Blood Red Ashes (Dying Ashes Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Description

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  CHAPTER ONE How far is too far

  CHAPTER TWO Sewer Details

  CHAPTER THREE What happens under the bridge stays under the bridge

  CHAPTER FOUR I'll just watch you stuff your face

  CHAPTER FIVE Honey, I'm home

  CHAPTER SIX Long-distance intimidation

  CHAPTER SEVEN Certified spook hunger

  CHAPTER EIGHT New kids on the block

  CHAPTER NINE That something that you do

  CHAPTER TEN Bloodbathing

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Giving me the run around

  CHAPTER TWELVE Leads: Get them while they're hot

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN All we needed was a Mystery Machine

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN In lieu of a good night's rest

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN At least we weren't stuck in the waiting room

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Medical Emergency

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Probably the most obvious hideout

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Following bloody footprints

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Written in the blood of innocents

  CHAPTER TWENTY Noone wanted to go swimming

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Mama knows best

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Everyone's favorite dead woman

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE And I thought one was too many

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The ghost next door

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE No one taller than the last vampire standing

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Epilogue: A night to remember

  From the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  First she died. Then she learned how to live.

  Almost a year ago, Ashley Currigan’s life was destroyed by a monster long thought extinct, and she destroyed it in return. But in the process, she lost her lover, most of her friends, and perhaps even her humanity.

  Now, she struggles to regain all three.

  As she delves into a supernatural mystery intent on saving the lives of innocent children being kidnapped from their homes, Ashes will have to face even greater foes. As she races against the clock to recover Birmingham’s stolen daughters before it’s too late, she’ll do whatever it takes to bring them home safely and punish the monsters responsible.

  But when one goes chasing monsters, one must be careful not to become a monster herself. And when you’re a monster already, every step can lead to a new decision of just how many lines you’re willing to cross in pursuit of “doing the right thing”.

  Can Ashes save the lives she’s pledged to save without losing herself to the same darkness she fights?

  Blood Red Ashes is the second 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.

  Blood Red Ashes

  Dying Ashes #2

  By Annathesa Nikola

  Darksbane

  & Shei Darksbane

  Butcher, Green, Brahe, Salvatore, Rothfuss, Schaefer

  For inspiration.

  Foreword by Shei Darksbane

  It’s 8:33 AM on March 26th, 2017, and I have not slept. In fact, I have not slept a full eight hours in over a week. My wife has not slept a full six. We have worked so hard to finish this book and bring it out before the end of the month as we promised, and I can honestly say it is the best piece of fiction we have produced to date. Anna’s plotting has amazed me as always, and the character development in this particular entry to the series had me yelling “feels!” at her more often than I ever would have expected. There’s lots of feels in here, guys. Be ready.

  I don’t want to go on about how awesome this book is. You’ll have to just see for yourself. But I will say we’ve put so much work into this book to make it the best we possibly could. Aside from the hours and hours of writing, editing, rewriting, revising, and re-re-re-revising, Anna and I have both put hours and hours of research into this book to bring as much accuracy as possible anywhere it was needed.

  Probably the most fun thing I’ve done while researching for this book was the time I spent immersing myself in the language and dialect of Haitian Creole and the Vodou religion. I’ve studied this topic before, in part out of simple interest, and in part from having connected with this beautiful, fascinating culture in other stories that I may yet write and share with you one day. But this will be the first title we’ve released in which I’ve put that knowledge to use. The accents, the words, the slang, the vocal patterns, and even the lyrical, musical rhythm of the language were all firmly planted in my head as I wrote in great swaths of dialog by the characters who used them. I can hear that beautiful language in my head, and I just can’t get enough of it.

  The fun part was blending what I’d learned of Haitian Creole with my native-born understanding of the local accent of Birmingham, Alabama. So I mixed people I knew in real life with the right local accents with the accents I learned about and produced the best approximations I could.

  This was really fun, really challenging, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. I hope you’ll be able to hear those beautiful sounds in your head as I imagined them. And I did my best to keep it easy enough to read.

  And if I made mistakes—gosh, I’m sure I made some mistakes in all that somewhere—I meant no disrespect. I’m just trying to create an approximation of something that, to me, is beautiful beyond words.

  There are so many lovely cultures represented in this series so far, and I expect there will be more before it’s over. So far, besides the Haitian Creole, we have some Latino, and Native American representation, as well as various Southern US accents and probably a few more I’m too tired to think of right now.

  Anna and I both obviously have a love for language. She could write all day and be perfectly happy. Me, I could listen all day. I could just listen to all the beautiful sounds humanity makes in order to communicate the combined experiences of our species all over our world.

  It is my hope that in these pages, we have done those sounds some level of justice, and that when you read, you can hear those lovely sounds too.

  One day, should we option this series for an audio book set, there’ll be a voice actor with their work cut out for them.

  I really can’t wait to hear that either.

  With all my heart, I hope you enjoy this tale of horrible crimes, atrocities, and despair…

  And the fierce determination of a girl who had to die to understand what it meant to truly live.

  - Shei Darksbane

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

  Awakened, Hunted, Driven, and Blooded.

  CHAPTER ONE

  How far is too far

  First was stillness, in darkness.

  Then a burst of furious motion. I wrapped my dead arms around my victim; one arm went high, bending his torso backward, baring his neck to me. My other arm went low, pinning his arms like an iron vice; his greater size and strength rendered suddenly, violently irrelevant. Without missing a beat, I opened wide and plunged my double set of Strigoi fangs into his exposed throat.

  The four sharp teeth lurking just behind my upper canines weren’t enough to rupture the carotid artery on their own, but they had a lot of help in the biting department from
the same superhuman strength that rendered the stranger powerless. If I’d still made a habit of breathing, I would have sighed in relief as the torrent of delicious lifeblood funneled down my dry, dead throat.

  The process wasn’t nearly as pleasant for my victim.

  No anesthesia blunted the pain. No mystical vampire powers kept him quiet, or kept the shock of blood loss at bay. Only the loss of oxygenated blood to the brain would bring his release now; until then, he struggled and panicked and tried to scream.

  His partner in death, I likewise stoically rode the encounter out to its inevitable ending.

  Gunshots pulsed a lethal beat into the night, the thunderous sound echoing and resounding back at the three of us from the nearby walls. The other individual sharing our dingy, dimly lit Birmingham alley recovered from the sudden shock of the supernatural and responded to his newfound terror in the manner I’d come to expect. Bullets pounded heedlessly through the dying man in my grasp, mortal-crafted bits of lead stopping only when they struck my undead flesh.

  My lip curled as dead blood hit the air, turning viable sustenance spoiled and repugnant in an instant. What a waste.

  The once-rapid thump-thump struggled and slowed as his blood pressure plummeted; mere moments in, and already there wasn’t much blood left to squander. It still surprised me—even after several feedings—how very quickly this type of wound killed, how completely fragile and fleeting a human life could be in just the right—or wrong—hands.

  I dropped the corpse to the dirty, cracked cement. The futile gunshots stopped. Only the “dregs” were left in the discarded husk; even if the last few, quickly spoiling drops had still been able to quench my thirst, I hardly needed them.

  There was plenty more standing right in front of me.

  We locked for the briefest of moments before he turned and fled. I stifled a grin as I called on the shadows around me, and they swarmed me gladly. Concealed from mere mortal view, the chase was on.

  And I’d have been lying if I’d said there was no thrill to the hunt.

  Though really, this was the end of my hunt, not the beginning. These were not two random guys in the wrong place at the wrong time, bleeding their last in a dirty alley for nothing more than a meal for a monster.

  Not like it had been with me.

  I’d watched them on and off for a couple of weeks now, just like the ones I’d killed before them and those before that. I had long determined that if I had to take life to keep my own, it would be from those that, to the best of my knowledge, preyed on others themselves. Those who hurt their own kind. Those who traded in addictions, ruined lives, and back alley brutality.

  Monsters of a different kind.

  It was far from perfect, but it was the best I could manage.

  About one person every two weeks. That was the cost in human life to keep me “alive.” About thirty a year to feed one Ashley Currigan. It was still hard to justify the worth. Not that I knew a whole year’s count for certain yet, but I soon would; it had been over nine months since I’d been successfully left for dead, only to rise again as one of the last Strigoi vampires on the planet.

  Nine months since I’d killed the creature who killed me—this time for good—and forced the other two responsible to flee the city. Not that I’d done it alone, of course, or that the victory in question had come without a steep, steep cost.

  My feet pounded hard on the asphalt and concrete of the twisted back streets and alleys. The shadows muffled the sound just as they muffled my form. The pulse of pursuit mirrored the frantic heartbeat I followed. Once, newly turned with my body suffering from clumsy stiffness and rigor mortis, this chase would have been rough. Now, it could hardly be termed a chase at all; those first few months had fled and so had those problems, to be replaced with a supernatural quickness that no mere human could match.

  Really, I was just waiting for the guy to corner himself some place where his cries, struggles, and probable gunshots wouldn’t draw much attention.

  That chance came soon enough: a dead end with a closed-off access point where workers loaded freight during the day. My quarry put his back to the thick metal roll-down door, pressing against it hard, and sweating with the desperation of being cornered. He threw his gun up and scanned the shadows. His pulse pounded, the siren song of prey urging me onward. He might not know where I was or even what was going on, but those good old human instincts told him that something was wrong, that something unnatural was still after him and his life was in peril.

  I leapt easily from rooftop to rooftop, from side of building to side of building, parkour that was at the same time superhuman and rudimentary. I quickly closed in and dropped to the ground, crushing his gun hand in mine and pinning him to the metal before he even realized I was on him.

  Then it was over, and I wasn’t hungry any more.

  Birmingham, Alabama, might not be so bad on the scale of cities like Detroit or Oakland, but it still had one of the highest crime rates per capita in the country. And now, I was part of both the sickness and the cure. I still didn’t know how to feel about that. I tried to tell myself that it was just one more scumbag off the streets. I had seen first hand what this guy, and so many like him, had done to others. I tried to tell myself it was good riddance. I tried to say that I was kinda like Batman, except that I ate people.

  And now I was worried, because I was starting to believe it.

  It had been nine months since I was turned. Long enough for a normal, still living girl to have a baby, but instead I’d given birth to a whole new me.

  I had worked hard to keep my urges under control, pushing myself toward better mastery of my new nature. I’d had to move out of the apartment I’d shared with my long time girlfriend, for her sake, and I purposefully hadn’t taken many possessions or distractions with me. As a Strigoi, I didn’t need much, so I spent all of that extra time trying to master myself instead.

  So far, I thought it was going well. Hopefully.

  The last of a dead stranger’s useful blood ran down my throat and I let the used-up corpse crumple into a limp pile at my feet. Unnatural liquid vitality flooded through me, filling me with stolen, molten life. Most of the scarlet draft didn’t even make it to my stomach before I began to feel it dispersing throughout my system. More than merely quenching a thirst, I felt exhilarated, ironically alive, in an incredible rush that nothing else could provide.

  I couldn’t say it wasn’t addictive. As addictive as breathing, more intoxicating than anything I’d ever encountered while alive. It made for a daily struggle—a constant temptation—but I hadn’t failed myself yet, and I didn’t intend to start anytime soon.

  Now, to cover up. The stalking, the hunting, the murder; that was stage one. Stage two was making it all disappear.

  Despite the aforementioned high crime rate, the number of people I ate would make up a decent little chunk of Birmingham’s yearly murder quota by itself—that is, if any of the bodies were ever found. As it was, I figured they were written off to gang violence or missing persons. My friend Tamara had assured me it was easier for everyone if I didn’t leave exsanguinated corpses draped in embarrassing positions in random dumpsters all over town.

  So I connected to the energies released by the two deaths I’d just caused, those energies so similar to the ones animating my own body. I picked him up and pushed myself sideways, moving in some inexplicable direction that wasn’t one most people were familiar with. The air around me blurred, and just as suddenly and simply as that, I stepped Next Door.

  Next Door, that strange realm that somehow coexisted both beside ours and within it at the same time. That realm made of dreams, of possibilities, of fancy, of nightmares and imagination. The place where all magic came from, whether coaxed across by magicians or bleeding through on its own. The home of those creatures we knew well from mythology by many names: the Good Neighbors, the Sidhe, the Fae...and of course, the occasional bloodthirsty demon.

  Now I was no longer in the Magic City;
instead I was a whole world away. Monuments towered around me, grave markers so vast they made me feel like an action figure. Here, it was easy to feel swallowed by rolling hills covered in dry grass and obelisks that stabbed upward from the earth like the quills of some massive stone porcupine.

  One did not arrive in the same place very often, as Next Door wasn’t connected to our Home in any logical way, and yet I’d been here at least twice before. It was a place that was kind of hard to forget. At least there wasn’t anything watching me this time as I dumped the body—yet.

  I dropped it to the ground, then tore off the head.

  It was easy; effortless. And absolutely necessary. As a Strigoi, I would turn any victim I killed—whether I wanted to or not. The last thing I wanted was to spawn little vampirelings of my own. I’d already seen the harm my kind could cause unchecked, and I wasn’t about to open the door to that kind of plague. Not only that but I also wasn’t going to hand my kind of power to the sort of assholes I fed on. If that took severing a few heads here and there, so be it.

  The worlds blurred and melted together like runny eggs as I stepped back across. It was always easier to go back Home; once you were Next Door with all the magic, it was much easier to gather enough energy for the return trip. At least for me. And if I did it quick enough, I even tended to re-emerge close to where I left.

  A quick jog and a turned corner or two brought me back to the cooling corpse of my first victim. There were just enough wisps of deathly energy lingering about the site of his demise to power one more trip Next Door. And once more, I found myself in Monument Valley.

  Odd.

  That made four times in the last two months. If I'd looked hard enough, I probably could have found the first handful of rotting bodies somewhere among all the towering obelisks. With the hair on the back of my neck standing at attention, I did my business and left as quickly as possible. I might not have seen whatever it was that had been watching me, but I’d certainly felt it, a cold sense of observation that dug relentlessly at that spot between my shoulder blades.