Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows)

by C. V. Larkin

  "Do you presume to keep me waiting, mongrel, or are you simply that weak?"

  Weak.

  It was an execrable answer, but at least it was an honest one. She wasn't stupid enough or crazy enough to give it voice. Instead, like any well trained slave, Tian fought to get herself off the ground, taking more time than was safe or pretty. Eventually, by some act of the absent Goddess, she plugged her feet in under her and clambered to a position that resembled vertical.

  The surface she was balancing so poorly on was the sole solid patch in a vast expanse of rolling steam and rippling water that extended to the tiled edges of a once opulent bathhouse. Far above rose a wild canopy of intricately laced stained glass panels. Tendrils of vines and fully grown plants drifted upward beneath the insubstantial plane at her feet, curling against the brittle liquid in patterns that were both lush and primal. A single emerald tree grew from the depths in front of her, laden with layers of weightless pale white cushions. The long extinct sapling slumped towards the liquid as if bone-weary under the gravity of an immense burden.

  Tian wiped her mouth and nose with the back of a still shaking hand in an attempt to clear off the drooling darkness and bowed her head. "Oracle," she said, acknowledging the well-dressed male lounging in the tree's embrace. Her throat was raw from misuse.

  "Half-breed," Oracle countered on a sucking inhalation. He was using a long thin filigree pole to consume the tendrils of mist in every conceivable color that rose from the pool she struggled to retain footing on.

  The Oracle's azure gaze narrowed into reptilian slits as he appraised her in a way that made her uncomfortable to be naked. "I certainly hope that you prove to be more useful than you are aesthetically pleasing, Little Death. Your disfigurement is offensive. It puts me off my vapors."

  "Apologies, Oracle."

  Tian averted her face to obscure the lines of scar tissue that streaked diagonally over her right cheek. She watched through her peripheral vision as he exhaled a plume of bright orange smoke that had been a different color when it had entered his body.

  "See, now don't you feel better?" He speared a gaseous pocket of lavender haze with the pipe balanced lazily between the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. His skin took on the same cast as the cloud he'd just discharged, causing him to look bloated against the white cushions.

  "If it pleases you," she answered.

  She didn't feel better. She didn't feel anything except the usual hollow agitation in her ribcage. Then again, if she hadn't been theoretically afraid of him she would have told him to go fuck himself, so maybe she did feel something after all. It was hard to tell.

  Tian watched the trapped cloud of lavender vapor as it billowed a hairsbreadth before shooting down the metallic tube. The Sidhe Oracle ignored her, sucking hard on the other end of the pipe with the singularly focused zeal of an addict. He paled along with the inhalation, going boneless, as a light purple flush started in his throat and worked its way through a body perfectly formed for leisure. It took less time than she had expected to consume the garish orange color that had made him look like a kumquat. He still looked plush, though.

  There were no harsh angles to the Oracle's physique, no leanness that indicated he had ever known hunger or struggle. He was well made in the way of all Sidhe, but soft, like a bully aware he'd never be troubled by karma. And under his pampered aesthetic lurked something off kilter, a taint that worried at the foundation deep below the pristine veneer like a plague. The undeniable sense of decay, or alienation, or insanity spread outward corrupting the temple around them in subtle ways. The realization made her twitchy.

  "Such a pity about your face." He belched around a writhing mass of emerald green smoke. "Even for a mongrel you were never without charm."

  He leaned forward and used the filigree pipe to trace the curve of her breast. Tian quit tracking him through the corner of her eyes and stared at the swirling patterns in the tree bark as she made a concerted effort not to flinch or fight back. She slipped beyond thought, beyond the near equatorial heat of the space, dissolving into a vacant balm of apathetic lassitude until she was devoid of response.

  "A female is not meant to have hard edges, and you," he continued in a business like tone, "now have entirely too many. Tell me Little Death, do you find that you miss the ministrations of your first Lord, or does Eamon put that extraordinary resiliency to good use behind the confines of closed doors?"

  Prick.

  There was a beat of silence that indicated he might continue. When he didn't, she responded wondering, given the now greenish tinge to his flesh, if he would be amicable or unnaturally inclined to be contrary to whatever came out of her mouth.

  "You would have me answer?"

  The Oracle hit her hard, snapping her head to the side with enough force that at least one vertebrae was dislocated in the process. He'd left his seat and struck out with such speed Tian had barely seen the blow coming. She sure as hell felt it land though. She landed and skidded on the aether as the surface solidified in a series of angry pops and crackling noises. Tears welled reflexively at the corners of her eyes.

  "I did not call you here because I had the desire to be questioned by a mongrel. Speak."

  A flare of white hot fury arched through her, ashes even before it had formed. She struggled to hold on to the rare spark and came away with nothing. Obviously, it had been the wrong thing to say.

  Tian shook her head to clear the fog and bit back a curse as her neck popped back into place. She stood, noting dully that her blood looked darker mixed in with the remaining ichor from the gate. The vines beneath her curled towards that brackish mixture in a disturbingly aggressive manner. She watched them as she answered, knowing the emptiness in her expression was only going to provoke another attack.

  "Eamon wields all weapons with mind bent to purpose. They are honed the same."

  Truth, followed by another obstructed sucking noise from the Oracle that made her want to grab the front end of the pipe and shove it through the back of his hairless skull. Instead she stood there, impotent, hands at her sides, bracing for another violent response.

  None came, only a breathless wheezing laughter followed by a statement that made her blood run cold. "As that is the case," the Oracle said, "you should be able to appreciate that I too, have found a purpose for your accursed existence." His fevered eyes glittered with malicious amusement.

  "Oracle."

  "Your absent tone comes dangerously close to profaning my position, mongrel."

  Tian dropped to one knee and bowed her head in an empty gesture of respect given to one who hadn't earned it in centuries. "I beg forgiveness." There wasn't any emotion behind that statement either, but he didn't notice.

  "You may be coarse and unsightly, but at least you are not stupid. There is an object I require you to return to me. It is a simple task really, just find a cup, fetch it, bring it back. I would assume that such a thing is within the realm of even your capabilities."

  The Oracle turned his back on her, striding over to his former perch in the tree and settling himself with no small amount of flare. "I also require your oath of silence in the face of The Unmoved," he added in calculated afterthought.

  Just a cup, my ass.

  Tian's head shot up in shock. The request was at best unusual, at worst she was afraid to consider the repercussions.

  He cringed, disgust evident in his features. "You forget yourself, Breed."

  Tian swallowed and forced her head back to the side. There were a lot of ways to die badly, repeatedly, and eternally, and dicking around with one's owner was the line item at the top of the list. Especially Eamon. There was a reason the Dark Queen's left hand was referred to as the Unmoved. He was a completely clinical, detached strategist with a silver tongue and little tolerance for deceit. He could taste it, and the ramifications for lying to him were legendary.

  Moreover Eamon had been decent to her. He hadn't been gentle, but he a
nd the Queen's Assassin had trained her to be something other than a victim. Eamon had used his position at court to lay claim to her death-proof ass, and thus far had made good use of the ill-fated indestructibility that didn't involve being bartered out to an endless supply of sadists and psychotics for small favors. A slave by any other name, but she owed him for that.

  "Perhaps the Dark Queen's own ward Brenwyn would be of more assistance in finding the cup you seek, Oracle. It is said that her gift is quite extraordinary," Tian said.

  "The Queen's own ward is an otherwise occupied asset one does not request lightly. You are a convenience and I would have your oath now."

  "Oracle."

  "I find these one sided conversations with your kind tedious. Your oath."

  "No."

  The silence that greeted her response was resounding. She was bracing for the series of inescapable blows when they came, so the impact was hardly a surprise. It wasn't as if he could do anything that hadn't been done before, and his ministrations lacked the finesse or purpose she was accustomed to. That said, being accosted with a metal pole wielded like a baseball bat never felt good, no matter what the diameter of it was. She choked, hacking two teeth up onto the aether, and watched them skip across the awkward surface like stones on a pond. The Oracle chuckled.

  "Entertaining, mongrel, however, your Lord would not be disinclined to acquiesce to my claim on any of his dogs were I to make one, and believe me when I say that I do not want any of you. Tell me that even with your low level reasoning skills you comprehend the implied threat."

  Was he fucking kidding?

  "My oath," she said, "that I will not speak of this to The Unmoved, nor will I speak of it in his presence." She was so far removed she could barely hear herself form the words. Tian held her breath, wondering if the Oracle would accept an oath with so many blatant omissions.

  "Was that so difficult?"

  Anyone with less of an ego would have ripped her apart.

  "Not if it pleases you, Oracle."

  He speared a cloud of yellow smoke corkscrewing through the humid air and inhaled slowly, savoring the taste where it mingled with the remnants of her blood left splattered on the metal. The grace in his movement struck Tian as forced.

  "They all think I'm mad, you know."

  The change of subject was abrupt, but the statement was hardly news. She agreed, but he wasn't asking, so she kept her mouth shut. The Oracle's madness had been the rumor for centuries.

  "Answer me," he said. He appeared unaware that he hadn't asked a question.

  "I believe that we are all slave to something, Oracle," Tian said. She leaned over and covered her molars with the palm of her hand, unwilling to leave them behind and hoping he wouldn't notice.

  He barked out a sharp burst of brittle amusement before his face closed in on itself. He worked the filigree pipe between two fingers. His shoulders hunched around his ears and he leaned towards her with a feral snarl. The Oracle snapped the fingers of his free hand, expecting her to crawl to the base of the tree where he was perched. Little to her credit she did.

  "I am slave to none, mongrel, least of all Her."

  He was referring to their errant Goddess. The one that had forsaken them so long ago she was more myth than reality. Tian had been born after the abandonment and found it difficult to muster up anything other than ambivalence. The highborn Sidhe, especially the older ones, still mourned the loss. Supposedly Faerie had been on the decline ever since, not that anyone would admit it.

  "As it pleases you, Oracle. What of the cup you would have me retain?"

  Easier to fall back to ritualistic answers as she struggled to get the conversation back on track. The faster he told her what he wanted, the faster she could get the hell away from him.

  "That was not my fault." The vehemence in his response spewed loose strands of spit down his jaw and at her face.

  Whoa, now.

  "No Oracle."

  Any other half-breed would have handled this cocksucker better, but her brain didn't churn out the kinds of platitudes that would get the job done. She used to grovel better than this. Now she just died and hoped like hell she stayed that way. It never worked.

  "They're using it against me," he said. "Taking what is mine."

  "Who is?"

  "If I knew that, obviously I'd have little use for you. JUST GET ME MY FORSAKEN CHALICE!"

  Tian felt herself pale.

  Goddess turned.

  He'd lost the Sidhe Chalice. No wonder he'd required her oath of silence. She was screwed. Totally, utterly, unfailingly screwed.

  Chapter 3

  A Blind Eye

  Sio shoved back from his desk. There was a stack of paperwork covered in his handwriting with notes in the margins that he had no recollection of making. A flick of the cordless mouse next to his right hand, and a halfhearted glance at the digital read-out at the bottom of the monitor caused him to curse out loud. He should have been gone nearly an hour ago. Instead he'd been chasing stray thoughts around his skull that had no business being there in the first place. Overthinking his life had never managed to do him any favors and yet here he was doing it at work of all places.

  Textbook definition of a glutton for punishment, son.

  He was still obsessing over the three hour stretch he'd spent in the shower after getting home. He'd scrubbed Gray Dress's phone number off of his chest until the water had run cold and his torso looked like it would be better suited to a butcher shop than a bedroom because she'd written on him with a goddamned purple permanent marker. A Brillo pad had been the only thing he could find that had been sufficiently abrasive. He would have preferred steel wool. Hell, he would have preferred sulfuric fucking acid if it had been available, and even then he had the sneaking suspicion the removal would have taken more effort than he'd had skin. He should have been paying enough attention to avoid being used like a coloring book by a woman whose name he couldn't remember.

  He couldn't remember much about the sex either, except that she hadn't shut up. She'd moaned, whimpered, cussed, gasped, and whined like a porn star until he'd been forced to choke her to get her quiet. He didn't want to think about that though, didn't want to think about the fact he felt like he'd profaned the mirage of the goddess in the fireplace by getting laid, or how he felt unclean.

  The whole incident was another item on a rapidly increasing list of shit that he didn't want to think about. Sio shook his head, disgusted with himself, and scrubbed a hand over his face. He should have kept his dick in his pants, but he hadn't and now he was at the center of a full on meltdown that began and ended with the hallucination of a staggeringly hot piece of strange floating in a hotel fireplace. The breakdown was beautiful in its simplicity.

  The image of that half submerged female was burned into the back of his brain. He couldn't get her out. Sio rubbed his eyes, miss-stepped in the mental sparring, and pulled up a pulse-cranking visual from the night before. He'd been avoiding it all day. Picturing her only made things worse. The contrary impulse to find her set off a savage flare of temper that nearly caused him to put a fist through the wall of his cubicle. He'd broken a sweat. The realization of how close he'd come to losing control made him nauseous.

  Sio took a deep breath and pied-pipered his spooling sanity closer to home. Out of all of the seriously broken sad sacks he'd known, he had the dubious honor of being one of the most high-functioning. Vacillating emotion settled into something less mercurial. There was only one remedy for this kind of head trip and he craved it before he'd fully resolved to make the call.

  The chair beneath him groaned in long suffering protest as he hauled his ass up and out. He grabbed his gym bag and made for the exit. He hit the landing and barreled down the stairs, taking them three at a time. It felt good to move, as if he could outrun the sick feeling that came on the heels of too much personal reflection.

  If he had any sense, he'd be headed straight for the gym to beat hims
elf until there was nothing left to his psyche but muscle and movement. But he didn't have that much sense and he knew it. He needed to hit something, sure... problem was, he needed that something to hit back. Sio dug into his pocket on a mission to locate his phone. He found it and came away undaunted by the lack of reception in the stairwell.

  Thirty seconds later he was standing outside being battered by the ambient street noise of the financial district, wondering how he was going to hear anything that came out of the other end of the line while city fire trucks wailed past in every direction. The sun filtered through the cloud cover, glinting off the mirrored high rises in random patches that looked like slanted golden searchlights. On any other day he loved the city, loved the subtle neon hum, the wildly varied crush of life, the vibrancy, and the grime, and the dark edges that hid in the shadows of alleyways and alcoves. He loved the comfortable anonymity of existence. Today, every urban molecule was suffocating.

  Sio took a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping for some miracle akin to drowning in reverse. The airflow was cool in his chest, thick enough to conduct the electric charge that seemed integral to the city's natural rhythms. It wasn't fresh, but he wasn't choking on it either. It was also curiously absent of whatever magical soothing property he'd been hoping for. He tried not to dwell on the disappointment as he sifted through the contacts he never used in search of the elusive one he kept telling himself he was going to delete. After two years it was still there.

  He hit send and started walking, pointedly ignoring the group of tourists who were taking his picture from across the street. He hadn't been sure if the line had made connection until it went silent. Ten seconds later a whisky soaked brogue hit the other end.

  "Speak."

  "I need a fight, Liam."

  A heavy rustling in the receiver preceded a satisfied grunt. "I don't do amateur on short notice, mate. Even for a crowd pleaser like yourself."