Page 47 of Blood & Ash

“Using your name.”

“Yes.”

She nodded once, short and decisive. Her brown hair fell across her face, and she pushed it back with a hand that had stopped shaking.

“I need to see Gabriel,” she said.

Eric reached for the heavy door. The hinges groaned. Cold air pushed into the room from the corridor beyond, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and the damp that lived in stone passageways no matter how many fires burned.

Aislinn walked past him without touching his arm. Her steps were measured. One foot in front of the other. The wool sweater hung loose on her frame. She had lost weight during the year his name was gone. They both had.

Eric followed her into the corridor. The door swung shut behind them. The ritual chamber held the ash, the blood and the single candle that kept burning because nobody had thought to put it out.

The packhouse great hall carried the ghost of the sickness. Two chairs sat pushed back from the scarred oak table where nobody had bothered to slide them into place. The air still held a faint medicinal smell beneath the woodsmoke. Morning light came in grey through the high windows, thin and cold, catching the dust motes that floated above the hearth where the fire burned low.

Gabriel stood at the head of the table. His blue eyes were flat. The hellforged scar that ran from his temple to his collar caught the firelight and held it. The ones on his forearm and thigh did the same when he moved, silver against skin that had stopped trying to heal them years ago.

Autumn sat to his left. Her hand rested on the table close to his forearm but not touching. Her green eyes moved across the room, reading each face in turn. Her red hair was pulled back. The cuffs of her sweater were frayed.

Dex occupied the chair to Gabriel’s right. His arms were crossed. His jaw was set. Ramsey sat three chairs down, his silver-streaked hair wild from running his hand through it too many times. A half-dozen pack members filled the remaining seats. Some still carried the roughness of weeks of illness: a woman with dark circles under her eyes, a man whose right hand trembled when he reached for his tin cup. They had all come. Even the ones who had nodded during Galen’s accusation. Even the ones who had looked at the door first whenever Gabriel spoke.

Gabriel laid it out without ceremony.

“Arrow has been in Ashton Grove longer than any of us understood.” His voice filled the room without volume. It simply arrived where it needed to be. “He didn’t arrive with the demons. He didn’t come after the war. He was already here.”

He walked them backward. Each marker delivered in short, declarative sentences that built on each other like bricks in a wall.

“The demon war. 1998. We lost Kiera. We lost Radha. We lost the unborn. Arrow was already established by then. Established enough to coordinate.”

A woman near the fireplace shifted her weight. Her boot scraped the plank floor.

“The rose left at the scene of Kiera’s death. Narcisse’s signature. Arrow took Narcisse’s name three weeks before burning the nest in 1878.”

Ramsey’s mouth pressed into a flat line. His hand closed around his tin cup. The metal dented under his grip.

“Narcisse was sent to Ashton Grove for Kiera’s fae blood. Arrow controlled him. Arrow has controlled every vampire in this territory for over a century through Narcisse’s name, and then through others when Narcisse died.”

A man by the window went still. His hand had been tapping the table edge. It stopped. The tapping didn’t resume.

“The burning of the nest in 1878 was Arrow clearing house, not a hunter operation. Removing a tool that had served its purpose. Narcisse had found Ashton Grove for him. Found Kiera. Found the fae bloodline. Arrow took the name, burned the nest and waited.”

The room went progressively quieter, the quiet of people realizing the ground beneath them wasn’t what they had thought.

Dex uncrossed his arms. He placed both hands flat on the table and looked at Gabriel across the scarred oak.

“How long exactly?” Dex asked.

The question hung. Every face in the room turned toward the head of the table. The fire popped in the hearth. A log settled. Ash drifted.

“Two hundred years,” Gabriel said. “Give or take.”

The murmurs that followed built fast. A woman near the back wall said something about the founding. A man by the cold fireplace cursed. Voices overlapped. Questions rose and collided. Someone’s fist came down on the oak hard enough to rattle a tin cup. The sound cracked through the hall.

“Two hundred...”

“...impossible...”

“...the treaty wasn’t even...”