Demon Ash

by M. J. Haag

  He waited for me to lead the way and fell in step beside me. I could feel his gaze on me and glanced at him with a kind smile, wondering how long it would take before the fey stopped being so curious about women.

  “Did everything go well on the mission today?” I asked. “It looks like you ran into a little trouble.”

  He grunted in the non-committal way they liked to communicate, so I tried a different topic.

  “Have you seen any girls you’d like to meet? I’d be happy to introduce you.”

  I stepped off the path and pointed to an area between us and the field.

  “I think we can dump the peels right there.”

  He continued walking right past where I’d pointed. I frowned and hurried after him. The fey had farmed a long time in those caverns and had probably picked up a few tricks. If he wanted to place the peels somewhere else, it was fine with me.

  Just a few yards from the fence, he set the pot on the ground and turned toward me.

  “Don’t you think putting the peels this close to the fence is a little dangerous? I mean, I know there aren’t many animals out there now. But once the hellhounds are gone, I think having a compost pile here might attract them.”

  He tilted his head and studied me for a moment.

  “What’s your name?” he rasped.

  “Mya,” I said automatically. How could he possibly not know that by now?

  Between one heartbeat and the next, I realized my mistake. The scars. The dirty clothes.

  This wasn’t a friendly fey from Ernisi. One of the exiled criminals stood before me.

  I opened my mouth, ready to scream for help, when he crouched forward, knocking the wind out of me with his shoulder to my middle as he picked me up. In a familiar move, he took a running start at the fence before I could catch my breath. The ground fell away underneath me. A second later, we landed with a thud on the other side of the fence, and he took off running.

  Every time I opened my mouth to scream, Merdon bounced me on his shoulder, cutting off my air supply. My stomach wanted to heave as the world sped past beneath his feet.

  Drav.

  What would he think? I’d promised them all that I wouldn’t leave.

  The scenery changed. The once dense forest thinned, and Merdon ran next to a road. The pavement blurred under his feet, changing to lush grass. Then, the ground got very far away again. My stomach felt weightless, and bile crawled up my throat.

  The fey dropped to the ground and slowed his pace. I lifted my head as Merdon stopped and wood creaked under our combined weight.

  My heart pounded in my chest at the sight of an untamed yard. Why would he take me to a house?

  He stepped inside and flipped me off his shoulder onto the hardwood floor. I teetered, dizzy. His hands gripped my shoulders tightly.

  “You will stay, Mya.”

  Twenty

  Merdon didn’t say my name with respect or reverence like the other fey did. I studied his iridescent yellow eyes.

  “It would be best if I didn’t stay,” I said.

  He released my shoulders and gave me a nudge further into the living room.

  “You will stay. You will listen to us.”

  Us? Shit.

  “Listen to you? What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Maybe she is like the stupid humans,” a gravelly voice said from the back of the house.

  I pivoted toward the source.

  A fey stepped down the darkened hallway, his gait unbalanced. His dim outline made him look bigger than any of the other fey. Big enough that his broad shoulders almost brushed the walls as he moved forward.

  I took a step back, bumping into Merdon as the new fey stepped into the light.

  His hair barely brushed his shoulders, but his body was riddled with scars. Bite marks, bullet wounds, and jagged lines from deep cuts…a map of the brutality he’d suffered since his last resurrection.

  His eyes glittered with vivid yellow and dark green as he stared at me.

  “So, human. Are you stupid like the others?” he asked.

  “No. And, my name is Mya.”

  He turned his gaze to Merdon.

  “Why did you bring her here?”

  “She was the one in the woods, Thallirin. The one Drav protects.”

  Oh, that didn’t sound good. I blinked as I realized what woods he referred to. The moment outside McAlester when I’d had my pants down in the trees and an infected almost found me. I’d kissed Merdon by mistake. I stepped away from him, my eyes rounding.

  “Hmm,” Thallirin said as Merdon stepped toward me, a slight smile on his lips.

  “You remember.” Merdon crowded me, forcing me backwards until I hit the edge of the couch.

  “Sit.”

  I sat and turned my head so I wouldn’t be staring at his waist. I really didn’t want to know what he thought of the kiss in the woods. Clasping my hands so they wouldn’t shake, I reminded myself that the fey at Whiteman had been checking on me at regular intervals. When they found an empty kitchen, they would start looking. Hopefully, they’d find the pot by the fence and figure things out.

  Merdon stepped aside, and Thallirin stalked closer.

  “We want our exile lifted,” Thallirin said.

  “What?” I said. I’d heard him just fine. However, I didn’t understand why he was talking to me about their exile.

  “We want our exile lifted,” he repeated, crossing his arms over his chest.

  The cold, empty look in his eyes made my stomach churn. I swallowed with difficulty and tried to keep my voice from shaking.

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “I saw you with Drav,” Merdon said. “He watches you. Carries you. Protects you. You are of importance to him. Even Molev consults you.”

  Thallirin leaned toward me, his hands braced against the back of the couch on either side of my head. His piercing gaze pinned me, and I tried not to shiver in fear.

  “Are you important, Mya?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, afraid to lie. I was important in the way they were implying. Drav would do anything to get me back. That these two knew that terrified me.

  Thallirin’s gaze shifted between my two eyes.

  “I see why. Your eyes beg me for mercy. For protection.” He lifted a finger and gently brushed my cheek. “So soft and fragile. I would want to protect you, too.”

  He straightened away from me suddenly.

  “Breathe, Mya. We mean you no harm.”

  I exhaled shakily and tried to muster some courage.

  “I’m not sure I believe you. Molev exiled you because you killed someone. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.”

  When Merdon growled something in their language, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Thallirin, however, didn’t seem upset. He sat in the stuffed chair near me, the furniture creaking under his weight.

  “That is why you are here. To listen when they would not.” His gaze never wavered from mine. “Will you listen, Mya?”

  I nodded jerkily. I’d listen to whatever he wanted and give the fey time so they could find me.

  “We are not the dangerous criminals they think us to be,” Thallirin said. He leaned back in the chair and considered me for a moment. “Merdon saw Drav take you to the entrance of our home. You saw the glowing rocks in our world, yes?”

  I nodded again.

  “They give light and life, like this one.” He lifted his wrist and showed me his crystal bracelet. “My first memory is of the caves and holding this crystal I now wear. I knew how to speak but didn’t know my name or where I was. None of us did. That was our beginning.

  “We started with nothing but the crystals we held and the seeds in our pouches. We worked hard, tying the crystals to our wrists to free our hands to help the plants grow. We spread out, working in small groups in the caves with the brightest crystals. We hunted to feed ourselves and wasted nothing because we had nothing.”

  He leaned forward, his gaze intense. “We plante
d. We hunted. We moved on. We did not know the monsters we were creating. You cannot imagine the confusion and desperation when the first hounds found us. We did not know what they were, only that they hunted us.”

  He exhaled heavily.

  “It took time, and many deaths, to build the wall around our city. I was not the first reborn to the pool. But, I was the first to wonder how it worked. Why my clothes and hair did not return with me while my crystal did. No one else cared. The hellhounds were our priority.”

  “I tried not to care. I fought with the others to defend the wall and drive back the hounds. But with each death, I could not stop wondering why only the crystal always returned with us.

  “After the wall was finished, Merdon, Oelm, and I went to the source where we harvested the larger crystals to keep the hounds away. As I worked, I kept wondering about the crystal on my wrist. I crushed my crystal, needing to see what would happen to me. Nothing happened. I felt no different. I cut myself and still healed quickly.”

  He looked down at his arm, lifting it enough to turn it to study the scars covering his skin. After a moment, he leaned back in his chair and focused on me again.

  “Discouraged that I had been wrong about the crystal’s importance to our rebirths, I went to retrieve a new one from the source. It gave me another, freely. It also filled my head with a vision of this world. Of killing a deer and waiting for it to come back to life.”

  “I saw that, too,” I said, believing him. “When Drav brought me to your world, he wanted me to have a crystal. He thought it would work for me like it did for you, but the source didn’t give me a crystal when I touched it. It gave me your history.”

  “And what did you see?”

  I repeated the story the source crystal had shown me. He said nothing when I finished. His gaze stayed locked on the floor.

  “What I don’t understand is, why did it show me something instead of just giving me a crystal?”

  “Because of our mistake.” The anger in his eyes turned to bitterness.

  “The crystal did not give me our history. Only the vision of the deer. And, I shared what the source crystal had shown me with Merdon and Oelm. All of us wondered what the vision meant. Oelm thought that the nearness of the crystals swayed the time it took to be reborn. He removed his crystal and told us to test his idea on him,” he continued.

  “And we did,” Merdon said from behind me.

  “When his body didn’t leave, we tied the crystal back to his wrist. Still, his body remained. We carried him back to the city and placed him in the pool, but nothing happened. Oelm never returned, but we learned how important our crystals were. We were foolish to test the truth of the vision on our friend, and we were exiled because of it.”

  I couldn’t deny that I felt a whole lot of pity for them. They’d made a huge mistake and had paid for it for a very long time. Why had the crystal shown Thallirin anything? Why had it shown me what it had? I looked at the floor, thinking.

  “The crystal had been trying to warn you,” I said, once again meeting his gaze. “At that time, you still didn’t know the hounds were from the deer you ate, did you?”

  “No. I believe the same as you. It was trying to tell us to stop killing the deer. We were too slow to understand that.”

  “I think the crystal was trying to warn me, too. My people are dying up here because of the hellhounds the fey accidentally created. The crystal changed you, giving you an immunity from the curse that created them. Humans don’t have that immunity. I think the crystal was telling me that humans need the fey.

  “It would have been easy for me to hate the fey for what’d been unleashed on my world had the crystal not shown me the truth. Now, I understand the fey had no choice about living in the caverns. I understand that none of you knew about the deer. I don’t hate any of the fey for what’s happened to my world.”

  I studied Thallirin for a minute, wondering what he would think of my next words.

  “And while I agree that you made a mistake in killing your friend and have suffered long enough for it, I can’t help but wonder if I should hate you for what you’ve done recently.

  “You’ve been shooting out lights and letting the hellhounds and infected inside the fence to attack my people. Not just at the base where you stole me from, but also the first place we stayed.”

  Merdon growled, his fangs showing in his anger.

  “They pierced our skin with their loud guns. They challenged us. It was our right to accept.”

  I considered both of them for a moment. They had no one to explain things to them. The other fey still wanted to remove heads when they were angry. Yet, they didn’t because of me. These two had done no more than Drav had in the beginning. I could still remember the feeling of terror when the lights at the gas station had been broken the night I met Drav. Was I stupid to consider giving these two a chance to start over?

  “Our ways are different. Gunfire isn’t a challenge,” I said. “It’s a warning to stay away. We humans are just trying to survive, and we are afraid.”

  “Ah,” Merdon said, calming.

  “Yes. Ah. The rules are different up here. You can’t behave the same way you did in the caves. What would you do if you were no longer exiled? What do you hope for?”

  “To no longer be alone,” Thallirin said.

  “We miss our brothers,” Merdon added.

  The fey didn’t have traditional families like humans, but they’d always had each other. Drav seemed to know each fey from his world and not just in passing. They were each other’s family. I’d gone crazy trying to get back to mine. Why wouldn’t it be the same for Thallirin and Merdon?

  I studied the pair. Merdon stood by Thallirin’s side. Both wore the same serious, forsaken expression. Both had more scars individually than I’d seen combined on all the other fey. They were fighters. Survivors. Like the rest of us. And, we humans needed as much help in this new world as we could get. Trading in an adversary for an ally made sense. Would Molev and Drav agree after I told them all of this?

  They knew these men better than I did.

  “You will speak on our behalf?” Thallirin asked, breaking the long silence.

  “I will. But, you didn’t help your case by stealing me. Drav is going to go crazy.”

  “But you will speak on our behalf,” Merdon insisted. “There was no other way for us to speak with you.”

  “I will, but I can’t guarantee it will help. Will you take me back to the base?”

  “No. We will wait. Our brothers will come to us.”

  “That’s probably not a wise plan. Your brothers would be more forgiving if you took me back.”

  Thallirin shook his head. “They would find us before we reached the fence and remove our heads before you could speak.”

  Given Drav’s reaction when he found me at the school, Thallirin had a valid point.

  “Fair enough. We’ll wait. You wouldn’t happen to have anything to eat, would you?” I asked.

  “I do not know. We have not been here long.”

  “Mind if I look?”

  Merdon extended his hand in the direction of the kitchen.

  Nodding my thanks, I stood and went to check the cabinets. Merdon and Thallirin followed, watching me. Finding nothing significant in the cupboards, I opened the fridge before quickly closing it. The power had obviously gone out long ago.

  “Don’t open that,” I said with a gag and a cough.

  Moving around the room, I opened a plain door and found the pantry. Inside, cans of pork and beans, tuna, and little snack packs of mac-n-cheese sat on the shelves.

  “Jackpot,” I called, grabbing the tuna for the fey and a can of pears and a tin of chicken for me.

  “Take a seat,” I said, re-emerging from the pantry. I gestured at the table when they didn’t move. “It’s okay to sit.”

  Merdon and Thallirin sat and only glanced at the cans I put before them.

  “You guys aren’t hungry?” I asked, already moving t
o find the can opener.

  Neither answered. When I glanced up from my search through the drawers, they were frowning at the cans. They didn’t know what the cans were.

  I found the can opener and grabbed some spoons from the drawers before joining them at the table. I reached over, picked up Merdon’s can, and slowly opened it for him.

  “It’s tuna,” I said. “A kind of meat that we’ve preserved.” I started opening Merdon’s can. “Most cans have something edible inside of them, but not all cans are meant for humans.”

  I set Merdon’s can before him then gave them their spoons.

  “I know you guys have rules about eating first based on the length of your hair. It’s not like that here. You can go ahead and eat,” I said, peeling the lid back on my chicken. After I took my first bite, they did the same.

  “So, what have you been doing up here?” I asked after swallowing.

  The two exchanged looks.

  “We have been exploring,” Merdon said.

  “And killing?”

  “We did not know there would be no rebirths,” Merdon said, frustration lacing his words.

  “You saw our home,” Thallirin said. “You saw the safety the wall provided. Without that wall, the hounds hunted us. Merdon and I died countless times. Though we were strong fighters, stronger than those with longer hair, we were also tired.

  “After the caves opened, we ran. We thought only of finding a place without the hounds. It was dark and strange. When we saw your people, they either wanted to bite us or use their guns. We accepted each challenge and removed many heads. But we never stayed to see their rebirth. Exile taught us to move. Fight. Stay alert.”

  “When did you realize we don’t come back?” I asked.

  “The birds in the sky killed many. No one returned,” Merdon said.

  “How did you learn English?”

  “We watched and listened. One large, red home had a TV. We listened for one night and watched the men inside the fence shoot the stupid ones.”

  “They’re starting to get less stupid,” I said.

  Thallirin nodded.

  “We put something by the fence, and the less stupid ones climbed over the top. While the men were busy, we took the TV. It did not talk again, though,” Merdon said.