Page 1 of Beg the Night (Mystics of Ashora #1)

ONE

athena

E veryone was finally dead.

Everyone but me, anyway. Ironic, since I was the one who deserved it the most. The sun roasted my skin as I gripped the tarp that held my younger sister’s body. She wasn’t nearly as heavy as my father was, thank god. Last week, it had taken all my strength to move him the ten feet through the yard to the grave I’d spent hours digging.

Burying bodies was a new thing for me. My muscles still screamed at every movement.

Jasmine’s body felt too small to be burying. It was too small to be burying. At seventeen, she had just barely started her life. Now I was burying her in the yard with the rest of my family.

Mother, Father, Kylar, Jasmine.

Jasmine’s death hurt the most.

Her body rolled into the grave, landing with a sickening thud, and I quickly got to work covering her with the brittle dirt. My palms were blistered from the wooden handle of the shovel, but I barely felt them ripping open as I continued to fill in the hole.

Even the torture of the first death didn’t match this. I cried for days after Mother drowned in the stream up north, so did the rest of the family. It was a freak accident, apparently, because she had been swimming in that stream her entire life.

An accident.

The word replayed in my mind until it gnawed at my every thought. I couldn’t get away from that word. Couldn’t move past it.

Accident.

Kylar died next. Snake bite to the leg. The infection that set in took him just days after Mother drowned. We hadn’t even begun to feel the grief that awaited us. Father and I buried them without saying a word. What was there to say? By then, our family had already been destroyed.

Then Father. Heart attack, it seemed.

That’s when Katherine left us. My older sister swore that this house was cursed, that we would all die if we stayed.

She had been acting strange since Mother died. I blamed it on the grief. She wasn’t thinking clearly when she chose to leave. None of us ever left town. It wasn’t safe out there. Not with the war raging on, with the Ministry hunting mystics. I hoped Katherine made it out safely, even if I hated that she’d left us.

It was just Jasmine and me for weeks. And after those first few miserable days, the silence of the house grew almost comforting.

Do you think Katherine misses us? she asked me just last week. Her blonde hair was pulled into a loose braid, and the time she’d spent in the sun had given her cheeks a pinkish glow that made her look even younger than she was.

How could she not? I forced a smile. Jasmine’s relationship with Katherine was vastly different from mine. She had been protected from some of the cold, hateful things I had seen over the years.

It was hard to hold it against my older sister. It’s what she did to survive. Katherine’s bitterness hadn’t been there all our lives. It grew like an old oak tree, branching and taking over until it was the only thing visible for miles.

The memory stung the back of my throat as I hauled more dirt over Jasmine’s cold body.

The worst part? I’d actually begun to believe Jasmine might survive.

But then the flu wrecked her body. She slept through most of it, not even aware of the torture that slowly shut down her organs.

It wasn’t a bad way to go.

My entire family—aside from Katherine—lie dead and decaying in this dirt. And as much as I hated to believe it, Katherine was likely dead, too. A woman alone never survived long. Not with the Ministry on the hunt. That’s what Father had taught us. We were earthly—not mystic—but it didn’t matter to them. No one was safe anymore. They would take people from their families in the middle of the night just to run tests to determine whether they were mystics.

And nobody ever returned.

That’s why my family lived way out here in the middle of nowhere, far from anyone who might notice us. Far from anyone working for the Ministry.

Not like it did much good. Everyone ended up in the ground eventually. The last few weeks had been testament enough to that.

Once Jasmine’s grave was filled, I wiped my dirty palms on my trousers and sat back in the grass. Birds chirped above me, swarming the skies. I would have traded any amount of money for the kind of freedom they possessed.

Sick bastards.

The birds didn’t know the world was ending. They didn’t know we were killing each other one by one, fighting for something that didn’t exist.

A cool breeze brushed my dirt-brown hair over my shoulder. I wouldn’t normally risk sitting outside like this, but my ability to give a shit was dwindling with every passing second.

Jasmine.

She was the last good thing left in my life. The final hope I had that we might actually survive this war. Hold yourself together, she would say. We need you to stay strong, so when this is all over you can put our family back together.

A sharp laugh racked through me, painfully piercing the silence. What family? What life?

Gunshots rang out in the distance. I’d stopped flinching at the sound months ago. What was the use? My family and I had been hiding from the Ministry since the war had started two years ago.

But I’d only fought as hard as I did in order to keep my family safe. Now, I had no family. If I was right about Katherine, then there wasn’t a soul alive I cared for. No reason to keep going.

I dropped my head back as I took in the bright blue sky above me. Forgive me, Jasmine. I’m not nearly as tough as I pretended to be.

The truth was, my sister’s death took all the strength and determination I possessed, and I feared I would never get it back. I no longer cared enough to fight.

To run.

To hide.

If the Ministry wanted me, they could damn well come find me. I was too tired to keep fighting. I was too—too?—

A single tear fell from my eye, rolling down my dirt-covered skin and lingering on my chin before dripping to my tattered shirt.

Though I wasn’t a mystic, it didn’t matter. I was a woman. And in the depths of this war, the Ministry was gathering all the women they could find.

In some ways, I envied Jasmine. She would not have to endure what came next.

The voices and gunshots grew louder, but I didn’t even have the strength to stand. They wouldn’t shoot me. My long, wavy locks and womanly figure would be a dead giveaway. They’d want to take me alive. Not that I’d stay that way for long.

More silent tears fell.

The birds scattered, launching themselves from the trees noisily, evading the horror that approached.

I didn’t turn around, didn’t even bother to move from the spot near my family’s graves as the footsteps approached.

A deep voice shouted unintelligibly. More male voices followed, disturbing and harsh. The ground vibrated with footsteps.

A sharp needle pierced the side of my neck, and in seconds, it felt as though I was flying.

It was nice.

And then it was all over.