Falling to Ash

by Karen Mahoney

  To Kyle’s credit he didn’t beg for mercy and he didn’t try to resist.

  Sickened, I turned away and let my Maker finish securing the bonds.

  Jace had walked away. He sat by his father’s body with his back to me. I wanted to comfort him, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that he wouldn’t want me to touch him right now. The tension in his shoulders and the way he held his body told me everything I needed to know. We’d locked eyes just once in the past few minutes, but he had turned away from me as though I was a stranger.

  My stomach clenched with the injustice of it: This was hardly my fault, I wanted to scream at him. But that wouldn’t matter to him right now.

  I swallowed and took one more look at Kyle, wrapped in his silver cocoon like the victim of a giant spider. The sun would rise in a matter of minutes and Theo had already headed back down to his half-wrecked home. Kyle’s eyes were open and I knew why. He probably hadn’t seen the sun in at least half a century – this would be his last chance.

  His only chance.

  I shivered as a sharp breeze lifted the hair from my face. Thin fingers of sunlight inched their way from between gray clouds, pushing through nearly invisible gaps. I turned away from the shining aura that slowly began to surround the restrained vamp. His blond hair looked brighter than I ever remembered seeing it. The sun was already surprisingly intense; a few stray beams hit the glass of neighboring windows, and I winced in reflexive sympathy as Kyle screwed up his eyes against the glare. His skin began to blacken and shrivel, like meat on a barbecue. Bones cracked and melted. His body gradually collapsed in on itself, the decay of the grave taking minutes rather than years.

  He burned under the sun, falling to ash in the first light of dawn.

  Silence spread like a balm. Kyle was gone.

  I crawled across the roof to Caitlín, reaching her after what felt like hours. I collapsed beside her, pulling her into my arms and propping myself up against the low wall. I checked her breathing again then rested my cheek against hers. I could take her downstairs when my legs felt like working again. Theo was most likely waiting for me before he slept; I needed him to wake her.

  The morning sun on my face felt like a blessing. I didn’t know how much longer I would be able to experience this – I couldn’t take it for granted and I would need my shades on very soon, but for the moment I just felt human again as the sun stroked my skin. I held my sister tightly and thought about what might have happened, how bad things could have been.

  We were lucky, I knew that.

  I couldn’t take anything for granted, and I didn’t think I ever would.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I FELT JACE approach before I saw him.

  His arm pressed against mine as he sat next to me, looking out at the slowly rising sun. We didn’t speak for a long time, and there was a treacherous part of me that wished we could stay here forever. If we left the roof, I’d only have to go back downstairs to face Theo. I didn’t want to have to live this life anymore.

  While I could still survive under the sun – a winter dawn couldn’t do more than hurt my eyes – I wanted to make the most of it.

  ‘I’m so sorry about your dad, Jace.’

  He took a deep breath; I felt it in the rise and fall of his body. ‘Yeah, because he was such a great guy.’

  I glanced at him sharply, but had to look away at the intensity of anguish written in his eyes.

  ‘He was still your dad.’ I thought of my own father, safely tucked away with his grief and his memories, picturing his drink-lined face and his fading red hair.

  Jace stirred against me. ‘Why did he have to be working with that . . . thing?’

  I shivered and clutched Caitlín a little more tightly. ‘Thing’ was a pretty good word for Kyle, but was Jace referring to his being a vampire or just the fact that he was a back-stabbing, murdering bastard? I was sort of hoping for the latter, but if I was honest I couldn’t be sure of anything right now. Least of all how Jason Murdoch might feel about me after everything that had happened.

  ‘I don’t know, Jace.’ Wow, how much did I suck at the whole offering-comfort gig?

  But it didn’t matter now; none of it mattered anymore. Kyle was dead. Dead for real, this time – no coming back for another chance at existence. And more important than that, there would be no more innocent kids being taken and drained and then turned into shambling revenants. No more casual death for teenagers like Rick and Erin and Byron, or for innocent bystanders like Nurse Fox.

  There was also the not insignificant detail that Theo had, by default, successfully completed his task for Solomon. His position of Master vampire in Boston was safe. We were safe – both of us. Although there was a job vacancy for a new Enforcer.

  ‘Seems like Kyle was leaving a trail of bodies in the hope of framing your Maker,’ Jace said. I kind of got the impression that he needed to talk about something – anything to delay the inevitable of dealing with his father’s body.

  My lips tightened. ‘Yeah. Seems like it.’ Theo had still drunk from an underage kid – Erin – but at least he wasn’t a murderer. He hadn’t gone rogue. That should make me feel a whole lot better, but somehow I couldn’t find it in myself to be happy. Funny how that worked. Had Theo not fed from Erin in the first place, she would never have ended up in the hands of Kyle. Never ended up dead . . . I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I could somehow dislodge the unshed tears I knew were there. ‘I’m sorry, Jace. Sorry he was involved in any of this.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. Looks like Dad was involved enough all by himself.’ He lowered himself until he was sitting in the gravel of the rooftop, leaning against a low wall. ‘He always hated the creatures he hunted. That was his mistake: getting emotionally involved.’

  Emotionally involved. The words echoed inside my head. Was I emotionally involved with Jace? I looked at him, wishing I could say that I didn’t care. For a moment, I seriously wished that I’d never met him. He was a human being, and one who had wanted to kill me when we first met. Not that I truly believed he would have followed through – not now that I knew him a little better. But after what had just happened to his father – and what Theo still had to do with Murdoch’s head to complete his challenge – how could I know he wouldn’t change his mind about me and put me right back at the top of his hit list?

  I tried to wipe the blood off my face with my sleeve, but I only managed to smear it around. Oh, well. Healing fast had its uses. I glanced at Jace and found him watching me. My stomach dipped. I remembered the feel of his lips on mine, but the hard look in his eyes made it seem like a dream. I wasn’t sure if it was a good dream or a bad one, but either way it was a long time ago. I wanted so much to believe it had happened. To believe in him.

  I reached out, tentative, placed the tips of my fingers against his cheek. I felt his jaw tighten, but he didn’t move away.

  ‘Moth, I need to leave.’

  His voice made me jump. I rested my hand back on Caitlín’s shoulder and looked away from him. ‘OK, I’m not stopping you. And Theo won’t be outside again until sunset. I can deal with things here.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I mean . . . I need to leave. Get away from here. Figure out what to do about my dad. I’ll do what I have to do for him, make it right – and then lose myself for a while.’

  Everybody leaves, I thought. Everyone goes away or I leave them. Maybe that was my superpower: driving people away. My lip trembled like a stupid girl’s. I laid Caitlín gently to one side and climbed to my feet. It felt like my body weighed a ton.

  ‘Where will you go?’ I asked. I thought of the OPI – they would be a natural home for someone like Jace. Would he join the ‘Spook Squad’? Be my enemy forever? I cursed my vivid imagination. Surely he wouldn’t do something like that. Jason Murdoch struck me as more of a natural loner.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He answered me before I could say anything further, put any ideas into his head. ‘Maybe somewhere in Europe. Dad has money
put aside – I guess he won’t be needing it anymore.’

  I tried to push away the sadness that threatened to overwhelm me as Jace stood up and stepped toward me. I swallowed, wondering why I couldn’t stop shaking and hating myself for it. He touched my face with fingers made sticky with his father’s blood. I didn’t care, for once hardly noticing the scent. All I could think about was how close he was to me and how much I wanted him to hold me. I wanted to ask him not to leave – not yet – but I couldn’t speak past the confused emotions bunched together in my throat.

  And then he pulled me against him, pressing my head against his chest and folding me in his arms. The feeling of safety reminded me of what it was like when Theo held me, only that was more like the embrace of a father – a father who loved me. Right now there was nothing familial about the desire warming my stomach. I felt a hunger I only vaguely remembered; not a hunger for blood, but for something so much sweeter. I buried my face into the rough material of Jace’s jacket, took a deep breath so that I could remember his scent.

  Jace rested his chin against the top of my head and I felt his jaw move as he spoke. ‘I didn’t realize vampires could be so sentimental.’

  I could hear the smile in his voice, and for some reason that made the tears spill over. His father had died and I was the one crying. But of course, I wasn’t shedding tears for Murdoch Senior.

  Jace released me, holding me away from him and looking into my eyes. ‘Will you be OK? I mean, with him. Theo.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  I looked up sharply, but for once there was no judgment in his voice or on his face. I shrugged. ‘Maybe one day,’ I said. ‘But that day is not now.’

  ‘Don’t let him control you,’ Jace said. ‘You’re better than that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ My voice was huskier than ever. ‘What about you? Are you OK?’

  ‘I will be.’ His gaze flicked over to where he’d dragged his father’s body and his jaw tightened. ‘There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.’

  We both turned our attention to Kyle’s ashes, stirring gently in the morning breeze. I shivered, but not from the cold. I avoided looking at Murdoch’s body. ‘Theo will sort it, Jace. All of it. He’ll treat your father’s remains with respect – he always respected him as a hunter. Just go . . .’

  I didn’t say anything about the Council, or about Theo needing Murdoch’s head. It really wasn’t what Jace needed to hear right now.

  Much later, after Theo had done the ‘cleaning up’ he had to do, I walked into his bedroom, not bothering to knock. He should have been sleeping, recovering his strength, but I straightened my spine and fixed him with a serious expression.

  ‘I need to know the truth. About that night.’

  ‘Which night are we talking about? There have been many nights between us.’

  Blushing, but refusing to back down, I continued to press him. ‘You know which night I’m talking about. There has only ever been one quite like it.’

  He visibly deflated. The expression on his face was loud and clear: Here we go again. ‘You mean, when I turned you.’

  ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘when we slept together.’

  ‘Which was the same night, if my memory serves.’ His eyes narrowed as he clearly wondered where I was going with this.

  ‘I want to know if you compelled me to sleep with you. If I was somehow . . . under your control.’

  Anger flashed across his face, there and gone in less than a second. But I saw it and braced myself for his reply.

  ‘Ah, my Moth. If you remembered that evening as well as I, you would not be so quick to claim I needed to compel women to my bed.’

  Now my whole face was burning. ‘Theo, I need to know.’

  ‘You loved me,’ he said, his voice rough with emotion.

  ‘I still do,’ I replied, surprised to find that I meant it. ‘I always will. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Recently, I’ve been remembering things. I remembered a lot of stuff from that time, and I can’t help wondering how much of it was my choice – and how much of it was your . . . influence.’

  ‘I didn’t force you.’ His voice was cold with anger.

  ‘That’s not what I said.’ I took a step forward, expecting him to pull away and unbearably relieved when he didn’t. I laced my cold fingers with his. ‘I asked if you used your abilities – your vampire abilities, I mean,’ I added hastily.

  He smiled, but it was an unbearably sad expression. ‘I did not. I . . . could never have done that to you, m’anamchara.’

  Now my heart was pounding, and I felt suddenly afraid. ‘Don’t call me that. Not now.’

  He brought my hand to his mouth, brushed my knuckles with soft lips and then held my hand against his heart.

  A heart that had stopped beating a century and a half ago.

  ‘You know that vampires have natural pheromones – a body chemistry that far exceeds that of our previous human form.’

  ‘Yes.’ I also knew that the older the vamp, the more powerful the pheromones. It’s what draws our prey to us and relaxes them enough to enjoy the process of sharing blood.

  ‘If I, to use your own word, “influenced” you in any way, it was something done without my conscious control. My pheromones would have convinced you that you were safe with me, but no more than that.’

  I didn’t know whether to feel anger or relief.

  Anger won. ‘But I wasn’t safe, was I? That’s the whole point.’

  Theo bristled. ‘I gave you eternal life. Many would be willing to die for such a gift.’

  ‘And I did have to die for it, didn’t I?’ I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice. ‘You took my humanity.’

  ‘You will only truly lose your humanity if you let it go.’

  ‘That’s not true. It’s not something I can control – not entirely.’

  He touched my hair, stroking it gently, almost absentmindedly. ‘Moth, I’ve been twenty-six for precisely one hundred and sixty-eight years. Do I get tired? Of course. Do I move further away from the person I was born as? Undoubtedly. But I still remember what it means to be human.’

  ‘And that’s why you could turn me in the first place?’

  ‘I believe so, yes. I still possessed enough of my soul to share it with another.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My shoulders slumped and I shook off his hand. ‘I can’t help feeling angry at you. It’s like . . . you took something that wasn’t yours.’

  ‘I don’t know how many times I can tell you that I regret what happened.’ He dropped my hand as though my skin burned him. ‘I rarely apologize for anything, Marie. It is not what the head of a Family does. And yet I have apologized to you, many times.’

  ‘Being sorry doesn’t give me back my life. My real life.’

  ‘Did you ever stop to think that perhaps this is your real life? Perhaps you were always meant for greater things.’

  Greater things? Was my life, now, something greater? I wasn’t convinced.

  ‘So what you’re saying,’ I said slowly, wanting to make sure I really understood, ‘is that although you didn’t roofie me, you might have gotten me a little drunk.’

  His expression was one of distaste. ‘It is an unpleasant analogy, little one.’

  ‘But it’s the truth?’

  ‘It will do. Are you satisfied?’

  ‘No. But thank you for telling me the truth.’

  He frowned. ‘Perhaps you will forgive me, in time.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Epilogue

  I have stared death in the face – on more than one occasion – and yet I still dread sitting at a dinner table with my biological family.

  Strange how something so simple can feel so complicated. So terrifying.

  I caught my younger sister’s eye and her lips twitched. Caitlín’s happiness made it difficult to worry about being here too much. I gave her a sickl
y smile in return.

  Almost a week had passed since what had become known in Theo’s Family as a failed coup. Kyle was gone. Thomas Murdoch too. At least three teenagers from my past life had died – plus an unfortunate, hard-working nurse called Stephanie Fox – during Kyle’s attempt to unseat Theo from his position as Master of Boston’s Family of vampires.

  All along, he’d been part of the growing movement of vamps who believed it was time to ‘come out of the coffin’ and take their place alongside human beings in the world. Politics or violence, two pathways toward independence, and there were groups aligned on either side within the vampire community. Kyle was a member of the United Vampire Alliance, or UVA.

  Yeah, the name was ironic. Never let it be said that the undead don’t have a twisted sense of humor.

  Theo was safe. The High Council had Murdoch’s head, and that meant that I was safe too. I couldn’t help but feel a warm glow at being fully accepted into the Family, no matter how much I wanted to deny it. There would be no more hiding for me. My un-life was opening up to new possibilities.

  I glanced around the dinner table and tried hard not to think about Jason Murdoch. I especially hadn’t given any thought to that one kiss beneath Murdoch Senior’s van, or to the feel of his arms around me on Theo’s roof the last time I saw him.

  Well, OK, it might have crossed my mind once or twice. But, in all honesty, I was mostly thinking about that terrible, lost expression on his face as he sat by his father’s body. Jace would be far away from here by now, taking the break he needed to get his head straight. Maybe even going back to school, but I doubted that somehow. He’d talked about there being a ‘network’ of independent hunters across the US. I worried about whether or not he might feel it was his duty to take on Daddy’s mantle for real. I was glad he didn’t know how his father’s body had been mutilated before burial. It was probably for the best that he never found out.