Burnt Devotion (30 page)

I would burn them all.

My magic reacted without me, flaring into the darkened road in an explosion that rocked the ancient building I stood in then rippled down the old stones of the streets and the stores that had stood there for hundreds of years. It singed the very air as the creatures disintegrated into nothing. The poor people who still walked fled from it, the ones who lay bleeding put out of their misery.

A pang of guilt I never would have felt before roared through me in an angry wave as I moved into the darkness behind me, the heavy wooden door of the space closing with a thud.

I jerked at the sound, regretting what I had done, regretting taking the lives of all those people. All the ones that lay on the street.

I knew they weren’t all dead. I had heard them moan, seen them writhe. I had heard their pain as the poison Edmund had engineered moved through them, awakening their magic, infecting it and turning them into just another of his puppets.

I had lived that nightmare for years, and I didn’t wish it on anyone.

I held to that as I battled the regret that was corrupting me. The guilt at such pointless loss made me wonder if perhaps there had been a way to save them, to help them.

If
we could have saved them.

If I could have helped instead of destroyed.

We would never know.

I tried to push away the emotion that kept growing and turned into the dark toward the boy that was writhing as he began to wake up. His body was limp and pained from exhaustion and insanity.

With one hand against his forearm, I plunged him back to sleep, his body lifting itself as my tiny frame hoisted him over my shoulder, carrying him awkwardly as I ascended the stairs toward Sain’s voice and the men who hadn’t left my mind.

I needed to know they were okay. All of them. I need to see them with my own eyes.

My heart pulsed painfully with each step, each one taken at a run before I burst through the ancient, carved door at the top of the narrow stairwell and to the three men I had been so ecstatic to see. Whom I had been so concerned about.

It was nothing like I had expected.

They were there, the three of them. Dramin was bleeding profusely from the neck where he was hunched against the wall. Thom was unconscious and covered in blood I prayed was not his. And in between them was Sain. He cowered against the floor like a beaten dog, his hair mussed, his eyes wide as he looked at me with the green that was darker than I had ever seen it. A green so haunted that everything around me froze.

My shoulders hunched in fear as my heart accelerated, the panic at seeing them, at needing to know if they were okay frozen to my bones as I looked at him.

Then a voice more ice than fear passed from his lips.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

I barely even heard him.

I couldn’t focus on his words, not above the way every muscle in my body tightened, not with the way my pounding heartbeat filled my ears and mixed with the echoes of screams until I was surrounded by them. Surrounded by death. Surrounded by pain.

All I saw was Thom.

Without stopping to think, I rushed into the room, Ryland’s body dropping to the floor with a resounding thunk that echoed in my head, elongating into a bass drum of more pain.

More confusion.

More blood.

Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion as I reached Thom, my shaking hand pressing against him. His skin was as cold as ice, his body as limp and lifeless as though he was dead.

Please don’t let him be dead.

The thought was a vice against my heart, a pulse of pain and anger that threatened to explode out of me.

I had only come to terms with everything, with losing Talon, with understanding the caged personalities I faced, with still loving the seemingly lifeless man before me.

I didn’t want to know what kind of monster losing him would create.

Violently, my magic filled him, rushing through his body in a wave that swallowed him. I checked for organ function, for signs of life, and for his magic. It was a checklist in my head—what to do to save a life or some such nonsense. Except, right then, I couldn’t focus on it.

One by one, I found them—the gentle pulse of his heart, the low gasp of his breath, the calming waves of his magic.

He was alive.

And yet … something was off about them. The calmness of them, the way they seemed to be sleeping, the way he was sleeping, yet nothing was wrong.

My magic continued to push through him, smothering him like a warm blanket as I looked beyond the simple, looked for the injury, for what was wrong, for a way to heal him.

Only to find nothing.

No cuts.

No bites.

No scary internal bleeding.

Just nothing.

It was as simple as him being asleep, but I knew he wasn’t.

“Thom?” The question came much louder than I had intended it to, my residual panic flooding through me as my magic pulsed in an intentionally painful wave. It was not enough to cause damage, just enough to wake. Much the way I had done to him centuries before.

I never liked getting up with the baby.

He didn’t so much as stir with the pinch, his body remaining where it was, hunched against the wall, the old peeling paper falling around his head like a crown.

“Thom?” My fingers wrapped around his arms like vices, my magic continuing to move into him as I shook, pulling him away from the wall only to have his head flop back against the aged printed flowers with a snap.

No response, not from his heart rate, not from his magic, not from him.

I couldn’t look away as my mind and body slowly turning to lead. The momentary panic grew before it was swallowed by my anger, my determination rising in me so quickly that, even though I knew I was dangerous, I didn’t care.

“What happened?” I didn’t even try to keep the growl out of my voice as I turned to Sain, my magic sparking dangerously as I fought the need to catch something on fire.

It would be like me to do something like that. Anger always equaled burn victim.

“Sain?” My voice was sharp as I stared at the aged man with my hand still firmly wrapped around Thom’s as though I was afraid he would fall through the floorboards and be lost to another dimension.

It could happen.

Sain only looked at me with wide eyes from where he cowered before me, his hands continually moving one over the other as if he was trying to rub the skin away. The movement was agitated, fearful, and I felt my skin prickle at seeing it.

His intense stare dug into me as I waited for an answer I already knew wouldn’t come. Not with the way he was acting, the movements so much like before, when we were trapped underground, and they had threatened to take away his mug.

Stupid Drak. If Joclyn ever started acting this way, I would have to take matters into my own hands.

The way he was acting had worried me before, but now I knew why.

Sain was not one to show emotion, but seeing him like that, seeing the fear in his eyes and the panic in his body, I knew.

He was afraid.

I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him afraid before. Even when Edmund had been only yards behind us, he had done little more than walk calmly forward, doling out subtle instructions.

Now, however, the emotions came off him in waves, infecting me like a virus. My magic reacted on instinct as he leaned closer to me, his eyes growing wider as the foul smell of his breath drifted through the stagnant air.

The room felt heavy and hollow as I waited for him to speak, the walls closing in until I was positive it was only us. Even the screams that echoed through the old wooden walls were a woeful memory.

Nothing could be worse than that.

Could it?

“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he repeated the words again, and the fear only grew. The meaning I had missed was a branding iron against my soul, and I flinched.

What
had
he done?

What had he done to make him so scared? To cause both Thom and Dramin to be so injured?

This couldn’t be his doing? There wasn’t any way.

“What!” the word exploded out of me as I moved over to Sain, the sound of my knees scraping against the dust-covered floor loud in the silence.

Sain flinched as if he had been punched, and I froze. The movement was so similar to Ryland, to Joclyn, that it made me wonder what I was seeing. As quickly as the movement had come, however, it was gone. Even though the fear continued to hold him, he still looked like Sain.

My heart raced as I stared at him, waiting for an answer that never came. With each second of silence, my panic grew, my anxiety tensing through me in a vice-like pain, pleading for answers.

“What did you do?” I asked the question again as he continued to wilt before me. The way he moved made it clear he wasn’t going to tell me anything, no matter how hard I asked.

Stupid Drak!

Fighting the need to punch him, I stepped away with a grunt as a gentle groan from beside me pulled me out of my anger and to the ancient beside me, the old man whose life I had ruined so many centuries before. I had vowed to keep him safe, to get him through this, yet he sat there bleeding.

I took one last look at Sain, my dark eyes flaring in anger before I rushed to Dramin’s side. His skin felt like ice under my hand as I pressed it against him, my ability rushing right to his neck, to the gaping wound there and the tiny bits of poisonous magic that was already infecting him.

My eyes snapped to his at the realization, the fear only adding to the panic I already felt. A scream rang loud and clear from right outside as I looked at him, wishing there were words to say.

He had been bitten by one of the rats. One of Edmund’s little weapons. I didn’t know if there was any way to reverse what was done or what it would do to him in the first place.

Normally, the bites sent you into a coma fairly quickly, but he still sat before me, very much awake, his painfully weak magic not so much as reacting to the infiltration.

“Dramin, I—”

“I am fine, Wynifred,” he cut me off, his weak voice riddled with a plea that he didn’t need to speak aloud, an acknowledgement that, Drak or not, he had known all along.

He had known from the moment the sky had exploded with those things. Hell, he was a Drak, so he had probably realized it long before.

My heart tensed in an anxious vice at the knowledge, the unwanted fact ripping through me. I had wanted to save him, to find a way to make up for what I had done. I knew he was accepting defeat, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up yet.

I wasn’t going to tell him that.

I nodded once in understanding, and his face cracked into a sad, little smile as I pooled my magic in his neck, around the open wound that blood still poured from, and began stitching the skin back together. The process was slow and arduous as I fought against the tainted magic that was inside of him, fought against a wound that didn’t seem to want to go back together.

“I can fix things as well as I can destroy them,” I said as the bleeding stopped, the skin continuing to weave itself together until it was nothing more than a fine, pink line, sealing the poison and the possible death sentence inside.

“One neck is hardly worth the trouble.” He sighed.

My pride prickled a bit at the depth of his deceivingly kind voice.

“It is to me.” I could barely get the words out. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he repeated, his frail hand moving over mine in a motion that looked more like a slow motion memory replay than reality, the pressure heavy and somewhat calm as he looked at me and tried to comfort me without magic.

He looked even frailer in the weak light of the dust-covered room if that was possible. His eyes were wide and searching, an emotion behind them bleeding into me in words I could almost understand even if he didn’t say them.

“Dramin?” I was surprised at the shake in my voice, the way my hand clung to his arm, a fear I didn’t fully understand moving into me.

He said nothing. He only looked at me with the same confusion I felt, the screaming and panic from outside seeping through the shuttered window like a fog.

I felt more of a responsibility toward this man than I had anyone before, with the exception of one. Despite keeping him alive, saving him, wasn’t going to repay what I had done, it was all I could think of to do. And this felt like a failure.

Combine that with the desperate look that covered his eyes, and I couldn’t stop the dread, the guilt, from winding its way up my spine and latching itself onto my shoulders like a hundred ton weight.

He opened his mouth to speak, the fear in his eyes growing for only a moment before the loud boom of Sain’s voice shook through me, my muscles tensing back to the panicked knit.

“It is not the way of the Drak, son,” Sain’s voice boomed from behind me with the depth of sight that I had heard before—with the deference he always seemed to think he was owed.