Page 21 of Ash and Roses

I blink the tears from my eyes, and that’s when I see Jade. Not on the ground, but on a tree branch—his once bare skin now slick with red. His eyes are open, the piercing green of them staring back at me in horror. He couldn’t have gotten that high himself, and the growl of the animal towering above me saps me of everything I have left. Teagan is dead, Jade is dead, and any moment, I will be too.

I close my eyes and wait for the snapping of teeth and tearing of flesh, but nothing comes. As quickly as it attacked, the animal—the monster—disappears.

“Jade?” I choke on his name. Darkness seeps in around the edges of my vision, but I look at him for as long as I can. Still in the tree. Still unmoving.

My eyes grow heavy, and I let the darkness have me.

CHAPTEREIGHT

QUINN

There’s blood on my hands.

That alone isn’t unusual, but everything else about this is wrong. I’m human, but I shouldn’t be. I feel it in every cell of my body. The monster is still ever present, demanding. Hidden just beneath the surface of this human shell.

The blood is dry, but that means little. I can still smell it,taste it.Deer, boar, a rabbit or two… and human.So much human.

What the fuck were so many people doing this deep in the forest? I should go back to where it happened and try to understand. What’s one more piece of my humanity stripped away? It’s not like there’s much of it left now.

I pull in a deep breath. The tang of blood is still heavy on the wind, so I can’t be far off. There won’t be much left, but there’ll be enough to make sense of this. This is far from the first time I’ve taken human life, but the last time it was on this scale…

‘Please.’

I freeze when the memory of that voice hits me, feather soft and pleading. I replay the word over and over in my mind, willing myself to remember it—to rememberher—and then I see it. A woman cloaked in wolf’s skin lying in the mud, blood seeping from a wound on her back as my claws tear into her.

But then I stopped.

Why did I stop?

‘Please.’

I shake my head and the memory with it. I should just return home. I’m human, so there’s no reason for me to keep to the trees. What’s happened is in the past and there’s nothing that can be done to change it.

But the girl. Did I just leave her there? If she’s alive, abandoning her now would be the same as killing her. I can make excuses for the monster, but I don’t have that luxury. One way or another, she needs to be dealt with.

CHAPTERNINE

ABBY

I’m still lost to the darkness, but something is different. There’s a dull pain in my shoulder, ever growing and making itself the focus of my attention. I long to ease back into the nothingness and return to the place with no pain and no loss. My memories are returning, and with them comes a swirling haze of images that dance through the forefront of my mind.

The blood. The monster.Jade.

He can’t be dead. Just because he was in that tree doesn’t mean he didn’t survive like I did.

I try to open my eyes, but they protest in heavy refusal. Only small streams of light reach me, and with them comes the blurred image of two shadows—no, people—speaking at the far end of the room. I can’t see enough to make out details, but I can already tell this place is unfamiliar. The scent of pine and something sweeter invades my senses, and it’s nothing like Lunae.

I try to call out to Jade, but the two figures don’t seem to hear me. I can only catch wisps of their hushed conversation as I force my senses to focus.

“Are you certain she wasn’t bitten?”

“Positive. Aside from the bump on her head and the scratch on her shoulder, she’s fine.”

A scratch? It feels a lot worse than a scratch. The burning in my upper arm is more prominent now, and it feels as if flesh was torn clean from bone. I turn my head towards it, and I can just see through the blur the bloodied cloth wrapped tightly around my shoulder and upper arm. Whoever these strangers are, they’ve at least taken the time to tend to my wounds.

Pain radiates through me as I ease myself upwards in the bed, and I can’t stop the groan from slipping between my lips. I have to speak to someone in charge. I have to find Jade and see if anyone else survived the attack.

“Whoa, whoa, hey. Don’t move too quickly,” a female voice says hurriedly as the blurs rush to my bedside. I blink away the haze and force my vision to clear. A man and a woman stare down at me, concern radiant in their eyes.