Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)

Towering bookshelves lined the walls, their height seeming taller than they had in the light. Everything appeared elongated and stretched in the darkness, as if the room itself would swallow me whole.

“Hello?” For a brief moment, I wasn’t sure if he was even in there, a thought that made me shiver in agitation.

“Ah,” he sighed, the sound more like a deflating balloon than a person, “I had a feeling it would be you.”

Of course he did. Darn Draks and their infallibility. If I had been accompanied by Captain Mal, he would have had the same reaction. If he knew who that was, of course. Well, and if he was real, but I wasn’t going to get hung up on logistics.

He was real enough.

“You saw me coming, I take it?” He laughed at my question, and my shoulders stiffened, my feet stopping their slow advance as I froze in the middle of the room, my eyes scanning the dark until I found the withered, old shape that I was sure was him, his chest rising and falling calmly.

“No, my father told me of your conversation yesterday. He warned me that you would be visiting.”

“Warned.” I guessed I deserved that, all things considered. “Is it okay that I am here?”

“Of course, but if you wouldn’t mind turning on a light? As much as I enjoy chatting in the dark, I like to see the people I am to be friends with.”

His comment caught me off guard, the light, calm nature of his voice seeming so out of place that my alarms were screaming trap before I could calm them. No matter what I had heard about this man, no one could easily turn things around after what I had done to them.

No one.

Except Talon.

After all, I supposed Talon had done the same. I had killed his sister, yet somehow…

My breath shook on an exhale at the thought, the reminder for what I had come here to do in the first place a dead weight in my gut.

My magic flared on its own as my pulse accelerated, and the few lamps that were littered throughout the room caught as the fire magic washed over them, giving life to the dry and dead wicks for the first time in what I could assume had been decades. Judging by the state of the room, it might have been longer.

Those earthen mugs were everywhere along with books piled and disheveled. I had been so preoccupied with restraining Ryland and memorizing battle plans earlier that I hadn’t really paid much attention.

His room looked like the disheveled library of a mad scientist, something you would see on an old TV show. I didn’t know why, but it made me comfortable, almost like I was walking onto the set of a show I used to love.

“Much better,” he sighed, and my focus snapped to him, my body still stuck in the middle of the floor as if I had been glued there.

He lay on the same bed as before with masses of blankets piled and tucked in around him. From where I stood, I could sense the magic tucked between the layers, the healing flowers and water folded into the fibers of the cloth. We had done the same thing to Joclyn after she had broken her back, but this almost seemed to be more, as if the magic within the blankets was all that was keeping him alive.

Looking at the way he sagged and melted into the bed, I wouldn’t say I was that far off. He was tired looking, his hair incredibly unkempt. If he wasn’t sitting there, smiling and talking to me, I would say he was dead already.

“Tatinek seemed to think I would sleep, and so he left me in the dark, something that wouldn’t have been a problem if I had the ability to light my own lanterns.”

“Can Draks not ignite lights?” I asked, fully aware that I had lived under Sain’s green lights for nearly a month.

“Normally, yes, but there seems to be something wrong with my magic. It doesn’t seem too interested in working properly.” He spoke sadly.

The loss of his ability hit me in the gut. I knew what it felt like to lose something so instrumental to your being. It was like losing an arm.

“It seems that whatever the Siln? hit me with did more damage than anyone thought. Of course, I could also be dead, so I must look on the bright side.”

“But she healed you.” I was fully aware of how childish the statement was, but I didn’t care. At this point, I was more interested in keeping the conversation away from the massive saber tooth tiger that was sitting on my chest and bringing it to something light and airy, instead.

Like not dying.

This was not going to work.

“I guess you could say that,” he said as he laughed. “Of course, she saved you, too, didn’t she?”

I could only nod.

The skin around Dramin’s eyes wrinkled as he smiled at me, the emerald green of his eyes dancing a bit in the light. I stared at the color so similar to Sain’s and wondered if that was what Joclyn’s eye color used to be. She had told me once her eye color had changed when she had received her mark, and judging by her family…

Family.

The word seemed dead after yesterday, after watching them all react and fight and throw verbal mud at each other. My brow wrinkled and I took a step away without thinking, the parallels from her family and mine making me uncomfortable.

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