Rising Ashes

by Annie Anderson

  “I-I have to get my wife. I have to get her husband. I have to... I’ll be back. Is there a place where we can arrive without going through the ER?” I ask because I need to get back to them as soon as I can.

  “Sure, just travel to the conference room upstairs. But Asher? Get back quick, okay?” Willa’s voice is soft but firm, and I know I don’t have much time.

  “Thanks, Willa,” I say as I realize I may never be able to thank this woman for snapping me out of my freak out. She nods and I travel back to my wife with fear embedded deep in my heart.

  EVAN

  The howl of agony coming from Nicola’s body isn’t Iva’s. No, this is Nicola’s pain erupting from her breast, creating a maelstrom of fear and grief and rage. Her eyes are trained on Kyle, and her fear is palpable. She drops to her knees, scrambling across the forest floor through fire and dirt and bracken, trying to get to him. I look behind me and order them to get him out of here.

  “Get him to a fucking hospital!” I scream rushing to intercept her. In her shock, her Fireskin has died down, but I don’t trust it or her. I strike out with my rapier, putting a thick gash on her cheek, but that doesn’t stop her. I restrain her bodily keeping her away from the injured man.

  “No! No, don’t keep me back from him. Please! Kyle! Please!” she pleads, and the change in her voice from Iva’s thick Irish brogue to Nicola’s delicate English accent almost make me believe her.

  “I’ll let you take her soul. I’ll hold her back, just please let me say goodbye to him,” she begs, her eyes flooded with desperate tears, and I let her go.

  She wastes no time with me and shoves past me to get to him. Nicola grabs his face to hurriedly whisper in his ear as Ian tries to staunch the flow of blood pouring from Kyle’s stomach. His eyes drift open, and he grasps her wrists.

  “Lo-love you, Nic. See you on the other side,” Kyle whispers before his eyes roll back in his head, and he loses consciousness.

  “Noooooooo!” she shrieks, but Aidan doesn’t wait for her to lose it. He rips Kyle from her arms and travels from the fray so all she’s clutching is air. A rumbled shriek erupts from her chest, her eyes blaze and her Fireskin blooms over her flesh. West and I scramble back from Nicola.

  Without Kyle here, without her focus pulled to him, something passes over her face, and I know Iva is back controlling her body.

  “You should have killed me when you had the chance, little girl,” Iva says as she reaches for me with a lone burning hand.

  She misses me by inches as West catches me by the waist and swings me out of the way, accepting the agonizing burn of her touch for himself. He growls in pain before tossing me away from her.

  But that’s my mate she’s fucking with, and I phase without thought or volition. Rushing her without care for my hide or my life. She has West in her clutches, and she’s not fucking with one more goddamn person I care about. My power swarms through me, the cold blankness causing the earth to shake and debris and dirt and leaves to swirl first around my body, but picking up speed and force and growing, growing, growing until it is bigger than her and me.

  This is more than just my life or her life or the lives of my family. This is for the Aegis children she damn near murdered into extinction, the Witch and Warlock and Shifter children that she killed for whatever sick reason she had, for the hurt and pain and suffering she’s caused. I make it to her, ripping him from her hands and grabbing her arms in my blistering grip.

  Her agony is swift, and though I hate hurting Nicola, I cannot let her get away. I can’t let her live after all the death she’s caused. Iva’s scream turning into Nicola’s and it brings me so much pain to do this.

  “Ju-just do it, Evan. It always had to be this way. Take the soul, goddamn it! Do it!”

  The permission is what I needed, I think. The knowledge that she knew what I was doing, that she allowed it.

  I open my mouth and inhale the dark, twisted essence of Iva and fourteen hundred years of condemning deeds filters through my mind. Murder. Torture. Genocide. And more recently the killing of children with extraordinary powers. The ones who had more power than most. The ones who could be her downfall one day.

  And now they never would.

  That was the worst because they weren’t just teenagers, they were babies, barely a fresh breath in this world before their life was snuffed out. I can’t take it. I can’t take so much evil… I can’t…

  Blackness clouds my vision, and I hear my howling scream before I hear nothing at all.

  MENA

  Asher picked us up and took us to this sterile, but silent hospital waiting room where we’ve been sitting for hours now. I haven’t eaten, I have barely moved except for the motion of my nervously shifting feet. Rhys looks like he’s about to lose his fucking mind, and all he can do is stare out the window at the rapidly fading day.

  Has it only been a day? I’ve lived almost two centuries, and they have flown by without a word or whisper, but this day? This fucking day has lasted decades, millennia, eons. Aurelia isn’t the only person we’re waiting on word about. Evan, West, Kyle are all severely injured. Aidan came with Kyle first, and then it was Cam bringing Evan and West hanging onto Ian by a very thin thread.

  And Nicola.

  We don’t know who will be there when she wakes up, or if she even does. Right now I can’t think about who she’ll be.

  I can only think about my sister as I sit here waiting to see if her world will explode once again.

  A doctor – Asher called her Willa – passes through the OR automatic doors, and I don’t know if I should be pleased or scared, and I don’t know how I can breathe right now.

  “Aurelia?”

  Rhys jumps up from his perch on the windowsill to meet her. His body is strung tight like a string about to snap.

  “Your wife is in recovery. Your daughter and son are in the NICU for a little while, but given their species, I don’t expect they’ll be in there for very long.”

  “A da-daughter and a son?” Rhys breathes. “Can I see her? Can I see them?”

  “Yes to both, but her first, and only one at a time.”

  “Do you have word on Evangeline, West or Kyle?” Cam asks, his voice a quiet, somber rumble.

  Willa looks back at him, and though her eyes flash from amber to green back to amber again, she makes no other outward sign other than a small shake of her head.

  “N-not yet,” she mutters before leading Rhys away back through the double doors.

  Three lives accounted for and three more to go.

  I hate waiting.

  EVAN

  My mind is cotton candy and fluffy clouds, but all I want is clarity. I want to wake up. I want to see my West. My eyelids are heavy, but I force them open. My room is dim, but I can make out the orange blinking lights of a vital sign monitor. Right next to it, sleeping upright in an uncomfortable hospital chair is my West.

  Tight black t-shirt over dark-wash jeans and motorcycle boots. His wavy hair is pulled back from his face in a topknot, but his beard is scraggly and unkempt, and I can tell he’s been sitting there for quite some time.

  His large hand engulfs mine and rests on the bed at my side. I squeeze it before drifting off again, happy he is alive and well, and obviously better off than me if he’s out of a hospital bed, but I’m so tired.

  “Evangeline? Angel?” his wonderful rumble vibrates through my chest.

  “Hmm?” I sleepily respond.

  “Never mind, baby. Just sleep.”

  “Mmmm… only if you come sleep with me. I sleep better with you.”

  “Whatever you want, Angel,” he murmurs, and his warm arms close around me as I drift back to sleep.

  And I had sweet dreams.

  Epilogue

  EVAN

  “West! We’re going to be late!” I yell from my perch at the bathroom vanity. Yes, I might be on hour two of beauty prep, but dammit it isn’t every day your best friend in the entire universe decides it is high time to have a wedd
ing.

  Aurelia had a bad habit of waiting until the dust is settled to let herself be happy, concentrating on everyone else and solving all the problems before she could move on to her joy, but since the twins were born, she has decided to be happy every day. I’ve never met a woman more suited for motherhood than my best friend, and as soon as she figures out how to stop swearing in front of the kiddos, she’ll be golden.

  “All I have to do is shower and put on a suit. I do not have to do makeup and hair for two whole hours that looks like you just rolled out of bed looking that beautiful. Chill, woman,” he grumbles as he leans down to kiss the sensitive spot on my neck, the soft yet rough rasp of his beard doing all kinds of awesome things to my belly.

  I want to argue, but it’s true. All he has to do is put on a suit. And if he doesn’t quit it, all my hard work is going to get fucked up when I attack him. He meets my eyes in the mirror, gives me a chuckle, and then runs his fangs along my shoulder inciting a full body shiver. He turns and walks his naked ass over to the shower. I have to fight all of my instincts so I don’t follow him in and ruin my hair. It took me forever to do this damn hair.

  When Aurelia said she wanted to be married to Rhys in a meadow, I loved the idea. She said she wanted something simple, nothing too fussy. Just friends and family and Rhys. It sounded good in theory, but Aurelia was the Primary, and she couldn’t do something small if she wanted to – too many people would be pissed if they didn’t receive an invitation. Mena skated by on her wedding to Asher because she married a Wraith and it is not customary for Wraiths to have wedding ceremonies. Our bindings are rather private, and in our culture, all a person needs to see is the binding mark to know you’re taken. That’s not to say Mena and Asher didn’t have a wedding – they did – but it was a private affair on a secluded beach.

  But Aurelia wasn’t that lucky. So I took over the planning and flexed my Queen muscle to get shit done. Well, and I had Claire’s help. For someone so quiet and reserved, Claire can organize like a boss and scold caterers like it was her job. Ari had her hands full with the babies once they finally came out of the NICU, and is about the least fussy bride I’ve ever seen in my freaking life. She only cared about her dress and the fact that she was marrying Rhys. Everything else was fair game for me to choose, and I went nuts with the bohemian theme.

  My mind drifts to the first time I got to see her after the twins were born. I was up and about before she was, which is a testament to how much childbirth takes you to the edge of death. My body just needed a few days of rest. Aurelia’s body needed to heal itself back from the brink of death. Willa never told Rhys how close the doctors were to losing all three of them, and I’m glad they didn’t. Rhys was barely hanging on by a thread.

  Aurelia was white as a sheet sitting up in her hospital bed. Rhys was in the NICU watching the twins, and she was alone for the first time since they were born. I didn’t even get to ask what was wrong.

  “I need to ask you a favor,” she burst out.

  “Of course, anything.”

  “Can you get West back here? I want to ask you both something.”

  “Sure thing, darling,” I said as I peeked my head out of the room and crooked a finger to West as he rested on the wall just outside the door.

  “All present and accounted for, what’s up?” I said as I returned.

  “I want to run the twins’ names past you to get your approval.”

  “Okay. Shoot,” West said, but Ari looked nervous.

  “We want our son to be named Henry Alexander Constantine,” she said, her eyes on West. He took a step back in surprise but didn’t look angry. I had no idea why the name held significance to him.

  “I was born Henry Carmichael Weston, but you knew that already, didn’t you?” he rumbled, and I looked at him in surprise. West didn’t talk about his past. He gave me the highlights – enough to know his father was a fucking rat bastard, and his mother, Merina, was one of the strongest women I’d never get to know – but I didn’t know what his given name was.

  “That I did, and your mother gave you a good first name that I hope you don’t mind me borrowing.”

  “I think that wherever her soul is, she’d love that,” he replied, his voice rough with emotion.

  “Good,” she said taking a deep breath. “We would like to name our daughter Olivia Collette Constantine,” she announced, and it was me who took the step back in surprise.

  “Yes. Absolutely. Mama would have loved that.”

  “My babies have names,” she whispered to herself. “What do you guys say about taking a field trip to go see them?”

  “You allowed to do that, little mama?” West asked.

  “Meh, probably not, but I want to tell Rhys the good news, and I want to feed my babies. So I’m going to one way or another. It would just be easier if one of you procured me a wheelchair first.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he returned as I went to hold her hand.

  Aurelia’s teary smile made my heart hurt.

  “I’ll never be able to thank you for all you did for us. You killed the boogeyman, Evangeline, and I’ll never be able to tell you how grateful I am. I love you, darling girl,” she whispered as she squeezed my hands.

  “Love you too. Now let’s go see these babies.”

  And they were the most beautiful babies I’d ever seen. Born at only four pounds, eight ounces for Henry and four pounds, four ounces for Olivia, they were thriving better than I thought they would for being so small. Both babies had a full head of black hair like their momma, but their eyes did not match at all. Baby Livy had her mother’s pale, mint-green pupilless eyes, and Henry had his father’s dark, coffee-colored ones. It was obvious already that Henry had some Aegis powers. He kept frying the vital sign monitors, so they quit hooking him up to them. Sooner than they thought possible, the twins were cleared to go home.

  A smile stretches across my face, and I blink back into the present. I wonder how hard it would be to convince West to knock me up. Meh. I’ll wait until I get done christening every room of the penthouse before I do something like that.

  I study my hair and makeup in the mirror. My honey blonde and platinum hair was teased out to maximum volume before I braided sections away from my face and then wrapped it all into a delicate chignon at the nape of my neck. My face was done up to full dewy highlighted awesomeness, and while the look mimicked a ‘natural’ look, I had more makeup on my face than the law should allow.

  West stepped from the shower, still dripping rivulets of water down his tattooed eight-pack leading down his happy trail on down to nirvana. Hmm. I wonder how bad my hair is going to get messed up.

  Totally worth the risk.

  MENA

  Aurelia got ready at my massive master bedroom vanity, her tan skin didn’t require much makeup but she still gussied herself up for the big day. Her naturally wavy hair got a stern talking to by a very hot curling iron, and decided to submit to her will and behave for the rest of the day after it was wrestled into submission into a complicated but loose bun at the nape of her neck. Instead of a veil, she wore a beautiful gold leaf hairpin that rests just atop her bun.

  Her dress, still on the hanger in my closet waiting for her to finish up, is delicate and ethereal. Full belled sleeves lined with scallops of lace matching the deep open ‘V’ at the back, full silk organza and scalloped lace skirt with a chapel train. Every time I look at it, I smile. It is so her. Complicated but simple, stylish without giving a fuck. Yep, that’s my sister.

  “Okay, I’m ready. Where is Evan?” Aurelia calls.

  “Never mind. She’s going to be five more minutes,” she yells answering her own question. At this point I don’t even want to know. I slip into my gold silk organza dress with gathered straps and a deep ‘V’ in both front and back, and I’m thankful I do not have the same boobage problem my sister does. I’m almost positive she required industrial strength glue and a prayer to get a bra that worked.

  Not three seconds later, E
van pops in with her hair down in waves.

  “Nice sex hair, Squirt.”

  “Dude. I tried. I really did, but…” she gave me a look that said ‘what are ya gonna do.’ I agree. Sex happens when your husband is hot. No harm no foul.

  I shrugged and nodded, and then we helped Aurelia into her dress, grabbed our bouquets, and hit the road. Or I should say we traveled to the venue. Man, it’s good to have Wraiths around.

  The wedding itself was simple and elegant. No random hipster poem readings, no bullshit, no fuss. Just Aurelia and Rhys standing in front of a massive oak tree swathed in thin gauzy fabric and twinkle lights. Aurelia had Henry on her hip, and Rhys had Livy on his and together they held hands and promised each other forever.

  KYLE

  I spent a rare moment away from my mate when I went to Aurelia and Rhys’ wedding. I felt horrible about the shit they’d gone through, but I couldn’t exactly call them friends yet. Not when my mate was still laying in a hospital bed refusing to wake up.

  I didn’t know if Nic would ever open her eyes. I didn’t know if there was anything in her that would allow her to come back to me. I missed her. I missed her so much.

  I left the wedding just after the ceremony. Just seeing them together with their children after all Iva had put them through made me feel guilty.

  There were many things I regretted about the day Aurelia was attacked. I never should have left without the amulet, for one. I never should have let Iva see me, for two. And third, I should have killed Devereux Emerson with a bullet to the brain long before he touched my woman.

  But for now, my regrets are all funneled into one. I wish I would have bound her before all this mess. I wish I would have made her mine.