Lady Errant

Ash stood in the deep basin that had once been San Francisco Bay. Above him, late evening traffic passed for the most part indifferently by, but he could sense that a few dozen pedestrians and even a car or two had stopped to gawk at him. Turning with barely traceable speed, he caught them with his most malicious glare, the kind that was known to freeze helpless bunnies in mid-leap. The majority of the humans scattered like a flock of starlings startled into flight, but a handful met his gaze with contempt of their own. It was unnerving, to say the least, having humans look at him and know him for what he was. They never would have done that before the War.

Before the War, only Mary-Lynnette would have met his unspoken challenge like that.

He turned his back purposefully on his remaining audience, shouldering the encroaching thoughts coldly aside. His eyes wandered the slopes of the mountains in front of him that had risen to separate the city from the Pacific. Iliana had done that; the tiny white-blonde Witch Child who couldn't have swatted a fly to save her life, had moved an ocean to save the world. Somewhere beyond the lumbering peaks lay an army of dragons, sleeping hidden beneath the surging sea. Sleeping, not dead. The danger was passed, not gone.

He hadn't actually been here to see the Wild Power at work, but he had heard enough stories from the survivors to piece together a mental picture of the petite figure silhouetted against a violet dawn, hands raised imploringly to the sky, an invisible breeze picking up strands of baby-fine hair. At that exact moment he would have been somewhere not too far away, but far beyond any sight of the open sky. He would have been with Mary-Lynnette.

The skin on the back of his neck prickled unpleasantly, and a small, suppressed instinct was counseling strongly that he should be moving. Both feelings he attributed to the eyes watching him, and he drove them roughly into the farthest corner of his conscious. Allowing himself one hasty glance over his shoulder, he wondered briefly if Mary-Lynnette would mind if he hated humans, just a little bit, just for a minute or two. But no, that wouldn't have gone over well. Besides, that Ash no longer existed. He simply wasn't capable of that kind of blind, ignorant loathing anymore.

No, I know what real hatred is. The kind that eats away at your insides, twisting its way into every thought, keeping you up at night. Especially when it's turned against yourself.

There had been three sides to the War. Lord Thierry and his ragtag group of Daybreakers had spent countless hours preparing for the Millennium battle with the Night World, but they were caught unawares by the creation of a new faction. Those humans who hadn't supported Circle Daybreak or--surprisingly--the Night World Council had formed their own militia, fueled by their fear and hatred of all the strange new creatures that had appeared in their once well-organized world.

She hadn't told him directly, but he had sensed Mary-Lynnette had been proud to be chosen by Thierry as Circle Daybreak's ambassador of good will to the newfound opposition. She wasn't suited to fighting or killing, and the position instilled her with a feeling of usefulness in the midst of an increasingly military operation. He had known that, and Thierry had known that, and Ash had been certain to quietly and secretly gift the made vampire with a token of his appreciation. Ash had insisted on accompanying Mary-Lynnette not because of--or not only because of--his inherent protectiveness of his soulmate, but because he had something to prove. He had wanted so badly the opportunity to show her how much he had changed his views of the world, for her, for both of them.

She had overestimated human compassion for their own kind. He had underestimated the strength and cruelty of human terror. They had been ambushed by the radicals of the group, captured, and tortured for information. Sun lamps were set up in the cramped, dank cell they were allotted to deprive them both of sleep and to hinder his vampire abilities; they had been wounded, physically and psychologically; they had been starved to the brink of death. Half-blind, singed, and nearly mad with hunger, he had given up hope of either of them living to see the end of the war.

War is hell. Ha. That's not the half of it.

"Ash." Her voice was an echo in his mind brought to him by the whistle of the wind crossing the cliffs over his head, only a sliver of memory, but it was enough to make his breath catch. "Ash."

"I'm offering it to you freely, Ash."

"What if I offered you my blood? You need it much more than I do. I'm the immortal one, remember?"

"Semi-immortal," she corrected. "Not invincible. You still need to feed. And I happen to be, well, prey."

"Stop it. Mary-Lynnette--"

"Don't you get it yet? I do this, or neither of us leaves alive."

"Fine. I can live with that."

"The point is, you won't live with it because you'll be dead. Dead dead. Vampires don't come back, idiot. Poof. 'Out, out brief candle,' and all that. I at least have some chance of coming back."

One fierce explosion of breath, "No. Absolutely not. Give me time to think of something, and I'll get us both out of here." It was worthless bravado, and they both knew it.

"We don't have that kind of time." He didn't dare look over at her, afraid to see what he already knew was there. She was little more than translucent skin stretched taunt over razor-sharp bones. She wouldn't live through another 'interrogation.' "You don't even have the power to contact Thierry or Quinn telepathically. No help is coming until this battle's over. I can give you that power, I can change that. Now's no time to be valiant and brave and…and pig-headed. We have to face facts. You have to live. And I--" her voice wobbled, the first sign of weakness on her part, and it was not overlooked. "I'll be back."

"What, no Shakespeare, no Austen? You have to quote The Terminator at a time like this?"

"I'm tired. I don't want to fight. Not now. Not anymore." His heart broke, just a little, a small fissure in a very, very long process.

He wanted to hold her, but the wooden shackles around his wrists prevented him from any such thing. Instead he settled for sliding himself as near to her as he could manage, every curve of her body fitting alongside his so it was impossible to tell there were two people there at all, only one. As he moved, new scars stretched and broke open where they had burned him. He covered his pain by projecting images of his arms around her through the link they shared.

"I love you," he whimpered, suddenly very small. His voice was bleak in the empty, blindingly lit room. "Don't leave me."

"'Were a star quenched on high, for ages would its light still traveling downward from the sky, shine on our mortal sight. So when a great woman dies, for years beyond our ken, the light she leaves behind her lies upon the paths on men.' Longfellow. "

"That's not comforting."

"You asked for a quote, not comfort." But she gave it to him anyway.

"Now?" she asked after too little time. She held her head high and her voice steady with all the dignity of a biblical martyr, staring him in the eye with a gaze he couldn't meet.

So this is sacrifice, he realized belatedly. Can you give her up to have her back again? The answer was an unmistakable never, but the truth was that after so much deprivation, his body dictated of all his actions now. His canines, already lengthened to sharp, delicate tips, jabbed his bottom lip and throbbed agonizingly. His vision narrowed to the pulse beating in her veins even as his senses expanded to their super-sensitive apex. Positioning themselves was an excruciating experience, and bound hand-to-foot they knelt facing each other on the filthy floor, staring breathless with the effort of their movement.

"You're taking too long," she accused, just as he lunged unsteadily forward for her throat.

She gasped involuntarily, and an abrupt squeezing pressure in his chest forced him to pull his dive up short. To cover his hesitation, he kissed the junction of her neck and shoulder, easing his lips slowly, sensually up her skin until she relaxed against him, heading turning instinctively at the right angle to bare her throat to him. And then he bit her. It hurt him more than it did her.

Their minds merged completely, two drops of water melting into each other.

Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry, his thoughts ran the same path with unflagging persistence.

Shut up, Ash. You're ruining the moment.

He reached for her essence, but she was already there, her thoughts blazing meteors that lit up the space they shared. He felt the faint flickers of her emotions, fear, pain, exhaustion, and overwhelming love.

Yes, her voice echoed in a way it never had before, like from a long way off. Love. I love you. So don't think I'm going to let you get away so easy, Ash Redfern.

Love. He clung to that, recovering his self-control and caging away the animal he had unleashed. Her physical body was leaning heavily against his chest, her head slumping down as he released her, her breathing disturbingly shallow. But still breathing, blood still pumping weakly through her veins.

He sent an inquiring tendril of thought out, farther and farther away until he encountered a familiar presence. Quinn.

The mind recoiled from his with a mixture of shock and disbelief. Please, don't!, he shouted after it.

Ash?

Help. Already the connection between them was fading, the little power he had gained winking out. An indistinguishable affirmation came from the other vampire just before the link snapped, but it didn't matter. Quinn was too far away. There wasn't nearly enough time.

It was just four days short of her twentieth birthday.

That was about the time his world ended, even while outside a new day was dawning on San Francisco, an entirely new world. The War didn't last more than three days after that, and when the humans called for a ceasefire, he was delivered back to Thierry as part of the conditions. He had refused to let anyone but Thea touch his soulmate, guarding her like a bulldog, which had nearly driven Hannah to hysterics. But he hadn't had much sanity left at that point, and he'd been entitled to a pointless mandate or two. They took him home, as much as the Las Vegas mansion was home, and confined him in his suite for his own good over several weeks. He only saw Hannah, Thea, or Poppy when they came to coerce blood and strange concoctions down his throat, nursing him slowly, reluctantly back to health. Thea told him much later that she had done everything she could for Mary-Lynnette, but…But no healer, no witch can revive the dead. Not even when it's the woman who set you on the path to salvation. Not even when she's your reason for existence.

His first night back he heard the entire inner circle gathered on the floor beneath his prison, celebrating their hard-won victory, laughing, arguing, crying some, and discussing the points of the new treaty to be drawn up with the humans. But he knew there was no victory, there never would be. Late that night, Thierry had stolen away from the festivities long enough to visit him for a few minutes, a silent swab of night keeping vigil over his sickbed. His eyes were hard to make out in the darkness, but when the moon hit them at the right angle, the look in them…Ash was sure that he understood his thoughts.

It had taken time to prove just how right he was. Danger had never left them, it had only changed hands, changed faces. It wasn't so much a new world, but the old one in new skin. The silent tyranny of the Night World had been replaced by the open resistance of small pockets of humans, even now, two decades after the War. There were more vampire hunters since the existence of Night People had become common knowledge, but vampire hunter wasn't the right word anymore; they hunted all types--vampires, 'shifters, 'wolves, they were even known to burn a witch every once in awhile. And the Night People weren't completely satisfied with the 'new' world either. There were those that resented the way humans treated them and called up memories of how the Night World Council had tried to protect them from exactly the violence they were daily confronted with. There were those that were trying to resurrect the Night World.

That was his job now. To gather information on those people for Thierry, to foil their attempts, to hunt them down. It was the least he could do in exchange for the space he took up in his and Lady Hannah's house. The rest of the inner circle had all filtered out into the world, organizing local chapters of Circle Daybreak or simply starting their own lives. He was the last one left.

He shoulders blades were tingling now in a fiercer version of the prickling warning his neck had been giving him about the watchers above him, and it was a much more difficult intuition to push aside this time. He swung around, only to see a vacant ledge overhead. His spectators had apparently deserted him when he had failed to do anything more remarkable than stare at the skyline. He shook himself to discard the feeling, the skin on his back rippling like an animal's pelt.

A week ago he had given a half-truthful excuse to Thierry about a lamia rallying supporters in San Francisco. Of course Hannah had seen straight through him, and his friend had given him odd looks and sad smiles as she insisted on helping him choose a few clothes to pack. There had been pity there, too. The one thing he couldn't stand from either of them, the reason why he barely spent anytime in Las Vegas anymore. She knew that Poppy had sent him another message about a premonition she'd had. But Poppy had been sending him similar messages for over seventeen years, and it only upset all of them--Ash, Poppy, and Hannah--when they failed to come true. And when Poppy was troubled on his account, he and James were not on good terms. Thierry was the only one that remained stoic about it all; after all, he had waited thousands of years for his soulmate. What was a decade or two?

If Mary-Lynnette was coming back at all. If. For all his hopes over the years, he had never actually believed she would. She had an impressive stubborn streak, but he doubted even she had the force of will to compel herself back into a living body. And the way Gillian had spoken reverently once or twice, he suspected she wouldn't relinquish a place like that for a ne'er-do-well scoundrel like him.

Mary-Lynnette. It came full circle again. He had left Las Vegas to outrun his memories of her, but they were more unavoidable than his shadow. That was the curse of soulmates; you could get along just fine in life until you found yours, but after that there was no thought that didn't incorporate them, no day that could be lived fully without them. His life was dedicated to her, a sacred offering, dead as she was.

The warning trickled down into his stomach, turning it with a sickening sensation that was something akin to the nauseating plunge you experience upon finding yourself in mid-air. He growled his irritation at this unbidden part of himself surfacing. He knew very well that there was no threat behind and above him. No, not danger…The thought was hard to distinguish in the pink haze of his anger, but he clung to it tenaciously, sure he was missing some important piece of the puzzle.

Pink. Oh, Goddess. I don't even like the color pink.

His feet were in motion before his mind registered the thought, quickly scaling the nearly sheer wall in front of him back to the crowded streets above. Sun-baked earth crumbled into his hair, his clothes, but he didn't bother to brush it away, not even when he stood on solid ground again. He heeded the direction of the wrenching between his ribs, nearly running now along the new sidewalk that paralleled the path of the freshly paved road. Everything in this portion of the city was new, given that the original had been almost completely demolished during the War and the looting afterward. But the population had moved cautiously back in within a few years, rebuilding homes and businesses, remaking their lives anew from the ashes. Humanity was an incredibly resilient entity. And at the moment, humanity was greeting him with a few pointed glares and rude gestures as it parted reluctantly before his obstinate search. He never saw them; his entire focus was on the electricity tickling his spine, the tug in the pit of his stomach.

Who? Where?

There. Standing in the middle of his path, people flowing by on either side of her like a stream parting for stone, her feet firmly planted a shoulder-length apart, her hands resting in fists on her hips. It occurred to him unexpectedly how perfect she was. Just the perfect height so that her chin could rest comfortably in the crook of his neck, but not so far apart in stature that she couldn't look him in the eye when she needed to, so he never had to stoop to touch his lips to hers. Her hair was longer, swirling in a dark cloud around her shoulders; it was the style among teenagers lately, a vague imitation of their glamorous Night World counterparts. Her eyes didn't hold the same glint of knife-edged fear that the rest of the humans tried to disguise; they were level and clear and wonderfully blue. She remained calmly still amidst the motion around her, waiting patiently for him to come to halt a foot away from her. He was reminded belatedly of his own appearance, and ran a useless hand through his hair, dirt scattering where he touched. He racked his brain painfully for something to say beyond 'Hi,' but she managed to speak first.

"Ash Redfern." Her voice was huskier than he remembered, but there was the same rhythm to her speech. "You certainly took your time."

The earth under his feet stopped turning. The words he had been forming vanished instantly, but he had a hunch they were something along the lines of 'Hey, you're never going to believe this, but…' She remembered him. It was better than anything he had wished for. In all his imaginings of this scenario he had never dared to dream…

Her next words brought that train of thought to screeching halt as well. It was the sweet, lyrical tone she used when she was in anything but a good mood.

"Now, would mind please telling me who the hell are you?"

TBC. (In the case of reviews, that is.)