Chapter 40
Ash
Kneeling on a dirty tavern floor in a salt circle is not how I thought I’d spend my morning.
And yet here the fuck I am.
Irritation tries to claw its way inside me but I swat it away. My jaw unclenches. My shoulders drop. I need to focus but everything is suddenly pissing me off.
Glamour. Fucking glamour.
It’s not like it’s easy for me to just shut it off. Every other Fae born and raised this side of the veil knows how to slip between forms like changing clothes. They learned it as children, probably. Practiced in mirrors. Got tips from their parents over breakfast.
But humans are just...humans. No magic. Just intuition they mostly ignore even on a bad day.
How am I supposed to let go of the Ash that existed before this moment?
All the thousands of tiny moments that make up the woman I was.
The missions. The training. The way I learned to hold a knife before I learned to hold a pen.
The calluses on my palms that took years to build.
The sound of Graves’ voice telling me I was special, chosen, valuable.
Lies wrapped in praise wrapped in chains.
Woman.
What a funny little word when you realize you aren’t one.
You’re Fae. A Fae woman?
Fuck, focus, Ash.
But it’s not easy.
I look at my hands. The ones I’ve known my entire life. At the little scar on my left hand, between my thumb and forefinger. I got it caught in a fishhook when we were fourteen. Ripped the skin clean off.
I think it was Pepper who had a rogue casting.
And I love that fucking scar. It’s mine.
It’s proof that I existed, that I lived, that I was a kid once who did stupid things with her cousins and bled for it.
What if it’s just gone when the glamour falls?
What if I drop this mask and there’s a body underneath that doesn’t belong to me?
One I don’t know. Don’t recognize. Don’t understand.
Will the scar still exist?
That’s what I’m supposed to just let go of. I know the memories are important. Morrigan made that clear. But the scars. Those are the reminders that I lived and I fucking survived and no one can take that away from me.
No one.
“Ash.” Kieran’s voice cuts through the spiral. He’s kneeling just outside the salt circle, close as he can get without touching the barrier. His ice-blue eyes hold something I don’t have a name for. “Do you want to talk it through?”
No. Not really.
But that’s not how relationships work, is it? As a human I could just push that aside. Bury it. Add it to the pile of things I don’t examine too closely.
But the more I sit here, the more I understand that Kieran, Orion, and Finnian can feel my emotions. They can tap into them the same way I can tap into theirs. The bond doesn’t allow for hiding. Not really.
“It’s silly,” I say, clearing my throat. I’m grateful the goddesses and Dagda are in the kitchen. I hope like hell they’re cooking food and not planning any more magical ambushes.
“Nothing about you is silly.” Kieran says exactly the right thing. “Stubborn, certainly. Perhaps a masochist. But in the best ways.”
I almost laugh. Almost.
“It’s the scars.” I look at my forearm. Point to the raised line on my shoulder. “Shrapnel. I took a hit but it saved the lives of my guys.”
“They mean something to you.” I can see how much it kills him that he can’t come into the circle. That he can’t touch me, hold me, fix this with his hands the way he fixed so many other things.
Orion stretches his legs out long, getting cozy on the floor like we’re having a picnic instead of a crisis. “When did you get them?” He rests his hands behind his head, elbows out, leaning against a chair that looks deeply unsteady.
“Fourteen.” I run a finger over the coin machine scar. “Twenty-five.” The shrapnel on my shoulder. “Also fourteen.” My knee, fell off a roof running from a security guard. Don’t ask. “Eighteen.” The thin line on my forearm where a car window exploded inward.
“Ah.” Orion nods like I’ve just confirmed something he already knew. “They aren’t leaving.”
I blink at him.
“Before immortality,” he continues, far too casual for my liking. Though that’s just who he is. “Permanent. Scars you got as a mortal stay. You’ll use glamour to cover ‘em up if you want, but they’re part of you now. Part of your story.”
Oh.
Oh.
I look at my hands again. Really look this time. And I see it. The slight shimmer around the fish hook scar. A whisper of magic so faint I never would have noticed if I wasn’t searching.
My glamour. Wrapped around the wound like protective film.
It’s not hiding the scar. It’s preserving it.
All this time. All this time, the magic wasn’t erasing who I was. It was keeping me safe until I was ready to remember.
Something cracks open in my chest. Not pain. Release.
I settle back. Close my eyes. And focus inward to that space inside me where I keep everything tightly locked away.
Then I blow the doors off the fucking hinges.
The smell hits first. Dust and old paper and something green underneath. Growing things. Waiting.
There’s no power surge. No dramatic explosion of magic. Just a release of breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
Mentally, I see myself step into this massive warehouse in my head. Rows of shelves stretching into darkness. Boxes stacked floor to ceiling, each one labeled with something I’ve buried.
Fear of abandonment.
Lucy’s death.
The sound of Graves’ voice.
Every time I wasn’t enough.
I walk past them. Not today. Those boxes can stay closed.
I’m looking for something specific.
The aisles blur together until I find it. A shelf near the back, dust-free, like someone’s been visiting. A single box sits alone, a name written on the side in handwriting I don’t recognize.
Ashlynne Moonshadow.
My hands shake as I reach for it.
The cardboard is warm under my fingers. Alive, almost. Humming with something that feels like homecoming and terror wrapped together.
I open it.
My breath catches. My heart slams against my ribs.
Inside, there’s no object. No artifact. No magical key.
There’s me.
Living. Moving. A window into a life I never got to live.
I see a woman. Tall, taller than I am now, with ears that come to delicate points.
Her hair falls past her shoulders in waves of pinkish-silver, darker at the roots where green bleeds through like new growth on a plant.
Her eyes are full green, no whites, no pupils, just endless forest that holds secrets I’m only beginning to understand.
She’s laughing at something. Running through trees. Her skin shimmers with patterns that move beneath the surface. Thorns and vines, ivy that breathes and pulses with her heartbeat like a living tattoo.
She looks happy.
She looks free.
She looks like me.
My eyes sting. I didn’t know I could look like that. Didn’t know there was a version of me that moved through the world without bracing for the next blow.
That’s you, something whispers. Not a voice. Just knowing. That’s who you were always supposed to be.
I watch her a moment longer. Watch the way she moves without the weight I’ve carried my whole life. Watch the thorns spiral up her arms when she laughs, green-gold light pulsing in time with her joy.
Then I close the box.
And I let go.
Not of her. Of everything else.
The grip I’ve held for twenty-eight years. The desperate clinging to a version of myself that was never real. The fear that if I stopped being Ash Morgan, there would be nothing left.
My hands shake. My breath comes out ragged. But I don’t stop.
I let it all go.
The sensation is strange. Not painful. Not like the goddesses’ assault. More like peeling off a wet suit that’s been slowly suffocating me. Layer by layer, the glamour dissolves. I feel it leaving my skin, my bones, my blood. Feel it releasing its hold on my cells one at a time.
My spine lengthens. Just slightly. Just enough that I feel taller even sitting down.
My ears ache for a moment, then settle into new shapes. Points. Delicate and strange and right.
My hair shifts against my shoulders. Longer now, heavier, and when I catch a strand between my fingers it’s not the dark brown I’ve known my whole life. It’s pink fading to silver, with green at the roots like I’m a plant growing toward the sun.
I should be freaking out. I’m not. It feels right in a way nothing has ever felt right before.
The thorns beneath my skin wake up.
Not just pulse. Bloom. I feel them spreading across my ribs, up my arms, down my spine. Not painful. Not invasive. Just...present. Like they’ve always been there, waiting for permission to exist.
I open my eyes.
Kieran’s face goes slack. Orion’s mouth falls open.
“Holy shit,” Orion breathes.
I look down at my hands. The coin machine scar is still there. So is the shrapnel mark on my shoulder. So is every single wound I earned being Ash Hayes-Morgan.
But around them, beneath them, through them, green-gold patterns spiral and shift. Ivy and thorns woven together, pulsing with my heartbeat, alive in a way that should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
It feels like coming home.
“The scars stayed,” I say, and my voice sounds different. Deeper. More resonant. Like it’s coming from somewhere older than my throat.
“Told you.” Orion’s grin is shaky but real. “Permanent.”
Kieran hasn’t moved. He’s staring at me like I’m a stranger and the love of his life all at once. Like he’s seeing me for the first time and recognizing me from a dream he forgot he had.
“Troublesome thing,” he says softly. “You’re—”
“Different?”
“Magnificent.”
Magnificent. He sees me. Always has and to him? I’m magnificent.
I reach for the barrier. The salt circle that’s kept me trapped, protected, contained. My fingers touch the invisible wall—
And it shatters.
Not because I broke it. Because I don’t need it anymore.
The glamour was survival magic. And I’m not just surviving anymore.
The goddesses appear in the kitchen doorway. Morrigan’s silver eyes go wide. Badb actually gasps. Macha says something in Old Fae that sounds like a prayer or a curse. Hard to tell with her.
“Well,” Morrigan breathes. “There you are.”
I stand. Taller now. Steadier. The thorns pulse beneath my skin, ivy patterns catching the light, and I feel—
I feel like myself.
For the first time in my entire life, I feel like myself.
Turns out she was in there all along. Just waiting for permission to exist.
“Ash.” Kieran’s on his feet, reaching for me, and when his cold hand finds my waist I don’t flinch. Don’t pull away. Just lean into him and let myself be held by someone who sees exactly what I am.
“I’m okay,” I tell him. “I’m actually okay.”
Orion joins us. His heat at my back, his arms wrapping around both of us, and for one perfect moment everything is still. Everything is right.
Then the war horn sounds.
The noise cuts through the tavern like a blade. Deep, resonant, ancient. The kind of sound that lives in your bones and demands attention.
The front door slams open.
Dagda fills the frame, his massive form blocking the light. His face holds something I’ve never seen on the jovial god before.
Fury.
“We’re under attack.”