Dreadful Ashes

by Annathesa Nikola Darksbane

  “Or better yet…” Tamara tugged me to a stop before we could turn toward Haven Street, capturing my gaze with her eyes. Without another word, she ran a hand up my spine, cupping the back of my neck and pulling me toward her.

  For a moment, I hesitated, holding back. “But, Tamara,” I whispered, my face hovering an inch from hers. “What if the skunks see?”

  The Moroi burst out laughing, yanked my wrap all the way down, and pulled me into a deep, passionate kiss—

  —only to break it off almost instantly.

  “Something’s wrong,” she whispered.

  You’re telling me, I thought back. Every time we moved to close the lingering distance between us, Tamara pulled back. I considered the warm, soft stir of desire deep in my core as I stared into her eyes.

  Whatever the problem here was, it sure as hell wasn’t me.

  This time, I started to say something about it, but Tamara put a cool, pale finger between our lips, shushing me.

  That was when I noticed her eyes: wide, luminous, and on edge.

  Something was wrong.

  “I feel something,” she hissed, scanning the darkness between buildings, the collapsed office building, and the empty top floors of sleeping homes. My eyes followed hers, and I put an arm around her protectively. “Some…thing…passed this way.” That got my hackles up. She met my eyes again. “It reminds me a little of…you.”

  I took a deep, useless breath, tugging my wrap back up before I could puff a lungful of dead air back in her face, and concentrated. A moment later, I caught it too: a lingering shadow, a whisper of death. One of many I’d felt recently, but this one was different. Something had passed this way, and not long ago, or the faint wisp of energy would have been long gone.

  “There!” Tamara exclaimed sharply, quietly, her arm outstretched toward one of the nicer buildings a block and a half away, an old three-story brick home clearly worn down by time and repaired with love. “Someone…someone’s hurt. Dying.”

  “I’m going in,” I replied and started moving.

  Tamara caught at my arm, and I accidentally dragged her halfway across the road before I noticed.

  “No,” Tamara frowned. “Don’t just burst in, we don’t know what’s in there.”

  “You’re worried. It’s sweet.”

  She glared at me. “I’ll wait at the front and count to sixty. You slip around to the back.”

  I nodded. “Sure.” I grinned, knowing she couldn’t see it under the wrap. Even so, the Moroi gave me one last, suspicious glare as we split up.

  I went around back, counted to three, and promptly kicked the door in.

  Double bolt locks burst apart without effort, and I drew the shadows in around me like a cloak as I darted inside. Something else had cleared the way for me; I felt the remnants of a crumbled threshold tug at me as I stepped inside, too feeble now to prevent my entry. Once inside the home, I could feel it more firmly: the fragile remnants of a human life, barely holding on, and the whisper of death that had preceded me.

  Oh, and a dozen strange heartbeats, hammering away upstairs.

  Tamara was right; we didn’t know what might be in here—which was why I was going to find it first.

  I threw myself up the switchback stairs a flight at a time and smashed aside the flimsy wooden door that barred my way to the third story. The scent of copper and iron hit me first: the potent aroma of fresh human blood, heavy on the air. An older man lay face down in the middle of a hallway littered with pedestals, paintings, and curios, a shallow pool of syrupy crimson swiftly dyeing his fancy pajamas a gruesome red.

  Shadows shot away from his body as the door slammed open, a blur of movement in all directions. My dead eyes searched the darkness, but despite my ability to see through the dark in shades of monochrome gray, I discovered nothing.

  Slowly, I stepped into the middle of the hidden heartbeats. I couldn’t pin any of them down; the echo was a cacophony that bounced off the hallway walls and the low, angled third floor ceiling, hitting my ears from every direction at once.

  Straining to stay as alert as possible, I uttered a low growl of warning to the watchers all around. Kneeling next to the man’s body, I glanced him over. I hardly needed to check his pulse, but a cursory examination revealed the wound that leaked out his life: a savage, clean cut that delved deep between his lower ribs.

  Claws? A blade? It was obviously no accident unless it had been a really spectacular accident. I reached out to the man, considering whether to move him or not—

  —and froze as another deep, warning growl mimicked my own.

  I glanced up, and a pair of lantern-bright amber eyes searched mine from the shadows.

  The world around me moved. What I’d assumed to be discarded pillows, lumpy shadows of furniture, or any number of other innocuous things disappeared in a flurry of motion.

  Sure, I could see through the dark, but my eyes could still lie to me.

  A large, gray creature blurred past my feet, almost close enough to brush against my jeans; I braced myself and turned to track it—

  —only to be hit from behind instead.

  Something heavy, strong, and larger than a man slammed into the middle of my back and latched on, rending my tank top. I stumbled forward, then flexed, reached back, and tossed the creature across the hall, shattering antique trinkets with a low yip of pain.

  But my attacker was far from alone.

  A flash of white teeth lunged for my face; I slapped it aside. Another large creature latched onto my ankle and pulled, keeping me off balance. Yet another slammed into my midsection—had I still been a breather, it would have driven the air from my lungs. Powerful jaws clamped around my bicep as a huge, dark-furred monster rose on its hind legs and sought to drag me down.

  Were these fucking wolves?

  My damaged knee weakened as something tore at it; as soon as I stumbled, something else slammed into my leg. Sensing weakness, the pack swarmed me, knocking out that knee’s support and yanking my other leg out from under me.

  I went down, covered in a sea of fur and fangs.

  Yup, these were wolves all right.

  Individually, none of these supernatural animals were as strong as I was…but there were a lot of them, and they knew how to work together at an instant’s notice. For a moment, all I could see was the pale ivory of teeth and claws, or the glimmer of lantern eyes in the dark as they piled on me, trying to pin me to the floor and rip me apart, worrying viciously at iron-hard Strigoi skin.

  And then the largest, dark-furred lupine I'd ever imagined pounced on my chest and closed its massive supernatural fangs around my throat. Before I could rip an arm free of the wolves enveloping it, the huge wolf’s maw clenched, powerful muscles snapping it shut around my neck like a vise.

  Or it tried to.

  His jaw tensed and clamped down mightily, digging at my skin, but I felt nothing save where one long fang found the still-raw rent along my jawline.

  He twisted, yanking his head viciously to the side, then back and forth, trying to break my neck.

  Nothing happened.

  As he adjusted his grip to try again, I jerked my arm free and punched the oversized wolf in the face, sending it flying down the hall and away from my not-so-vulnerable throat.

  “Will you fuck off? I just got that fixed.” Dead muscles flexed as I powered to my feet, shedding loose wolves everywhere. Threatening growls echoed from wolf to wolf as the uninjured ones regained their feet and circled me.

  Without warning, the pack snarled and surged at me again, but I could be stupid and stubborn too. I kicked the first one to lunge at me through a floor-to-ceiling mirror, hoping absently that it wasn’t important. I swatted another one out of the air, then pulled one free from the back of my neck and threw it headfirst into the furry mass like some sort of wolf dart. The biggest one latched onto my arm again, and I spun, using its body to knock aside incoming pack members and glass-topped display pedestals alike.

  And fina
lly, after a couple of quick spins, its teeth slipped free, and I slung it out of the window as hard as I could, leaving changeling blood dripping from daggers of broken glass.

  The pack hesitated, whining and growling.

  “What the—” Tamara burst onto the scene, her breath and heart rate a little faster than normal. Before I could explain where I’d found all the wolves, she straightened, her eyes flashing like sapphire lighting.

  “Leave her ALONE.”

  Fear wasn’t Tamara’s specialty, but it was still a weapon in her arsenal. I felt it wash over and past me like a dark wave and set the ocean of wolves to trembling.

  Abruptly, the tension snapped. As one, the pack fled, leaping out the window after its alpha, shooting past us to the stairs, or even breaking windows in the other rooms in their haste to retreat, moving with speed that only supernaturals could wield.

  “Yeah!” I called after them. “You better run. Or I’ll have some big furry rugs for my cold stone floors.” With a victorious snort, I turned around…

  …To see Tamara glaring at me, hands on hips.

  I swallowed hard.

  “You didn’t wait on me.” She eyed me, the liquid blue in her eyes quickly solidifying. She was breathing a little harder now.

  I don’t wait on Charles either, I started to quip, but thought better of it. “Sorry,” I rasped apologetically.

  She nodded, then knelt and flipped her phone out of her tight back pocket. “See if you can find something I can use as a bandage.” She gave the dying man a cursory glance-over and shook her head, her expression dark and doubtful. “If an ambulance gets here quick enough, he might just make it.”

  2

  Probably just missed him

  The abandoned rail yard made me think of a rotting industrial corpse. Its dirt and cement skin was overgrown with weeds and stunted trees, its clogged veins formed from rusted track and battered, weather-worn wood. Forgotten train cars and massive, dilapidated engines crouched motionless on the bent tracks or wheel-deep in the gravel, while the frameworks of a few skeletal buildings decayed silently away in the background.

  It reminded me of another place full of discarded metal and lifeless, abandoned machines: the Blood Man’s junkyard. All it was missing was a little more fog and the pervasive smell of blood and meat.

  “Why are we meeting here, of all places?” I eyed the silent field of dirt and rust with suspicion. “You asked us to hurry. Did something happen?”

  “No.” Rain’s light brown eyes shone with amber in the light of the full moon and cloudless sky. “Well…yes. But we’re okay now.” The young shifter offered me a tentative smile, but the slight tremble that rippled through his body and voice was far from reassuring.

  “Hopefully,” Jason muttered. His eyes were a little too wide, their blue-gray also flushed with amber tones. While he wasn’t noticeably shaky like Rain was, his wary, furtive glances and his ready-to-run body language said the same thing in different words.

  Fear.

  “You guys don’t seem okay,” Tamara objected quietly, proving that it wasn’t just my own imagination at play.

  Rain took a deep breath, running a hand through his short, sweaty, brown-black hair. “We will be,” he managed another, more genuine smile. “Now that you guys are here…and that thing is gone.” He paused, shuddered, and glanced at his best friend. “Hopefully gone.”

  I exchanged a worried look with Tamara. “Okay. Explanation time. What thing? Something was out here?” Easy to believe, with the eerie light of the bloated moon staring down at us, bleaching twisted, forgotten steel the color of bones.

  “Oh, something was. That’s for damn sure.” Jason took a deep breath and scrubbed at his face. “C’mon, ladies.” He pretended to shrug the matter off, a skin-deep display of bravado. “Let’s show you ground zero for the creepy digging monster.”

  o o o

  Near the core of the expansive railyard lay a field of scrap metal and junk, some of it sorted half-heartedly into piles, all of it long forgotten. A massive, black engine lay on its side, its bulk holding back a tide of corroded detritus, segregating the misshapen scrap heaps from a half-maze of shadowy railroad cars.

  “So what did this monster thingy look like?” I tried not to sound too critical or doubtful, but some of the details in the boys’ story seemed off, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Besides, the two shifters hung out with me regularly; I figured they would have been accustomed to monsters by now.

  “It was huge,” Rain said immediately. “And scary.”

  “Not that big,” Jason corrected. “Still pretty bulky though.”

  The teens exchanged glances, communicating a flicker of wordless information in the way that only changelings and packmates could. “Roughly humanoid?” Rain ventured finally, adjusting his loose jeans. “Tall, but moved around all hunched over. I think.”

  “You think?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “It was dark,” he replied defensively.

  “But you see really well in the dark,” I countered. “Also, full moon.” I pointed upward at the bright silvery disk high overhead.

  “I don’t think the darkness was the problem, Ashes,” Tamara’s voice echoed softly, drifting ethereally through the curls of the scrap piles. “I feel something too.” She opened her mouth as if to say more, then trailed off with a frown, her eyes shimmering in the moonlight.

  “Its body was shadowy, but kind of tattered and indistinct around the edges,” Jason elaborated. “It also had big pale eyes like fucking flashlights and these enormous, curved claws instead of fingers—sorta like yours, but way bigger,” Jason nodded toward my currently clawless hands, while Rain just nodded in agreement.

  “Did…” I hesitated. “Just to be sure…You guys didn’t take the red pill, did you?” I wished it was just a Matrix joke that neither of the high schoolers would get; like the omnipresent syringes from earlier, those little blood-red pills were all too real and all too common, and terrifying hallucinations were one of their most common and notable side effects.

  Rain looked taken aback, but Jason just rolled his eyes. “C’mon chica, we know better than to fall prey to a Sang pill-pusher. This shit was real.”

  A covert glance at Tamara revealed the Moroi subtly shaking her head; the boys were clean. I breathed a mental sigh of relief as we moved on.

  “Here!” Jason snapped his fingers, then winced at the volume of the crisp echo. “We spotted it digging at the ground somewhere around there,” he continued more quietly, gesturing to a deep divot in one of the larger scrap heaps, notable for being punctuated by an ancient, half-buried yellow bulldozer.

  Hmmm. “So, if this thing was really that scary,” I picked up a chunk of jagged metal blocking the way and chunked it off into the distance, “why get closer to it?”

  Rain’s shoulders slumped. “That one’s my fault, I think. We were running through here in coyote form, felt its presence…and curiosity killed the coyote, I guess.” He shivered.

  “You should probably have that looked at,” I mumbled, knowing he could still hear me.

  “Do you feel that, Ashes?” Tamara tucked her hands into the front pocket of her borrowed black hoodie. Her breath formed a wisp of frost in the air, and I frowned; it hadn’t been that cold five minutes ago, on the other side of the railyard.

  I reached out with my own not-so-keen senses as best I could, tried to pay attention…and finally shrugged. “Nope. I got nothing.”

  The Moroi’s eyes glimmered with momentary luminosity. “There’s terror in the air here.”

  I still couldn’t feel what they felt. But the way Tamara said it put me on edge anyway. I threw an arm around her shoulders, just in case.

  “Don’t have to tell us that, chica,” Jason took a deep breath, the warm vapor lingering visibly in the air, and both changelings shoved their hands into their pockets in near-unison. I quirked a hidden smile in amusement; they’d even worn the same outfit: dark long-sleeved shirts and jeans ove
r running shoes. Clothes the two half-Fae shapeshifters could run around the city in, but nothing they’d miss if one of their transformations went awry. “Hell, we’re probably the source of it.”

  Eyes faintly alight, Tamara shook her head.

  “Yeah, it really spooked us,” Rain added. “For something so big, it was so quiet. We nearly ran right into it.” As we continued looking around the area, I noticed the fear Tamara had mentioned settle back onto both boys like a chill mantle, accompanied by slightly elevated heart rates. Even the Moroi herself looked a little on edge.

  “And you said it was…digging? In the dirt?” I rasped, furrowing my brow. “That’s an odd activity, to say the least.”

  Jason grunted. “Dug through the scrap, too. Slowly. Like it was searching for something in particular.”

  I soon found the physical evidence for myself: several sets of slashes in the ground, where something long and sharp had churned the packed earth and gravel. Near the front of the old bulldozer, freshly disturbed dirt showed where the junk pile had recently been shifted and now leaned precariously against the forgotten machine for support. On closer examination, I even saw sets of shallow rents in the discarded metal—like one would expect from a set of powerful claws. “So far, this thing doesn't sound like anything I’m familiar with. Though I guess that doesn't mean much.” Where was Charles when you actually needed him?

  “Hmmmm.” Tamara caught my attention. “You know what that description does sound like, though?” she commented to me quietly.

  “What?” Rain and I answered at the same time.

  Tamara eyed me pointedly. “You, except bigger and scarier.”

  Or normal me when I pour on the fear, I amended silently. As much as I didn’t like the idea, she had a point. Hints of fear, death, and shadow around town that weren’t me? It was food for thought, and it tasted awful.

  “So now you see why we wanted you here pronto,” Jason said. “This shit was not cool.”

  “Hey, we got here as quick as we could.” Now it was my turn to be defensive. I’d hauled our asses across town as fast as I possibly could, after all.