The Lady of Toryn Anthology (Lady of Toryn trilogy) (52 page)

What?
Ashlyn let her dad’s hand lower
to her lap, still clutching his fingers tightly.

“Toryn broke my spirit,” he said,
and his eyes were misty with memories. “I wanted to save my kingdom, but I
could not fully dedicate myself to a cause I did not want, and Toryn and I both
suffered for my half-hearted attempt at ruling.”

“Dad,” Ashlyn said unsteadily,
“I’m not trying to get out of being Lady of Toryn. I’m not running again.”

He smiled gently at her. “If you
want to lead, Ashlyn, I will help you. If you do not wish to become Lady of
Toryn, however, that is your decision. I would not force you to accept your
birthright. Perhaps…” He trailed off, visibly exhausted, before continuing,
“Perhaps I would have, three years ago. But not now. Besides…” His eyes
fluttered shut, his whisper barely audible when he said, “There are
other…options.”

Ashlyn waited for a moment, dying
to know more. But her dad was fast asleep, his fingers lax against hers.
Sighing, she placed his hands on his chest and glanced up at the IV bag. It was
still more than half full.

She lied down beside Lord Li and
put her hand over his. She’d be here when he woke up. They’d already spent far
too much time apart.

Eventually she drifted off to
sleep, but her dreams were violent and fitful- reenactments of the battles
she’d fought over the last week, with different endings each time. The worst
memory was from when she had rescued Lord Li from Kou’s army, and Drake had
lost
resist.
Each time she relived
the incident, something different happened. Once she had to kill Drake to save
her father. Once she watched helplessly as Drake bit Lord Li and drained what
was left of his blood. Once Skye entered and engaged in a bloody battle with
Drake, with Ashlyn at a loss as to how she could help.

It was a relief for Ashlyn when
she finally woke up, and when her eyes opened, the first thing she saw was her
dad’s peaceful profile, a slight smile on his lips. The light was still on, and
Ashlyn shifted on the bed, thinking she should probably turn it off.

As she rolled onto her back, she
started at the sight of a man standing beside the bed.

It was Kou.

He smirked down at her. “Hello,
Ashlyn.”

In the next instant she saw the
flash of her bo shuriken in his hand, and he brought it down, intending to
impale her with it. Ashlyn rolled off the bed, crashing into his legs as the
shuriken ripped into the mattress where she had been lying moments before.

Her mind was still fuzzy with
sleep, but Ashlyn had the presence of mind to grab onto Kou’s leg as it moved
right by her head. She bared her teeth and bit fiercely into his calf,
eliciting a squawk from the Toryn man. He fell backwards, colliding with the
wardrobe against the wall. His momentum knocked the huge piece of furniture
sideways, and it scraped along the wall as it fell, landing with a crash on the
floor in front of the door.

Ashlyn leaped up and danced
backwards as Kou swiped at her legs with her hira shuriken. He scrambled to his
feet, edging around the bed as Ashlyn advanced on him. She glanced over,
noticed that the window was open and immediately cursed her stupidity for not
considering it as an entrance point sooner.

“Did you forget about
reveal?
” Kou taunted her, waving the
hira shuriken in front of his face. Her stanes glittered at her from the
weapon. Ashlyn hadn’t known that anybody outside of FLD even knew how to use
reveal,
but she was so livid that she
didn’t stop to wonder how Kou had figured it out.

“You are
dead,”
she hissed, advancing another step.

“I don’t think so. Correction:
your
father
is dead,” Kou snarled.

Ashlyn’s heart skipped a beat.

Things seemed to be moving in
slow motion as she turned her head, looking at her father, who was still lying
in bed, sleeping peacefully. Ashlyn’s eyes moved to his IV tube, and she saw
with immense horror that there was a depleted syringe poking out from the tube,
its needle embedded into the IV line.

The terror in her heart nearly
caused her to miss Kou flinging the shuriken at her, but Ashlyn saw the glimmer
of the weapon from the corner of her eye and spun aside just in time. The
shuriken grazed her neck, and she simultaneously felt the sting of the cut and
heard the shuriken embed itself in the wall behind her.

There was a rattling at the door.
“Ashlyn!” Aik bellowed, and the door shook as he flung himself against it from
outside.

When Ashlyn turned back, Kou was
gone. She rushed to her father’s side. “Dad!” she cried, shaking his shoulders.
“Dad, are you okay?”

Lord Li did not respond.

“Dad!” she screamed in his face,
shaking harder. “Wake up!”

“Ashlyn, let us in!” Sara’s
voice, high and fearful, permeated the haze of Ashlyn’s consciousness. She
stumbled to the door and grabbed the edge of the wardrobe. She couldn’t move
it. Grunting, Ashlyn threw herself down on the floor and braced her feet
against the heavy wood bed, pushing her back up against the wardrobe and
shoving it out of the way of the door.

The door banged open, hitting her
in the arm, but Ashlyn was too numb to care. “Help my dad!” she yelled at Sara,
pointing at the bed. White-faced, the older woman ran to Lord Li’s side and
began searching for a pulse.

“Help me move him to the floor,”
she called after a moment, and Ashlyn scrambled to grab her dad’s legs, helping
Sara to haul him out of the bed and onto the rug.

Sara crossed her hands over Lord
Li’s heart and began to pump. “One, two, three-”

Ashlyn drew a breath, hardly
realizing she hadn’t been breathing at all this whole time, and turned her
horror-stricken gaze to Aik, who was standing in the doorway. His wolfish
expression, normally so serene, was grave.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Sara
chanted as she pressed on Lord Li’s chest. She stopped and crouched down,
fixing her mouth over his and breathing life-giving air into his lungs.

Ashlyn sat silently as Sara worked,
her blood roaring in her ears. This was not possible. This was not happening.
Any moment now she would wake up next to her dad, and he would be fine and they
would be safe, and Aaron would be coming to get them tomorrow.

She stood, and wandered to the
hira shuriken in the wall. It stuck fast when she tried to pull it out,
embedded too deeply into the thick wood to be removed easily. Ashlyn slid
reveal
out from its slot. Better to keep
the magic safe with her, where no one could get hold of it.

The bo shuriken caught her eye
next, poking comically out of the mattress. Ashlyn walked to it and pulled it
free from its feathered resting place. She finally had her bo shuriken back.
That was better, too.

She turned back to Sara just in
time to see the older woman sit back on her heels, tears streaming down her
face.

“I’m sorry, Ashlyn,” Sara said,
and her voice was muffled, like it was coming from inside a bubble. “He’s
gone.”

This
is not happening.

Ashlyn tried to draw a breath,
but it caught in her throat, and she backed away from Sara. “I don’t
understand,” she said, and her voice was muffled, too.

She bumped into the open window,
feeling the cold draft from outside, and shivered. Kou had escaped through this
window.

Kou had killed her father.

Ashlyn turned and climbed out the
window, sinking up to her ankles in the snow outside. She vaguely heard Aik and
Sara calling her name, but she ignored them, running into the night in search
of her father’s murderer.

Chapter 10

The Vision

Her breath came in quick, painful
gasps, more like a habitual spasm of her lungs than the act of breathing. The
reveal
stane was clenched in her fist,
bright orange rays emanating from between her fingers and tracing the path
before her as she ran. The bo shuriken was in her other hand.

Ashlyn’s heart was pouring from her,
sucked from her with every agonizing exhalation. The pain was indescribable. There
was a gaping hole inside her, as though she’d been stabbed through, but with no
physical evidence to show for it.

Her intent was single-minded.

Find Kou, and kill him.

It was bitterly cold, and she’d
been running for what seemed like hours. The tears on her face had long ago
turned to ice, melting and re-freezing as she pushed her body beyond its
intended limits. Still the orange path stretched on before her.

It was dark outside of North
Camp, with the only light coming from a sliver of moon above that disappeared
behind the clouds intermittently. The only sound besides her breathing was the
crunch of her sneakers in the snow. The shifting light from the stane cast
everything in an eerie light, the shadows stretching beyond the illumination
proving almost more ominous than the darkness itself.

She had some idea of where the
magic was leading her, but nonetheless felt a surge of uncertainty when the
first spire of the Heavenly City rose up out of the darkness before her. The
City was dead, a graveyard filled with whispering spirits and lingering magic.
She hadn’t ventured inside since Jenn’s death three years prior- few people
did.

Ashlyn paused at the edge of the
cliff, allowing for only a split second of indecision before she turned,
shoving the
reveal
stane into her
pocket and the bo shuriken into her waistband as she pushed sideways, her
sneakers sliding on the slick incline as she skidded down the canyon wall. The
blackness came up and swallowed her as the magic of the stane dwindled, and
Ashlyn scrabbled for a hold on the cliff face, slowing her descent as much as
she could.

She landed waist-deep in water at
the bottom, and momentarily forgot how to breathe as the freezing cold
enveloped her. Ashlyn drew in a shaky breath, feeling it rattle in her lungs,
and whispered a few words through her chattering teeth. The
reveal
stane lit up from her pocket, a
flickering trail of orange fireflies tracing a path through the water. She
eased forward, pushing chunks of ice out of the way, shivering violently and
trying to make as little noise as possible.

Jenn had once told her that
without the power of the Angels, the Heavenly City would someday begin to sink
into the icy depths of the lake on which it rested.
 
It appeared that the other girl had been
right. From what little Ashlyn could see, the water covered everything. The
stunning pearl-tiled street glinted at her from beneath the water, ominous and
un-alive in the eerie stillness. Ashlyn paused, fresh tears springing to her
eyes as she remembered the last time she had walked these streets, three years ago,
wondering if her father would ever believe her when she told him of the
grandeur she had witnessed.

The fireflies took a sharp left,
leading up a short staircase to higher ground, and Ashlyn followed, blinking
furiously to stay her tears. If she had been cold in the water, stepping out of
it was another shock to her body, as the breeze she hadn’t even noticed before
somehow managed to turn her clothes to ice against her skin. Even at the top of
the steps, her ankles were still submerged, making it even more difficult to
move quietly through the water.

She paused next to a building
with a long, curving spire, watching with knitted brows as the fireflies
sparked and swirled around each other, leading through the open doorway. If Kou
was inside, it would probably be best to still the magic and try to track him
herself. She murmured a word to end the spell, and was plunged into darkness,
barely able to see even an inch in front of her face.

Ashlyn stepped through the
doorway, keeping close to the wall, partially for support because the cold was
sapping her strength, and partly so she wouldn’t lose her way. As her eyes
adjusted in the faint moonlight streaming through the door, she saw a winding
staircase, with what appeared to be polished marble steps, spiraling up into
darkness.

It was so cold that she couldn’t
feel the floor beneath her feet, and after the first few steps, Ashlyn paused to
remove her water-logged sneakers, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to fight
with them on. She ascended the staircase slowly, struggling in vain to control
her quaking body. There was no way to find her center, but she was trying to
quell the rage that seethed through every part of her being and the horrible
emptiness that challenged it. It was all she could do.

At the top of the staircase was
another open door. Drawing her bo shuriken from her waistband, Ashlyn crept
forward, crouching next to the doorway. The door opened onto a balcony with
white pillars as a railing. She tried to peer around the edge of the door,
checking to see if there was anyone behind it. A flutter of movement caught her
eye on the other side, and Ashlyn heard the distinctive scrape of a boot on the
marble floor. She held her breath for a moment. This was it. This was her
chance to avenge her father’s death and finally put an end to it all.

Suddenly she felt something press
against the back of her neck. “Move. Now,” a voice said in Toryn.