Ashes Of Memory

by Aiden Bates

  In Tam? If he was deep enough, if the mage had been cruel enough—and, I knew he was—every hour could be years. Anything could be happening to him. Even if Master Nkendi got here, and woke him up, there was no telling what state he’d be in. He certainly wasn’t sleeping peacefully. That, at least, I knew.

  Tam had risked himself to save me. He could have died going into the minefield that my brain was when he helped me put myself back together. If I hadn’t trusted him, if I had let him go for a moment, if I hadn’t believed him, we would still be rotting away on a bed somewhere on campus, dying together.

  How could I leave him to that? If I waited for Master Nkendi, what if it took days? What if the cabal had some reason to tell her to stand down? Would she?

  I wanted to believe that she would prioritize me over the power structures that constrained us. But I knew that belief was unfounded. She loved me, I knew that. I loved her. She was the only mother I knew, really, even if her role was never meant to be truly maternal. But she was still a master in Custodes Lunae. And all masters were that first, above all else.

  I couldn’t take that risk.

  “I’m sorry, Master,” I murmured softly as I lay down next to Tam and took his hand in mine. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

  If nothing else, I could hope that she’d get there eventually, and if I really fucked up, maybe she could clean up the mess and scold me after.

  And one by one, I began to take the bricks out of the Big Wall of Bad.

  21

  Tam

  For the hundredth time, or the thousandth, or maybe it had been a million—I didn’t know anymore—I found myself standing outside the dank cave where the pups had been taken. I closed my eyes, tried to push it out, tried to wake up or at least dream something else. It never worked before. No reason it should have that time.

  “There are only three of them in there,” Vance said. He looked up at me. “The pups are still conscious. I can hear them.”

  Kieren pushed between us and moved to enter the cave. My hand shot out against my will. “Kieren, wait,” I told him. “You’re injured. Let us lead.”

  “Fuck you,” Kieren spat, and pulled away.

  Vance rested a hand on my arm, lowering it before I could grab him. “They're his kids,” he said gently. “We’ll stick together, stay close. Could you hold back if it was Baz?”

  “No,” I admitted grudgingly.

  I wanted to say that it would end badly, that Kieren would have to see what happened, that Vance would never be the same. But my lips wouldn’t move. My thoughts stayed inside my head. My arm waved, my feet moved, and when I tried to close my eyes this time, they didn’t respond.

  Kieren led, with me just behind him, Vance at my side. The ring of magic was constant here, both from Vance as he probed at the inside of the cave and the minds there and from deeper within, where something terrible was already happening.

  My scales trembled, warning me of danger that I couldn’t yet see. At the same time, the part of me that was aware of the dream knew what was going to happen. I tried to break through, to shout at Kieren to stop, to not take the next turn into the depths of the cave system, but it was hopeless.

  He made the turn. Magic sang a vicious tune. Kieren managed to move, but not before the bolt of lightning caught him across the leg. Electricity shot through his body. He was a shifter, he could take the damage—but it left him twitching on the ground. The mage came out from the corner, hands raised. I couldn’t burn her without hurting Kieren.

  Behind me, Vance growled. His magic rang louder. The elementalist froze, then put her hands to her head and screamed.

  The sound echoed against the stone walls. No one could have missed it. They knew we were here.

  “Shit,” Vance hissed, as I leapt across the space between us and the elementalist and slammed her head against the wall. “Fuck, Tam, I—”

  “It’s fine,” I said quickly, “but we have to move fast.”

  He looked at Kieren. “Should we...?”

  “He’ll heal,” I said. “From this. Not from losing his kids. Come on.”

  I should have told Vance to stay with him. I tried to, but my lips wouldn’t move, and my tongue was stuck. I watched us push on into the caves, knowing that there was no way to stop what was about to happen.

  We saw the glow of flickering lights. Vance staggered. “No,” he whimpered. “Oh, gods, no—Tam, they—”

  I heard the roar of someone triumphant. I smelled the blood. I knew what had happened.

  “Both of them?” I asked.

  Vance’s head bowed. “We weren’t fast enough.”

  Anger burned in me, violent and white. Fire came with it. I shifted too far to be able to speak anymore, my head brushing the ceiling of the cave. I snapped my jaws, and Vance knew what I intended.

  “The least we can do now is make them pay,” he growled.

  We followed the light. We made the turn. I saw the bodies, and the two mages basking in some kind of sickening afterglow. Hateful eyes lowered, and a cruel smile spread over thin lips. I opened my mouth to fill the cavern with fire.

  The leader, the one in the long coat, his hands slick with blood, barked a word.

  “Tam!”

  And then Vance was in front of me, hands raised. I swallowed the fire, reached up to pull him aside.

  I didn’t see what happened. Not really, not the way a mage would have seen it. There was a crack of magic, a bell not ringing but shattering. Vance howled. He thrust his hands out. The two mages in the cavern staggered, sagged, fell to the ground on their knees.

  The one who’d smiled at me started to rise.

  Get him out of there, I told myself. Get Vance out while there could still be time, you dumb son of a bitch!

  But the rage had taken me over, and all I saw was an enemy, a killer, a threat to the man I wanted to be my mate, and he wasn’t dead yet. I opened my jaw wide, and expelled enough fire to coat the cavern floor. Screams rose up, but were short-lived. Burnt flesh and smoke filled the room.

  I spat the rest of the fire out, swallowed to be sure I didn’t harm Vance, and turned to nudge him. No response. He was staring into the fire. Drool marked the corner of his mouth. His eyes looked in different directions. His hands jerked at his sides.

  There was no time to get him conscious again. I lifted him into my arms, shifting down to human form so that I could maneuver better in the tight space, and ran back the way we’d come. I got him out first, and then went back for Kieren, who was just starting to recover. He looked around, confused at first, then smelled the smoke.

  He realized the pups weren’t with me.

  “No,” he shouted, and slammed his fist into my chest to get me off of him. “Tam, no!”

  I couldn’t hold onto him, not without knocking him unconscious. And I had to think of Vance. I let him go, and rushed back out. I shifted, gathered Vance into my paw, and flew.

  In the next moment, I stood before a bed in the infirmary at Custodes Lunae. Master Nkendi stood shaking on the other side of him. “This was foolishness,” she said, glaring at me. “He should not have been anywhere near this business.”

  “If you’d helped us,” I said, “if you mages didn’t turn a blind eye to the plight of us shifters, then we’d have had a more experienced team behind us!”

  She flinched at that. She shared some of the blame, or at least her people did. She hadn’t been able to stop Vance from being involved, and hadn’t been able to back him up, either. “That is no excuse—”

  “It’s not an excuse,” I told her. “It’s a goddamn reason, now can you wake him up or not?”

  She bowed her head. “It is not as simple as waking him,” she said. “His mind is... there is a great darkness there. Something which does not belong in this world, and which cannot be comprehended. Its presence in his mind is destroying him from within.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, panicking enough that my fingers ached as talons tried to push out. Scales
pressed against the inside of the sweats I’d been given when I arrived.

  She raised a hand. “It means it will be very difficult. Not impossible. But, the damage will be great. Perhaps...”

  I waited, and when she didn’t go on, leaned over the bed. “Perhaps what?”

  “He requires a foothold,” she told me. “But... there is a great deal of risk.”

  “What kind of foothold? What kind of risk, what do you mean?” I gripped the rail at the side of the bed, and it gave a metallic groan as it crumbled in my hands. “Just fucking say what you mean, mage. No gods damned riddles.”

  “I know that the two of you are in love,” she said. “I have seen it in his mind, when he does not keep his focus. When he is thinking of you, instead of his practice. How serious is it?”

  I shook my head, uncomprehending how this could possibly matter. “We... we’re... I love him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Enough to claim him?”

  I flinched. “That...”

  “Yes, or no?” she asked.

  It was a split-second answer, with no time to think. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong. I wouldn’t get the chance to find out. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, enough to claim him.”

  “And him?” she asked. “Would he accept it?”

  “I...” I looked down at Vance’s face, tortured even though Nkendi assured me he was too deeply asleep under her magic to even dream. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it, I kept meaning to... I don’t know.”

  “Then,” she said, “there is a choice. I do not understand the magic of the claiming, but I know that it creates strength. That it binds a shifter to their mate, and that they share something deep—something beyond magic. Something of the soul. If you claim him, there is a chance it will give him the needed foundation to stand on.”

  “A chance,” I said. “So, what’s the other side of that coin?”

  She folded her arms, and held the words back for a long moment before releasing them. “The magic that afflicts him is virulent. Dangerous. To both of you. Perhaps, he will be saved. If not, then the magic of the bond will prevent me from reconstructing his mind myself. He will die, and likely you with him.”

  I took a step away from the bed as if it had threatened to bite me. “Which one of those will happen?”

  She spread her hands. “I cannot say. Not enough is known.”

  “Then, no,” I said. “I won’t take that chance. Fix him, and we’ll talk about it after, when he’s awake, when we can be sure and—”

  “Tammerlin,” she said gently, “if I do the work myself, I will have to contain this experience. Lock it away inside him. Memories are not isolated. They are connected, one to the other. I will have to follow those links, find everything that is now tainted. It will be put away. He will not remember. He may not remember you. He may be forever changed.”

  Do it, I told myself. Take this chance. You may not get another. Claim him, like she offered. You don’t know what it’s going to be like.

  “Are you sure?” I asked instead.

  “No,” she admitted. “But those are the two paths forward. And you must choose now. If I must repress his memories of you, of what you had, what led him into this—then for his safety, you must never see him again. At least not for a very long time. Not until he has the strength and training to withstand those memories. That day may never come.”

  Risk his life, or ensure that he lived without me. That was my choice. I should have taken longer to think about it. But with him lying there in front of me, being hollowed out by whatever he’d seen, whatever magic had taken hold inside of him, all I could think was that he had to live. He had to live, or what did we have? Nothing. Not without him.

  At least, if he was alive, he would be in the world.

  “Do it,” I whispered. “I won’t risk him. Not again.”

  Master Nkendi’s head dipped. “Then... you should say your goodbyes, and leave.”

  Claws dug into my heart and threatened to rip it out of my chest. I choked on a sob, and moved closer to the bed. I brushed Vance’s hair with my fingers, and leaned in to kiss his forehead. “I love you,” I whispered to him. Even though he wouldn’t hear it, wouldn’t remember.

  I would remember. And it would kill me, slowly, for the rest of my life.

  I turned away from him.

  And froze. He stood behind me, different now. His brows pinched with pain. His lower lip caught between his teeth. His hands balled into fists. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad or both, but this was new. I’d had the dreams hundreds of times now, and they’d been the same each time, replaying the worst day of my life again and again.

  I started to walk toward him, and then passed him, still on automatic, still unable to change the past.

  A hand touched my shoulder. “Tam.”

  I stopped. That was new, too. I raised my hand, looked at it, turned it over, and then reached up to my shoulder to touch his fingers. Realization made my stomach churn. I turned slowly to face him. “Vance?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Really here, I mean.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” I said, my voice thick. I glanced past him to where Master Nkendi and dream-Vance’s forms had become blurred. I hadn’t looked back once I left. “You saw?”

  Vance looked away from me, just for a second before he nodded. “Yeah. I saw.”

  Those claws dug deeper. My eyes burned again. “I couldn’t let you go,” I said. “Not... like that. Not after getting you hurt. If you’d died, Vance—”

  “I get it,” he said. His words were sharp, cutting. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I put my hands on his shoulders. “It does. You have to know. If there was any other way, if I could be sure that you would survive...”

  His eyes softened, and his lips eased out of the tightness they’d taken on. “Why did you come back?”

  “I shouldn’t have,” I said. “I know that I shouldn’t have, that if I’d—”

  “No,” he said, and laid a hand on my chest. His fingers dug in gently. “I’m not accusing you. I’m asking why.”

  I started to answer again with more apologies, but that wasn’t what he wanted. Instead, I searched my thoughts, took myself back to the moment Liana suggested it. “You were the only one who could help in time,” I said slowly. “But... I could have found someone else.”

  “So why me?” He pressed. “Why come to me, Tam?”

  “Because I missed you,” I rasped. I squeezed his shoulders, pulled him to me, put my arms around him and crushed him close. “I missed you and I’d been dying for three years since I left you there, since I let you forget me. It was selfish, and I’m sorry that I dragged you back into all of this. I love you. I should have left you in peace.”

  His arms slipped around my waist. He hugged me back. “I know,” he said against my chest. “I love you, too, Tam. I was dying, too. I just didn’t realize why. Now come on. I have to get you out of here. All of this is the past, right?”

  I let him go, but only reluctantly. “How long have I been here?”

  “Not long,” he said. “A few hours.”

  Fuck. It felt like forever. “Is it safe? What are you even doing here? I thought you—”

  “I figured it out,” he said dismissively. “It’s fine. We have to go get Baz and put an end to all of this, and I can’t do that without you. So don’t worry about it.”

  But I was. I dipped my head to catch his eyes when he wouldn’t look at me. “Vance. What did you do? How did you get here?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “I told you, I figured it out. It’s my magic, Tam.”

  “But how?” I insisted.

  “I...” he sighed. “I took down the wall. The Big Wall of Bad.”

  Fear clenched in my gut. “Gods... Vance, why would you—”

  “Because I made a different choice,” he said, cold at first. But he closed his eyes and seemed to shake it off. He took my hands, and pulled them to his c
hest to hold them close. “I know why you did what you did. I lived. I lived long enough to get back to you, for us to have a future. I wasn’t about to give that up. We got a second chance, Tam. It’s worth anything. Everything. We’ll figure it out. Now come on. We can’t stay here.”

  It was done now. I didn’t know if it could be undone, but I knew I couldn’t do anything about it from where I was. “All right. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I’d have asked you, but you were unconscious,” he shot back.

  Something passed over his face. A moment of fury. He closed his eyes tight, exhaled a slow breath. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I’m... let’s just go.”

  Before I could say anything else, he pulled me to him, and the world around us dissolved.

  22

  Vance

  Tam and I both woke with a gasp. The rise from his dreaming mind hadn’t been easy. There were barriers upon barriers, as if the burned mage had tried to ensure that there would be no escape, not even with help.

  Down in Tam’s mind, I’d been able to lean on him for a degree of stability. Like his concept of me gave me something to grasp, to graft myself onto so that I didn’t fall apart.

  The moment we were back out in the real world, though, I reached for something to keep me whole and found empty air.

  Flashes of that night in the cave came back to me. That yawning abyss opened in my mind’s eye. The things on the other side of it, the hissing voices, the snapping of some cosmic maw, even the moments just before, when I’d felt the deaths of those pups, all came rushing up.

  “Vance,” Tam breathed. He was over me, his hands on me, but I couldn’t quite tell where they were. And they burned, as if my nerves didn’t know how to interpret the sensation.