Dreadful Ashes

by Annathesa Nikola Darksbane

  I turned toward Tamara with open arms and a grateful smile—

  —just in time to catch her as she collapsed, the crackling sapphire light in her eyes sputtering fitfully out.

  5

  Sometimes you can’t sleep it off

  “Raedra? You’re not…dead?”

  “I’m not Raedra, but I am dead,” I responded. I didn’t know the name, but I was still on my feet and at her side as soon as Tamara spoke.

  She stared up at me from my crappy pallet, her dim sapphire eyes slowly focusing on my face in the here and now. “Hey…Ashes. Sorry. Still a little out of it, I guess.”

  “No need to apologize.” I shrugged, showing her a hint of a grin over the edge of my lopsided mask. “I’m more worried about if you’re okay.” I crouched at the Moroi’s side as she mulled the question over.

  “I think?” She sounded uncertain, and I frowned at her skeptically. “Just drained.” She took a deep breath and leaned up on her elbows, initially unsteady. “What the hell was that thing?”

  “Fae.” I was certain of it; the clues were all there, and his reaction to the dead iron of my claws had sealed it. “And a powerful one, at that.” I shook my head. “I’d rather have fought the two trolls again.”

  She snorted, and my continued concern was validated by the thin dribble of blood that ran from her nose.

  “You got something there.” I reached to wipe it away, but she dodged me. A moment’s concentration and a spark of light in her eyes saw the rich, red blood dissipate, leaving her alabaster skin pure and unsullied once more.

  “I’ll be fine, Ashes.” She gave me a warm smile, more lively than I’d expected. “You’d think this was the first time I’d taken a few lumps. Trust me, it’s not.”

  I didn’t let her off that easy. “I was there for a few of those, remember?” I narrowed my eyes. “And exactly how many times have you passed out in my arms after over-using your powers fighting off a Fae that generates terror?”

  “You…might have a point there.” Tamara made a face and slowly, carefully sat up. I didn’t insult her by trying to help. But just as she achieved an upright status, some asshole’s car roared past outside at ten times the acceptable speed limit, blaring bass—and she jumped, squeaking entirely too cutely, and almost fell over again.

  I just stared at her, my hand already there to steady her.

  She sighed.

  “I’m not going to badass my way out of this one, am I?” she asked, flashing me a soft, resigned smile as she shivered.

  I waited until the shaking stopped before I removed my hand from her arm, taking a brief detour to brush away wayward wisps of silver and black from her eyes.

  Her smile returned, but it was short-lived. “I’m sorry, Ashes.”

  “Huh? I thought we’d moved past the apologies already.”

  She shook her head. “Not…about that. About letting that Fae—”

  “Fright,” I supplied.

  “—letting…Fright…affect me, control me like that.” She looked down at her hands, avoiding my eyes completely. “First Meladoquiel, now him. And again, I almost got…someone I care about killed.”

  “You shook it off when I needed you,” I offered. “That’s what matters.”

  “Is it?” Tamara leaned her elbows on her knees as if she needed the support. “I’m…supposed to be stronger than that.” I tried to decide whether or not to hug her as she shivered again, but the moment quickly passed. “The…closer I got to him…the worse it was. Things moving out of the corner of my eye. The darkness closing in. Whispers, shadows crawling under my skin, like they were trying to peel it free. He was huge. Unstoppable. I was absolutely certain I was going to die—and that you were going to die trying to stop him.”

  I waited, offering her a sympathetic smile and trying to be a solid, passive support as she talked it out.

  “I was terrified,” she finished simply. “And once again, it felt like there was nothing I could do about it, no way for me to even control myself. It…reminded me of her.” There was little need to define who she meant.

  I could only wonder how much those experiences had damaged her identity, not only as a Moroi, but as a free-willed person. Especially with the things she’d been forced to do as Meladoquiel’s puppet, events I still didn’t know the full extent of.

  “Well, maybe I have something to make it better,” I replied after a moment. I rose to my feet, leaning my weight on my one fully intact knee, and glanced around until I found which shadow harbored my prize. Then I dropped two big, brown paper bags onto the rickety card table with a grin.

  “Bag of burgers, bag of fries,” I rasped, motioning to the twin, grease-stained bags with “Randy’s” emblazoned on their sides in a white, lightning bolt-style font. “Eat up.”

  Tamara’s vulnerable smile slowly brightened into the real thing, and she held out a hand.

  I crossed the room with a grin and helped her up, then let her trudge to whichever of the stolen metal folding chairs she preferred under her own power. The early-19th-century church I squatted in might pass for a fortress, with its high stone walls, broken floor-to-ceiling pillars, cracked medieval sculptures, and mighty foundation. But it was much less of a home, and it lacked a majority of even the most basic amenities, like decent furniture.

  In fact, down here in the cramped, debris-littered, super-secret under-basement we lived in…it was kind of a dump, at least by the standards of the still-living.

  With a stiff flourish, I dumped a heaping pile of chili cheeseburgers onto the table, almost forgetting which bag was which and barely catching one yellow-wrapped escapee before it could hit the cold stone floor and make a run for it. “This should help with one kind of hunger, at least,” Not that I would mind helping with the other kind, I almost said.

  The first doomed burger was gone before I even sat back down with a second hot on its heels. I grinned, knowing in my undead heart I’d made the right call. I pulled out my phone and powered it on.

  “Thanks so much,” Tamara’s voice was so muffled by her struggling cheeseburger I could barely make out her words.

  “Not a problem.” I swiped out a quick text, accidentally smearing the screen with either chili or Fae blood.

  “Did you…go get it while I was out?” A perfect throw landed both wrappers in my nearly-overflowing wastebasket, and she selected a third sacrifice from the pile and unwrapped it.

  “Nah. Never left your side.” I cleared my throat, though as always, it did little for my voice. I gestured to the pile of food. “Coyote delivery service.” I turned the phone around to face her. “Told them I’d text when you were up and about.”

  I’d also called Charles for emergency Moroi medical support, hoping he’d return the favor Tamara had paid him repeatedly over the last couple of years. But no dice. As it had been all too often of late, there was no response, with the Magic City’s only knighted Magisterium wizard off attending his new duties…somewhere. Whatever those were. I’d gone ahead and left a series of texts explaining the whole situation up to this point, but I didn’t expect much.

  After the trials we’d endured together while contesting the Ur-demon, the distance between us bothered me. It felt…off. And dumb. I knew that Charles was genuinely busy with his new responsibilities, which he took very seriously.

  But still, if he was avoiding us, or even just me, I figured the real cause was just regular old guilt.

  I folded my arms on the card table, careful not to tip it over as I watched Tamara’s storm of cheeseburger eating lose momentum. The substantial amount of calories she was consuming would certainly help her recover some of her energy and heal, but it wouldn’t top off the supernatural side of her fuel tank by itself.

  “Okay,” she wiped her mouth on a tattered napkin as our eyes met from across the table. Except for the lack of supernatural blue in her irises, she seemed almost back to normal. “I need your help.”

  “Anything.”

  “I need a res
cue. I can’t possibly eat all of these.”

  I chuckled, a rasp of dead air in the dark. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m still mortal, and I’m pretty sure this Randy’s chili has a half-life. Want one?”

  My chuckles evolved into full-fledged hoarse laughter. They did smell good… “I’ll pass.”

  She leaned an elbow on the table and pinned me with a flat stare. “I know you want one.” She held one up and waved it under my nose.

  I found myself unconsciously adjusting my face mask, tugging it up higher on my face.

  Tamara caught my hand.

  “Ashes…” her fingers were soft and warm on my dead skin. “Just stop.”

  I hesitated.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. Resting her bust precariously on the card table, she lifted a burger with her other hand and slowly rubbed it up against my face. “Eat the damn burger.”

  With a rattling sigh, I lowered the mask and started eating, careful to chew on the intact side of my face so nothing…fell out.

  It was good, at least.

  I stopped after two; I liked the taste, but burgers wouldn’t blunt my real hungers, either. Tamara seemed satisfied, too. Or so I thought; something didn’t seem quite right. “What is it, Tam?”

  Now she hesitated. With my eyes casting almost everything in shades of gray, I couldn’t tell for certain, but I thought her cheeks flushed a little. “Could we…chill out tonight? Together? Maybe get cleaned up and watch a movie?”

  She doesn't want to be alone, I realized. I grinned and stood up. “After all the excitement tonight, I could use some time to wind down.”

  She smiled, not just appreciative, but relieved.

  I took her arm. “I’m not getting any younger. Let’s get started.”

  We gathered up some fresh clothes and other sundries, I grabbed my bucket, and we went upstairs together. I shoved aside the two-ton chunk of grooved, time-worn pillar that blocked the shallow set of stairs downward, careful not to tear open old wounds or completely destroy my knee while scraping the set of routine-worn gouges in the stone one shade deeper.

  We traded out use of the solitary working bathroom; I ceded priority to Tamara after purposefully losing a game of rock-paper-scissors. With a wink and a knowing smirk, the Moroi wiggled her fingers at me in an almost-suggestive goodbye and went in to run down the hot water. She returned a good twenty minutes later, cleaned and clad in button-up, off-the-shoulder pajamas and a pair of soft, loose slacks that didn’t match. Her hair steamed from the heat of the shower, clinging in curls to her face and hanging in dripping, multicolored ringlets down to her shoulders. She grinned; it even seemed like a bit of the lively sapphire glimmer had returned to her eyes, and the sight of it tugged the corners of my mouth up into a smile of my own.

  Freshly cleaned, steamed, and dried, no one would have known that she almost died a couple of hours ago.

  My turn. I gave her a thumbs up, took my bucket, and went inside.

  Like everything else, the old church's bathroom was made entirely of stone, steel, and a little broken glass. Mostly stone. The wide sink basin and compact shower stalls were all made of the same coarse gray stone, as were the walls, ceiling and floor. A single round grate was set into the middle of the floor to deal with the inevitable drainage issues of the showers, the tarnished steel reflecting light from a solitary bulb dangling directly overhead. The pipes were basic metal tubes jutting abruptly from the walls, battered and scuffed with age and abuse, kind of like what I imagined they had in federal prisons. A discolored rectangle of wall space was positioned perfectly above the sink basin; a plain, sharp-edged mirror had once hung there, but I’d broken it a couple of months back.

  I smiled. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t nice. But it was mine, and it was home.

  I kicked the metal bucket under a spigot and cranked the cold water up to max; my deadened senses could barely tell it apart from the warm side, which made sharing convenient. I tossed in a sponge and some heavy-duty liquid soap, then spared a longing glance at the simple shower head. I hadn’t been dead so long yet that I’d forgotten what a real, warm, relaxing shower was like, the same kind that Tamara had obviously just savored. I wondered what it would be like, if I could actually stand under the stream of water and feel my body relax instead of going numb and stiff, if I could feel the soothing heat work its way through my bruised flesh and battered bones.

  Oh well.

  A dented metal plate, my hidden chunk of crude armor, hit the floor as I stripped and kicked my bloody clothes into a corner; laundromat day was swiftly approaching for both of us. I set aside fresh clothes and cloth bandages and took up my bucket; the bucket was for washing, the basin for rinsing, since too much running water left me unable to do basic things, such as think coherently or defend myself.

  My durable car-washing sponge went to work, scrubbing deathly pale skin free of traces of Fright’s blood…as well as my own. I took special care with the dark cut that ran diagonally between my breasts from hip to collarbone as well as the thinner line down my too-visible ribs; I’d learned a while back that too energetic a scrubbing could reopen the demon-dealt wounds, even if I didn’t notice it happen. Which was obviously a bad thing since the injuries were so very slow to heal. Similar caution went into cleaning around the worn flesh at my major joints, and especially my poor ravaged knee, the muscle and tendon nearly destroyed during my fight to save Charles from the demon that had stolen his skin.

  Good or bad, nothing seemed to affect the rent under my jawline, a final goodbye left by a now-dead Sanguinarian vampire hunter, or the ragged hole I was all too aware of in my cheek. They simply weren’t healing at all. I just tried to not make them worse…and to ignore them the best I could. With any luck, all of those would follow the example of the elbow Salvatore had snapped, and eventually begin to heal.

  I cleaned my slender frame as best I could before time ran out and my fingers went numb, even dragging some soap and conditioner through the unkempt, shoulder-length black hair that Tamara kept insistently trimming for me. Then I paused, watching the last of dark red and icy pale Fae blood chase each other through slits in the rust-speckled grate and disappear, Fright’s pallid ichor sizzling as it crossed the metal. Finally, I pulled on my long black Lordi T-shirt—the one with the least visible bloodstain—and carefully re-wrapped most of my wounds. Hopefully I didn’t still smell. I couldn’t really tell anymore.

  At least Tamara didn’t mind as much as Lori had.

  I growled a little at the unwanted, intrusive thought, and accidentally scrubbed soap and water into my pale green eyes.

  Once my vision returned, I rejoined my friend, eager not to keep her waiting—or alone—for longer than necessary. She smiled at me, looking up from her phone, almost hiding the anxiety in her beautiful eyes before I noticed it. “Finally done?” she teased.

  Wouldn’t have minded sharing, I almost replied. She eyed me, eyebrow raised. “Let’s go watch something?” I offered instead.

  Sealed away downstairs once more, I dug through my limited collection of old-ass DVDs. “Okay. As always, I have Jackie Chan, Bruce Willis…and Jackie Chan.” I glanced at my battered laptop. “Or we could watch the internet, I suppose.”

  “Jackie Chan is fine,” she laughed. “Besides, I think we watched Hudson Hawk the last three times in a row.”

  “It’s a classic,” I replied defensively, and scooted off to set up my laptop for optimal viewing.

  Tamara made no indication of wanting to move movie night to her own nicer underground room across the hall, so I fixed up what passed for my bed to be as mortally-comfortable as possible. It ended up looking more like a nest that a bed, but she settled into it with a smile, nonetheless. I put out the lights and closed us in.

  We sat close in the dark, watching the flickering screen shoulder-to-shoulder. She doesn't usually sit this close. Not that I minded in the least, but the Moroi’s close, constant contact was more than a little…distracting. My ey
es kept being helplessly drawn to where the flawless curve of her alabaster shoulder peeked out of her nightshirt, and to where her oversized slacks rode low enough to reveal the tone of her strong, flexible, perfect figure from between the last few undone buttons.

  My senses might have dulled since my death, but never let it be said that Strigoi couldn’t feel anything.

  I shifted around for the first time since the movie started. She had to know, right? To feel what I felt? When we’d first moved in together, I’d wondered over the possibilities, even if it had been…too soon. But now…well, I couldn’t blame her if she simply wasn’t interested anymore.

  I readjusted my knee bandages with the heel of my foot, all too conscious of the ragged condition of my dead body. All in all, pretty understandable.

  Tamara chose that moment to lean forward, hit pause on the movie mid-punch, and stand up.

  “You…okay?” I wondered how much I had been emotionally leaking.

  “No,” she smiled. “Just need something to settle my stomach.” A few fries and a half bottle of water later, we picked up where we had left off, and I managed to let my worries dissipate enough to just enjoy sitting close with a person I cared about, at least for a little while.

  One movie came and went; I put another in and we continued. But about halfway through Who Am I?, Tamara caught me completely off guard.

  “Want to talk about it?” She squeezed my hand. I hadn’t noticed she was holding it.

  “Yes,” I responded immediately, then second guessed myself. “Wait. Talk about…which?”

  “About the other Strigoi,” she replied simply, giving my hand a harder squeeze, maybe to make sure I could feel it. “The one you keep chasing.”

  “I…” I worked my jaw, trying to chase down the words necessary to respond. “…How?” I continued eloquently.

  “How did I know, you mean?” She smiled and bumped her bare shoulder into mine. “I could just say Moroi. But that’s not all of it.” She breathed out a light sigh. “You’ve described enough of what happened every time you go on one of your chases for me to put the pieces together. It wasn’t…even that hard.” She gave me an apologetic look.