Once Salvatore realized what being a god truly meant, I was done for.
“Why don’t you quit, Strigoi?” I could hear the contemptuous sneer back in the Sanguinarian’s voice as he taunted me, the rush of power restoring his battered confidence. “You, like your people, were doomed from the beginning.” He raised his hand high, and a multitude of blood-red blades, each one perfectly curved and keenly edged, rippled into being, drawing their fluid from the very ground beneath us.
Those blades descended in a volley without warning or waiting for a response, and I hunkered down in Charles’ heavy coat, covering my head with my arms and trusting my life to the wizard’s enchantments, while Salvatore’s display of magic pounded me into the ground.
Blows rained down long enough that it took me a moment to realize when the assault had ceased. Shaking it off, I pushed myself to my feet and cracked a stubborn grin. “I guess I’m just too stupid to know when to quit.”
Both of his hands reached for the sky, and the light darkened as the blood mage manifested another arsenal from nothingness. With a delighted, depraved cry, he brought them down on me in a torrent.
The sheer force crumpled me, flattening my body against the ground, and I was forced to draw more heavily on the death in the air to remain intact. Fortunately, Charles’ coat acted almost as a magical bulletproof vest, blunting the edges of spikes, swords, and spears, converting them to sheer bludgeoning force that was easier for my undead body to withstand.
It took a moment, but when it was over, I slowly struggled to my feet again, bones creaking. “That all you got, asshole?” I spat out a globule of my own dark ichor, tainting his red bloody floor. “My grandmother hits harder than that.”
My eyes followed his superior smirk and the line of his own bleeding orbs upward to the massive hammer of manifest blood already hanging over my head.
“Uh-oh.”
I drained almost all of the remaining death energy an instant before the Sanguinarian magician literally dropped the hammer on me.
A mind-numbing volume of blood smashed apart on my body, flattening me like a crimson tsunami shattering against a cliff.
“Ashley. Ashley, please get up.” The voice reminded me of Tamara and Lori alike, but it was so small. So afraid. Where was it coming from? It seemed so close. It took me a moment to put the pieces back together and stubbornly put my limbs back under my battered body. “You’ve got to get back up, please.” Fearful emerald eyes glowed with inner fire as a small figure helped push me to my feet, smearing my blood on her pale skin as she shouldered part of my weight.
I regained awareness of my surroundings in time to register how dim the light was, the blazing eye-sun flaring fitfully and dipping below the horizon. I also suddenly registered Salvatore, the angry vampire about five feet from my face.
“Stop!” The cry rang out, resonating and powerful from such a weak, young throat, as Daniella stepped in front of me before I could stop her.
The command, while impassioned, didn’t grasp at my soul the way Tamara’s could—and it didn’t even slow Salvatore down.
“There you are.” He slapped Daniella aside without a second thought, his attention—and rage—solely focused on me. She crumpled to the ground, and for a moment, I panicked, concerned that the peak of Salvatore’s strength had killed her outright until I saw her roll over, her green eyes glowing as she curled into a ball and clutched at her injured side.
“I wondered where she’d gotten off to,” Salvatore grabbed me by the throat again and slammed me into the toothy outcropping behind me, burying me in it a foot deep. The sky flickered fitfully behind him as I struggled. “Though I’m not certain it matters anymore. Look how mighty I am now.”
Just a little longer. Gotta hold the line just a little longer. “Yeah. You win the supernatural dick-measuring contest.” Bits of bone and enamel broke free as I lunged at my foe, but Salvatore matter-of-factly caught my arm, twisting it to the side in a joint lock and hauling me off balance. With a wordless snarl of victory, the empowered magician locked my arm in place, bringing his other fist down in a powerful hammer blow to the back of my elbow.
I winced at the grisly sounds my own body made as duct tape squealed and tore free, my bones cracking as they came out of their proper place, ripping through skin, cloth, and tape alike as my arm bent the wrong way.
Slamming me against the broken tooth, Salvatore pinned me there, his eyes still angry but also cold and cruel. I braced myself.
“Do you know what happens to your body when your kind get staked, Strigoi?”
I snarled, the rage I’d kept a handle on all this time bubbling up and stealing my words.
“You’re paralyzed, of course, but you still see, hear, feel everything that goes on around you.” A long, perfectly sculpted claw of dense, rippling blood slid slowly free of his index finger. I tried to push him away, but Salvatore’s strength now far exceeded mine. “Feel everything that happens to you.”
He pressed me against the tooth-stone, still holding me motionless, but the attitude behind it abruptly changed as he pressed his legs against mine.
“We didn’t get to to torture as many of your kind as we’d have liked, you know. You were too dangerous to bother tormenting you before you died.” He sighed, almost wistful, his eyes dripping blood freely. Behind him, the macabre “sunset” dimmed the edges of the horizon.
Salvatore slowly raised the blood claw he’d formed, poising it well above the left side of my chest, letting me get a good look at it. “Maybe, when all of this is over,” he mused, “I’ll even go find your friend Lori. Give her a good long bite.” He showed off the addictive venom dripping from his long, serpentine fangs.
Now trembling with rage, I spat dark blood out onto his crimson vest. “You gonna talk about it or do it?” I snapped. “Some of us don’t have all night.”
With a fresh snarl, Salvatore plunged the long claw down.
It sheared through both layers of borrowed sweater, no problem. Its tip hit the hit the thick, flat panel of cast iron I’d hidden underneath the clothes and broke off, but even blunted and slowed, it still penetrated the inch of makeshift armor, drilling through the metal in search of my heart.
Then it hit the layer of salt wrapped in cloth behind that, and burst like a soap bubble.
Salvatore spasmed, his concentration shattered by the backlash, and I laughed in his face. In response, his arm went high, another long, jagged claw dripping from his finger and aimed at my chest. In his rage, his anger at being foiled again, he must have drawn heavily on his stolen blood realm—one final time.
I watched with grim satisfaction as the sky behind him blackened around the edges, going dark and crumbling like the molting wings of a falling angel.
His claw plummeted toward my chest.
It was finally time to act.
My dangling, badly damaged arm snapped up, eighteen inches of blood-rusted, razor-sharp metal punching through a shocked Salvatore’s ribs, shredding the Sanguinarian blood organs hidden within. They ruptured, already overfilled to near-bursting with stolen blood, and his claw shattered upon striking my hidden breastplate.
As Salvatore’s deific strength failed and fled, I snatched up Charles’ salt pouch and upended the rest of the contents into his face for good measure. The coarse granules settled into his bloody eyes like razor-edged snowflakes, absorbing into the bleeding crimson.
He screamed.
I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. Strigoi rage, this time icy cold instead of tinting my vision with its blazing heat, rose unbidden at the sound.
Around us, the sky shook, chunks falling free just like in the childhood fable. The blood under our feet started to darken and decay as well, as if spoiling and drying up, all at once.
But I only had eyes for my tormentor.
“This…won’t stop me,” Salvatore staggered, trying to manifest his magic, but with his internal organs ruptured—and thus, with no blood to draw on to repair the
m—it wouldn’t obey him properly.
I kicked his legs out from under him, and stepped on his hand while he tried to clutch at his perforated chest or maybe rub at his salt-encrusted eyes. Sanguinarian bones ground to meal under my boot, even as they tried desperately to heal back, and he squirmed and gasped in agony.
“You really were stupid, you know,” I rasped, staring down at him coldly, watching his agony with satisfaction. “I wasn’t here to fight you, to match wits or powers with you, or even to rescue Daniella. I was here to distract you.” I grinned wolfishly as he squirmed, staring up at me with bloody, unfocused, eyes filled with sudden realization.
“Meanwhile, back Home, Charles destroyed your blood pool.” I carefully pinned his other wrist beneath my boot and slowly applied the same bone-crumpling pressure. “Without a blood pool, without Maggie, without a Blood Man, without the tormented souls buried there...I guess you’re shit out of luck.”
As Salvatore cried out in agony and tried to pull away, I examined my broken arm, ragged bits of tissue dangling from the joint. The lack of proper tendons and working joints didn’t seem to matter, not compared to Strigoi magic and pure, unadulterated will. But I reset it anyway, snapping the bones back into place with a quick yank.
“That was Charles’ job,” I continued coldly. “Mine was stringing you along, keeping you pissed off and unfocused, kicking your ass but not hurting you badly enough that you’d have to call on your powers to save your life and realize how close to godhood you were.” My smile was purely wicked. “And you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. And let it all dribble through your fingers. I hope you enjoyed your squandered godhood while it lasted.”
I glanced up as a not-sound reverberated through the decaying little world and watched a hole rot completely out of the sky, exposing a blank, glassy nothing behind it.
“But you’re trapped here now too,” Salvatore rasped. “You had that wizard...destroy all the ties that bound Here to Home and Next Door. You...stranded yourself.” He managed the vestige of a broken, satisfied smile. “You lose too.”
“Ah, how wrong you are, asshole.” I untied a small, burlap sack from its place in Charles’ heavy, battered coat. A single button eye and unfaltering smile peered out of the opening. “Turns out that’s just you.”
Something tugged at my waist. I twisted, irritable at the interruption, to see what it could possibly be.
I looked down into the deep emerald eyes of Daniella Moroaică.
“Please, Ashley…” She glanced up at the dying horizon, the collapsing sky. “I want to go Home.” I could feel her fear leaking outward, as well as her hope and faith in me. Those Moroi eyes snapped me out of the cold, angry trance I was in, the hardened Strigoi rage bleeding out of me.
I smiled. “You’re right. It’s time to go.” I took her hand.
As we turned to walk away, Salvatore’s own shattered hands snaked out, trying desperately to grasp at our ankles, watery, meager blood claws struggling to form at the tips of his fingers. “Please,” he said, his voice broken and pitiful. “You can’t just leave me here… Please. Show mercy. Anything but this.”
I considered, but it only took me a moment to know in my heart the right thing to do.
“Killing you would be the only mercy you deserve,” I rasped, a tinge of that icy Strigoi wrath creeping back in. “But you killed children. You reveled in torturing and wiping out my people. You threatened Lori. You don't deserve my mercy.”
I spat at his feet and stepped away, leaving Salvatore behind as I took Maggie’s doll from its sack and cradled it in my arms. “Besides,” I said over my shoulder, “you’re kind of a crazy asshole, and I just plain don’t like your face.”
Daniella trembled; I pulled her close and filled her vision with my damaged but smiling face. I held her and Maggie’s doll close, shielding the young Moroi with my body as the Blood Man’s realm imploded around us.
- - -
For a moment that lasted forever, I was at peace. Then I felt the signal, Charles’ signal, cutting through the nothing as something moved in my arms, tugging insistently against me. Slowly, I remembered there was somewhere else I needed to be.
I grabbed hold of that lifeline and pulled, spilling us out of the abyss and into bright, blinding light.
Taking us Home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Epilogue: A night to remember
Daniella had sprinted into Tamara’s arms, the two of them comforting each other through happy tears as only Moroi sisters could do. Even if nothing else had, that sight alone would have made everything I’d struggled through ultimately worth it.
I was substantially less certain of her sister’s desire to treat me like some sort of legendary hero. I only had one thing in common with Hercules, and it sure wasn’t a massive chest. In lieu of being introduced to Tamara’s family as a conquering soldier, I’d insisted that Tamara take all the credit instead. As I saw it, this might just keep me out of the spotlight a little longer—and we both knew that the Moroi would try to use me just as much as Salvatore would have, just in a different manner and to different ends.
“Besides,” I’d said, “it might even get you out of the doghouse.”
In the end, even Daniella had promised to keep the secret. Only time would tell how events would flow from there.
As soon as that decision had been settled, I started to make my way out of the junkyard, only to be stopped by a squinting Charles, who promptly stripped the coat off my back. “You’re leaving? Just like that? Leaving us with all the cleanup?”
I thought about it for a split second. “This time? Yep, I sure am.” I grinned.
“Leave her alone,” Tamara called. “She deserves it. She’s got somewhere to be.” The Moroi shot me a wink.
“And what the hell did you put my poor coat through…” He wandered off, grumbling, never even asking if I was okay. “Simply barbaric,” I heard him mumble.
- - -
I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to Rain and Jason though. For people so young, they’d been surprisingly steadfast allies. Without their noses and the stealing run they’d made earlier tonight, I wouldn’t be standing right now.
I found them near where the blood pool used to be, now a mundane, muddy hollow over a shallow fissure in the earth. They didn’t look as happy as I would have expected; in fact Jason in particular looked downright depressed.
“Why the long faces, guys?” I rasped. “The good guys won.”
Jason stared at the still-moist earth. “But at what cost? You mighta kicked his ass in the end, chica muerta, but...we failed all of those kids, you know. All the others.” He sounded like an echo of my thoughts, reaching me hours after I’d finally voiced them.
“And all we could do was sit here while you did it, playing magical gopher for Charles,” Rain added. “Not that it wasn’t pretty awesome, but still...”
In place of the missing Corey, it seemed Charles had conscripted two new younglings for his ritual assistants.
I shook my head. “I know. It hurts. But we’ve got to count the victories we can reach. Someone once told me that we do the best we know how to do, and when we know better, we do better.”
“That’s...pretty smart,” Jason finally said. “Who told you that?”
I grinned. “Oh, just some asshole.” Somewhere in the distance, I could feel Charles’ eyes boring into my back. “But a pretty cool asshole.”
“Still, though. I wish we could have done more,” Rain said, rising to his feet.
“Guys.” I made sure to catch both their sets of amber-tinted eyes and took Jason’s hand to pull him to his feet as well. “I’m not certain anyone else did more.”
I took turns clasping each of their hands, and Rain grinned at me. “Does this mean…” The young shifter blushed a little. “Maybe we could all hang out and watch a movie sometime?”
I nodded, a smile slowly spreading across my face. “That sounds good.”
- - -
&n
bsp; To my surprise, I also passed Hershel on the way out.
“I thought you left already,” I rasped, caught off guard.
“Had to stay for the end credits,” he replied with a beard-splitting grin. “Don’t worry, Ash. I didn’t help, so you don’t owe me anything.”
As I started on my way out, I paused, remembering what he’d said days ago. I grinned. “Well, Hersh, I did it.”
“Did what?” He raised a curious, bushy eyebrow.
“I weathered that storm,” I replied with a note of pride.
His smile took on a hint of sadness, and he sighed. “Ashley...this wasn’t the storm.”
I stood there so long that Hershel left the scrapyard before I did. I would have remained there, thinking, even longer, had I not heard Charles bellowing angrily about me leaving him an entire live troll to dispose of.
- - -
I fixed my hair as best I could. I dressed myself for the occasion, digging out the one clean set of clothes in my possession, the nice ones I kept safely wrapped and tucked away for just such a hopeful occasion.
I re-wrapped my arms with ace bandages, extras I’d ended up somehow carrying home from St. Valentine’s. I braved a very thorough shower and sprayed on way too much perfume—because not doing both was nearly unthinkable. I even went a little further goth than ever before and applied some heavy, dark makeup, trying to cover up some of the recent wounds while I was at it.
I made it to our dinner date an hour late, and everything was perfect. At least, as perfect as I could have hoped.
But the biggest surprise came halfway through my sixteen ounce ribeye and her double club sandwich.
“So tell me what happened. Tonight, I mean.”
I glanced up, surprised. “Um…” I momentarily forgot how to talk.
She rolled her eyes fondly and gave me a hesitant smile. “I’ve decided…I don’t want things to stay like this between us.” She locked eyes with me, and I fell into her beautiful, slate gray eyes like I always did. “I’m willing to try…If you’re willing to be patient and not overload me.”
Blood Red Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 2) Page 29
