Ash (Fire & Blood Book 2)

by Alexa B. James

  Every time I closed my eyes, the last sight I had of Ravage played through my mind. His mouth made the words, “You’ll be my creature by morning.”

  What did that even mean?

  Timothy kept us going, urging us with words and then holding our hands and pulling us further down when words were no longer enough motivation to keep going. Time had no meaning. The air felt as if it was solid, like blocks of ice slipping over my skin. I kept coughing, and each time, it felt like the motion ripped into my chest. My brothers glanced back at me, with growing expressions of alarm.

  Timothy tried to give me his coat, but I refused to let him run around without anything covering his torso. The world became a fuzzy mess, and I was only moving forward because my brothers were pulling me. Twice I collapsed mid-step, and my brothers had to catch me.

  The cough was ripping through my whole body now, and I was so thirsty—it was an ache deep in my throat. The little sips of water I had from my brother’s water flasks didn’t even touch the pain. The next time I coughed, something projected from my throat, and a glob of blood splattered down my chest. The cave spun, and my mouth felt full, like I was trying to bite through cotton wool. “I don’t feel right.”

  “Kori.” Brendan looked between my face and the blood soaking into my sweatshirt. After raising his hand with the ball of Ignis fire, he inspected my eyes with a growing expression of horror on his face.

  “What?” I asked.

  He pressed a hand to my forehead, and it felt like fire on my skin. Brendan hissed in a breath and pulled his fingers away like I burned him. “Your skin is three shades paler, and your forehead feels like frosted metal. It felt as if it took a layer of my skin off when I touched you. Both of your pupils won’t constrict in the direct light, and your pupils are the size of your irises—I’d even say that they’re bigger, if it weren’t scientifically impossible.”

  “You’ll be my creature by morning…” I mumbled as the words played through my head for the thousandth time.

  “What does that mean?” Timothy asked, leaning closer and narrowing his eyelids against the glare of the Ignis fire.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the last thing Ravage said to me. I was really cold for a while—but I’m feeling warm.” My throat burned as I talked. “And—I burned a vampire with Ignis fire. I think I did. I don’t know. There’s something wrong… I think there’s something…” I fell. One moment I was upright, and the next the world blinked out into nothingness.

  Chapter Ten

  Ravage

  I stood before my warriors, pacing down the line. For my entire existence as an undead fiend, I had resented every single vampire, regardless of their station. The only thing I despised more than vampires were life-sucking humans. Both groups were equally deserving of their dismal fate. And yet, both had their uses.

  I had to remember that in this moment as I looked at my sweaty and filthy warriors kneeling on the train tracks. The tracks were still humming from the passenger train I’d sent on to Portland. My warriors on the ground there would deal with the passengers. Dust rained down in the tunnel as the rocks shifted. A hundred feet into the tunnel, boulders again piled on the tracks.

  “Sacrificing your most eager soldiers needlessly is bad for morale,” I mumbled under my breath. They were some of the last words that Kori spoke to me before her lovers stole her away. She was right. But then, Kori was usually right when it came to war.

  My most eager warriors knelt before me now, covered in the blood of my enemies. But their hands were empty. Kori got away. Her brother got away. Her lovers got away. And some needless sacrificing would do wonders for my mood.

  Ignis fire lit in my palms, crackling over my skin, but I squeezed my fists, extinguishing the flames. “Tell me again how not one, but all three of the former Kings of Portland escaped.

  Strike, general of my warriors, lifted his head, and peered up with terrified brown eyes. He was the largest and fiercest warrior I had ever recruited into my elite battalion, but his heart had softened over the years. He already failed me by bringing Ruin into a tavern. It had been a risk to allow Ruin to wander Nightendale. The dark-haired young warrior was too intelligent for his own good. If Ruin had an ounce of ambition in him, I would have recruited him long ago, but he didn’t, and now I had a dozen reasons to see him dead.

  Strike rubbed his fingers over his bald head with a shaky hand. “The former kings must have figured out the irrigation tunnels that feed your gardens. They headed straight for that tunnel system and swam through a grate that had been removed from the outside. Then, they escaped through the underground river that feeds the plants. You didn't want any one of us to enter your gardens…”

  I slashed a hand through the air, signaling that I wanted silence. “Kori planned this.” I said her name like an oath. She would feel my wrath for this. It was one thing to go along with an escape attempt, it was an entirely different crime to plan it.

  I had truly believed that when she agreed to marry me, she was admitting that her feelings had changed. I thought I pushed her too far. It was all lies. She’d agreed to marry me simply to further her plot to return to her lovers.

  “Your Highness?” Strike asked.

  “Not now.” I paced down the tracks. It had to have been Kori. I hadn’t provided her with any information about the irrigation system, but there was no possible way someone could navigate the maze of tunnels without mapping it out from the inside. There were no records in existence. My fury at the warriors lined up before me cooled, igniting toward a different target.

  This failure belonged to me.

  It was a strategic move in the game I was playing with my future queen, and I could not blame the warriors she outsmarted.

  “Get up, Strike. This failure is mine, and I am facing the consequences of my miscalculation. Allowing an irrigation system to water my plants has always been a flaw in this kingdom’s security.”

  Strike pushed off the rail line and got to his feet with a shaky breath. “Do you want us to go after them through the irrigation system?”

  That would just mean that more minds would know how to navigate the tunnels beneath our feet. For perhaps the thousandth time, I considered closing the irrigation and letting my plants die. Yet, I couldn’t live in a world without flowers and trees. If only I could devise a way that they could survive on blood. Nightendale had an abundance of that, but blood was too rich and would rapidly overfertilize their root systems.

  “Forget about those three. They’re not important. I have a different task for you, Strike.” I rubbed my hand on my chin, considering the predicament from every angle. “We could actually use this situation to our advantage. If we play this right, it could move up the timeline on the attack on Seattle. “Lead the army toward the Deep,” I said, “But stop before their first line of defense…” I trailed off as a tingle started at the back of my eyes. The sensation spread through my face, and I knew that a prophecy was coming on fast. Raising my hand, I commanded, “I’ll expect you to be ready to leave and on your way within the hour.”

  I held my breath and turned, walking as fast as I could away from the railroad tracks. I would not let my warriors see me vulnerable, but the power was coming on so strong, it would force me into a prophecy at any moment.

  I turned into the nearest cave, walked ten feet in, and then pulled on the stone, breaking it into small pieces. It sounded like rocks being ground together, high pitched and grating. Then with a loud crash, the cave system collapsed, plunging the space into darkness. I leaned back into the wall and submitted to the prophecy, but nothing happened.

  Over the past year, the Tempus power felt so right within me. It had been so many centuries since I could see the future at will. And yet, this strange diluted blood mage version was both more powerful and impossible to control. When I collected my other powers from blood mages, the powers that were taken from me by the vampire pathogen, they came just as they had been in the years when I was fae. It was this one po
wer, the power that I had missed the most, that had been twisted in the years that it had resided within human-fae descendants.

  There was a pattering of footsteps from within the tunnel, and I sat up straight. Had I collapsed this tunnel with someone inside?

  I ignited Ignis fire on my palm and stepped out into the tunnel. “Show yourself.” The words echoed again and again, and the footsteps grew louder. “Stay where you are if you want to live.”

  The footsteps grew closer together. They were running, then suddenly, they stopped.

  I smiled. My choice of tunnel had been no accident. This tunnel used to lead directly into my garden. It was one of the first modifications I made when I regained my power over earth.

  I took my time approaching my quarry, giving them a chance to panic. There was no way out, but as I turned the corner, tensed for someone to leap out and attack, I found an empty tunnel. It wasn’t just empty. There was no dead end. Where there should be a solid wall of stone, the tunnel emptied out into an open space.

  My heart stampeded in my chest as I walked out into a large, empty chamber. Holding up my ball of Ignis fire, I examined the large, barren stone chamber. It was my garden, but it was all wrong. There wasn’t even a sign that plants had ever lived here. Above, a solid cave roof hung heavy with stalactites.

  Was this the future? Was I seeing the destruction of my kingdom?

  There wasn’t a sign of Nightendale having ever been here. The walls were solid all around us, without so much as a scar on the land from where the palace once sat.

  Panic surged into my heart as I spun and fell into a sprint. I ran, holding up my ball of Ignis fire. My breath caught, and grief surged up in my heart. Where the Tree of Life once stood, there was only a smooth stretch of stone.

  This couldn’t be real. This could not be the future.

  A barely audible hushing sound came from my right, and I spun, feeding more fire into my palm. “Who’s there?”

  Just within the illumination of the flame, Kori stood. Her eyes were wide and hands raised like she was fending me off.

  “What did you do?” She asked. “Where are we? How did you take me?”

  I called the wind, expecting the air to sing in my blood, but nothing happened. Kori stepped back, unaffected by the wall of air I tried to form behind her.

  “This isn’t real,” I said.

  Her brow furrowed, and I noticed how ill she looked. Under her eyes were deep shadows. Her skin was too pale and had taken on a sickly greenish hue. She only wore a sweatshirt and pair of socks and both were caked in blood and dirt. Her dark hair was a tangled mess on her head.

  She peered around us slowly. “I think I might have died… Is this Hell?”

  Her words sliced through my chest in a way that I didn’t even know was possible. She said things like this to me all the time. I was her hell. I was her torment. It was always flippant and usually meant to wound me. This time, she truly believed it. Kori truly believed that she had died and gone to Hell, and Hell was a cavern where she was alone with me.

  “You’re not dead.” I crouched down to make myself seem less threatening. It had been a long time since I’d approached the wild animals of the surface world that had once been as dear to me as my own family, but I remembered what signals to use. “But, Kori, you will be soon if I can’t get to you. Where are you? I need to…”

  I trailed off as a second sound echoed through the space. Someone was approaching us, fast, and they weren’t taking any measures to keep quiet.

  Kori turned back toward the sounds, and I lunged, crossing the distance between us, and wrapping her in my arms.

  She gasped in surprise as I lifted her off her feet and gripped her to my chest.

  Kori’s body molded against mine, like she didn’t have any strength, but she looked up into my face with murderous intent blazing in her eyes. “Put me down, Ravage.”

  “No,” I growled. “Technically, this is still my twenty-four hours to touch you in any way I please, and I’ll use it to protect you if I have to.”

  Instead of fighting me, she relaxed against me like she didn’t have any energy to spare. It was so disconcerting, I couldn’t take my gaze from her for a few moments when the footsteps grew louder, coming straight toward us. I adjusted my hold on Kori and threw out a column of fire. “Get back!”

  The flame licked through the air, rolling over the figure of a man charging straight for us. The flame rolled past, and the man didn’t even seem to notice. He charged forward with a prone figure in his arms. The body he carried was limp. A familiar face stared up at the sky, blankly. Half of my brother’s face was ragged torn flesh. His neck was nothing more than bloodstained sinew, but his chest still rose with breath.

  I staggered back a step and fell, landing on my ass and pulling Kori onto my lap without meaning to.

  She made a sound of protest and grabbed my arm. “Ravage, what is this? Is that you?”

  I looked up into my own face as I charged past, carrying my brother. The cavern had been pitch-black, and I hadn’t seen the rock.

  “Stop!” I shouted, but my past self didn’t hear. He continued to run, soaked in the blood of my slaughtered family. My bloodstained boot hooked under a rock, and we flew through the air. My brother tumbled from my arms.

  The sound as he hit the ground echoed through the tunnel, it was the sound of his skull cracking against the stone. This projection of my past-self raised his head to stare into the darkness. I remember. I couldn’t see my own nose.

  “Night.” It was a ragged cry, but my brother was gone. Out of his chest, a bone-white stalk grew, twisting up into the air. The remainder of my brother’s form melted away into roots that slipped between cracks in the stone, pushing the fissures open. Out of the great white trunk, four branches grew.

  The man I once was roared in agony. He fell onto the trunk and howled.

  “Ravage.”

  I startled from my trance, looking back to Kori who leaned over me. Her hands cupped my cheeks, and I didn’t even notice.

  “Is this something that happened to you?”

  I stared up into her bloodshot amber eyes. “Did you bring me here on purpose? Did you?” I grabbed her wrists, wanting to rip her hands away from me, but not sure if I’d unintentionally rip her arms from their sockets. Rage rose in my chest, and Ignis fire exploded from my palms. “Are you torturing me?” I demanded. “Are you?”

  Kori watched me through the flames. “I wouldn’t do that.” Her thumb wiped a tear from my cheek. “Who did this to you?”

  Under my fingers, Kori’s figure grew less solid. Her face faded into the darkness. “Where are you, Kori?”

  For just a moment, as she faded away, I stood in a room with a low crackling fire. Before me, Kori lay on a filthy bed with tattered blankets covering her form.

  The cavern melted around us, smearing together in lines of black, brown, and white.

  I opened my eyes to darkness. It took me a moment to catch my breath. The air tasted earthy, like dust and mildew. I lifted a hand and Ignis fire lit on my palm. The cave illuminated in a harsh white light. I blinked around at the narrow cave I’d taken refuge in to have my prophecy. Beside me was the stones I’d just brought down to ensure my privacy.

  I reached out and touched the rocks, finding them solid and still hot from when I’d cracked them apart.

  Straightening from where I leaned against the wall, I called out to the wind once more, and this time, it sang in my blood. A roaring sound came toward my cave, like thunder rolling through the train tunnel. The wall of rocks burst inward, and a thousand cuts scraped across my skin.

  I relished the pain as jagged shards of stone slammed into my arms and face. As soon as the path was clear, I stepped into the train tunnel. I kept my pace even as I strolled down the tracks and turned toward Nightendale. Halfway across the bridge to Nightendale, I turned and leapt over the handrail. Wind whistled past me as I plummeted.

  I knew where Kori was, and I was coming fo
r her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kori

  I woke with the taste of smoke on my tongue and images flashing through my mind. When I blinked my eyes open, Brendan was sobbing beside my bed.

  For years, my oldest brother refused to show any emotion. He was sarcastic, sardonic, and often logical to the point of being cold. My twin Genevieve was the emotional one. She was the one who kissed our scars, visible and invisible, and gently called us out and calmed us down when our emotions got the better of us. We four siblings each took on roles to protect the herd, and emotions have simply been outside Brendan’s realm.

  That was why I just lay there, watching Brendan sob over my bedside, unable to form words. Beside him, Timothy rested his head on a coarse blanket folded at the foot of my bed, his face stained with tears. Little whimpers escaped him as he dozed.

  I lifted up on my elbows to find a small cavern with three mattresses that looked like they’d been used to filter a sewer system. Blankets and pillows around the space were nothing more than tattered shreds, but someone had taken the time to fold up the material and lay them at the head of the bed.

  A small earthen hearth overflowing with burning moss saturated the air with an overwhelming earthy scent. Even though the fire wasn’t more than embers, the room felt too hot.

  I’d never seen conditions like this, not even in the destitute sections of Portland during the revolution.

  “Where are we?”

  Brendan’s eyes snapped open, and he jumped. I’d say he jumped out of his skin if that was actually possible. He fell off a rickety wood chair and examined me with wide, shocked eyes. “Kori?”

  “Sorry for scaring you.” I sleepily pushed up on the flea colony that no one, ever, would mistake for a bed. “What’s going on?”

  Timothy raised his head and his cat eyes scrutinized my features. He closed his eyes, looking resigned for some reason, though his cheeks were stained red from crying. “Why do my gut feelings always have to be right?”