Dreadful Ashes

by Annathesa Nikola Darksbane

  I was still hungry too.

  “Rain check,” I said, forcing myself to pull away.

  “Ashes?”

  I stopped, one foot out of the bathroom. “Yeah, Tam?”

  “I really care about you, Ashes. But…”

  “But you can’t keep living like this,” I finished for her. “I know. I’ve known—or figured—for a while now. But I’m gonna fix it.” I caught her raised eyebrow with a firm stare. I didn’t know how, not anymore, but I meant it anyway. “I promise.” I flashed her a self-deprecating smile. “I mean, when have I let you down before?”

  “Never,” she replied. The simple, immediate rebuttal caught me off guard, the honesty shimmering wetly in her warm blue eyes. I stood there for a moment, mouth still open, enraptured by those brilliant eyes as she crossed the room and kissed me one more time. Then she leaned back, smiled, and put a hand under my chin, closing my mouth for me.

  And then it was time to go.

  I needed to start a fight, and there was a man in town that needed killing.

  20

  Moments of truth

  I smashed through the dining-room window like a cannonball, slivers of glass ricocheting around the supernatural drug lab like shrapnel.

  The startled Sanguinarians inside, clad in suits or lab coats and surgical masks, didn’t mind the sharp strips of bouncing glass. They did, however, mind being skewered by eighteen inches of angry, rusted iron.

  I threw the impaled Sanguinarian off my claws, slinging him down the length of one of the long, sleek steel and glass tables crowding the room, busting beakers and scattering supplies everywhere. The other dozen Sanguinarians and addicted human workers in the room rose, reaching for weapons or manifesting blood claws, but it was already too late.

  They were already outnumbered, they just didn’t know it yet.

  I broke the legs of the nearest vampire with a kick as bullets tore through the walls of the abandoned mansion, shredding hapless Sanguinarians and human thugs alike. One ducked the first volley and tried to scramble for the exit, and I crushed her spine with a swing from Rusty and left her for dead. As they fled the dining area, another injured Sanguinarian reflexively tried to bite me from behind, but I simply shrugged her off and shattered her jaw with an elbow, then cracked her head open with the heavy, bloodstained pipe wrench.

  My dining room entry point hadn’t been chosen at random. The abandoned, isolated mountainside mansion that served as Juris’ headquarters and main Ruby manufacturing location had a lot of exit points, and neither Garibaldi nor I wanted anyone to escape this time.

  Not after what he’d done, and what he’d tried to do.

  So I chased Sanguinarians deeper into the building, cutting them off from the closest exits. Heavy gunfire from Paulie and the rest of Garibaldi’s safely-entrenched men tore many apart as they fled, and any vampire clever enough to try for a nearby window had their head scooped off by Jackie or another of the waiting snipers. Following implacably, inevitably along behind, I finished off any of them too injured, stubborn, or slow to properly run for their unlives.

  Battering my way through the press, I found that the old mansion’s study and living area had also been converted to a state-of-the-art Ruby lab, where old, dusty bookshelves and furniture had been pushed to the corners and replaced by shiny steel, touch screens, and chemistry everywhere. The same bullets that bounced inertly off of me had already shredded most of the new decor and toiling blood vampires, and the room already stank of Sanguinarian blood, both fresh and old, pure and chemically altered.

  The first Moroi I’d seen tackled me as I came into the room, and I brought my fist down on her head without thinking, breaking her skull and her spine with a single blow.

  Frowning, I bludgeoned her once with Rusty as she writhed on the bloody floor, granting her what little mercy I could.

  I hoped it wasn’t anyone Tamara knew.

  Her attack and my momentary hesitation cost me though. Most of the enemy were down, if not dead, but a few Sanguinarians had evaded the others’ fates and sprinted toward the hallway leading to the back exit. If they made it outside, it would be a trivial feat for them to disappear into the forest sprawled across the mountainside, and we’d never catch them.

  And among the cluster of escaping Sanguinarians was one tall, pale, refined man in a sharp suit.

  Juris.

  My rage got the better of me, and I sprinted after him in pursuit, swatting aside tables and dying Sanguinarians alike, trying to reach him. But in the back of my head, I already knew there was no point: he knew the building’s layout better than I did, and he didn’t have handfuls of half-dead blood drinkers latching onto him every few steps, desperate for sustenance. Despite my greater speed, Juris only managed to enhance his lead as I chased him through the building’ labyrinthine ground floor, and he even turned and briefly tugged his hat down in a speedy, sarcastic salute before turning the corner toward another exit—

  —and running straight into another enraged Strigoi.

  Already covered in other people’s blood, my scion bellowed in rage as he burst through the door and smashed Juris to the ground with a bookcase, breaking it in two with the impact. He threw the bottom half at the cluster of accompanying Sanguinarians that tried to defend their boss, then stuck both sets of claws through a survivor and literally tore them in half.

  I winced just a little, and wondered if I’d been that bad when I was newly turned, too.

  Meanwhile, Juris rolled to his feet and away from the roaring Strigoi, setting his broken bones in the blink of an eye and sprinting away from both of us, down the hall and into the large, open foyer, the front door only a few dozen feet away.

  Paulie kicked it open and knelt, bracing a fucking light machine gun with his stout frame, and opened fire.

  Panicked, Juris dove for cover—not that there was anything in this house substantial enough to use as cover against that thing—and glanced back the way he’d come, at the pair of Strigoi charging toward him, almost shoulder to shoulder in the hallway.

  Trapped, the Moroi had nowhere to go…but up.

  A fashionable, wide-brimmed hat fluttered to the floor as the pale-skinned vampire leapt onto the side of the spiral stairs leading upward, and my scion missed grabbing his ankle by inches. Rusty in hand, I vaulted onto the stairs in pursuit, but Juris leapt from one staircase to its mirror on the other side of the room and back, staying one step ahead of us and the withering hail of 7.62mm bullets from the entryway.

  And disappeared into the extended wing of bedrooms upstairs.

  “Come on!” the other Strigoi shouted, catching my eyes, his own seething with anger. “You said we could end this here!”

  I nodded. We couldn’t let Juris get away.

  Fortunately, he had nowhere left to go.

  With my scion close at my heels and Paulie puffing steadily along behind, LMG in tow, we quickly hunted down the Moroi’s heartbeat. Try as he might, if the vampire tried to leave through one of the many tightly-shuttered windows, Garibaldi’s skilled snipers were ready and waiting to kneecap him, and there were no other exits on the top floor.

  So it was only a matter of time. I grinned behind my new mask.

  We cornered him, hiding in one of the rooms in the middle of the wing, sitting on a dusty, moth-eaten bed and waiting for us.

  I grabbed my scion by the arm, digging in my heels and dragging the tall vampire to a stop as he lunged immediately for Juris.

  “Stop,” I snapped, and, to my surprise, he obeyed. “We need him alive, remember?”

  “So you say,” he responded, his tone edged in anger and irritation, and he shook my slack grip easily from his arm.

  I didn’t really hear him though.

  I was staring at Juris.

  Juris grinned back.

  Without the hat…

  He looked familiar. He was a Moroi.

  But he wasn’t Juris.

  A frigid chill trailed its intrusive fingers down my s
pine as I looked at the grinning vampire, as I recognized the deep, snake-like punctures on his pale, otherwise flawless neck.

  Huffing, Paulie bumped into me from behind and stalled as well.

  “Hey, Paulie,” I said quietly, “if it looks like Juris, walks and talks like Juris, but isn’t Juris, what is it?”

  The husky gunman stared past me and froze; I could hear his heart skip a beat.

  “A fuckin’ trap,” he replied, surprisingly calmly for a man who knew he was about to die.

  Still grinning madly, “Juris” thumbed the detonator concealed in his palm, and the world roared and went sideways.

  A gunshot blew out the back of Fake Juris’ head at the same time as my scion stuck a claw through his jugular, but the vampire died laughing. Meanwhile, my mind raced as the floor slipped out from under us, shaking madly, a deafening roar and swell of deadly heat blossoming under our feet.

  I grabbed my scion by the arm again, put my hand on Paulie’s shoulder, and closed my eyes.

  Near-lethal warmth kissed my face for an instant before the world twisted and shifted, wrenching at my gut in a sickening way as it tried to deny my wishes. I strained and pushed past it, defying the drag of the cumbersome weight in each of my hands—

  —and caught my toe on the corner of a stone pew, the three of us tumbling to the floor in the middle of my church as I finally let go.

  “What the…holy…fuck…” Paulie gasped for breath in between bouts of vomiting, hanging onto the nearest pew as if for dear life.

  I crawled out from under the half-broken pew I’d ended up beneath and rose, to find my scion already staring me in the eye.

  My stomach rumbled as a sudden spike of hunger passed through it. I ignored it, for now.

  “You…saved me.” His face was a mask; I couldn’t quite tell if the words were appreciative, confused, or accusatory. Or all three.

  After a moment, I nodded. I hadn’t thought about it at the time; I’d simply acted. “I suppose I did,” I rasped in return.

  “Don’t think it makes us even,” he replied, the undercurrent of anger in his voice catching me a little off guard. “You took two lives from me, beyond my own.” I started to ask, but his glare silenced me. “I had a wife, a daughter. I let them think I died because what choice did I have? I did so much to protect them, to make certain they had a safe place to live, and a way to make it since I was…gone.”

  The Strigoi shook his head, sadness mixing with the ever-present rage. “And now I can’t even stay here to watch over them.” His glare returned, transfixing me. “So what do I have left, then, that you haven’t taken from me? Anything?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why—”

  “Because that was an assassination attempt,” he growled. “And it almost succeeded. Those other vampires, they know how you act, how to get at you. The one you wanted to kill wasn’t even there. You told me before how they tried to kill your friend, how they went after his family.” Worry crept into his gray-green eyes. “How long before they target mine?” He shook his head. “I tried to do my part…to do what was right…and you’re right. I fucked it up. But now…”

  “You think if you disappear now, they’ll think you’re dead, instead of hunting your family down because you’re involved,” I reasoned, finally understanding.

  “Jasmine, Sierra…” He said the names like they were his lifeline, and it was unraveling. “They’re better off without me now anyway. Better off without the monster I’ve become.” The last, lingering vestiges of his anger suddenly evaporated, and his shoulders slumped, his tall frame sagging as if exhausted.

  I frowned, trying to deny his logic. “We can still fix this,” I rasped. “We can still go after Juris, end the whole—”

  “Why did you have to spare me?” he asked, the words quiet, but hanging heavy in the air between us. “Why did you have to save me?”

  I finally dropped my eyes from his, unable to hold his dead gaze any longer.

  The other Strigoi, the one I created, the one I saved, turned to walk away, heading toward the massive doors of my church.

  He looked back over his shoulder. “Why couldn’t you just be the monster I thought you were? A monster I could kill and make everything okay again?”

  I guess I had it a lot easier after all.

  My monsters were real.

  “Where are you going?” I asked as he resumed his trudge toward the door.

  “Somewhere I don’t have to look over my shoulder for you,” he replied, pausing. I supposed I deserved that. “Unless you plan to stop me.” He flexed his claws, wary or perhaps…hopeful?

  I should. The thought of another Strigoi, one that knew next to nothing, one that was my fault, disappearing into the night filled me with an undercurrent of dread. Who knew where he might go, what he might do? What mistakes or decisions he might make that were also ultimately my fault?

  Slowly, I relaxed, letting my claws dissipate into the chill, still church air.

  The only alternative I had was even worse.

  At some point, I had to say to myself: Ashes, you did the best you could. The rest isn’t your fault.

  …Even if you did fuck it all up in the first place.

  The grating of stone on heavy stone broke into my thoughts, and I crossed the nave, grabbing his shoulder before he could slip out the door.

  “Wait,” I said, letting go before he could become aggressive. “I don’t…”

  I hesitated, battling my own guilt as he stared me down.

  “I don’t even know your name,” I finished.

  “And?” the tall, battered vampire replied.

  With that, he turned his back on me and left, taking a corner to break my line of sight and disappearing without another word, only the lonely echo of his final heartbeat lingering, as if left behind and forgotten.

  I closed the door and went back inside.

  Tamara was waiting for me, along with Paulie, near the old, broken altar. She gave me a sympathetic, sad smile.

  “Didn’t go well?”

  I shook my head; she already knew, anyway.

  Meanwhile, Paulie had finally stopped vomiting long enough to kneel, cross himself, and thank God for his timely salvation.

  I didn’t bother to correct him.

  Tamara came close enough to put a gentle, comforting hand on my cheek, along with a simple kiss. “So.” The corners of her perfect lips quirked in a sardonic smile. “When are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  I sighed.

  “That’s two,” Paulie commented, grunting as he rose. He slapped me firmly on the shoulder, probably harder than was good for him. “Two I owe ya, I mean.” He gave me a serious nod. After an uncertain moment, I returned it. “Welp, we need to get back in touch with Mitch as soon as we can.” He nudged me, breaking into a grin. “No use making ‘em cry over me no longer than necessary, right?”

  o o o

  The Italian forced us to take a cab and texted his boss the whole ride, so by the time we returned to the foot of the winding road that led to the burning manor, Garibaldi was waiting.

  Before anyone could speak, the two men embraced, Garibaldi pulling his friend into a tight hug and slapping him on the back.

  Then, as several others approached to congratulate Paulie on his miraculous return from the dead, the slender figure of Jackie pushed past the crowd and dragged his husky co-worker away, his hand tight on the other man’s arm.

  I smiled.

  “It was a trap,” I said as Garibaldi and I returned our attention to each other.

  “You don’t fuckin’ say,” Aine commented, stepping out from behind him.

  Taken aback, I shifted my stare between them. “So, what? You two are meeting in person, now?”

  “She showed up after the explosion,” Garibaldi said, shrugging.

  “Well, I ain’t here t’ fuck spiders. Ain’t much point in pretendin’ now, is there?” the Sanguinarian snorted. “I came to tell you about the
trap, but I see you figured it out without me.” The vampire’s tone dripped with sarcasm.

  “Ashley,” Tamara took my arm firmly. “Is this who I think it is?” she asked, her tone full of why-haven’t-you-told-me-yet.

  I swallowed hard. “A…business…partner?” I knew I sounded as guilty as I felt. “There was a good reason,” I protested. “I think.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “We’ll talk about this later,” she promised.

  I swallowed again. Ten minutes into our newfound relationship, and I was already in trouble with my girlfriend.

  I put my arm around her shoulders anyway and gave her my best winning smile, and her glare became a resigned smile as she huffed and looked away.

  “Later,” Garibaldi interrupted firmly, if politely. “We have bigger concerns at the moment than Aine’s presence.”

  “Shit yeah,” the Sanguinarian agreed.

  “They played us,” I ventured. “Both of us.”

  Garibaldi took a long, deep breath, staring off, the flickering flames of the mansion-turned-inferno dancing in his eyes. “Yes. Unfortunately, they did.”

  “We tried the same thing we did before,” I felt like kicking myself. “We should have known better, but going after Jason, then Tamara…the whole thing just had me so angry—”

  Tamara squeezed my arm. “Ashes. Remember who was in the car.”

  I paused and stared at Garibaldi. “Davora. That’s why Juris told her to shut up and keep her head down. We weren’t supposed to know she was there.”

  He nodded, his face grim. “I was busy fortifying myself against Juris’ manipulation and left myself open to hers.” He pinched his nose, looking weary.

  “Worse, any evidence you two mighta had here got conveniently incinerated.” Aine jerked a thumb toward the roaring blaze up the hill.

  Tamara frowned, reached out and tapped Garibaldi gently on the arm to get his attention. “Hey. Remember, my cousin is probably one of the strongest of her particular bloodline. Much stronger than Juris. I can’t even keep her from affecting me.”