Howler's Night

by Marie Hall

  I shook my head, gulping in huge lungfuls of air, shaking violently from the transference of so much raw, untapped power.

  “Baby, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” Her words were frantic, her hands soft as she ran them up and down my arms, which were now visibly healing.

  I coughed and then shook my head, leaned into her cool touch, and nodded. “I’m fine.”

  “Ash, wh-who was that?” I could still hear the strain of nerves in her voice.

  “Not an angel, little demon.”

  “What?” She blinked and then glanced over to the spot where the woman had been. “How do you know? How do—”

  The geas had been lifted, my tongue was free, my thoughts centered and my own. Dean had placed no such injunction over me, I could speak without impunity, but the story I had to tell was too long, and I wasn’t sure I could find the words to tell it.

  I wrapped my fingers around her wildly waving hand and shook my head. “Grab the key, Pandora, and let’s get out of here. All your answers are in that book.”

  Clenching her jaw, she gave me a long and penetrating look. Then in an act that could have been symbolic or merely desperate, she grabbed my face between her hands and slammed a kiss onto my lips.

  It was slightly painful, but I wasn’t going to tell her to stop.

  “I’ll trust you, Ash, because ‘strong walls shake, but they never collapse.’ Right?”

  “That’s right, little demon. We won’t collapse.”

  I desperately wanted to believe that was true.

  Chapter 15

  Pandora

  I made him take me to a hotel.

  With the way I’d been acting lately, I agreed completely that it was high time to find my family. Maybe if I was around them I could learn to control these devils living inside me.

  I shuddered when I remembered Ash at the kissing tree, talking me down. I’d been so close, so much more Pandora than Ya-el. I’d been so relieved, so grateful to be coming out of it, that my focus had wavered just long enough for the one with the bow to take aim at Ash. And at just the thought of any more harm coming to him, of them trying to kill him, I’d felt murderous. Righteous. Vengeful.

  Wrath had surged to the front, taking hold of Pandora and drowning her out in its fury to make that suffer which would dare to hurt the priest.

  I could hear Asher pacing the length of the bedroom outside the bathroom door. I was sitting in the tub, with the water to full heat.

  This wasn’t the best of hotels. We were in St. Louis, staying in a seedy part of town. Earlier I’d spied a prostitute and her pimp raging on the corner. Off in the distance I heard the echo of gunfire, but I felt safe enough here.

  At least no monsters were banging down our doors, and maybe the water tank couldn’t decide whether to stay hot or cold, but that didn’t matter either.

  Because while I understood that we needed to find Luc and that all signs were pointing to Poteet, Texas, as their current home, I wasn’t ready to go to them.

  I wrapped my arms around my chest. It’d been three days since I’d gotten the key, and I’d still not worked up the nerve to read the book. Doing so would require me to trace back to Kem’s trailer, to grab that book and finally unravel the mystery inside of it.

  But to be honest, I was a little scared of what I might read. Which sucked because Ash really knew me. He’d seen what I’d done the other night, and still the bastard stayed with me.

  I didn’t know why, I really didn’t understand it. I think he wanted to save me from myself, but I’m beginning to fear that’s just not going to be possible. That night in the cave I’d been so hopeful, so sure we could fight this thing together, and for a while it’d seemed that way, until I’d totally lost my head.

  I’d told Ash that we’d go find Luc and the gang, but not until I’d read the book. Not until I’d given myself time to digest what was inside, until I’d had time to make sure that no matter what I read in there, he and I could work through it.

  I was a freaking masochist, because as much as I wanted to pull away from Ash, I also knew that if he didn’t leave me, I’d never leave him. I needed him like I needed to breathe.

  Though after what I’d done, I wasn’t sure he felt the same for me anymore. It’s hard to even look Ash in the eyes now, because I saw his face after I did it. I saw the look of horror, of shock, that’d drawn down like a veil over his features.

  I was a monster. A devil. I should have been destroyed, just like he’d been trained to do.

  Hiccupping, I let the water sluice down my body, still feeling dirty even after sitting in there for over thirty minutes.

  There was a knock at the door, and then his muffled voice called my name.

  I could ignore him and pretend like I’d not heard. I shut off the tap.

  “What, Ash?” I said it softly, leaning my head against my arm. I smelled like soap and blood. I still smelled it all over me, no matter how many showers I took, I just couldn’t get the smell off.

  I scratched at my arm.

  “You know you can’t stay in there forever. Eventually you need to come out.”

  I nodded silently.

  He sighed, and I heard the scratch of his body as he dragged his frame down the door, resting on the other side of it.

  “So we’re at an impasse, then?”

  I shrugged. “What do you want me to do, Ash, huh? You want me to go back out there and get triggered by something else and lose my shit all over again and have you look at me like…” I swallowed the words and squeezed my eyes shut, hating my weakness, hating that I cared so much what he thought of me. Why couldn’t I be more like Luc, who didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone?

  I mean, hell, he’d ditched me to save his precious little carnival. Yeah, it was bothering me more than I’d let on. At night, when I wasn’t dreaming about being dissected like a living lab rat, I dreamed about him bailing. About him laughing in my face and telling me to fuck off because I’d gotten what I deserved.

  I was so confused. On the one hand, being with my family could help. Or it might make me want to kill them all for leaving me as they had.

  The curtain was tossed aside, and Asher stared down at me with hard eyes. “You want to talk, then let’s fucking talk.”

  I sighed, realizing I’d pushed him too far again, but I was tired of saying I was sorry, because it was starting to become nothing but words.

  “‘Bout what?”

  Plopping down onto the toilet seat next to the tub, he glared. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”

  I shrugged.

  “No.” He shoved a finger in my face. “No, I don’t accept that. You want to rail and piss and moan, then do it.” He pounded his fist. “You tell me exactly what’s going on, but you stop locking me out, you hear me? I won’t take this shit anymore, Pandora, I won’t, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what!” I snapped, shooting to my feet. “You’ll leave me?” I laughed, but the sound was bitter to my ears. “Good. Do that. It’s about time. I told you to leave me a long time ago.”

  He was up and in my face in seconds, and rather than feeling terror, I felt something else entirely. My skin prickled, Lust woke up as if from a long slumber, and Ash’s nostrils flared.

  Then he was shoving my hands into the slick wall above my head, and he was in my space, breathing my air, slamming his lips over mine as he ground his erection against my naked thighs.

  “You want me to leave?” he growled.

  “Yes,” I panted, wrapping my leg around his thigh.

  “Really?” He released one of my hands, only to slip his calloused palm over my breast and roughly roll one of my nipples between his fingers.

  “Oh, yes. Yes.” I moaned, and I’m pretty sure I was totally losing my train of thought. That rat bastard was playing my body like a violin.

  His teeth clamped down sharply on my ear lobe, and the pain and pleasure, it was almost more than I could bear. With a sharp growl, I tore free of his grasp o
n my other hand and reached for his zipper, then quickly reversed positions, so I was the one pinning him against the tiled wall.

  Slipping him free of his jeans, I mounted him quickly. This was wild and animalistic. We grunted as we moved on each other. I was clawing at his arms, at his chest, both pushing him away and dragging him closer.

  Asher wasn’t patient with me like he’d been the first time. He rammed deep inside me, filling me up, and it was fire and brimstone and so amazing that I came in just another two thrusts, crying out his name as he rocked me with him.

  The moment it was over, I blinked and then laughed when his lips stretched into a slight smile.

  “If you just wanted sex, Pandora”—he tweaked my nose—“you only needed to say so.”

  Wrapping my arms around his neck, breathing easily because the tension of just moments ago was gone, I buried my nose into his still-clothed chest.

  After cleaning us up quickly, he pulled me once more against his body, and his fingers idly strummed my back. “So now are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “When is enough enough, Ash?”

  He didn’t say anything, and I was grateful that at least he didn’t try to fill my head with lies. I knew I was pushing him too far, knew that had he been anyone else they would have left me already, and knew that when he did I’d have nothing.

  He kissed the top of my head, then he shook his own.

  And that helpless gesture just about broke my heart. I had to try. Faced with the reality of what I was doing, I knew I had to try harder. Will myself back to health, to sanity and reason.

  I clutched at his shirt as he tried to move out of the stall. “I want to go get Kem’s trailer, Ash, and then I want to go find Luc.”

  Shoving blunt fingers through his thick, brown hair, he nodded. “Fine. We’ll do that.”

  He was walking away from me, and it hurt. I’d pushed him to this, I was killing us, only I could save us.

  “Hey.”

  He glanced back at me with a question in his eyes.

  “No more.”

  His brows furrowed. “No more, what?”

  “I choose you, Ash. Us. Give me another chance to show you that I can fight this.”

  His mouth tipped into a half smile, but then he left and didn’t say a word, and like a junkie faced with the stark reality of his actions, I trembled with the realization that it might already be too late.

  ~*~

  We’d had to backtrack a fair bit to get to where we’d hidden Kem’s trailer over a year ago. I’d expected the swampy marshland of Florida to have rotted it out by now, but Asher had not only kept it going, he’d improved it after the grenade the shifters had tossed into it.

  Everything purred like a kitten when he started it up. Asher had told me he’d drive the truck while I sat in the back and read the book.

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of reading it, but I’d also realized how selfish I was being by putting it off. The book was a huge source of anxiety for Ash. I needed either to read it and put him out of his misery or throw it away and never think about it again, and he needed the absolution of knowing one way or another.

  So there I sat on the bed where my world had turned upside down over a year ago and, lulled by the gentle motion of the trailer moving over open road, stared down at the book in my lap.

  Asher had used a very complex substitution cipher when he’d created his key. Letters were replaced with other letters at random, so A could become Y, and B could become D, but he’d also randomly dumped other letters using pi as his numeric reference. But the key then went on to explain that since the code written inside the text was long enough that frequency analysis could be used to crack it, he would place the remaining letters in a Caesar box, writing the letters down a column to reveal the phrase.

  I was impressed by the craftiness and ingenuity of it while at the same time horrified at the amount of work I’d have to do just to read the first page.

  I worked all through the night, never stopping to drink, or pee, or even to ask him if we were there yet when he pulled the truck off the side of the road and crashed into bed with me, exhausted and asleep within seconds of his head touching the pillow.

  The sun was cresting the horizon and splaying pink and peach washes of color through the room when I finally got into a good rhythm. But I wasn’t reading any of what I was writing.

  Though my heart pounded when my name appeared, and other words like Lust and Aquilla stood out in bold relief. But I shut my brain down and just worked, hand moving like a blur across my previously empty journal as I rearranged the words, transforming them from simple medieval sonnets into darker, deeper, and more sinister thoughts.

  He’d shifted out of the bed around six in the morning, flitting his fingers across my cheek in a silken caress before getting back into the driver’s seat.

  It was another seven hours before I was finally done.

  I stared at the binder in my hand, rubbed my throbbing wrist, and knew it was now or never.

  Opening to the first page, I began to read.

  Chapter 16

  Pandora

  Asher’s Journal, Entry 1

  I write these words down because to speak them would kill me, but I know the time will come when you will need to know these truths, though I do not wish to share them. Even as I write this, I struggle with the knowledge that what I’m about to do is a breach of everything I’ve ever held to be true. To understand me, Pandora, we must start at the beginning, with the day I met her…

  ~*~

  Entry 2

  I was born a mortal during the reign of Charlemagne. I can no longer remember my true name, but I remember my occupation. I was a Catholic priest. But I was ambitious and I was smart; in no time I’d risen beyond priest, monsignor, bishop, and even archbishop, to cardinal. I was a young cardinal, but I had friends in high places, and I exploited my position for power. My lust for influence was only supplanted by my zeal for righteousness, or my version of it anyway. One night I was called to Rome to visit Pope Stephen IV. I was thrilled and not a little nervous, as the call came during the dead of night. Everything was done under a heavy veil of secrecy. I remember vividly that no one talked or even cleared their throat as I padded silently down the marble halls to his holiness.

  I was led into his private chambers, and there we spoke. He told me he’d noticed my works and the level of prestige I brought to the papacy. I drank in his words as though they were the elixir of life, expecting nothing more than his gratitude, when the conversation began to take on a different tone.

  That was the night I learned of a budding organization, his brainchild that he’d named The Order. That was also the night I discovered that I lived in a world with monsters that came straight from Hell.

  Dropping a damask curtain hung up behind him, he revealed a steel cage, and beside it stood a man with a wild shock of silver hair, who I would later learn was named Ari. Inside the cage was the most beautiful creature I’d ever beheld.

  A woman with flowing locks of red hair that looked as though she’d dyed it in the juices of pomegranates, so rich it had been. Her hair had been plaited high on her head, and she was dressed in the garbs of gypsies, exposing the lines of her thighs and the ample shape of her breasts.

  I lusted for her, and so ashamed was I by my visceral reaction that I instantly decried her as the scarlet lady. Stephen was pleased by my pronouncement. That was when he asked me if I wanted to be baptized in the blood of the lamb.

  The woman inside the cage had screamed then, reaching her jeweled hand through the bars with nails like claws. Her eyes had struck me dumb because in an instant they’d gone from a normal gray to a glowing lavender.

  The demon pleaded with me to spare her, begging me to let her return to her family, that she meant us no harm, but Ari notched one of his bows and shot it through her throat, so that the only thing we could hear after that was her choking on her own blood.

  I knew t
hen that I’d been crafted for the express purpose of ending everything like her. I nodded my willingness to the Pope, and that was when she appeared.

  Allora, the angel in white.

  ~*~

  It must have been hours that I’d sat there reading, because the room was dark again and Asher was standing by the foot of our bed. He was debating whether to come to the bed with me or not.

  I crossed my legs and patted the spot beside me. He didn’t say anything for the longest time.

  “How far have you gotten?”

  “To the Lust demon in the cage.”

  Nodding, he took off his clothes then crawled over to me, laying his head in my lap. He wrapped his arm around my waist and buried his nose against my skin, breathing me in.

  I ran my fingers through his hair and didn’t start to read again until his breathing turned long and even.

  ~*~

  Entry 3

  Dressed in battle armor and with flowing white locks, she immediately captivated me with her beauty. Compared to the demon, she was all that was holy and lovely. A fierce and terrifying woman, her words shook the air like thunder.

  “Do you wish to be a servant of the Lord from now until the end of eternity?”

  I was consumed with passion for her, for the righteousness of the vision she’d revealed to me, by my desire to be the Lord’s emissary, fighting the hoards of Satan and sending them back to their fiery and eternal seat of judgment.

  I nodded my consent, and that was when Allora sliced through her wrist with her own nail. My gaze flicked to those around me. To the still screaming harlot, to Ari, and to the Pope. But if none of them told me this was wrong, then it must be right.

  So I took her hand, and I brought it to my lips, and I drank. That was the night of my rebirth. The transformation from man to death priest was not an easy one. Only the best of mortal kind can attain it. Only the brightest, the strongest, the bravest.