A prickle of instinctual fear climbed my spine, and I suppressed a backward glance at the very last possible moment.
I planted my feet. “Why?” I repeated. Because of Lori. Because of everyone you’ve hurt. Because you’re everything I don’t want to become. Because all of these bones were people once, dammit. But there was no point in justifying myself to an aberration, only in keeping its attention for a few more seconds. “Because enough is enough. Because you don’t get to decide what I am or what I’m going to be.” I shrugged. “But mostly? Because your face looks like a side of raw ass left out in the sun too damn long.” For punctuation, I flipped it off again.
Vibrating with hatred, it rushed me, maw open wide to consume.
Behind me, I felt Charles’ strong, heavy pulse finally even out. Show time..
I rolled to the side at the last moment, flicking my long, deadly claws at its eyes just enough to make it recoil. It tracked me and tried to turn, its momentum stalling in a wide scattered arc of bones as it twisted its body like a cat, fearsome mouth still open wide and dripping with insatiable hunger.
I flung myself as far across the chamber as I could, tumbling to the bony ground and instinctively shielding my face as Charles finished his spell.
A roaring lance of flame, backed by the impression of a mounted knight in full charge, both an inferno and an idea incarnate, burst forth fully formed from Charles’ outstretched hands. The magician’s conjuration embodied a fervor for consumption that dwarfed even One-Horn’s. The galloping conflagration smashed into the injured Rawhead with a deep, rumbling boom that made the sea of bones dance and sent a tremor of dread through my dead core.
The demon went up like a Roman Candle, knocked prone by the concussive blast, its roars shifting to wails. Six dangerous paws scrabbled with frantic rage as it rolled back to its feet, lambent lantern eyes now burning with the ruby red light of madness.
I wanted nothing more than to just curl up until the flame had gone away of its own accord, but the Rawhead didn’t give me that luxury. Despite the terrific injury Charles had dealt it, despite its head being wreathed in fierce, consuming flame and three other foes on their feet, it had eyes only for me.
Let’s dance, sexy.
Instead of allowing vampiric panic to consume and control me, I threw myself to my feet, immediately losing my balance and nearly falling prone as the loose ribs of some poor, forgotten soul migrated unexpectedly underfoot. Had I fallen, I had no doubt I would have died right then and there, with the monster right behind me, foul breath almost on my neck, bounding along in very literal hot pursuit.
With no hope of outrunning the gigantic, six-legged predator, I shifted course repeatedly, keeping it from gaining momentum and bowling me over or finding enough purchase to pounce on me. I knew it was a short-lived tactic. It wouldn’t be long before it saw through the haze of rage clouding its mind and anticipated me, or I stumbled and went down, this time to never rise again. I had to think of something quick, or I was double-dead for certain.
Fortunately, as a Strigoi my mind was clearer under fear and duress than it had ever been when I was human. Even with a blazing freight train of an inferno right behind me, I could think clearly enough to scan my surroundings for salvation.
And I spotted it, sticking up from a clustered pile of tangled human bones.
I threw myself forward, hand outstretched for a miracle. As I did so, I dodged a massive paw strike that would have taken me off my feet—I hadn’t even known it was coming. Diving and rolling, my hand touched cool plastic and latched on, but my hands were no longer as tactile or adroit as they had been a few days ago, and I fumbled it.
I rolled and stumbled to my feet, but failed to wrap my hands around my prize well enough to use it properly. So instead, I slung Corey’s Super Soaker forcefully into the onrushing demon’s face.
Only one thing happens if you throw a water-filled plastic container at a solid object with that much force: it explodes. A lance of panic pierced my dead heart as the water gun went the way of the cinder block before it, deadly wet shards blasting out in all directions. I yelped and leapt behind the huge mirror. Bits of plastic rained down, tinking harmlessly off it like a last-second shield.
Then I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the Rawhead roaring in agony. I knew that somewhere on the other side of the room, Charles was shouting, but it could have been another spell or a cupcake recipe for all I knew. I was temporarily separated from everyone else; the bulk of the demon’s blazing, smoking, furry body blocked the rest of the room from my sight. Left to my own devices, I peeked around the mirror and saw that, instead of putting out the fire like I’d hoped, the holy water had somehow joined forces with it, both of them coexisting to eat away at the demon’s raw, exposed head.
But even now, blinded as water and fire ate away at its dimming eyes and scoured the stinking flesh from the white of its skull, the beast still didn’t die.
My foot landed on something as I shifted and I slipped and almost fell, clutching at the mirror frame to retain my balance. I glanced down, expecting to see more of the omnipresent bone, and blinked in surprise as my loyal, ill-gotten street sign rolled up against my boot.
I grinned, a toothy vampire grin. A Strigoi grin.
I picked it up, and with a screech of metal on metal that was lost in the din, sheared the end of it off at a sharp angle with my claws.
Then I stepped out from behind the mirror, and rammed it as hard as I could into the naked, blistering muscle covering the Rawhead’s skull.
The unbridled cacophony of torment and furious madness filling the chamber gurgled to a stop, replaced by rattling convulsions and hissing air, the death rattle of a nightmare. Then, slowly, that too was gone.
I planted my end of my valiant signpost into the bony ground and stepped back, careful and anxious to keep a safe distance from the still-burning, still-bubbling monster corpse. The butt end of the pole slipped, as if it might give way under the dying creature’s weight, but the bones suddenly shifted around it. The end of my makeshift spear dropped firmly into a sudden rut in the bony terrain, seemingly held in a vengeful grip by the bones of those very souls the monster had once feasted upon.
I smiled.
Edging carefully around the hopefully dead demon, happy to give the disintegrating body every spare inch of clearance the chamber could provide, I made my way toward the rest of the group. As I slipped by, it slowly slumped and slid a few more inches further onto the pole with a wet, gruesome sshhlurk.
I made a face and kept going.
Across the way, everyone was superficially intact. Charles was upright, breathing hard, staff smoking and emitting dim light like a dying ember. Corey crouched by Charles’ feet, squatting on his haunches, face smeared with blood and dirt. I realized quickly that he was checking on Tamara, who, to my surprise, seemed to be worse off than everyone else. There were no physical signs of damage to her person, but she sat on the ground as if her legs had simply refused to hold her, shaking her head and staring at the floor. Worried, I started to go to her side.
Charles stopped me.
“Are you Ashley?” the wizard shouted at me, pointing his staff in my direction in a wild but totally threatening manner. I held up my hands defensively; I’d just seen what that thing could do, and I wanted no part of it.
On the other hand, my head was pounding like I’d gotten my mental ass kicked, so “polite” was having trouble sticking in my vocabulary. “Yes, I’m me. I’m also wet, gross, and pretty battered. Thanks for asking.” I pointed in the general direction of the boiling, burning Rawhead. “Also, you’re welcome for not letting that thing eat you. Again.” I glared at him a little.
“Okay. You’re fine. Thank God.” He lowered his staff with a relieved sigh.
With Charles no longer holding me at staffpoint, I went over and knelt by Tamara. Corey stood to give us some space or perhaps just a wider berth. He glanced at me, shaking his head and frowning with concern in
Tamara’s direction.
Of course, I didn’t really know how to help, either. “Tam, you okay?” I poked her in the shoulder, my claws having once again vanished into thin air. “Tam, we gotta move. People are depending on us.”
As the seconds crawled by in silence, I started to think she wasn’t going to respond to me. So it caught me by surprise to hear her voice, uncharacteristically small and quiet, as I started to rise.
“There’s no point. No matter how hard I try, in the end, I’ll be just like them. Just like Charles said… Just like Liandra. Just like… Mother.” She drew her knees to her chest and hugged them tightly as she shuddered. Tears welled up in her sapphire eyes, then raced down her alabaster cheeks.
“No, Tam. That’s not true. That’s not who you are. It wasn’t real. That thing got in our heads, and messed with us like an enormous douche canoe.” I reached a hand down to her, and smiled as warmly as I could manage at the beautiful Moroi.
After a long moment she finally met my eyes; the light and clear liquid life in hers still hadn’t fully returned. Something haunted them, like a ghost at a crossroads you have to pass every day. “That doesn't mean it was wrong,” she whispered, echoing my own thoughts from earlier.
Charles cleared his throat. “It’s a demon. I don’t know what it said to either of you, and I don’t want to. But know this.” He held up a hand. “What demons do is deceive and twist the truth to their own ends. To creatures like those, the truth is nothing but a plaything, ready to be forged into a weapon. And nothing is more believable than a lie wrapped around a kernel of painful truth.”
I looked down at Tamara and nodded. “Exactly what I said. It was an asshole.” Tamara quirked the faintest shadow of a smile. “Besides,” I lowered my voice, wishing it didn’t sound so much like sandpaper. “Do you know what helped me break out of its spell or whatever? Right when I was about to give in?” I gave her an honest smile.
“What?” she whispered.
“What you’ve spent the last two days trying to drive through my thick skull,” I replied, hand still tirelessly outstretched. “That we have a chance, and that no one gets to decide who or what we are but us.”
Another long moment passed. She finally nodded. I managed a silent sigh of relief. “Thanks, Ash.” Tamara blinked and shook her head. “Ashes. Sorry.” She shook her head, reached out, and firmly took my hand, using it to pull herself to her feet. She gripped my shoulder for stability and dusted off her clothes, composing herself. “And you’re right.” I gave her a curious eyebrow. “He was an asshole.”
“So let’s not listen to him.” I glanced around the wrecked chamber, dimly lit by the remnants of broken lantern and burning demon. “Besides,” I gazed at the creature’s corpse, “what does he know? He’s dead.”
I managed to pry a chuckle free from both Tamara and Corey. Charles just sighed and waited for it to be over.
Realizing I’d seen to everyone but myself, I took stock. Physically, my clothes were shredded, and I was coated in a layer of ichor, blood, and gore. It wasn’t pleasant; after its stint inside my head, any lingering residue from the Rawhead turned my undead stomach, making me feel foul, contaminated. I’d have considered burning my clothes later, if that idea hadn’t held horrors of its own.
“Just when I couldn’t imagine you smelling worse,” Charles commented, liberating the other water gun from a pile of tangled skeleton parts. I opened my mouth for a rebuttal, but he cut me off. “There’s no time. We can practice introspection and insults later.” Tossing the remaining water gun to Corey, he pointed toward the mirror.
“Are we too late?” Dread bubbled up from my gut. I kicked myself mentally. How much time had we spent trying to pull ourselves together? “Can you still do the mirror thing?”
Grabbing what we could, we collected scattered supplies in Charles’ wake and skirted the disintegrating Rawhead. “Well,” he glanced the huge mirror over, “Neither of you idiots broke it, so it should be fine.” He glanced around. “This will be quick, dirty, and difficult. The plan was always to use their own magical connection against them, so I’ll try to drop us on top of them, and we can pray for the element of surprise.” He sighed. “But I wouldn’t count on it. No time for another ritual, so we won’t know what we’re getting into until we’re ass-deep in it.”
I stepped up, popping my knuckles, one more set of cracking bones in the room. “Me first. Let’s do this.”
Charles set himself, grappling mentally and magically with the mirror like I had physically with the Rawhead. It took far too many agonizingly slow seconds, but the solid surface finally began to ripple.slowly at first, then faster and faster until it undulated like a turbulent, steel pool. The faded afterimage of ghostly movement flickered into view on the other side, but it didn’t resolve into anything recognizable.
“Go. Now. Can’t hold it.” Charles’ voice was tight with strain, and he was sweating more than I’d ever seen. I didn’t hesitate, throwing myself headlong through the mirror, the other two right on my heels, the lot of us as ready as possible for one more battle.
I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect it to be so pleasant. This time, the journey was like a moment of a cool, floating sensation, like drifting placidly and slowly through the depths of a pool of cold, liquid silver.
Then it was over, and I hit the dirt and tumbled to a stop on a grassy slope, feeling the immediate thumps as one, two, then three others followed me. But I didn’t dare check on them.
I didn’t even dare move.
We hadn't come out into the middle of a Strigoi ritual. We’d come out in the middle of a semicircle of waiting Hollow Men, each one military, armed to the teeth with high-grade weaponry, and prepared to throw trigger discipline to the wind.
I lifted my hands slowly into the air, hoping that the gesture would buy us a few more seconds. “I guess we were expected.”
26
We're all night terrors
“Shit,” Charles said. For once, I wholeheartedly agreed with the man.
Mostly, I was worried about the others. I could deal with bullets; they couldn’t. I was pretty much safe here. Mostly mortal adversaries just couldn’t do much to me…
...Unless they came equipped with blessed knives. Or they had anointed bullets in one of those assault rifles. Or they—
“LOVE ME.” Tamara’s voice cut through the air and my head with equal, supernatural ease, a command pregnant with power that was impossible to deny. It rolled out from her like a tsunami, its aftereffects clinging to me as I stood and stared at her, all previous thoughts wiped away.
I knew there was someone else I was supposed to be thinking about, but I couldn’t remember her name. It couldn’t be that important, though. Just like my reason for coming to—wherever this was.
Besides, she was right. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it before. What other conclusion was there to draw? With how we’d put our lives on the line for each other, how close we’d gotten, how we’d kept each other company in dark times... We were obviously fated to have met, fated to be together, and…and...
And with a monumental thrust of willpower, I threw that suffocating blanket of feelings off. One moment Tamara was the best and brightest thing in the universe, but the next that feeling was fading, and we were once again just four people surrounded by an uncomfortably high number of military zombies, a couple of trigger pulls away from death.
Luckily for us, none of them were moving. Or shooting. Not yet. For now, they just stood staring at the young Moroi vampire, her skin luminously pale in the cloud-filtered moonlight, arms cast out wide to the sides, projecting an aura of command and confidence that radiated from her body like a nearly palpable crown of power. Her irises were the size of dinner plates, the deepest and bluest things I’d ever seen, sparkling in the starlight. Just glancing at them was almost enough to drag me back down the rabbit hole of her naked power.
I tore my eyes away. Beside me, Charles staggered as well,
but his eyes were already his own, and he quickly regained his stability. “We have to go,” he hissed sharply, insistently, moving to the side of a drooling, utterly entranced Corey. “She can’t hold this forever.” And with that, he said something arcane and slapped his apprentice, hard enough to leave a red handprint on his cheek.
There was a moment’s pause, a delayed reaction before the boy wheeled on his mentor, fists tight and his green eyes initially gleaming with anger. Then he blinked, confused, and his expression softened with recognition as he focused on the older wizard.
“Go.” Tamara’s voice held a note of command that made me want to turn and start running, just to please her. “He’s right. I can’t protect you for long.” Stubbornly, I didn’t move, and she glanced my way. “I’ll be okay. Go. I’ve got this.”
I started to move, not because she told me to, but because I knew there were about a dozen people that didn’t have time for my doubts. I almost believed her, too, until I caught a final glimpse of Tamara’s eyes, a flicker of their normal sapphire that, unlike her words, was far from confident or fearless.
“Go, go, go!” Charles was at my back, pushing me and hauling Corey at the same time up the grassy slope. But topping the rise, I was only able to take a few steps further before turning back. Tamara had looked scared. How could I possibly leave her to—
Charles thumped into me from behind. It didn’t move me, but it did shake me free from my lingering distraction. He didn’t push us to keep going. Instead, he motioned us low to the ground to break our line of sight to Tamara and the Hollow Men. I didn’t see his heavy duffle anymore or the extra water gun. Likely, they lay forgotten on the ground somewhere behind us. But as we both slowly complied, he tugged the sole remaining backpack off of Corey’s shoulders, quickly unzipping it and glancing inside with a grim smile. “Excellent.” He looked back up. “Now, does anyone know where the hell we are?”
Dead Girl's Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 1) Page 24