Exile (21 page)

Please, just let it go
.

She wasn’t supposed to know how to do most of the things she could do with ascard and it would bode ill to let him in on those things. If only she could talk him down this time, get him to give up.

Jayce’s lip lifted in a silent snarl. “You aren’t going to get the last word, Indigo.” He hissed her name like it was some foul thing that people only whispered of in dark corners. “That isn’t the way this works.”

He moved forward again and she backed a few more steps, trying to maintain distance between them. This time she came up against a table and had to move to one side to clear her way. “Why don’t we sit down and talk about it? Maybe we can find a way to settle things that works for both of us.”

He shook his head. “No one else gets to have you.”

She narrowed her eyes, the ring becoming heavy on her finger, reminding her that someone else had already had her, someone handsome and powerful who needed her. Stopping her retreat, she stood tall and stared hard at him. “It’s too late for that.”

Lightening flashed in his eyes and she cursed herself for letting her emotions get the upper hand. One moment of reciprocated anger, a mere flash of defiance, was all he needed to keep his rage burning hot.

“Whore,” he yelled, his voice cracking. A tear ran down his cheek and her stomach twisted into knots. Did he actually believe he ever loved her or that she somehow belonged to him? “I’ll drag you down to the docks and sell you to the slave traders. Maybe they can find a use for you.”

Anger and frustration pounded their way to the surface. She was wasting precious time arguing with him. People she cared for were in danger. “Get out.”

Jayce lunged at her then, the movement so sudden that she didn’t manage to dodge him. He grabbed a fistful of hair, using it to pull her head back and down. She staggered, a second of panic overriding rational thought. One knee struck the floor, sending a bolt of pain up through her hip. His eyes were wide and a lunatic grin warped his handsome features. He drew back his free hand to strike her. The gesture took her back to the last time he had attacked her, before she had gone to Lyra. Everything stopped, a razor edge of hatred erasing all of her fear. She wasn’t about to let him strike her again. Not ever.

She slammed a wall of ascard power into him. His hand jerked opened in surprise, freeing her, and he reeled back into a table. The decorative candelabra on the table crashed to the floor. He caught himself, looking confused for a moment, and then he glared hatred, hatred edged with a bitter note of fear that sung loud to her wide-open ascard abilities. She climbed to her feet, using another side table to steady herself. Her heart pounded so hard in her chest that it sounded like war drums beating in her ears.

This is war
.
It won’t end until one of us is dead
.

She could scare him with her power or put him to sleep as she had once before, but there would always be another day when drink made him bold and brought him back to her door.

“I’ve had a bad day, Jayce, now isn’t a good time to test me.” She returned his glare while she struggled to take control of the loathing boiling up inside her. It was an abhorrent emotion, one that planted cruel thoughts in her head.

Jayce’s lip curled up in feral snarl. “I’m done doing things on your schedule.” He drew the hunting knife from his belt.

She shook her head, keeping a hand on the table. Her mind spun with the possible conclusions to this confrontation, none of them good, and part of her wondered what the harm would be in ridding the world of such a man. Today that part of her was more persuasive than usual. “Don’t do this,” she warned. “It isn’t worth dying over.”

He hesitated for an instant, brow furrowing with uncertainty, and she hoped he would remember that she had put him to sleep and burned his hands on prior encounters with no more than a thought. Then the brief sanity vanished from his eyes and he lunged. Her hatred stepped in to meet him, a relief from long hours of uncertainty and sorrow. It filled her mind with scalding fury. She grabbed the knife by the blade, protecting her hand with a shield of ascard, and twisted it from his grasp. At the same time, noting the rise of horror in his eyes with an odd sense of detachment, as though she watched from a distance, she dove into him with ascard, closed it around his heart and squeezed. Somewhere someone screamed a denial in her voice. When his heart was silent in his chest, she released the crushing hold. He collapsed at her feet like an oversized marionette whose strings had been cut.

For some uncertain length of time, she stared at the body, uncomprehending. Then the reality of what she had done crept in.

Murderer
.

Still holding the blade of his knife in one hand, she sank to her knees next to him. She pressed her fingertips to his neck and searched for a pulse even as she confirmed with ascard that his heart had been crushed into pulp by the force of her power.

Murderer
.

How was she going to explain this? She had murdered someone. There were so many other ways she could have stopped him. So many ways she could have used her power to disable him long enough to call the authorities. Instead, she had killed him in cold blood.

He would have come back. He would have always come back
.

Her stomach turned. There was no excuse for what she had done and no way to call it an accident. Any decent healer would be able to see that. Her hands began to tremble, knelt there beside him, still holding the cold steel blade of his knife in one hand. This wasn’t who she was. Or was it? Serivar skewed her training toward making her into weapon. Yiloch had let her be his weapon. Was this what she was now, a tool suited more for killing than for love? An adept groomed to hurt rather than heal?

“What have I done,” she whispered, fighting back nausea and fear that threatened to overwhelm rational thought.

I must not panic.
The trembling spread through her body, every muscle shaking.

“You appear to have killed him.”

She flinched and glanced over her shoulder. Edan stood in the doorway of her bedroom, gazing down at her. Too calm. Too composed. When had he come in? How long had he been there?

She looked back at Jayce, lying dead before her, the panic she warned herself against blossoming in her chest.

Focus
, she commanded, trying to keep her breathing steady.
Look where your carelessness has gotten you and learn from it.

“You’re masking has improved,” she stated. There was only a hint of a tremor in her voice despite the fact that her heart threatened to pound its way through her chest. Still bowed over Jayce’s body, she slipped his dagger into the sleeve of her cloak and checked all her masks and barriers, ensuring that Edan wouldn’t sense her fear.

“Your old fiancé?” he asked, his tone far too casual, too void of alarm or surprise, for the situation.

“How did you find me here?” Her voice shook more this time despite her efforts. She hoped he would assume that was due to her panic over what she had done. If so, he would be at least partly correct.

If I get out of this, I will never let my guard slip again
, she promised herself. For an instant, she considered praying to The Divine, but having just killed someone, she didn’t think The Divine was likely to hear her.

“I apologize for my intrusion, but I was concerned. You were so upset earlier. I decided to check on you. I saw you come here the other evening, so I assumed this was where you were staying. When you didn’t answer my knock, I let myself in.”

Something in his tone undermined his words, making them sound like rehearsed lines in a play, devoid of sincerity. She managed not to jump when his hand appeared next to her face, offering to help her up. Jayce’s eyes stared accusation at her. She closed her eyes, trying to clear her mind, longing for clarity and control. If only it would all be gone when she opened her eyes, like a nightmare.

“It was self-defense,” Edan reassured, his voice destroying her moment of glorious self-delusion.

Opening her eyes, she took the offered hand and allowed him to help her stand. When she was on her feet, he pulled her around to face him, placing her back to the wall with a bookcase on one side and a hand on the opposite shoulder to keep her from moving away. With the other hand, he traced a gentle caress along her jaw line. She sensed that the secrets he kept were very close to surfacing. Those secrets might be of use to her now. Forcing herself not to recoil from the passion burning in his eyes, she stood her ground.

Concealing her workings, she extended numerous tendrils of ascard, skimming over all of his protections in search of a way through. His masking, though much improved, was still not perfect. As his desire flared and he moved close enough that their lips were almost touching, she felt his barriers shifting with his distraction.

Drawing on the additional power woven into the ring, she found that she could dig past his outer barriers, masking the tendril of ascard she used to bore her way in. Beneath the outer barriers, she encountered deeper layers of masking and illusion bearing the ascard signatures of several other individuals. The work was magnificent. Drilling down through those layers, she finally found his true inner aspect, and the ascard signature there was all too familiar. She peeled back her masking, allowing him to feel the tendril of ascard as she drew it out.

A cold calm filled her, the vast supply of ascard she drew into herself now driving fear and revulsion into a deep, secluded corner of her mind where they couldn’t interfere. Now that she knew who she was dealing with, every fiber of her being understood that she couldn’t afford any weakness.

“You almost fooled me,” she murmured, a soft, sensual whisper.

The illusions melted away and Myac stood before her, his black eyes shining with dark humor, long obsidian hair adding a ghostly pallor to already pale features.

“What gave me away?”

“It was something in your eyes when we met,” she said, remembering the first time she met him as Edan and the sense of something familiar in his look.

Myac leaned in and kissed her, his lips warm and soft against hers. She returned the kiss, the calm moving aside to make room for cruel indifference rising on a soothing wave of ascard power as she slid the dagger from her sleeve.

Myac moved back from her the tiniest bit, his predatory smile filled with a deep satisfaction and a hunger that declared his intentions without a need for words.

“I told Serivar we were the same, you and I.” He traced the line of her jaw again, his gaze following the motion of his fingertips, admiring.

“You were right.” A pang of remorse stabbed through her chest at the truth that lived in those words.
We are both murderers
.

Then she shoved the dagger into his chest and pushed him away, pulling the weapon free when he staggered back. Pain and surprise burst forth in his widened eyes. Falling to one knee, he looked down at the blood spreading over his shirt then up at her, silenced by shock. His expression darkened and she erected a protective barrier when she felt him opening up to more ascard. Jumping over Jayce’s body, she threw open the door and fled the room.

There was no time now for pondering options. There were very few options left.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was dark now. Indigo slid the bloodied dagger up into her sleeve again on her way out the door and hurried back to the academy. Myac would have to focus his power on healing for a time if he were to have any chance of surviving the dire injury she had inflicted on him. Given his power and association with Serivar, there was a fair chance that he would be able to do so. The healing process would at least buy her some time. She could only hope it would be enough.

Outside the administration building, she hid in the shadows, waiting while she searched the building for any sign of Serivar. With a growing sense of hope, she finished her search and found no trace of him. She entered the building. Those few healers present at this hour were there primarily as emergency support for the neighboring medical buildings. They greeted her politely, so used to seeing her there now that they didn’t think to question her. She kept her pace casual and returned their greetings, keeping her hands hidden for their shaking and the blood that still stained them. Knowing who she was up against now, she wasn’t going to squander precious ascard resources to clean or steady her hands.

She slipped into Serivar’s office and went back to the hidden training room where the key stones waited, lined up on the shelf. Grabbing the two active stones, she placed one in a pocket and held the other, the one Serivar had touched that she was sure would be for Yiloch’s prison, in her palm. The stone pulsed warm in her grasp, its response to her touch drawing forth a small gasp of surprise. She didn’t know if what she was planning would work, but there was no time to come up with a better plan. There was no time to waste on indecision. She focused her power on the stone and entered the prison.

The long beach stretched out before her. Several yards away, she spotted Yiloch sitting cross-legged and gazing out over the water. He turned to look at her, handsome as ever under the false night sky, a false moon giving shine to his silvery hair, and anger flared to life in his pale eyes. Rising in one smooth motion, he started walking toward her, rage adding a deadly threat to his elegant stride. She longed to speak with him alone, to try to explain what had happened, but she couldn’t risk the time just now. Ignoring him with effort, she pulled the other key stone from her pocket and focused her power on it. It grew hot enough to scald her palm, disintegrating seconds before she could react to the pain, and Ferin staggered out of nowhere beside her, gasping for air.

Yiloch stopped and stared at Ferin with a puzzled expression. Then his rage-filled eyes refocused on something behind her, giving her a few seconds of warning. She spun to find Myac standing behind her, disguised as Edan once more, though the illusion was far more superficial this time, a hasty working meant to hide him from the majority of people who didn’t have the skill to dig past it. He was holding a stone like the one she held. A secondary key to the prison. He must have had it on him already to have healed and followed her this fast.