Shattered Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Description

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter One Halfway to Normal

  Chapter Two Accidental Clubbing

  Chapter Three Warning call

  Chapter Four Rescue operation/fiasco

  Chapter Five Upstairs throwdown

  Chapter Six Motives hazy try again later

  Chapter Seven Worst Bath Ever

  Chapter Eight Family intervention

  Chapter Nine So tired of refrigerators

  Chapter Ten If things were different

  Chapter Eleven Those dam negotiations

  Chapter Twelve What’s beneath rock bottom

  Chapter Thirteen Battered not broken

  Chapter Fourteen Not quite Gandalf

  Chapter Fifteen For the one you love

  Chapter Sixteen Waking up is hard to do

  Chapter Seventeen Stranger bed fellows

  Chapter Eighteen Exit stage right

  Chapter Nineteen Best served red-hot

  Chapter Twenty Should have hit her with the chair

  Chapter Twenty-One Where there's smoke there's lies

  Chapter Twenty-Two Epilogue: All roads end somewhere

  From the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Ashes went through Hell and back to rescue the woman she loved from villains aplenty. It’s been a couple years, and her relationship with Lori is finally starting to feel normal again. So when a bit of foul vampire business starts to heat up, Ashes does everything she can to help her friends and safeguard her city without causing her traumatized lover any further stress. But when a demon of the past shows up in Birmingham, it’s all Ashes can do to keep her friends and herself from ending up six feet under.

  Can Ashes save her friends, her city, and her strained relationship all at once? Or have the stakes finally risen too high for even a Strigoi to handle?

  Shattered Ashes is the third novel in the Dying Ashes series, a gripping dark urban fantasy about a smart-assed dead lesbian and her undead adventures in the supernatural mixing pot of Birmingham, Alabama. If you like intense, thrilling action, witty banter, and deep character development, you'll love this series. Fans of Craig Schaefer's Daniel Faust series and Simon R. Green's Nightside will love this beautifully-written romp through the supernatural dark side of the Magic City.

  By Annathesa Nikola

  Darksbane

  & Shei Darksbane

  To Neil Gaiman

  “Find the next word.”

  You really kept me going this time, buddy :)

  And to my fans:

  Writing this book, I had one of the worst, unending fracking depressions/anxiety spells in recent memory. I hope that, despite that, it’s still up to my usual standards...and yours.

  Thanks for sticking with me.

  Foreword by Shei Darksbane

  It’s 2:53 AM on June 19, 2017 as I begin to type this foreword, immediately after finishing the revisions on this title with Anna. She’s now contentedly enjoying some well-earned Rimworld while I format and finalize the addition. We still have a lot of work to do to get this book out, and we plan to have it live on Amazon by tomorrow evening. We did our best to have it out before now, but life has played havoc on us lately, and try as we might, this was the earliest we could manage.

  All the same, we have put blood, sweat, and tears into this story. A lot of tears actually. It’s rather touching at points. Anna has surprised me yet again with the depth and beauty of the characters as she develops them further and further.

  This particular story really was a ride for me. Anna took a plot I conceived of long ago and turned it on its head, upside down and inside out, and any way but loose. She took my little idea and brought back something so much bigger. I have no idea how she does this. She just absolutely thrills me with her magic for storytelling.

  At this point, the thing I want most from our career is for Anna’s stories to be seen. Sure, we want to make an income (everyone’s gotta pay rent and buy groceries), but my wife has a gift. And I want to see it shared with the world. I want people to see the brilliance in her stories and the depth in her characters. I want them to see the majesty of Anna’s mind as I see it.

  It is my hope that you will all enjoy these works that we have worked so hard to bring you. It is my hope that through these works, we bring representation to the unseen, unheard, and under-appreciated.

  It is my hope that you can find yourself in Ashes or Tamara, or Charles, or Rain and Jason.

  And maybe along the way, you’ll get a chance to see a little of what I fell in love with nearly 18 years ago.

  It is my great pride to present to you Shattered Ashes, a tale of love, loss, and determination that neither Hell nor high-water could overcome.

  - Shei Darksbane

  And if you like it, check out our other series:

  Awakened, Hunted, Driven, and Blooded.

  Chapter One

  Halfway to Normal

  “Get wrecked, Beelzebub,” I snarled. I darted across the shattered floor of the broken-down burning cathedral, jabbing my oversized sword into the hulking demon’s clenched fist over and over in a flicker of inhumanly quick motion. “And get your hands off my woman!”

  “Yeah, get your hands off me!” As soon as the massive monster’s clawed hands split apart under my strikes, Lori darted to the side, rolling over and over across the rubble-strewn ground to avoid being snatched up again. “Where’s the chalice?” Lori bumped into me, leaning her weight against me as she dodged and wove desperately, a frantic grin stretched across her pale, beautiful face. “Don’t tell me you lost it!”

  “Relax! I got this.” I leaned against her in return, careful not to push her over accidentally, and darted back into the fray. With reflexes quicker than any human’s, I handily took point, dodging and striking, fearlessly taking the fight straight to the King of All Demons. I scooped up the Lesser Grail as I ran, barely an instant before one of Beelzebub’s freakish minions could snatch it, and jammed on the buttons as hard as I could without breaking them.

  After a few more minutes of relentless action, the Lord of the Infinite Underworld lay dead at our feet, with Lori and I standing triumphant over his disintegrating form.

  Or rather, our characters did.

  “Damn, that was fun,” Lori set her controller aside as the end-game credits started to roll, grinning like a madwoman.

  “You’re telling me. Feels like it’s been years since the last time.” Going on two, I suppose.

  “I almost thought we’d made it through all of that, just to lose right at the end, and there you came out of nowhere, and—Ow.” Lori thumped me hard on the arm and winced. Apparently, her excitement had caused her to forget how my death and undeath had rendered me tougher than iron, and about as good an idea to whack your fist against.

  I snorted. “Careful.” To be honest, I liked that we were at a stage where she could forget what I was, even for a few minutes. Those times still didn’t come often enough.

  “That really was fun,” she reiterated, finally relaxing and leaning back against the couch. “I...really missed stuff like this, you know?”

  Apparently, our binge night of Demon’s Song III had gone pretty well. “Me too,” I rasped. Careful not to spook her—physical contact could still be a little iffy sometimes—I put my arm around her shoulders, pulling Lori’s slender frame close. To my relief, she relaxed against me instead of growing tense. “I’m certainly up for making it more of a habit.” Like it used to be.
/>
  “Especially if you’ll go a little easier on the controllers,” she teased, looking up at me with a wink.

  I glanced over with a brief pang of guilt and sadness at the small pile of controllers I’d destroyed over the duration of the night, my old black-and-white favorite first among them. With a sigh, I shrugged it off; it was a small price to pay for a good night with the love of my life. Besides, nothing lasts forever.

  It did make a pretty pertinent point about the need for me to fine-tune my supernatural strength, though. Easier said than done, when I lacked the full range of tactile input I’d had as a living human. It had gotten harder than I ever would have expected to manage my mortal friends’ relative frailty; the first time I’d tried to playfully shove my Lori—instead knocking her over completely and bloodying her nose—had been a interesting debacle, to say the least.

  “What do you wanna do now?” I asked as the game scrolled through the credits and cycled back to the main menu, filling the apartment’s living room with its high-octane opening theme. My voice was still as rough, hoarse, and raw as ever, but I didn’t try to hide it any more. Not that trying had ever helped very much in the first place.

  “Nothing.” Her voice was as soft as her bright, slate-gray eyes.

  “Nothing?” I glanced down, drawn in by those same deep eyes, entranced by the pale, flawless curve of her shoulder and neck that her long off-the-shoulder T-shirt exposed. Hypnotized by the throb of her pulse, veiled but not hidden by the soft curls of her hair, now dyed a luminous platinum blonde…

  “Nothing’s fine too,” I rasped, leaning my head on top of hers with a smile.

  Cloaked in comfortable silence, the moments drifted by, no matter how determinedly I clutched at them.

  “You hungry?” She asked finally, quietly, shifting in my arms.

  I grunted noncommittally. I knew she wasn’t asking if I wanted an omelet. The silence returned, almost as comfortable as before, framed by the steady rhythm of her mortal heart.

  “Have you thought about it?” Lori shifted, not pulling free, but pulling away just enough to meet my dead-rimmed, pale green eyes.

  I was proud of her. It had taken her a while to be able to stare into my gaze again and see me, instead of the death of a person she loved, instead of the torment she’d suffered at the hands of a creature with similarly death-glazed eyes.

  But the scars of that torment were slow to fade, both the mental and physical alike.

  Lori shivered; the chill that hung in the air around me and crept into human bones wasn’t easily ignored. I pulled away from her long enough to grab a thin blanket off the back of the couch and drape it around her shoulders.

  “Yeah. You know I want to,” I replied finally. A frown slowly ate its way through my smile and replaced it, despite my conscious opposition. “Not that easy though, Lor.”

  She snorted dismissively. “How not? You don’t have much stuff over there. Just pick it all up and...bring it back home.” We both heard the momentary hesitation in her voice, but neither of us acknowledged it. “These days you spend more time here with me than at that old church, anyway.”

  It really wasn’t that easy, though. The old, abandoned, nameless cathedral church was my lair for a very good reason, namely, that the Sanguinarian vampires that wanted me perma-dead couldn’t step foot inside. Once, long before I was even born, the blood vampires had conspired to exterminate my entire race. But the fact that I’d died at Strigoi hands and become one of them obviously meant that their genocidal crusade had missed a few. Fast forward three centuries or so, and they were just starting to figure that out—mostly because of me and my ill-advised antics.

  And when they finally decided to finish what they’d started centuries ago, that was trouble I didn’t want to bring home to Lori’s doorstep.

  Literally.

  “I just… Don’t want to make things bad for you, Lor. Not again.” The last time had ultimately been my fault, and it had almost broken her. In Lori’s absence, the church had become my lair—but my home had always been here with her. Tensions on the street were rising. The Sangs were watching. I didn’t want to bring our home down around both our ears or worse.

  Three times, I watched her try to take a breath and speak; three times I watched her fail. We both knew what she wanted to say, what she was trying to say; what the old Lori, the pre-torture-at-a-demon’s-claws Lori would have said. Fuck a whole lot of that. Those supernatural assholes can go screw themselves. I want you here with me.

  But those times were gone and that person ruined, stolen from us both by cruel, weighty reality.

  Because of me.

  I felt more than a little responsible.

  Could I risk doing that again? Could the Lori I knew survive that again? Thoughts of the supernatural haunted her nearly daily with her dead girlfriend serving as a constant reminder. What if—

  “It’s not just your choice,” she said softly. A pale, slender hand brushed the side of my neck, where once another Strigoi had torn out my throat, and her surprisingly strong fingers tangled themselves in the hair at the back of my neck, tugging me toward her until our foreheads met. “I don’t know what to do, Ash.” Her voice was a whisper of emotion, a warm breath breathing a semblance of life back into me. “But I know I want you back. I know I don’t want to have lost everything I’d made of my life to that...thing.” Her words shuddered, coated in a layer of disgust and faded terror.

  “Shhh, Lor. He’s long gone now.” I’d said those words no few times. I said them with the firm, reassuring certainty of having killed her demonic tormentor with my own two hands and a steel street sign.

  “I know,” she replied, and I fell into her eyes as she locked her gaze to mine. “But you’re still here.” She squeezed my hand tightly, her slate gray irises burning suddenly, almost hungrily, with passion. I let her other hand pull me down, and our lips met, like lightning coursing along my dead skin. Slowly, almost cautiously, the intensity mounted; I ran my cold hands along her arms and her sides, careful not to pull at her, not to make her feel trapped by my supernatural strength. I stopped pretending to take breaths, not wanting to breathe dead air into my lover’s face.

  Somewhere deep in one of the pockets of my jeans, something shuddered and moved. I ignored it, even as the chorus from Eye of the Tiger started blaring from my hip.

  I continued ignoring it right up until Lori slowly, reluctantly pulled free of me and licked her lips. She poked me in the shoulder. “You gonna answer that, Ash?”

  “What?” I was still drowning in her eyes. “Oh. My phone.” I blinked, coming back to myself in a regretful rush. Fumbling the phone out of my pocket, the ring tone managed to die out moments before I could hit the accept button. I glanced at the missed call and the series of missed texts that had led up to it. “Shit. That was Tamara.”

  Lori leaned back, all long legs, pale skin, short shorts, and an amused smirk worn on perfect lips. “You forgot it was Friday, didn’t you.”

  I scrambled to place why Friday was important, then facepalmed with an audible smack. “Shithats. It’s her club’s grand opening.” I hesitated, worrying at my fangs with my tongue and glancing between my phone and my Lori.

  She smiled. “You should go. You promised.” She rolled fluidly off the couch and rose smoothly to her feet, making the decision easier on me.

  I took a deep breath. “You’re right.” I had promised, and I really didn’t want to miss tonight. All of my friends would be there, and I hadn’t seen Tamara in the last couple of weeks as she ramped up to her new club’s opening days. But I didn’t want to make it look like I was picking Tamara over Lori, either; she was understandably sensitive—even a bit jealous—of the inhumanly beautiful Moroi.

  It probably didn’t help that Tamara had become my best friend and biggest comfort in her absence.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “By the time we’re done, it may be—” />
  “Near dawn?” Lori smiled. “I know.”

  “So, you mean—”

  “Yes, Ash. It’s an invitation. Geeze, you’re dense.” She rolled her eyes. “I want you to come back and spend the night—well, the day. Here. With me.”

  I knew I was showing off a goofy grin as wide as my face and couldn’t care less. At least, as long as I actually looked goofy, instead of dead, fanged, and horrifying.

  “Now go get dressed.” She picked up a pair of nice boots from beside the door and tossed them at me, wincing when I didn’t bother to catch them and just let them bounce harmlessly off of my face.

  “Whatever you say, darlin’,” I rasped out my best overdone, imitation Southern drawl, grinning as she cringed, and darted off toward the bathroom.

  I’d never considered it easy to make myself look pretty. In retrospect, that probably had more to do with how poorly people had treated the only open lesbian in school than with my actual appearance. After all, I’d managed to win over Lori, and I liked to think she had otherwise decent taste and standards.

  Of course, now I was dead, and that came with its own set of hurdles.

  Dark eye makeup went on to cover and redefine the now naturally dark flesh around my eyes, repairing where the makeup’s freshness had faded over the night's video game marathon. I kept the flair to a minimum, but let it contrast with my deathly pale skin. A light layer of lipstick, properly reapplied, brought the illusion of life back to my lips with a dark wine color that didn’t conflict with the hint of blue veins that showed from beneath my skin, almost as if I were made of fleshy marble. Tamara had shown me how to properly turn “maybe an actual zombie” into “oh, she’s doing that goth thing” utilizing the magic of makeup, and I did my best to master and mimic her skills.

  I re-wrapped my worn, decaying joints with fresh, unstained cloth bandages, like an urban semi-mummy, then tossed the old, stained ones in a bag where Lori wouldn’t encounter them. I’d wash them later. I took special care wrapping the elbow that a power-mad Sanguinarian had snapped; even after months, the tissues were still torn and the bone still cracked—a sight that would turn most mortal stomachs. I’d managed a shower upon first arrival at our apartment, but I braved the sink long enough to wipe myself down again anyway, despite my hands going numb under the running water. I didn’t sweat anymore, so I knew I shouldn’t smell too bad, but some of my friends had very sensitive noses. I finished by hosing myself down with body spray and hoped for the best.