Ashes and Flame

by Aiden Bates

  By the time I crashed to the earth near the camp, the pain inside me had gone from excruciating to nearly unendurable. I clawed my way toward him where he lay in the ruins of the tent, naked from the fire that had burned his clothes away. From my height and size, he seemed both smaller than ever, and larger than I remembered. I nudged him, tried to rouse him, but he didn’t respond. Panic took me, and I nearly shifted back to my skin—but if I did, I wasn’t sure I would have the strength to get my wings out another time.

  And whatever was happening to him, he needed help. Help that I didn’t know if I could give him.

  Not like this, I commanded myself, and him, and our bond, and my dragon. I will not lose my mate like this.

  My dragon seemed to agree. A rush of adrenaline pumped through me. I searched the ground for a glimmer of light, and found the amulet Laleh had made, and scooped it up. That and the other fragment I dropped carefully under my tongue before I scooped my mate carefully from the ground, along with the unburnt messenger bag with that damned book, and held him close to my chest as I limped my way away from the camp and braced myself for the pain.

  With no cliff to leap from, the only way into the sky was to jump. I clenched my jaws tight, conscious of what I carried there, and shifted my weight onto both hind legs. The broken one protested with a furious shock of agony that drove into my hips and spine and made my wings momentarily weak. But I pushed, and beat, and my paws left the earth, and I made it into the sky. Two days I had been without sleep. And that after spending myself claiming my mate.

  But my dragon and I made an agreement. If we had to fly until we died, then we would.

  So I set my course east, following another primal instinct. One that every dragon since we first took to the skies had felt, for ages and ages without measure.

  Take my mate back to the nest.

  I flew half blind, in a fugue state of mixed worry, pain, and aching sadness that only grew worse, until I knew that I was simply letting powerful instincts guide me. My conscious mind was unable to think. There are stories of shifters that pour themselves, for one reason or another, often by accident, so deeply into their beast that they never become human again. That the beast consumes the human side, some think, and what’s left isn’t really a shifter anymore; just an animal that was once human.

  I understood that as I felt my awareness slipping. How all the higher thoughts could just… stop. But my dragon had the same urgent need that I did. And so we flew, lower than was legal, until I knew that we wouldn’t make it. We would fall, and hit the ground, and this time we weren’t going to recover.

  And eventually, I did. My wings gave out. I couldn’t make sense of what I saw below; it was just land, not a place. I felt myself dropping, falling, and the only thing I could do was curl myself around my mate and hope that when we hit the ground, he would survive.

  I struck at an angle and rolled, plowing into soft earth that exploded and rained down on me. Both my forepaws were at my chest, my wings wrapped around me. From a far-off place, I felt them break. The pain tried to get me, but I was too far gone. When I finally stopped, I half-opened my paws and twisted my neck to get my good right eye on my mate. He was there, breathing. His heart still beat. But his eyes were closed. He had bruises.

  There was no justice. We had won. We were supposed to have this. After. We were supposed to be able to move on, figure things, out, make it all work. Or at least try. Instead, all we had were final moments. Maybe I could heal, if I rested long enough. But I didn’t know that I wanted to. Not if Daniel wasn’t going to make it.

  Feet approached us. Running. Lots of them. My dragon snapped and snarled, and I couldn’t stop it and didn’t even want to. No one was getting close. If we were done, then we’d be done in peace, and I would spend these last breaths together with my mate.

  “Whoa there,” someone said. A man I vaguely recognized. “Fuck. What the hell happened to you, Rez?”

  I tightened around Daniel, and let a low, warning growl leave my throat. Keep your distance.

  The man put his hands up. “Okay,” he said calmly. “Listen to me. Your name is Rezzek Grayson. You know me, Rez. Let me help. See?”

  I smelled the dragon in him. But something about the man’s scent put me nearly at ease. He was mated, I could tell that, so he didn’t want my mate. Probably. Still, I twitched away from his hand as he came close and reached for my snout, and when his hand got too close, I snapped at it.

  He didn’t pull away. “Fuck, Rez,” said softly. “Don’t do this, man. Come back to me. Let me help you. You look like hell. Shift back. Come on. We can’t move you like this.”

  The words didn’t make sense. They were just sounds. They echoed in my ears and tried to find a place to settle, but wouldn’t reach the right spot.

  “He’s got someone in his paws,” another voice said. Deeper, more serious. More threatening.

  I tried to lift my head, but my neck was weak. I gave a warning snap, and belched fire, but that was weak, too. I didn’t have anything left, couldn’t protect my mate.

  And then instead of men, there were dragons. Three of them, one bright red, one an opalescent white, another with nearly black, jagged scales and a face full of horns that hinted at authority. They closed on me, as if they might take advantage of my weakness to finish me off, devour me, take my mate. I tried to muster the strength but powerful paws held my head down, others unfurled my wings and arms, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

  I struggled, but could do nothing when two people took Daniel from my hands and carried him some distance away. Fire leaked from my jaws. My vision darkened. I tried to reach, but slipped away before I could manage it.

  Then there was nothing.

  26

  Rez

  “Easy—don’t move too fast.”

  When sound and scent returned to me, my mind was right where it had been before.

  Daniel. My mate. Where?

  Strong hands pressed against my chest as I tried to rise, to sniff him out. He was somewhere close. I could hear his heart. I tried to claw at the arms that held me down but my claws were blunt.

  “Rez, stop,” the voice barked.

  I froze.

  “It’s Nix. Here…”

  Something soft moved on my face. Slid up. Light stabbed at an eye. Just one. Half my world was missing. But the part that was still there contained a familiar face.

  “Say my name,” he said, patient but clearly worried. “Can you say my name, Rez?”

  My mouth was dry. I started to speak, but only air rasped out, and the word was hard to form. The thought was hard to form.

  “Nix,” he said. “I’m Nix Emberlin. Say it, Rez.”

  “N-Nix,” I managed. “Emba… Em…”

  He rubbed his face, let his head drop. But he smiled. “It’s a start. Gods, I thought you were… uh, try to stay calm, all right? Daniel is here. We saw the bite. He’s still unconscious, but Vance and Mikhail are here. They’re working on it, trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Water,” I rasped.

  Nix smiled wider. “Yeah. Of course. Here you go.”

  He offered me a glass, and I reached for it. I missed. He pressed it against my palm until I wrapped my fingers around it. “You, ah… your eye isn’t healing. Yet. So your depth perception is gonna be a little off. And you’re pretty busted up. So try to get some rest, all right? Daniel’s safe. You’re both safe. You got him here.”

  I drank, and he took the glass from me when it was empty. Bone-deep exhaustion made every movement feel like I was swimming in slowly hardening concrete.

  “Just rest, Rez,” Nix urged me. “We’re taking care of him. I promise.”

  I wanted to get up, to see him, to smell his skin, his hair, to curl around him and keep him safe. But I couldn’t make my tongue and throat and lips say it, couldn’t make my legs move. And before long, I couldn’t see at all as my eyes drifted shut.

  “Careful,” someone said. Nix. No—n
ot Nix.

  I opened my eyes. Nix was there, but so was Tammerlin Blackstone, and his mate, Vance. Vance stood over me, his brows knit. I felt something in my head, like a cool breeze but for my brain, as if something were drifting through and stirring up the dead leaves of my thoughts.

  “Daniel?” I asked.

  Vance smiled, and the feeling in my mind waned. “Hey, Rez. Daniel’s nearby. Still under. Mikhail’s with him, he’s safe. Can you sit up?”

  I flexed my fingers first, then moved my arms, and finally accepted Tam’s help to sit up. The pain was less. I’d been healing. Still couldn’t see out of my left eye, but my bones didn’t ache. The only hurt I could identify was the one deep down in some place I couldn’t reach or even put my finger on. “Something’s still wrong,” I said with a tight, dry throat.

  Nix glanced at the two guests and slipped past Tam to stand closer to me. “Yeah… you’ve been out for a couple of days. I asked Vance to keep you under, just so you could heal. Listen, don’t panic, all right? Not yet. But… there’s a complication. With Daniel, and Mikhail thinks maybe with the bond.”

  I did panic. My heart raced, adrenaline washed through me, hot and cold as I pushed the blankets off me and swung my legs off the bed to stand.

  Nix stepped in front of me, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey—calm down. Mikhail has been up for two days figuring it out, all right? He thinks he knows what the problem is, and how to… well, not fix it exactly but at least alleviate the pressure, I guess. I brought you clothes. Get dressed.”

  Tam and Vance left the room while I dressed, and Nix watched the window. We were in his house, in the room that had once been his father’s. “You were beat to shit when you crashed,” he said. “I take it the djinn problem is…?”

  “Solved,” I grunted as I zipped the jeans and reached for the shirt. “Killed him.”

  “Good.” He looked me over, his eyes lingering on my face. “Must have put up a hell of a fight. That eye might not heal back to normal. Doc said it was burned all the way back to the nerve.”

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Where’s Daniel?”

  “I’ll take you,” he said, and went to the door. He looked like he had something else to say, but his jaw muscles twitched as he instead opted to keep his mouth shut about whatever it was.

  Maybe he didn’t approve of my bringing Daniel here. Probably Daniel wouldn’t have approved, either. But that was a conversation for when we were back together.

  Walking even down the hall was an effort. The tearing feeling inside made my knees weak, and played hell with my head. I couldn’t quite tell what I was feeling or even thinking at times. Thoughts came and went, feelings flared up and died. I was furious one second, full of grief the next, and then caught in a thin, short-lived bubble of ecstatic joy that burst and left me numb.

  Nix led me to a door at the end of the hall—Pendrig’s old room—and paused. “We’ve had to contain him,” he said quietly. “Vance and Mikhail figured it out. It looks bad, but he’s under control.”

  My stomach sank as he opened the door.

  Daniel wasn’t on a bed like I’d been. He was on the floor, on a kind of tarp that had writing scrawled all over it. Mikhail sat in a chair at one corner, and Tam and Vance had come here after they left me. Vance was on his knees at Daniel’s head.

  Daniel was naked, and I could see why. There were burn marks over the walls, on the floors. His magic had glitched out at some point.

  Vance looked up at me, his smile weary but friendly. “He’s stable. For the moment.”

  “Stable is not really the right word,” Mikhail muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. I put a hand to my chest, then my stomach. “There’s… it started back out west. This feeling like…”

  “Like you are being torn in two?” Mikhail offered when I couldn’t put it into words.

  I nodded. “Sort of.”

  “It is because you are,” he said. “Both of you are.”

  I took a step toward Daniel, but Nix stopped me. “You can’t go in, it’s… delicate work.”

  “What’s that mean?” I pressed Mikhail.

  He spread his hands. “The best that I can say… he was bonded to the book. Then you claimed him. Now he is bonded to you, as well, and the pressure of this is pulling him apart. I cannot say for certain why you are experiencing your pain, but the book does not have a soul for me to observe. Perhaps it is attempting to separate the two of you. I do not know, there is no guide for this kind of event. You are both patients zero.”

  “Nix said you had a solution, though,” I said, as crushing weight settled on my chest. It was my fault then. I had claimed him, and now he was dying because of it. “If you don’t even know what’s wrong…?”

  “I do not know how to fix all of the problem,” Mikhail clarified. “But I do know how to mitigate the symptoms. However, it is an extreme option. One that he cannot agree to because he is not conscious.”

  “And I can’t bring him out of it,” Vance said. “Or reach him to find out.”

  “Then do it,” I said. “Whatever it is, I don’t care, we have to—”

  “Rez,” Nix said gently, one hand on my shoulder to calm me, “let him explain. It’s a big deal.”

  Mikhail nodded, and stood from his chair to go to a wooden chest at one end of the room. He opened it, and there was light inside that made him squint. He pulled out two small fragments that burned like stars—the two pieces of Daniel’s soul. The one I’d recovered from the djinn, and the one that Laleh had taken out.

  He cupped them in his hand to dull the light, but it still shone through, lighting the necromancer’s hands so that I could see the bones and veins. He turned to me, grim. “I do not understand the connection between Daniel and the book,” he said. “But what I can see is that you both are being slowly pulled apart at the level of the soul. If there was only one soul, I think that the pressure would go away. It is not done, and I had to consult unsavory sources to discover the way. But, half of the work is already done. These two pieces will be like seeds. I can invest them into you, and it will join the two of you together, in time.”

  “Fine,” I said, bewildered that we were still talking about it. “Then do it. We die otherwise, right?”

  “You do not understand me,” Mikhail said. “You will share one soul. It means… how can I explain this… it means that when you die—and, one day, you will, as all things do—it will not be the two of you together in the world after this one. It will be the one soul, the one being. All of his sins, all of his virtues, and all of yours, will be weighed together. This is a matter of eternal consequence, Rezzek. Do not make the choice lightly. Not for him, and not for yourself. This is not a reversible thing. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  I wasn’t sure that I did. The things Mikhail understood were utterly beyond me, but what I did know was that I didn’t want to lose my mate. That I had promised Daniel a future, and I would keep that promise.

  What I didn’t know was what Daniel would have wanted. It was a choice that he would live with, and die with, forever.

  Tam moved to stand by Vance. “Believe me,” he said softly, “I know what’s going on in your head. I can’t tell you one way or the other what you should do, but… he’s your mate.”

  Vance glanced up at his mate, troubled, and reached for his hand. He held it tight as he looked at me. “Whatever you decide,” he said, “we’ll support it.”

  “We will,” Nix said.

  Mikhail only watched me, and waited.

  Every weight in his soul would be on mine. Every selfish thing I had done would be on him. There would be no endless paradise together in Elysia. I didn’t even know what that meant, what it would look like. But I knew that there was an underworld—Mikhail had been there, so had Nix. There was a world after this one, and the mating bond followed two souls there as it had Mikhail and Nix. If we died now, we’d have that.

  But if we lived… we’d have thi
s. Life. A chance to figure everything out. A chance to understand what was happening between him and the book, and how to fix it, maybe. And Mikhail said that it couldn’t be reversed, but the last couple of months had been a demonstration of impossible things that couldn’t happen. Magic couldn’t solve every problem; I knew that. But there was always something new to learn, some truth that had been hidden.

  What would Daniel have said? What would he have wanted?

  There was no way to know. So I had to believe that he would trust me. And if it were me unconscious, and him awake, I knew what I would have wanted him to choose.

  “Do it,” I said. “Save him. Save us both. So we have a chance, at least.”

  Mikhail gave a solemn nod. “All right. Then you should lie down. Tam, Nix—you should hold him, as well. This will be very painful.”

  I knelt beside my mate, careful to avoid the writing that kept his magic either suppressed, or at least contained, and bent to kiss him. His lips were colder than they should have been. “I told you I would keep you safe,” I whispered. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I hope you understand.”

  Mikhail wasn’t lying.

  It did hurt.

  But it was worth the pain.

  27

  Daniel

  I was warm.

  That was the first thing that occurred to me as I woke from a dream that didn’t make sense, filled with things I didn’t understand. I had been flying, the wind sliding over my scales, pressing up against my wings. I had seen the whole world below, like some kind of painting, or a vast miniature that someone had painstakingly constructed with attention to every fine detail. The work of a century, maybe a thousand years. Maybe more.

  When I opened my tired eyes, I ached for the dream, but it slipped away from me, leaving me with a distant sense of longing.

  But I was warm.

  There were strong arms around me. Rez’s arms. I knew the smell of him, the feel of his skin, and would have known my mate’s touch if I was blind. I pulled his arms up to my chest, snuggled back against him, and felt the beating of his heart like it was my own. His breath was calm and easy, and seemed to move in time with my own lungs.