Out of Smoke and Ashes Read online

  As she closed the door behind her, his head hit the pillow. He stared up at the ceiling, his mind whirling. I’m bloody well fucked. Rodolfo wasn’t any great guy to deal with, but he had his own strange code of honor. You couldn’t trust him, but he did honor his word. He was cruel and mean and heartless.

  Well, in a strangely predictable way.

  And he wasn’t crazy. You could always follow the thread of his sanity, no matter how strained and twisted, through his actions.

  Mercedes didn’t just want revenge. She was completely insane, something he’d apparently overlooked before. Used to dealing with a certain level of evil over the years, somehow she’d managed to fly below his radar.

  He just hoped he lived to regret it.

  * * * *

  She returned a few hours later with a tray of food. Still dressed in her bathrobe, she set the tray on the bedside table and sat next to him on the bed. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t hear a lot of plaintive screaming and begging from you. That was refreshing.”

  “You’ve done this before, I take it?” Why play games? She had the upper hand and he wasn’t going to break free of the charmed cuffs. If she was going to kill him, he suspected nothing he could do in his current position would change her mind on the matter.

  She cocked her head as she studied him. “No, I just anticipated a certain level of groveling out of you based upon your previous actions in life and what my brothers told me about you. The words sniveling and cowardly were used more than once.”

  He let out a snort but didn’t answer.

  After a moment, she said, “Well, here’s the deal. I can roofie you again, if you’d like. Drop it in your drink like I did before. I’m also going to dose you up again with the Viagra, but the roofie’s optional. Your choice.”

  “Why?”

  “Why’d I roofie you? Pops, I’d think that answer’s obvious.”

  “No. Why are you giving me a choice about it now?”

  He wasn’t prepared for the way she studied her meticulously lacquered nails for a while before answering. “Because maybe there was a moment or two in there that made me curious to see if you’d enjoy it that much without it,” she quietly said.

  Here he’d thought he’d pegged her as a totally conscienceless sociopath. “I’m gay,” he said, comforted by the fact that she wouldn’t kill or seriously mutilate him until she’d gotten what she wanted from him. “No offense, Mercedes. It’s nothing personal. You are, admittedly, a beautiful woman. No one with a set of working eyes and the ability to appreciate the human form could deny that. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m attracted to men. Yes, in my younger years I did sleep with women in an attempt to ignore what I was. Bloody lot of good that did me,” he added in a mutter.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  This is peculiar. “What do I mean about what?”

  “About it not doing you any good?”

  “Couldn’t change the fact that I’m a beta, now, could it? Couldn’t change the fact that even though I was the firstborn child, my father’s only son, my Alpha younger sister was the one who received all his blessings. All his attention. All his respect.”

  “Ah. The Daddy Didn’t Love Me defense. Seems like we have more in common than it would first appear.”

  “At least you knew up front your sire was an arsehole. You didn’t waste years of your life trying to earn his respect. You didn’t waste years of your life having your younger sister and her family lorded over your head. You didn’t waste your life breaking your back working for the man, toiling, trying to earn any scrap of decency he might throw your way just for him to completely disown you and tell you how disappointed he was in you with his dying breath.”

  There came the head cock again from her.

  He didn’t break the silence. What difference did it make if he told her? He wasn’t under any illusions how dangerous she was, or how she likely would kill him the moment she discovered she was pregnant.

  “Did you ever take a mate?” she quietly asked.

  Another subject he didn’t like to think about, and hadn’t talked to anyone about in years. “Yes,” he softly admitted. “A few years after my sister did. I’d already met a human man I knew was meant to be mine, but in that time, even that kind of attraction wasn’t enough to make me break through my fears to follow my heart.”

  He swallowed hard, the old wounds he tried to ignore bleeding anew in his heart. “Then he went and married a girl in town and it made the matter moot. Our Clan did adhere to the Code of the Ancients. I couldn’t have him even if I could talk him into it.”

  A heavy sadness settled over him as he thought about his mate. “Saying she was from a poor family doesn’t begin to express the bleak nature of her existence. I had decided to leave, to strike out on my own since I didn’t want to be tortured by what I couldn’t have. I told no one. I’d headed south, hoping to reach London. A day’s journey from home, I rode through a small village of the dreariest, most abjectly depressing kind imaginable. One family had just lost what little they’d owned the night before when their house burned down. Including their eldest child, their only son, who was nineteen and shouldered the greatest burden of working their pitiful farm.”

  As his mind traveled back, he recalled the acrid smoke stinging his nose as he stared at the smoldering remnants of their tiny house. “They had two other children, daughters. One eighteen, one fifteen. The elder girl, Elsbeth, wasn’t homely, but she wasn’t…”

  He sadly smiled. “She couldn’t hold a candle to you, dear. And I don’t mean that as a vapid compliment, either. I stopped my horse and listened to the family as they grieved over their lost son. I don’t know what caused me to dismount and walk over. Perhaps it was knowing in my life I’d never felt that kind of hopelessness until I’d left home and given up what I thought was my life. And even then it was a choice, not a fickle toss of Fate’s hair in my direction. I had plenty of choices.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I walked over to the father and before I realized what I was doing, I found my hand dipping into my purse and pulling out probably more coins than he’d ever dreamed existed, much less would ever cross his palm. I asked him how old the elder daughter was, and if she was betrothed. She looked up at me, surely in shock over what had happened and then at my appearance. I assured Elsbeth that her family would never again want for anything.”

  He conjured her face, the blue eyes red from crying, covered in soot and clothed in little more than rags. “We sought out the village vicar, who was easily convinced with a few more coins to dispense with the legal formalities and assured me he would obtain the license for us in the morning and bring it along personally the next day. Because we were in Scotland, we didn’t have to worry about announcing the banns. I took my new bride to the closest inn and after getting her a bath, I marked and mated her. She was truly a virgin.”

  Mercedes’ eyes widened slightly. “Wow,” she quietly said. “How’d you get from apparently being a decent guy to murdering families and being chained to my bed?”

  He ignored the jab. “I felt a genuine affection for the girl. She was quite shocked to find out what I was, of course, but she raised no objections because she loved her family. I informed her of the blood oath, and I swore I’d never mistreat her. All I required in return was her silence.”

  “Guess she was pretty shocked that you were a shifter, huh?”

  He smiled. “No. She was shocked that I was gay.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “Oh.”

  “I think my father was even more shocked to see me return home with her. I’d stopped along the way, of course, to clean her up and buy her some proper clothes. She agreed to go along with my story that she was the cousin of an acquaintance and to hide her true origins. I believe since we’re past the point of worrying about niceties such as being indelicate, it won’t surprise you to hear I could, of course, tell when her most fertile times were. I didn’t ask of her to do her wifely duties
any other time than to try to produce an heir, although there were a few times she approached me and I obliged her out of respect for what she’d taken on by agreeing to my scheme in the first place. It took us several months, but she finally became pregnant.”

  “Wow. Why’d you lie and say you didn’t have any kids to fulfill the oath?”

  “Because I didn’t. The oath required a female born of an Alpha male. Do you want to hear the story or not?”

  She shrugged, indicating for him to continue.

  “Kathleen and Oswald had by that time already produced two sons. Asolo and Boyd. Betas, but I believe Father and Mother doted on them for the reason that they felt no guilt. Those two children, at least, would never have to hand over any of their children to the Abernathy Clan.”

  “Right.”

  He laid his head back. “Our first child was a little girl, Angela. An Alpha. Apparently the Goddess has a very fickle sense of humor. Father took great pleasure in digging at my pride about that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Frankly, I’ve given up caring why.” He went quiet, lost in his thoughts about a past he’d refused to revisit in decades.

  “What happened to them?” she finally asked.

  “Who?”

  “Elsbeth. And your daughter. Did you have any other kids?”

  “A son a year later.” He closed his eyes. “Elsbeth died shortly after giving birth to him. He was stillborn and she bled to death. Medical care was quite lacking back then, and even the mate of a shifter wasn’t immune to death.”

  “Oh,” she softly said. “Dude, I’m so sorry.”

  He looked up at her. “I never again tried to marry. I let people assume it was due to my grief. Turns out Father suspected all along I was gay and told me he hoped I didn’t ruin any other women’s lives. Told me it was dishonorable to do what I did even if no one else thought the same way.”

  “Harsh.”

  “He could be a very harsh man. His mother died of soul sickness after her mate was killed while she was pregnant. He was a man of contradictions, emotional and sentimental in his own ways.”

  “What happened to your little girl?”

  “She was killed in a Clan war when she was seventeen. She was a lot like my sister, vicious when need be, a fearsome fighter. She was killed in battle.”

  Mercedes sat back, apparently deep in thought. He didn’t break the silence.

  After countless minutes, she looked at him again, meeting his gaze. “Did you decide about the roofies?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not have them.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged as much as he could with his hands cuffed to the bed. “I have plenty of memories to help me out,” he admitted. “And you’ve got the insurance of the little blue pills.” He bucked his hips at her. “And the vibrator in my ass,” he snarked, his pride more than a little pinched by that. Yes, it felt good. But to have it deliberately used against him like that was the straw that oddly broke the camel’s back of his pride.

  “Well, I did that because I thought you’d like it,” she said. “I wanted you to enjoy it. If I’d just wanted to do it efficiently I would have gotten one of those electric shock things and jammed it up your ass and forced it out of you.”

  He wanted to laugh in her face. “Seems like you’ve already forced it out of me. At least begrudge an old wolf what little of his pride remains.”

  “Did you love your daughter?”

  He felt his face heat. “Yes, I did. Very much. As much as any father could.”

  “Then how’d you get to the point where you helped murder a family? A little girl? Edgar and Lenny told me you took the girl in the ritual. That it wasn’t in the original plan to kill her.”

  “Her older brother was supposed to be there. No, we weren’t originally going to kill her. Is that all they told you?”

  “They told me you didn’t have to do the ritual. You didn’t need it like they did.” She grinned, wolfish and looking every bit like Rodolfo Abernathy’s daughter. “That’s a pretty shitty thing to do, slitting a child’s neck, trying to drink and bathe in her blood. They said you dropped the goblet.”

  “I didn’t drop it. It felt like something swatted it out of my hand.”

  “That’s not an answer, pops.”

  “I never said I was proud of all the things I’ve done in my life.” He briefly considered not telling her the rest of the story, then decided it didn’t matter if she killed him there or not. “Don’t suppose your darling brothers told you what they’d planned to do with the girl had I not killed her, did they?”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “Oh, yes,” he shot back. “They’d planned to take her with us. And as soon as she was fertile, they planned on raping her until they got her pregnant. She was an Alpha dragon.”

  Her eyes widened. Before he could even follow the movement, his head rocked to the side as she slapped him. He tasted blood in the corner of his mouth. Turning to face her again, he sneered. “Darling older brothers left out that part of the tale, didn’t they? No, I didn’t have to kill her. But what I did was a far kinder fate than they had in store for her.”

  “You fucking liar!”

  “Am I? I saw you have Edgar’s book. He and Lenny made notes in the margins about the slave ritual they were going to use on her to keep her quiet and docile until her body was ready for breeding, as they called it. And notes again about the fertility rituals to speed things along. Why do you think that was, hmm? They didn’t have mates. They weren’t even going to wait until she was an adult. They were going to begin trying to breed her when she had her first period. Think about it. A hybrid Alpha drag-atrice? They must have seen how powerful you were, their baby sister, a wolf-atrice. They knew if they could breed drag-atrice offspring it could be a game changer. Just because they loved and pampered and doted on you as a child doesn’t mean anything. Just as I loved and doted upon my daughter doesn’t mean spit now!”

  She punched him in the face several times before getting up and leaving, slamming the door behind her.

  He laughed even as he licked at his split lips and felt his left eye swelling shut. “The truth hurts, doesn’t it, my dear?” he yelled after her.

  * * * *

  The tray of food had long grown cold as he lay there for hours, light fading and his stomach growling. The left eye had swollen completely shut. At first, he’d heard noises out in the house, her screaming, ranting, raging. Howling. Things being broken and thrown.

  Then, nothing.

  No, he wasn’t proud of everything he’d done in his life. Far from it. But he had sworn to the blood oath. Despite not agreeing with it, he’d done his best to uphold it.

  And the little girl’s eyes and screams haunted him to this very day in his nightmares.

  But his conscience would have haunted him even more had he let her live to suffer at the hands of the two cockatrice he’d partnered with. He’d been contemplating how to get her away from them when the point had been rendered moot by her brother’s absence.

  He’d almost drifted off to sleep when he heard the door open. The shadow of her form filled the doorway, backlit by light drifting down the hallway from the living room.

  Hoarse, pained, he nearly didn’t recognize her voice when she spoke. “Why?”

  He almost felt sorry for her. Her brothers had obviously meant the world to her. Her vengeance ran fierce and strong, and to have it so suddenly derailed like that must have been almost too much to bear.

  “Why what?” he painfully pushed out through swollen, bruised lips.

  She stepped into the room and hit the switch turning on the bedside lamp. Her hair hung, tangled and limp, along her face. She looked at the floor. She had Edgar’s book clutched in her arms.

  “Why didn’t they tell me?”

  He somehow suppressed the urge to laugh. “Hitler had a German Shepherd. Her name was Blondie.”

  Her fingers clutched the edges of the book.
“Are you saying I was their pet dog? They loved me. They raised me. They stood up for me and protected me from our own kind. They killed for me to keep me alive.”

  “No. You missed my point entirely. He is agreeably one of, if not the worst, mass murderers in the history of the world, and yet he had a pet dog. Actions might be pure evil, but people are not.”

  “So you’re saying you’re not evil? Don’t try to piss on my leg and say it’s raining. I know damn well some of the things you’ve done. Or helped do.”

  Laughing hurt, but he managed it anyway. “I’m no saint, dear. I’ve done some pretty despicable things in my time. There is blood on my hands, no doubt about it. I’ve been cowardly and some might say spineless. Looking back on my life, I’m not going to say I’m having any great epiphany or a road-to-Damascus change of heart. I’m a selfish bastard, yes.”

  He sighed. “There was a time in my life I thought I was a good man and doing good things. The right things, at least. When I buried my daughter next to my wife and son I knew there was something missing in me that others weren’t lacking. My father apparently knew it and had no qualms about telling me.”

  He shrugged as best he could in his restraints. “Why bother? I tried doing what was right and that didn’t help my Angela, now, did it? The Goddess will, I’m sure, make me pay my considerable karmic debt when I pass on.”

  Wordlessly, she turned and left the room, the door standing open. He heard her moving around out in the kitchen. She returned a moment later with a glass of iced tea and a bottle of blue pills. Setting both of those on the tray next to the cold food, she then pulled something from the pocket of her robe and leaned over him.