Only Ashes Remain

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have . . . I didn’t want you to see that.” His eyes flicked to the body still writhing on the ground. He swallowed heavily. “I’m just nervous. Eating makes me feel better.”

  “Like comfort food.” Her voice was flat. “You’re likening torturing people to eating ice cream when you feel shitty.”

  He bristled. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be crawling into that man’s chest cavity and ripping his organs out if you were in my shoes.” Nita flinched. “Fabricio got away and might report us. I’m meeting Henry in a few hours, and he might very well decide to punish me with death by INHUP. And I’m ravenous. Am I not allowed to enjoy a fucking last meal?”

  But that was different. In Nita’s eyes, his comfort food was more monstrous than the crime he was worrying about.

  “I don’t even get why this Henry thing is so hard,” Nita snapped. “Why can’t you just kill and torture him? He’s actively trying to kill you or bring you back to the mafia. I can’t think of a more deserving person for torture, except maybe Fabricio.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t murder the person who raised me for ten years just for your convenience,” he snarled, mouth twisting cruelly, voice dripping sarcasm.

  “That’s not—”

  “No.” His eyes were narrowed, and his voice suddenly went icy cold. Nita’s eyes widened and she stepped back, instinct pulling her away. “You don’t get to do that, Nita.”

  “Do what?”

  “Judge me for not wanting to kill him. Judge me. You’re uncomfortable that I ripped a stranger’s tongue out. You, who blew up an entire market! Who lured strangers to a building to murder them! But you’ve got some sort of righteous rage that I won’t murder the man who was like a father to me?”

  “The people in the market were bad!”

  “All of them? All the people? Even the prisoners?” His voice dipped low.

  “That couldn’t be helped.” She swallowed. “I just . . . I have some morals.”

  “So do I.” His eyes narrowed. “And they don’t exist for your convenience,” he spat. “They don’t bend or change based on what you want or need at the time, Nita.”

  His eyes were black, and there was no light in the shadow of the barn, masking his face in darkness. His voice was low and angry, and Nita’s heart jackrabbited as he spoke. Sometimes she could see the monster inside him.

  And sometimes he made her see the monster inside herself.

  She swallowed and looked toward the INHUP agent, gasping on the ground a dozen feet away.

  She looked at the man, with his wide, frightened eyes, face covered in blood, and she flashed back to another pair of frightened eyes. Fabricio, crouched in a cage, begging for help. This man had the same eyes.

  She’d stood up to her mother and saved Fabricio. And he’d sold her.

  If Nita saved this INHUP agent, if she followed that withered thing she called her conscience again, what would happen? He would thank her. And then he’d clap her in cuffs and send her to jail and Kovit to death.

  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “I get it. I won’t bring up the Henry thing again. Go eat.” She swallowed. “I’m going to go to the barn. Come get me when you’re finished.”

  His anger melted away, and he hesitated, like he hadn’t expected to win this argument, and he wasn’t sure he should have.

  “Okay.” His voice was soft. “I’ll be with you soon.”

  She turned away and stumbled up to the barn. She slammed the door closed, but it didn’t stop the screams from seeping through the wood and slinking into her mind like shadows.

  Her body began to shake, and she crumpled to the ground, wrapping her arms around her knees.

  And there, quietly, with the sound of an innocent man’s screams in the background, being tortured because of her mistakes, she began to weep.

  Thirty-Four

  THE SCREAMS STOPPED soon after, but Kovit didn’t return. If she strained hard, she thought she could still hear gurgles and gasps. She wondered if Kovit had crushed the man’s voice box so she wouldn’t have to hear the screaming.

  It was considerate, in a horrible kind of way.

  She swallowed, her throat choking with phlegm from her tears and sniffling into her jeans. How had everything gotten so fucked up?

  You teamed up with a zannie. How did you think this was going to end?

  He’d made it very clear he had no rules about who he hurt as long as he didn’t know them. He didn’t care. Human suffering meant nothing to him.

  She’d done it again, gotten lulled by the lighter side of him. Sometimes she could forget what he was, what he did. Until she was forced to remember.

  She’d read once that people formed stronger bonds in wartime, and they did it faster. Shared trauma made people connect. She wondered if that was all she and Kovit were—a biological consequence of the constant tension they’d experienced together in the market.

  How much of their friendship was just chemicals? Two people in a high-stress situation who clicked?

  If that’s all it was, did it make it any less real?

  Her hand made invisible Y incisions in the air with her bloody scalpel.

  She thought about the paused video last night, the promises of the monstrous things that would happen caught in a child’s brilliant smile.

  An image of the INHUP agent he was torturing outside flashed into her mind, bone sticking out through flesh, blood pooling around him, and Kovit’s hungry, needy expression.

  Stop. Stop thinking about it.

  Her mind didn’t obey.

  And even though her imagination continued to supply her with awful images, her foot continued to tap on the ground, impatient for him to finish so they could get the hell out of here and kill Fabricio.

  That scared her a little. The fact that even after this, even though she was terrified, crying in a barn trying to block out screams, she still imagined herself doing things with Kovit in the future. She still saw them as a team.

  How fucked up was that?

  “Nita?”

  She turned around. Kovit pushed the door open and approached, worry lines creasing between his eyebrows. His hands were black with dried blood, and the blood in his hair had dried and kept it out of his face like hair gel. It blended into his natural hair color so it was completely invisible.

  Nita cleared her throat. “That was fast.”

  He hesitated. “We have things to do, places to be.”

  He looked away as he spoke, but she didn’t press him for the real reason he’d cut his meal short. She didn’t want to hear the words. That he’d died too soon. That blood loss from ripping his tongue out had caused him to go into shock and feel less pain.

  That if Nita hadn’t been there, he could have drawn it out much longer, that she was stifling him.

  Nita looked up at him. She felt like she’d known him for ages, the darkness of his eyes more familiar to her than her own.

  Maybe that just meant she should look in a mirror more often.

  Sometimes she thought there was nothing left of her soul to burn away, that everything was long gone. And sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t more normal than she wanted to admit.

  She’d told herself she’d face the darkness in herself, in her mother, in others. She wouldn’t turn away and pretend it wasn’t there. But she’d been doing just that since she met up with Kovit again. She’d been willfully ignoring the parts of him that didn’t suit her and taking advantage of the parts that did.

  Kovit was not all evil. But the fact was that the evil was there. And it wasn’t going away.

  She didn’t like knowing what he did. She didn’t like seeing that man’s eyes bulge in pain, didn’t like hearing Mirella’s screams echoing through her memory. But when she didn’t see it, she didn’t care.

  She really had just replaced her mother
with another monster.

  “Nita?” Kovit’s voice was soft. “Are you okay?”

  She blinked and focused on him. He stood a few steps away, hands loose at his sides, and his eyes were dark with concern. Her heart gave a little flip for an entirely different reason.

  She was so messed up.

  She massaged her temples. “It’s fine. I’m just on edge.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder.

  She flinched.

  He jerked his hand back and lowered it. His face went from shock to sadness, then a moment of deep, pitiful guilt before smoothing over into a poker face.

  “I’m sorry.” Nita reached to take his bloody hand, but he moved away.

  “I get it.” He gave her a tight smile, but he didn’t look her in the eye.

  She opened her mouth, wanting to tell him she didn’t know why she’d flinched, she knew he wouldn’t hurt her. She wanted to explain that whenever he touched her, her heart raced and she wanted to lean into it, but at the same time, she could still hear the screams of his victims rattling around in her skull. And the two emotions swirled around each other, tangling and intertwining until she didn’t know what was happening.

  Could you simultaneously be horrified by someone and still desperately want them to stay close?

  But she closed her mouth. Because she didn’t know how to put it into words.

  Nita let out a breath. She had a job to do. She would sort this out later.

  They stood there a moment, and she had the worst feeling, like she should say something more, like she’d walked away in the middle of a fight.

  The silence stretched between them longer and longer, like an unraveling thread, and Nita was scared if she spoke it would snap, but if she didn’t it would all come apart.

  But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t know how.

  “Let’s go see Henry,” she said instead.

  Thirty-Five

  THEY DIDN’T SPEAK on the drive back into town. Kovit had loaded the body into the ice cream truck after they’d called Adair. It was in the freezer, keeping fresh for Diana.

  Nita wondered if Adair would tell the ghoul where her meal came from, and decided if he did, he’d lie about it.

  They’d parked the ice cream truck on a side street, where Adair was coming to collect it. Nobody wanted the truck left alone while Nita and Kovit saw Henry.

  Not that Nita would be seeing him. But she’d be watching.

  In her hoodie pocket, the INHUP agent’s gun weighed heavy. Their security.

  Henry had agreed to meet Kovit at a Starbucks. It was a busy one on Queen Street—familiar territory. Nita had met her mother in this street. She recognized the Venezuelan restaurant they’d gone to as they walked by.

  She wondered what her mother was doing now.

  Nita imagined her, sitting with a bowl of popcorn, watching the news and following the black market discussion boards, silently laughing as Nita got herself in more and more trouble. Nita could almost see her black and red fingernails clicking against her phone, typing a message reminding Nita that if she just came home, all her problems would be solved, and her mother would make sure the black market regretted targeting her.

  Nita swallowed the thick, viscous fear of defying her mother, and pressed shaking hands against her side. A hunt like this was just the kind of thing her mother would have loved to participate in.

  “We’re too early.” Kovit considered the Starbucks where he was supposed to meet Henry. “Why don’t we get lunch in the meantime?”

  “All right.”

  They made their way across the street to a sports bar. The interior was dimly lit, making it seem like night. There was only one other customer, drinking at the bar. In the corner, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall played one of Lyte’s live concerts. She was an aur, a type of bioluminescent unnatural, and when the lights went off and the music started, she used her ability to cast spiral shadows through carefully designed holes cut in her clothes. People said her concerts were works of art.

  The bar smelled like grease and fries, which reminded her of Vietnam. Her mother had hated the taste of lemongrass and ginger, which were in practically every dish there. So she’d made her own truly terrible burgers. Nita had to fake liking them, but whenever her mother went out, she’d grind the burger meat up, soak it in chili oil and spices—lemongrass and ginger included—so she couldn’t taste what her mother had done to it, then eat it on rice noodles or in pho.

  Nita and Kovit took a booth to the side. Nita tentatively ordered a burger, hoping that it would be better than her mother’s.

  The silence stretched awkwardly between them, and finally Kovit cleared his throat. “When it’s time to meet Henry, you should stay here. We don’t want him seeing you.”

  “I’ll be in disguise.” Nita kept her eyes on the table. She still couldn’t look at him. “Shall I show you?”

  He swallowed and nodded, hands pressed tight to his sides.

  Nita closed her eyes. First, she did her hair. She removed the keratin in it so it fell straight, and changed the melanin levels. It melted from medium brown with a faint orangish tint into a soft gray with hints of white.

  Next Nita targeted the skin cells on her face, and deepened the wrinkles on her skin until she looked old, aged well beyond her years. Her eyes peered out from heavy folds of skin, and her mouth was pulled down by deep-set wrinkles.

  She’d considered just making her face swollen like she had at the airport, but she was worried that a swollen face would gather more attention, not less.

  The thing about disguises was people could see through them. Her mother used flashy distraction, colored hair and lipstick and nails, to make people remember the wrong things.

  But if they were looking for her, they’d see her.

  If people were looking for Nita—a seventeen-year-old unnatural—and they saw an old woman, they weren’t going to look twice.

  Kovit stared. “Wow.”

  Nita cracked a smile. “How do I look?”

  She rose and got out of the booth to spin around for emphasis.

  He blinked and tilted his head. “Like a very sporty grandma.”

  Nita snorted. “I’m sure there are grandmas who wear hoodies.”

  “Undoubtedly.” His voice was solemn, but the corner of his mouth twitched. Then he frowned. “Couldn’t you just look like this all the time? The black market would never recognize you.”

  “I haven’t actually changed my features, just loosened skin and taken the color from my hair.” Nita sighed. “I don’t want to look seventy for the rest of my life.”

  Kovit gave her a small smile. “I bet you’d never get carded. You could pick up alcohol for all your friends.”

  Nita laughed. “You mean like you? Aren’t you already legal?”

  “Here I am. Eight more months in the US.”

  Nita rolled her eyes as the waiter returned with their burgers. He did a double take when he saw Nita, then shook his head, shrugged, and left.

  Both of them dove into their food like they hadn’t eaten all day. Which they hadn’t, now that she thought about it.

  The burgers were definitely better than her mother’s. Too salty, though, but she’d been finding everything in Canada too salty after living in Peru. The Coke tasted different too, sweeter, and not in a good way.

  She couldn’t help touching her face as she ate. She’d never tried messing with her age before. She’d always been scared it would be irreversible. What she’d done now, that was temporary. She could slough the skin cells off, and it would be fine. It was no more than a mask. But really changing her age, the deep, internal stuff, that she’d never tried.

  As she ate, she wondered if it was as simple as surface stuff. Healing issues as they appeared. Healing her cells so they stayed young.

  Her mother had looked the same for Nita’s whole life, even as her father grew gray at the temples and the lines around his mouth deepened.

  Her mother was perman
ently about thirty.

  Nita had always figured it was an illusion, much like what she’d just done.

  But she wondered—with a body that could self-heal, and the ability to appear young . . . How old was her mother?

  It was a slightly disturbing thought, because Nita wasn’t really sure.

  They slowly finished their food, still awkwardly not looking at each other. Kovit was polishing off the last of his fries when he froze, staring at something beyond Nita’s head.

  Nita stiffened, and slowly turned around. There was no one there.

  “Excuse me!” Kovit called to the waiter. “Can you turn the volume up on the news?”

  The waiter shrugged and obliged.

  Nita blinked, and opened her mouth to ask Kovit what was happening, but he held up a hand and stared intently at the TV screen.

  Nita looked up at it. The caption below said TEEN MURDERED BY UNICORN IN MONTREAL. The screen showed a school photo of a smiling white girl with long blond hair.

  “Miss Lyon was found at four in the afternoon by a man walking his dog. Her eyes were open, and missing their irises, which prompted the man to call INHUP immediately.”

  The eyes were the window to the soul, as the saying went, and anyone who lost their soul was missing their irises. It was the signature of a unicorn attack.

  Someone onscreen was now talking about unicorns. They looked like human men, and could steal a soul with a simple kiss, or in some cases, even a touch. They could only steal unstable souls, though, souls that weren’t comfortable in their bodies. Most children and teens, and many younger adults, had unstable souls, which was where the virgin association started. But the truth was, lots of people who weren’t virgins or who were older also had unstable souls. Instability of the soul had less to do with age or virginity and more to do with mental stability and being settled in one’s body.

  The horse concept, explained the man on the television, was because in the past, unicorns would lure people away to eat their souls. However, if the soul was too established in the body, they needed to destabilize it before they could eat. So they would “mount” the youth and pierce them with their “horn.” Raping the victim usually caused sufficient trauma to destabilize the soul so that the unicorn could eat it.