Ashes And Grave Read online

  Ashes And Grave

  Dragon Magic: Book 2

  Jill Haven

  Aiden Bates

  Contents

  1. Nix

  2. Mikhail

  3. Nix

  4. Mikhail

  5. Nix

  6. Mikhail

  7. Nix

  8. Mikhail

  9. Nix

  10. Mikhail

  11. Nix

  12. Mikhail

  13. Nix

  14. Mikhail

  15. Nix

  16. Mikhail

  17. Nix

  18. Mikhail

  19. Nix

  20. Mikhail

  21. Nix

  22. Mikhail

  23. Nix

  24. Mikhail

  25. Mikhail

  26. Nix

  27. Mikhail

  28. Nix

  29. Mikhail

  Free Bonus Chapters!

  Come Join My Facebook Page!

  Ashes And Grave

  1

  Nix

  “It’s been three days,” Council Member Areela complained at the third of what had spontaneously become daily council sessions. There were murmurs of agreement around the long, curved table where the seven of them sat. “You told us you had found a solution to the problem. Where is it?”

  I wanted to wring my hands, rub my neck, clench my fists. But my father’s voice echoed in my head from a talk he’d given me just a month ago. They will push you, prod you, try to make you overreact. It’s a test. It’s their way of making sure that you’re capable of real leadership. When they question, always answer—don’t make excuses.

  I wished it was him standing in front of them, and not me. “As I told you before,” I said with what I hoped was stately dignity, “arrangements have been made. Custodes Lunae has agreed to send a—a necromancer to deal with the problem. And as I have said, it takes time to make the requisite preparations. You can continue to ask me, but the answer will be the same until he arrives.”

  “Assuming he ever does,” Vilar muttered. He was an ancient dragon, nearly two hundred years old and showing every year of it in the deep lines of his face, and who looked out of place like the rest of them seated in a bathrobe. With a poltergeist running loose in the weyr, all of them were dressed for an unexpected shift. “We should prepare a backup plan in case this one falls through. Any of the cabals might withdraw aid without even telling us, just to prove their point. There are those among the fae capable of interacting with the spirit world. The court of San Diego has old ties with our weyr—”

  “With respect, Council Member Vilar,” I interrupted politely, “those ties are half a millennia stale. I approached the fae first, if you’ll recall.”

  Areela gave a quiet hmph. “Perhaps if one of the more senior members of this council were to approach them, they would be more open to the possibility of aid?”

  You will lead this weyr, my father’s voice said. You are the voice of our people. Do not let them take that from you, or they will never return it.

  I let a bit of steel slip into my spine. “If this council does not believe that I am capable to lead our weyr, this council is welcomed to propose a vote of no confidence and remove myself and the Emberin bloodline from leadership.”

  The unspoken part of it, the threat of a split in the weyr which could crack our community in half forever, hung in the air between them at their table and me at my podium. I searched their faces, looking for signs that any of them would take me up on it. Another of father’s bits of advice: If you need to shut them up, tell them to take a vote. Those old bone-sacks are just as afraid of showing their hand to one another as they are of losing their seats from incompetence.

  Why he’d never simply dissolved the council, I had no clue. There were barely fifty dragons in our weyr, and only half of them had dragons for mates. Emberwood didn’t need a council at that size, and certainly not one with the traditional seven members who almost never actually accomplished anything.

  No one spoke up, raised a hand, or otherwise moved to make the vote. Nervous glances disguised as imperiously casual looks passed around the table before Areela inclined her head graciously in my direction. “It has not gotten so bad that we would remove you from office,” she said. “You still show a great deal of potential, much as your father did when he was your age.”

  That was high praise, though I didn’t believe it. Areela hated Roland Emberin, because he’d chosen my mother over her when they were teens. When she couldn’t mate into the Emberin line, she’d chosen instead to seek out a seat on the council, and gotten it—and made father’s life difficult from the first day she sat on it.

  “I appreciate your confidence,” I told her. I scanned the table. “I appreciate the confidence all of you place in me. I know that my father’s illness raises many questions, and makes it difficult to predict the future of Emberwood Weyr. Believe me, nothing would make me happier than to see another century of his leadership to guide us. But I have watched him since I was small, and he has not taken it easy on me as he prepared me for this. I assure you, Emberwood will be safe in my care.”

  They say the gods are cruel, and petty, and that we invoke them at our own risk. What they don’t say is that sometimes the gods are looking on, waiting for just the right moment to fuck you up the ass and laugh about it with their friends.

  The council chamber grew chilled. At least a ten-degree drop in the space of a few seconds. That was always the first sign.

  The second, when we were momentarily shaken by the change, was that the two doors behind the council table, where the deliberation chamber was, slammed shut hard enough to shake the walls of the building.

  By then, council members were already shifting. Scales of green, gold, black and red spread, until seven half-shifted dragons rose from their seats and braced themselves for what came next.

  I shifted as well, removing my pull-away track pants and zipped sweatshirt as black scales burst out of my skin and my dragon swelled up. Scales were proof against a lot of magic, though they wouldn’t keep a poltergeist from killing us with blunt force, or entering through the eyes, nose, or ears to possess someone. It was the best we could do.

  Emberwood had faced a lot of enemies over the ages. We’d been contentious before the Midnight Incident and the Enlightenment, and very contentious during the Census, but we’d always had fire and claws and weapons to back up our stance. And, in the past, those things had worked.

  But an enemy that was already dead was difficult to kill.

  At one end of the chamber, where spectator benches were bolted to the ground, wood groaned precariously a few seconds before an entire bench tore itself free of the concrete floor and came sailing across the room toward me.

  I crouched, braced myself, and just before it struck me, I swung an arm to shatter the bench into two pieces that broke around me and crashed to the floor on the other side of the podium. Before I could even enjoy having shown off a little in front of the council, shards of the broken bench rose up like dry leaves on the wind and began to whip around the room in a hailstorm, gaining speed as the wind picked up.

  Two of the council members ran to the rear chamber doors and tried to open them. When they wouldn’t open easily, they began pounding on them instead. Even old dragons were tremendously powerful, but the doors didn’t budge, and the sound of their pounding on the old oak was muted.

  A howling rose up alongside the wind. The same hollow, furious voice that had plagued the weyr for three hellish weeks. The temperature dropped further. By now, I knew that meant it was about to get worse.

  Two more benches rose, but instead of hurtling toward a target, they broke into chunks, as if a great invisible beast we
re chomping down on them a bit at a time. Shards of wood, along with the long steel screws that had bolted the benches in place, joined the hurricane of debris. Bits began to strike at us, moving as fast as bullets. None of them pierced scales, but they had momentum, and as a hail of detritus rained down on me, I staggered, and crouched down to protect the parts of me that were still soft enough to pierce.

  One of the screws struck the side of my head. The force of it made my ears ring, and my head begin to pound from the impact.

  Sooner or later, the spirit would show itself. It always did. “Fire,” I shouted over the noise. “Take away it’s ammunition!”

  No one immediately jumped to obey. None of them wanted to burn down the council building.

  We could build another gods damned council building. I raised my head, widened my jaw and clenched the small muscles deep in my throat as I exhaled a gout of dragonfire into the maelstrom. Bits of broken bench turned to ash and cinders almost instantly. Flying screws turned to slag that splashed across the floor, and the benches in the gallery, and even the walls, where they either cooled or began to smoke.

  More benches tore free. These flew directly at me, longways this time, like missiles. I swatted the first of them aside, but the back end flipped around and caught me across the shoulder. I went flying into the podium, taking it to the ground. It crushed beneath me, jabbing into my shoulders and back, and knocking the wind from my lungs. I rolled, and looked up in time to see the other bench coming for my head.

  One of the council members—Vilar, in his jagged, blood-red scales—appeared over me, tackling the bench out of the air and to the ground. I had no time to thank him, instead pushing to my feet and turning to belch more fire. He joined me this time, burning not just the debris but the remaining benches. If we had to, we would burn the whole chamber to nothing and give the spirit only ash to fight with.

  The third stage arrived as if in response. Ash and flame swirled with the hurricane, then pulled as if a great maw inhaled them toward the door. They gathered, and took shape, putting together a floating puzzle one chunk of charcoal and ember at a time, until a nearly human-shaped golem of ash and fire hovered by the chamber entrance. Eyes and a howling mouth emerged in the head. Fingers stretched, and a mane of hair made of soot spread out behind it. It gave another wail of fury, and then shot across the room toward me.

  I crossed my arms over my face and pressed my nostrils shut, pushing the flaps inside my ears out to seal them as well, and bit my lips to keep from granting it entrance to my mouth. We’d seen two of the three people killed already possessed first, and it had been a gruesome way to go. I could hold my breath for three minutes—hopefully long enough to wear it out.

  Fire burst across my arms as the spirit attacked. My scales shook under the onslaught of spectral energy, resisting for the moment.

  Before I had to take a deadly breath, the main doors of the chamber slammed open. Magic chimed, and a voice with a hint of some kind of eastern European accent called out. “Excorcizo immunda sunt! Valeo! Redi a quo factum est!”

  The magic struck a chord, and the attack of the cinder-geist halted. It gave a screech, and then dove into the ground. When it struck, it seemed to shed the suit it had made for itself, sending embers and ash and a cloud of soot bursting over the floor to leave a starburst of black and smoldering chunks of bench in its passing.

  All of us looked to the door, and found a young-looking guy with jet black hair, a long black leather coat, and a cream-colored messenger bag on his shoulder. He looked around the place. “Well… it could have been a lot worse.”

  A bitter taste filled my mouth, and an old, painful anger clawed at the inside of my guts.

  The necromancer had arrived.

  2

  Mikhail

  I love Vance Beauregard as though he were my own brother, birthed from the same womb as me. I would, and have, done anything for him even at the expense of my own progress in the cabal and sometimes at the risk of my own life.

  But I would have throttled him if he had been there with me. He had told me that Emberwood Weyr was ‘haunted’. This? This is not what ‘haunted’ looks like. This looked like a place that was plagued.

  “That was intense,” Gabby muttered beside me. “Poltergeist, you think?”

  I didn’t answer her. We were in mixed company. Instead, I strode through the wreckage, covering my mouth from the lingering smoke in the air, to approach the two half-shifted dragons near the middle of this room. As I did, the black-scaled one dipped to collect a pair of pants which had small holes burned all along the legs, and began to put them back on before his scales receded and he lost perhaps a foot of height, until he was in his human form.

  “Oh, my,” Gabby murmured. “No one said he was fucking hot.”

  I ignored her, and was careful not to look the man over. She wasn’t wrong, but this was a professional meeting. “I am Mikhail Baranov,” I said, extending a hand. “I am told you have a ghost problem.”

  The man did look me over. And not, I thought, because he liked my style. He didn’t take my hand. “Thank you for coming,” he said, with the tone of someone whose life I had not recently saved. “Whoever told you it was a ghost problem understated the matter.”

  “That is clear, yes,” I said, looking around at the destruction. “I apologize that I couldn’t be here sooner. I had to collect supplies, clear it with my master.”

  “Sure,” he grunted. “Mage bureaucracy. Luckily, no one else has died in the last three days. Thank you for your assistance. You can see the treasurer about your payment.”

  Gabby snorted. “Oh, boy.”

  I looked down at the place where it looked as though a missile had struck, and nudged a glowing coal away from my boot. “You misunderstand what has just happened,” I said, looking up at him. He had remarkably green eyes—rare for a dragon, as I understood it. I pointed to the spot where the poltergeist—if that is what it was—disappeared. “That was only a banishing. Like a band-aid, so that it would do no harm at the moment and allow us to discuss the matter. No; the job is not done.”

  Behind him, a few of the dragons gathered there, not dressed and human, took on what I thought were smug looks.

  For his part, this person—who I thought could be Nix Emberin, the dragon I was supposed to speak with—seemed almost aware of the shift in attitude, but kept his eyes on me. “I see,” he said, his words clipped. “Well, then—what do you require to finish the job?”

  I shrugged. “To speak with people who have been affected, learn some of the history of the area, discover what keeps the spirit attached to this place, what it is angry about, use those things to summon it to a location where I can—”

  He sighed, and raised a hand to stall me talking. “It’s a process is what you’re saying.”

  I inclined my head. “It is a process, yes.”

  He clenched his jaw, just long enough that I spotted the twitch of muscles. It was a very nice jaw, I had to admit. Gabby nudged me with her elbow. “Smoldering eyes. I’m a sucker for smoldering eyes. You should totally let him fuck you.”

  Sometimes, pretending like Gabby was not there was particularly difficult. “If all that you need is a temporary banishing,” I said, “then we can consider my work done and I am happy to—”

  “No,” he said quickly. “No, we need this to be dealt with.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Then I will deal with it. And… you are…?”

  He grunted. “Nix. Nix Emberin, I’m the leader of this weyr.”

  “Leader pro tem,” the old man who had been the red dragon moments ago corrected.

  Nix’s eyes hardened somewhat. “As Council Member Vilar says—leader pro tem. My father leads the weyr, Roland Emberin; but he’s taken ill recently. I’ll be managing your contract with us.”

  There was definitely tension in the room over that. Vance had told me that his mate, Tam—who led the Blackstone Weyr back in Virginia—suspected that there was some plot to destabili
ze shifter communities and mage cabals alike all along the East Coast. I couldn’t help but think of that. Once he’d told me about all the different political and social unrest that had cropped up in just the last year, I had to admit it did seem suspicious.

  “I do not care who is in charge,” I said, as much to the rest of the council as to Nix, “as long as everyone is able to cooperate. Removing a dangerous spirit is not a simple task. But it is a reliable one. Once my work here is completed, you have my word that there will be no more attacks of this nature. However, it will take several days. I will need lodging. My needs are few; any place with four walls and a roof will be fine.”

  “Ask if you can stay in his place,” Gabby urged. “If you don’t want to sleep with him, at least let me get a good look in the shower.”

  I had to bite my lip to keep from replying that she had a filthy mind.

  Nix narrowed his eyes at me. “Is something funny?”

  “I remembered an anecdote,” I said flatly, pushing all amusement out of my head, “about a poltergeist. It is not relevant, just a memory. So. If we could get started? Your poltergeist is very strong, a simple banishing will not keep it at bay for much time.”

  “Nix will be happy to show you to your quarters,” Vilar said. “And may I say, on behalf of the council, that we are grateful for the offer of aid from Custodes Lunae. We hope that this will mark an era of better relations between our people and your organization.”