The Lady of Toryn Anthology (Lady of Toryn trilogy) (54 page)

Blood spilled from her arm,
pooling gruesomely beneath her limp hand. With some effort, Ashlyn lifted her
hand, resting it across Tag’s massive head, trying to elevate the wound as much
as possible to slow the bleeding.

Killed
by a wolf in the Heavenly City,
they had said.

It seemed that at least that much
of Kou’s vision had been accurate.

The sound of her labored breathing
punctuated the silence. Ashlyn lay still for a long time, watching for the moon
to emerge from behind the clouds.

                                                           
To be concluded…

REDEMPTION

Book
3 in the Lady of Toryn trilogy

Chapter 1

Stay Awake

Skye materialized in front of a smooth marble pillar
as the sun peeked over the horizon. Rays of light illuminated his solemn,
clean-cut features.

“Ashlyn Li,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ve been
in this situation before. How many times I have told you that true leaders
don’t abandon their followers?”

Ashlyn’s eyes fluttered as she fought to stay
conscious. “I had to…kill…Kou,” she rasped. Her lips were dry as paper.

The blond swordsman turned his disapproving gaze on
her. “And you didn’t even do that right, did you?” he replied scornfully, and
pushed off the pillar, crouching beside her. “You killed Tag, but only managed
to injure Kou. He might die. He might not. But his odds are better than yours.”

Ashlyn had struck Kou in the shoulder with her
shuriken, but it hadn’t been a killing blow. Fury and despair roiled within her
as she considered the events of last night. Kou had murdered her father, and
Ashlyn’s first thought had been to avenge Lord Li…but Skye was right. She’d
acted recklessly by going alone, and she had failed.

“Don’t give her such a hard time,” Vargo said,
suddenly appearing sprawled across the railing just a few feet from where Ashlyn
lay. One leg dangled listlessly off the side of the railing, swinging idly.
“She tried. She just wasn’t up to the challenge.” He took a long swig from a
flask that flashed silver in the early morning light.

“Please,” Ashlyn whispered. She tried to raise her
hand to reach for the flask, but her fingers twitched in response, too weak to
do anything more. “P-please,” she repeated. Her voice was a dry husk, empty and
lifeless.

“What? Oh, this?” Vargo said, holding up the flask.
“You wouldn’t want this. Nothing in it.” He turned the flask upside down,
proving his point.

“We’re not real anyway,” Skye spoke up. “You know
that, right?”

Ashlyn knew. She knew that she was seeing things
that weren’t really there. More than that, she knew that she was dying, and no
one was coming to save her. But somehow, even as she realized for the hundredth
time that she was talking to a figment of her imagination, the epiphany seemed
to crumple up and float away, and she looked up at Skye again, wondering
woozily why he wasn’t helping her.

She hadn’t looked at her arm since the first rays of
light appeared over the horizon, but she didn’t need to. The wolf’s sharp teeth
had torn her flesh from just below her elbow up to her shoulder.

She didn’t know how much blood she’d lost…but it was
bad.

Ashlyn let her eyes drift shut. Maybe rest would
help her heal.

“You’re not falling asleep on us, are you?” Vargo
asked sharply. “That’s pretty inconsiderate.”

“I’m…sorry,” she muttered, and opened her eyes
again.

Tag, one of the Toryn ninjas who’d pretended to be
Ashlyn’s younger brother, had used the
shift
magic to turn into a wolf and attack her. Ashlyn had stabbed him through
the neck with her shuriken, killing him, but he’d fallen on top of her, pinning
her down. His heavy, stiff body was still immobilizing her legs, his massive
head resting across her chest and stomach. The seeping blood from his neck wound
had soaked her clothing and then frozen overnight, but Ashlyn had long ago
stopped shivering.

Her father had told her the night before that
shift
was capable of transforming its
user into a wolf, in addition to the bear and panther forms Ashlyn had
witnessed previously.
 
Wolves, the only
animals in Kresmir capable of intelligent thought and conversation, were lethal
opponents, but Ashlyn had never seen a
shift
wolf until Tag had attacked her.

Vargo dropped his flask on the pearl-tiled floor,
but instead of clattering against the tiles, the sound it made sounded like
footsteps. “Damn,” he said. “Good thing it was empty.”

“Ashlyn!” someone yelled, and it wasn’t Vargo or
Skye.

“You’re hallucinating,” Skye said, seemingly amused
by her feverish state.

Aik’s furry face entered her line of vision. Ashlyn
was happy to see her friend, but much too cold to react to his sudden
appearance. He padded up to her and touched his muzzle to her cheek. Normally
the wolf’s nose was cold, but right now Ashlyn was so chilled that she couldn’t
feel any change in temperature, only the pressure from the contact.

“Hang on, Ash,” he said, and sat back on his haunches
before sending up a long, eerie wolf howl that rang in Ashlyn’s ears like a
bell.

Skye and Vargo abruptly disappeared.

Drake vaulted up the stairs and skidded onto his
knees beside her, looking decidedly
un
-Drake-like
as he slipped in the sticky, half-frozen pool of blood.

“Ashlyn, look at me,” he said urgently, putting a
hand to her cheek and turning her face towards him.

She stared at him dully, lamenting her sad state of
mind for conjuring up the vampire in her fantasies. “Go away,” she mumbled.
“Bring Vargo back.”

Something flashed across his handsome features-
something like the pain she’d felt the day before, when he had coldly
backpedaled after finally admitting his feelings for her. Ashlyn felt a brief
twinge of satisfaction.

The loud whirring of engines reached her ears, and
over Drake’s shoulder she saw the airship circling, looking for a place to land
in the water-soaked city.

Drake grabbed Tag’s body and flung it aside, finally
freeing Ashlyn to move. She tried to pull one knee up, and couldn’t do it,
barely eliciting a tremble from her leaden limbs. Drake gently reached over and
touched her injured arm, and the green light of
heal
illuminated his face as the warming effects of the magic
enveloped her.

“No…use,” Ashlyn mumbled, and turned her head to the
side, irritated at the loss of her numbness as she began to warm up. “Leave me
alone.”

Somewhere in her head she was aware that he was
trying to save her, and she was also very much aware that he did not seem to be
another one of her hallucinations. But she wanted to be left alone.

Drake turned her face towards him again. “Stay
awake,” he said firmly.

“No use,” she repeated.

“I won’t let you die,” he snapped, ruby eyes
flashing. “I promise you that.
Stay
awake.
”

She could feel her wounds closing, nerves
reconnecting and flesh knitting under Drake’s touch. As the pain of healing
intensified, it seemed to penetrate the haze of her delirium. Ashlyn found
herself thrown back into reality with surprising abruptness, and her whole body
jerked in shock. “That
hurts,
” she
moaned, trying (and failing miserably) to pull her arm away from Drake. “Stop
it.”

He responded by sliding his arms underneath her and
standing, picking her up so that her head lolled back and her arms dangled
awkwardly. Ashlyn’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, but a sharp bark from Aik
brought her back. “
Crap,”
she said
ineloquently, realizing that her body was trying to quit even as Drake was
trying to save her.
I’ve lost too much
blood.

“I’m taking you to the airship,” Drake said, and he
shifted her in his arms so that her cheek was against his shoulder. “Stay
awake.” He began to run, and Ashlyn was totally helpless to do anything but lie
in his arms and stupidly hope that he didn’t drop her. She could hear the
rhythmic clicking of Aik’s claws on the pearl tiles as he followed, could feel
Drake’s hands tightening on her body. Every step served to jolt her out of
near-unconsciousness, but the urge to sleep was constant and nearly
overwhelming.

“Talk to me,” Drake told her suddenly. He leaped
over the last two steps, landing with a splash in thigh-deep water that
drenched them both, and waded towards the next staircase. The urgency of his
movements and the shallowness to his breathing was unmistakable. He was worried
about her.

If she’d had the strength to do so, Ashlyn would
have laughed out loud. She was dying, he’d rejected her, and he wanted to talk
now?
Her thoughts were too muddled to
comprehend that he was trying to keep her awake, but some miniscule, polite
corner of her mind (a corner that was clearly repressed during her more lucid
moments) reminded her that it would be rude not to comply with his request, so
she struggled to respond.

“You don’t…need…to breathe,” she murmured, saying
the first thing that came to mind. It seemed a betrayal for Drake to deceive
people with unnecessary human habits.

“But I still do it,” Drake answered candidly as he
ran up the steps. “As much from habit as an attempt to blend in. Keep talking.”

Ashlyn thought about her dad, lying beside him and
holding his hand. She’d been so happy to see him again. But after Kou had
broken into the room, her dad had still been lying there, a peaceful and serene
expression on his face…except that he hadn’t been breathing at all.

“Kou…had…
re
…
reveal
,” she whispered, and she was
speaking so softly that only Drake, with his superhuman hearing, could have
understood her.

Their eyes met briefly as his step faltered, a
slight hitch in his stride, and she saw the sorrow in his eyes. He knew about
her father.

Ashlyn had lost her hira shuriken to Kou in the
basement of her home in Toryn, and she was so desperate to save a dying Vargo
that she allowed Kou to escape with the weapon, along with the stanes inside
it.
Reveal
led its user to whatever
they were seeking, and Kou had found Ashlyn’s father by using the stane’s
powerful tracking magic. Kou had murdered Lord Li as Ashlyn slept beside him,
by injecting some kind of poison into her father’s IV line.

There was a small, desperate part of her that had
secretly hoped Sara or Aik were wielding some kind of rare magic that would
bring her father back to life. There were so many stanes in Kresmir, so many
magics. One of them had to bear the power of resurrection.

But the despair in Drake’s eyes told her the truth,
and Ashlyn wanted to die in that moment. For three years she had avoided her
father and Toryn, fleeing her destiny until even Lord Li had believed her to be
dead. When she’d returned, Kou had led her to believe that her father was the
enemy, driven mad by
shift,
but in
reality Lord Li had been a victim of Kou’s manipulations and cruelty. His last
months had been spent suffering at the hands of a monster. If Ashlyn had
accepted her birthright and returned to Toryn following Lord Angelo’s defeat,
then maybe her father would still be alive today.

“He’s
gone,”
she
choked out, and began to cry, except that she had no tears left, and her sobs
only invoked pitiful tremors in her already trembling ribcage. Hers was the
crippling, heart-rending grief of a dying daughter, the lamentation of a broken
warrior. There was no reprieve.

Drake lifted her closer, crushing her to him in an
awkward embrace as he ran. “I know,” he said, and his voice was raw, like he’d
been breathing hard from running too long, except that Ashlyn knew vampires
didn’t need to breathe and Drake Lockhart could never get winded.

The sound of his boots against the ramp to the
airship clanged in her ears, and Drake said, “We’re here, Ashlyn, just
stay awake,
” before Sara’s shrill voice
cut in with, “Careful now. Where is she hurt?”

“Her right arm was torn open. I’ve sealed the vein.
She’s nearly bled out.” Drake spoke as he ducked into the airship, heading down
the corridor towards the infirmary. Ashlyn numbly focused on keeping her eyes
open, fighting the urge to squeeze them shut under the harsh fluorescent lights
inside the ship.

“She’ll need a transfusion.” Ashlyn heard metallic
squeaking as Sara yanked open a file cabinet. “What is her blood type? I can’t
remember. Where is her file?” Desperation was creeping into the scientist’s
tone.

Drake placed Ashlyn on the operating table, easing
her down carefully and lacing the fingers of his right hand through hers.
 
“We have the same blood type,” he said,
brushing strands of frosty hair back from Ashlyn’s face with the cold metal
fingers of his gloved left hand. “Take mine.”

There was a brief pause as Sara considered this, and
Ashlyn stared up into Drake’s face, blinking furiously to abate the sting of
her dry eyes and trying very hard to stay conscious. Now that she’d been yanked
from her own delirium into the real world, emotions were ricocheting back and
forth inside her, each one opening a fresh and painful wound upon impact. She
wanted to sleep, she wanted to die…she wanted to wake up from this awful dream
and be back in Endro, far away from Toryn and Kou and the horror of reality.