Chapter 41
Ash
The attack comes from the south. Through the dark cover of trees and the endless purple twilight.
Luckily I get a whole five minutes to actually put clothes on. If you could even call that luck.
I feel them before I see them. A wrongness in the air, a pressure against my newly awakened senses. The thorns beneath the surface of my skin pulse oddly, vibrating in a warning.
“How many?” Kieran is already moving, shadows pooling at his feet.
Dagda closes his eyes and I swear his ears twitch as he listens.
“Thirty. Maybe forty.” He shakes his head. “Mixed forces. Seelie, Unseelie, exiles. And...” He frowns. “Humans.”
Humans. No. Impossible.
But is it? Is it impossible? After everything I’ve witnessed. After everything I’ve felt and I’ve watched. Is it impossible?
No. Not if Graves never left Faerie. And I well and truly doubt he did.
“They’re using siege formation.” I’d know. I created it. With Davis. With my team. It’s what we were good at, how we survived. “Standard encampment purge protocol. Surround, suppress, eliminate.”
Everyone turns to look at me.
“How do you know that?” Orion asks.
“Because I helped design it.”
Shame burns the back of my neck. How was I so lost in myself that I was blind to the world around me?
I taught four teams that formation. Watched them drill it until it was muscle memory. Then I signed off on the final assessment myself.
I thought I was protecting my country.
I was building the machine that ate my own people.
The guilt is there for exactly one second before rage swallows it whole.
“They don’t know who’s here,” Morrigan says, with a touch of excitement that should terrify me. Instead it energizes me. “They think this is just another encampment.”
“Then let’s educate them.” Badb’s smile shows too many teeth. “I do so love teaching lessons.”
We pause just inside the tavern. Peering out I see the tree line, the hidden men in trees.
Always above. Always. Especially if you have an easy cover like trees. People always forget to look up.
From here I see a few in the first row of trees, some deeper.
“They probably have us surrounded,” I whisper, trying to count the odds. “A dozen at least I’d say.”
But they’re not expecting three war goddesses, a father god, an Unseelie prince, a Wild Court guardian, and me.
Whatever the fuck I am now.
Morrigan moves first. One moment she’s standing beside me, the next she’s a blur of black feathers and ancient fury. Her body shoots through the air right at the top of the trees, cutting through the first unit like they’re made of paper. Blood sprays in arcs that catch the purple twilight.
Badb laughs, actually laughs, as she tears into the second unit. Her form shifts between woman and something else, something with too many angles and not enough mercy.
Macha doesn’t make a sound. She just kills. Efficient. Methodical. Bodies dropping in her wake like leaves in autumn.
Dagda... Dagda is terrifying in a different way. He doesn’t fight like a warrior. He fights like a force of nature. The ground itself rises to meet the attackers, roots erupting from soil to drag them down, stones launching themselves with bone-shattering force.
Kieran’s shadows consume everything they touch. I watch a mercenary vanish into darkness, his scream cutting off mid-breath. For one second our eyes meet across the chaos, ice-blue finding whatever color mine are now, and something passes between us that doesn’t need words.
I see you.
I see you, too.
Then I’m moving. Fully outside in the open. They’re everywhere. Maybe three dozen.
Orion burns. That’s the only word for it.
His fire isn’t the controlled flame I’ve seen before.
It’s wildfire, hungry and indiscriminate, turning attackers to ash before they can get within twenty feet.
His fire arcs past me close enough to singe my hair, and he doesn’t apologize.
Just grins. The wild thing in him recognizing the wild thing in me.
And me?
A Seelie warrior breaks through the chaos, blade aimed at my throat. I raise my hand instinctively—
And thorns explode from my palm.
I don’t mean to do it. They just erupt. Foot-long spikes of living wood punching through his armor like cloth. He looks down at his chest. Looks back up at me.
The light leaves his eyes before he hits the ground.
My hand is still raised. Still crackling with green-gold light.
Huh.
More attackers pour from the trees. I lose myself in the rhythm of combat.
Duck, strike, kill. The thorns respond to thought now, erupting wherever I need them.
My new body moves differently than my old one.
Faster. Stronger. I don’t have time to think about what that means.
I’m just thankful as fuck that I can keep up.
A scream cuts through the battle, human, not Fae, and I spin toward the sound.
That’s when I see him.
He’s standing at the edge of the tree line, directing the attack with hand signals I know better than my own heartbeat. Tactical vest. Combat boots. The same steel-gray hair he’s had since I was seven years old.
Colonel Marcus Graves.
My feet are moving before my brain catches up.
Kieran shouts something. I don’t hear it. Don’t care. There’s only one thing in this forest that matters right now, and he’s standing at the tree line directing my people to their deaths.
Through the chaos of battle, past the bodies and the blood and the screaming, my eyes lock on the man who made me.
Who broke me.
Who sold me to monsters and called it patriotism.
He sees me coming. His eyes widen. Probably noting my height, my ears, my hair. And the ivy.
The fear that flashes across his face pleases me.
“Ash.” He says my name like it still belongs to him. “You’ve changed.”
“You have no idea.”
I hit him with everything I have.
Not thorns. Not magic. Just my fist connecting with his jaw hard enough to send him sprawling. He hits the ground and I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms, hands wrapped around his throat.
“Twenty-eight years.” The words come out raw. Scraped. “You used me to hunt my own people.”
“You were an asset.” He’s not even sorry. His eyes hold nothing but cold calculation, even now. I’ll never find warmth in these eyes that only hold strategy. “The most valuable asset I ever acquired. Do you have any idea what you could have been? What we could have accomplished together?”
“I know exactly what I could have been.” I lean closer. “I could have been a queen. A daughter. A person with a family who loved her. Instead, I was your weapon.”
“Sentiment.” He spits the word. “I made you strong. I made you useful. Everything you are, the skills, the survival instincts, the ability to kill without hesitation, you owe to me.”
“You’re right.”
I smile.
His expression flickers, uncertainty bleeding through his arrogance.
“I do owe you.” I loosen my grip on his throat.
Just enough for him to hope. “I owe you for every mission where I came home covered in blood that wasn’t mine.
For every nightmare I still have about the things you made me do.
For every time I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the monster staring back. ”
“Ash—”
“Did you know what I was? The whole time?”
He’s silent.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No shame. “We recovered you from a soil displacement event when you were approximately three years old. Then I just so happened to run into a couple goddesses. You were something valuable to them.”
Something valuable.
Not someone.
Something.
“Right.” I loosen my grip on his throat a fraction more. Just enough for him to hope. “I keep forgetting that part.”
I break his left hand.
The sound is wet. Crunching. His scream echoes through the trees, and somewhere behind me I hear the battle pause as everyone turns to watch.
Let them watch.
“That’s for Lucy.” My voice comes out flat. Calm. “She died thinking I abandoned her. But I was on a mission. Your mission. Hunting vampires in the Carpathians while my best friend took her last breath.”
“I didn’t—”
I break his right hand.
Another scream. Weaker this time. He’s going into shock. I can see it in the pallor of his skin, the rapid flutter of his pulse.
I have time.
“That’s for my parents.” I lean in close enough to smell his fear. “Cian and Niamh Moonshadow. They died to save me.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Oh, I understand perfectly.”
I start humming.
I don’t mean to. The tune just rises up from somewhere dark, somewhere Graves put it, and I can’t stop it.
It takes him a moment to recognize it. When he does, his face goes white.
Good. He should. He taught it to me. Said it helped with the dissociation. Count the kills like counting letters in a name.
“Strawberry Shortcake, cream on top, tell me the name of your sweetheart...”
“Ash.” His voice has changed. The cold calculation is gone, replaced by something I’ve never heard from him before. “Ash, listen to me—”
“A stands for Anton.” I grip his index finger. “Budapest. Remember him?”
Snap.
He screams. I wait for it to stop.
“B stands for Barnes.”
Snap.
“C stands for—” My voice catches. Castellanos begged in three languages. I was the one who finally shut him up. “C stands for you don’t get to know his name.”
Snap.
“Do you know what they all had in common, Colonel?” I continue the song under my breath, working my way through his remaining fingers. “They all thought they were untouchable. They all thought they could cause harm and nothing would happen to them.”
Snap. Snap. Snap.
“They were all wrong.”
He’s sobbing now. The great Colonel Marcus Graves, architect of a dozen black ops programs, reduced to a blubbering mess on the forest floor.
“P-please.” The word comes out slurred. Broken. “Ash, please, I can help you. I have information. About the attacks. About Amarantha. About—”
“Tell me.”
He gulps air. Tries to focus through the pain.
“We’re not the only team.” A laugh bubbles out of him, hysterical, fractured. “You think this is it? You think you’re saving anyone? We’ve been running these operations for decades. Every Wild Court encampment. Every settlement. Every family we could find.”
Right there. That, that is when he seals his fate. He just doesn’t know it yet. But I do.
“How many?” My voice is ice.
“Hundreds. Thousands. I lost count.” He’s grinning now, blood on his teeth. “You’re among the last, Ash. The Wild Court is gone. We’ve almost completed everything. And you can’t do anything about it.”
The Wild Court is gone.
My people. Gone. The language I never learned, the songs I never heard, the family I never knew. All of it erased while I was busy being his weapon.
I’m supposed to be their queen.
Queen of what? Of this? Of ashes and silence and a throne no one’s left to sit on?
“You think this hurts me?” I hear myself say. “You think telling me my people are dead is going to break me?”
His grin falters.
“You already broke me, Colonel. Twenty-eight years ago, when you pulled me from Morrigan and decided I was useful.” I stand. Look down at him. “But here’s the thing about broken things.”
My thorns respond to my fury. They don’t erupt from my palms this time. They grow from the ground beneath him. Slowly. Deliberately. Vines wrapping around his wrists, his ankles, his throat. Green-gold light pulsing as poison seeps into his skin.
“We learn to put ourselves back together.”
His eyes go wide as he feels it. The venom spreading through his bloodstream. Not fast. I don’t want fast.
“What—” He chokes on the word. “What is this?”
“Poison.” I crouch beside him, watching the veins in his neck turn black. “The same kind that runs through wild ivy. Through thornbushes. Through everything that grows in dark places and refuses to die.”
“Ash—”
“My name is Ashlynne Moonshadow.” The thorns tighten. “I am the last queen of the Wild Court. And you are going to die knowing that everything you built, everything you worked for, ends with me.”
His mouth opens. Closes. The poison has reached his lungs now. I can tell by the wet rattle of his breath.
“I...made you...” he gasps.
“Yes.” I stand. I watch him struggle with a sick satisfaction. One I’ll likely question about myself later. “You did. You made me into exactly the kind of monster who could do this. And I want you to spend your last moments thinking about that. Thinking about how you created your own destruction.”
The thorns constrict.
His body spasms once. Twice.
Then Colonel Marcus Graves, the man who stole me from the earth and forged me into a weapon, goes still.
I look down at his corpse.
I should feel something. Triumph. Horror. Grief. Something.
Instead there’s just...quiet. Like the static in my head finally stopped.
Fucking finally.
“Ash.”
Kieran’s voice. Close. I didn’t hear him approach.
I don’t turn around. Don’t want to see his face. Don’t want to know what he thinks of the woman standing over a corpse she killed slowly.
His hand settles on the back of my neck. Cold and steady.
He doesn’t say anything.
Neither do I.