Ash (The Elemental Series, Book 6)

by Shannon Mayer

  I headed straight for the edge of a cliff. I scrambled, doing all I could to dig my hands and feet into something that would slow me. I managed to spin around so I was going feet first, and I stared back up at the streak of blood I left in the snow behind me. The snow was too soft to use as a grip.

  I called up the earth under the snow, but it was too far down to help me, and I wasn’t strong enough to pull on it. I wasn’t Lark, I couldn’t draw the earth like she could.

  “Peta!”

  “Hang on, I’m coming!”

  She raced down the snow, leaping fifty feet with each stride, but it was going to be close.

  I held my hand up as my legs shot out into open air.

  With a last jump, she landed and grabbed my hand in her mouth, stopping my flat-out race down the mountain.

  “You know, I think you like the drama of the last-second rescue,” I breathed out. I put my free hand into the snow and she helped me away from the open overhang. I turned and took a look back.

  My heart pounded as I stared at the abyss below. As far as I could see, there was no bottom. No end to the fall that I had no doubt would have killed me.

  “Peta . . .”

  She snorted. “Drama of the last second? I’m good, Ash, but even I’m not that good. I almost didn’t . . .” She flexed her shoulders and shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. You’re on this side of the mountain, as am I.”

  We made our way up the slope, away from the loose snow. I rubbed a hand over my bare arms and looked around. The snow was cold, but it was summer, so the depth of the chill wouldn’t kill me.

  At least I had that going for me.

  Peta sat and stared out at the mountains around us. “I suppose you had a reason for bringing us here? You said Granite, but you also said Cassava. Which is it?”

  “Both, I think.” I couldn’t shake the sense that Granite was here too. Something I’d never shared with anyone . . . a trait I had that had bubbled up during my training had given me the title of being one of the best.

  Latent Tracking abilities had shown up in me. Not to the depth of a true Tracker . . . but I could often get a generalized area for those I knew well. Granite, I knew very well. Cassava . . . I knew her better than I wanted to.

  “Cassava was buried here in the rubble of the Eyrie when she faced Lark.” I stared out from our vantage point. The mountains spread in a blanket of white and gray around us, and as I situated myself with the four points of the earth, I twisted so I faced the Eyrie. Or at least where the Eyrie had been before Lark had destroyed it.

  “I think they are both here; the pull to the Eyrie was too strong,” I said softly.

  “I’m sorry, what?” Peta reached up and put a big paw on my thigh. “What did you say?”

  I crouched beside her. “I can . . . sometimes sense where a person is when I look at the globe in the Traveling room. Not quite like a Tracker. I think it’s something else. But . . .”

  “It’s why you thought Lark was dead. Because you couldn’t sense her?” Peta blinked several times. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrugged. “You were so certain she was alive, and I know what it is to believe that someone is alive when they are dead. You won’t listen to anyone, you can’t. You have to see the truth for yourself.”

  Her ears twitched. “I hear a story from your past there, Ash.”

  A story . . . I wished it was only a story. “A long time ago, yes. It is not a tale for right now.”

  She bobbed her head and let the topic drop. “What is your plan then? You can’t possibly think to walk into the Eyrie, can you?”

  “I wasn’t with Lark when she was here. They won’t see me as a threat even though Samara threatened her life,” I pointed out, standing and making my way toward a chunk of the mountainside that looked like it had some half-decent handholds.

  Peta moved through the snow beside me and shook her head. “And what about me? They know I am her familiar.”

  “Then you will have to stay back at the edge while I go in and ask some questions.”

  I was hoping there would still be enough chaos that I could slip in and out without drawing the attention of the new Eyrie queen. The last thing I needed was to add a few Sylphs to my problems.

  “And your reason for coming to the Eyrie? They will want to know.”

  I shrugged. “I have no reason to lie. I am searching for the traitors, Cassava and Granite. We believe she didn’t die, and that is all the reason I need to come to the Eyrie. We believe that he is still helping her. Under the laws of the Enders, I have every right to search for a traitor of my own family even within another elemental family. You know that.”

  Peta was silent for a few minutes, her whiskers twitching now and again. “Ash, you know Samara may try to kill you just for being from the Rim.”

  “She might.” I went to my knees to inspect a section of the mountain I thought would be good to scale down. “But I have dealt with pissy rulers before, Peta. I am not new to this.”

  “Could have fooled me. You were in that cell for months and you decided where to go seconds before we had to leave.” She snorted.

  I smiled. “I never said I was perfect.”

  She snorted again. “Tell that to Lark. She thinks the sun shines out your ass.”

  There was no stopping the laughter from escaping me. “Gods, Peta. She’s not that bad.”

  She shrugged and peered down at me as I slid over the edge. “She loves you. That’s enough to keep her from seeing your flaws, of which you have more than a few. But I approve of her feelings. You are the one for her, Ash. Don’t doubt it no matter what happens.”

  Her words stopped me, and I stared up into her green eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “That she loves you, or that you’re the right one for her?”

  “The second bit. I know she loves me.”

  She smiled, which showed off all her pearly white and wickedly sharp teeth. “I am her familiar. Whether she likes it or not, I can see the people around her and how they affect her. You . . . you support her, help her to be more than she is on her own.”

  Her words reflecting what Raven had said to me in the cell made me shiver. I started down the side of the mountain, not sure I wanted to hear more of what she had to say.

  “I’m not done, Ash.”

  Laughing to myself, I hurried up my climb.

  “You can’t get away from me, you should know that by now,” she called down, which only made me go faster. A literal game of cat and mouse proceeded down the slick mountainside and I let the movements and pull of my muscles push all the thoughts out of my head.

  The ache in my side from the dagger wound Chive had given me slowly eased as the skin knit together. I touched it once, checking it. Chive . . . another life lost because of Cassava. I didn’t think my hatred for her could grow, but I was wrong. She’d done so much and caused so much pain in this world of ours.

  But before I found her, I would have to deal with the Sylphs.

  My left foot slipped and I scrambled, hanging from one hand for a heartbeat before I got another point of contact on the mountain.

  “Keep your mind on what you’re doing or you’re going to fall,” Peta said from above me. She was almost vertical in her stance, head down and tail up, but she didn’t seem bothered by the positioning.

  I grimaced. “Yes, Mother.”

  Peta was right. There was no room to worry about what Samara would say, or what Lark was doing, or what trouble the Rim faced. There was only my body, the rock and snow beneath me, the next hand- or foothold. That was all I could feel, all I could do with the moment at hand and the slick rock as it tried to dislodge me with every move. Either I paid attention to what was in front of me, or I was going to pay a very steep price.

  Finally, my feet touched ground that was not vertical and I took a breath that turned into a deep sigh. As I turned, I got a look at the direction we were headed. From what I could see, there were three mountains between us a
nd the Eyrie. The missing peak that Lark had so recently destroyed had left a gap between two mountains, like the gap between a child’s front teeth.

  My positioning of us from the Traveling room was poor at best. This was what I got for using a Traveling band under pressure. A half-assed move.

  Hardly something I was going to brag about when I saw Lark . . . I stopped, my line of thoughts skittering off to one side.

  “What’s wrong?” Peta butted her head against my thigh. I shook my head.

  “Was thinking about telling Lark something, and—”

  Her voice cracked. “You remembered that you can’t tell her anything.”

  “Yeah.” I breathed the single word out, surprised at how much it hurt.

  She pushed her head into my hand. “It’s like when we were looking for her when she was in the oubliette.”

  I nodded. That was exactly the problem. “Almost like finding her was a dream, and losing her again, we’ve gone back to the nightmare and had to start all over. Only this time . . . we’re looking for the one who created the nightmare.”

  Two years we’d spent looking for Lark, our every waking moment searching out corners of the world that she might have been stuffed into. In the beginning, I’d believed as Peta had that Lark was in an oubliette, and I knew we only had so much time. Weeks at the most, where Lark would survive as she slowly starved to death.

  Those first few weeks had passed, and I began to lose hope. Not because I thought we wouldn’t eventually find her, or that I’d give up. No, I never thought that. We’d stopped in at the Rim more than once and I’d tried to find Lark on the globe in the Traveling room, and had picked up nothing. I tried to tell myself it was because she was in an oubliette, and not because she was dead.

  I lost hope that we would find her alive. Oubliettes were designed to hold an elemental for a few days as punishment, a week at most if you’d been really naughty. They were the last effort before you were banished.

  Most times, the dungeon was used, as it had been in my case. The theory was the same: cut off the prisoner from his or her connection to their element, and they were in essence cut off from the mother goddess and her grace. In those moments of despair, they were to be humbled and as such, come to their senses.

  But in Lark’s case . . . the oubliette had been a death sentence, a horrible, torturous way to die, as well as a way to hide her death from the world and from those who loved her. So we’d searched the surrounding area of the four elemental families, we’d gone to the desert, the deep arctic plateaus, and solitary islands that floated on the ocean with no luck.

  In the end, it had been Peta’s idea to check the jungle. “It feels right. I cannot make more sense of it than that.”

  I’d agreed, thinking that it no longer mattered, not in truth, and we’d gone to the southern jungle. And we’d found Lark, against all the odds, we’d found her.

  I shook myself out of my thoughts. They weren’t going to help us now.

  “Peta, are you sure you can’t fly? Can you not shift into some great winged beast that could help speed things up?”

  She dropped to the snow beside me, sinking up to her belly. “Not last time I checked.” She lifted her nose and scented the air. “What makes you think Cassava is alive? Lark buried her under the mountain. While she is certainly strong, do you truly believe she could survive that?”

  I started forward, working my way down the slope. For the moment, it was smooth and easy enough that there would be no vertical drops if I slipped. “I don’t know for sure. But the way Raven talked about her makes me think she’s not dead.”

  Peta grabbed me with a paw. “Wait, stop right there. What do you mean the way Raven talked about her?”

  I blinked several times and then frowned. “I thought I told you about Raven?”

  “You most certainly did not. What about him?”

  I opened my mouth to speak and the words stuck in my throat. Almost like I was being kept from saying them. “Shit.” Well, at least I could manage that much.

  “Ash, he probably used Spirit on you to keep you from speaking about him to anyone. Goddess knows what else he might have told you to do!”

  “Then why could I even say that little bit?” I frowned, struggling to remember when Raven had given me any instructions.

  She shrugged, the spotted fur on her shoulders rolling. “Probably because you weren’t really thinking about it. The words just blurted out.”

  I scrubbed a hand through my hair and started walking again. “Well, do you get the gist of what I wanted to say?” I was hoping she could make the connections.

  Of course, she could; she was a cat.

  She nodded. “Obviously Raven showed up at some point in your incarceration and you two had a chat. Whatever he said, you now believe Cassava could still be alive. Or it could be what Raven wants you to believe so you disappear on another long search for an elemental who is supposed to be dead. That would certainly put you out of the running for some time.”

  I grunted. “Something like that.” A chat . . . Raven’s words echoed inside my head. There had never been a point where he’d told me not to repeat his words, yet obviously, he had somewhere in the conversation. He didn’t want anyone to know we’d spoken? Or did he not want anyone to know that he’d been in the Rim? Maybe some of each.

  Or maybe something else altogether that I could not see. I touched my head as if I could dig out the answers from it.

  Again, I could understand why those who carried Spirit were so feared. How did you fight something you had no defense against? That you not only couldn’t see, but never even knew when it was used against you?

  A rumble of the earth below my feet and the ground dropped, snapping me out of my thoughts and sending both Peta and me into a crouch. Peta flattened herself into the snow and I did the same until I was almost buried under the icy cold white crystals. The mountain seemed to shift and roll, sending a wave of rocks and snow thundering past us. I could have sworn that I heard a laugh echo through the mountains, and then I was sure of it. The words were booming, loud and thunderous as if they were all around us. As if she was the storm and we were being buffeted by her. The voice could only belong to one person.

  Cassava.

  “Fool, you think you can come at me and survive? I will kill you both, and steal Lark’s heart and soul in one fell swoop,” she screamed.

  I stared at Peta and nodded. We were more than on the right track, we’d hit the bullseye. But far sooner than we’d expected, which meant I was not prepared, and there was no plan.

  How had Cassava seen us coming? There was no one that knew where we were going, what we were doing; I had no thought of coming here when I spoke to Raven, so there was no way he could have known and been able to warn his mother.

  The ground rumbled again, a deep shudder that went on for a solid twenty seconds as we lay in the snow.

  “Ash, that isn’t good,” Peta said, the breath from her words melting the snow around her mouth and nose. Her green eyes flicked to mine, fear trembling in them. As a cat of the mountains, she knew the landscape better than I.

  “Avalanche?”

  She nodded. “A bad one.”

  The shaking subsided, but a new noise grew around us, tripping and falling over itself as it swelled through the air. Cassava’s laughter faded, but I didn’t feel any better about the position we were in. She might not be able to see us now, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t try and strike us down.

  I rolled onto my back and looked back the way we had come. The top of the mountain crumbled as I stared, as if in slow motion even though I knew it was anything but, and the speed would only continue to pick up. Snow and rocks crashed toward us like a raging river. The rocks I could handle, deflect and even soften; the snow was another problem. Made of frozen water, I couldn’t manipulate it.

  I pushed to my feet and lurched forward. “Peta, run!”

  She looked back, only once, then bounded down the mountain angli
ng to the right. I followed her, using my connection to the earth to power each stride and help me stay ahead of the tumbling snow, rocks, and chunks of ice.

  Barely, though. Cassava’s laughter echoed in the air. “Fool. Such a fool. I will have you yet, Ash.”

  I didn’t look for her, that would have been a fool move. My focus was solely on keeping my feet under me.

  Already, though, the river of snow flowed to either side of me, as if I were truly caught in a flash flood of fast-moving icy water. I fought to stay ahead of it, but even connected as I was to the earth, I was losing the race against the mountain and all its strength.

  “Peta, go!” I had to trust that she would escape and be able to come back and help dig me out. Because I knew I was about to go under. I could feel the tug on my feet and legs, like a beast swallowing me bit by bit.

  She didn’t look back but bolted forward, leaving me behind in only a few huge leaps. The tip of her tail and the spots on her coat were the last things I saw as I was dragged under the snow and plunged into a darkness where there was no air, where I couldn’t so much as move.

  Caged in a tomb of frozen water.

  CHAPTER 6

  n the embrace of the avalanche in the Eyrie, I wasn’t sure which way was up or down. I could have been inches from the surface yet die because I chose the wrong path to dig. That is, if I could have moved at all.

  My entire body was pinned, crushed beneath the weight of however much snow was above me. Chest compressed, I could manage tiny gulping breaths, but even that was slowing as the air around me dissipated.

  Panic reared its head, battering at my mind. You’re going to die here. And it will be slow and painful and of no use to anyone. The words were my own, and I could not seem to stop them.

  The darkness and cold were complete, cutting me off from nearly all my senses, making the fear that much worse, stealing my ability to think things through . . .

  No. I refused that line of thought.