Imdalind Ruby Collection One: Kiss of Fire | Eyes of Ember | Scorched Treachery

by Ethington, Rebecca

  “You still sound like a surly a teenager,” Ilyan said, his usual morning grumble mixing with his laugh.

  “I am a surly teenager.” I made a face at him. He didn’t laugh. “We just need to work harder. I need you to train me more. Train me faster. You said I’m supposed to save everyone. So, let’s do it.”

  I leaned into him, and Ilyan didn’t lean away. He froze, our eyes locked as his fingers intertwined through mine, his magic swelling through me from the Štít.

  “We will,” his words were as determined as his magic. “But first, we need to do something. Come on, Joclyn.”

  “Come where?”

  Ilyan smiled and pulled me up, the door leading into the attic and the house creaked as his magic opened it.

  “I know you said it was the haunted house, but sparring in the attic does not seem like a good idea.” I chucked nervously. I didn’t feel comfortable going into someone else’s house, although it did feel an awful lot like the crazy adventures I used to go on with Ryland. My heart thumped, more out of excitement than nerves.

  Ilyan didn’t respond. He simply smiled at me and dragged me out of the little room, weaving us through cluttered walkways lined with boxes before stopping in front of the hatch and fold out ladder that led below.

  “Ilyan,” I tried again, “what are we doing?”

  “You’re hungry, aren’t you?” he asked as he rolled his eyes. “Well, they have food and bathrooms down there and I don’t feel comfortable leaving the house yet, so…” He turned toward the hatch as it opened to the dark house below.

  “What if they see us?” I asked, but Ilyan only smirked and pulled me down the ladder.

  Ilyan hit the bottom and turned, grabbing me around the waist and helping me down.

  “Don’t worry, Joclyn, everyone is asleep, and even if they were awake, I’d make sure they couldn’t see you.” Ilyan smiled as his magic flared in my shoulder to send warm ripples through my body.

  He then took off down the hall, his feet silent as he moved. Okay, time to be a ghost. I quick-stepped after him, but I felt like every step I took caused louder and louder squeaks around the quiet space. Finally I gave up trying to be quiet and took off down the hall to catch up with Ilyan.

  He led us to the kitchen, stopping at a large, ornate bathroom on the way. It wasn’t as nice as Ilyan’s bathroom at the motel, but it was five star after the tiny bathroom at the apartment.

  “I want to take a shower later,” I said as we entered the dark granite kitchen.

  “Later,” Ilyan whispered back before placing his finger to his lips in a reminder to be quiet.

  I rolled my eyes at him then turned to rummage through the cabinets. I could tell after looking through the first cabinet that we had walked into Ilyan’s own personal hell. I carefully picked up a box of ‘Chicken and Dumpling’ dinner, displaying it for him like a game show host. Ilyan stuck out his tongue in disgust before he moved to the cabinet next to me. I leaned around to peek over his shoulder before having to press my hand against my mouth to stop laughing. The cabinet was absolutely stuffed with mac and cheese, ramen noodles, and Vienna sausages.

  Ilyan made another disgusted sound and moved away with a look on his face of what I would have expected if he had unwillingly walked into a butcher’s shop. I grabbed a box of mac and a small can of Vienna sausages and shoved them in his face.

  “They go good together,” I said, unable to keep the smile off my face.

  “If you’re human,” he countered. I rolled my eyes at his not-so-subtle reminder of his differing species.

  “You’re half-human. You could at least try.” I shoved the box into his hands, and he held onto them like they were poison.

  “No, I am half-Chosen.” He tried to place them back in my hands, but I side-stepped him, failing to restrain a laugh.

  “I’m all Chosen and I love them. Besides, the mac and cheese has milk in it.” Ilyan’s scowl deepened further, making my laugh grow more.

  He attempted to get me to take the box back, but I side-stepped him again only to run into the counter. I spun around and grabbed a container of flour off the counter, ripping the top off in a threatening manner. Ilyan rolled his eyes at me.

  “Come one step closer and I’ll get you,” I said as menacingly as I could.

  Ilyan placed the mac and cheese on the counter before over-dramatically stepping toward me. I froze, the look in his eyes stopping all thought. I let one nervous chuckle escape me as he continued to come closer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice laced with honey, “you will do what, now?”

  I opened my mouth to retort, my rebuttal paused when the light to the kitchen flashed on.

  “What’s going on in here?” The old man’s voice was loud and stern, shaking just enough to show that he was scared.

  His yell combined with the sudden appearance of the light startled me. My magic surged through my hands and into the flour, causing the whole thing to explode in my face. The old man took one look in my direction, froze, and turned down the hall screaming and swearing as he went.

  “He could see me, couldn’t he?” I asked.

  “Well, not you,” Ilyan said through a smile as he moved to wipe the flour from my face with the palm of his hand. “But he could see the flour. So you were essentially a floating face.”

  I stared at Ilyan for a minute before joining in with his laughter, the ridiculousness of what had happened hitting me.

  “So much for getting a shower tonight,” I said through my giggles.

  “True, but you do make one great ghost,” Ilyan said lightly before pressing his lips against my forehead.

  My laughter stopped. I hadn’t been prepared for the gentle swoop my stomach experienced at his touch.

  Seventy-Nine

  Wyn

  Ever since the incident with Talon’s attack and the moving ground I had been plagued with dreams.

  The dream usually featured a beautiful little girl dancing in a meadow. She danced through the tall grasses with flowers in her blonde hair. At first, I wondered if it was some repressed memory of me dancing as a child. But I didn’t have blonde hair. My hair was dark; it always had been.

  After a while it was obvious that I was sitting in the grass, watching her with some guy beside me.

  I would like to say the guy was handsome, but he was not Talon. No one could hold a candle to Talon. Talon was tall and built like a football player. This man was sinewy, his skin a burnt brown. Besides, the mystery guy from my dreams was dressed like Henry the Eighth and there was nothing attractive about that.

  He looked like a peacock.

  It didn’t look good then, and it wouldn’t look good now. Not like anyone would dress like that now.

  It didn’t take me long to realize what it was. A memory.

  I had been wanting information from what had happened before for years, but now that it was here, I was not sure I did.

  A child. A man. Clothes from a time that I wasn’t supposed to be alive.

  The dream had always started the same; I sat next to the man in my dreams as he talked, his lips moving, no sound coming out. Then the dream would morph. The girl, the man, and I would move from the meadow to a village, then to a marble lined room, and then to the darkness. It was in the darkness that the sound would begin. The only sound the dream ever had was in that room; when the little girl screamed as Edmund tortured her.

  The dream only grew worse as whoever was screaming around Imdalind grew louder. The more the mysterious woman in Imdalind yelled, begged and screamed, the more my dream changed. Now, I was forced to watch the little girl succumb, her screams dwindling to nothing until I would wake up and scowl at the high ceiling of our room.

  Except for this morning. This morning, I was awoken by the blasting of Ilyan’s phone playing ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’.

  Wait.

  Ilyan’s phone.

  His direct line.

  I rolled over and kicked Talon, my magi
c surging through him. He jerked as I zapped him, my not-so-nice way of waking him up shooting him out of bed. He tried to crawl back in, grumbling at me before he jumped when the sound of the music hit his ears.

  Talon’s fingers reached toward the phone as he sat down on his side of the bed, already mumbling. I just curled up under the blankets in the spot Talon had just vacated. It was so warm. I probably looked like a cocoon, a pile of blankets and wide eyes as I stared at Talon’s tense back.

  “Ilyan?” Even Talon’s voice was tense.

  Yes, it was the middle of the day where Ilyan was. Yes, he was free to call whenever he wanted. But, the fact that he would have known it was the middle of the night here, and he was calling the white phone that was a direct connection to Talon, was not a good sign.

  If someone had hurt Jos I was going to go bat-shit on them. My magic was already flaring in preparation.

  Nothing positive was going to come out of this call.

  “Princess Mudgy.” Talon's voice was low, the statement making no sense to me. For all I knew it was a code word, and if it was a code word…

  And I was sitting up, watching Talon as he listened to Ilyan talk, his shoulders knitting together more and more. His body language spelled danger to me. Ilyan’s voice was a mellow buzz that slipped through the air until the line went dead and Talon dropped the phone to his lap. Talon hadn’t said anything more after the code words.

  “What is it?” I didn’t dare move.

  Talon sat with the phone in his hands, his knuckles white from clenching the small, white box.

  The silence was painful. I wanted to hear. I wanted to pry, but I knew I wouldn’t get answers anyway.

  “Talon?”

  “Meet you in my dreams,” Talon said tersely. Not once did he look at me as he lay down and opened his arms for me.

  Okay, I was seriously on edge now. Whatever had happened was monumental enough that neither he nor Ilyan wanted anyone else to know what had happened. I lay down next to Talon and closed my eyes, letting the magic of the Tȍuha take me away to meet with him.

  My mind pulled right into his, the large expanse of the Münzenberg Castle courtyard surrounding us. Wispy projections of people walked around us as Talon’s memories fueled the Tȍuha. The castle was as whole and intact as it had been centuries ago, when Talon remembered it. I was never alive in this castle’s time, but this was Talon’s mind, what he envisioned our Tȍuha to be.

  “Okay Talon, you’ve got to talk to me or I’m going to go crazy. What happened?” I pulled away from him and put my hands on my hips.

  “They were attacked.”

  The tension that now flowed between both of us was too much to contain, and the people around us zapped into vapor, colors floating through the air as they disappeared.

  “I knew I should have gone with them! I knew this was going to happen!”

  “Calm down, Wynny.” I took a breath, knowing he was right. We were both too tense. Me for Jos, Talon for Ilyan.

  Talon had been raised to guard Ilyan. It was his job, but Ilyan had dismissed him when he took me as his mate. No matter how much he tried, Talon could never move past what had been his entire life up until a hundred years ago. He still felt responsible for Ilyan, and blamed himself if anything went wrong. Like now, judging by the look on his face.

  “We should have gone with them,” I amended my last statement and Talon nodded once. “Are they okay?”

  “He claims they are.” He clearly didn’t believe him, neither did I. I could see the sparkling sheen in his brown eyes, the tears threatening to escape from him.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said before he had a chance to let the words he was painting himself with become more of a weight against him.

  He nodded once and swept me up against him, his hold tight as his breathing slowed. He finally lowered me back down to the ground, the wetness was gone from his eyes. He did not show emotions like that very often, but when he did, it was my job to build him up and always love him. I would always do that.

  “Does he know who betrayed him?” I asked as Talon moved away from me and toward the large, carved stone bench we always sat on. I followed him, my bare feet slipping against the slickness of the cobbles before sinking into the hard, unrelenting seat next to his.

  “No,” Talon answered simply. His hands brought my feet onto his lap and he began to trace the dark marks that graced my left foot, the jagged swirls matching the ones that ran along the entire left side of my body. “He wants me to watch for signs that someone might know what happened before we announce it. It is probably our best chance at tracking whoever it is down.”

  “You mean, like a certain screaming woman.”

  He said nothing, not that he needed too. Everything Talon had said only re-affirmed that someone was inside of Imdalind, someone who should not have been able to get past Ilyan’s protective shield. You had to have Ilyan’s blessing in order to get past the gate to the caves, you couldn’t even use a stutter to get inside. Somehow, though, someone had managed it.

  All it would take was one.

  We still hadn’t seen any more signs of Timothy in Prague, and while we had told Ilyan, he needed more proof. I was already certain. I already wanted to act.

  Get one of Edmund’s men inside and then, like ants, the rest would follow. They would place themselves in dark corners and hide where no one else would go, waiting until the time was right. Then they would jump out and attack, and within moments, the last of the Skȓíteks would be gone. I had seen it happen before. There was a reason there were so few of the Skȓíteks left. It was probably the sole reason I still was not fully accepted in these halls—I had marched against them once upon a time.

  Well, my kind had. I was more like the kid with the magnifying glass, burning all the ants away.

  “Okay, so we need to find the screaming woman. Because we’ve been so great at that up to this point.” I couldn’t help my snark. Not that I was trying to squash it.

  “I’m going to order extra patrols. Maybe even a curfew.”

  I screwed up my face uncomfortably. I guess it had really come to that if Ilyan was being tracked.

  I didn’t know how to phrase what I was feeling. I wished we could find the traitor, and fast. I wished I could tear their arms from their sockets and torture any of my kind they had let into the halls of Prague. Okay, so maybe that was a little dark, but Imdalind was my sanctuary now, too.

  My magic increased beneath my skin, my heart thumping erratically in either excitement or fear; I wasn’t quite sure which.

  “I will keep you safe, Wynny.”

  “Oh no! Not this again!” I was up, swinging onto my knees to face him, my finger in his face. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know you can,” he said, his voice soft as he grabbed my hand and kissed the tips of my fingers. “But I will still honor my promise to you, Wynifred. All of them.”

  He knew I could take care of myself, I didn’t need him to protect me. I heard what he said between the lines, though; I heard how much he cared, and so, my frantic heartbeat continued. I listened to the sound of my full name on his lips, the promise of my safety heavy on the air.

  “You promise?” I asked as he kissed my fingers again, my stomach giving a gentle swoop.

  “I will protect you above all else.”

  “Even Ilyan?” I asked, unable to help the question and the accompanying laugh from seeping out of my lips.

  “Even Ilyan. I took a vow to protect him the day he was born, but that vow was broken the day I sealed myself to you. It is the vow I made with you that is the most important bond to me. I will honor and protect that before all else.” His voice was serious, his tone so true and honest. I felt it melt into me, and our magic surged together.

  As our magic intertwined everything inside of me caught fire. I felt a dulled version of this connection outside the Tȍuha, but here, inside the Tȍuha, everything was heightened. Like our magic, our connection, was fire itself.r />
  I was not sure how long we spent in the shadow of the castle, but before either of us were ready, we were pulled away, only to find ourselves in each other’s arms in the flesh, the door already being banged off its hinges.

  I sighed as Talon left me, his další v příkazu responsibilities already in full force, just as I assumed they would be.

  He was gone most of the day, leaving me alone to attempt to clean the huge mess I had made when I had attempted to make dinner the night before, something I never do.

  Talk about a nightmare. I had cut my finger off when trying to chop carrots. Yes, off. Luckily, I was magical, or I would have forever been walking around reverse flipping people off. As it was, I just reattached it. Though, after the soup became inedible and more solid than it should have been, and I had burned the Galder, I remembered why I never heated food. It was better cold anyway.

  The whole experience was a great reminder as to why I hated human food. It was gross, and the texture was so off. I don’t know how or why, but humans can take a simple tomato and turn it into a slime-covered bit of goo. I mean, just leave it alone. Don’t touch it. Just put it in your mouth and eat it.

  Humans eat weird food.

  After I had cleaned the house, it became quickly evident that I needed to wash the lace tablecloth. After the finger-loss induced bloodletting, it was clearly required. Unfortunately, the dratted thing had the label ‘hand wash only’.

  Hand wash only!

  Whoever had created such stupid fabric needed to be shown a washing machine. There was a reason that washing machines were created, and that was so hand wash only items needed no longer exist. But, some fool decided to make an unnatural fabric that needed to be hand washed only. Then another silly fool—ah-hem, Talon—decided to buy a bright white tablecloth for his lovely wife—that would be me—made out of said abhorrence of un-natural fabric.

  I took the tablecloth down to the old guards’ chamber, the closest place that the freezing cold water of the underground spring ran. The dark grey stone of the cavern was jagged, unlike the rest of the tunnels we called home. The roughly hewn walls arched high above my head, the only light source was a small collection of magical orbs that floated and bobbed amongst the shallow cavities of the stone ceiling. The green light that blossomed from above gave the room a dark glow that cast hundreds of eerie shadows around me.