Falling Ashes

by Annie Anderson

  “So noted. I’ll remember that while someone is trying to behead me in battle,” she snarks. “You have no idea what it means to be a true leader. If you think shelling out more money to already filthy rich people who could just as easily provide for themselves makes you a leader, you are sorely mistaken. Since you’ve been so benevolent to our people, I’ll let you live, but I want you to remember who your Queen is so you will watch as I turn them to dust,” Evan snarls, and then the screaming starts.

  Javier’s brothers do not die quickly. Their skin abrades away slowly, showing muscle and sinew and then bone, before the bone chips away to show their organs and blood. So much blood. Before that, too, fades away to dust. All the while, Evan watches Voyt’s face morph from surprise to disgust to fear.

  It is the fear she is going for.

  After Evan is through with them, she delicately dusts off her hands, and walks to Voyt, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and raising him as high as her limited height allows.

  “Mr. Voyt, I am letting you live so you can send a message to all your followers. My father made me Queen, and I will hold this position without a husband. Tell them what I do to traitors. What I did to the men who took my parents from me. If anyone tries to come and take my throne, I’ll be sure to remind you of my message. Personally. After I kill every single person you hold dear. Have I made myself clear, Voyt?”

  “Y-yes. You have, my Queen.”

  “Good. Oh, one more thing. Tell the leaders of each of the remaining head families that I will be meeting with them in one week’s time. Tell them to be ready for my call,” Evan murmurs and releases him so he thumps to the ground. Voyt wastes no time traveling from the gorge, leaving in a swath of smoke before he even regained his balance.

  Then I feel it, the prickle of unease just as Aurelia screams, “Get down!”

  We scatter; Cam and Aidan covering Evan, Rhys phasing on the fly and yanking Aurelia behind him, Carver wrenching a rapier from the head of his cane.

  I try to move, to get in front of everyone so they can use the cover of my Aegis, but Ash bands an arm around my waist and hauls me to the slim cover of the brush line against the cliff face. I struggle against him, and his arm tightens before I feel his lips at my ear.

  “Shh. We don’t want to show your abilities just yet. These could be the same people who tried to get you in Fraser,” he whispers in my ear, and I have to give it to him, I didn’t leave anyone alive in Fraser, so these guys wouldn’t know the extent of my abilities. I can’t just give it away now. I need them closer, in a group, so I can fry them all at once.

  Ash pulls me behind him, but I smack his arm and hold my hand out for a weapon. He rolls his eyes and pulls a handgun from his left thigh holster, slapping it into my hand as he raises his compact assault rifle and we both start firing back into the dark. Then, I hear the sweetest sound, the thunder of the fifty-cal.

  Thank. God.

  I praised the heavens too soon, though, because Wraiths smoke in on all sides, advancing on us like a plague. But they aren’t strategic, they are untrained or disposable or both. I go for headshots, taking out five before my clip runs out. Shit. I reach for Ash, ripping the katana from its scabbard on his back, protecting his front as he drops his empty rifle and draws his kukri.

  Aurelia and Rhys fight on my left as one, but Evan is having trouble with her Guardians doing their job a little too well, refusing to let her fight at all. Carver ends up on my right, slashing two men down before lifting his apparently decorative eye patch and giving me a wink with his right eye before popping it back down. He’s not as injured as he pretended, and Carver spins and twirls with ease over the rocks and bracken taking heads of three more men as he goes. The rest of the combatants that are left alive leave realizing that they are being mowed down like grass, and then the firing from the cliff intensifies, and it’s so much worse than before.

  “Son of a bitch,” Evan screams when she’s grazed at the top of her arm, and Aurelia and I yell for Cam and Asher to get her the fuck out of here. They can’t though, because as soon as Cam touches her uninjured arm, she gives him a feral growl, and he rips his hand away as if burned.

  Hell, he probably was.

  I growl low in my throat and catch Aurelia’s attention as I see three men and two women stalking toward us in the dim. They form a loose semi-circle, tightening the noose as they stalk closer. Other than the lit pyre and the Fireskin of Aurelia, Rhys and myself, there is no other light. I discreetly motion to the advancing group and give her a cutting signal. She nudges Rhys and as one, we phase back, cutting off our light in the now pitch-black gorge.

  I can see just fine in the shadows, so it’s easy to stalk in my bare feet closer to the rapidly advancing group of bastards trying to kill my family. And that’s what they’ve become. This rag-tag bunch of misfits are my people. Wraiths. Phoenixes. Doesn’t matter. They are mine, and I will protect them.

  I don’t know what I’m capable of until it happens, but my phase comes without thought and draws the fire of the five in the water and several from the opposite cliff top. I don’t worry about the ones up high; their muzzle fire makes it easier for Ian to find them and take them out. The ones in the river, the ones dumb enough to get so close and not take the lead of their brethren, I make sure they pay. Their bullets ricochet off my shield, and bolts of lightning erupt from the tips of my fingers wrapping around their throats. I see bulging eyes, but I don’t hear screams.

  Not that they’d be able to even if they tried.

  I don’t hear gunfire anymore either, but I do smell cooked flesh and hear the muffled keening of their agony over the rush of the river. I feel my power rise in me, tethering to their bodies like a lash, raising them up from the water. The tips of their toes don’t even touch the surface as I raise them higher and higher, their trousers and dresses dripping over the surface of the rushing water.

  “Do you see? Do you see your friends? Do you see them burning?” I scream into the night, and then I take one long beat of my wings, rising from the riverbank, dragging them with me.

  “Can you see them? Watch them die,” I order into the dark and concentrate all my power into these would-be murderers. I watch their bodies fill with blue light and then explode in a shower of ashes to the water and ground below. I beat my wings, rising higher into the sky, making sure they hear me. Making sure they can see what I am capable of.

  “You come after me or my family; I’ll do the same to you,” I growl into the stillness.

  Silence is my only answer.

  Epilogue

  MENA - ONE MONTH LATER

  I roll over in the warmth of the bed and feel cold sheets where my husband should be. I slowly open one lone eyelid, irritated, until I smell the coffee. The other eyelid finally decides it’s okay to open. Asher is sitting shirtless, just in his gray pajama bottoms, in his new reading chair, bare feet crossed on the ottoman I made him get.

  “Got any of that for me?”

  “Me, the book, or the coffee?” he asks his eyebrow raised not looking away from the page until he can blindly locate the bookmark on his left armrest.

  “The coffee. Duh,” I quip as I roll mostly naked from the bed and pad over the hardwood to sit in his lap. I kiss him on the lips before reaching across him and bring the sweet nectar of life to my lips, the large diamond of my four-carat, cushion-cut, pink diamond wedding ring winking at me in the morning light.

  “Well, at least you paid the toll,” he murmurs against the sensitive skin of my neck, and the beginnings of an exquisite make-out session that will most definitely lead to more sex is interrupted by the doorbell. Grumbling, Asher presses one last kiss against my lips before setting me off his lap and padding out of the room to answer the door of our new house on the outskirts of Denver. It serves as a Phoenix headquarters of sorts with the new Wraith hub just forty-five minutes away in a high-rise downtown. It has been a month, and Nicola still hasn’t resurfaced, so Aurelia and I took the mantle as leaders
. We have had feelers out almost everywhere looking for her, but when an Oracle doesn’t want to be found, she doesn’t get found.

  I refused to set foot in the house in Oregon, and Aurelia said since we’d both been tortured there, setting the motherfucker on fire was a viable option. We didn’t, but it was tempting. We’re still working out the kinks, mostly with the Oracles, but it is getting better. Or it would if I could get Aurelia’s head out of the toilet.

  For a woman who claims to be psychic, she sure doesn’t realize when she’s pregnant very quickly. Rhys and I are still trying to persuade her to take a test, but she’s stubborn. She can be stubborn all she wants, I’ll get Ian to take blood on her tomorrow.

  We’ll just see who trains while pregnant.

  I throw on a bra, a tank, a fuzzy grandpa sweater and some jeans, pop in the bathroom to tame the sex hair and brush my teeth and head for the stairs.

  “Mena!” Asher yells for me as I hit the landing and by his voice, I’m running for my husband before I can blink.

  Asher is kneeling next to a large man lying on the cold tiles of the foyer. He’s bloody and dirty and enormous. He lays there nearly naked, only wearing tattered jeans, no shoes or shirt at the start of a Colorado winter, and his hair and beard are wild and dirty as if he’s been inside the walls of a cell for a while. The part that concerns me is, he keeps repeating a name - the name of a woman I owe my life to. The woman we’ve been searching for.

  “Nicola… They took her from me. They took her over… They put Iva in her. They took her over… Nicola…” he rasps before he loses consciousness right there on the cold tile floor. I look up to Ash, but he’s already answering my question.

  “This is Kyle, Nicola’s mate.”

  Son of a bitch.

  THE END

  Don’t miss the next book in the series!

  RISING ASHES

  RISING ASHES

  ASHES TO ASHES - BOOK 3

  West Carmichael is not my real name.

  It is the name I pulled from thin air over five hundred years ago. I don’t come from royalty—I come from the dregs of the ethereal. As the King’s assassin, I have more blood on my hands than most. I don’t deserve her. I don’t deserve anyone. But I will keep her safe. Even if I die trying.

  Evangeline Black.

  My name sounds like the heroine of a historical romance novel – not that I read those or anything. My life so far: Dead parents? Check. Broken heart? Check. Evil mistress of darkness, hell-bent on power and thirsty for my death? Big. Honking. Check. But this mess won’t get cleaned up by itself. I’ve got a job to do.

  As these two reluctant hearts fight their pull, they must decide if they want to fall apart in the midst of the chaos swarming around them or yield to their hearts…

  and rise.

  PROLOGUE - EVAN – 1906 – SAN FRANCISCO, CA

  I wish I could remember why I was so angry, but in this sea of rubble and flames, I seem to have forgotten. I remember there was danger and rage, but at this very moment, I cannot fathom what could make me do this. What I do know is that I caused this mess, and the longer I look around, the longer I hear the screams of the trapped and dying over the ringing in my ears; the more I know I should let the flames consume me. I feel the souls, so many souls out there, and most of them were good people.

  And I killed them all.

  My gaze pinpoints on a broken baby doll, the pale china face half gone, crumbled to dust in the melee of toppling buildings and shaking earth. A lone child’s slipper rests in the middle of the cracked street, teetering on the edge of the broken brick, waffling between the coming fire and oblivion.

  The flames creep lazily toward me, tip-toeing their way across the buildings as if they have all the time in the world to put me out of my misery. To dole out my punishment.

  I deserve this.

  I deserve to burn.

  I have failed my parents, my race, and for the life of me, I cannot remember why. How could I do this?

  Suddenly, it all comes rushing through the fog of shock and the thick ringing in my ears.

  Men came in the night.

  They came for me - for my head - and the poor souls who called themselves my Guardians lost theirs instead. I can still see the shocked look on Devereux’s face when the blade pierced his neck, his wide eyes are burned into my brain as if with a hot iron.

  I don’t think he ever expected them to get this far. To follow us all the way across the country to the bustling port of San Francisco. He thought we were safe in the throng of people coming and going.

  He was wrong.

  Now, Devereux and Sam are both gone, cut down like wheat against the scythe, and I have no idea what to do. Guilt claws at me. It’s all my fault.

  I didn’t mean to lose my mind. I didn’t mean to reap this much death. But I had no idea I was this powerful. I had no idea I could cause so much destruction. The city is in ruins, like a dollhouse thrown by a toddler in a fit of rage. And what is worse is I am so hungry, starving for the stained souls calling for me to send them to hell. My fangs descend, cutting into my lips and bringing the coppery taste of blood to my tongue. It only makes me hungrier, and I fight my body’s urge to travel to them, to glut myself on the souls of the evil.

  I can’t do it. I can’t send them to hell when I deserve to go myself. I close my eyes to the mayhem, waiting for the flames to do their duty.

  “Are you going to get out of the way or are you planning on burning to death?” a husky female’s voice calls to me. I blink through my haze of shock to see a woman not much bigger than my own meager height eyeing me like I was a bug on her boot. And her eyes… No pupil and such a pale milky green, she shouldn’t be able to see me, but by the expression on her face, she most certainly does. Dressed as a man in trousers and a waistcoat, she has to be the oddest person I’ve ever encountered. And for a Wraith in the middle of a ruined city, that’s saying something.

  “No offense, girlie, but Wraiths like you tend to fry when exposed to open flame. You might want to move,” she says matter-of-factly, and that’s when I lose it.

  “I-I…did this. C-caused all this,” I stutter as my breaths come in great gasping heaves, and I break right there in the middle of the cracked street.

  Then, the bricks start abrading away underneath my feet, and I feel the pull of the silence, the deadness in my own head calling for me to put it all away. The guilt, the fear, the pain of losing my closest friends – all of it.

  I don’t see the fist coming for my face until it’s too late, and before I know what hits me, blackness clouds my mind.

  I wanted oblivion, I think as the lights fade out. It might not be the death I asked for, but a nice sleep will do.

  Yes, it will do just fine.

  CHAPTER ONE - WEST

  You would think people would know by now.

  But they don’t.

  People as a whole are dumb, lazy bastards only out for themselves. Maybe it’s just Wraiths that are like this. Maybe outside factions see us as the cockroaches of the ethereal because of the way we act. I think it is probably a few ruining it for the rest of us.

  Welcome to the ethereal! Where we don’t give a shit what color you are, but if you have powers we don’t like, well, then fuck you.

  I silently chuckle a little to myself. Yep, the game show host in my head has lost his nut. Good times.

  I stay in the shadows, not too hard up here on the cliff top, crouched in the darkness of a yawning crevasse and watch as Wraiths in fancy funeral dresses and tuxes prepare to fight a battle they can’t win. A few haul long-range precision rifles from narrow, padded gun cases.

  I guess they aren’t fucking around anymore.

  They are dressed very differently from me. While they look refined and out of place as they spoil for a fight, I look right at home with the prospect of a good, old fashioned blood bath in my black fighting leathers and body armor.

  Luck favors the prepared, so the saying goes, and I am very, very l
ucky.

  I travel from the cliff top to a nook on the roof of the house overlooking the gorge where I think Ian might be hiding. It still pisses me off that I’ve never been able to find him. Ian possesses an innate ability, making him almost impossible to find if he decides to cloak himself.

  “You looking for me?” Ian asks as he appears in front of me as if from thin air. One second there was nothing, and the next he’s lying supine on the rooftop looking through the scope of a fifty-caliber sniper rifle, his dark skin midnight in the moonlight. I’ve been looking all over this roof for the last ten minutes, and he’s been there the whole damn time.

  Dick.

  “Are sure you’re not half-witch instead of half-human?” I ask, my voice gruff from disuse. I haven’t spoken in the last day – not that I speak much to anyone but Evan... Or, at least, I did. My girl could talk your ear off, and I’d never tell her, but I love her chatter, her life. She has kept me from sliding into the darkness.

  She is air and light…

  I miss my light. I miss my Angel.

  “Who knows? Dad did get around,” he quips as he adjusts the elevation dial on his scope, and it pulls me back into the moment. His tone is laced with a hint of derision, and it dawns on me that it might be a sore subject.

  Oops.

  Well, that’s what he gets for hiding from me like an asshole.

  I study his rifle with dubious interest. I have an issue with long-range weapons as a whole. It is too hard to do a dead check from a thousand yards away.

  If I’m doing the job, I’m doing it right. None of this ‘from afar’ bullshit, but it’s harder to kill me than it is Ian. I suppose we must go with our strengths, and the up-close kill is mine.

  “Are you going to be able to stay cloaked and fire at the same time?” I ask because he’s no good here if he can’t.