2. Last Rites for the Damned

Ashton, Ash to his friends, thought his next kiss with the Reaper would have involved less arterial spray, no poison, and more tongue. But Death had always been a dramatic bitch.

A gasp tore from him, clouding in the summer night air. Agony, like a sentient glacier, gnawed through his body.

Destructive and cruel as it fused his internal organs together. The bullet had lodged somewhere deep inside his petrified chest.

They'd forged it from star-rot, some kind of ash, and witchbone. Star-rot because it was untouched by human or monstrous hands, pure—unlike him. Hunter's ingenuity at its bitchiest.

The bastards had upgraded their arsenal. Last time, it was just holy water, and poor aim.

Useless and annoying. They'd still caught him. Imprisoned him. For six horrific months. Unlucky for him, they'd got it right this time.

The bullet triggered the transformation of muscle to stone, leached out his immortality, ripped away his regenerative abilities, and trapped a primal scream in his throat.

Five years. He'd survived five brutal years by outrunning or killing every threat to his existence. He'd walked away from being stabbed, clawed, and bitten.

But as his body failed to heal, and the freezer-burn burrowed into his marrow, helplessness enveloped him like a smothering burial shroud.

Each breath became a battle, a fight between him and his overdue funeral, lungs shrinking and drying out. Frost crawled up his neck. Fight or flight, warring, and the freeze won.

If he had a pulse, it would jump out of his throat, thoughts cycling and yelling at him for being so reckless. Trapped, he was a statue gradually crumbling, powerless to stop the insidious creep of the poison.

It felt like frosted glass shattering in his veins—a million glittering knives carving his arteries into ice sculptures. Jagged and precise as they punctured his system.

He wished it would knock him out, but that wouldn't make him regret every life he took to sate himself, now would it?

His chest tightened as he realized he'd sell whatever was left of his soul to walk away from this.

For more time, he'd cleave himself in half and offer the best piece to any God who promised him life. Survival was all he knew.

He excelled at survival, yet this time seemed insurmountable. His fingers had gone first. Tendons calcified into marble.

He thought, this is how Pompeii felt.

It almost made him laugh.

His lungs crinkled and crackled like plastic bags, getting scrunched up in a tight fist. Breath crystallized into blades of ice that sliced his shrivelled lungs.

He lay there. Eyes skittering around, vision tunneled and losing depth as it gripped him and squeezed.

Adrenaline died as fast as it surged, devoured by the death chewing through his body. Fastened to the filthy ground, hidden beside a dumpster in some alley, he had collapsed here after escaping the Hunter's facilities.

He'd slaughtered them. But he'd signed his own death warrant in the process. Five years ago, he'd been human.

Then came his ex-girlfriend's betrayal. His turning. The brutal silence he'd caused after freeing himself from his ex's clutches. He was no one's pet.

He was a hacker-turned-vampire with a vendetta against those who killed his brother Jason.

He'd avenged himself, and killed many of those who'd harmed his brother. But he had failed Jason in every other way.

Now, he was the monster they'd all made him.

A vampire with a talent for dismantling hunter cells remotely and killing them for sport. But tonight, they'd thoroughly dismantled him.

Memories of his sanguine getaway rolled across his mind's eye. The hunter's gargling voice jeered in his ears as if he crouched beside Ashton, admiring his vicious handiwork.

"Run all you want, bloodbag. You'll never be free again."

The man's last threat had sounded orchestral when Ash ripped out his throat. It had transformed into his own death rattle. And the echo of his brothers, the hunter Guilds doing, harmonized it.

It hurt him more than any test they'd performed on him. It was a knife driven into his spine. The darkness inside him, the thirst for violence and control, had long since taken over.

He'd buried the worst of it deep within his mind. Locked it in the vault of dread memories, he refused to look at it. Even that wasn't enough to trick himself into believing he'd circumvent death this time.

Even as it ravaged him, a glimmer of dark amusement sparkled in his gaze. He'd eviscerated those hunters like overripe fruit, their guts painting the underground exit, but this was his proper punishment.

Left alone, stripped of his strength. Left to rot, he'd be nothing but ash in the wind come morning. The last hunter had caught him by surprise. Perched high in a skeletal pine, he had clipped him with a parting gift.

A bullet designed specifically for him. They'd carved his initials into the casing. And their own symbol. An Ouroboros swallowing a Cross. Classy.

They loved a bit of theatre. The alley walls seemed to lean closer, threatening to topple down and crush him into dust once his body gave out.

He let out another gasp, weaker than the last, as a glacial, fiery sensation roasted through his muscles. The urge to grit his jaw against it mocked him. The stench of rotting takeout and wet concrete should've choked him.

Beneath it—saffron. Static and fresh ink, and the iron tang of old blood. It was a scent that clung to his nightmares and daydreams in equal measure these past few months.

He'd caught traces of it before his capture when he was hunting for a monster bigger than him. Ash had smelled it in the flicker of a shadow at a crime scene, in the ashes of a hunter's journal, and whenever he awoke from an explicitly themed dream. The myth even monsters feared.

The demon who'd haunted Europe's underbelly for centuries. She was a ghost he'd only heard frightened whispers about as he sought answers and protection.

He did not know why or how he recognized her scent. He only knew it was hers.

Inwardly, he chuckled. He'd been warned a thousand times to stop seeking answers in dark places.

He never listened.

And just look where that had gotten him. He sighed and stared at the clouded sky. Rain pattered off his gaping face, silver eyes dull. Opened wide, unable to blink.

If this was it, he'd never get to try those dumplings he'd promised himself before everything went to one of the Hells.

It was a childish promise that was always meant to sever. He wasn't supposed to survive his escape, only destroy the Hunters' research. Somehow, he'd ended up here. Movement distracted him.

Shadows writhed at the alley's mouth. His frostbitten heart thudded once. Just a tiny remnant of his humanity as his unnatural second life guttered.

And the silence it left behind screamed, endless. The dumpster's shadow stretched toward him. Liquid and hungry. It slunk closer, pooling around his frozen, fisted hand. Warm as a lover's breath.

It coiled up his arm. It had the shape of a serpent fashioned in smoke, and for a phantom heartbeat—he felt it.

Fury, fear, a hunger older than cities and deeper than the abyss. Hallucination.

It had to be.

He wished Jason were there to rescue him. Take him out for dinner. Ash would never eat moo shu pork or kung pao chicken ever again.

It was a fucking tragedy, really. He forced a sardonic grin. The same practiced charm he used to disarm his marks, monsters, and bartenders.

If this were the end, at least he'd die true to his script. The performance of a lifetime. By now, he surely deserved a damn Oscar. His beatless heart grew impossibly colder as the poison spread its frozen fingers inside him.

The icy rain fell faster, akin to fragments of glass prickling his paling complexion, but underneath that, he sensed something he craved more than anything else. Something he could never have for himself again, heat.

It was a tiny spark behind his fracturing ribs, like a match struck in a tomb. A whisper of warmth he'd give his left arm to keep. His scars itched, flesh drawing too tight over his shivering bones.

Some were smooth and barely noticeable, only seen when standing under a fluorescent light.

His olive skin bore other tattered and pink wounds, which were ruched gouges. Silvered score marks that littered his chest, back, arms, and legs—a wordless story of his resilience to the many horrors the supernatural world contained.

The scars he'd once told himself were from bar fights, from games gone wrong, now glowed faintly beneath his shirt. Tribal, bioluminescent, sometimes.

It was a language he couldn't read. Suddenly, a high-heeled boot crushed his chilled wrist.

The air pulsed, ozone, pomegranates, and midnight's velvet ether saturated the atmosphere. Then came a sound, melodious and sibilant, that cut through to his marrow.

"Dumplings? Really?"

Her voice was a blade dipped in honey. A lure that was somehow familiar.

His brain kept logging the details despite its failing state. He'd read that a succubus could hear the object of her desires' thoughts when on the hunt.

He hurriedly hauled a mental wall up, hoping it would block her. Infuriating. What else did the universe wish to torture him with?! He was carrion at this point.

Her luscious voice slithered under his skin like a live wire. Or a jolt of caffeine shooting through his drying veins. Of course, she'd weaponize his last words.

Hadn't she ever tried an exceptional dumpling? Or a bowl of perfectly cooked shrimp fried rice? They were worth dying for.

This small sliver of his mortal self still lived in him despite his attempts to crush it. He'd demolished everything else. He'd joked to himself as he fought his way out of his cell.

"First rule of killing cult-ish hunters; always get dumplings after they use you as an overgrown lab-rat."

He'd said it to get him through the torture. Get him through the dissections and transfusions. The bleedings. It was useless now. He didn't think a demon would offer him anything but an extra-helping of madness and mutilation.

Magical creatures were selfish, cold, and callous. Everything was leverage for them. Your soul, your blood, your fucking hope and sanity.

Now, here she was. Here they were, half-truths and lies soon to be rotting between them.

Neither of them could ever claim honesty as an innate trait. But the tiny spark of warmth she'd inspired still fluttered in his chest.

He wanted to keep it. He'd been too late to save his brother. Too late to save his damn self, too. He always got there too late.

But maybe she was right on time.

Ash tried to turn his head as the air heated, but the permafrost had welded his spine to the pavement. He didn't need to turn.

He swore silently as a vibration in the earth under him spurred him to flee.

He couldn't move. Above him, shadows coalesced, swirling and rising, bleeding into the shape of a woman.

If he were able, his jaw would've cracked off the floor. He would howl with body-shaking laughter. Oh, he had to watch his loose mouth.

He couldn't use his usual tricks. She would play the marionette master now. She was taller than he thought.

Maybe it was the heels. He guessed she was around five feet seven from his supine vantage point. Gold-cracked lips curled into a lethal smirk before they colored in crimson.

The rest of her filled in as though an invisible hand painted her there. Long wavy copper hair tossed over her shoulder as she fully formed. Her glamor was immaculate.

Too flawlessly fashioned to be human. Her eyes were the cold black expanse between two stars, fissured with amber and bruised violet.

She gazed down at him, sneering, as if he'd bled on her expensive clothing. Scarlet and black wrapped around her curves like a second skin.

Her claws gleamed, sharpened. They were relentless as they hovered over his chest."You look terrible," she said, kneeling beside him. "But don't worry. I'll make it worse."