In Which Marks and Scars Become Matters of Life and Death

I took a deep breath at Al's words, letting it out slowly. "Have we?" I asked, catching and finding the hint of plaintiveness in my voice very annoying. As angry as I was at him, as much as he'd put my heart through the shredder in the past few days with his meddling between Ash and I…I really wanted him on my side.

For an answer he pulled off one of the silver bracelets, blew a whispered charm over it, and handed it back. He did the same to the other one, leaving me holding them with a befuddled expression. "I expect you to wear them at all times," he explained sternly. "They are for everyone's protection until you get your powers under your full control. You now have the ability to remove them, should you wish. You will explain yourself every time you do, and it had better be a life-or-death scenario or there will be some heavy consequences. Not the least of which will be your own damned guilt for blowing up innocent people. Are we clear?"

I nodded and slipped them back on, disliking the feeling of being cut off from the lines again, but much, much more sanguine about it. Ash's analogy to learning to drive still made a lot of sense. But my mind was already moving to the next matter on my to-do list: buying Rachel's mark from Al. I'd try to take care of that, then see if I had time to talk to Ash before Adrian summoned me back for a little detective work. I was feeling better, even cautiously optimistic about things.

I should have known better.

"Al…I have another favor to ask you. Would you sell me a mark?"

Al cocked his head. "A mark?" he asked, forehead crinkling with confusion. "You want ownership of a mark of debt?" he clarified, still looking dubious. I'd gone on and on about not swapping souls, after all. "Whose?"

"It's one that belonged to Rachel. When she marked Hope? Newt said that when she died, it reverted to you, as her mentor."

Al froze in place, then very deliberately slid off his glasses to fix me with a very, very intense stare. "You're telling me," he said, carefully, "that Rachel marked Hope? Impossible."

"No, she did. She didn't tell you? I was there. We both marked her. So did Newt."

Al's gaze flitted to the side as he made a mental search of some kind, then fixed back on me. "You're mistaken. The moment the database confirmed the death of her soul, it would have passed ownership of the mark to me. And I have no mark of Rachel's."

I stared back, confused. "But…she was your student. Newt said—"

"Newt is correct." There was something darker brewing in his eyes, and I found my stomach beginning to clench in a far too familiar sensation of fear. "Which is why you must be mistaken."

"Surely she wouldn't have…sold it." Not Rachel. She was even less likely to sell a mark than I am.

"She would not have sold it," Al confirmed, and I was shocked to see that his eyes were darkening, going black, then black-on-black.

Oh, shit. "Hope still has the mark," I said. "Otherwise Newt wouldn't want me to buy it from you."

Al was still frozen in place, only his eyes and mouth moving silently as he worked something out. "Pierce!" he roared, face suddenly twisted with rage. "GORDIAN NATHANIAL PIERCE!"

Pierce appeared, looking startled, and I realized Al had simply pulled him from whatever task he'd been doing. Al had closed the distance between them and grabbed him by the neck in an eyeblink, faster than even my demon reflexes could see. The witch gave a choked cry of surprise, struggling in earnest to breathe. But Al pulled him close, then pinned him to the stone wall along the path.

"Little runt," Al growled, and it was a growl, deep and throaty and vibrating. "You cried so prettily, you offered yourself up as a martyr to save the fucking elf. You told me you saw her soul dissolve into nothing, that you couldn't save her."

Pierce kicked, face going blue and eyes bulging, and I just stared, frozen in place. I felt like my world had suddenly been rocked to its foundations. "Al, stop," I said, voice thready with confusion. "Stop it, you're killing him!"

Al eased up with the bruising pressure, still deadly intent on his prey. I watched Pierce with wide eyes, waiting for him to deny, to explain. The witch coughed and choked, and under it all I was shocked to see the contempt in his blue eyes. His lip curled, and though he could probably have spoken, he said nothing, nothing at all.

"P-pierce?" I said, but the witch wouldn't look at me. His defiant eyes were fixed on Al, who got all the confirmation he needed from that one simple action.

In that moment, I knew Pierce was a dead man. I rushed forward, placing a hand on Al's arm, trying to stop him, distract him, bring a mote of reason back into those implacable black eyes. But Al was too deep in his fury to take heed, releasing the witch before backhanding me into a bed of herbs. But he'd only released the witch to put two steps of distance between them. He cursed Pierce with something terrible, and the witch's scream of agony was an obscene thing in this place of peace.

"Al, stop!" I shouted, rushing back again to try something, anything to save Pierce from Al's wrath. But that was a mistake, too.

"She lives, doesn't she?" Al turned his face to me, the heat of his rage a palpable thing.

"How could it be possible? I saw her! She didn't have a soul!"

"How much did you know of this conspiracy, Yvette…?" Al asked, gripping my wrist with crushing power.

"What? Nothing!" I twisted, knowing he was beyond reason. I did not want him in my head at this moment, but he pushed and drove his way past my defenses. I yelped and fought him, which only drove him deeper into his fury and made him even less careful as he rummaged through my memories. "I'm telling you, I—"

"You saw her," Al said, his presence in my mind finding and ripping forth the memory of Rachel, the last time I'd seen her.

Rachel. Hospital bed. I.V. bag, amulet. No soul, no aura, beeping of electronic equipment.

I didn't remember this much detail, but Al enhanced it, focusing and scanning like an expert scientist at his microscope, ignoring my cries of protest and pain.

Ivy, Jenks. Rachel's pale face. Trent and Quen, bandaged.

Gargoyle. Asleep, clutching something as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

A bottle.

And around Rachel's wrist, a slim silver bracelet. Elven design.

Wild magic.

I heard the conclusion Al reached echoing through my own soul. "Oh my God," I said instead, going limp with confusion.

"How much do you know?" he rasped. "You were there yesterday. Talking to that fucking elf. How much—" He paused, quiet with a moment of discovery, analyzing something he'd found in my mind that I couldn't even see. "You bitch. You treacherous fucking bitch!"

What the hell…? "Al, stop! I didn't know!" But Al was far past hearing anything now. He was on me, in me, ripping through one layer of memory after another like a man throwing clothing from drawers in a frantic search. I screamed, pleaded, begged him to stop. Not five minutes after we'd reached our truce, Al was killing me, and I couldn't stop him. I fought his presence in a blind panic as he tore and shredded his way through my mind looking for what he wanted, my screams sounding farther and farther away. In desperation, I called out to the only other person who might hear me, might help.

Al was suddenly gone, physically and mentally, and I collapsed into a bruised, throbbing heap at the base of the olive tree. Through the haze of a splitting headache, I heard the sounds of a down and dirty fight, male voices cursing and counter-cursing in between physical blows. I managed to crook a single finger and try to slip it under a bracelet. Al wouldn't catch me by surprise again. If he tried, I was going to fry him good and proper.

But it wasn't Al who seized me by the arm and hauled me against him, and it wasn't Al who spirited me away. And it wasn't Pierce, either.

"Ash," I whispered, as we rematerialized on the broken, windswept, desolate surface of the Ever After.

He'd come for me. Despite everything, he'd come.

Not that he was happy about it. Ash wasn't exactly being gentle, and the moment we were solid again he threw me against a crumbling wall, pinning me there with an arm to the chest. His own eyes smoldered with jealous rage, chest heaving as he regarded me without an ounce of pity in his eyes. "Bastard. You're mine. Not his. Mine." He loomed over me, teeth bared. "Mine to kill."

I just gawked at him, open-mouthed and dazed, in too much mental agony to try to comprehend him. I watched, unmoving, as he raised a hand heavy with blackness. Ash was going to curse me. Ash was going to kill me. And I was too damned out of it to even try to talk him out of it. I just stared into his furious eyes, bewildered to the end.

But he hesitated, even through the rage, his eyes flicking again and again to the scar on my face. After an agonizingly endless moment, Ash dropped his shaking hand. "Why?" he asked, frustrated. "I've wracked my brains for days. Tell me why!"

Well, I'd wanted a chance to talk to Ash. I just hadn't expected it to be so soon, or to be so fucking painful. "To save you," I managed.

He did something that caused a starburst of torment behind my right eye, all the way down my throat and lungs to my right hip. I was almost too weak to scream properly, but I managed it. "How had I failed you? How could you leave me there? What did I do?" he demanded. "Tell me why, so I can kill you and be done with it all!"

Not exactly Ash at his most convincing. But he wasn't the only one befuddled by the past week's turn of events. "What…the hell…are you talking about?" My mind was sweeping up the pieces and putting them in order, but it was slow going.

"You left me here to rot! Shredded me and abandoned me to this!" he indicated the blasted landscape, the endless destruction.

"No."

His features twisted in fury, and I could feel his body tense with his outrage. I was queasy and desperate with fear. The last time he'd been so beyond reason, he'd tried to rip my soul from my body. I'd been just as bewildered then, though now I knew why he'd done it- because I'd rejected him. And I'd done so again, or so he thought, but what the hell was he talking about? I blinked, hard, shuddering with cold and shock. This wasn't making any sense, and my stomach was about to empty itself all over him.

What had Al done while wearing my shape?

"Wrong answer, love," he growled, and his hand lit up again with a curse so black that I felt it twist the air itself with its foulness. "I grow ti—"

"Ash…you know that it was Al who saved you…don't you?"

He froze, eyes narrowed. "It was daylight!" he protested, then stopped, eyes wide.

"You idiot!" Pleading with him wasn't going to work, but maybe insults would get through. "Al saved you! In my body!" Al. That rat bastard. I was right back to hating him with every ounce of my soul.

Ash's face was terrible in its desperate confusion. "How…?" Did he even realize how much he was hurting me right now? I squirmed against his implacable anger, the grinding pressure of his arm against my chest pressing me painfully against broken stones. "You're lying."

"You ass! You think I knew how to bust you out of that curse? To reconnect you to the collective?" I demanded, watching as each word arrowed into his chest with an almost audible thud. The curse faded from Ash's hand, even as the strength faded from his grip and his face flooded with sudden, humiliating realization of having been Al's dupe. My body was shivering with more than just pain and cold. I'd kill him. I'd kill Al. He'd totally screwed us over. Just let me get my hands on him…!

Ash's other hand clutched my hair in a death-grip, face close as if he could read the truth in my eyes. Again, his gaze flicked to the scar, and the pain in his face tore my heart. "Yvette Therese Sinclaire, if you're lying to me—"

"He told me you were dead, Ash!" My voice broke, but I forced the words out anyway. "Ash, why didn't you come for me? Why didn't you come back? Why didn't you fight for me?"

Ash was shaking now, hand trembling harder with this new emotion than it had trembled before in rage. "Couldn't. Aura was shredded. Curses gone. Had to heal."

"Al left you here? On the surface?" Horror filled me. "Without your magic?"

"Couldn't even tap a fucking line. Only your aura made it bearable." His face was haunted with pain and misery. "And unbearable," he added, head falling forward, forehead against his arm across my chest. His entire body was jerking as if wracked with pain.

"All this time I thought you were dead, and you were out here, alone and trapped? Thinking I'd forsaken you?" The bitter wind sliced at the wet trails that tears had left on my cheeks. So cruel. Such exquisite cruelty, even if Al had known that Ash couldn't die. I'd misjudged Al. Again. Perhaps he was inclined to destroy us, for any number of reasons including a totally irrational jealousy based on the resemblance he'd just told me about. "I'll kill him. I'm going to fucking rip him apart! Let me go, Ash!" I started struggling in earnest, the desire for vengeance filling me until no other feeling remained.

"Evie—"

"Take me to him!" Therese ripped off the stupid bracelets, filling my soul with power. For once, I agreed. I didn't care if I damned myself, I'd rip the Ever After apart stone by stone until I unearthed the little weasel and crushed him. "Now!"

Suddenly Ash was on me, lips devouring me, his warm body pressing me to the rough stones, and I was drinking him in, thoughtless and desperate as anyone dying of thirst. He pulled the power from me, venting my helpless rage into the air around us. Energy from my raw fury spit and crackled into the ether as Ash drew it away, replacing it with need, with hunger, with his scent and his passion. If any other demon had tried it, tried taming me in such a blatant, insolent way, I'd have roasted his soul without a second thought, but this was Ash.

Mine.

We fell in a tangle of limbs, heedless of the ruins about us. I was sobbing, huge wracking sobs that hurt worse than my headache, but were the most beautiful pains I'd ever felt. I wrapped myself in his warmth and held on, grasping his hair, sinking fingernails into his shoulders, locking my legs about his. I felt as if my entire body were reaching for him, my want was so great. The greedy strength of his arms, crushing me to him with rough caresses, spoke of his own desperate hunger. He thrust himself into my mind, taking advantage of my distraction to rifle through my recent memories, echoing the action in a far more physical way. My demon took me there, in the ruins, until the desolate surface of the Ever After rang with my screams and the sizzle of my leftover ire as my magic singed the air.

But even passion couldn't block out our hideously scarred surroundings, the filth and the stink of old magic and recent death, for long. Once we were spent and shaking, it quickly grew unbearable. "Ash, let's get out of here," I murmured finally, shivering with far more than just the arctic chill of the wind and stones.

"Yes," he said, then hesitated, possibly recalling what he'd done to our place. But after a moment, we rematerialized in his library. He sat on the leather couch, pulling me down with him. His arms trapped me against him, and I leaned on him. We were silent for a long time, the silence of shock and recovery after trauma, as we both tried to make sense of the convoluted turns our lives had just taken. His heartbeat thrummed reassuringly under my ear. I felt the hot tears slipping from my eyes, though inside I felt numbed and bruised. One question kept circling through my brain, unshakable even though I feared to break our silence, our temporary truce. The cruel curse between us wasn't entirely dissipated, not by a long shot. We had a long road ahead of us.

"You thought I'd abandoned you," I said finally. "Why didn't you kill me yesterday?"

"It was that fucking scar," Ash said softly, into my hair. His voice was quiet and bewildered, as he stroked a finger down my cheek. "I just couldn't understand how you could say all that shit to me, abandon me, take Al as your familiar…then have the temerity to pretend ignorance of the whole matter. I'd have smeared your molecules across the ether yesterday, but for the fact that you still wore that scar."