I always had been.
“Focus, Ryland.” Sain’s voice tried to break through my insanity, but I barley heard it, barely felt his hand against my shoulder. “You can do this.”
“No … nononono … Kill…” The words kept coming, the image of Joclyn attacking me floating through my mind with more blood and hatred than I was sure had been there a few hours ago when it had actually happened.
“Ryland”—the pressure grew—“you are stronger than it.”
“Nooooooo…” If agony could be put into words, that would be it. It would be the phrase that would encompass my soul and the sound that seeped from me, the echo of a breaking heart. “No.”
“Yes. You can do this, Ryland.”
You can never defeat me.
Never get away.
Do what I ask. Maybe then I will set you free.
Maybe?
Kill them.
“Don’t listen to him.” Sain scooted closer, his fatherly voice a deeper calm than I had come to expect from him.
I looked into the patriarch who sat before me. He was the embodiment of the parental strength I had spent my entire life without, infusing into my soul in such a way that I knew what I had been missing. He was the support I had always wanted and needed, sitting right before me.
“It took Cail centuries to master; me, decades. It can take you weeks. You are stronger than us all.”
“How?” The word sounded as broken as I felt.
“How were you calm before Cail would pull us into the nightmares?”
I knew the answer before he had even finished the question. I knew because he had told me the very first time when I was pulled into the blade, when I had met the man before me and, for the first time in weeks, could think clearly. I had felt like myself. It was the blade. It held what my father had taken from me.
I would always be broken until I got it back.
“I want my heart back. I want my soul back.” The words were more of a sob as I stared at the dim dawn light that had begun to stretch over the ceiling, my heart clenching at the normality, my battered soul wishing the comforting green would never leave.
“You can get it back,” he whispered, pulling my focus from the grey stone. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
I only stared at him with my back pressing roughly into the stone wall behind me as I attempted to drown out the laugh that had begun to filter through me, the joyful strain an overture to the answer I already knew was coming.
The task I already knew I could never complete.
Not like this.
“We will have to get the knife from your father. You will have to face him.” He tried to make his voice lower, as though it would lessen the blow.
It didn’t.
“You will have to fight him.”
“I … don’t … I can’t…”
You’re right. You can’t.
You never could.
And now is no different.
“If you can get me that knife, I can fix everything.”
“I need…” I gasped, my hand pulling at my hair, wishing I could take out enough to take him away.
What do you need?
“I need…”
Say it.
“I need to kill…”
Sain shook his head in disappointment, a move that was so parental I was surprised I reacted the way I had seen teenagers on television do so many times before, considering it was something my father had never done to me. My father’s way of parental scolding was something more along the lines of torture or forced destruction.
“You don’t need to kill Joclyn.”
“I do … I need…”
Kill.
You need to destroy her.
I need to.
What are you waiting for?
Do it.
Kill her!
Kill her.
“Kill … Kill … kill.”
“Look at me, Ryland. Look at me.”
I kept repeating the word over and over, the call for blood flowing from me, until Sain grabbed my chin and forced me to look at him. His hard eyes dug into me enough that I could focus on not pulling away, even if the word kept coming.
“Focus. Think of the space before the dreams, the space where your heart and soul are one. Think of how you felt when Wyn placed a shield over your heart … that calm. You said it yourself. You want your heart back. You want your soul back. That’s what you want,” he repeated, his hand dropping from my face, his now bloodstained fingers looking broken in the dim light.
Sain was right—it was what I wanted—but he was also right in another way. In order to find that, in order to reach that, I would have to face my father.
Face me.
It was that thought that destroyed me.
Try.
His laugh echoed inside of me as if he had heard my thoughts, as if he knew the impossibility of what was before me and found joy in watching me fail.
He always had.
I always will.
Try. You will fail.
The thought was a painful stab, and I jerked, causing my head to slam into the stone in a move that was both a comfort and pain.