Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  Three words. Just three words, somehow the inversion of the three we had both spoken to one another just hours before, and the visions of the future that I had indulged myself in seemed to shatter into a million razor-sharp pieces that rained down on my heart and cut it to shreds.

  “I’m sorry,” Mikhail whispered again. “I should have told you.”

  I rocked on my feet, and had to search for the couch to sit down. “You... you can’t be,” I said. “You’re not his...”

  It didn’t make any sense. The world didn’t make sense. I didn’t mate the brother of the man who’d tortured mine, who had plagued and haunted me for ten years, who was now impossibly back from the grave to visit revenge on my people, who had literally drained the life from my father to do so, who had—

  “When did you know?” I asked. If I didn’t speak, I would be swallowed by me thoughts.

  “The night you told me about him,” Mikhail said. He seemed unwilling to sit, or too nervous to come near me. I didn’t blame him. “You described the scar on his face. When we were children—well, after we were inducted to Custodes Lunae—we had a fight. He almost killed me. I struck him, and gave him that scar. He was always picking fights with me, tormenting me. He was always a monster. Perhaps he was born this way, I do not know. My nagyi—my grandmother—she saw it in him when he was very small, and worried that a darkness was rooted in his soul. She was right. She... died in the wake of his first awakening, under circumstances that I have always believed were intentional. Nix. Please say something.”

  I looked up at him, and found that it was difficult to look in his eyes, or at his face. Now that he'd told me, I couldn’t help seeing it, and wondered why I hadn’t before. The shape of his jaw, the set of his eyebrows. Even his hairline, all seemed like they should have been obvious features, that I should have recognized them.

  When I gave in, and looked away, at any place but him—my own mate—I knew that it hurt him but I couldn’t risk forcing myself and doing worse. Already, anger began chewing away at my rationality and my control. “You let me claim you,” I whispered, harsh around the lump in my throat. “You... you fucked me and you knew—”

  “I have no excuses to make,” Mikhail said stiffly. “And I cannot beg forgiveness. By the time I realized, I had already begun to feel...”

  “What?” I asked, my stomach trembling with nervous laughter. “What, that you wanted to put a dragon notch on your belt and telling me you were the brother of my nightmares might screw your chances? Fuck, Mikhail. Just... fuck.”

  I put my hands in my face, but in the darkness I saw that sneering face, as if from all those years ago Rav—Ivan—mocked me, laughing at the knowledge that he might be about to burn, but in ten years his brother would find me and crush my heart.

  “Was it revenge?” I asked, taking my hands away to escape the awful images. “Did you do this because my father killed him?”

  “Nix, no,” Mikhail said, desperate and pleading, “I swear to you, I did not know what happened to him. He disappeared, he left the cabal and took a book of magic with him. Dangerous magic that many believed would destroy him in the end. We hunted him, I hunted him and had every intention of killing him. I do not wish any revenge, I promise you—Ivan deserved worse than what he received.”

  He came a little closer, sank to his knees to try and find my eyes, but I denied them to him. I just couldn’t look at him. Not if I wanted to stay human, keep from grabbing him by my shirt that he wore and shaking him with my fury. “Master Laryn took me to the underworld,” he said, “when he learned that Ivan had at last met his end. It was a dark and terrible part of Tartarus, and what was left of him should never have been able to return. He did not have enough of himself left to even tell us how he died. And when we left, Laryn ensured that he would never be released, that he would never find his way back to this world. I don’t know how he did, but learning that it was possible made me sick. To know that my blood, my brother, was still causing such harm. Nix... please look at me.”

  I tried. My neck wouldn’t move. My pulse was almost loud enough in my ears to drown out the sound of his sniffling as he stood.

  “I will go,” he said. “Not from the weyr, just to the shack. I will make the calls. I... I understand if you do not wish to see me again. But Ivan must be stopped, and so I will see that it is done.”

  Two opposing forces sank painful hooks into me and began to pull in opposite directions. Mikhail collected his bags, and headed for the door. I wanted to stop him, to tell him to stay, and to wait—that I needed to burn this rage off so that I could think clearly, and that when I did perhaps we could work through this.

  And yet it was all I could do to hold myself still, to keep from throwing something at him. I was sick, deep in my gut, maybe in my soul. Flashes of our lovemaking, of the beautiful expression on his face when I’d coaxed him to a height of pleasure I knew he had never felt before, struck me like blows, each one tainted by a sudden twisted image of Rav-Ivan’s face imposed on his. I wanted to throw up, but I hadn’t eaten in days because I had spent them nurturing his body while his spirit walked abroad, worried that I hadn’t spoken up soon enough to keep him. To keep that man’s brother.

  Before either of the forces at war inside me could come to any accord, the door closed, and he was gone, and I was alone.

  And I always would be. Because I had claimed the brother of my enemy.

  I would never have another mate.

  If Ivan’s goal was not to kill those responsible for his death, but to hurt us so badly that we would forever carry the scar?

  Well, then, the motherfucker had won in the end. I had no doubt he was watching, and laughing loud enough to wake the rest of the dead.

  20

  Mikhail

  Perhaps worse than having hurt Nix so deeply, so profoundly, that he could not even look at me was the fact that I was utterly alone with it. My constant companion was not there to soothe me, to reassure my conscience, she had not been there to stop me when I begged him to claim me. I had made these mistakes on my own, and I would live with them on my own.

  I ignored the curious looks of those who saw me as I walked from Nix’s house back to the small shack. No doubt they smelled him on me, no doubt they knew the meaning of clothes that were too big for me, and surely these things would cause him still more damage. It was as if my very existence was a blade, slowly sawing into him, heedless of the hurt it caused.

  When the door was finally closed behind me, I indulged myself in only one minute of self-pity. I even set the timer on my phone as I sank down against the door, put my face in my hands, and allowed the grief and self-loathing to rise up and drown me. Fresh tears, which I was somehow not empty of, poured through my fingers. I only contained the cries of renewed loss that tried to claw out of my chest because I knew that everyone within a hundred meters would hear, and wonder, and whisper, and perhaps make things even worse for Nix.

  The timer went off.

  I raised my head, tapped the button to silence it, and closed my eyes, breathing deep as if each breath was a heap of soil under which to bury my emotions. One at a time I filled the grave, one at a time I let the weight crush them down, until I could feel as close to nothing as possible.

  Nothing, at least, except the strange new feeling inside my chest. Like a delicate but unbreakable thread, winding around my heart and leading off into some distance, where another heart beat at the far end of it.

  It was cruel. Forever, I would feel that beating heart. Perhaps not in death, but even that was uncertain. So little was known. Shifters did not appreciate the long interest mages held for the strange magic of the bond, and they guarded it fiercely. For that reason, it was taboo for a mage and shifter to be connected in such a way. Vance had been lucky. He had been liked.

  I would be lucky to leave Emberwood alive.

  But for the moment, I could not dwell on these things. My brother was at large, and he would not rest until he accomplished his ends.
I stood, unsteady at first but then with more certainty, and paced the room considering carefully what I would say before I called Master Laryn and pressed the phone to my ear, waiting.

  He answered quickly, but did not immediately speak to me. “Have it on my desk by the end of the week, Grant,” he told a student. “That’ll be all.”

  In the moments before I was able to speak to him, my emotions, like my dead brother, pressed up against the grave I had committed them to. I choked back an errant sob just as Laryn answered me. “Mikhail?”

  I had to swallow it down, but not in time for him to miss it. “My boy, are you all right?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I am not all right, Master. I have... made some number of mistakes here. But first and most important: the poltergeist in Emberwood was the work of a necromancer. I have discovered the identity of the perpetrator.”

  I heard the heavy sigh on Laryn’s end. “Mikhail, it isn’t—”

  “It is Ivan,” I told him. “There is little doubt, though I cannot say if he is working alone or not.”

  “How do you know, Mikhail?” he asked.

  I told him the story, how Rav had taken Pendrig’s soul, how the weyr had hunted him down. About Roland Emberin’s wasting disease, likely the manifestation of Ivan’s death curse. About the breach, and the hungry ghost, and finally about Gabby.

  “Dear boy,” Master Laryn breathed. “I... cannot express my condolences adequately. You’ve been through so much. Perhaps it’s time to hand this off to someone else, you should return to the campus, take time to grieve and recover.”

  “I can’t,” I said miserably. “Not after... I have to see this through. But I do not believe I can do it on my own. I don’t know what happened, whether he is being aided or if it is something else, but Ivan’s power has grown tremendously, and he was already a remarkable mage in life. I cannot know if he is operating from this world or from beyond the veil, but I am not even sure that two or three of us is enough.”

  “He must be receiving aid of some kind,” Laryn argued. “That kind of power—he was in no position to leave Tartarus. Not without help. He shouldn’t even have been able to leverage his death curse from the state he was in.”

  “Who else could have gone so deep to retrieve him?” I asked. “Surely, it was no one in the cabals.”

  “I can’t say,” he muttered. “I agree, none of the cabal masters would dare commit such a crime. To say nothing of the consequences, it simply isn’t in the nature of any of them. But to release him from my seals, to say nothing of going so deep into the underworld and coming back with an injured soul... it would be someone with at least the skill equal to a cabal-trained master.”

  My thoughts went to Henry DuPont. “What about the prodigy killed a few weeks ago?” I asked. “DuPont. Could he have done something like this?”

  Laryn grunted. “It’s conceivable, I suppose. But if that were the case, whatever support he offered Ivan would be gone now. DuPont will not be returning from the underworld again. Not even with help.”

  I didn’t know precisely what DuPont’s punishment had been, but while the essence of a soul was effectively eternal, that did not mean that it had to be eternally in one piece, or one place in the infinite vastness of the underworld. “What about other rogue masters, someone or some group of necromancers cast from the cabals, or missing. DuPont took his apprentice with him when he left, covered their tracks with an accident to fake their deaths, perhaps—”

  “No,” Laryn said quickly. “No, I don’t think that could be possible. DuPont was a fluke. No, it has to be someone else. The book that Ivan stole—if he made students, gave them access to it, and they’ve been amassing power and skill these last ten years... if at least one of them were exceptionally clever and powerful, perhaps a prodigy, then it may be that they utilized that knowledge to resurrect their master.”

  Early in this fight, I had considered that perhaps an apprentice might have done such a thing. But it was not in Ivan’s nature to share power. “Master, with respect—does that sound like Ivan? You knew him, perhaps even better than I did.”

  He breathed heavily, considering. “It is difficult to say. Not in his nature, no—but if he were desperate, and if he had found apprentices who would be adoring enough to feed his ego? He adored praise. And impressionable young potential mages would be a near endless source, if he doled out his lessons only sparingly and kept them ignorant of the true extent of their gift. It has been done often enough over the ages.”

  This was true, but such apprentices once abandoned rarely went on to master the kind of skill this would require.

  We were on the verge of talking circles around the subject, though. “We may speculate endlessly about how,” I told him. “The people here require a solution. Can you come? I greatly need not only your assistance, but your guidance. And there must be some few you can trust to bring with you.”

  I did not like the quiet that descended.

  “Have you gained the approval of the Emberwood council for such a breach of their usual tradition?” he asked finally.

  “We are working on that,” I told him. “I have made allies here. They are attempting to sway the necessary opinions.”

  “I see,” he murmured. “Well... in that case, I will make arrangements here. I don’t doubt that Custodes Lunae would jump at the chance to be the first cabal in seventy years to make treaty with the Emberwood Weyr. If I bring that to the council, I have little doubt they’ll approve an officially sanctioned intervention.”

  Perhaps it was not the ideal time to inform him that the chances of any long-term treaty was likely destroyed by my breaking the heart of the future leader of the weyr. No one would appreciate my lying, but at least they would all be alive to scold me for it. “I believe that is very possible,” I said. “I have explained the seriousness of the matter to them, and I have good will to spend. Thank you, Master Laryn. I have missed your counsel. The world outside the cabal seems always to be a dangerous and lonely place for me. I wonder that I ever leave.”

  He grunted. “Yes. Well. A young man of your age ought to get out and be uncomfortable more, Mikhail, but I understand the sentiment just fine. I’ll call you when I have word. Be well.”

  “Be well,” I echoed, and hung up.

  It was at least promising. I doubted that a treaty would be possible—but, if after these events Nix or the council were able to see the value in having a relationship with at least one cabal, perhaps there would be some gain. Certainly, I would have the assistance of more competent mages. Or, rather, Master Laryn would have the assistance, and I would be part of it.

  However powerful Ivan or his hypothetical apprentices were, no mage could stand against a well-coordinated and well-trained team of opposing mages. That was what kept all of us in line. The promise of retribution from our peers.

  Ivan did not seem to fear that retribution, but then Ivan was a sociopath who believed he was inherently superior to all other beings. As clever as he was—and he was terrifyingly clever in life—and as powerful as he might be, though, he was not a god, and he was not truly immortal. All things ended. Death came for the great and small alike, in the fullness of time.

  Even the dead.

  I found myself clutching my phone in a vice grip, and slowly eased my fingers and put it down before I sat on the corner of the bed, trying to hold on to the numbness. After a moment, I looked around the empty, silent room, and closed my eyes. “Gabriella Ruiz,” I intoned, reaching, pushing magic into my words, so that they echoed into the ether, “I summon thee. Appear before me.”

  I waited. It was foolish to expect a response. And yet, I managed to spark in myself some small hope that she would rise up, show herself, embrace me and tell me that it was all okay. That she would be here. That even if I had no one else, it would be me and her, until I died and even beyond. That she would be with me until I held her hand and walked into Elysium to return her to her mother and father and two brothers who had grieved her passi
ng. I would finally introduce her to my nagyi, and we would tell her the stories of our exploits together, both the sad and the happy—and, no doubt, Gabby would supply the mortally embarrassing.

  But that hope sputtered and died quickly. Gabby didn’t arise. She never would.

  I hoped at least that she was more at peace than I was. That was a hope that, absent proof to the contrary, I was able to cling to as I lay down, and began to focus on the problems before me, and how to solve them.

  Ivan would be thinking many steps ahead. So I had to think several dozen beyond that. Or it would be a very short match.

  21

  Nix

  Once I felt able to face the world with a clear face, if not a settled heart, I arranged the meeting with the council, and set up a more intimate appointment with Council Member Vilar just before. I had to know what the opinions of the council were, and whether they would back any suggestion of extending an invitation to more mages. Rezzek had already spoken with Vilar, at least, and had said that he understood the gravity of the problem. Whether he’d agreed or not, Rezzek couldn’t tell.

  Even on my way to meet with Vilar at his home, it was clear that the other members of the weyr knew that something was going on. Few approached me, but one or two of those that did mentioned having seen the necromancer leaving my home in clothes that didn’t appear to fit.

  “His were damaged when he saved Vilar’s girls,” I told each of them.

  Their responses were generally muted. None of them dared bring up the scent that they inevitably caught if they were within a few yards of Mikhail when they saw him.

  By the time I reached Vilar’s, I was ready to never leave his basement. I would just stay there until a generation or so passed, and assuming they didn’t pass down stories of me, I would emerge with a slate that was finally clean. I would still be mated to a necromancer, still alone for the rest of my life unless I cared to fuck the occasional tail-chaser—no other shifter, to say nothing of another dragon, would have me. But at least the gossip would have died down somewhat.