Crown of Cinders (Imdalind Series Book 7) (15 page)

Great. Here we go.

Are you ready?
Ilyan whispered in my mind, the tension in his voice as clear as it was on his face.

I smiled. Love was dripping from him, smothering the slowly awakening crowd behind him into oblivion.

Ready?
I laughed.
This is nothing compared to an angry Ovailia who really wants to kill you.

Point taken,
he said, a chuckle plainly audible in his words.
Come. Let us stand together as king and queen. Those who do not see you as such have no place in our kingdom. They have no place to stand beside us in the battle we are to face. They accept you, or we reject them. This is the time we know. This is when our battle begins.

The crowd began to shift and move as I stepped forward, placing my fingertips against the king, standing beside him as he did me, hand over hand.

His magic moved inside of me, the connection rattling my strength as my nerves twisted underneath my skin in an eagerness to get out. The same anxious energy moved amidst the crowd, theirs in anger. The emotion rushed back into them, ready to explode. To attack, to fight, to run. It was all there on their faces. It was there, running inside of me. And now that I stood on the other side of the barrier, the emotions felt deeper, a density that threatened to explode out of me.

All I needed was another rock to come my way, which I was certain would come in a matter of seconds.

Wyn and Ryland stepped forward as I did, the extraordinary heat of Wynifred’s internal fire spanning over the cool air of the room. Glaring at the audience, Wyn folded her arms over a faded Boston T-shirt, full bodyguard status engaged.

“We stand before you as your king and as your queen. We are your rulers, and as your rulers, we command—”

“She is not fit to lead us!” a solitary voice broke over the crowd, snapping through them in a wave that discharged in tiny pockets of hatred, pockets of loyalty rising up.

Violence erupted in sparks of magic, blasts and bangs echoing amidst the ruins as more than punches were thrown.

A stream of violet headed toward us, Wyn stepping in front of me, ready to face it, only to have it be intercepted by an attack from one of the many Skȓíteks in the crowd. The woman rushed to stand before us in order to protect us, several others following her lead.

One after another, they came, forming a human barrier, ready to protect us, to fight for us.

“We need to protect those who stand with us!” Ilyan shouted above the noise, his magic already moving over them, ready to begin. “Get our people on this roof; immobilize the rest. We will deal with them once they are taken care of.”

“Sounds boring, but you’re the boss,” Wyn mused, winking at me before jumping off the dilapidated slab of roof, fire following behind her as she went into action.

Stay safe, můj kamarád.

Ilyan followed Wyn’s lead without a second glance, his magic spinning inside me in the same type of mad eagerness I had seen so many times before. I could feel his exhilaration for battle resonating within me, fanning my own eagerness. But they were emotions that did not reach Ryland’s face.

Ry stared at me, wide-eyed, fear and panic pulling at him.

My own heart fell into the same familiarity. I could already feel it trying to eat me alive.

“Ryland?” I asked, my thoughts moving a million miles as I blocked an attack right beside us, trying to pull him out of whatever hell he had fallen into. “We have to go.”

We both internally went right back to the massive hall, his house falling apart around us, to the rescue mission that had been the worst kind of failure.

I almost expected his eyes to darken and his soul to turn black.

I almost ran away.

I deflected another attack to the side as a blast almost hit my feet, shifting the rubble we stood on precariously. I screamed at the movement, falling back into Ryland who was still frozen in place, trapped in his father’s head, his eyes screaming for help.

“You can do this,” I whispered, putting my hand on his forearm without thinking, ignoring the flinch that came from the contact. “You can control him, and you can help us. Ilyan brought you up as his second, after all.”

“I know,” Ryland whispered, his voice so quiet I could barely hear him. “Just, if I lose control—”

“You won’t. And if you do, I’ll …” I stopped midsentence, my voice catching as my head spun, my magic slamming into me so hard I was positive I wasn’t breathing. I was positive I had been hit.

Ilyan?

Joclyn!

There was no other magic in me but my own, no other magic than my sight that was quickly taking control.

My sight …

Joclyn!

“Joclyn!”

I fell to the ground with a thud, Ryland’s scream mixing with Ilyan’s as he tried to catch me. Ry’s magic softened the fall, but it didn’t matter.

Ryland’s voice echoed in my head, the sound bolstered by the screams and explosions that surrounded us. I could still see him before me, but it was fading, the world spinning around me.

The magic moved into me, and though I tried to fight it, I couldn’t. It took control. It dragged me down. Everything was so far away. It was moving away.

“Ryland,” I tried to force the words out as my magic swelled in my head, erupting underneath my skin in the worst kind of goose bumps, ice against fire. “I can’t stop it. You have to protect me.”

I didn’t know if I had been able to get the words out. I didn’t know if he had heard me. I couldn’t even hear the battle anymore, yet I could see Ryland screaming at me, his curls bouncing, the magical attacks exploding over his head in pastel fireworks. I heard nothing, just the buzzing as my sight pulled at me.

Ryland faded into the black of sight, the vision swallowing me like the drain in a tub, sucking me into oblivion.

The power took control as my eyes darted to black, leaving me staring at the dark, the occasional quake of what I assumed were explosions rumbling around me.

They shook my bones, everything tense with fear. I almost expected the sight to end, to drag me back to the war. However, with one sharp inhale, a flood of color wrapped around me, a million images coming one right after another before they stopped in an alley I recognized as being in Prague. Except, the sun was too yellow, the street too clean.

The children, however, I knew at once. They were younger, but I knew their smiles and their button noses. I had never seen Jaromir without the mark on his cheek, yet I knew him without question.

“I don’t like fighting,” Jaromir groaned as he sunk down against the wall, folding himself into a tiny pretzel.

The world around him rattled with another blast, glass banging in frames, rocks shivering on the ground. He didn’t seem to notice. He simply lay still, his back shaking with tears as Míra came up beside him, wrapping herself around him like a cage, her cheek pressed against his back.

“I don’t like it, and it’s getting worse.” Míra’s voice was a distant whisper as it moved within the sight of the past.

The sound of Jaromir’s cries was haunting as they rattled with another blast.

“Promise me you’ll never hurt me like Papa hurts Momma,” Jaromir begged, sitting up so fast that Míra had to scuttle to avoid impact. “Promise me you’ll always love me?”

“Silly, Jay-Jay. I’m your best sister. Of course I’ll never do that.”

The kids smiled and laughed, the sound of their promise following me as they moved away, like oil through water, colors swirling and dancing until a cave took their place.

I expected the same cave I had seen so many times before, the one that taunted me with Ilyan’s death, the one I had seen Míra standing in days before. This one was different—a large, open cavern flooded with muddy water. I was convinced I had seen it before, but I couldn’t place it.

My heart clenched as the memory embedded itself. The story Dramin had told me so many times smacked me in the face. I knew what this was.

Imdalind.

“Are you watching?” The deathly hollow of my own voice filled my ears as my sight flickered alongside another explosion, the water shimmering as the rocks shifted. Except, when the echo of battle ended, my own image was now standing before the pool. Standing, staring with a bloodied length of ribbon in my hands.

I stood still before another explosion waved amid the sight, wiping me from view and shifting the sight back to the kids, back to Míra who sat, crying in a tent, back to Jaromir who was throwing rocks against a barrier. Each image flashed for a split second before they changed again, replaced by a forest I knew too well, one I had been hunted in for nights on end. Taunted by Cail and his games.

“Are you watching?” the deep voices of a hundred Drak inside me asked again, louder. The death in my voice twisted in my stomach, writhing down to my legs as I fought the need to run. Run past the trees, away from the steps I could already hear coming after me.

With the snap of lightning, with the rumble of thunder, the forest flickered and left, the same trees pulled into a perfect circle, a fire blazing in the center. Wyn, Ryland, and I sat around the pit, sharing the same pie we had so long ago. The sound of our laughter bounced off the trees, bounced in my ears, before it was replaced by the blast of battle, Ryland’s scream traveling alongside it.

I cringed at the sound, at the panic, and tried once again to pull myself out of the sight. It stayed, the clearing emptying of people and pie and filling with hundreds of Skȓíteks, each dressed in clothes more fitted to that of the Elizabethan era. And in the middle of them, a woman stood with hair as blonde as Ilyan’s, dressed in white, a handkerchief over her face. Sain stood beside others I didn’t recognize with a bright blue Vilỳ I was convinced I had seen before and a Trpaslík on either side of him. The others were crying while Sain stood still, attempting to hide a smug little smile on his face.

I stared, confused at the scene, before everything rattled again, pulling me into the middle of an ornate hall, large oak doors and marble floors surrounding me.

I knew this hall.

I had grown up in this hall.

But it was not the hall of my childhood. It was the hall of my nightmares.

It was the hall that was full of rot and rats where everything smelled of death and was dripping with water so rusty it looked like blood.

Maybe it was.

My mind said it was.

My mind took me right back to those haunted halls, the explosion that shook the space making everything real.

“Are you watching?” my own voice asked again as the lights in the hall flickered with an explosion.

With each flash of light, a tall woman appeared, shimmering in and out as she had in my nightmares years before.

My mother.

“No.”

My heart stopped beating as my mouth went dry, the flickering leaving me staring at her bloodied face. Her feet were twisted on the cracked tiles she stood on, surrounded by the long curls of wallpaper that were pulling away from the walls.

A scream pressed against my chest as I tried to run from her. Run from my mother for the first time in my life.

She looked the same as she had the last day I had seen her, down to the chipped yellow nails that I had watched go limp as a trail of blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.

“NO!” The scream found its way out as my gut tensed and ripped in two. “No.”

“Are you watching?” This time, it was my mother who spoke, the words haunted and hollow before an explosion rattled around us, pulling the sight right to the room I had left more than an hour before.

My brother slept curled in his bed, his blanket tucked around him like he was a toddler.

“Are you watching?” a familiar little voice asked.

I turned, expecting to face Míra, only to come face to face with her brother.

Dramin’s bedroom fell away to reveal the dark hallway outside of Dramin’s room.

Jaromir walked amidst the dark, flinching as an explosion rattled the halls around him. The same explosion rattled my dreams and alerted me to the haunting reality I now faced.

This was
now
.

Another explosion shook both of us. The boy flinched further as tears streamed down his face. Míra followed behind him with a grin so sly it sent shivers down my spine.

“Are you watching?”

The sound of Jaromir’s steps was hollow in my ears, an odd squelching noise following each step. He walked as though he were dead, forward, unseeing. Until …

At once, the vision shifted, the children jerking around and moving forward and back as though they were being pulled by a string, as though the whole sight was being rewound.

“Here, they walk,” my voice said, the sudden change in direction pushing a fear against my gut.

“Are you watching?” The depth of my voice came again, pulling me right back to children.

But they were no longer walking in the hall.

Jaromir lay facedown in a pool of crimson, the wet spilling away from him like molasses, seeping into his nightshirt like a sponge, bright red. Míra walked away from him in tears, magic sparking on her fingers as she talked to herself, as she screamed and cried. Cried out to Jaromir. Cursed and yelled at him. But she didn’t turn to help her brother. She didn’t try to save him. She merely walked past.

“Here, they fall.”

Míra walked right toward Dramin’s door as everything rattled, stretching her hand across the dark to clasp the knob I myself had closed minutes before. That I had left, foolishly thinking those behind would be safe.

A door I knew at once would never be.

“Are you watching?”

The images faded as the screams of the hall I had left behind filled my ears. My heart raced in my chest as the panic the prescience had been blocking infected me.

“Are you watching?” I said to myself, sitting straight up as reality returned to me.

Ryland’s worried face stared right into mine as he sat next to me, protecting me from the battle that was still rampant.

He was not the only one.

A wall of Skȓíteks and Chosen surrounded us, their backs to us as they battled.

For a split second, I wondered if we were winning or losing, but I couldn’t ask. I didn’t have time. I didn’t have time for anything.