I had been letting my fear and panic get the best of me, something that was becoming strikingly obvious was not going to work here.
Not with Sain’s stubborn Drak-ness, another thing that was only becoming more and more irritating the more I got to know him.
Stupid Drak.
I fought the need to roll my eyes and scooted closer to him, unsurprised when he flinched away.
“What do you know Sain?” I barely spoke louder than the rats outside the window, careful to keep my voice calm, although I am not sure exactly how well it worked.
“I know nothing.”
“Bullshit.” I knew I needed to stay calm, but it obviously wasn’t going to work with him. Maybe, if I threw him out the window or dangled him in front of the little monsters, he would talk.
I pinched the bridge of my nose in agitation, hating how quickly the old tendencies came to mind.
I hated more that I could make it work.
I wondered if I could get the same result by making him listen to Bruce Springsteen.
“You obviously know something, Sain. You did something wrong, remember? You saw this and then lied to us that it had already happened, why?”
I didn’t dare look away from him, no matter how much the fear in his eyes was paralyzing me. I watched and waited, silently pleading he would give me the answer I so desperately wanted.
I was foolish to think he would break that easily.
“We need to get out of here.”
The forced calm I had been trying so desperately to cling to snapped in half like a popsicle stick. My magic pulsed, and I could smell the smoke, even if I had no idea what I had set on fire. I really didn’t care anymore.
I let it burn for a moment before extinguishing the old dresser, leaving the pleasant smell to linger in the air, something the Vilỳs liked, as well, and their attempts to find a way in became more vigorous.
“Excuse me?” I was sure my voice had hit an octave that wasn’t natural, but I really didn’t care anymore. “Answer the question, Sain.”
“It’s not safe.” The suggestion was not only ridiculous, but an obvious side-step. The knowledge only beat against me more.
“Nowhere is safe!” Another rat bird joined the first as I roared, and both Sain and Dramin flinched. I looked to Dramin, part of me desperately hoping he would back me up, but he only looked at me with the same plea I had seen before, his body sagging farther against the wall as he tried to stay upright.
Fine. I would do this on my own.
“Ilyan told us to come here. He will be here. We aren’t going anywhere.” I was firm.
Why couldn’t he answer the freaking question?
“We need to leave,” he repeated the same phrase like someone had skipped back a chapter. The inflection and everything was the same. Everything except my reaction.
My anger turned into a smolder, a flame that licked against my insides. It was like the anger of before that threatened to explode at any time, yet this one would burn. I wasn’t going to let this go on anymore. I wouldn’t.
“Answer the question, Sain. What did you do? What did you see?”
“We need to leave.”
When it came again, I reacted, lunging toward him before he had a chance to move away, my tiny hands wrapping around his arms and holding him in place. My sheer strength kept him there, millimeters from me, as I locked my magic inside of myself, afraid of what it would do to him. I was sure, by the pain in his face, that he could feel the heat against his skin. He could feel the warning.
Let it burn him.
I needed my answer.
“Knock it off, Sain,” I growled, fully aware my voice was feral from behind the clench in my jaw. “We can’t go anywhere. Even if you saw something, we are still stuck in this tiny room full of invalids. I can’t wake Ryland up without risking him bringing the whole building down; Dramin can barely move, let alone walk; and Thom … Thom. What did you do, Sain?
“We need—”
“No!” I snapped, cutting him off with a crack that mixed with the screams from outside, the rats that still clawed at the window. He flinched from the outburst, and I was certain I had accidently pushed some magic into him, but I really didn’t care anymore. “No more. You need to tell me. I can see in your eyes that something happened. I don’t care about your asinine rules. I respect them, but if you keep this up, more people are going to get hurt. Someone is going to die. This time, you have to tell me. I’m not going back out into that massacre with this many useless bodies unless you talk. So talk.”
Sain stared at me unblinking, his body frozen where I held him before me. The dim light of the room wavered around us as we stood, surrounded by screams and the scratches, in a room that was as much like a prison as the one we had met in.
A prison that had forged a bond, a trust, that I don’t think anything could break, even though I was starting to question it. The Eagles broke up for a reason, after all.
“Talk, Sain.” My voice was soft, a fact he noticed right away, his body relaxing under mine as my hands dropped. He looked to his son as if seeking approval, though his face was full of a plea for forgiveness.
“The sights are broken, Wynifred,” he whispered the same thing he had said before, but this time, it rippled through me with a much deeper understanding. “I have seen things since the earth was nothing but a barren waste and men and magic existed in peace. Millennia of sight. And only now do things break. Things that I have seen centuries before are now nothing but a Zlomený. Things seen are now broken with lies. I saw the city under attack, yet it was not. Nothing is certain anymore.”
He looked away from me to Dramin, his eyes hooded with guilt as I waited, listening to the fading sounds of battle that still waged outside.
A shiver moved over my spine, the fear of the uncertain feeling rawer than I think it ever had.
My life had always been influenced by the Drak. For hundreds of years, Sain had guided my movements as Edmund’s assassin, and even after he had gone, we still relied on the sights he had left us with. Prophecies that one after another had come true. Infallible truths that we had followed. Even with Ilyan, we followed his sight, knowing, without question, what would happen.
Now, there was question.
Now, there was fault.
“What happened to Thom, Sain?” I hadn’t meant to ask the question, but it had slipped out, anyway. My heart tightened with the pressure of what had happened to him, needing to know. Part of me whispered that, if he finally told me, perhaps I could rouse him, and then maybe we could get out of here as Sain had suggested.
“I had a sight while we walked through the city, and it told me of the dangers of this place. Of where we were heading…” I tensed as he paused, the incessant claws of the Vilỳs sounding louder for some reason, while a distant scream sat heavy on my chest. The danger Sain spoke of seemed far too close. “I tried to tell him to stop, to convince him to find Ilyan, but he refused. He began to yell, and the shield dropped only moments before the Vilỳs tore the sky apart.”
I could only nod. I had seen this. I had seen Thom yell, which was so out of character for him that even the memory made me uncomfortable.
“They were everywhere…” His voice was hollow as his eyes drifted out of focus, his memory pulling him back as mine did. The faint sounds of screams that still echoed from outside made it easy to remember, to feel the fear that still hadn’t really left. “I tried to fight them off. Thom tried to fight them off. But then he was hit with an attack from behind us. From you, from Ryland, from Joclyn? I don’t know. But he fell to the ground. It took all my strength to escape those things and drag them both here. I had to keep them safe. He’s my best friend. My son.” His voice drifted away as his body sagged into itself, his shoulders hunching over as he slunk down next to his son with guilt running through him.
I wanted to tell him he was okay, that at least he had gotten them here, but I was sure whatever failure he was feeling was rooted much deep
er than that.
Besides, something else was digging into me, something I wasn’t necessarily sure I agreed with. I was trying my hardest to convince myself that I must have seen it wrong.
Sain had said Thom had been hit with an attack from either Ryland or I or someone near us. However, I hadn’t been shooting out attacks, and even though Ryland had, by the time he had started to do so, Sain and the others had already been gone.
I wanted to say I was remembering wrong, that they were still there, but I had seen the empty street moments before Ryland had gone bonkers. I remembered the dread of not being able to feel their magic, of not knowing where they had gone.
I stared at Sain blankly as I tried to push the questions from my mind, only to have Joclyn’s voice fill my head—the deep conspiratorial whisper as she confided in me about her father and how she didn’t trust him.
She had stood in that hallway and looked at me, begging for me to understand her. At the time, I couldn’t. I had been locked in that prison with him. I had escaped the city with him. He had saved me. How could I not trust someone who had gone so far for me? She just didn’t like her father was all.
Then why was it grating on me right now?
“What did you do wrong?” I asked the question slowly, knowing he still hadn’t answered me, my mind still fighting against the ill-placed doubt as I sought for understanding.
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.
Eighteen
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 a
ble 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.
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