Eden's Embers Read online

  That left the liquor and the belladonna for a cowardly way out.

  Alana poured herself a measure of rye and another of malodorous pear liquor into a goblet, watching by the glow of a gas lamp as the two mixed into a cocktail powerful enough to ignite a fire. It wasn’t a particularly appealing beverage, but she wasn’t looking for refreshment here. She uncorked the vial of belladonna and carefully shook out a fingernail’s worth into the glass. The powdery dust settled like sediment at the bottom. It would take some stirring to mix it up properly. Alana wasn’t worried. She had time to finish the concoction, ingest it, and make her way into bed.

  She was just reaching for her bowl and pestle when a powerful clap of thunder rumbled from beneath the ground. The kitchen shook and Alana’s bottles with it. She barely had time to set the heavy stone bowl down before another quake rattled the house.

  There was no discounting the second blast. It was so loud that Alana found herself blinking grout and sawdust from her eyes. Above her, the ancient roof was threatening to give way.

  The bottles nearest to the edge of the table tipped over, shattering on the floor and splashing her feet. Alana counted herself lucky to be wearing her boots or else she might have found herself tripping over jagged, razor-sharp shards as she darted for the door.

  A third quake loosed one of the cracked rafters overhead. Alana felt the whoosh of air as it crashed mere inches from her heel. One step, two, as the house shook and wobbled around her, a hard shove against the door—

  She collapsed into the dewy grass outside on hands and knees, her heart lodged somewhere in her throat and yet still pounding a staggered tattoo. She pinned a hand into the dirt to push herself up. There were no earthquakes in these parts, or at least there hadn’t been in the forty years since the colony had been established.

  It wasn’t until Alana looked up and saw the amber gleam of flames by the main gate that she understood. This was no quake.

  New Eden was under attack.

  * * * *

  The chaos didn’t register, at first, not when Alana was staring at the vast and impenetrable wall that surrounded her town now cleaved open like a wound by a tall blaze. The main gate was only one of three access routes into the city, but it was the best defended and had a direct line of sight on both of the other two. With it aflame, the other entry points were vulnerable.

  Tendrils of smoke were creeping from the east into the night sky, sign enough that at least one of the gates was already compromised.

  “Everybody to the river!” Alana heard a voice shout. She thought it might be Krall himself, but couldn’t be sure. The crackling of burning wood was very hard to contend with, to say nothing of the screams.

  She saw people fleeing toward the gate in far fewer numbers than those headed the other way. Some were in their sleep clothes, haggard and scared. Others had brought rifles along. It wasn’t until Alana saw two men armed with machetes and decked out in breastplate and helms that she realized there was more to flee than the flames.

  Fear gripped her fast, but she shook off its clutches. If she remained in the open like this, she’d fall prey to one of those shiny blades. Or else she’d wind up trampled underfoot by people she otherwise considered friends. Get up, Alana told herself. Run. So she did.

  There was a thicket of trees between the fields and the sloping hills that surrounded the town proper. Alana sprinted toward them, seeking out their shade as around her the shouting grew louder and louder. Lights were burning in the windows of homes that should have gone dark by now.

  Every precaution the townspeople had taken presumed the enemy was either mutt-shaped or walker, both of whom would’ve been brain-dead and easily subdued with a big enough gun. The same didn’t hold true of raiders.

  Alana watched a woman slit the preacher’s throat on the pleasure house balcony. Two others were fleecing a body in the lane outside, helping themselves to whatever their victim happened to have in the pockets of his sleep shirt.

  It was horrific. Alana couldn’t stop watching.

  “Someone there?” a voice hissed, its whisper jarring and overloud. She couldn’t make out the speaker in the shadows, but he didn’t sound remotely familiar.

  The machete in his hand was another story.

  Alana flattened her spine to the rough tree bark at her back, clamping a hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming. Keep walking. Keep going, don’t stop. There’s no one here. If she could will the man on by sheer willpower, there was a small chance she could still get out of this alive. If he found her trace, Alana knew her death would be far less painless than belladonna and rye.

  The heavy crunch of footsteps on dried leaves and scattered twigs alerted her to his advance. He was maybe five feet away, just on the wrong side of the contorted seedling. Two more and he would see her knees, her cover blown. Her life forfeit.

  Luck was on Alana’s side. Just as the drifter was about to step forward, there was a flash of movement in the nearby shack—the Laus were trying to make a run for it.

  Her would-be murderer took off after them, waving his blade high above his head, all ready to strike. Relief was a gasping exhale, a rush of heat through her chilled body, but Alana didn’t let herself get bogged down by the miracle of her narrow escape. She pushed herself up and ran. With everyone headed for the river, there was only one place she could hope to find shelter.

  The streets of New Eden had been her haven and her cage since she was a little girl. She had trawled through them in darkness, dashed through the rain and sleet leaking from the eaves. She had navigated in the snow, when all dwellings looked alike. She had put her sweat and her blood into rebuilding the town after the Dark Days, but she had never seen New Eden so blood-spattered before. Corpses lined the streets, eyes wide and mouths gaping open, their insides revealed to the world.

  Alana fought not to step over them, but there were so many. She steadied herself with a hand against the tanning shop door and her fingers came away slick and red.

  The shop was a mere fifty feet away, just within her reach. Alana blinked past the smoke and the tears welling in her eyes—and saw that the door was already open.

  “No!” She stumbled forward, but it was already too late.

  A gust of scorching breath spilled from the shop, singing her cheeks and evaporating the air in her lungs. The fireball that followed would’ve burnt the rest of her to a crisp were it not for a broad shoulder bearing her down to the muddy ground.

  Alana shouted, both with pain and the shock of being manhandled by unfamiliar hands. She hit the dirt hard, one arm twisted under her painfully and the other clutched in a man’s iron grip. Her first instinct was to beg for her life. Her second, and by far the stronger, was to struggle until the son of a bitch let go.

  She twisted, bringing up her free hand, and backhanded her assailant as hard as she could across the face. It didn’t matter that a horrible throbbing radiated through her knuckles with the impact. White ash was streaming down onto her face, hot like papery flakes where it touched her skin. At least the man was off her. She could run. She could—

  “Alana!” Jackson’s voice registered as though from very far away, but he was sitting right there, collapsed on his side in the dirt, his black fringe swept to the side. There was a machete at his hip, as there hadn’t been when they’d last met. He had recovered his weapons.

  Alana felt the breath seep from her lungs. “You…” It was too great a coincidence to think that he had simply lucked out by visiting town the day before New Eden was attacked. “You’re part of this?” Alana choked out, staggering to her feet. Every gulp of breath seemed to sear her throat. The air itself stank of death and spilled blood and, oddly enough, dried lavender.

  She watched Jackson rise, his broad-shouldered form a far cry from reassuring. He was a drifter, same as the people laying waste to her city and driving all of her friends into the wilderness.

  “Yes,” Jackson confirmed, squeezing his hands into fists. “I’m sorry about
your shop. That wasn’t my doing… If you don’t fight us, I swear you won’t be harmed. We’re only here for food and ammo.”

  His apology meant nothing when New Eden was going up in smoke. By morning, there would be nothing left but a sad brick coop and a few dozen ruins. Without a gate to keep out walkers and mutts, the town would take years to rebuild to its current standard. They would be unable to retaliate, much less give chase to the perpetrators.

  Impunity was written all over Jackson’s defiant stance, etched into the shape of his brooding frown. Alana knew he was lying. She had seen the bodies. She had watched that harpy slay the preacher in the brothel window. Like him, there would be countless other victims—perhaps not Alana, but being spared would only offer a protracted death sentence. Sooner or later, the wilderness would finish what the drifters had started.

  And in the meanwhile, I am to be wed.

  If the sheriff lived, the council would surely leverage the survival of their town against her choosy female heart. If he didn’t, she didn’t doubt that another husband would be found for her.

  Sat in the ruins of her shop, wearing someone else’s blood, Alana sucked in a breath and said, “Take me with you.”

  Chapter Three

  Jackson was still staring at her, bemused, as seconds ticked by. “What did you say?”

  “Take me with you,” Alana echoed, as if she hadn’t been clear enough the first time. She took a tentative step forward, locking her knees to keep from falling. “I won’t fight you. I’ll be obedient—whatever you want. Just, please… I can’t stay here.”

  Being the sheriff’s wife in a time of peace and plenty seemed like a recipe for disaster. Being his wife when his temper was sure to be running high and winter would have to pass without the usual provisions was unfathomable. “I’ll beg if I have to,” Alana ventured, her voice rising in pitch. “Do you want me to go to my knees?”

  The ping-ping noise of crackling glass vials was startlingly audible as what was left of her livelihood went up in smoke. Nothing that remained could be salvaged. She would have to start fresh if she remained and she lacked her mother’s diplomacy to smooth the council’s ruffled feathers. Krall would never allow it.

  Jackson put an end to her spiraling misery by seizing her wrist. “Come on.” His grip was firm, but no more brutal than it needed to be.

  Alana bit back a yelp of surprise as she was dragged to her feet. Somewhere not so far away, she could still hear the cries of those who had survived the initial incursion. She couldn’t tell if they were the lucky ones or if that dubious honor went to the bodies of the guardsmen and women she passed as Jackson forcibly pulled her through the still smoldering ruins of the main gate.

  She tried not to gawk at the charred, mangled bodies, nor dredge up their names and stories from the depths of memory. They were just bodies now, slowly cooling in their final resting place. The parts that made them people were already gone.

  It was many minutes before she realized she had left the town behind, that she was stumbling along in the dark with a man who could yet prove a worse bet than her intended. When she tried to stop and glance back at the wall, Jackson tightened his grip as if to keep her from fleeing. Alana gasped. There would be bruises decorating her forearm tomorrow—assuming she lived long enough to see another dawn.

  Out of boredom or some attempt to erase their trace, Jackson didn’t stay on the hard-packed dirt road for long. He pulled her through the underbrush, brier and nettles brushing her hem as they penetrated into the depths of the copse. Alana refrained from telling him that he needn’t have worried about confusing her as to their route. Already after half an hour’s worth of walking through unfamiliar woodland, she didn’t know which path would lead her back to New Eden.

  The scratch of thistle sage was a familiar annoyance, at least. Alana’s tears flowed more freely after a few prickly thorns scratched her ankles, drawing blood. She sobbed, too, but not for the pain. There wasn’t much of that, despite the bruises and the sting of brambles in the undergrowth.

  “Quiet,” Jackson hissed, with nary a glance over his shoulder. What was he worried about? They had left the fighting behind inside the city walls. The only creatures out here were birds and his godless people and the other things that roamed and fed on careless wanderers.

  Alana felt her breath catch as she heard growling up ahead.

  Jackson nudged her behind him with a calloused hand. This time, Alana went willingly.

  The growling came again, thick and angry like a dog’s, but deeper. Alana had heard talk of mutts since she was a girl and she had grown up singing songs to ward them off, but as an adult she knew full well that they were just mindless creatures—born from man’s unbridled imagination, his potential for creation—meant to amuse and delight onlookers in the zoos and circuses of old. A few had escaped into the wild back in the day and they had defied the laws of God ever since.

  There were dozens of new species now, each one more dangerous than the last.

  Jackson had brought the two of them to a clearing where the glare of moonlight through the treetops was just bright enough to see the mottled shape of a furry beast looming dangerously before them. It was a mutt, all right, because no mountain lion could be as tall as a man or possessed with fangs that reached a good two palms down from its maw.

  Alana knotted a hand into Jackson’s shirt. If she’d known that putting her fate in his hands meant imminent death less than five miles from the walls of the city, she might have reconsidered that hasty leap of faith.

  “Don’t move,” Jackson murmured. “It can only smell us.”

  “W-what?”

  “They’re as deaf as doornails and they can barely see in daylight, never mind the dark… Don’t move. It’ll pass us by. There’s charred meat not far behind us.”

  Bodies, Alana thought. People. But she couldn’t bring herself to correct him. Her people were already dead. “I’ve never seen one,” she bit out. “A mutt.” She felt Jackson’s hand settle gingerly at her hip, his touch almost reassuring.

  “What?” he mumbled with a touch of disbelief. “Never?”

  She gave a minute shake of the head because the mutt sure as hell didn’t look blind, whatever Jackson had to say about it. It was coming closer, too, every skulking step revealing the ripple of muscle under its thin, bristly fur.

  “Maybe once,” Alana breathed, forcing herself to speak to keep from crumbling to her knees. “It—it was a small one, though. Like a fox, but with wings?”

  “Oh, those are nasty,” Jackson whispered. He had a nice voice, smooth like silk, and he didn’t swallow his consonants like some of the men in town.

  Alana cataloged the detail for further study, trying not feel as though she had given up her life for a warm voice and a pair of green eyes.

  “Yeah…” Vicious or not, the creatures she knew were slim pickings compared to the creature looming over them now, its long muzzle scenting the air by Jackson’s ear. Its skull was perfectly round at the back, skin stretched taut with no room for ears. Its eyes were wide, though, and vaguely human-looking.

  Alana squeezed her own shut, heart beating so fast she felt as though it was trying to leap out of her ribcage. She counted down the seconds like sheep, not to put herself to sleep but in a last ditch attempt to distract herself from her impending doom.

  She had reached seventy-three by the time she felt the hulking mass of the animal begin to move. It took a while for her to find the courage to open her eyes, but eventually she did and found Jackson smirking with half a mouth.

  “You okay?”

  Alana nodded despite herself. She was alive, which counted for something. So many of her neighbors couldn’t say the same.

  “We have to keep going,” Jackson said. “A lot more than mutts in these woods and they’re not all crippled by faulty senses.”

  It was tempting to ask what he meant, but Alana just couldn’t muster the energy. She fell into step beside him, her wrist still clutched fi
rmly in his grasp. The prickly shrubs that scratched her calves went unnoticed. She only hoped that somewhere at the end of this long trek, she might be allowed to rest.

  * * * *

  The creeping light was playing across her eyelids like the brush of a lover’s fingertips. At first it only registered as discomfort, but all too quickly the torrent of fresh, indelible memories broke through the dam of blissful ignorance. Alana jerked awake, kicking out her legs against an unseen, unreal attacker.

  A shallow cave concealed beneath a wide overhang resolved into being around her. Jackson was there, holding watch with his back against the stone pillar at the entrance of the grotto.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Alana heard herself ask, as though the hour mattered. She had nowhere to be. She would never again have anywhere to be that wasn’t in line with Jackson’s desire. The thought settled over her like a heavy mantle—like the ash that had poured from the ruins of her shop back in New Eden.

  “Not long,” Jackson said quietly. “There’s water in the gourd if you’re thirsty. Those berries are edible, but I’d recommend you try to eat the salted meat instead.”

  It took Alana a moment to grasp that he had brought her food and water. “Thanks… Where did it come from?” The berries he might have gathered from one of the non-poisonous shrubs that grew in the wild, but the meat?

  Jackson smiled. “We leave provisions for one another. You should thank the charitable souls who had the foresight to mark down a place where we could find shelter and food.” That explained how he had known precisely where to go last night, when Alana herself had felt like they were running around in circles.

  “Think they’re the same charitable souls who set fire to my town?” she wondered aloud, sitting up.

  A thorn was sticking out of her left ankle, so she pinched it with the ash-tipped points of her fingernails and tugged. It hurt, there was no disguising that, and a hissing breath crept out through her clenched teeth, but Alana didn’t flinch. She welcomed the pain.