Only Ashes Remain

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  The door cracked open, and Kovit came in. Nita sat up quickly, eyes scanning him for injuries. His eyes were tired, and some of the post-torture glow had faded from his skin. It made him look like a boy who hadn’t slept in too long.

  But he looked unhurt. Nita’s shoulders loosened, and she let out a little sigh. “You’re okay.”

  His eyes were exhausted, but his smile was all relief as he took her in. “I should be asking you that. You were the one chased with guns.”

  “I can heal bullet wounds. I’m fine.”

  “Were you shot?”

  His eyes ran over her body, and she swallowed. “No. I’m fine.”

  He smiled, soft and relieved. “I’m glad.”

  Her heart flipped, and she looked away.

  Kovit sank down on the other side of the bed. She yelped as the balance tipped and she rolled into his side.

  “Miss me that much?” He laughed.

  She sat up and rolled her eyes, then asked, “Did anything else happen after I left?”

  “No.” He frowned, and ran a hand through his hair. “Why? Should it have?”

  Nita opened her mouth, then closed it. Where to even start?

  “Tell me what you know about Tácunan Law,” Nita said finally. The way Gold had said Fabricio’s family’s company made Nita worried. Like an order from them was as good as done. Like nothing anyone did could change the fate Tácunan Law decided.

  “Not much.” Kovit considered. “I just know it makes sure monsters don’t get in trouble with the law. Offshore accounts. Legal shenanigans. Investigation coverups. The occasional witness silencing. But mostly money stuff. Money tells a lot of stories, and powerful people’s money trails can destroy them. Tácunan Law is kind of like Switzerland, you know? No one wants to attack it, because the whole world keeps their money there and you’d make a lot of enemies. And no one wants to piss them off, because they can leak incriminating finances to the authorities.”

  They sounded like someone Nita didn’t want to mess with.

  Unfortunately, they messed with her first.

  Fabricio was using his father’s reputation to shield himself and kill Nita. If Nita could somehow shatter that reputation . . . No. Steal that reputation for herself . . .

  Kovit sat down beside her. “Nita.”

  “Yes?”

  “The woman who chased you.” He folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them.

  “What about her?”

  “I know her.” He swallowed and met her eyes. “She’s part of the Family I worked for.”

  Twenty

  “SHIT.” IT REALLY WAS the only response Nita could think of. “Did she see you?”

  “I don’t know.” He ran his hands through his hair, fisting them before lowering them to his sides. “I don’t know.”

  “Fuck.” Nita closed her eyes. Everything she’d heard about this Family made her very sure she didn’t want them knowing Kovit was here.

  Kovit sucked in a breath. “They can’t possibly know we’re working together.”

  “No,” Nita agreed. But if they found out Kovit was here, it would look damn convenient that they were both in the same city. “Tell me about Gold. What are we up against?”

  “Marigold is the daughter of the head of the Family.” He grimaced. “You remember the story about tricking a vampire into the sunlight just because she hated him? That was Gold. She’s got a reputation.”

  Nita frowned. Not good.

  “The Family has branches in multiple cities, so we only met last year. She was transferred to my branch to learn the ropes away from her father.”

  “Are you”—Nita chose her words carefully—“on good terms?”

  Kovit shrugged. “Not really. She doesn’t like me. But it’s not personal, if that’s what you’re asking. She just dislikes zannies.”

  “Seems to be common.” Nita’s voice was dry.

  Kovit rolled his eyes. “Very.” He sighed. “She was friends with Matt. Before the Family decided to kill him.”

  “What did she think of that decision?”

  “She was pretty angry. But not even she had the power to save Matt. Not after . . .” Kovit trailed off. “Well. Not after everything.”

  Nita raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m not so much worried about Gold,” Kovit admitted, deftly changing the direction of the conversation. “I’m more worried about her boss, the head of my chapter of the Family. Henry. If he finds out I’m alive . . .” He ran his hands through his hair. “He started phishing, you know, a few days after the market burned down. Casually emailing me to ask how I was. I nearly responded the first time before I realized if I answered he’d know I was alive. And that was why he was emailing. To figure out if I survived.” He glanced at her. “Obviously I haven’t answered any of his messages.”

  “Of course.” Nita hesitated. “Were you close?”

  Kovit stared at the ceiling. “Yeah. He’s the man who recruited me for the Family. He got me settled in the States. He brought me food.”

  “He picked who you tortured.”

  “Yes.” His eyes flicked to her and away. “He fed me. He took care of me. He was basically my guardian after my mother died.”

  Nita folded her hands on her lap. “I got the sense your relationship didn’t end well.”

  “No.” Kovit was quiet for a moment. “Henry’s the one who ordered me to torture Matt. I said no. I’d never said no before, and he . . .” Kovit swallowed, and his lashes fluttered softly. “He was angry. He locked me in a room alone and told me if I didn’t eat who he told me to, I didn’t eat.”

  “Sounds like a nice guy.” Nita snorted.

  Kovit laughed, sharp and bitter. “He’s used to getting his way. After a day, I told him I agreed, but when he led me to Matt, I helped him escape instead. Henry didn’t take it well.”

  “Didn’t take it well how?”

  “He wanted me to be punished the same way anyone else who defied the Family was.”

  “Which was?”

  “Me, of course.” His smile was sharp and thin. “I dealt out all the punishments.”

  Of course. Nita frowned. “He wanted you to torture yourself?”

  His gaze shuttered. “No. He wanted to torture me.”

  Nita stared.

  “He knew all about my mother. What she’d done to me.” Kovit’s jaw tightened, and he blinked and looked away so she couldn’t see his dark eyes.

  Henry had been like an adoptive father to Kovit. And just like his previous parent, he’d wanted to torture Kovit. Nita could taste the stomach acid in her mouth from her fight.

  Kovit cleared his throat, and his voice was steady. “For-tunately, the head of the Family disagreed. Gold’s father. He sent me off to South America.”

  Nita nodded. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Henry used to be the torturer for the Family, until they decided they wanted the reputation boost of a zannie. Before I met him, I never knew regular humans could be as addicted to torture as a zannie.” Kovit’s voice was distant. “He supervised all my sessions growing up.”

  Kovit closed his eyes, and a dreamy smile crossed his face. “We had a lot of good times. He’s so inventive. He used to call me an artist.”

  Nita’s hands balled into fists. Something fearful and nauseous and unhappy slid along the back of her throat and scraped at the flesh, making her want to cough or gag or swallow.

  She wanted to run away from Kovit.

  She wanted to put a hand on his shoulder and hold him close.

  She said, “I imagine that meant a lot to you as a kid. Being praised for something everyone else saw as monstrous.”

  “Of course it did. There’s no child in this world that doesn’t appreciate being praised for something they like doing.”

  Nita thought of her dissection table, her craving to take people apart. Some of her earliest memories were of her mother and father standing in an autopsy room, Nita on a stool so she could see the body. They�
�d take it apart, her father’s gentle voice guiding and teaching, her mother’s smile flashing approval when she’d done something well.

  If she’d had a different life, would she still obsess over cutting people open?

  She didn’t know.

  “You’re better off without him.” Nita’s voice was soft.

  Kovit’s eyes snapped open, and he sat up immediately and grabbed her wrist. “Nita. Stop.”

  She stared at him, eyes wide. “Stop what?”

  “Justifying me. Henry didn’t make me who I am. My mother didn’t make me who I am. I made me who I am.” His eyes met hers with a fury. “I can see the justifications going through your brain. If Henry hadn’t praised me, I wouldn’t have done awful things. If Henry hadn’t brought me people and enabled me, if Henry hadn’t taken away consequence for crime . . . if if if.

  “If everything were different, who would I be?”

  Nita didn’t deny it. A small, traitorous part of her had been imagining Kovit as a tragic figure with bad influences. And wondering.

  “But the plain fact is, no matter how many ifs had changed, I’d still be me. Maybe not this me, here with you. But I’d always be a zannie, Nita. I like what I am. I like hurting people.”

  She yanked her hand from his, eyes narrowed. “Believe me, Kovit, I know. I was there when you tortured Mirella.”

  Sometimes, when it was quiet, she thought she could still hear Mirella screaming and Kovit laughing.

  He blinked and looked away. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to ever not see me. I know so many people see me as nothing more than a tool for pain. But the other side of the coin is when people make excuses for everything I do. They blame it on a tragic past. On what I am. As though who you are is defined by what you are.”

  His smile curved upward, soft and cruel. “You once told me I could get my food from hospital emergency rooms. Or maybe palliative care wards. You’re right, I could. And it’s a choice not to.”

  Kovit lay back down. “Every time someone thinks about me and imagines who I’d be in another life, they take away the choices I’ve made in this life. They make it seem like I was crammed into a life I didn’t want.” He closed his eyes. “They take away my power in my own life. Build me up in their minds into a person I’m not. How is that any different than the people who only see me as a tool or a monster?”

  Nita blinked, slowly. “I suppose it’s not. Just a different side of one-dimensional.”

  “Exactly.” He favored her with a smile, a soft, genuine expression that was both sad and amused. “I am not a good person. But I am a person. I make my own choices.”

  Nita watched him. She thought about how long she’d wanted to leave her mother, how long she’d saved and dreamed of college. How perfect her chance for escape with Fabricio had been before she was sold to the market.

  How she hadn’t taken it. Escape hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  It was only now that she’d been torn away forcibly from her mother’s influence that she was finally able to say no. To refuse her mother and choose her own path.

  And she wondered whether Kovit really had been in control of his choices when he lived with Henry or if he clung to the illusion of control because there was so little he’d had power over.

  She supposed the only way to know would be to see how he handled independence. Whether he stayed the course he’d been put on, or if he forged a different path.

  The same would be true of Nita.

  “Choices,” Nita murmured to herself, “almost always involve regret.”

  Kovit closed his eyes. “Are you asking me if there’s anything I regret?”

  “I suppose I am.”

  He smiled softly. “Lots. Is there anyone in the world with no regrets?”

  A smile crept across her face. “I doubt it.”

  He was silent for a time, before softly whispering, “I regret trusting Henry.”

  Nita waited for him to elaborate, picking at the stray threads on her jeans.

  “I regret letting myself be blinded by him. I did love him. He saw me at my worst and accepted me anyway. I assumed that meant, in his own way, that he loved me too.”

  Kovit sighed. “He didn’t. He loved the power I represented. I was a zannie, completely under his control. I was a tool, a very rare, dangerous tool, and he used me to show everyone who he was.”

  Kovit closed his eyes. “But unlike a tool, I had lines I wouldn’t cross. I told him those lines in the beginning. I wouldn’t hurt children. I wouldn’t eat pain that was sexual. I wouldn’t hurt my friends.”

  “But he didn’t listen.” Nita’s voice was soft.

  “I thought he had. He never broke them, never asked me to. Until he brought Matt to me. And when I reminded him of them, he—” Kovit gave a sharp, short laugh. “You know what he said?”

  Nita wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “What?”

  “‘Monsters don’t have friends.’” Kovit looked away. “He’d never called me monster before. Other people had—and it’s absolutely true, I am one, I’m the first to admit it—but the implication, that I was just . . .”

  Nita understood. “He never thought of you as a person.”

  “No. Just a tool to be praised when it did its job well and discarded when it broke.”

  Nita thought of her mother, who hadn’t saved Nita from the market. Who only asked Nita to come home to do dissections, who shut down all of Nita’s dreams.

  “That’s the kind of betrayal that’s hard to forgive,” she whispered.

  “I’m not interested in forgiving. Or getting vengeance. I just want him to think I’m dead so I’ll be left alone.”

  “He won’t find out.” Nita voice was soft and fierce, eyes locked on his as she promised, “And if he does, I won’t let him take you away.”

  Kovit’s eyebrows were downturned and his mouth soft and sad.

  Nita shifted forward so she was inches from his face, her eyes locked on his. “We will never be prisoners again. And we will destroy anyone who tries.”

  Finally he nodded, his black eyes tracing her face as he whispered, “Never again.”

  Twenty-One

  THE TWO OF THEM lay together in comfortable silence for a while. Nita took the time to ease her various aches and pains until they were nothing.

  Beside her, Kovit’s shoulders relaxed slightly when she made all her minor pains vanish. She wasn’t sure if it creeped her out that he’d been absorbing them all this time and tensing to avoid the shivers, or if she felt bad for him because he couldn’t be near anyone without extremely tight control over his reactions.

  She began strengthening her tendons and ligaments. Her newfound muscles and bones had served her well in the chase. But she could feel the strain on other things. So she densified and toughened and made her internal connections as close to indestructible as possible.

  Kovit rose and stretched. “I’m going to wash the blood off.”

  “Blood?”

  She turned to look at him and was surprised to find he was covered in dried blood. She’d managed to completely forget that their prisoner had vomited blood all over him.

  She blinked. “Wow. Yeah. Go wash.”

  He slipped into the washroom, and soon the drumming of the shower filled the apartment.

  The sound of running water calmed something inside her she didn’t know was tense. She could imagine the water turning gray from dust and pink from dried blood, and strangely, that made her think of Mirella and her long pink hair and gray skin.

  Nita didn’t really know what she considered Mirella. They’d been prisoners together. They’d escaped together. When Nita had blown up the market, Mirella had slaughtered those who tried to escape. They were allies.

  But Nita didn’t know if they were friends. Nita had befriended Kovit, even though he’d tortured Mirella. And when she thought about that too hard, thought about the way Mirella would react if she ever learned that, something painful and guilty bit into her conscience
.

  But Nita wondered about Mirella. About what happened after they parted ways that final time on the river.

  Hesitating, Nita pulled up her phone. Even though she knew there was probably nothing, she Googled Mirella anyway. She nearly dropped her phone when she saw the results.

  She clicked the first article. Amazon River being held hostage by dolphins.

  Pods of pink dolphins have been disrupting trade along the Amazon River, resulting in a total shutdown of trade routes and passenger shuttles.

  Nita skipped down to a video. She put the phone on mute and turned the subtitles on.

  There was Mirella. She wore a black eyepatch like a pirate, and her hair was a much brighter pink than Nita had ever seen it. It was tied back harshly, so her cheekbones seemed more prominent.

  “We will not allow transit to continue along the Amazon River until the governments of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil agree to crack down on black market traders operating in their countries.” The subtitles scrolled below in English and Spanish. “Far too many unnaturals are being exploited, and it’s time for it to end.”

  Nita paused the video and stared at Mirella’s determined face, her chin tilted high, her remaining eye vivid and clear and alive.

  When Mirella had told Nita she wouldn’t let the black market return, Nita had never imagined something so dramatic. But she had to hand it to Mirella, it was an effective strategy. Cutting off a major trade route? Getting international publicity?

  Maybe she’d get people to listen.

  Or maybe someone would get impatient and order men in helicopters with machine guns to kill all the dolphins in the Amazon River.

  Nita pushed the thought from her head and put the phone back on the table, thinking about Mirella and how she’d used her power to hold something for ransom. How she’d taken things others needed to get something she needed.

  So many ways to make people respect you. So many types of power. Which kind did Nita need to be left alone?

  Kovit came out from the shower, hair dripping, and saw her expression. “Something up?”

  Nita shook her head and cleared her thoughts. “No, nothing.” Then she frowned. “Can you see if there’s mouthwash in the bathroom?”