Ashes And Grave by Aiden Bates & Jill Haven

Author:Aiden Bates & Jill Haven [Haven, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

15

Nix

“Nix?”

Rezzek knocked at the door. “Man... you’ve gotta talk to the council. They’re practically at your door. Nix? It’s been two days. We have to figure out what to do next.”

I ignored him. Half-shifted, I curled around Mikhail’s body. The shivering had stopped, at least, a few hours after I delivered him to my house and got him inside and into a hot bath. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he’d been cold. Deathly cold. If it wasn’t for his pulse, beating so slowly that I didn’t understand how he could still be alive, I would have assumed he was dead.

In that last moment, when adrenaline and my dragon had taken over, I had seen something I didn’t know was possible. Maybe dragonfire wasn’t enough to kill a ghost—or whatever happened to ghosts in place of death—but to see it twisted like that, turning that awful, eye-biting green color made my dragon recoil. And then to see it turned around and blasted back at us…

Mikhail had dropped on the spot. And part of me wondered if it was because of my interference that it had happened. If it wasn’t for dragon senses, I wouldn’t have heard the next beat of his heart, or sensed the smallest rush of air through his nostrils, or smelled the faint scent of life in him. It was like he’d just… left.

I thought I had gotten him killed for just a few horrible seconds, staring at his fallen body where it laid motionless on the cracked road. Not that long ago, the sight would have given me some degree of satisfaction, maybe. But that was before I knew him—as much as I did—and saw what he was willing to do, how far he was willing to go for people that didn’t like him, didn’t want him around, didn’t deserve him. And when he fell, I didn’t feel satisfaction. I felt something I didn’t even like naming in my own head, where no one else could hear it.

Loss. He was dead, and it was my fault, and I hated myself for letting it happen in the few moments before I realized that maybe it hadn’t.

And anyway, he’d told me that for a necromancer, death was just an inconvenience.

So I held him close, ignored the calls, the knocks on the door. If I could just keep him warm, keep dripping water into his mouth every few hours, then wherever he was, whatever was happening to him, he could come back from it.

“Nix,” Rezzek pleaded. “Your father is starting to look better. Actually better. He’s not up to taking his position back yet, but he will be. He’ll want to know why you’re not doing your job, and the council is going to tell him. Come on, man. You have to at least let them meet you here.”

Gods damn it. Of course, after all this, Mikhail had been right. Pop’s affliction was mystical. Necromantic. It wasn’t a fair trade. Not for that abusive asshole. “Let him,” I called to the door, my voice grating against the wrong kind of vocal cords.

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