24. Get the Fuck Off My Stage, I’m Your Worst Bad Decision

The silence after the blast made everything appear as though it were underwater. Time slowed. The air paused.

Everything inside her tensed as she prepared to phase into her darkness and obliterate them for daring to think they could attack them here. Before she could do it, Ashton’s hand shot out and clamped her wrist.

The contact was a static burst that almost made her yank it back. Her pulse fluttered faster as she glared at him.

“No,” he said; his voice was all steel and ice. Final.

She sighed through her nose and tried to pull out of his grasp, but he just tightened his grip. If she tried to dematerialize now, he’d come with her. Footsteps neared where they were. The smoke was rapidly clearing away.

She tightened her jaw, baring her teeth as she ordered, “let go, leech. They’re here for you.”

“I know.” His molten silver eyes glimmered in the gloom, holding hers as he rolled his shoulders. “It’s my turn to settle a score. Plus, I need to catch up with your murder count. Dont worry, demon,” he added, that infuriating smirk unfurled on his lips even as her head shook. “You trained me, I’ll survive.”

He released her and turned to face the six hunters streaming through the open entrance. Weapons in hand. Masks covering their pathetic faces. Her heart rate tripled as Ashton took a step toward them.

She spoke, words too sharp and revealing tumbling out of her. “It’s not you I’m worried about—it’s me.”

Her mouth snapped shut. Tongue-curdling, an acidic taste at the back of her throat that she struggled to swallow. Ashton halted. His back tensed. He glanced over his shoulder, and the smirk faltered.

Her shadows hovered between them, wanting to console him and berate her. Traitors. But her stomach wrenched, a cold and greasy dread like a worm slithered through her innards as he met her gaze.

Something she didn’t recognize—or hadn’t allowed herself to feel—flashed in his expression. It froze her in place. Lips locked shut. Hands curling into fists.

It was raw, unguarded, and disappointed... absolutely devastating. A gelid pain pierced her sternum.

It was as though he’d knifed her straight in the chest. He caught himself fast.

The mask slammed back down, smirk slanting sharply and revealing a hint of fang.

“Liar,” he said. It hit her like a soft, last bullet.

He walked away. Never looked back as heat crept up her neck, adrenaline making her hands shake, the impulse to main someone almost a physical thing.

She summoned her dark magic before the hunters could spot her and phased to a balcony. Liora watched, cocooned in shadows so the mortals wouldn’t see her, as Ashton dismantled the six hunters.

Her breath kept getting trapped in her throat as if she were eating steel wool. He fought like her now. A lethal waltz with a touch of the brawler he’d always been.

He’d been a gutter rat. Forgotten by all but the hunters, raging over what had been done to him.

She wished sometimes that she hadn’t caught his scent the night they met. Her gaze followed his every movement on the fractured grand stage.

He dodged a yew-ash trap right as it sprung for him. Frost flew from his fingers and encased it in a glittering ice cage. He tossed it away. It disintegrated as it hit a wall.

The resounding bang couldn’t compete with the thumping of her blood in her ears as he grabbed a hunter by the head and twisted it.

The mortal’s neck snapped wetly and his gun clattered away to the side of the stage. Ash threw the boneless corpse aside.

He moved with a cold precision that was a synthesis of hers and his own touch.

Theirs, she knew. She shuddered, trying to push the thoughts away, but even her mind was against her.

Her demon sighed like a lovesick teenager, he’s so pretty. Look at him tearing out a heart! Romantic, isn’t it, little martyr?

Liora had the abrupt urge to laugh, maniacal or joyous; she didn’t let herself find out. Her mouth was a tense white line. Her claws unsheathed and cut into her palms as her shadows tracked the vampires’ every move.

Her chest tightened. Warm rot bloomed wild, pride? No, something much older than that. An ancient hunger she’d damned long ago.

A hunger that didn’t want to just consume, but to keep. A ridiculous idea.

Inevitable, her dark tendrils corrected her. She ignored them and watched the fight. Below Ashton was a storm of frost and fury.

He ducked under a Silverthorned net, a petite hunter employed. Female, Liora guessed as Ash’s fingers braceleted the woman’s wrist like they had hers earlier. He snapped the fragile bones, the sound akin to dry kindling.

The woman screeched, wrist and hand flopping as though they were only a useless, flesh-colored glove. The sour reek of human fear saturated the theatre. He slit her throat mid-scream, the iron dagger turning red.

Scarlet arterial spray flecked his savage face. Her belly dipped, heat flaring under her skin. The rotten, chemically sweetened smell of their spilled blood reached Liora’s scrunched nose.

Disgusting, she frowned. A growl tried to escape her as a gun barked. Ash didn’t phase, but the speed at which he moved acted as if he did.

He blurred, frost lashing and rendering the gun useless as he reappeared. His knife buried in the hunter’s chest.

He twisted it, yanking it free as the other man crumpled to the floor in a whimpering, bleeding heap.

Only two remained. The hulking leader with a mace, and a smaller, quicker one holding a serrated Silverthorn blade. She cursed the day she’d given them that gift.

The thorns that budded from the ashes of her reborn rage whenever she burned and rewrote herself. She’d handed them it. Idiot. It was too late to change it.

They’d regret the day they betrayed her. Liora held her breath. Feet itching to go down there. End it cleanly.

No, let him have his petty revenge.

But her shadows coiled, shaking their formless heads at her. They whispered of the blade’s poison.

The slow, paralytic death it would bring him. Similar to the death she’d saved him from all those weeks ago.

Death by Silverthorn was much worse than that. Her magic urged her in buzzing murmurs to get the weapon far away from Ashton.

She silenced them with a heatless, vicious look. He had to earn this. He had to learn. Her changed brand scalded her collarbone as she stayed rooted to that sagging balcony. Heels sinking into the damp, decaying wood.

She chewed on the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper and wished he’d hurry as the deadly knife glinted again. Ash feinted toward the leader, pivoted, a whirlwind of focused malice. He slammed his boot into the knee of the quicker hunter.

The crack echoed for an eternity before the man’s stumbling screams drowned it out. He collapsed onto his good knee and kept howling.

It was the opening Ashton needed. He put his back to the downed hunter, all his focus on the bigger leader as he lifted the mace—she couldn’t tell what poison might be in it.

More yew, she hoped. It was easier to heal.

She refocused on the last battle as Ash raised his dagger to take the killing blow. Liora’s mouth suddenly dried out. Heartbeat rattling like the baseline of a horrible song she didn’t want to learn.

She saw it before he did. The downed hunter, through his agony, lunged. Not at Ash’s back like she assumed. The mortal went for the back of his knee. To cripple and claim a dirty win.

The world didn’t slow this time. It shattered as if the very fabric of the universe regretted bringing this upon them. There were no thoughts.

No strategy or clever reason. There was only a void where Ashton was about to be broken. And her primal, screaming imperative to fill it. She phased.

The theatre dissolved into a roar of wind, broken arches, and darkness. Her shadows were relieved as they whisked her to him. Liora reformed in an explosion of splintering wood and thick dust.

She stood on the stage behind Ashton. Her body was a solid, unthinking shield between him and the blade.

She could’ve stopped it. Could’ve killed the mortal with a thought if her mind had been working.

Heat, searing and shocking, erupted in her hip. The knife’s serrated edge ripped through leather and skin, hitting the bone in a sickening grind. The force of it hammered her into Ash’s back.

For a fractured second, only the shock of the impact, the metallic scent of her own blood. And the familiar feel of his cold, solid body against hers existed. She gasped, chest catching as she stared down at the man.

The hunter slumped to the floor, dull-eyed through his mask, pulling the weapon out of her as he fell. She didn’t move to kill him.

The pain arrived as fiery blood poured down her thigh. It was a blaze of hellfire that scorched her nerves and burrowed into her cracked hipbone. She couldn’t make a sound.

Her vocal cords shivered with the weight of the trapped scream she should be giving. She stared at it.

Her sliced flesh had peeled apart like the petals of a grotesque flower, obsidian nectar mixed with opalescent venomous thorns poured freely from the open bloom. Her shadows flittered like panicked birds.

She pressed her trembling hands to it as Ashton spun to her. Silver eyes frantic and blew wide. Fury, she realized, not fear. An incandescent rage rolled off him as she staggered.

He caught her, steadying her, gaze dropping to the ragged wound she’d taken for him. Slippery black blood stained her fingers. Her shadows tried to seal it shut, but their movements were sluggish.

Unused to dealing with such intense wounds after lifetimes of her having no equal on the battlefield. It wouldn’t kill her.

But the heavy feeling in her chest, the breathlessness, and shameful dizziness just might do the job. Ashton shot daggers at her with his eyes as he made sure she could stand alone.

Her legs seemed made of broken glass held together by Sellotape as he let her go. But she remained standing. Thank the useless gods.

“You stupid fucking—” he snarled, voice a raw, guttural, and dark thing. “Why did you do that?! You could’ve just healed me!”

She didn’t have an answer. She hadn’t thought. Had simply... moved. She sagged, loosing a taut breath as his attention whipped back to the hunter.

A sound ripped from him. It was a sound that was nothing like the man she knew. It sent a chill snaking down her spine.

He dove toward the smaller hunter. Liora never saw the kill. She heard it.

It was a wet, life-ending tear followed by a percussive blast of frost. Flash-freezing the blood splatter in mid-air.

The leader met a similarly swift, brutal end. Ash wasn’t fighting anymore.

He was erasing them. Whether out of anger at her or for what they’d done, she didn’t know. Her heart still raced. Pushing blood through the partially healed wound as she pushed her shadows away from it.

It should scar. Thick and ragged, pink... it should scar to remind her of this stupidity. She shook her head. What the fuck was wrong with her?

What instinct had overridden five centuries of solitary survival? Her jaw clicked as it rippled.

A familiar heat sparked—the rush of adrenaline from her reliable temper. It washed through her as silence fell.

Heavy, weighted down by all the poor decisions she’d ever made. The smell of iron and ozone was nauseating. She almost wanted to clamp her hand over her mouth and nose.

Ashton stood over the broken bodies. Chest heaving, knuckles bleached white around his knife. He spat on them, turning back to her.

His expression was a terrifying mask of frozen fury. Her spine straightened, face hardening under the force of his ruinous attention. His gaze locked on her hip as her shadows searched him for wounds to heal.

She did not possess the wherewithal to reprimand them. He brushed them away and said, “I’m fine. See to your master,” when they tried to slither under his clothes.

Her hackles lifted, eyes narrowed, and a thousand barbed insults clawed like demons up her throat. Ready to demolish him with words, but he beat her to it. Questioning her.

“What the hell was that?” He was a foot away, hands shaking. “You’ve got a funny way of worrying about yourself, Liora. I had it under control.”

True. She hadn’t waited to see if he’d sensed the hunter behind him. Instinct, pure, stupid instinct—she didn’t know how to explain.

She didn’t think she wanted to explain it even if she could. She cracked her bloodied knuckles. Lips curling into a weak imitation of her usual feral snarl. She ground her teeth, pulse speeding again.

She clung to silence. Liora grabbed his arm with a low growl, hip shrieking in protest. Her blood, a hot stream, trickled down her side.

Slower now. She commanded her darkness to take them back to the penthouse.

The theater diffused into a sickening swirl of shadow, frost, and pain. Her stomach lurched unpleasantly, mouth filling with venom as the night took them away.

When they reappeared in the penthouse’s dim grey hall, she dropped his arm and limped away. Seeking refuge in the bathroom.

Don’t follow, don’t follow, don’t follow, she chanted in her mind. The mental wall she’d kept between them had fallen down. The magic required to hold it up was too taxing after this.

He replied. Mind calmer than his mouth had been minutes before.

You don’t get to give orders, Liora. Explain.

She paused outside the open bathroom door. Eyeing the bath longingly, shoulders tense, spine so stiff she feared it might shatter.

“I don’t know how.” It was a quiet, hesitant admission that stained her cheeks with pink heat.

She didn’t look back as she entered the tiled space, ignoring the mirrorless vanity sink, and the shower in the corner. Her dark snakes went to work to fill the bath as she braced herself to strip out of her leathers.

Footsteps echoed like a warning down the hall. Of course. Of course he’d follow.

She’d just handed him the ammunition she had no defense against. The ammunition he’d been waiting for.

Her head slumped, tongue too big for her mouth as the pain chewed through her nerves.

Her demon’s voice crooned, you’d have been better howling your claim on him from the rooftops. This was... messy.