Burnt Devotion (28 page)

The sensation was familiar, but here, among all these people, I did not know if it was one I should be having. I didn’t know if they should know of my true nature.

Cover my eyes,
I pleaded, knowing what was coming and not wanting anyone to see. Not wanting them to know the full extent of my powers.

It was how it had been for so long. It had been so crucial for Ryland not to know, I had assumed the rule here would be the same. However, Ilyan merely chuckled, his arm tightening around me as he pressed his lips to the hollow underneath my ear.

“I will only cover your power if you truly do not want them to see, mi lasko,” he whispered, his voice deep and heady. “There is no need to hide anymore.”

His grip against me was a comforting weight, the love that swelled from him a strength I didn’t expect.

It was more than pride at what I was and what I had become that swelled within him, however. It was more than a need to show his people the Silnỳ they had all been waiting for. It was admiration. It was a deep-rooted love and support that worked to build me up, to set me free, and to let me be without fear of recourse, of judgment.

I could hear the thoughts clearly within his mind, the desire to let me be who I was. To support me as I became what I needed to be. What I wanted to be.

I clung to him as the dizziness grew, as the strength of his arms around me increased, and the awed support only grew.

I didn’t move. I didn’t turn into him, despite the fact that part of me so desperately wanted to. I let the sight come. I let it swell and grow as my vision burned red, and my magic surged, pulling my mind away from the present, away from the stale air of the room and the faded screams of the massacre that was slowly dying. My vision faded from red to black as the startled gasps of Ilyan’s subjects faded to nothing, the sound of screams and fear overtaking them.

I braced myself for the sight, for the guidance, for the future, for some new insight into what we were facing.

However, nothing was new. I had seen this before.

Only days before as we stood around the map, in the sight that Sain had pulled himself into, the vision that had made me question everything.

How sights work, if I could trust them, if I could even trust my father.

If I could trust anything.

It was the same sight, yet something about it was different. Something was pulling at the deep threads of my magic and begging me to watch, whispering at me to see.

The red roofed skyline of the city we were now trapped in drifted into view, the setting that of the wide river as a glittering trail of gold. I had seen this city. I had walked through it as the sun had cast its last rays.

I watched it set now, waiting for the next piece of the sight to come, waiting for the towers of Vilỳs to erupt into the sky. Then, like a movie, like a camera set too far in on zoom, that vision panned back, speeding away from the red rooftops to the roadway I had only just seen, except this time it was whole, and the sun was high in the sky.

I had seen it set. I had watched it dip down, the sky turning as red as the rooftops.

No, I realized with a panicked fear. It wasn’t the sun. It was the shield. It was the magical barricade that Edmund had cast around us.

Only moments after the realization filled me, the world exploded with noise, the earth shaking as the Vilỳs exploded into the sky, the roadway collapsing in on itself, the buildings and people that surrounded the once safe structure moving into what quickly became a prison wall.

I could hear the screams as the attack began, saw the people run through the streets that appeared to be far below me, the dingy brown of the Vilỳs tracking each of them down.

The whole thing was much more frightening from this angle, the dimmed colors of what I knew now to be a sight of the past mostly unnoticeable.

I had lived this, after all.

The screams echoed in my ears as my mouth opened wide in the maw of sight, the depth of my voice sounding dead against the scream of death within the sight and the gasps of surprise without. “The death will come; the sky will fall.”

The same words seeped out of me like syrup. I was surprised they were not different given the change in the sight, though the meaning behind them was. The barrier that covered the sky shimmered in the bright sun before I was sucked back into the city, right to the group of people who were huddled in the alley, the ones I had seen before.

The ones I had seen minutes before.

I could see the boy that now lay unconscious behind me amongst them, his face stricken in fear as he clung to what I now knew to be his mother.

The river came next, or at least it should have. Instead of the wide river that ran through Prague, it was the same room we now sat in, the same boy on the floor where he now lay, my hand pressed against his skin. I only saw a glimpse of the magic, felt the pull of my own move beyond the barrier of sight when the vision shifted.

The same boy stood in the darkened city, the buildings crumbling and derelict as he fought a mutated Vilỳ, his hands sparking with light and magic. The knowledge of what would happen to him, what he would become, and the possibility that he wouldn’t be as infected as Edmund had hoped was a balloon of possibility inside of me.

“The war begins in the dark of night.” I didn’t even have time to register what I had seen before the rumble of my voice filled the room. The same river from before stretching before me for a breadth of time then flashed to the same cliff face I had seen before with the man on a horse carved into the ancient surface.

Blood dripped down the surface of the wall, the man and his horse bleeding from stone as though the stone itself had been cut and bleeding.

The stone hemorrhaged as the vision shifted, myself and more than a hundred others standing on the roofline of the city, our cloaks beating behind us as we faced the barricade, faced the wall of rubble and the red sheen of the wall that Edmund had erected.

As we soared toward it, my hand extended as I shattered it with a pulse of energy so wide and powerful I wasn’t sure where it had come from, that I was capable of producing it.

“With hell behind and hell before,” I said as we moved through the barrier, watched fire devour the buildings behind us, watched us move through the bleeding cliff face. One after another, the sights came, the quick succession of them spinning through me before they once again slowed to the same river of blood I had seen before, the thin streams of dark fluid moving through the deep grey rock of the cave floor, spreading over the smooth valleys of the ancient floor.

“One must fall before the light,” my voice was dead as I followed the sight, as my heart raced at the image of the same hand, the fingers loose and lifeless. I expected the sight to fade to red as it had last time, for the vision to end and the final unfamiliar words to drift past my tongue, but it continued.

The hand turned into an arm, a strong arm with a wide burn of black water along the bicep, a strong shoulder that held me every night and wide empty eyes that I loved so much.

Ilyan.

“It is divided.” The last words drifted past me, but I barely heard them. I couldn’t even make them out against the scream that ripped out right after, the panic and desperation that had gripped me.

That had ripped me apart.

Ilyan’s arms embraced me like a vice as the scream continued. I fought the need to fight the hold, to run away and find my father, to beg to know how to change what I had seen, to find someone to tell me that the sights were not infallible as I had once thought.

I had fought that acceptance so hard. I had fought my father as I fought to save my brother.

They couldn’t be true.

I had wanted so hard to believe. To be able to use my ability to change the future.

I had before.

Somehow, seeing this sight…

Something had changed. It wasn’t like it had been before with my father. The magic was stronger, the truth of what I had seen almost screaming at me.

I didn’t know how I could deny that.

Yet, I wanted to.

As I looked into the startling blue of his eyes and saw the fear and worry reflected back, I needed to. I couldn’t let that happen.

I couldn’t lose him just as he could not lose me.

I could feel his magic grow as he calmed me, feel his panic and worry fill me as he searched for an answer that, while I knew he needed, I would not let him see.

Before he could find it, before he even had a chance to see, I pulled the sight out of my mind, locking it away in a bind that I knew even he could not break.

I would protect him, even if it meant sacrificing my own life.

I loved him that much.

And you would do anything for the ones you love.

And I would do this.

I needed to find them.

They had been in front of me, only steps ahead.

I could still hear the echo of Thom’s heightened anger as he and the Drak had reappeared in front of me. His uncharacteristic anger had been frightening as the crowd around them shrieked with their seemingly miraculous appearance, cowering away from the bloodied men who had burst forth from nothing.

Or at least, that was what I had thought.

I had been wrong.

I had watched them scurry away from Thom. I had watched them cower in fear as the earth began to shake with some deep quake I couldn’t place. However, I was so focused on the verbal assault that Thom and Sain were waging that I hadn’t seen what was really happening. I hadn’t seen the towers of Vilỳs descending on us until Ryland had screamed in fear beside me, his magic erupting in an uncontrolled attack.

The anger in Thom’s face twisted into his own fear as I turned toward the boy who had gone into full attack mode, his magic ripping from him in waves of weapons and energy that sliced through the air in a desperate move to get the vile creatures off him. To somehow escape the pain, escape the attack.

I knew it wasn’t possible.

Not with the flock of creatures that had fallen upon on us, the numbers so many that we were trapped in a cave of leather wings. The momentary break in the wall revealed Thom and the others had gone. I only hoped they were safe. I needed Dramin to be safe.

I moved my hands as quickly as I could, ripping the Vilỳs from the sky and throwing them into the air away from me, my magic flaring into them the moment my fingers wrapped around their gnashing bodies, burning them alive with one touch, destroying the beasts with nothing more than a simple flame.

The mortals around me screamed in fear as they ran, trying to fight the wicked beasts, running from me in what they perceived to be a new enemy. They ran and tried their best to fight, only to be felled, anyway. Their screams only grew, fear and anger mixing with the distant sound of a car.

And still I fought.

Fire streamed from me, waves of attacks rippling through the darkened, stagnant air as one after another of the creatures fell to the ground.

It wasn’t enough. They kept coming. Fighting the airborne creatures with an earth-based magic was nearly impossible. As much as I tried, my magic couldn’t reach them through the air. I needed the physical contact to burn them. It was the only downfall of the fire magic. I could use pretty much anything else as a conduit but air. And water, but that was a given. Even though the fire could travel on the back of my regular ability, it lessoned the power somehow, something that I didn’t need right now.

I needed that power.

Ryland’s screech broke through the sounds of the Vilỳs that infected us, his yell pulling me away from the battle as the pain and fear rushed out of him in a wave that shook me.

A mortal ran between us, blood oozing from a bite on their neck, in a mad attempt to find safety, to run inside, only to have the monsters break through the windows after them, their scream increasing as they were devoured.

Ryland’s was more than just a yell of terror, though; it was in warning.

Perhaps it was because he knew what would happen when the mutated things would bite him. He knew what danger awaited him if they did.

A bite to awaken their magic, but more than that, a bite to poison you, to pull you under Edmund’s control.

The Vilỳs might have been creating an army for Edmund with each kiss they administered, but with one bite from them on one of us, they would do the same.

We would be under Edmund’s control, as well.

Although, that was a hell Ryland was already facing, and with the break in the shield, Ryland was on his own.

He was already succumbing.

Ryland moved from laughing to screaming to fighting to helping so fast his actions were distorted, his voice broken as the scream left only to return a moment later. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a rhythm to his attacks as they cycled from me to the Vilỳs so quickly I could never be sure when the next one was coming.

If the next one was for me.

My heart beat in a rapid tattoo of fear and panic as I fought against the Vilỳs and the frantic boy. Blocking another of Ryland’s attacks before wiping several of the monsters from the sky, I continually looked toward where I had last seen Thom, Dramin, and Sain, but the street was empty.