Regret (Lady of Toryn Trilogy) (12 page)

“You stayed the night with
Lockhart?” Vargo said from behind her.

Um…

“I was really glad to have the
extra help with my dad,” she offered lamely.

At this point Aaron and a Toryn
man Ashlyn didn’t recognize were making their way down the ramp, carrying a
stretcher between them, with Sara following close behind. Drake stopped next to
Ashlyn, and she gave him a tight-lipped smile before reaching over to smooth
her father’s damp hair back from his face. He was still asleep, and in the
sunlight his face looked even more gaunt and pale than it had the night before.

“Dad,” she said softly, trying to
rouse him.

“Let him sleep,” Sara advised,
pausing in front of Drake. “His body needs to heal itself right now.” She
quickly lifted Lord Li’s hand, examining the scarred flesh of his forearm
before checking the pulse at his neck. “Drake, would you mind…?” she asked at
last, motioning to the stretcher.

The vampire gently lifted Lord Li
onto the stretcher, being very careful as he withdrew his hands from beneath
the other man. Ashlyn’s throat tightened as she watched the simple action. Most
of her excitement was because her father was alive and safe, but the compassion
that Drake was showing to Lord Li made her heart flutter.

Aaron and the other man began
carrying her dad towards the airship, and Ashlyn followed closely. “Is he going
to be okay?” she asked Sara.

The shorter woman shook her head.
“We’ll do everything we can for him, but it’s too soon to tell. I’m sorry.” She
followed Aaron up the ramp, quietly issuing orders about how to carry her new
patient.

Ashlyn stopped at the base of the
ramp, feeling very discouraged and worried. She shouldn’t be surprised- Sara
was a realist, and Ashlyn didn’t want the other girl to lie to her, not
really.
But right now all she wanted to
hear was that her father was going to be all right. After everything they’d
gone through, after she’d waged war inside herself for the past several weeks
over whether she could truly challenge him or not…after thinking that he might
be lost to her forever, Ashlyn couldn’t help but feel that a little optimism
was deserved. Her father had fought to survive against all odds, when people
were draining his body of its life force. Sara would save him. Perhaps Aaron
could even take Lord Li to Cosmea, where the healers were renowned as the
greatest in Kresmir.

“Don’t sweat it, Ash,” Vargo said
to her, squeezing her shoulder. “Your dad’s gonna be fine.”

She smiled up at him, grateful
for his unexpected kindness. “Thanks.”

“Ashlyn.” Drake appeared beside
her, and gestured up the ramp, indicating that she should ascend. He followed
by placing his hand at the small of her back, pushing lightly. Confused, Ashlyn
obeyed the pressure, and Drake walked up the ramp beside her, keeping his hand
against her back, his horse following behind them.

It occurred too late to Ashlyn
that Drake was deliberately moving her away from Vargo, and also making his
intentions towards Ashlyn clear to the red-haired Spartan. She glanced over her
shoulder and saw Vargo standing at the bottom of the ramp, eyes narrowed as he
stared at her.

He wasn’t stupid- he had to know
that something was going on.

The last thing Ashlyn wanted to
do was cause tension within FLD. Her feelings towards Vargo were decidedly
mixed, especially now. She’d thought earlier that there was no danger of
ambivalence regarding the situation with Drake, but after seeing Vargo again,
she felt…well…she felt confused and sick to her stomach over the entire
situation.

When Drake turned towards the
wing of the airship where the horse stalls were located, Ashlyn firmly stepped
away from him. “I’m going with my dad,” she said. Drake nodded, but she knew
that as astute as he normally was, he probably would not miss the warning in
her eyes. She didn’t like the thought of men fighting over her, and she
especially disliked the idea of Drake staking his claim as though she was a
piece of property.

By the time she made it to the
infirmary, her dad had already been moved into a bed. Aaron was gone-
presumably prepping the airship for lift off- but Sara was carefully inserting
a needle into Lord Li’s arm. The older woman looked up as Ashlyn entered the
room, and her blue eyes were warm behind her glasses.

“I’m going to set him up with an
IV,” she said. “He needs to get hydrated if he’s going to recover.” She worked
quickly and efficiently, hooking a tube to the needle and connecting it to a
hanging bag of clear fluid. “I hope I didn’t scare you earlier, Ash. I didn’t
want to give you false hope, but honestly, the fact that your father has made
it this far bodes well for him. He must have been in exceptional physical
condition before this ordeal began.”

“He was…getting a little tubby
the last time I saw him,” Ashlyn said affectionately, smiling slightly at the
memory. “But he’s always been fit.” She stared down at her father’s thin face,
noting how very different it was now than it had been during Lord Angelo’s
reign.
It doesn’t seem right,
she
thought.
Lord Angelo couldn’t break my dad,
even when he had control of Toryn, but Kou managed to do it just by telling him
that I was dead.

“Aaron wants to talk to you,”
Sara said. She had a stethoscope around her neck, and fidgeted with the
earpieces for a moment. “You should probably head to the bridge. I’ll let you
know if anything changes with your father’s condition.”

Just then, the airship rose off
the ground, and Ashlyn clutched the railing on the side of the bed, her stomach
flip-flopping. “I hate flying,” she said out loud, and sighed, shaking her
head.
You’d think at almost nineteen I’d
be over this.
“But I’ll go find Aaron. Thanks, Sara.”

The other woman nodded to her
distractedly, and Ashlyn turned to leave.

She half-expected either Vargo or
Drake to be outside the infirmary, waiting, but she was relieved to see that
the corridor was completely empty. She just didn’t want to deal with romantic
entanglements right now. Holding one hand to her stomach and the other one to
the wall as she walked, she made her way up the hall towards the bridge.

She paused outside the doorway,
leaning up against the wall for a moment and welcoming the feel of the cool
steel against her flushed skin. So much had happened, and she’d hardly paused
to process any of it.

Unless Skye had confirmed his
death, there would be no way to know if Kou was still alive or not. But the
fact remained that he had survived being shot by Drake and falling from the top
of Na Michico. His survival was something Ashlyn wouldn’t have believed if she
hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

Her dad had clearly been held
hostage this entire time, helpless to stop Kou from taking more and more Li
blood to enable the army to use
shift.
Perhaps
the reason Kou had been searching for her and had brought her back to Toryn in
the first place was because her father was growing too weak to supply blood
anymore. But she still wasn’t sure why Kou had lied to her, pretending to be
her brother. Had he been toying with her? Or was he just trying to figure out
if she would join his cause? The unanswered questions and possible answers
disgusted her.

Her thoughts were about to turn
to her own mess of a personal life, and the situation with Drake and Vargo,
when Aaron suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“You gonna stand out here all day
or what?” he barked. “We got things to talk about!”

“Like what?” Ashlyn answered
testily. “Can’t it wait until we get to the city?”

“Hmmph.” Grabbing her none too
gently by the arm, Aaron stomped into the bridge and lead Ashlyn to the viewing
screen. “They’ll be arrivin’ at ‘bout the same time we are,” he told her,
pointing.

Ashlyn pressed her hands up
against the glass, heart sinking as she surveyed the lines of ninjas crossing
the cliffs below. Kou’s troops were moving towards Toryn, and although their
ranks had thinned significantly after the two attacks yesterday, there were
still more than enough soldiers to potentially overpower the inexperienced
Toryn army.

“Crap,” she muttered.

“That’s one way to put it,” Aaron
observed.

“We can’t take my dad to Toryn,
not with them so close,” Ashlyn said, glancing over at the pilot. “Can’t
you…can’t you just drop me off and take him to Cosmea?”

“Already talked to Skye about
that last night,” Aaron replied. “He said Cosmea’s the first place Devlyn’s
gonna look.”

She bit her lip. He was right,
and Kou had been to Cosmea once before so he was already aware of the layout. “Skye
thinks we should move my dad somewhere…what, out of the way or something?”

“Somewhere they’re not gonna
think to look for him.”

“Somewhere like…North Camp?”
Ashlyn said, picking the most obscure location that popped into her head. “Do
they have healers there?”

“Sara’s not leavin’ him. He’ll
have whatever healin’ there is to be got from her.” Aaron scratched his chin,
chewing thoughtfully on his cigarette. “North Camp ain’t such a bad idea, kid.
I could take ya both there, keep them from gettin’ anymore of your blood. It
ain’t likely they’ll track you there, either.”

“I can’t leave FLD here to fight
alone,” she protested hotly. “You can drop me at the city and head for North
Camp. I’m not running away.”

“I’ll go with you,” Vargo spoke
up from behind her.

She turned to see both Drake and
Vargo standing there. Vargo tapped his electro-baton against his thigh,
trademark smirk affixed on his lips, looking more like his usual sarcastic self.

“The Toryn army can use all the
help it can get,” Ashlyn said, “but I hate to ask you guys to put your lives on
the line. There are gonna be a lot more
shift
monsters down there than there were last time.”

They acted as though she hadn’t
spoken. “We’ll need to destroy the
shift
stanes
after this is over,” Drake said. “You and your father will be targets, for your
blood, for as long as the magic is in existence.”

“Might as well start with that
one,” Vargo said, motioning with his baton to Ashlyn.

She frowned. “What?”

“The stane in your armlet,” Vargo
said. “It’s
shift,
right? Let’s get
rid of it now, before the battle. You don’t want it getting back into Kou’s
hands.”

She opened her mouth to respond,
then closed it. Hmm. She didn’t really feel comfortable giving up
shift
. It had saved her life in the
forest.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea
just yet,” she said at length. “I had to use it in the forest when I was attacked
by some other ninjas, and then again when I was in the cave with Kou. I might
have died without it.”

“Dangerous magic, Ash,” Aaron
spoke up. “Shape-shifting ain’t natural.”

“But it kind of is, for me. I
mean, it felt really natural. I wasn’t in pain and I was in total control of
myself even when I was in animal form. I think maybe the craziness and the
addiction just comes from the…the dishonest part of what Kou’s doing. Injecting
with blood because he’s not really a Li, and all that. I feel fine.”

“You don’t feel addicted?” Vargo
asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then you won’t mind if we
destroy the stane.”

Ashlyn rolled
 
her eyes. “Be serious, Vargo. I’m telling you
that there’s no need to destroy it. That magic could really come in handy for
me in the next hour or two.”

“Or it could snare you even
further under its spell,” Drake said. “You agreed that it was necessary to
destroy
shift,
Ashlyn. What has
changed?”

“That was before I used it,” she
retorted, and paused, considering her answer. After watching Tag transform in
her basement, she had sworn to destroy
shift,
but that had been…before.

Was this what the beginnings of addiction
felt like?

She reached over and pulled the
stane from her armlet, staring down at the gem with some trepidation. Drake was
right, of course. For as long as
shift
existed,
there was always a danger that someone like Kou would try to steal Li blood so
they could wield the magic.

She still remembered her reasons
for wanting to destroy it. Those had not changed.

Reluctantly, she held
shift
out to Vargo.

He took the stane and put it on
the control table, then raised his baton above his head and widened his stance,
ready to smash the glittering gem.

“Wait!” Ashlyn said, hardly aware
that she was saying the word until it had already passed her lips. She took a
step forward, but Drake stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

Vargo brought the baton down hard
on the stane, shattering it into a dozen pieces, and she flinched, acutely
aware of the sudden loss of power, feeling the broken magic dissipate within
her.

There was a long silence
following her exclamation. Ashlyn stood very still, trying to make sense of the
conflicted emotions within her.