Dawn of Ash (32 page)

Straightening my shoulders, I turned from the man, seeing the invalids’ faces still full of a barrage of emotions. So far, with the exception of the girl who lay right below me, fear and distrust were not among them.

Perfect. It would make my job easier.

A wicked smile spread over my face as I turned back to Sain, whose eyes were back to their deep green.

“Your plan will work. Wynifred is gone to us. We must move.”

I didn’t need to ask how he knew what I was planning, how he knew my concern over the loose end I had released inside of Ilyan’s confines. I had seen the black of his eyes, and if he said I would succeed, then I would not doubt it.

My smile stretched.

“Wait for me outside,” I instructed.

His own disreputable smile matched mine before he swept from my side, departing through the solid door without a second glance, leaving me to wonder, once again, exactly who he was.

I watched the door close before turning back to the scatter of people whose eyes were still focused on me, although fear had begun to take the place of curiosity.

Not that it mattered, anyway. In no more than a few short minutes, all anyone would hear was their screams.

“Mommy.”

I knew that voice. I knew the joy behind it, the calm. I knew the excitement and the way it was just about to laugh.

I had heard it so much in my life that I could not forget it.

I had heard it enough in the last few months, too. Then, it was different. Then, it was frightened and haunted. Then, it was smeared with blood.

This was not that.

This was beautiful.

“Mommy?” It came again, like she was calling to me—
to me
. Wherever I was, whoever I was.

I was having trouble keeping track of it. Despite knowing the voice, everything else was foreign and confusing.

I had been here before, I realized. I had been in this white, shapeless space. I had been in this place where my body was nothing and everything.

How had I gotten here?

The last thing I remembered was the city and running away from the cathedral in an attempt to save my friend, to save myself, to save my daughter. I remembered the dimming light of the sun, a strange pull taking over me. I remembered Edmund’s greasy smile as I walked toward him, unable to control it, unable to stop. The shard in my pocket, the thing I had left the safety of Ilyan’s cage for, had betrayed me.

It was more than that, though.

It was the sound of my scream that reverberated through my ears, the painful pressure of a stab in the center of my hand. It was seeing his smile, feeling his hands on my body, knowing I no longer controlled it.

I no longer controlled anything.

Until this moment, when that voice—the calm, beautiful voice of my daughter—pulled me out of the painful prison and into this void, this familiar space of nothing and everything, of nobody and everyone. I was floating amongst it, part of it. It was strangely calming.

“Mommy?” The voice came again, eagerness I didn’t recognize pulling through it. “I think she can hear me this time!”

A garbled voice I couldn’t quite make out cut through the fog in answer, the sounds oddly distorted as they ran over me.

“Okay,” Rosaline’s little voice squeaked. “Mommy, open your eyes. I’m here.”

Eyes.

I didn’t have eyes. I was nothing, the same as when I had felt this before with Ryland and Sain …

Like a battering ram, it hit me—the memory of that moment, of Sain telling me to find my body, of promising I really existed, that this comforting mist of nothing wasn’t me.

I wasn’t me.

But that voice…

That beautiful voice…

It was real.

And if I was real, if this was real …

I opened my eyes.

I opened my eyes to the dark grey stare of my daughter, to her little, upturned nose, to the dimple that sprouted on the right side of her face when she smiled, to the curtain of dark hair that fell around her cherub face.

She looked at me with this amazed shock, with so much happiness flowing through her that the last memory I had of her meant nothing, and this happy, little girl, this girl with the dark eyes so expressive they took your breath away, was all there ever was. Everything else was a cruel nightmare.

“Rosaline?” The single word broke away from my shock, soaring from behind the mind-numbing disbelief that had filled me.

“Mommy!” she screamed with tears running down her face, long streams of salt water that ran over my cheek and pooled in my hair as she fell on top of me. The lanky strings of her arms wrapped around me in a familiar embrace I had never thought I would feel again.

“Rosaline!”

I couldn’t think beyond the numbing happiness that had overtaken my body, the way my heart swelled and throbbed and ached and screamed, and every emotion and every fear and every impossibility flew out of me like a thousand blood-soaked birds. They were stripped from my bones and ripped from my soul.

The guilt of failing my daughter, the fear of never seeing her again. The pain of loss. The agony of a love never returned.

It all fell away.

She was right there, in my arms.

And none of those things mattered anymore.

“Rosy,” I sobbed. “My darling girl.” I wasn’t even convinced the words were distinguishable from my cries. Neither of us cared.

Rosaline sobbed harder, pressing her face into my neck in the burrowing motion that was so her. “I’m so glad you can see me this time!”

“This time?”

“Yes, when you were here before … I tried … You couldn’t see … But now you are here!” She pulled away then, smiling through her tears with the same joyful light I had always loved.

I fought the need to pull her back into me. The elated weight in my heart was so unfamiliar I didn’t know how to handle it. It was going to explode out of me. In some ways, I wouldn’t have stopped it. That way, Rosy could feel it, too. Looking in her eyes, I was positive she already could.

She smiled bigger, her little hand pressing against my cheek as she leaned into me, kissing me on the nose as she always had. The memories mixed with reality so thoroughly I couldn’t help it; I had to ask.

“Is this real?”

Rosy’s face fell, her brow furrowing as she pursed her lip in the five-year-old pout I had seen millions of other children do before and after her. My soul soared from watching it line her face.

“That’s a difficult question.” The reply came from beside me, the adult, masculine voice even more familiar to me than that of the child who was sitting on my lap. After all, his held centuries of familiarity, centuries of time together before everything had shifted. Then, after Rosy, after me, it had changed, and he had never been the same.

Yet here, sitting beside me, he was the same.

“Cail.” It was more of a gasp than a word.

“Hey, sis.” He smiled, moving from where he stood in the oddly distorted forest to sit beside us, leaves crunching, twigs snapping at his movement. “It’s been a while.”

He sounded so much like the man I had grown up with, the foolhardy and mischievous best friend who had practically raised me. There was enough pride in him to snap anyone to attention, but so much love and compassion hidden away.

The anger in his eyes that I had seen for so long was gone. The twisted smile melted back into the impish scowl he had always reserved for me.

“Cail,” I said again, fully aware I was caught on repeat. My eyes flashed between him and Rosy, the latter’s smile increasing with each glance, her tiny thumb continuing to play circles over my cheek.

“Wynifred,” Cail said with a laugh, picking up a twig from the ground before him, the mutilated thing vanishing into thick tendrils of smoke at his touch.

“Am I dead?” I asked, unabashed, the solitary logical answer falling into place with a jolt of adrenaline.

Normally, the thought would bring fear, but there, surrounded by my family, it didn’t seem like such a bad ending.

Cail smiled, however, his head pulling into a small nod. “No.”

“Then how…?”

“You were here before with Sain and Ryland…” He didn’t even finish the thought; he let it hang while my brain spun in circles around it as Rosaline leaned into my chest, wrapping her body around me like a little monkey. “We were here, too.”

“The blade.” My voice was hollow and monotone, a weird emptiness opening through my chest.

The calm smile he’d had faded into one of fear and anger, the sharp lines of his face reminiscent recoiling through me, reminding me of the person he had been for the past three hundred years.

“Yes.” His voice was as hard as the look that had overtaken him.

“I’m inside of the blade again.”

“Well, your soul is, yes,” Cail provided, his voice still a harsh line of pain. “Your body is another story.”

My body.

My body that was being forced to walk toward Edmund, the man who had sought control of my magic since the day the fire awakened. The man and his terrible daughter who had looked at me with eager grins, who didn’t even flinch when I screamed. They smiled, exactly as they always had: twisted, vile, malevolent.

I didn’t need any other explanation.

I knew.

I knew because I had seen Ryland under the same kind of control, seen him turned into a puppet, controlled by the same piece of blade that had brought me here last time, the same piece I had pulled from Ryland’s heart. The same blade sitting in my pocket.

And Sain knew.

He had seen where I had gotten the blade. He had told me to run, and I had trusted him, but I had seen him standing in that street, right by Edmund with that same haunting, out-of-place smile as before.

I should have known better. He was working for Edmund …

“What is he doing?” I asked, uncertain if I was referring to Sain or to Edmund—not that it mattered anymore.

“Walking around the cathedral, trying to make you show him the way inside.” It was Rosy who answered, her body not so much as moving from where she lay against me. However, her voice had lost all of the excitement, dragging in a kind of exhaustion that sent the mother in me into high alert.

“Rosy?” I asked, but she didn’t so much as move.

“She’s fighting his control,” Cail supplied, his voice awed as he leaned over to me, his hand soft as he ran his hand over the crown of her head. “She’s disrupting his connection.”

I looked between the two of them in confusion when a sharp pain shot through my hand. I gasped at it, lifting the culprit to eye-level, expecting to see some kind of bug or snake, but there was nothing there, not even blood, something I was sure I would feel running over my palm, over my arm.

“You can feel it, can’t you? Where the blade is?” Cail asked as he snapped another twig into smoke.

I nodded, confusion still rampaging over what exactly I was going through.

“That’s how he controlled Ryland. You know this. I was the one who impaled you with the blade the first time, after all.” Another snap of a twig, his fists tight around the two pieces in his hand. I didn’t need to look at his face, at the way his brow furrowed, to see his temper rising.

Hundreds of years ago, I would have calmed him. I would have shielded his heart. Right then, I sat, not convinced of what I was looking at or even which Cail I was dealing with.

The thought slapped me in the chest, the similarities painful. He had broken his mind when he bound the curse, just as mine was bound. Each of us, essentially two different people trapped inside a whole, every part fighting for space.

Even Rosy, in a way, was shattered into many: a child, a woman, an immortal trapped in a forever, having to live with what had been done to her.

My hold on her tightened again at the thought, but this time, she grunted, the stress finally getting to her.

“So he’s controlling me the same way.”

“Well…” Cail answered, a small smile playing around his lips, all sign of his agony lifting, “he can try. As we said, Rosy is very good at stopping him. He is not a fan of her.”

“It’s my soul,” she answered, her voice the same exhausted sigh as before. “He used my soul to make the blade. It’s all of me. Everyone else is part of me—my soul, my blood. He can control it because he is my grandfather, because a tiny part of him is here, too. But I can stop him. Stop him from hurting my family—Uncle Cail, Uncle Ryland, Aunt Joclyn. All but Sain. Sain controls me. I don’t like him here. That’s why I couldn’t see you before. But now you are here!” she finished happily before she collapsed on me again, her weight comforting against me.