Page 14 of Wolf of Ashes
“Saying ‘please’ doesn’t amount to begging.”
I swipe at the sweat dripping down my brow, sighing into the heat. “I need boots…please.”
“As you like,” he says.
Knee-high leather boots appear on my feet. They’re so soft and fit me so perfectly that it feels like… Well, Mom once described silk sheets to me and I imagine these boots feel a lot like that.
Other than the boots, I’m still only wearing my underwear, but I don’t give a shit about my near-nakedness. I’m accustomed to the cold and this heat…Phew… It’s nearly too much.
I saunter toward the courtyard, pretending I’m not so thirsty that I want to crawl out of my own skin. The panthers gather around me, deftly avoiding stepping on any lava fissures.
“Not the natural world?” I arch an eyebrow at the keeper. “What you should have said is that we were about to step into literal hell.”
He gives me a grin that I find more than a little wicked, as if he’d be delighted to escort me on a vacation to the underworld.
“This isn’t hell,” he says, studying our surroundings. “I sense the light magic that was used to create this place, and it has the same stench as the magic that was used to create the place you came from.” He gestures in the air. “This is a pocket of the veil.”
“The veil.” I flinch at his mention of it. “Then this place was created by angels.”
According to what Mom told me, the veil is the space between the natural world and the heavenly realm. Within the veil, pockets have been created and doorways into those pockets are hidden throughout the United States. Our cage was located within such a pocket.
“Indeed,” the keeper is saying. “Only angels with the strongest light magic can create pockets in the veil like this one. Are you familiar with Sentinels?”
I’m too fucking familiar with Sentinels. They’re supposed to live in groups of three within the veil, guarding precious objects. If any other supernatural were to manage the nearly impossible task of finding and infiltrating a pocket of the veil, the Sentinels would fight to the death to keep that object safe and stop that supernatural from leaving.
“My jailer was a Sentinel,” I say, my response clipped. “Ordinary angels can’t hurt me, but Sentinels can.”
“With their soul light.” The keeper’s lips press into a thin line. “There are not many Sentinels, but the few who exist are extremely powerful and can inflict severe damage on creatures of dark magic.”
My shoulders have become hunched, the memories of burning pain returning to me.
The keeper’s right hand lightly brushes my cheek, drawing my gaze upward. His other hand taps his chest. “Your anger is warranted.”
For a moment, his face fills with pain, and I wonder if it’s his pain or mine. He tapped his chest like that before when he sensed my hunger.
The tension around his eyes eases and his voice becomes even softer. “In this case, it’s lucky for us that this pocket of the veil was created, because it has provided us with a conduit from my realm to the outside world.”
As he speaks, he inclines his head back toward the crumbling gap in the stone wall before turning toward the solid brick wall ahead of us. “This way. Step carefully.”
The panthers stay close to me, but they don’t seem so concerned anymore about the cooling lava on the ground, happily padding toward the center of the courtyard as if they belong in this hellish landscape.
Well, I suppose it suits them.
“You’re not fucking hellhounds,” I chastise them as I plot a careful path between sizzling fissures.
Not like my mother. She was a hellhound. A magnificent one. Strong against every other supernatural, except a fucking Sentinel.
Sometimes I wonder if she would have survived our cage if she’d chosen to remain in her fully-shifted form. After all, dark spaces didn’t frighten or diminish her. By choosing to spend so much time in her humanoid form—a form that needed fresh air and a blue sky and nutritious food—her body had weakened irreversibly.
She once told me she tried to stay in her shifted form as much as she could when I was a baby, snatching an hour here and there while I was sleeping. But she couldn’t care for me in that form. Couldn’t feed me, change me, or rock me to sleep. By the time I could look after myself, the damage to her body was done.
I press my hand to my heart, where it still hurts, and cast a glare at the keeper’s back.
Surely, by taking the power in my heart, he could have taken all of the pain too?
I glance down at the nearest male panthers, only to find them grinning up at me, their lips drawing back from their silver teeth. I don’t imagine for one second that they’re smiling at my pain. I called them hellhounds and it seems they don’t mind that title one fucking bit.
I’m not sure how the female feels about it because she’s prowled ahead of me and now travels at the keeper’s side.
