From Blood And Ash Series Novels & Stories

Because she doesn’t run to safety— She runs into places where she can disappear. Where she can vanish. Where she thinks no one will find her. Except— I already have. The scent hits me first. Blood. Not fresh. Layered. Older. My jaw tightens. She was already injured. Already fighting. Before I ever reached her. Before the warehouse. Before she stayed. Before she touched me. And she still— Stayed. The realization burns deeper than the silver. I turn the corner— And see her.

I had no answer. She let me go. Her gaze shifted to the urn in my arms. "You won't take this when it's offered? Then I am taking it from you. "You will not see your father's ashes again." She reached. The blood in my arms went cold. The control I had been holding cracked. "Please… please don't. It wasn't me. I'll do anything, anything you want. Just don't." I was about to fall to my knees again. I would have. The pride and dignity I'd had walking in here had been gone for hours.

Even in the dim light, I can see the torn fabric across his abdomen, soaked dark with blood. My heart drops. “Multiple wounds...” Charles says tightly. Only then do I notice the sticky warmth on my hands. I slowly look down. Blood. David’s blood. My fingers are coated in it. His trembling hand suddenly catches my sleeve. I lean closer. “Shaw...” he breathes. “Look into Shaw.” “What about Shaw?” I ask sharply. But David’s grip slips from my sleeve, and his eyes fall shut.

The house didn’t feel like mine anymore once the gunfire stopped. Declan’s men moved through the estate with brisk, practiced efficiency, zip-tying the guards who were still breathing, calling for a cleanup crew, sweeping every room for anything the Ghost might have left behind. I stood in the middle of the foyer, blood — not mine — drying on my knuckles, and tried to remember how to breathe like a person who hadn’t just watched her home turned into a battlefield. “Sera.” Declan’s hand found my shoulder, gentler than it had any right to be given the last ten minutes. “You’re not hurt?”

Around midnight she reached the section describing Meher's gradual decline. The whispers. The forest. The growing suspicion. The fear. A knot formed in her stomach. She kept reading. Then came the murder. The rain. The clearing. Meher's final words. I have only loved you. Aisha closed the notebook abruptly. The room felt too warm. For several moments she simply sat there staring at nothing. The tragedy struck harder than she expected. Not because it was real. Because it wasn't. Somehow that made it worse. A fictional murder should not have felt devastating.

“Get your hands off her, Ashford.” “She’s bleeding,” Luca said, still unhurried, still holding her hand like a relic. “But thank you for the theatrics.” He lifted his thumb again—her blood smeared across the pad. “I was just helping.” “If you touch her again,” Noah hissed, “I will stop pretending to be civilized.” Luca shrugged. “You weren’t convincing anyone.” Althea couldn’t breathe, not with Luca’s heat on one side. Not with Noah’s grip anchoring her on the other. Not with the entire room watching her unravel.

Scars. Hundreds of them. Ritual scars. Burn marks. Claw wounds that never healed right. Someone carved power into him and then left him to rot in it. Maereth coughs, blood spilling down her chin, but her eyes are still sharp when they find mine. “Listen to me,” she gasps. “It’s him. Ash-blood. He’s been feeding on anchors—” “Still talking,” the hybrid murmurs, tilting his head. Amusement flickers across his ruined face. “That’s why they feared you.”

She persisted, taking off the cloak and revealing his wounds. Shards of broken glass gashed through the skin of his broad back, blood seeping out of the deep cuts. "How did this happen?" She used a cotton swab to gently pick out the pieces of glass onto the tray. "A little explosion." He held in a grimace as she drew out a splinter. The bandits had tossed flaming bottles filled with sulfur and spirit at the village and he shielded them from the blast. "Little?" Elira tilted her head to the side, "Where did they come from?"

Let everything go back to normal. Normal. The word tasted like ash. I turned the water off and stood dripping in the quiet. Steam swirled around me thick and heavy. But I didn’t want normal, all I want is her. And that scared me more than any slap Ethan could throw.

“I thought the gods buried her deep enough.” I looked at him then—not as a threat, not as a stranger—but as a sibling. A broken boy trained in shadows and raised on silence. “Tell me everything,” I said. And he did. Ashen had been born first. She was older than both of us. A child of prophecy, of lunar fire and bloodstorms. But the moment she was born, the seers saw death. Not just war—extinction. They said she’d burn the whole bloodline down.