Kiss of Fire (28 page)

“What if I asked you to?” My hand froze. His voice had deepened into that of an adult, his head still hanging down.

“Ryland?”

“What if I asked you to leave, Joclyn?” He looked up at me, his thirteen-year-old face looking strikingly like my Ryland, the Ryland of today.

“I can’t leave, Ry.”

“I’m sorry, Joclyn. But it’s too dangerous now.” His hands reached up and grasped my shoulders tightly, his small fingers digging into my skin through the sweater. With one mighty jolt, he pushed me backwards. The white room disappeared as it faded into trees and sky. Ryland’s face continued to look down at me as I fell, fell away from him, fell out of the tree.

Wind I didn’t control came out of nowhere and caught me, just as my hand hit the ground in a precursor to the impact. The wind ceased as I dropped the last foot, landing hard on my back.

I grunted as I sat up, rubbing the now sore spots that had been so recently broken. “Ow.”

“Yeah, I’d say so,” Ilyan spoke from behind me. “You’re just lucky I was looking for you or that would have been much worse.” He was smiling broadly, but his smile faded away as he looked at me. It was like he could see right into me and knew what I had just seen.

“What did you do, Joclyn?” Ilyan asked, his voice sounded like my mother’s.

I flinched. “Oh, you know; the usual. Got mad at your sister, threw her into a wall, and flew away.”

“You’re not the first to do that,” he smiled, “but that’s not what I am talking about.”

“What are you talking about?” The cornered teenager reflex was coming on strong.

“What did you do, Joclyn?”

I backed away from him as he continually stepped closer to me.

“Pushed my magic into the necklace, even though you told me not to; shared a Tȍuha with Ryland, who was younger, by the way, and told me all about how Edmund made him kill his mother.”

Ilyan’s face went from angry, to concerned, to furious as I spoke.

“Is it true?” I asked softly, hoping to deflect his anger away from me.

“Is what true?” he snapped.

“That Edmund made him kill his mother.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Ilyan pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration, his eyes screwed up tightly. “Edmund tortures his children, Joclyn.” He dropped his hand to look at me. “He uses them to increase his power, to bend their will so that they only answer to him. He trains them to be destructive weapons and pawns in his little game. He holds no love for Ryland; he probably made him torture his mother as a way to break him, to teach him a lesson.”

“Them?”

“Yes, Joclyn. Them. All ten of them.”

I stared at him, my hands opening in a question.

“What do you want me to tell you? It’s nothing good.”

I could tell how uncomfortable the subject was making him; he was very edgy.

“I think I have handled quite enough to prove I can handle a bit of bad news.” My voice was firm.

He sighed exasperatingly at me before turning away, his hand running through his long blonde hair.

“Ilyan.” I wasn’t sure if I was angry or worried. The way Ilyan was reacting, it was so unlike him. I could almost feel the waves of negative energy flowing off him. He spun around to face me, his eyes damp.

“He tortures them, Joclyn. He tortures them until he breaks them and then he uses them or he kills them. It’s not a monarchy he is running here. There is no next-in-command. It is only Edmund and the children he gobbles up and spits out. He did it to Zetta; he did it to Markus, Drayven, Ovailia, Sylas…”

“Wait,” I interrupted him, my heart clenching in my chest, “Ovailia?’

Ilyan breathed out deeply, his face looking like a cornered dog. He looked away from me, his hand dragging through his blonde locks again.

“Ilyan?”

“Yes. Ovailia. He tortured my sister by making her watch as he killed her mate. He forced her to track down and kill her friends. She bears a scar from her neck to her tailbone where he cut away, bit by bit, until she agreed to do it.” His voice was so bitter, so pained.

I reached out to him, desperate to comfort him, to make it go away. Then, my hand dropped; the awful truth of what he was saying hitting me hard.

“Your sister.” My voice was a whisper.

“Yes.”

“No!” I took a step back in horror.

Ilyan looked into me, that unyielding defiance I was used to, coming on strong. His eyes, so familiar, so much like Ryland’s. I had been too focused on Ryland to put the obvious puzzle pieces together. I felt ridiculously stupid.

“No!” I repeated, but my voice had lost its shock.

We just stared at each other. I had no idea what to say. All my life I had hidden. I had moaned and groaned and whined about some stupid mark. I had let it ruin my life, and all the while, my best friend, the one person who meant the most to me, was being tortured every day of his life. Furthermore, it wasn’t just him; it was the man who had saved me, it was his sister, it was seven others who had lost their lives. I could have cried; my body almost begged me to. Instead, I squared my shoulders and held it in.

“We need to save him.” My magic surged beyond the barrier as I spoke.

Ilyan looked at me for only a moment before striding away from me. I ran up beside him, his pace winding me.

“We are going to save him, Ilyan, aren’t we? He’s your… your brother.”

“We are going to try.”

“Try? I thought this was a sure thing!”

Ilyan looked at me, his pace quickening even more. I wanted to ask him to slow down, but didn’t dare.

“Edmund has increased the security around the estate. We will have to get through a lot more of his ‘henchmen’ than I had originally hoped. What I could glimpse of Ryland did not paint a pretty picture; he can barely move at times, and when he does, he twitches so badly that he can’t accomplish much. However, the party seems to still be ready to go on as planned, which can only mean that we are walking into a trap.”

I stopped in my tracks, remembering all of Ryland’s warnings to stay away from him, to leave him alone. He was still trying to protect me, and here I was, preparing to stroll into the lion’s den to save him. It was ridiculous.

Ilyan noticed I was no longer walking beside him and trotted back to get me, now dragging me by the shoulder beside him. My feet stumbled before I caught up to his pace again.

“Don’t sulk like a child; we are still going in to get him.”

“We are?” My spirits soared.

“Yes, I need you two together.”

“Why?” I knew I needed him with me, but it seemed odd that Ilyan felt the same way.

Ilyan grunted and stopped walking right at the edge of the forest. I could see the door to the motel through the break in the trees. He pulled me around to face him.

“I saw the video, Silnỳ. He risked everything to talk to you, to tell you how much he loved you. And I know you love him, no matter how hard you try to keep it hidden.” He smiled sadly, his hand reaching up to cup the side of my face. I moved away a bit, but his hand stayed firm against my skin. “Your bond is the strongest I have ever seen, and I am becoming worried that if he dies, you may not be far behind. And I can’t let that happen. Because I need you, too.”

“
You
need me? Why?”

“I just do.” Ilyan leaned forward and kissed my forehead softly. I felt dirty for letting him touch me that way and moved away from him quickly.

“Wynifred is waiting for you in your room. We leave in the morning.” He left me standing in the trees, feeling grimy and guilty. I wiped my forehead angrily before storming toward my room.

---

It was official; I hated the smell of hair dye. It burned my eyes and nose, the ammonia smell making me sick. I shook my head a bit to get the smell out of my nose, but it was no use. It was burning off my nostril hair, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Hold still or I am going to dye your face pretty colors, too.”

I said nothing, but let her move my head to where she wanted it. When Ilyan had told me Wyn was going to help me get ready, this was not what I had in mind.

I had arrived in my room to a very excited Wyn who was armed with a pair of scissors and a bottle of hair dye. Even though they could alter my appearance magically, it would be easily seen through by Edmund and his men, which meant they had to alter my appearance physically. I had tried to convince Wyn to do something simple, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said that I needed to stand out enough that no one would guess it was me. It didn’t make much sense, but I didn’t want to argue.

I had been sitting dutifully in the chair since Wyn placed me here, my eyes closed as I refused to see what she was doing. I bit my lip until it bled when she cut off all my hair. My head felt instantly lighter. I only felt a bit of it fall around my face and on my neck before she began to coat it with the thick, sticky stuff I was now being tortured with.

I huffed angrily in the hopes of showing my frustration, but regretted it instantly; my throat was now coated with the burn of the fumes.

“Oh, calm down, Jos. I am almost done.”

“You better not have made me look terrible.”

“No one will recognize you. That’s for sure,” she laughed.

“What does that mean?” Now I was worried.

“Nothing. Stop freaking out. You can open your eyes now. You have to wait twenty minutes for it to develop and you’re going to look like a loon sitting still with your eyes closed for that long.”

I opened them, letting my eyes get used to the sharp chemical burn. Wyn stood in the middle of my bathroom with a huge grin on her face as she began to remove her gloves that were covered with cherry-red hair dye. She had told me she was dying my hair red, but for some reason, I had pictured an auburn color like hers.

“Red? Wyn! That’s red!” Wyn grinned at me evilly, flexing her one hand of still gloved fingers at me.

“And black,” she provided happily. “It’s kind of all blended and fun! You’re going to love it!”

“Wyn! My hair was already black! Why did you dye it
more
black?”

“Really, Jos. Calm down. You’re going to look
so
good,” she squealed and went back to cleaning up, dancing to the Styx music she had playing on the stereo.

“I don’t feel like I am going to look
so
good.”

Wyn just sighed at me and cranked up the radio in an effort to tune out my complaints.

“Wyn!” I attempted to yell above the music.

She turned down the radio and looked at me skeptically. “You’re not going to keep complaining, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I was just wondering what you could tell me about Edmund’s other children.”

She stopped dead in her attempts at cleaning up, her arms falling to her sides. “I am not sure I am supposed to tell you about that.”

“It’s okay, Wyn. Ilyan told me.”

“What did he tell you?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

“What Edmund makes his children do. He let it slip that Ovailia was one of them.”

She waited before nodding and leaned against the sink to face me.

“Edmund wasn’t always like that, you know. Ilyan’s father and mother were bonded about twelve hundred years before Ilyan was born; Ovailia was born about thirty years later. About two hundred years after that, he began to change. They have legends and songs and beautiful paintings of the love shared by Edmund—the bearer of the first mark—and Filare—the Skȓítek he shared his life with.”

“What happened? I mean, if he loved her so much, why did he leave her?” The eager light that had filled Wyn’s dark eyes vanished at my question.

“Edmund saw a woman in a town called Farcina. He lusted after her. Timothy…” she spat the word with venom, “my father, convinced Edmund to take her, convinced him that he should be the only one to bear the mark. He left everyone. Broke all magical beings apart. Edmund planted the seeds of distrust and started a civil war that almost killed all of the magic. And while everyone fought among themselves, Edmund massacred the Drak in secret.”

“The Drak?”

“The Drak were a people who were bred from the mud to be the Keepers of the Waters of Foresight. They were the only ones who could look into the black waters and see the past, present and future. There were stories that they saw a Chosen Child who would destroy Edmund, and stop the madness that he had created. I think that’s why he killed them.”

“You mean, like a prophecy?” I tried to keep the disbelief out of my voice.

“I guess you could say that, but they were really anything but. Ilyan was there to witness it. He told Ovailia, not knowing that she was being used as a spy. Because of what Ovailia told Edmund, he ordered the extermination of the Chosen Children.”

“And Ilyan still trusts her?” I was appalled. The bubbling turmoil in my stomach at what I was hearing was making me sick.

“Yes. It’s been several hundred years, so he must have a reason. After all, Edmund did almost destroy Ovailia.”

“Does Edmund… Does he really make all his children do... terrible things... or he...”

“Kills them, yeah.” Wyn moved over and sat down next to me softly.

“After Ilyan and Ovailia, there were Markus, Zetta, Drayven, Sylas, Gielle, Mym, Thom and then Ryland. After Ovailia, each one had a different mother, each one forced to do different things. Markus was murdered in 1480, Zetta has been missing since she was 130, Drayven and Mym fought with Ilyan for a while, but you can’t always escape the shadows of your past. They eventually turned against Ilyan, and he had to fight against his own siblings.

“Edmund found and probably killed Thom, about thirty years ago. He was hiding as a college student somewhere in the US. One day, his letters stopped coming. We all ran out to find him, but we never did. Not even a body. That was when Ilyan commanded that everyone stay together at all times. I never met him, but the way Ilyan talks about him, he was very brave. They all are, or were.”

My stomach clenched.

“He made Ryland kill his mother.”

Wyn turned to me with her mouth open in shock. It took her a second to recover.