His eyes widened with equal parts disbelief and horror. “Ashra.”
Her breath caught at her name on his lips.
Was he as confused and bewildered as she was by his seemingly instinctive recognition of her? He must have heard someone call her by name. He could not have known it otherwise. Yet, when Ashra searched her flawless memory, she found no mention of her name, at least not in his hearing.
She stared into his eyes, those beautiful eyes with flecks of gold embedded in emerald green. Damn him, those were Rohkeus’s eyes. The human had no right to reenter her hard-won normal life, no right to disrupt it. Her wings beat down hard, a single motion that carried her up so that she could stare straight into his face. “No,” she breathed so softly that only he could hear. Where were you when I needed you? Where were you when I almost died from losing you?
Grabbing his face in her hands, she pressed her lips to his, pouring all of her heartache and pain into that single kiss.
The human tensed from the intimate and invasive contact.
She did not release him. Within seconds, he would relax, his will weak and malleable beneath the icrathari’s sexual compulsion, and she would lure him back to his cell.
He jerked away from her. His lips bled—her fangs had cut into his sensitive skin—and his eyes were unfocused as he struggled to shake off her psychic influence. He took a single unsteady step back. Hate glittered in his narrowed eyes. He spit out a single word. “Demon.”
The backhanded fist he swung out caught her full across the face, and sent her sprawling to the cold tiles. Stunned by the impact, she pushed upright and stared after him, her eyes wide and incredulous as he scrambled past her, obviously seeking the exit. Had he actually resisted her and struck her?
How dare he?
She launched into the air and seized him from behind. Her fingernails extended. Razor sharp and curved like talons, they pierced his shoulders. She yanked him off his feet and hurled him away from her. He smashed into the wall and tumbled to the floor. A gasp of pain ripped from his lips. Leaning heavily against the wall, he dragged himself to his feet. He was still struggling upright when she closed in on him. She wrapped her fingers into his hair and pulled his head back.
“No,” Dana pleaded, emerging from the cell, her hand outstretched to a son who clearly had not recognized her.
Ashra lifted her chin, hardening her heart to the glaze of agony stretched over Jaden’s features. Her right hand tensed into a claw.
Rip his throat out. End this nightmare.
We both know it should never have come to this, Rohkeus. You should never have come back. There is no space for you in the city, in the tower, or in my heart.
His gaze focused on her. There was no plea for mercy in his eyes. Terror and fear had apparently no foothold on him, but hate simmered—not hot and violent, but cold and dark—the kind of hate that had been nurtured over decades.
She swallowed hard through her clogged throat. There is no hope for us, not if you see only a demon when you look at me.
Poised to tear out his throat, she drew her arm back and lashed down, striking out like a snake, but Dana’s fingers closed around her wrist, snatching it up from its deathblow. Ashra slammed the human’s head against the wall, knocking him unconscious, and dropped him to the floor before turning to face Dana.
“How dare you?” Her tone was mild, but the words were not.
Rebellion against the icrathari had cost many humans and vampires their lives, but Dana did not cower even though she must have known she stood no chance against an ancient icrathari. The vampire crouched low and bared her teeth in a snarl. “You can’t kill him.”
Ashra shook her silver hair away from her face. Her wings rippled as she arched her back. “We are monsters to him. Humanity’s nightmare.”
Dana’s hands curled into fists. “We earned those distinctions, and if you kill him, you’ll cement their impressions of us.”
Ashra shrugged, the graceful motion dismissive. It was a pity Dana would have to die too. She strode toward the vampire, but paused at the sound of a low hum pulsing through the tower. Ashra’s gaze flashed down the corridor toward the east. Beyond the tangled maze of undifferentiated walls lay the reinforced carbon steel doors that barred the sole exit from Aeternae Noctis.
Indecision flickered through her, but practicality won out. Perhaps in another time and place, Dana would have died for her insubordination, but with the city under attack, Ashra had a better use for Dana’s talents
She beckoned to the vampire. “We have work to do.” She did not look back at the injured and unconscious man slumped on the floor as she hurried down the corridor.
Dana hesitated for only a moment before falling into step beside her.
Ashra paused by one of the many thresholds that partitioned the corridor. Her fingers tapped an impatient rhythm against the communications console. “Siri?”
Siri’s voice sounded thin through the device set into the wall. “Daevas, at least fifty of them. I activated the pulsar shields, but they’re persistent. Elsker and Tera are heading out; Tera says she’s going to reason with them.”
Ashra swallowed the snort of laughter. Tera reasoned with the edge of her blades. “How many vampires are accompanying her?”
“Not nearly enough,” Siri said, her normally calm voice laced with tension. “We lost too many in the last battle, and the humans we turned into vampires last night are still recovering from blood sickness.”
“Dana and I are going out.”
“Should I come too?” Siri asked.
“No. Stay and mind the city.”
With Dana keeping pace beside her, Ashra raced through the labyrinthine belly of Aeternae Noctis. Just before they entered the farthest eastern chamber, she tossed a glance at a glowing red eye of the camera swiveling over the threshold and nodded, trusting that Siri was paying attention to the monitor.
Siri was. The carbon steel doors pulled back; the floor yawned apart. Ashra seized Dana around the waist and dove through the opening doors. The blackened ground rushed up at them. Ashra’s wings flared enough to turn a free fall into a controlled dive. Four feet from the ground, she released Dana, who rolled forward and came up in a battle crouch. Ashra’s wings beat back, snatching her from her dive, and she soared up through the thin air.
She threw a glance over her shoulder. Aeternae Noctis, protected beneath the dome and carried a hundred feet above the blackened ground, shuddered past her. A perpetual wind swept in its wake, its bite cold and cruel.
Shrieks and howls sliced through the night as icrathari and vampires battled daevas in the air and on the ground. Ashra caught glimpses of Tera and Elsker as they tore daevas from the sky, and sent them hurtling to the ground where the vampires waited like hounds trained to kill. The moon bathed the night in its silver glow, but Aeternae Noctis shrouded large swathes of battlefield in the massive shadow it cast.
Still, she did not need light to fight, not when the daevas’ eyes glowed bright yellow.
A snarl, low and threatening, rippled toward her. Ashra spun around as a daeva hurled itself at her, bat-like wings unfurled and talons outstretched. Its claws scored through her gown, but did not mark her skin. It was clearly a young daeva, lacking both strength and wisdom; if it had known better, it would have attacked a vampire instead. Remorseless, Ashra wrapped a hand around its neck and squeezed. Its leathery skin, baked by the punishing heat of the sun during the day might have proved resistant to a vampire’s claws, but it offered no protection against an icrathari’s strength.
Bone cracked in her hand. The daeva’s eyes flared wide, and it gasped. Panicked, its wings beat down as it tried to break free from her, but it was too late. Ashra drove her other hand into its stomach, her claws tearing through its hardened flesh. She tightened her grip around its neck until bone crumbled in her unforgiving grip, severing the daeva’s spine. With a wheeze, it died.
Even the immortals could perish. One only had to know how exactly
to kill them.
The icrathari knew much about the daevas. The seemingly demonic creatures, originally descended from the four icrathari who had chosen not to enter Aeternae Noctis, had been altered by the harshness of their environment and a millennium of subsequent evolution. The only traits the daevas and icrathari still appeared to share were the gift of flight and of accelerated healing.
Common ground vanished a thousand years prior. Any hope for peace perished shortly thereafter. Centuries of war over the control of Aeternae Noctis had torn their species apart.
On the ground, Tera’s vampire army fought in groups of three—two to hold the daeva’s attention, the third to strike the killing blows. Ashra needed no such distraction. Daevas scattered out of her flight path, flapping madly as she spun into a dive. She snatched a daeva from the air. It screeched, howling with pain as she ripped through its stomach. Its scream faded into silence when she tore its head from its shoulders. Her wings unfurled to their full ten feet as she soared up and hurled the daeva’s head and body into another winged demon.
The daeva swiped the grisly missiles away, baring fangs at her. Moonlight danced across a thin silver ring on its left hand. With a snarl, the daeva lunged up at her.
Ashra smirked as she shifted into a dive. Her upper lip pulled back, exposing her elongated incisors.
They collided in midair, tussling. Its talons cut through her skin, scoring vertical lines through her upper arm. Pain, foreign because it was so rare, flared through her. The daeva was older than the youngsters she had dispatched with ease. Its golden eyes fixed on her. In them, hatred gleamed—hatred spurred by memory.
She stared into its unrecognizable features. It had once been an icrathari. It had been born before the apocalypse, and survived. She had once known it by name.
No matter. Her irrational flash of compassion passed. The daeva had attacked her home, and endangered her vampires and the humans under her protection. Ashra slashed out, raking her talons across its face. Its darkened skin parted, and tiny rivulets of golden blood trickled down its cheek.
It screeched and reached over her shoulder to grasp her wing. Its hand closed around the bone that traversed the length of her left wing and clenched into a fist. Bone pulverized beneath its grip.
Shafts of pain pulsed down Ashra’s back, tearing a scream from her. Her other wing flapped, beating at the air, trying to keep her aloft. A fall from that height would not kill her, but injuries were inconvenient. In desperation, she caught the daeva’s wrists in her hands when it would have soared away from her.
It made a sibilant sound. Apparently responding to its summons, two other daevas dove toward Ashra, their clawed arms outstretched.
In spite of her crippled wing, Ashra twisted in midair. Her greater strength spun the daeva around, forcing the two attacking daevas to flap back desperately, but it was too late. The two daevas, accelerating for the kill, had too much momentum. Bat-like wings tangled in a flurry of claws and fangs that struck out indiscriminately.
“Ashra!” Elsker dove into the melee. With a violent shove, he pushed the ancient daeva away from Ashra. Panic smashed through Ashra as she tumbled through the curtain of bat-like wings and plummeted to the ground.
Moments from impact, the air around her trembled, vibrating as a flurry of black wings swept toward her. Tera snatched her up two feet from the ground. Tera’s forward momentum sent them both crashing into a gaggle of wide-eyed vampires. The icrathari warlord’s face was grim with suppressed anger when she pushed to her feet. Tera surged up toward Elsker, but the daevas broke away from their tussle with the male icrathari and fled, leaving their injured and dead behind.
Their wings crippled and escape rendered impossible, the injured daevas were slaughtered. The vampires prowled the battlefield, ostensibly tending their wounded and burying their dead. No one made any move to return to the city.
Ashra cast the vampires a narrow-eyed glance, and concealed the knowing smile. Vampires were innately curious about their icrathari masters, most especially when their masters disagreed.
“You fool.” Tera’s voice, though pitched low, carried clearly through the quiet night. She hovered several feet above Ashra, her gray eyes locked on Elsker’s face. “I told you to pull Ashra away from the fight and to leave the daevas to me. Instead, you charge in and tackle them. You could have gotten her killed.”
Elsker cast Ashra a distraught glance. “I was trying to draw their attention away from her.”
“You leave that to me. I could have killed them. Now they’ve gotten away!”
The male icrathari flushed. “I just—”
“I am Ashra’s Blade. You are just her Voice—”
Ashra cut in. “Enough, both of you. I need my Voice as much as I need my Blade, and my Hand,” she said, referring to Siri. She looked toward the west; the domed city, carried aloft by its massive repulse engines, was already a mile away, always racing away from the deadly glow on the eastern horizon. The longer they lingered on the surface of the planet, the farther they would have to carry their injured to catch up with the city.
She gritted her teeth as she flexed her injured wing. Torn muscles tugged around the healing bone, uncomfortable but no longer painful. Ashra looked at the vampires. “Return to the city. Elsker, Tera, and I will be along shortly.”
The vampires darted a glance at Tera. The warlord nodded at her second-in-command, a female vampire named Yuri. “No side trips,” Tera said.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Tera,” Yuri said, a smirk appearing on her usually unsmiling face. She tossed her head, swinging her red braid over a shoulder, sheathed her swords, and leaned down to help one of her injured teammates to his feet.
Ashra waited until the vampires, Dana among them, vanished into the distance.
Tera broke the silence first. With a scowl on her face, she paced the cracked ground. “I know what you’re going to say, Ashra. We need to appear united in front of the vampires, and all that damned nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense, but that’s not what I was going to say. The daeva I fought…it’s ancient. It is as old as we are.”
Elsker scoffed. “That’s absurd.” He threw a hand out in a sweeping gesture across the scorched landscape. “How could anything have survived out here for a thousand years? The odds are—”
“No higher than that of Rohkeus’s soul reborn in a human,” Ashra said, “and even that happened.” She turned to Elsker. “You’ve traveled with the scouts on occasion. Have you never seen that daeva before?”
“No, we’ve never really gotten close to the daevas. They’re much less common than they appear to be,” Elsker said.
Tera snorted. “And yet they’ve attacked Aeternae Noctis seven times now, always within hours of the full moon when we’re distracted processing the humans we’ve culled from the city. Each time, the daevas attack in larger numbers, and each time, we meet them with fewer vampires. Six months ago, I would never have needed the two of you to aid in the defense of the city, but now I do.” She paused, shooting Ashra an accusing glance. “Our defenses have grown thin.”
Ashra arched, stretching her back muscles. The leathery wings twitched as bone repaired itself and tendon and muscle stitched together. “We cannot take more than we need. The humans are petrified of us.”
“Would they rather be petrified or dead?” Tera demanded. “You have coddled the humans for far too long, Ashra. They need to know the truth.”
Ashra turned her back on Tera and Elsker. The memory returned unbidden, of Jaden’s face, of the hate in his eyes as he spat out that damning word, “Demon.” If the man, possessed of the soul of an icrathari, looked at her with such hate, how could she expect any less from the other humans?
She shook her head and sighed, the sound inaudible. “They can’t handle the truth.” She spread her wings and tested their strength as they lifted her into the air. A muscle pulled, but even that dull ache soon passed. “I want that daeva, Tera. Find it for me.”
Elsker took to the air, hovering at eye level. His brow furrowed. “I lead the scouts. That’s my job.”
Ashra arched an eyebrow. “You said you rarely see daevas.”
“Our scouts have farther range and the training to survive if they’re caught out in daylight. Our warriors need to stay close to protect the city,” Elsker protested.
“They’ll protect the city as effectively by ending the threat of daeva attacks.” She looked at Tera, and the warlord nodded, a smile on her lips. “I want you to find their sanctuary and burn it out from under them. How many warriors do you have left?”
Tera cast a glance at the burial mounds on the ground. “Twelve now.”
“The ten humans we took yesterday are yours, Tera,” Ashra said.
“But the scouts…” Elsker protested. “We must replenish their ranks too. We lost four to the immortali. All I have left are Dana and two others.”
“The remaining scouts will join the warriors and report to Tera.” She shot Elsker a warning glance when he opened his mouth to protest. “That is my decision, Elsker.”
“You cannot—”
Her wings carried her forward. Scarcely six inches separated her from Elsker. She stared him down. “I told you to track them after their first assault on Aeternae Noctis seven months ago. You haven’t found them, and their attacks have escalated. It’s time to try something else before the city is truly imperiled.”
“You’d employ brute force over diplomacy?” Elsker asked, his voice as taut as his expression was pained.
“I’d do anything to protect the city, Elsker,” she said. Her voice rose in challenge. “Wouldn’t you?”
She turned her back on him when he did not respond. The city was farther still, though the distance was nothing to an icrathari. She spread her wings, reveling in the night. Unfettered, she soared into the sky. Her jet-black leather wings bore a soft sheen, and the small gold-tipped horns that capped each wing joint glittered in the silver light of the moon.
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 149
