Burnt Devotion (20 page)

“Ryland?” Even Sain’s voice was shaking in fear, and the question that neither of us wanted to voice was clear in that one word.

What happened if we didn’t find him?

I looked at Sain, fully intending to ask, but he only stared straight ahead, his face dead and pale as he watched something I could not see, his lips moving in words that were drowned in the rumble of thunder from overhead.

“When the girl … Stays … take her blood…” I stared at him as the broken pieces of what I was sure was a sight broke his lips, his lips curling wickedly before the blank stare in his face broke, and he looked to me, eyes wide in a fear I had never seen in him before.

“Everything is broken,” he gasped, a gravelly undertone taking over his voice. “They are coming.”

I didn’t know what to say, how to react to him. I merely gaped at him as my magic flared in a warning. The warning of what was approaching coming too late.

Ryland’s scream broke the forest, the boy running through the trees in animalistic terror, yelling about death and destruction as a jet of black magic poured from his hand, the ribbon of what was sure to be death moving right for my chest.

I reacted before my mind even fully understood what was happening, my instincts kicking in as I raised my hand toward him, a wall of fire erupting from within me. Even though I knew I should be careful, that I shouldn’t attack him, I couldn’t stop it. The magical barrier sped away from me in a destructive force that intercepted the attack, burning it to a crisp before it had a chance to reach me.

With one pulse of magic, I shattered the wall of flame into nothing, ribbons of fire twisting into the air until it was nothing but smoke. I only hoped Ryland was safe and untouched on the other side.

It wasn’t Ryland I should have been concerned about, though.

It was then that I saw what the real danger was, saw the dozens of Trpaslík that Ryland had led right to us, saw the danger in their eyes, and I was facing them with only a useless Drak beside me.

I didn’t even lament this battle, this fight, this bloodshed. It was what I had wanted, after all.

I only smiled.

I smiled as they yelled, my voice echoing through the forest right alongside them, battle calls ringing loud as the thunder rumbled the earth and the magic broke the air.

My hands spread before me as fire lunged from my fingers in a ring that ignited a wall, an attack so much more powerful than what I had sent Ryland’s way exploding from me. This would only bring death, and nothing I could do would stop it. A solid mass of flame burned the front lines of the assassins, a second wave of power speeding through the ground and into the souls of those right behind, turning them to ash before they could even feel the heat of my power. Before they had a chance to fight back.

The tongues of flame fell to the ground when my magic withdrew, the bubbling torrent expanding under my skin as the rain began to fall. Large drops of water fell over us and stuck against the remains of what had once been people.

“Watch yourself,” Sain said from beside me. His voice was full of parental guidance that ground against my spine and clamped my teeth together.

“Now is not the time for lectures, old man,” I growled. “Go fix that one before you criticize my attempts to keep both of us alive.” I nodded my head toward Ryland who was now attacking the next wave of Edmund’s men, his face filled with maniacal laughter before he moved to slamming his head against a tree. “Now.”

I really shouldn’t have to ask him twice. First of his kind or not, now was not the time.

Sain left without another word as the earth moved below me, some magic shifting the dirt as another attack sped past my ear, singeing my hair as it flew beside me.

I had dodged on instinct, but it wasn’t going to be enough. With one flux of my magic, I could feel the deep hatred of the lines of enemies that were moving toward us. Wave after wave moved as swiftly as if they were nothing more than the flow of a tide.

As much as I had wanted this battle, this was going to try my ability to the absolute limit.

Challenge accepted, Edmund.

I fought without thinking, magic moving from my hands, streaking through the air as attacks met in mid-flight, exploding into the air in fireworks of color and energy. More than once, I felt the heat of them against my skin, the now stagnant attack burning potently into my flesh.

I had only just destroyed the last man before five more broke through the trees. Ryland screamed to the left of me right as Sain called out, the sound loud and pained as I was sure whatever Ryland had done was injuring him.

I couldn’t even turn to check.

I couldn’t even help.

The knowledge was a painful vice against my heart. I needed to help them, but with the armies Edmund had sent after us … I might be powerful, but I wasn’t Ilyan.

“Thom!” I screamed his name, my voice cracking with iron and salt as I transformed the five before me into ash, their bodies erupting in stone as the rain splashed against their once alive facades, streaking them with tears they could no longer shed.

“Thom!” I ran to Ryland before the next wave hit us, my magic rushing into him the moment I reached him in a desperate plea to calm him, to knock him out, anything. I might as well have been trying to turn carrots into glass. My hand was nothing more than ice against the heat of his skin.

He looked to me at the contact, his black eyes startling me for the briefest of moments before he smiled. It was a wide, wicked gleam that spread malice over his face. Stone weighed me down at that look, the realization that I was looking at Edmund and not at Ryland feeling like a stab in the gut.

“Think you can survive this, do you?” His voice was a snarl of ice, the magic that had built a wall inside of him so familiar that, for one brief moment, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at Ryland or Edmund. They looked so similar. The voice was the same. The magic was the same.

However, they weren’t.

I had seen Ryland and what they had done to him. I couldn’t let it continue.

“You are a fool to think
you
can, Edmund.” The words ground out of me as the full force of my magic pressed against the barrier Edmund had placed inside his son. I knew it wasn’t enough to break whatever he had done to him, only Joclyn had that power. Regardless, if it could give us reprieve for long enough to make it through the cave, long enough to make it to safety, I would do it.

I had to try.

I screamed as the magic drained from me, my body feeling weak and broken as the hold Edmund had on his son lessened enough that the boy came back full force, his eyes fading to a pained blue as he looked at me for the first time in the last few minutes.

If only it was enough.

The moment the boy came back, the next line of attack broke through the trees with a scream. I turned away, toward the monsters that rushed us, knowing I had to keep them safe. Without the contact of my skin against his, the voice snapped back into his mind, and he went right back to attacking anything and everything that surrounded him.

Throwing Sain away from the boy in a mad attempt to keep him safe, I ran toward those before me. There was nothing he could do for him now, and if he kept trying, he would only get hurt.

I sped through the air with a leap, landing on one of the Trpaslíks with a violent force that sent both of us to the ground, my hand pressing against his windpipe as I burned it closed, his lungs seizing as the flame continued into them.

Moving as quickly as I could, I jumped from the body of the first, lunging into the second and sending him plowing into a tree trunk as a spider web of flame moved over his face, spreading down his body as the slow burn devoured him.

Ready to take on the third, I turned, only to see Thom burst through the trees, Dramin falling to the ground as he moved to attack the next line that was already bursting through the trees.

I ran to Ryland, fully intent to stop him in his tracks, to find some way to keep him alive, to get him to stop as Ilyan and Joclyn appeared beside us in a stutter, their bodies seemingly materializing from nothing before they ran toward us covered in sweat, dirt, and blood. The fear that ran through me relaxed a bit at seeing them there, at knowing they were safe, that they were alive. It was a short-lived calm, because despite being glad to see her, I knew what else it meant.

I didn’t dare ask, because part of me already knew. Sain had spoken the words only minutes before that, in some way, had sealed her fate as much as ours.

Everything was broken.

“Did you kill Edmund?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice, although the emotion was more based in the battle I fought and not in the outcome.

I raised my hand again as she reached me, taking down another of Edmund’s men, trying to ignore the spark of recognition of having killed someone I knew. Someone I had grown up with.

I had killed people I knew many times before, but somehow, it felt different this time, more like betrayal.

In my pain, I ignited a tree not far from where I stood, glad when Thom took advantage of the powerful fire and threw the trunk into a few of the mad Trpaslíks.

“We have to get out of here!” Joclyn didn’t even answer. Her response was as much a guarantee to what I had already thought as to what Sain had said.

I nodded once in understanding, knowing anything else would have to wait until we reached the cave and what I foolishly hoped would be safety. Then she would have to tell me everything—about the golden ribbon that was peeking out from behind her hoodie and everything.

I would have to tell her, too.

Right now, I needed to get us out of here, and sadly, I already knew how.

“Thom,” I yelled to where he valiantly fought, the hunch of his shoulders showing his weakness more than he knew. “You take the Draks with Jos. I can stop them all long enough to give us a good start, but you all have to be ahead of me.”

I rushed the tree line as the sky opened up in a noise that tensed through my nerves, moving directly toward where Ilyan was battling Ryland in an attempt to get him under control.

Flinging two more of Edmund’s men away, I turned as an attack hit me in the gut. I gasped at the pressure, the pain rocking through my spine for only a moment before my magic burned the attack away, the residual energy moving through me with the same fire I always held, rumbling under my skin until it expelled into the earth, erupting several small trees around me into pillars of flame.

We couldn’t wait any longer.

“Ilyan!” I screamed his name in an attempt to get his attention. If this was going to work, everyone needed to be in front of me.

“Ilyan!”

He threw a now unconscious Ryland over his shoulder, his magic flaring as two other Trpaslíks were foolish enough to attack him, but still, he did not hear me.

An endless wall of Trpaslíks were coming right us, so many that, if we weren’t gone before they broke the tree line, I wasn’t sure what I could do, even with Ilyan and Joclyn here to fight with me.

I opened my mouth to scream again, right as Jos came up beside me, her voice so calm and controlled that it felt out of place for the firestorm we were surrounded by, for the blood she was covered with.

“He’s coming.”

I didn’t dare ask for clarification. There was so much more in her statement than calm, something that I was missing.

I let the fear fuel my magic as I turned from my friends, facing the trees that in a moment would become nothing more than flame. They would face the full extent of my magic.

They used to say that there was a reason the fire magic was taken from the earth, that those too foolhardy to use it brought so much destruction to the earth that it was nothing more than flame and glass, which only made me wonder why I had been given such a unique gift.

Why me with my temper and my terrible sense of right and wrong? Why had I been cursed with so much power?

Back then, when I had flared for the first time, it had scared me. That was when I had known.

Even with all the destruction I had done, even with all the death I left behind me, it was something I had never fully unleashed.

Until now.

The magic built to a raging inferno that devoured me from the inside out, a tangible force that pressed against my skin, against my skull, that moved into my bones and rattled them until they were going to fall apart, which was exactly what was happening.

It was a magic so strong that it devoured every fiber of my being. It controlled every part of who I was to work.

I was nothing but fire, nothing but magic. Nothing but destruction.

I could feel the flames licking against my skin, fingers of every color moving over my body and slithering across the ground like snakes that only I could control.

Snakes of flame that would destroy everything in their path.

I fought the need to scream out in pain at the power that had consumed me, my body shrieking as it became nothing more than the flame that dwelled inside of me.

My eyes snapped open as the army burst through the trees. What Edmund had meant to be his last line of defense froze in place as they came face to face with the witch that was bound in an inferno.