Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  But I could slow it down, and that became my plan. It was already focused on me. I just had to give Nix time to get the girls to safety.

  Or at least, it was focused on me, initially. As more of a wasted torso came into view, it twisted, pawing at the world of the living to turn itself around, the black, sucking voids of its eyes turning, searching.

  Because it wasn’t here for me.

  I raced around the hole to the other side, and planted my feet. The fetish rattled in my hand as I called more magic, ripping it from the fabric of the ether to bolster my strength.

  “Boss, no,” Gabby begged. She pulled at my arm. “That’s too much, you can’t—”

  “Go to Laryn,” I told her. “Tell him that Emberwood won’t hold, that Ivan has returned.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t, I’m not leaving you.”

  The sinew that bound the bones began to shake loose. “That is not a request, Gabby, it is a command. Do not make me back it up.”

  She was incapable of tears, but her eyes filled with pain. “Please don’t make me leave you, Mikky.”

  I met her eyes. “I will find you, and walk you to Elysium myself. You can finally rest. We will rest together.”

  She drifted back. “Boss, I...”

  “Thank you for being my friend,” I told her.

  Gabriella Ruiz let her hands drop to her sides. She glowed, brightly enough that the living would have seen her. “I love you, Mikky.”

  I didn’t know what she intended until she turned and charged the great darkness that had now risen to tower over me.

  “Gabby!” I reached out with my will and my power. “Gabriella Ruiz, I command you to—”

  It was too late. She dove, flashing like a supernova as her light plunged into the hungry ghost. The light spread like lightning across its surface, then vanished.

  The hungry ghost wailed, and clawed at itself. Its grip on the world of the living loosened, distracted by the sudden discordance inside as Gabby undoubtedly raised literal hell among the many spirits that had been consumed to create this abomination.

  The shock of her loss struck me hard in the chest, but I could not waste her sacrifice. I gripped the fetish hard enough that the sinew snapped. Vibrating bones dropped, then rose in the grip of magic fueled by pain and grief. They spun around me as I extended a hand.

  “I rebuke you,” I shouted, not in Latin, but in the tongue of my nagyi, and her ancestors before her. A bone shot out like a bullet, struck the shadow in the face. Darkness shattered like glass, evaporated and funneled down the hole. “I rebuke you!”

  Another bone shot out, this one blasting through the shadow’s chest. It howled, and continued to claw at itself, thrashing more violently. Chunks of the road cracked and flew, or dropped into the hole.

  A hand shot out, reached for me with frightening speed I hadn’t been prepared for. “Czernobog take you!” A bone bullet struck the reaching hand. It exploded, and revealed an opalescent light that twisted and burst, burning the shadow until the arm dissolved.

  “Return from whence you came!” I bellowed, and sent the last bone flashing into the spirit’s head. Light flared. The shrieking reached a pitch that threatened to deafen me, burst my ears.

  I gripped the fabric of the ether with claws of magic and pulled the edges of the great wound closed, screaming as my blood pounded in my ears, freezing as the raw magic of death itself coursed through my veins. My rage echoed down into the depths. The spirit tried to grip the world with its shadow hands, but they crumbled to smoke. It sank back, sizzling against the power that I pressed against it.

  Something massive crashed to the ground behind me. Fire gushed over my head, spraying across the darkness of death. It should have done nothing. But as it spread, it was caught up in the currents of magic. The bright orange and yellow turned a sickly black and green, the colors of death magic, of the fires of the underworld.

  I gave the hungry ghost a final shove, dropping to my knees, and slammed my hands to the ground. Magic followed suit. The ether rippled. A thunderclap of power struck the world, and the spectral dragonfire burst out in a wave.

  A voice howled from the closing breach. “Mikhail! I’ll rip the soul from your bones, bro—”

  As the breach slammed shut, the voice was cut off. The fire washed across me, and I expected to be incinerated. Instead, it passed through me, and dissipated, leaving the darkness in sudden and terrifying silence.

  My blood seemed frozen. I shuddered, and fell to my side.

  A burning hand caught me, the heat of thin scales from a dragon’s palm stinging against my freezing skin. Darkness and warmth closed around me. The world lurched, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open as wind howled as if furious that it could not reach me where I was.

  15

  Nix

  “Nix?”

  Rezzek knocked at the door. “Man... you’ve gotta talk to the council. They’re practically at your door. Nix? It’s been two days. We have to figure out what to do next.”

  I ignored him. Half-shifted, I curled around Mikhail’s body. The shivering had stopped, at least, a few hours after I delivered him to my house and got him inside and into a hot bath. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he’d been cold. Deathly cold. If it wasn’t for his pulse, beating so slowly that I didn’t understand how he could still be alive, I would have assumed he was dead.

  In that last moment, when adrenaline and my dragon had taken over, I had seen something I didn’t know was possible. Maybe dragonfire wasn’t enough to kill a ghost—or whatever happened to ghosts in place of death—but to see it twisted like that, turning that awful, eye-biting green color made my dragon recoil. And then to see it turned around and blasted back at us…

  Mikhail had dropped on the spot. And part of me wondered if it was because of my interference that it had happened. If it wasn’t for dragon senses, I wouldn’t have heard the next beat of his heart, or sensed the smallest rush of air through his nostrils, or smelled the faint scent of life in him. It was like he’d just… left.

  I thought I had gotten him killed for just a few horrible seconds, staring at his fallen body where it laid motionless on the cracked road. Not that long ago, the sight would have given me some degree of satisfaction, maybe. But that was before I knew him—as much as I did—and saw what he was willing to do, how far he was willing to go for people that didn’t like him, didn’t want him around, didn’t deserve him. And when he fell, I didn’t feel satisfaction. I felt something I didn’t even like naming in my own head, where no one else could hear it.

  Loss. He was dead, and it was my fault, and I hated myself for letting it happen in the few moments before I realized that maybe it hadn’t.

  And anyway, he’d told me that for a necromancer, death was just an inconvenience.

  So I held him close, ignored the calls, the knocks on the door. If I could just keep him warm, keep dripping water into his mouth every few hours, then wherever he was, whatever was happening to him, he could come back from it.

  “Nix,” Rezzek pleaded. “Your father is starting to look better. Actually better. He’s not up to taking his position back yet, but he will be. He’ll want to know why you’re not doing your job, and the council is going to tell him. Come on, man. You have to at least let them meet you here.”

  Gods damn it. Of course, after all this, Mikhail had been right. Pop’s affliction was mystical. Necromantic. It wasn’t a fair trade. Not for that abusive asshole. “Let him,” I called to the door, my voice grating against the wrong kind of vocal cords. “He’ll do a better job anyway. Let the council deal with him.”

  Rezzek was quiet a moment, and then the door burst open as he broke the doorknob and pushed through. He saw me, saw Mikhail. His eyes grew hard, but only for a moment. He looked me over. “How long have you been shifted?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I grumbled.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Shit, man. Two days?”

  Holding a half-form like
I had this long was like getting a cramp in my soul. My dragon was trapped in-between, stiff with the effort of balancing between skin and scales. At first, it had been agonizing. Now, it was a dull, distant ache that I embraced if it meant I could keep Mikhail warm, keep him alive.

  I had seen what he did. How he had taken a bullet—in a manner of speaking—for me, for Vilar and Markon’s kids, for our weyr. Until that moment, I’d wondered. Would he tuck tail and run when it really came down to it? And I got my answer in the same breath.

  He wouldn’t. He didn’t. So neither would I.

  “Go away,” I told Rezzek. “I have to keep him warm. You wouldn’t understand. We need him.”

  “There are other necromancers,” Rezzek pointed out. He came around the bed to Mikhail’s side so that I could see him. “Nix... what are you doing?”

  “I told you—”

  He shook his head, “Yeah, I know, but what are you doing?”

  I growled low in my chest, breathing hard to stir up fresh heat inside. “I’m not going to leave him. He almost died for us. Tell the council to speak to my father. Tell them I resign.”

  “Doesn’t work like that,” Rezzek breathed. He gave a quiet snort of disbelief, then shook his head and shrugged. “All right, then.” He began to pull his shirt off, and untied his pants. Blue-green scales began to emerge across his skin as he took on his half-form.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. If he thought he was going to pry me off of Mikhail, he was going to be painfully disappointed.

  Instead, however, he got onto the bed. “You have to rest,” he grated. “Let me take over. I’ll keep him warm, you spend some time in skin or scales, either one, and give your dragon time to recover.”

  I pulled Mikhail protectively toward me, drawing him away as Rezzek lay down next to us.

  Rezzek chuffed indignantly. “I’m your friend,” he said. “I know this is important to you. That he’s important to you. I’ll take care of him. If you don’t rest, man, you’re just going to lose control, your dragon is going to rebel, and you’ll hurt him. Seriously. Eat something. Sleep. Fuck the council, if that’s what you want. But don’t sabotage yourself out of stubborn pride.”

  He moved closer, and slipped an arm carefully beneath the pillow that cradled Mikhail’s head. He raised the other, and waved me over.

  It didn’t feel right, handing Mikhail over to him. He was mine—my responsibility, that is. I had been the one to leave him behind, to let him face that... whatever it was... alone.

  But Rezzek was earnest, and he was my friend. And he wasn’t wrong. My dragon had already tried to rebel, twice. Struggling to push me into a full shift, which would have crushed Mikhail if I’d been that close to him, or trying to get away and leave me in my skin. It was only a matter of time before I didn’t have the strength to keep it from doing one or the other.

  I let him gather Mikhail to him. He thrummed, rasping as he pumped air into his lungs, stoked his own inner fire, and began to put off a gentle heat. He held Mikhail close in a way that made me briefly jealous, but if there were any kind of untoward feelings there, I would have smelled them right away. Instead, all I scented from my friend was worry.

  Reluctantly, I sat up, and got off the bed. The moment I let my dragon go, it retreated, and I shifted to my skin. My legs shook, and I had to brace myself with a hand on the wall to keep from falling down.

  “Go eat,” Rezzek growled. “Get some water. Then come back and rest.”

  I gave a weak nod, and staggered out of the bedroom and into the main room, then to the kitchen where I leaned on the counter by the sink and filled a glass twice to slake my thirst. There were old leftovers in the fridge that smelled like they’d probably gone bad—but I had a dragon’s stomach, and wasn’t worried about a little mold. I ate without tasting, half a sandwich and half a pizza, until I was full, and then drank more to wash it down before I filled the glass a final time and took it back to the bedroom.

  Rezzek hadn’t moved. He held Mikhail close, just as I had, breathing a long, slow rhythm to keep his body heated. I crawled onto the bed, and with his assistance lifted Mikhail’s head to trickle water over his dry lips. After a moment, he swallowed weakly, just a few times.

  I turned when it was done and put the glass on the side table beside the empty one, then pulled the blankets aside and slipped under them to lay against him, my knees brushing Rezzek’s, scraping against his scales.

  “Sleep,” Rezzek urged, when I lay watching Mikhail’s pale, still face. “I’ll wake you if there’s any change.”

  I did need the rest. So I closed my eyes, expecting that I would lie there for a few hours pretending to rest until I could convince Rezzek that I could take over for him.

  Instead, the gentle claws of sleep slipped up almost immediately, and dragged me down.

  “Your brother screamed,” Rav snarled at me. “First in pain, and then in ecstasy as I fucked him.”

  My father’s talons dug into his cheek. The necromancer hissed, but bit back a cry of pain. His lips curled into a cruel smile. “I’ve got your mother’s soul, too. Or I did. She was delicious.”

  “Spit,” Pop said.

  “What?” I didn’t understand what he was demanding.

  He turned to me, his talons digging deeper, rivulets of blood pouring over the necromancer’s cheek, chin, his lips. “Spit in his face.”

  “Pop, just—”

  “This is the son of a bitch that killed your brother,” Pop snapped at me. “He’s trash. Worthless. Let him know it, show a gods damned spine, boy!”

  I flinched, and gathered what little saliva was still in my dry mouth, and spit on Rav’s face. It wasn’t much, and I didn’t think I was vicious enough about it.

  Pop apparently didn’t either. He made a derisive sound, a snort of embarrassment to have a son like me. But he turned his attention to the mage. “I’d ask about your last words,” he said quietly, “but frankly I don’t give a shit.”

  And with that, his jaw opened, and fire poured out.

  My skin burned. I clawed at myself. I staggered away, slapping at the flames as they consumed me. Rav screamed, and his scream became laughter, growing higher and higher in pitch as the two of us burned together, our screams blending in my ears until I couldn’t separate them.

  I awoke with a gasp of air, sucking in breath as the pain of the fire faded. It was dark, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was. A single heartbeat caught my ear, though. Then there were two—one weak, thin, the other steady and booming.

  “He’s okay,” Rezzek assured me as my hands moved to find Mikhail under the blankets. “It’s late. Almost morning. You feeling better?”

  “Not by a lot,” I muttered, and rubbed my face to clear the sleep, and the dream it had inflicted. “Any change?”

  “Some,” he said. “His heart’s speeding up. Listen.”

  I tuned my ears, and heard another heartbeat, much sooner than expected. Relief flooded me. That had to be a good sign. I twisted, pulled Mikhail to me, and Rezzek let him go. He shifted, his form softening, and the bed groaned as the weight left him. “He’s staying warm on his own now,” he said. “I kept it up for a while longer, but he started sweating.”

  The smell of Mikhail’s skin confirmed that. I drew him close and spooned him, tucking my knees behind his, pressing my cheek to the back of his head. “Thanks, Rez.”

  “Yeah,” Rezzek breathed. “Look... Nix...”

  “I know,” I said. He didn’t need to say it. Didn’t need to point out that Pop would lose his shit if he knew I’d gotten so attached to any mage, much less a necromancer. That the council would shit, as well. Vilar might back me up, given what Mikhail had done for his kids and his mate’s mother. But he would be just the one voice.

  Best case, I’d be looking at banishment. Pronounced by my father, carried out by the council. Basri liked me, but he was loyal to the weyr, and he’d carry it out.

  I tried to care more, tried to think about all
the things I’d be leaving behind. The community that I’d grown up in, who’d raised me.

  The darkness of the room eased as I shifted my eyes enough to see Rezzek watching me, his naked body on top of the blankets still. “If I have to choose,” I said, “I’ll choose him.”

  “Was afraid you’d say that,” he said. Not with the kind of distaste I half-expected, but with resignation.

  “Would you go with me?” I asked.

  He sighed, closed his eyes, and gave a quiet groan as he rolled to his back, then sat up and slid his legs off the bed. “Fuck. I don’t know. Yes. Probably. It’s done now. But you barely know this guy, Nix. You sure you wanna—”

  “I’m not,” I admitted, “but I know that he’s not what I thought, not what Pop probably thinks. And frankly I’m tired of Pop’s policies. Tired of this weyr being cut off from everyone, everything. If we’d had allies, relationships, this might not have happened. Maybe no one would have died.”

  “You leave,” he said quietly, “that may not ever change. Not till your pop is gone, at least. Stay, and maybe you could change that.”

  He wasn’t wrong. And I did feel some guilt at the idea of just walking away. But maybe it was just time. Maybe Emberwood had run its course, and if it failed then... maybe that was just the cycle. Maybe it needed to fail, and had been on the way toward that for a long time.

  “Will you think about it?” Rezzek asked.

  “Yeah,” I promised.

  He stood, and pulled his clothes on, then gave me a last long, sympathetic look. “Let me know when he pulls through.”

  “Thanks,” I told him. “For helping.”

  He smiled, and tipped his head. “We’re brothers, man. Always have been. I’ve got your back.”

  He left us, and I snuggled closer to Mikhail.

  In another hour or so, his breathing changed. His heart picked up. He began to stir. I let out a small cry of excitement and relief. “Mikhail? Hey—you’re okay.”