Dawn of Ash (38 page)

A jolt moved up my spine as his smile widened, as he wiped a blood-soaked hand against his brow, the laugh still ringing around me. I watched the vision, tension moving through me over what would come next. Instead, it faded, leaving me staring at the red of foresight before Ryland and Ilyan snapped back into focus.

Ryland stood in shocked silence before me.

“You won’t find her here,” I told him. “She’s already outside the city.”

Ryland’s jaw tightened with a snap, anger clouding his eyes in a dangerous warning that I felt the need to move away from. “They all got away.”

“Who got away?” I asked, my voice tentative as my sight pulled at me, heavy whispers telling me we were talking about more than the deceitful pair.

“Ovailia and Sain. But there is more. They were talking about Wyn, talking about needing to meet up with her before they left, needing to find her in time for a bonding—” He stopped mid-sentence, and I didn’t blame him. I felt like I had been punched in the gut, my lungs constricting so painfully I wasn’t convinced I would be able to force the air in.

“No.” As it was, I could barely get the single word out.

“You are telling me that Wynifred is working for my father, as well?” Ilyan’s voice was a rumble of feral warning from where I leaned against him. I felt his muscles tense as his magic quivered with an anger I wasn’t positive I had ever felt before.

I went rigid beside him, the intensity of his emotions frightening me.

“From what we are hearing.” Ryland shuffled his feet a bit, a tick I had seen so often in my life I knew what was coming. I could feel his discomfort rolling off him.

“What is it, Ry?” I asked.

His eyes met mine directly, his jaw so tight I was worried it was glued together. “We still can’t find Wynifred, and Etma has informed me that she was seen in the courtyard a few hours ago before the cathedral collapsed. A few people saw her attack Risha—”

“Risha!” Ilyan yelled, his distress understandable. “What happened?”

“Etma says she is unresponsive but stable. She thinks Risha was knocked out.” Ryland’s voice cracked and broke as he spoke, his worry seeping through in waves of apprehension.

Wyn and I had joked for months about his supposed crush on Ilyan’s second, but I didn’t think I had realized until that moment exactly how deep his emotions were.

That it was more than a crush.

“Do you need to go to her?” Ilyan asked, his voice caught between worry for his brother and worry for his people, his thoughts for them moving just as fast.

I reached my hand toward him, my heart longing to comfort him, something that was not missed by either of the brothers I stood before.

“No,” Ryland said, his curls bouncing as he shook his head. I had a feeling he was trying to put on a brave face. “There is nothing I can do for her now. I will be more help here. We need to find Wyn, or at least try, before she attacks someone else.”

“She attacked me, too,” I announced. The memory of those moments before the sight had taken me pulled at my soul uncomfortably. Those vivid pieces of sight I was granted twisted inside of me. “I was trying to take that blade from her.”

“What blade?” Ryland asked, the worry from before lost in the hardness of his voice. The intensity of it made me wonder if he already knew what I was about to say.

“She has a piece of the Soul’s Blade.”

If I had thought Ilyan was teetering close to destruction before, it was nothing to now, nothing to the explosive way his magic roared through him, through me. Nothing to the feral growl that escaped his chest.

“The Soul’s Blade? How did she get that?” Ilyan’s voice was tense as he took a step away, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose as he tried to dispel the anger. His feet snapped quietly against the dust as he paced.

“I saw it in a sight. I saw her remove it…” I stopped, my eyes flashing to Ryland, my memory pushing everything together in one, big clump.

Ryland met my gaze, expectant, almost fearful. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he expected me to fade into a sight, to give them some magical revelation. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t going to happen, not now, anyway.

It already had.

“She got it from inside of you,” I gasped, my eyes not deviating so much as a millimeter from where Ryland stared into me.

Ilyan turned toward us as if he had lost his footing, his hair fanning out, eyes wide, jaw tight. If I wasn’t as connected to the man as I was, I probably would have stepped away. As it was, I held still, facing the two brothers as differing levels of anger and confusion overtook them.

“She removed it from inside of me?”

“When?” Ilyan snapped, his anger rising.

Ryland winced at the tone, and a raw fear ripped down my spine. Pushing the emotion away, I stepped toward my mate, letting my magic flood him as I wrapped my hand around his. The soothing balm of my magic wound through him with a need to calm him, something I could already tell would be harder than it ever had been before.

“It was the room above the clock … before we came here.”

With those few words, my Drak magic flared, pulling me into a vision I had seen hours before, the colors and emotions of the space suffocating as everything shifted and changed: Wyn kneeling before Ryland’s unconscious body, a voice erupting around her, the pained sobs of a child that caused her to flinch the same way she had before. Her whole body rocked violently as the sight fluctuated, a child taking her place. The same little girl I had seen in the alley sitting right where she had, the same blade resting in her hands, the same blood covering them.

“Mommy.”
The child’s voice cut through me, her eyes haunting as they turned toward me, pulling me out of the sight with a start, my chest heaving.

“Rosaline.”

I jumped as the heavy confirmation seeped from Ilyan’s mouth, his hands feeling like a dead weight against mine.

“Did you see?” I asked him.

“Yes. The blade is made from her soul,” Ilyan said with a nod, my question lingering unanswered between us. “She must think she can free her daughter somehow.”

“She is a fool,” Ryland hissed from beside us. “My father used that blade to control me, to torture Joclyn, to kill her brother. What does she think is going to happen to her? That Edmund somehow won’t take control? The second he knows she has it…” Ryland’s voice faded away, his eyes bright as they snapped right to his brother. The anger that rose up in him was so powerful I could feel it infect me like a virus before I was able to help him calm. “They spoke about getting her back to Edmund. He knows,” Ryland whispered, his eyes wide, the fearfulness in them growing deeper by the second.

“If Edmund has her, he also has her magic.” Ilyan straightened his shoulders as he rose up to his full height, the power in his eyes emanating around us. “I have no way of knowing if they aren’t all outside of our reach. Chances are, the three of them are gone, beyond the barrier, but we must let the guards know. We may still have a chance to find Wyn. We
have
to find her, some clue of where she is. Ryland, you are my second now.”

Ilyan placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder, and Ryland straightened under the weight, his eyes wide in shock. “Take control of this situation. Get people looking. Let everyone know the change in Sain, what has happened, and get as many people searching for Wynifred as possible. Let them know she is dangerous and not to approach either her or Sain on their own. They need to come right to me.”

“Dangerous,” I repeated the word, knowing it wasn’t that far off, not after what happened in the cathedral.

I looked toward my hand, expecting my flesh to be falling off the bone again.

“Normally, I wouldn’t consider her as such, but given the situation…” Ilyan paused, his focus shifting between Ryland and I. “I can’t discount that she is either working for Edmund or being controlled by him until we find her.”

“It better be the second,” I growled, wishing my sight would pull me in and show me what was up. No such luck.

“Yes, my lord,” Ryland gasped, his voice seeming to be stuck in his throat.

“Ry,” Ilyan sighed, his tone clipped in agitation as he pinched the bridge of his nose again. “I am still your brother, and if you call me ‘my lord’ one more time, I will beat you up like the mortals do—boxing or whatever they call it. Heaven knows you need more of that in your life.”

Ryland nodded before moving away, winding his way through the few Skȓíteks who remained, beckoning them away, his hands moving fast as he began issuing orders.

As one, everyone exited the room, each one to their new tasks, Ryland trying his best to appear strong, while Ilyan and I walked hand in hand.

Nerves on the rise from what had been revealed, from everything Ilyan had said, from everything I had remembered, I continued on, barely paying attention to where Ilyan was leading me. Only to slip, my foot sliding to the side as the sound of breaking glass echoed somewhere from below me.

“What the …!” I said, barely catching myself as Ilyan clung to my hand for dear life, his heart rate accelerating in a panic deeper than what I would expect from a little fall. I wasn’t being attacked by one hundred forty Trpaslíks, after all, so the boy needed to calm down.

I would have chastised him, but I was already moving away from him, moving toward whatever I had stepped on. My magic pulled me as the power inside of me increased, the Drak power screaming.

It was a vial, a tiny glass thing filled with swirling green fluid that was dangerously close to leaking out thanks to a large crack along the side.

“Ilyan,” I called, my voice strangely hollow as my magic pulled. My fingers were inches away from picking up the thing when sight pulled into me. One simple image of Ovailia dropping the same green fluid onto Thom’s skin was all I needed to see.

“Mi lasko?” Ilyan’s voice pulled me out of the sight with the force of a gun, his fear escalating as I looked up to him, my eyes wide before I pointed down to the vial below us where the green was now spreading out and over the floor like syrup.

“Don’t touch it,” I instructed, my voice shaking with what I was about to say. “It’s what Ovailia used to hurt Thom. It’s what she was going to use on all of them.”

His eyes grew wider as I looked at him.

My sight pulled me forward, flashes of images I could barely make out, before Ilyan came back into focus.

My lips spread into a wide smile. “I think I can use it to save him.” 

Sain’s ragged breathing echoed through the stone hallway we walked through, hitting against my back and grating on my nerves. I recoiled at the sound, at the way his feet dragged against the stone, the way they always had when he walked.

His left leg was slightly turned, dragging like he couldn’t quite lift it off the ground. This time, however, the scrape seemed to be a little bit more pronounced, the drag a little bit longer. He had always claimed it was from an injury. Right then, I wasn’t so certain. I no longer thought any of him was real.

The scrapes, the breathing, the tap of my heels, they all reverberated off the cave’s walls in a hollow rhythm that dug against me. My heartbeat increased to match the sounds, unfamiliar fear rising up in me as I second-guessed my decision to bring him here. Second-guess my decision to not kill him along with all the other Chosen children back at Ilyan’s now foiled safe house.

I probably should have after what I had seen him do, after what I had seen him become. After what he had shown me.

It wasn’t like he was trying to hide it from me in any case. He had embraced it. He had shown me a stronger man than I had ever seen before. He had shown me one of the many faces he carried in his pocket.

He had shown me who he truly was.

And all that he had done.

It was so much more than him “playing us” as my father had assumed, as I had assumed. It was so much more complicated than that. I had no idea what end game he was working toward, but one thing was clear—something as extreme as this would only end in his death, whether by my hand or my father’s. I wasn’t foolish enough to think my father would want to miss out on that opportunity. So, I had brought him here, only to second-guess myself.