Page 30 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

“Zarek must have been struck. There’s blood here.” Condorr stripped off his coat and carefully covered the weapon.

“And if it’s Zarek’s blood,” Rocharde said with a low voice, “he’ll be powerless.”

Martar closed his eyes, reaching with his magick that helped them sense each other within this realm.

He felt the magick of his brothers beside him, and the faint trace of those at the Bone & Whistle. But there was nothing even faintly resembling the intense, fiery power of Zarek’s heat signature that he’d learned to recognize since they were boys.

“Is he—” Condorr started.

“Zarek is alive. I’d know if he wasn’t.” A thought Martar did not want to spend time on.

“But I can’t feel his magick.” With the coat holding the Poison Blade tucked under his arm, Condorr frowned hard at the ground, his hand out, using his gift for reading magickal signatures. “He was here, but now it’s like he’s been cut out of the world. Or he’s been taken. That Black Cloak—”

“Is gone.” Martar used the tip of his blade to poke at the Black Cloak ash on the floor of the alley as cars passed in the distance. The stench of wet concrete and fossil fuels polluted the air filled with invisible radio waves, but he couldn’t sense Zarek anywhere. Only emptiness. “He’s alive. We’d know if Zarek was…” He didn’t want to even say it. They’d all felt the loss of their brothers in the past, which gave him hope that his best friend was very much alive. “We’ll take the Poison Blade to the Seer for clues and organize search parties,” Martar ordered. “Let’s go.”

THIRTEEN

Her car steered down a quiet suburban street where other sleeping mortals dreamed of better futures. All blissfully ordinary and human.

Zarek lay twisted across the back seat, blood soaking into the fabric of Angela’s scarf, as the poison from the blade burned cold through his veins.

Every movement sent a dull reminder of how compromised he was.

The car was too small. He was too large. And he hated how he could do nothing. He was bred for destruction, the cause of death that lay out the rubble to bury the living, and she was too close to his fire.

But his fire, the very thing that controlled him and set him apart, had dimmed.

Worse, he had Angela’s scent surrounding him. It was like colors blending into flavors of soft florals that gave way to an unvarnished symphony of scents. It was honey stirred into warm oats, flavored with sweet pears and apples into a comforting scent that clung to her warm skin. It battled against the metallic trace of rain mixed with adrenaline, fear, and the unmistakable iron of his blood. Yet it was her scent that rose in this confined space, grounding him in a way he couldn’t explain while also being unbearable all at once.

She shouldn’t smell like this to him. He’d never bothered noticing the scent of a female because he never got close enough to try. Let alone think words of poetry.

And he most certainly shouldn’t be bleeding out in the back of this mortal woman’s car, a woman who had impossibly seen through the cloaking magic to kill a Black Cloak to save his life.

And yet, here he was.

If only he could read her mind.

Instead, he felt her emotions—impossible as it was—to know she was holding it together with a surprisingly firm resolve. She had more spine than some soldiers he’d trained to deal with tricky situations.

What’s worse, he couldn’t reach out to his brothers to take him home. And how did he give directions to the Bone & Whistle when the bar was designed to hide from humans and couldn’t be found by any conventional means? It didn’t mean he’d stop trying as he lay back defeated and reached with his magick…

But the damned Poison Blade had rendered him useless.

Angela turned down a long driveway leading to a small house; Zarek felt it immediately.

Wards.

Not aggressive ones. But a domestic kind of magic laid in careful layers, built to keep harm out. Just like the wards that had stopped him from entering the bookstore.

His jaw tightened. He should not be here, in her car, breathing in her humanity while poison hollowed him from the inside.

And yet, some reckless, traitorous part of him held onto her scent like a tether, because as long as he could still sense her, he knew the Poison Blade hadn’t taken him yet.

“We’re here.” Angela killed the engine and jumped out.

Zarek groaned as he tried to sit up, but the burning pain tore through him, which was odd as he usually embraced the burn. Her soft hand closed around his; the shock of it nearly stole his breath.

“You shouldn’t touch me.” He had never touched a human. His power would have burned them, like his sight drove them mad. Yet her skin met his, and nothing burned.