The Beautiful Ashes

by Jeaniene Frost

  For a few dazed moments, I stayed in the passenger seat, clutching the top Adrian had handed me right before he walked away. He loved this car like it was his baby, yet he’d smashed his own window to get away before he lost control and finished what he’d started.

  I didn’t know whether it was the most romantic thing he’d ever done, or the most insulting.

  chapter twenty-six

  The next day, Zach showed up with his usual style of no warning. I looked up from my book to see him seated in the chair opposite mine, a book in his hands as if he’d been reading, too.

  “Adrian!” I called out, not bothering to say hello. “Zach’s finally here!”

  “Why do you seem angry with me?” Zach asked, to the accompanying sound of the front door slamming.

  “I shouldn’t be upset that you took your time getting back to us when we’re not able to search for the only weapon that can save my sister?”

  Frustration over more than that scalded my tone. Zach didn’t get a chance to respond before Adrian came into the room. No surprise, he’d been outside all day. At least he’d given himself a reason to work on his car instead of just pretending to. As for me, I’d been pretending to read so it wasn’t obvious that I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what we’d almost done in that shiny black Challenger.

  “What the fuck, man?” Adrian asked, summing up his feelings more succinctly than I had.

  Zach stood. “I am not a man,” he stated crisply. “Nor am I yours to command or to reprimand.”

  Adrian replied with a burst of the exquisite form of Demonish, the sound caressing my ears like a symphony. Instead of being mollified, Zach was more upset.

  “How dare you use the tongue of my brethren, mortal!”

  “That’s angel-speak?” I asked in surprise.

  Adrian threw me a brief glance. “Yes, and I know it because it’s what demons originally derived their language from.” To Zach, he said, “We didn’t have a week to waste waiting for you. You of all people know we’re on a countdown.”

  “What countdown?” I piped up, but both men ignored me.

  “I needed time to procure your solution,” Zach said, his dark gaze blazing with pinpoints of light. “Did your impatience prevent that from occurring to you, endante?”

  At the foreign word, Adrian looked more pissed than Zach.

  “How about texting a cloud version of ‘brb’ then?” Acidly.

  I got up, the anger between them starting to concern me. We were dead in the water without Zach, so I had to shove my own feelings aside—again—to smooth this over.

  “Zach, you’ve been around forever, but we are mortal. Five days might be nothing to you, but with no word and only unbeatable obstacles to dwell on, it’s been tough on us.”

  The Archon glanced my way, his gaze stating that I hadn’t smoothed anything over. Okay, time for rough honesty, then.

  “For starters, I barely sleep because I keep wondering if this is all for nothing.” My voice caught. “No matter what Adrian said about the demons not wanting to lose their leverage, Jasmine might already be dead. Sometimes, I even wish she was. Then she wouldn’t be suffering, and I wouldn’t have to enter another realm. Then I hate myself for thinking that, so guilt torments me.”

  I paused to draw in a shuddering breath. “Worse, after last night, I know that I want Adrian so bad, I don’t care what happens afterward. Another night alone together and I won’t be able to stop myself from going to him, and no matter how much he thinks he has to, I know he won’t have the strength to turn me away again.”

  I made sure to keep staring at Zach as I spoke. If I so much as glanced at Adrian, I wouldn’t have been able to admit such raw, personal truths. Guilt over my sister wore me down on a daily basis, so last night with Adrian had used up the last of my willpower. Since he’d resorted to damaging his beloved Challenger rather than wait for me to open the driver’s side door, his willpower was on empty, too. Another night alone and it would all be over.

  A large part of me wished the Archon would have waited one more day to show up.

  Zach stared back at me, his expression turning thoughtful. I still didn’t look at Adrian, but I could feel his gaze moving over me, flaring everything it touched. I’d never been so hyperaware of anyone before, and when he let out a low, harsh sigh, I found myself inhaling so I could absorb his breath inside me.

  Zach’s hand on my head whipped my attention back to him. The Archon closed his eyes as if concentrating, and this time, I actually felt a tingle run through me. Or maybe it was still my body responding to Adrian’s unrelenting stare.

  After a moment, Zach removed his hand. “This new disguise will see you past the demon’s Hounds,” he stated.

  “How?” Adrian and I asked in unison, but then a car pulled up in the driveway. Adrian let out a sigh of relief this time.

  “Costa’s back.”

  Costa parked behind the Challenger. When he got out, I waved at him through the window—and then was slammed to the floor, Adrian’s large frame almost crushing me from the impact.

  “Don’t shoot,” I heard Zach say over Adrian’s urgent, “Are you okay? Did he hit you?”

  I couldn’t answer because I couldn’t breathe. My hands smacking at his shoulders must’ve conveyed that, because Adrian leaped off me with the same speed, though he remained crouched in front of me. I took in a deep breath, wincing as my ribs and the back of my head throbbed with pain.

  “Why’d you...squish me?” I managed.

  Over his shoulder, I saw Costa burst into the room, his gun drawn and his tanned face pale. “Is it dead?” he snarled.

  Adrian had Costa against the wall, the gun knocked out of his hand, before I could grunt out a confused “Huh?”

  “Why the fuck did you shoot at Ivy?” Adrian demanded.

  Costa threw a horrified look my way. “That’s Ivy?”

  “I can explain,” Zach said in an unruffled tone. “In order to get past the beasts, I glamoured Ivy to resemble one.”

  Adrian let Costa go, his gaze sliding to me with disbelief. “She looks like a Hound?”

  “Biggest, ugliest one I ever saw,” Costa croaked.

  “That’s rude,” I muttered, trying to reconcile the fact that I now looked like one of the demons’ guard reptiles.

  Costa’s mouth curled down. “Make it—her—stop hissing.”

  “I’m not hissing!” was my immediate protest, but Costa winced and backed away a step. “Oh, crap, all he hears is hissing, right?” I asked resignedly.

  A strangled sound came from Adrian’s throat. I looked sharply at him, realizing he was fighting back a laugh.

  “Ivy, stop hissing at Costa,” he said with mock seriousness.

  So it was all fun and games now that he realized I hadn’t gotten shot? I’d never get used to Adrian’s mercurial moods.

  “You’re sure this will get me past the Hounds?” I asked Zach.

  He inclined his head. “They’ve been trained not to attack their own. Glamouring you to look exactly like another Hound is what took me additional time, as first I had to catch one.”

  “How?” I blurted, watching Adrian’s eyes narrow, as well. “You said Archons can’t go into demon realms.”

  “The sounds she makes are seriously disturbing,” Costa muttered, but at least he put his gun away.

  “We can’t, but the demons are stationing Hounds in every realm as a precaution,” Zach stated. “Waiting at vortexes for them to appear as they were transported from one realm to another is how I procured the Hound you now resemble.”

  Zach had spent the past five days Hound-hunting to help us, and we’d both bitched at him as soon as we saw him. No wonder he’d gotten mad. If I were him, I might’ve left without giving me my new disguise, too.

&n
bsp; “Thank you,” I said sincerely, “and I’m sorry.”

  Once again, he inclined his head. “Apology accepted.”

  Adrian’s mouth thinned, but he didn’t ante up an apology. From Zach’s expression, that wasn’t a surprise. Then again, after what Adrian had told me about that day in the tunnels, the person who really owed the other an apology was Zach.

  I cleared my throat, knowing that wasn’t going to happen, either. “Okay, now that we’ve got a way past the guard reptiles, let’s head to the nearest realm and search it.”

  Adrian nodded at me and then gave Costa a measured look. “You up for going with us?”

  “I am, but Ivy’s the problem,” Costa said bluntly. “You can’t take her out in public. She looks like what would happen if a werewolf humped a Komodo dragon.”

  I bared my teeth at him, intending it as a joke, but he visibly flinched. All right, so I was horrifying. I’d say I was sorry, but it would only sound like threatening hisses to him.

  “And her clothes!” Costa went on. “You can’t expect a fully dressed Hound to go unnoticed in the realms.”

  “You can see my clothes?” I asked stupidly, then waved an impatient hand and said, “Adrian, translate.”

  “I don’t need to,” he said, giving me an appraising look. “Your disguises have only ever been skin-deep, so right now, Costa’s looking at a Hound in shorts and a tank top.”

  “And flip-flops,” Costa added, shuddering.

  I turned to Zach. “Well, that needs fixing.”

  The Archon raised a single brow. “The answer is obvious.”

  I waited for him to put his hand on my head again, but he didn’t. Realization dawned and, with it, incredulity.

  “You expect me to enter the realms stark naked? Not only would I freeze, I’d be naked!”

  Logic failed in the face of the appalling thought. Zach looked unconcerned by my dismay, but Adrian raked his gaze over me in a way that was both foreboding and anticipatory.

  “Hounds wear leather straps for easier handling. If we placed some strategically on you, they would cover the necessary parts without drawing undue attention, and as I said, Hounds return frequently to the town to get warm.”

  I closed my eyes. Either I let my sister rot, or I had to run around freezing demon realms wearing the equivalent of a leather bikini. How had this become my life?

  “Let’s get the bondage lizard party started, then,” I finally said, opening my eyes.

  Like it or not, this was my life, so I had to make the best of it.

  chapter twenty-seven

  We didn’t go back to the gateway in Collinsville, Illinois. Instead, the three of us drove to Boone, North Carolina so we could access something we’d been avoiding for weeks. A vortex.

  Since Hounds were being transported through vortexes, and I now looked like a Hound, Adrian said it was time to chance one. According to him, vortexes were like revolving doors, hitting several realms back-to-back. The bigger the vortex, the more realms it could access. Adrian said if Demetrius hadn’t stopped us in Oregon, and minions hadn’t chased us through the vortex in Mexico, we could’ve covered all the realms in North and South America through just those two entranceways.

  By contrast, the Boone vortex was much smaller, hitting only about a dozen realms. Still, it would take two weeks to reach each of those realms separately, and with my new disguise, limiting travel time was mandatory.

  Something I hadn’t thought of when I learned that I looked like a huge, prehistoric dog-lizard to everyone except Zach and Adrian: public restrooms were out of the question. I had to use the bushes along the interstate. If that wasn’t humiliating enough, Adrian and Costa had to walk me to and from them so their bodies blocked Ivy-monster from passing motorists’ view. When all of us were in the car, Costa would complain that parts of my beastly frame hung over his seat even though my arms and legs stayed completely in the back. And in gas stations or drive-throughs, I needed to have a blanket thrown over me so no one freaked out over seeing a monster in the backseat.

  Yeah, I was sick of this disguise already, and the worst of it was about to start now.

  We waited until after dark to enter the vortex marked by a tourist site called Mystery Hill. As with other vortexes, people knew there was something off about the spot due to its gravitational anomalies, but little did they know it contained a revolving door to demon realms. I wished I didn’t know, either, but that didn’t stop Adrian from pulling me through the gateway, which was situated on a concrete slab called the Mystery Platform.

  When we tumbled into the shadowy, cold version of the Mystery Hill site, the concrete platform was gone. So were the tourist buildings and the nearby highway. The scent of wood smoke remained, surprising me until I realized there were trees around us. Frozen ones, of course, but if some remained, it made sense that they’d be burned as a heat source.

  As expected, we’d been spit out onto the outskirts of the realm’s epicenter, so we were alone on the icy hill. For now.

  “Okay,” Adrian stated. “Stick to the plan, and remember, don’t show any fear, either to the Hounds or the handlers.”

  It was too dark for me to see his expression, but with his enhanced vision, he could see mine as I unzipped my ankle-length parka and let it drop to the ground. Beneath it, I wore only boots, a leather strap across my breasts, and the most uncomfortable leather G-string ever invented.

  The blast of cold on my bare skin felt like a full-body punch, knocking out my awkwardness at standing in front of Adrian with almost nothing on. My teeth began to chatter like a windup toy’s, and when I kicked my boots off, the ice made it feel as though I was standing on knives. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself, but “mind over matter” didn’t exist when you were all but naked in freezing temperatures.

  “C-can’t do th-this,” I stuttered.

  Adrian pulled me to him, his arms chasing away the cold on my back and his body warming up my front. Without thinking, I stood on the tops of his boots, easing the stabbing pain in my feet. The last time I’d been mostly naked in his arms, he’d overwhelmed me with passion. This time, tenderness seemed to pour from his embrace, soothing parts of my emotions I hadn’t even realized were bruised or broken.

  “You can do this,” he said, his words low but resonant. “The otherworldly abilities of legendary warriors, kings and queens run through your veins. With it, you are capable of so much more than I ever will be, but even if you didn’t have that bloodline—” his voice deepened “—I’d still believe in you, Ivy.”

  I let out a laugh that was half gasp, half choked sob. How could he say that? I’d screwed up every challenge thrown at me, and that was with his help. Without it, I’d be dead several times over by now.

  A growling hiss jerked my head to the right. To our left, another sounded, and another right in front of us.

  Ready or not, the Hounds were here.

  “You can do this,” Adrian repeated, going absolutely still. I disengaged myself from his arms, seeing him keep them in their half circle as though still cradling me. Amidst the smash of cold, my fear at those ominous growls, and the sole-splitting pain in my feet, I also felt a tinge of wonder.

  In our time together, Adrian had yanked me up, knocked me down, hurtled me through realms, trapped me against a wall and kissed me until I burned with need, but this was different. When he’d held me, I realized there was more between us than legacies and lust. He was what I’d been missing my whole life, and if he felt the same way, I’d be damned if either of us was going to die before we could do something about it.

  I turned around, shaking and all, to confront the lizard monsters who crowded around us.

  “Back off!” I yelled, hoping to them it sounded like the meanest, most badass hiss ever.

  Then I stared, my mind taking a few moments to
process what I was looking at. When I could think again, Costa’s description was right. They did look like what you’d get if a werewolf and a Komodo dragon had a monster baby. No wonder he’d opened fire at the sight of me disguised as one.

  Even on four legs, the Hounds stood almost as tall as me. Their snouts were elongated like a bull terrier, only with lots more teeth, as I saw when their mouths opened impossibly wide. Their front legs were small, but their back ones were massive with muscle, and they were balanced by a thick tail that narrowed into a point at the end. Claws as long as my fingers stabbed through the frozen ground, and though their skin had the leathery look of a reptile, it was also covered by a thin layer of dark hair.

  I could see all these things because light radiated from the spots on their backs, giving off an eerie glow, as if the Hounds needed any enhancement to their menace. Forked, thin tongues flicked out of their mouths, and when the biggest of the three came close enough to give me what I hoped was a friendly lick, I forced myself to stand still and not scream.

  If we made it through this, I was drinking an entire bottle of Adrian’s superstrong bourbon. Count on it.

  “B-back off,” I said again, making my voice authoritative and firm, which wasn’t easy with chattering teeth. One of the Hounds cocked its head, as if trying to translate the sounds from my rapidly clicking jaw. Then it came forward, leaving a trail of slime over my arm as it gave me a lick, too.

  “Gross,” I muttered, but it was better than them ripping me to shreds. Zach’s glamour was fooling them. I knew it worked on demons, minions and humans, but I hadn’t been sure about beasts. Oh, me of little faith.

  “Okay, guys, let’s go into town and get warm,” I announced, starting to run toward where Adrian had told me the town was.

  One followed me, but the other two stayed back, as if sensing Adrian’s presence even though he hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Come on!” I said, circling back and nudging both beasts, then running toward the town again. Hey, that’s what my dog used to do when I was a kid, and he wanted me to follow him. Here’s hoping the Hounds lived up to their nickname and understood.