Ashes (Fire Within Series Book 3)

by Ella M. Lee

  Carefully, I removed my hands from my own shield. It would hold by itself as long as nothing attacked it. I pressed my palms to the floor.

  Water. I could feel water, very faintly. Nicolas likely couldn’t pick up on it because his own use of magic was drowning it out.

  The concrete under us was somewhat fresh. This building was a recent construction—Nicolas had said that to me the day before.

  Nicolas, I thought, can you take three steps back when I tell you to? Press your hands together if yes.

  He froze, placing his palms together in front of himself as though about to pray. The lion watched him, confused, trying to figure out what he would do next.

  New concrete still has lots of water in it, I thought carefully. I’m going to heat the concrete to destroy it, and you’re going to use the water.

  I pressed my hands more firmly into the floor, focusing myself and calling up my magic.

  Now! I thought.

  With a sharp exhalation, I rolled my magic out toward the lion. Nicolas danced backward as the concrete around him shattered into dust with cracks that sounded like gunshots. For just a moment, steam hung in the air—the water that had been trapped in the concrete, now superheated by my power.

  Nicolas clapped his hands together. The steam dropped to the ground, liquid for only a single moment before it froze into ice underneath the lion, trapping its paws.

  The ice wouldn’t hold the lion for long, but all Nicolas needed was a second or two. The lion freed one paw with a metallic groan but stumbled onto its side, unbalanced.

  Nicolas vaulted over it as it tried to right itself, took a flying leap, and crashed into Derek. Derek’s shield shattered into nothing as Nicolas’s fist smashed into his face.

  Nicolas drew his knife, and with the precise motions of someone who has killed a lot of people, slid the blade up under Derek’s rib cage. Derek, whose hands had closed on Nicolas, stilled, going limp instantly.

  Dead.

  The lion collapsed, the magic in its eyes fading.

  Nicolas dropped his own shield. I could see him panting, his chest heaving. In one quick motion, he withdrew his blade, his hands covered in Derek’s blood, and dropped Derek’s body to the floor.

  “Nicolas?” I whispered, letting my shield dissolve.

  His head whipped toward me for only a moment, ascertaining that we were all right, and then he focused back on Derek. He went through Derek’s pockets frantically and pulled out a small object. He held it up. It was a hunk of crystal, lumpy and cloudy in raw and unpolished form.

  “Fuck,” he said, tossing it away. I had no idea what it was, but it must have meant something to Nicolas because he was on his feet and covering the thirty feet between us in a sprint.

  “Up, up!” he yelled.

  “What?” I asked, uncomprehending.

  “Smoke,” he said, his golden eyes alarmed and intense, pulling me to my feet. “That crystal is a tracker. This was a setup. We have to get out of—”

  The ground around us exploded in light so bright that I had to shield my eyes. Evie cried out, clutching Mark to her. When I had blinked enough to clear my eyes, I could make out a pattern on the floor.

  Concentric rings with runes between them. Strange designs spiraling out from where we stood. It was a circle, its diameter easily twenty feet, with us clustered nearer to one side of it.

  Smoke magic. And we were trapped inside it.

  Chapter 16

  Nicolas’s hands tensed around me, pulling me closer. He cast his narrowed eyes around. His composure had returned.

  “Don’t touch the edge of the circle,” he said quietly to me and Evie. “Stay still.”

  His eyes met mine. I love you, lamb, he said. Don’t help me this time. It’s too dangerous. Do you understand?

  Be careful, I thought. Please. I love you.

  Nicolas removed his hands from me. I sank back to my knees, checking on Daniel. His pulse was insanely high, but he was breathing, and his heart was beating. I didn’t think he would die.

  Evie was maintaining the tether between herself and Mark. She was shaking and in tears, but I thought there was probably enough time for Nicolas to figure out this next issue.

  Smoke.

  Smoke was here, whatever that meant. This circle was a clear demonstration of that. Only Smoke and Sky used circles for their magic, and Nicolas had identified this power himself as Smoke.

  Nicolas had drawn himself up, straightening his shoulders, assuming the intense persona he liked to use within Water. His power was flared around him elegantly.

  He paced with graceful, deliberate steps around the edges of the circle, reading the runes. His eyes were glowing. This was the Nicolas who liked to play games and solve puzzles.

  A very dangerous version of himself.

  He dropped to one knee. With the lightest touch possible, he caressed the lines at the edge of the circle. His fingers couldn’t go past that—it was a solid barrier, keeping us within it.

  Nicolas smiled, a vivid, feral smile that did not reach his eyes.

  He stood, spinning in a circle gracefully. “Katherine,” he called, his voice ringing through the quiet warehouse. “Where are you? I know this circle is yours.”

  Katherine? I thought. I had never heard Nicolas mention a Katherine before, but he rarely spoke of Smoke, and his past was littered with details I knew nothing about.

  Footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. A woman appeared in the gaping hole of the destroyed cargo door. She was tall and delicate and blonde and walked with elegant, deliberate steps. Despite the heat, she was dressed in a flowy, long-sleeved shirt, leggings, and knee-high boots. A sure sign she wasn’t here to engage in a physical fight.

  She stopped at Derek’s crumpled body. With the toe of her boot, she pushed him over onto his back. He was definitely dead, his eyes open and glassy, his mane of light hair soaked in his own blood. She smiled.

  “Thanks for this,” Katherine said, looking up at Nicolas. Her accent sounded Australian. “Derek was becoming an annoying problem, outliving his usefulness and intelligence, overstepping. You know what Stephan says: ‘A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.’”

  “David Hume said that, actually,” Nicolas corrected. “Stephan loves to take credit for things that aren’t his.”

  Stephan? Another name I had never heard. I had no idea what was going on, and that put me on edge. I was tense, waiting. Nicolas had told me not to help, but I had no idea what he meant by that either. I exchanged a quick look with Evie, her expression contorted in concentration.

  Nicolas was alarmingly calm considering we were trapped inside a circle, and this woman was on the outside. Her magic shimmered around her, the glittering and hazy fog of Smoke. More deliberate steps brought her within a few feet of the edge of the circle. She stopped, crossing her arms over her chest. She had incredibly light-green eyes and sharp features.

  “Hello, Katherine,” Nicolas said pleasantly, spreading his hands as though welcoming her.

  “Hello, Nico,” she said, smiling coldly.

  Nico? Only people close to him called him that.

  “You know, Kate,” Nicolas said, his tone still pleasant, “it’s a shame Stephan sent you this time. Didn’t he tell you what happened to Frederick?”

  Nicolas spun in a circle, studying the solid barrier of the circle around us and above us.

  “I saw the body,” Katherine said, shifting uncomfortably.

  “Then you know the ending of the story,” Nicolas said. His tone had turned soft and deadly. “Let me fill in the beginning. I got very tired of Stephan appearing in my life every couple of years with the intent to screw it up. The last time it seemed like I’d end up trapped in a circle like this, I brought Yu-Teng with me. You’ve heard of Yu-Teng, I’m sure. I love that I can lean on his reputation. Now, I don’t like torturing others. Very unseemly. Not my style. But Yu-Teng? He has no such compunction. I let him take apart F
rederick.” Nicolas offered a chilling, exaggerated sigh. “It took hours. Fred screamed the whole time. But before he finally died, he told me some interesting things about circles like these, things I didn’t already know.”

  Nicolas stepped forward and ran his hand along the hard barrier, searching for something. Eventually, his hand stilled for a moment before he swept it in a circle, thrusting some of his magic into the gesture. A large rune, previously invisible, lit up.

  He pressed his palm into it. “Oh, very bad, Katherine,” he admonished. “You tied your own magic into the circle, and now I can do this to you.”

  He drew another ward on top of it, a complex design, then slammed his palm against the rune, igniting it with Water magic. Katherine cried out in pain, her hand shooting to her head reflexively.

  But I could see that whatever Nicolas had done had hurt him, too. He flinched, his whole body shuddering. I was worried about him. Nicolas wasn’t an endurance fighter. He was strong and fast, but he tended to pour energy into what he did, and it tired him quickly. Fighting the lion had required quick thinking and movement, and now he was dealing with using his magic against a Smoke magician. Katherine didn’t seem like a commander, but Smoke magic bound into a circle was a very strong thing that many other magics couldn’t rival effectively.

  “Keep it up,” Katherine said, recovering her poise. “You’ll end up like Derek over there. Very dead. He deserved that, for all the times he screwed up. Stephan gave him one simple job, and he couldn’t even execute on it. Is your whole clan full of morons?”

  “Why, yes,” Nicolas said. “It’s often frustrating, but at least it’s predictable. Why don’t you join us? You’re going to need a place to hide after Stephan finds out you managed to lose me yet again.”

  “I have no intention of failing to do my job here,” she said, shrugging. “I know the consequences of that.”

  “The consequences are the same either way,” Nicolas said. “You won’t stay Stephan’s lieutenant for long if you fail. You also won’t stay Stephan’s lieutenant for long if you do well. I would know. How is my job treating you, Kate? Do you love it as much as I did?”

  I could fill a book with things I didn’t know about Nicolas, and there was another: He had been someone’s lieutenant in Smoke. Not a surprise, really. I knew he was brilliant and driven. And this woman had replaced him after he’d been locked up and experimented on.

  “I love not having you around,” she said. “Easier to shine when the bonfire that is Nicolas Demarais isn’t stealing all the attention.”

  “I love compliments,” he mused.

  He was intentionally drawing out this conversation. He either wanted time or information. Time was probably more likely—he seemed shaky on his feet. Stalling would buy us time for him to recover, and also time for the rest of our team to arrive. My right hand still clutched the trigger, and I tried to activate it again. Nothing.

  “Something for you to enjoy in your final minutes,” Katherine said.

  Nicolas laughed. “Ah, but my will is much stronger than yours, Kate.” He slammed his palm against the ward again, and she flinched, panting. “I can do this all day.” Slam. “But.” Slam. “You.” Slam. “Will.” Slam. “Break.”

  Katherine dropped to one knee, breathing hard, her expression twisted and pained.

  Nicolas could not do this all day. He was lying. He was lying very well, but he was lying, nonetheless. I could see the tightness of his jaw and the tension running down his back with each punch of power. He might outlast Katherine. Maybe. It was hard to tell without knowing more about her.

  I understood now what he’d meant when he asked me not to help. Whatever he was doing to her shield or circle in order to produce the kind of feedback they were both receiving was not something I could do.

  It seemed to be a specialty of his, though. On my first day in Water, I’d seen Nicolas use a handcrafted ward on Daniel that also invoked some kind of magical feedback to cause pain.

  “Here is what’s going to happen,” Nicolas said. “I’m going to smash this circle to pieces—that is a given—and it will quite possibly kill you. But I’m in a rush, so if you release the circle now, I’ll walk out of here without harming you further. You can crawl back to Stephan with whatever excuses you can muster as to why you didn’t manage to kill me.”

  “I’m not here to kill you,” Katherine said, hauling herself to her feet.

  Nicolas tilted his head. “Oh?” He ran his fingers in lazy spirals along the edge of the rune, and Katherine gritted her teeth.

  “I’m here to clean up a mess,” she said. “Derek. And those two Meteors you have behind you. You and the other two Waters are free to go.”

  “That is Stephan for you—whimsical, easily distracted,” Nicolas said with an exaggerated sigh. “Constantly changing his mind. It was such a chore working with him.”

  “You worked for him,” Katherine said.

  “No. You work for him,” Nicolas said, his tone the most condescending I’d ever heard from him—and I had been on the receiving end of several of his lectures when I was just his captive.

  I wanted to laugh. No one could put someone in their place quite like Nicolas.

  Katherine didn’t dignify him with a response to that. She merely said, “You know, you could just be agreeable for once. Two Meteors for your life? That’s nothing.”

  This was getting weirder and weirder, and I waited for Nicolas’s response with bated breath. Of the four people Nicolas was currently protecting, he certainly cared about me and Dan well above Mark and Evie. There was no logical reason for him not to accept Katherine’s offer.

  “Interesting,” Nicolas said softly. “Isn’t that the story of Stephan’s life? Me having something he wants? I think I’d rather keep these two. I have a bone to pick with them.” He slammed the rune again, and a crack flared through it. “My offer still stands. Break the circle, walk away. I promise I won’t tell Stephan that his lieutenant is weak and a coward.”

  Katherine gave him a look that could have melted solid steel. I smiled. Nicolas had the most beautiful and uncanny ability to get under people’s skin. Even right now—covered in blood and trembling—he was charming and graceful and poised, and I could see it made her want to strangle him.

  She had slipped up by revealing that she was here to collect Mark and Evie. Or perhaps she simply knew she couldn’t keep that information from Nicolas’s mind-reading abilities. It now seemed like he would fight tooth and nail for them. Evie was watching him with something like amazement, tears streaking her cheeks.

  I snuck a look at Daniel’s watch again. More than fifty minutes had passed since we’d arrived here. Our family would be reopening the portal any moment. Ryan, Sylvio, and Teng were on the other side of it, and the mere thought of them made relief bloom in me.

  Katherine was silent. She appeared to be debating, watching Nicolas warily. He stood very still, his eyes on her.

  “Enough,” he said finally. “I’m out of patience, and I’m done playing.”

  He placed both hands on the barrier, one on each side of the rune. I watched, terrified, as his magic flowed out into a sharp funnel. He brought the fingers of both hands together into a diamond around the rune and then drove the funnel of magic into it.

  Once. His whole body shuddered again, and Katherine stumbled backward.

  Twice. He swayed, his gaze still on her. I caught only the edge of his menacing smile from where I was positioned.

  “Don’t,” Katherine said, reaching a hand out.

  Three times. She collapsed to the ground in a heap as the barrier shattered into nothing. The light of the circle underneath us died.

  Nicolas turned to face me fully. His nose was bleeding, his eyes unfocused. He looked completely dazed.

  “Nicolas?” I asked.

  He blinked several times. Slowly, he brought a hand up to wipe the blood from his face, looking at it as though he’d never seen anything like it before.

 
“Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “I’m… fine,” he said, but his response was delayed and oddly detached. “Merely… in quite a lot of pain.”

  Behind him, Katherine moved. With a groan, she raised herself onto her hands and knees. Nicolas spun and walked quickly to her, standing over her.

  She stumbled back, standing and retreating with two hasty steps. He advanced on her, raised his hand, and backhanded her so hard that she hit the ground again. I gasped.

  “I have graciously refrained from killing Stephan all these years,” Nicolas said, his tone deadly. “One more abortive attempt to fuck up my life, and I will reconsider my feelings on the matter.”

  Katherine glared at him balefully. She made a move to pick herself up, but he grabbed her wrist and twisted it so hard that she whimpered. After a few moments with the two of them frozen like that, he threw her back down roughly.

  “Do not move,” he said to her.

  A rush of Water magic rippled behind us. At the far end of the warehouse, our portal home was opening.

  “Fiona, go,” Nicolas said, snapping his fingers. He hadn’t turned, his eyes still on Katherine.

  With a last glance at Daniel, I took off at a sprint toward the portal. Ryan was stepping through as I got there. He took one look at me, out of breath, and then cast his eyes toward the mess that was our battlefield.

  The gaping and ragged hole of the cargo door, the heap of metal that was the lion kynda, Derek’s dead body, Nicolas covered in blood, Katherine at his feet, Evie frantically keeping up her work on Mark, Dan’s unconscious form.

  His eyes widened, and he took a breath. “Teng, Syl,” he called, perfectly calm, sweeping quickly toward Nicolas.

  That was what I loved about my group—they were all consummate professionals, unfazed by emergencies.

  “Mark is dying,” I said, following in Ryan’s wake.

  If anyone here could fix him, it would be Ryan. He diverted his stride toward where Evie sat, cradling Mark. She held him defensively, her gaze cautious as she tried to get a read on Ryan.