Ashes

by Sophie H. Morgan

  When she’d first entered Trick’s rooms, they’d been exactly like she’d imagined a vampire’s lair: expensive, seductive. They hadn’t changed. Time came to die in Trick’s quarters.

  Velvet-upholstered chairs and couches in rich colors decorated the large oval area, spaced at regular intervals. The aforementioned rug, Persian according to Trick, stretched from corner to corner. The elegant burgundy-and-navy circular pattern remained vivid, having been sheltered from the sun. Five tall, genuine oak bookcases resided around the walls, brimming with rare paperbacks, some dedicated to the vampire genre. Trick’s little joke.

  The floor was dark plas-wood, the walls painted unrelenting black. A flowing crystal chandelier, salvaged from some ’crat’s mansion, hung in the center, illuminating the space. Through a pair of double doors, identical plas-wood to the floor, was Trick’s bedchamber, not that he’d ever invited her in and not that she’d ever wanted to go.

  He stalked from the window, flinging himself into the chair opposite her, his coattails crushed beneath him. Black hair tumbled from an artful queue, dramatic against his ghostly skin. “Did Faer tell you?”

  Ana affected a gasp. “He speaks.”

  Golden eyes glittered in warning.

  Ana tucked a shorn lock of hair behind her left ear. Three iron studs pierced the top. Iron because, painful as it was, it was the single way a piercing wouldn’t heal over. The metal was poisonous to her species. “Shade, right? I heard.”

  She wouldn’t let it worry her. Fires knew she’d been through worse.

  Ana linked her hands together, pushing at her thumbs to keep her cemented in the present. Her claws rasped her soft skin. Back in the room. “Who’s the payment from?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “And still the great war hero cowers in his palace.” Her lips twisted as she sneered, Edward’s image wavering in her mind.

  Trick tapped his fingers, long and elegant, on the arm of his chair. “You’ll stay with me until Shade’s history.”

  “Like hell I will. I’m no coward, Trick.”

  “Save me from such fierce independence,” Trick said to the ceiling in a long-suffering tone. “It’s not a master ordering, Ana. It’s your friend asking.”

  She softened, as he’d known she would. “Bastard,” she said. “It’s still a no.”

  He exploded out of his chair, reaching the other end of the room before she’d noticed he’d moved.

  She casually shifted, keeping him in sight. It wouldn’t be above him to knock her out. “I can handle it.”

  “Have you ever seen pictures of Shade’s victims?” Trick demanded. “The man’s savagery is legendary, his skills more so. They say he trained with the Wolf.” He raised his eyebrows as he named the legendary merc shifter.

  “And I trained with a vampire.”

  Ana pushed to her feet, walked over to her seething friend. She patted his face, smiling when he caught her hand. “No worrying, Trick. It’ll give you wrinkles.”

  “I’m serious, Ana. Stay with me.”

  “We’ll kill each other.” Ana slipped her hand out of his hold, paced a few feet away. Trick could be overprotective where she was concerned, a fact that never failed to bring both tenderness and annoyance along for the ride. Fire swirled in soothing coils around her body, swimming through her blood as she fought the annoyance.

  The hum comforted her enough to lose the worst edge of frustration. “You should go to your rest.” She tilted her chin to the shuttered window. “Sun’s almost at its peak.”

  Sun was a relative term in Edan, where a thick cloud layer rarely let any rays penetrate through to the ashen city below, but the vampire would still feel the draining pull.

  “Ana.”

  “Trick,” she said, exasperated. “I’m not the eighteen-year-old you plucked off the streets. I’m an assassin too, remember? She who is good with sharp objects. And I have this nifty ability with fire.”

  “At least lie low,” he persisted. “Until my sources can isolate his exact location. No point running into danger.”

  Ana struggled with his request, despising any restriction placed upon her. After Trick and his gang adopted her, taking her along on their protection racket, she’d built herself a new identity—Ana, street fighter, tough talker. Nobody was going to hurt her or anybody else on her watch. Never again.

  She liked to think her parents would have been proud of her, fighting for justice. Saving Edan might not be what they’d had in mind, but Ana couldn’t—wouldn’t—go back to face the judgment of the other Phoenix Houses. Her first cousin on her mother’s side, Sebby, had been nominated the governor, Princess Alana of the Royal House of Farrah having been declared legally dead.

  She’d never revealed her true identity to anyone. Not even Trick, though she knew he suspected. He’d never questioned her, and now he was asking for a favor.

  “Fine.” She folded her arms and raised her chin. “I’ll be the damsel in distress and hide behind the big, strong men.”

  He crossed to her, taking her face between chilled hands. He pressed a kiss to her pouting lips. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “There’d better be an éclair in my future.” Cake was better than sex to Ana, and a sure bribe.

  “Mountains of cream,” Trick promised, releasing her. “Do you want Faer to accompany you home?”

  “Now you’re just begging to be branded.”

  Chapter Two

  Ana tramped through the streets that made up the western field toward the small, ramshackle house she’d called home for the past three years. The environment was as familiar as her own body, and she could close her eyes and list every single crack and crevice similarly. It wasn’t pretty; pretty was as foreign as kindness in these vicious streets. Hopelessness pervaded like gutter air, alive in the scenes of destruction and death tagged on the concrete walls, the burned-out hover-cars that had dared to enter, the dips and valleys in the ground created by firebombs that had dropped during the Kingdom Wars. Time had frozen, held when life was at its bleakest. It was only in the fancier neighborhoods in Edan, the Upper Ring, you would see advancement—clean brick mansions, swaying silks and diamonds, genuine wood and leather that scented of rich life. ’Crats ferried around on hover-carriages with servants, gossiping on their phones, ignoring the poverty five feet from their technologically enhanced roads.

  Since the days of the Wars, technology had struggled on, evidenced in the wealthier areas, blending with elements of old to create a melding of the two. Most supernatural creatures, labeled collectively as “Others”, didn’t gel with the latest gadgetry like flash-guns, their biology uncooperative with the mix of magic and science. In matters of battle, they armed themselves with weapons of old, swords and daggers, while humans and their magically reinforced kin, High Mages, could and did exploit the technology to their advantage. Every so often, disputes erupted to test which was greater, might or magic.

  That was the norm now.

  Since the Wars, a backlash of primitive possessiveness kept tensions simmering, threatening to go off the boil. With the Kingdom divided into separate territories for each species, the Treaty had theorized that another Great War would never repeat.

  The Treaty had their heads up their asses.

  Ana pushed away the nibbling worries of war. Tipping up her head, she inhaled a deep breath of gutter air and basked in the sun that’d conquered the cloud layer for the day. Not often that happened—one reason, Trick had told her, why he’d chosen to base out of the dingy capital. Barring direct sunlight, Trick could come and go as he pleased, and the vampire always got what he wanted.

  Case in point: she was scurrying home, tail between her legs.

  Blowing out a raspberry, ignoring the gutter humans lingering at the outer edge who stopped their trash-picking to stare, she stomped down the weed-infeste
d street that led to her house. The man was unbelievable. Tying up her loyalty and affection and guilting her into agreeing. He was capable of anything.

  Irritating bastard.

  Her lips twitched despite herself. She shook out her tense shoulders. At least the time spent “hiding” would give her the chance to catch up on research she’d compiled on Edward’s chief advisor, Jonah. The advisor who’d fawned over her at her horrifying eighteenth-birthday banquet, a banquet that’d turned into a celebration of her arranged match to the human high ruler. To Edward.

  Even thinking about the vicious argument that’d followed between herself and her parents made nausea swim greasily in her stomach. The words they’d hurled at each other, her mother snapping the royal locket from her neck, the fire she’d been unable to control lashing from her body to set their bed alight. Guards muscling the doors open, her own bodyguard among them.

  The morning after, when they’d been found.

  Ana shoved the thought back into its lockbox as she approached the front door of her house.

  Taking out the key from inside her bra, Ana inserted it into the lock attached to the chipped door and twisted. No fancy computer-controlled security like the Hoods’ HQ here—at least not outwardly. If squatters or thieves were stupid enough to believe that, they needed to learn fast that appearances didn’t count for shit. A lesson Ana was happy to teach.

  She pushed open the door, bracing it with her hip, and touched fingers to a panel of plas-wood to her immediate left. At her urging, it slid aside to reveal a glowing keypad counting down from ten. Enough time for her to enter her code. With the last digit entered and the pad’s glow fading, she tossed the key onto a nearby rickety table and bumped the door closed. Gloom enveloped her, dust motes dancing in the pools of light that trickled in through the windows. It was cramped, cozy and all hers.

  There were four rooms, big enough for one. A bedchamber, a lounge/study, a bathroom and an honest-to-goodness kitchen. Not that she ever cooked. But the possibility of it pleased her all the same.

  A far cry from the gorgeous white-stone castle in the High Lands, overlooking two hundred acres of bright green grass and a murky loch she’d once thought held a monster.

  With a yawn that cracked her jaw, she ran a hand through her short, fiery hair. Damn, she was tired. Taking out the demons had required more heat energy than she liked to expend. She’d need to expose herself to fire for a while, then catch some Zs. All in the comfort of her own home, thank you, Trick.

  She wandered into her lounge, shedding her coat and casting it into the cracked plas-leather armchair she’d installed in the corner. Although she was tired, she studied the rectangular board she’d nailed to one of the walls. It took up almost half of the space.

  Her focus narrowed to Edward’s drawing, dead center. The syn-paper was torn in several places from the arrows she’d yanked from it. Her bow had seen plenty of action aiming at the high ruler’s deceptive face. If it were as easy as aiming at his heart, the Hoods would have killed him within a year. After multiple assassination attempts and Edward’s longer than average life, they’d come to the conclusion that something else was powering the human. She only hoped the something wasn’t that his scientists had finally succeeded in melding human biology with Other DNA—Edward’s vile dream made flesh.

  If it was, things would go from fair to fucked in a matter of days.

  A sudden wisp of musk teased her nose. Fire flared in her belly in warning.

  Intruder.

  A blade sliced out at her neck, pressing into the delicate skin of her throat. “Don’t move.”

  Shit.

  Her heart thudded once.

  Ana relaxed against what she assumed was a dagger, lifting her hands to prove she was unarmed.

  “I’m curious,” she said conversationally, her throat rasping the sharp edge. “Before I slit your throat, how’d you get past my security?”

  “Easily. A code-breaker made child’s play of your so-called security.”

  It was a man’s voice, deep and amused. He drawled the words as if he had all the time in the world.

  Her blood heated to an angry simmer.

  “If you’re looking for valuables, you’re better off hitting the streets away from the Maze.” She gestured around the room, indicating the sparse decorating scheme. “As you see, nothing valuable here.”

  “I disagree. I’m looking for someone very valuable.” A rich pause. “Liberty?”

  Fire uncurled in warning. The merc. “Liberty…well, aw, shucks, ain’t that the rebel after Edward the Bloody?” She played down her accent, which even after all these years retained a touch of aristocrat. “I wouldn’t have anythin’ to do with the likes of ’er.”

  “You’re lying.” His breath whispered across the back of her neck, voice almost a growl. “Rumors say the woman who lives here knows where to dig Liberty out. Since you’re the one with a key…”

  “I’m just a simple woman tryin’ to make ends meet.”

  His voice was close to her ear, softly amused, as he said, “Then why have you got a dagger in your pants?”

  “Maybe I’m pleased to see you.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Not many are.”

  “And who’re you, then?”

  The blade lightened a fraction as he leaned in. “I go by Shade.”

  She let silence fall between them before answering. “Sorry, not ringing any bells.”

  “You talk a good game, but we both know you work for Liberty.” He paused. “Or are Liberty.”

  Fire crackled in her blood at that devastating statement. “I tell you, I’m just a simple woman.”

  “Who goes around slitting throats?” Again, that mocking amusement.

  “I do live in the Maze—you think I’m just going to scream and beg?”

  “Most do.”

  “Killed a lot, eh?”

  “It’s a job.”

  Ana used the anger, drew on it as she drew on her fire. “This’ll be your last.”

  She grabbed hold of the wrist that held the dagger, scorching the flesh until a sizzle leaped into the air.

  He shouted in pain, a rumble of a growl slicing through the room. The weapon clattered to the floor when his hand automatically withdrew. The smell of burned flesh hovered as Ana spun with a roundhouse kick, catching him in the stomach. He flew backward into her wall, shards of old plaster crumbling over him.

  He was up the next blink, legs apart and hands outstretched.

  “Simple woman, huh?” he snarled, face shrouded in shadows. His voice was jagged; it vibrated along her body.

  “A woman can’t learn how to defend herself?”

  He dusted himself off, strong hands brushing plaster from the dark trousers and sweater he wore. He played negligent, but Ana knew with the reputation Shade had built, he wouldn’t be an easy target.

  She studied him as she withdrew the dagger from her thigh sheath. He was tall, but not overly so, a fact that probably worked to his advantage in a fight. Leanly built, but his body rippled with muscle. In fact, she would place odds on him not having a spare inch of fat anywhere. Long legs, strong thighs, big hands.

  Ana caught the flash of white teeth. “I’m not usually surprised.”

  Me either.

  She kept back, keeping her own features in the shadows. Yes, she was going to kill him, but no point advertising her identity.

  He mirrored her action, even though she now spotted a black demimask over the top half of his face.

  “All right.” She worked a small amount of fear into her voice. “Yes, I work for Liberty. Odd jobs. Tend the house, things like that. I don’t know where she bases.”

  “That might work on your neighbors, sweet, but it isn’t going to fly with me.”

  “It’s the truth,” she lied. “Ask anyone.”

 
“Yeah, see, I did that. But nobody’s ever seen Liberty. Only a woman. Covered in blood.” He paused to add emphasis. “Cleaning hairier than I remember?”

  “She doesn’t advertise her presence, and I’m no chatterbox.” She didn’t address the blood.

  “Right. How did you come to work for her?”

  “She came to me.”

  “The simple woman trying to make ends meet.”

  “Yessir.” She smiled, all teeth. “Drug me up from the street, has she.”

  “You can stop trying to disguise your accent,” he said, causing a seed of irritation to sprout. “You’re educated. Funny how your bad grammar weaves in and out, isn’t it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m sure I’d enjoy that,” he answered, as steady as a surgeon’s hands. “Unfortunately, the client always comes first.”

  “In bed with monsters,” she retorted.

  “If you like.”

  “I don’t. Anyone who works for bastards deserves to die.”

  “Honey, I’ve deserved to die for a hell of a lot longer than you can imagine.” A flicker of something appeared in his voice, roughening it, before he continued. “Stuff the crap. Even if you’re not Liberty, you do kill for her.”

  “Then why haven’t you killed me already?” she challenged, raising her dagger to study the hilt. Casual. Planning. “Why are we having ourselves a cozy tête-à-tête?”

  “There’s something…off.” He prowled forward, angling his chin against the light so only a defined jaw and slashing cheekbones were exposed. A growl of warning poured from his throat, alerting her to his race. Shifter. “You sure as hell aren’t just a simple woman.”

  Ana tested the point of her dagger with one finger. Now that she knew he was a shifter, the tenor of the game had changed. Shifters were insatiable hunters, bonded to an animal at the soul, able to shift into that animal at will. They were basically evolved humans, explaining how he could wield a code-breaker against her security—which, damn it, was something Trick had warned her about. More worryingly, dominant shifters were especially stubborn, which she judged Shade to be. If he was onto her scent, he’d never let go unless she gave him a truth.