Burnt Devotion (32 page)

Sain looked at me, his eyes darting to Dramin’s before coming back to mine in obvious confusion. It was a look that was so out of place for a Drak that it took all my strength not to laugh.

“What was your serious mistake?” I asked again, hoping that repeating the phrasing would jog his memory, but he only continued to stare at me, his wide eyes dropping briefly before he jerked, the moment so fast I was sure he had been zapped.

“Dramin,”—Sain’s voice rumbled in the deep, heady tone that I had grown used to, the sound combined with the lingering smell of salt and soot sent a chill through me—“there is a room over here if I remember correctly. I think it’s time you lie down.”

My brow wrinkled in confusion as Sain stood, Dramin didn’t so much as say a word as his father pulled him to standing. He half dragged, half assisted him to a room I was sure hadn’t been used in a decade and would be so dust covered you wouldn’t be able to tell the rats from the dust bunnies.

I watched them go, the confusion only growing before I shuffled across the floor to sit beside Thom, part of me expecting him to roll over and grin at me the way he had for so long, but he still slumped against the wall, his body contorted awkwardly.

Like he was dead.

That iron fist punched me in the gut as the thought shoved its way back into me. My hand pressed against him on instinct, my magic plunging into him in desperation to feel something, to feel some trace of an injury.

Still, there was nothing.

No sign of an attack. Nothing to heal.

It didn’t make any sense.

If he had been attacked as Sain had said, there should be some sign of that happening, some trace of what had hurt him and was keeping him trapped in whatever this was. I couldn’t even find a bite, however.

The tension that had taken up residence in my chest tried to dislodge itself, but it wasn’t working, so I sat, listening to the low buzz of Sain and Dramin’s voices. The nondescript argument came through the old door and supercharged through my agitation.

I reached for Thom’s hand with a shake, only to freeze as my fingertips moved over a dozen raised bumps on the palm of his hand. Turning his hand over, my eyes widened at what appeared to be slowly growing boils, and my confusion grew.

I had searched his body for injury. I should have felt this. I should have seen it. Even as I stared right at it, there was nothing there to feel.

I clung to Thom’s hand as I tried to pick out something, anything, that would give me a clue as to what was going on. On what game Sain was playing at.

There was nothing.

Nothing but the questions and inconsistencies that piled up the more I tried to ignore them.

It didn’t make any sense.

Sain’s story. His reaction. Thom’s injury.

He hadn’t even answered my question, and that haunted look seemed to have been burned into me.

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

What terrible mistake, Sain? What have you done?

I kept trying to push my doubts away, yet they kept coming back like the waves on the beach, faster and farther in every time. I had to trust him.

I had to.

After everything, I didn’t have any reason to doubt.

Still, something wasn’t adding up. That was what was hurting the most.

What hadn’t been said was almost louder than what had.

I sat on the dust covered floor, my hand wrapped around Thom’s as I tried to decipher the voices that came through the door, a task that was proving to be impossible thanks to the sound of the Vilỳs that were still trying to get in.

Even though the attack was wearing down, the sound of screams coming farther apart and farther and farther away, the Vilỳ’s that clawed at the shutters still remained. Their claws pulled at the wooden barrier of the walls in a desperate attempt to get in.

I knew they couldn’t, but listening to it was increasing my agitation level, and I kind of wanted to open the window and rip their heads off.

“Wyn?” The weak voice drifted through the dark from behind me, and I jumped, fear tensing through my spine as I turned toward the sound, my skin heating in expectation of attack.

Ryland lay where I had accidentally dropped him, the dust of the floor spread around him in a fan. His body moved and twitched as he began to wake. He grunted and groaned my name again as he tried to pull himself out of the stupor I had placed him in, his mind muddled enough that he wasn’t a danger at that moment. I knew it would not last, however.

Thom’s hand fell from my hold with a thud as I slid across the floor, the sound of fabric against wood loud as I reached him just as the moans of confusion began to twist into the sounds of pain and fear.

My magic rushed into him with one touch, pressing into him as I moved right to his heart, to the battered organ that seemed to be the gateway for whatever Edmund was still doing to him. I already knew my shield would not be enough to fight whatever power he had been infected with, but I had to try. We had already discovered that noises too loud would only attract more of the little beasts, and Ryland could be as loud as they came.

The last thing we needed was a swarm of the rats right outside our window.

That was more of a beacon than I was interested in dealing with at the moment.

“Ryland,” I soothed, my voice calm as I leaned toward him, the pressure of my hand against his increasing in what I hoped would be comforting.

He reacted to it, his body calming beside mine until, like a silent snap, he curled into himself, his voice ripping out of him loud and angry, and I knew at once we were in trouble.

First comes panic then comes magical explosions. Then comes a missing wall and little winged rats ripping at your flesh.

It was like those cookie books, but with death. Well, and my rodents had wings.

“Ry,” I tried again. “It’s Wyn, Ry. I’m right here.”

“Nonononononono.” He ripped at his hair, writhed on the floor, and tried to pull away from me, but I held on like he was my life raft rather than the other way around.

Although I knew I needed to knock him out again, I almost felt bad for having to do so. This hell Edmund had plunged him into, this terrorized reality where he was always haunted and tormented. Where he couldn’t find the line of what he was and who controlled him. Where we always knocked him out because he was unmanageable.

This wasn’t a life.

“Ryland,” I tried again, careful to keep my voice low as I leaned closer to him. He didn’t so much as respond.

I needed a stronger shield. I needed to be able to block them out. It was what I had been trying to do; I just needed to increase the power.

“It’s okay, Ryland.” The words were more for me than to him, my magic flaring as I pushed it against his heart, doing my best to keep the fire magic restrained, to keep from burning him alive.

I might not be anywhere close to Joclyn’s ability, but that wasn’t going to stop me from trying to help him.

My magic wrapped around his heart, shielding him from the inside out, smothering him in comfort. I knew at once it was working. I could tell by the way his body relaxed, the tension in his back falling away.

It might have even worked, too, if it hadn’t been for the laugh. The childish laugh that I recognized at once, that froze through me and tensed every muscle, broke my heart and threatened to do me in.

Not here.

Why here?

Rosaline.

I had heard it every night in the false Tȍuhas I had been plagued with. I had grown used to the pain of hearing it there, but here?

My magic shifted at the sound, and then Ryland’s yell erupted before I could slide the powerful wall back into place, only to have the laugh come again.

My head snapped toward the sound, part of me expecting to see her lying next to Ryland, to see the blood slither down her face the way it had in the last moment of her life.

However, it was only Ryland. Only Ryland and the sound of my child that seemed to be coming from inside of him. No, not inside of him. The sound was clearly in my head … but how?

I stared at Ryland as he calmed, his bright blue eyes shifting to look at me in thanks. That was not what I saw, though. I only heard the laugh as I stared, unfocused, at the boy before me, my magic swelling again as I tried to understand what had happened.

“Mommy.” Her voice was clear. It was calm. It was beautiful.

I couldn’t stop the jerk. I couldn’t stop the way my magic flared, and my heart crashed inside of me, a pain I had thought I had escaped coming to rip me in two jagged pieces.

I tried to move away from the sound, from the voices, but Ryland’s hand was like a vice around mine. No matter how hard I pulled, he wouldn’t let me go. It was no longer Ryland we needed to be concerned about. It was me.

As tears trailed down my face, and my magic caught fire to the floor, long flames licking over the surface in twisting snakes as if there was a trail of gasoline there, I tried to keep the sobs trapped inside of me. They came, anyway, loud and angry as I tried to escape the vice of Ryland’s hand, tried to escape the voice that came again and again.

“Mommy.”

My focus snapped to Ryland, ready to yell at him to release me, to let me run as far away from here as possible. However, the look in his eyes stopped me. The calm that I didn’t think I had ever seen from him, the plea for help, for understanding, clear without him so much as saying anything.

It froze me.

“Take it out,” he moaned, his voice a hollow echo in my ears as Rosaline’s laugh filled my head. The words only confused me more until he tightened his hand around mine, his face trailing with fresh tears. “Take it out.”

With those three words, it all made sense. Those three words froze me.

The blade.

The blade that had been made from Rosaline’s soul… It couldn’t be.

I begged for it not to be, but after one look in his eyes, I knew. A piece was inside of him.

“Mommy?”

I cringed against the voice, the way it echoed in my head and pulled at my heart.

“Can you hear her, too?” I asked the question on instinct, but I knew at once he could not.

He only stared at me, the pain in his eyes for another reason.

I closed my eyes, embracing the blackness behind my lids as a high-pitched scream echoed from outside, the sound followed almost instantly by the laugh of the child I still mourned.

From the moment Edmund had destroyed her life, I had vowed to ruin the monstrous man. I had vowed to release Rosy from the prison she had been entombed within. Inches away from me was the first piece to that debilitating task that I had embarked on.

There wasn’t any question about what I was supposed to do. There never had been.

From the moment her laugh had filled my head, I would have moved mountains to help her, despite the pain.

It just so happened that this mountain involved cutting open an innocent boy’s heart and miraculously putting it back together again before his magic died, taking him with it.

I had removed hearts for centuries, keeping them beating for Edmund’s use, keeping the magic alive so he could devour it. Given that, this should be a simple task, like breaking into a Pink Floyd concert.

Yeah, I got this.

I didn’t even look at him as I put him to sleep. I heard his head hit the floor with a painfully loud beat as a held breath seeped from his now relaxed lips, and then I went to work.

His chest was riddled with the same scars I had seen in the dungeon, the same scar that moved through my hand. Line after line, one over the other as the blade had been plunged into him again and again.

Scars that would never fully heal, that would only serve as a reminder of what he had been forced to do. Scars inside and out. The thought disgusted me. Even with my inner knowledge of how Edmund worked and how he used his children, this was crossing a line. Ryland’s life had been stolen before it had even had a chance to begin.

I wanted to find a way to give that back to him.

I would start with this.

“Mommy?”

My magic swelled with her voice, moving into his heart, into the beating organ that held the core of his magic, his life. My magic tensed at the concentrated power of it and the ripple of energy that tried to push me out.

You weren’t supposed to let your magic enter another person’s heart, strictly speaking. I knew Ilyan did it all the time, but he was insanely strong. He could control his magic so perfectly that there wasn’t any risk. He could defend himself against the soul’s automatic defense system—that little response that tried to destroy anything that entered the heart of another. It was something I could feel trying to destroy me.

Painful pricks of energy pressed their way into my magic, into me, surging through me in a warning that I already knew I couldn’t heed. I only needed to find the blade, whatever piece had been left behind.

My chest tightened as I searched, my breaths coming in massive heaves as I tried to fight against Ryland’s defenses. The magical assault punches were coming fast now, and I knew I didn’t have much time.