll get someone else on their way out to help, even. We just can’t let the trail go cold.”

  Mikhail gave me a look of mixed sympathy and exasperation. The sort of look that says sorry you have to go through this, I’ll pour you an extra glass of wine at dinner.

  But it slowly turned to a slightly different expression as he met my eyes. “Fuck,” he grunted. “Vance, you can’t—”

  “I’ll help,” I said, even though it made a knot of anxiety tighten like a serpent around my middle. One that was about to bite me. “Just to confirm. That’s all.”

  “That’s all I need,” Tam assured me.

  There was something else I remembered about Tam then. Maybe too little, too late, but it came through clear enough as we left the study.

  He always broke his promises.

  3

  Tam

  I guess shouldering the fear and anxiety over my nephew wasn’t enough for one night. I had to pile on a heap of guilt and old hurts, too. Reminding myself that it hadn’t been my idea, and that it was the fastest way to at least make sure that Baz was alive, if not find out where he’d been taken, didn’t help.

  Especially not with Vance’s friend in the passenger seat glaring at me the whole drive back to Blackstone. He wasn’t looking directly at me—but he didn’t have to. I could feel it.

  Worse, I could see Vance in the rearview mirror, but had no idea what was going on in his head. He had settled from before, at least—he didn’t look as anxious or unstable, and he no longer exuded the scents of uncertainty and sheer terror. Instead, he smelled like nothing. That was somehow worse. Normal humans couldn’t completely hide the scent of their emotions. Not even mages could normally do that—Mikhail certainly wasn’t doing it. Only an esper could utterly eliminate all evidence of emotion, but I had never known Vance to do that in the past.

  For that matter, years ago I would have known what he was thinking. Back then, he’d have let me know. The most direct way he could.

  It had been strange, at first, and scary. One of the few things in my life that had ever made me genuinely nervous, in fact. Letting an esper into my mind completely, and accepting the openness in return was like being laid bare. All the secret, hidden thoughts I would never have spoken out loud to any other partner—I may as well have shouted them. It was the kind of vulnerability no one wanted to show. The sort that triggered a survival reflex.

  But Vance had been different than anyone else I knew. He had been open with me first, let me see that he was safe. And after that, he’d never shut me out. Any time I wondered what he was thinking, I could just turn my attention toward the part of my mind that was him, and there it was, waiting for me to come in.

  At the end, that had almost killed me.

  “Thank you for doing this,” I said, for probably the fifth time since we’d left. “It means a lot to me. To the whole weyr. We won’t forget it.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Vance said quietly, staring out the window. “I can’t really make any promises about what I’ll find. And if you’re wrong, what I do find could just make it all worse.”

  He probably didn’t remember saying almost the same thing when I’d roped him into the situation that had gotten him where he was now. Just like now, he’d been the fastest solution to an urgent problem. If it looked like this was the same problem, I’d send him away. Do it right this time, instead of making the same mistakes.

  “Did the weyr piss anyone off lately?” Mikhail asked.

  I glanced at him, irritated that he’d come along but also glad to see that Vance had some support. Clearly, Mikhail was protective of him. He certainly did not like me, though. I could understand why. “We’ve considered that already,” I told him. “We aren’t at war with anyone, haven’t offended anyone. Those we’ve had beefs with in the past have treaties with us now. But there are always people who target shifters, just like there will always be people who target mages, vampires, fae—we’re always going to unsettle humans.”

  “Could it have been humans?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Maybe. In some ways, that would be the best situation. But I doubt it. Whoever came after Haval and his family blew through security. There’s nothing at the scene to suggest weapons fire, and a human team would have to be outfitted with better than military weaponry to make a move like that. There’s magic at the scene, it’s what made us think to reach out.”

  “Magic you can sense?” Vance asked.

  I nodded. “Some of it, yes. We’ve got a security agent, Claudia. She’s got talent. Enough to know what she can’t sense.”

  “So, you’re looking at a team,” Mikhail muttered. “More than one kind of mage?”

  “Or fae,” I agreed. “Or a mix. But we’ve got agreements with every cabal in the southeast, and the fae generally know better than to impinge on a weyr’s territory.”

  Mikhail grunted softly. That had likely been his next question. The thing was, whatever our past disagreements, no one in the region wanted any kind of conflict. Certainly not the kind this would cause. I didn’t exactly trust the cabals, exactly, or the fae courts. But they were smart. If they were responsible, I doubted we’d even know anything had happened. A coordinated attack by a cabal was any shifter community’s worst fear.

  Teeth and claws weren’t much use against well-planned magic. Sometimes magic wasn’t much use against well-planned magic.

  The discomfort that I felt bringing Vance into this was something I had to set aside for the moment. Baz was out there, somewhere—I hoped—and the longer it took me to find him, the more likely it became that I wouldn’t. Or that it would be too late even if I did.

  “I remember this place,” Vance murmured as I pulled up to Haval’s place.

  I nodded, and peered at him in the rearview. “You’ve been here before. With me, and with Baz. You knew Haval and Sophia.”

  “Sophia had red hair,” he said, and met my eyes in the mirror. “Right?”

  I smiled sadly. “Yeah.”

  Mikhail twisted in his seat to look at Vance. “You sure you’re okay to do this?”

  “No,” Vance admitted, shrugging. “But I can try. If something triggers me, I’ll just... pull out or something. I do still expect that paprikash after this is done. And wine.”

  His friend snorted, and turned back to face front and open his door. “Now your memory works just fine. Sometimes I wonder.”

  We got out of the car, and Liana met us at the door to Haval’s place. It was sealed, now that her teams and the sheriff’s department were done. She gave me a nod, then settled a surprised and saddened gaze on Vance. “Hey, you. Long time.”

  Vance regarded her with parted lips, his eyes narrowing as he tried to place her face. “Uh... I’m sorry, you’re familiar but...”

  “Liana,” I offered. “You only met a few times.”

  “And I’ve got one of those faces,” Liana said, though she definitely did not. “Thank you for coming. I guess Tam told you it was time sensitive.”

  “He did,” Vance said. “And the impressions don’t always linger very long. I should probably go in.”

  Liana inclined her head and turned to peel the tape off the door. She drew a Sharpie from her coat pocket and signed it with time and date, then put a hand on the doorknob but hesitated. She looked back at Vance. “If you need to touch anything, I’ll need to print you afterward.”
r />   Vance nodded quickly. “Sure, I understand.”

  Mikhail started to follow Vance to the door when Liana opened it, but Vance turned and shook his head. “I should go in alone.”

  “Fat chance,” Mikhail grunted. He gave me and Liana both a cursory but wary look before he leaned in as if Liana and I didn’t have the sort of ears that could hear pins drop at twenty yards. “If you lose it, I’m the only one here who can shut you down.”

  That gave Liana pause, and made me probably even more uneasy than it did her. She glanced at me, and I gave a dismissive shake of my head. She hadn’t been there when Vance was first hurt. She didn’t know what Mikhail was talking about.

  I did. I still heard Vance’s psychic screams in my sleep sometimes, could still feel the texture of howling thoughts scratching against my own. Then, we hadn’t had backup—another mage who could intervene. This time would be different. And for that matter, it wouldn’t come to that. I hoped.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was a bad idea. That, again, I shouldn’t have brought Vance into our mess. Shouldn’t have asked him to take a risk like this. I told myself, again, that it was for Baz, and that this was the only option we had in the moment. It felt like I was choosing him over Vance.

  Which, I suppose, I was.

  “If you feel like you’re pushing yourself too far,” I told him, “just back off. Don’t go deep if you don’t have to or don’t think it’s safe. All right? Stay at the surface.”

  Vance cocked his head a little to one side, watching me with interest. “I told you how it works.”

  “I was a shit student,” I said, trying to smile. “But yeah, a little.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he promised me, and then Mikhail.

  Mikhail looked from Liana to me. “Leave the door open.”

  They went in, and I had a strong instinct to follow. But among the other things I knew was that I would only be a distraction. It was the reason Vance didn’t love the idea of Mikhail going in.

  As far as I understood it, Vance’s particular magic let him access a kind of second skin in the world. A psychic plane that was just underneath everything. Or, maybe there was a plane between this one and that one? In any case, it was indiscriminate in what it recorded. It was constantly in flux, and even the fact that there had been security and law enforcement inside since Haval and Sophia were killed would mean a lot of psychic garbage to dig through.

  It got more complicated from there, and that was about as much as I knew to worry about. It was all the things I didn’t know—especially now, with Vance like he was—that made my belly clench with worry when he and Mikhail disappeared into the house.

  Liana folded her arms as she stood next to me, and nudged me with her elbow. “You reek. Is he gonna be okay in there? Something I should know?”

  I shook my head and tried to relax. Before the attack, Vance had been remarkably talented, one of the most skilled espers in his cabal, if not the most skilled, even at just second circle. I trusted that he knew his limits. “Nothing that would matter. I just feel like shit for dragging him into this.”

  “Must be strange, seeing him after all this time,” she said quietly. She shot me a sympathetic look. “Does he remember you two?”

  My heart constricted a bit. “No, I don’t think so. Not in detail, anyway.”

  “Fuck,” she breathed. “I’m sorry, Tam.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me,” I said, and gestured at the open door. “He’s the one that’s been through hell.”

  “I’d say you both have,” she countered, “but I know what you mean. I kind of hoped coming back here might jog his memory or something. Just so something good could come out of all this.”

  I grunted, a different kind of guilt nagging at me. “I don’t know if I’d call that good or not.”

  The minutes ticked by, drawing my patience and anxiety both taut as a bowstring as I paced the yard in front of the house, listening for any sign that something was going wrong. I heard two heartbeats, both racing, and the sounds of feet padding through the house, but neither Vance nor Mikhail spoke out loud.

  When the footsteps finally did stop, I stopped as well, and watched the darkened windows, waiting for them to emerge and tell us that they knew where Baz was, or that something worse than we imagined happened, or any of a dozen worst-case scenarios I hadn’t thought of.

  “What’s happening?” Liana whispered.

  “I don’t know, they must be—”

  A horrendous screech seemed to fill the air. I clapped my hands over my ears as splitting pain cut deep into my brain. It didn’t affect the sound at all. Not in the air—it was in my mind. A tidal wave of despair, fear, and panic hit me, strong enough to nearly drive me into my full dragon form. Beside me, Liana staggered back, fell, and started to scramble across the grass.

  No, no, no, no. Thoughts that I knew weren’t my own cracked like thunder through my mind, laced with terror and desperation. I knew they were Vance’s—I’d felt the touch of his mind inside my head before—but they were nothing like what I remembered. These were jagged and sharp, flying out like shrapnel from a grenade, puncturing my own thoughts as they blasted through me. Flashes of disjointed memories followed in their wake. A glimpse of the man in the yard, through Haval’s eyes. Sounds like words, but twisted into some inversion of speech. A sneering, narrow-faced woman with scars over her face—that was from before. From Red Valley.

  Mikhail was trying to talk Vance down, I could tell that much, but Vance was wailing, crying out for help both with his voice and his mind, and it was too much to ignore. I couldn’t run; my feet wouldn’t move that way, wouldn’t carry me in the right direction. Instead, I found myself sprinting toward Haval’s house.

  I charged through the door, and rushed to the kitchen to find Mikhail on his knees next to Vance. He had a hunk of chalk in one hand and Vance’s wrist in the other as he scribbled furiously on the hardwood floor. He looked up when I came bounding over the couch in the living room. “Get out!”

  I ignored him. He was trying to sketch out some kind of circle, but couldn’t do that properly with Vance in one hand. Vance was trying to get away, trying to flee in a panic. I dropped to my knees next to him, opposite Mikhail, and wrapped my arms around him.

  The contact amplified the waves of psychic torment pouring off of Vance. I barely managed to speak as foreign images and emotions tore into me like a wild animal trying to survive. “I’ve got him,” I told Mikhail, or shouted at him, or possibly whimpered. I couldn’t even tell. The moment I let the words out, my memory of them twisted and warped until I didn’t know if I’d spoken.

  But Mikhail let Vance’s wrist go, and began scrawling with more focus and intensity, chalking out arcane figures as he moved around us. He kicked a chair at the table out of the way, then shouldered the table itself back to make the space he needed.

  The images leaving Vance’s mind made no sense. Chasms of blackness opening up around him. A field of red, blinking eyes. Creatures with thousands of teeth yawning wide to devour him, that were impossible to remember when the image had gone. The world shaking like it would break itself to pieces around us. Raw, unfiltered terror of a kind I had never fathomed before—more than mortal fear, it was almost transcendent; as if it were the fear of the entire span of creation.

  Mixed in, there were shard-like images of Haval and Sophia, sitting at a table eating. One moment they were having a meal, the next Haval was hurling the table to one side. Glass blew in from the back door. Overlaid in the same memories, though, Haval and his family had a pleasant dinner. In another layer, Sophia stabbed Haval and grabbed Baz before bolting out the back. And more, and more, until one of them was a wave of blackness that pressed down on my mind and dug into all the little crevices where my most primal fears were stored and began to churn them like silt at the bottom of a lake until I could barely think through them.

  I clutched Vance to me, my eyes shut tight, and restrained his flailing l
imbs, endured the assault of his magic, of his mind, and kept the two of us that way as I tried to focus on my own thoughts, my own memories, and cut through the noise. I anchored myself in them while Mikhail began to chant.

  The park where I’d first seen Vance. The sun on my bare chest and shoulders. The sight of him reading a book.

  My lips pressed to his. The rush of satisfaction that came with it. Need, deep in my bones. Being inside him, our bodies pressed together.

  His hands in my hair. His voice, whispering. My lips at his ears as I held him.

  “You’re okay, Vance,” I told him, my mouth close to his ear again, these years later. “You’re not alone. I’m here. Mikhail is here.”

  Whatever Mikhail was doing, he finished it. Power snapped in the air around Vance and me, and like a light being turned off, the storm of psychic energy winked out. Somehow, the effect seemed to press down on my own mind. I kept Vance held close as I stared out of the back door of Haval’s house, nearly blank until Mikhail snapped his fingers to get my attention. “Hey, Tam,” he hissed. “Look at me. It’s probably hard to think. I had to establish a psychic dampening field. Where’s Liana? Is she outside?”

  I nodded, numb, and uncertain whether that was the right answer or not.

  Mikhail watched me for another few seconds, then sighed. “Right. You’re a turnip. Just—stay here, don’t leave the circle. Keep Vance there, too. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I muttered.

  He stood, gave a long sigh, and left. “...knew this was a shit idea...”

  I pulled Vance closer, and he gave a soft, plaintive groan. But he didn’t try to get away.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told him, and rocked him slowly. “I’m sorry. I never should have come to you. I’m so sorry, Vance.”

  In my arms, Vance began to cry. And I knew it was because of me.

  4

  Vance

  I stood in an alley between two buildings that stretched so far into the sky that the tops of them disappeared in roiling clouds. There was a storm up there, threatening to open up and pour down rain and lightning any moment. I was naked, freezing, and it was so dark here that I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me, even though the clouds above were pregnant with the light of nature’s impending wrath.