“I had a sight while we walked through the city, and it told me of the dangers of this place. Of where we were heading…” I tensed as he paused, the incessant claws of the Vil?s sounding louder for some reason, while a distant scream sat heavy on my chest. The danger Sain spoke of seemed far too close. “I tried to tell him to stop, to convince him to find Ilyan, but he refused. He began to yell, and the shield dropped only moments before the Vil?s tore the sky apart.”
I could only nod. I had seen this. I had seen Thom yell, which was so out of character for him that even the memory made me uncomfortable.
“They were everywhere…” His voice was hollow as his eyes drifted out of focus, his memory pulling him back as mine did. The faint sounds of screams that still echoed from outside made it easy to remember, to feel the fear that still hadn’t really left. “I tried to fight them off. Thom tried to fight them off. But then he was hit with an attack from behind us. From you, from Ryland, from Joclyn? I don’t know. But he fell to the ground. It took all my strength to escape those things and drag them both here. I had to keep them safe. He’s my best friend. My son.” His voice drifted away as his body sagged into itself, his shoulders hunching over as he slunk down next to his son with guilt running through him.
I wanted to tell him he was okay, that at least he had gotten them here, but I was sure whatever failure he was feeling was rooted much deeper than that.
Besides, something else was digging into me, something I wasn’t necessarily sure I agreed with. I was trying my hardest to convince myself that I must have seen it wrong.
Sain had said Thom had been hit with an attack from either Ryland or I or someone near us. However, I hadn’t been shooting out attacks, and even though Ryland had, by the time he had started to do so, Sain and the others had already been gone.
I wanted to say I was remembering wrong, that they were still there, but I had seen the empty street moments before Ryland had gone bonkers. I remembered the dread of not being able to feel their magic, of not knowing where they had gone.
I stared at Sain blankly as I tried to push the questions from my mind, only to have Joclyn’s voice fill my head—the deep conspiratorial whisper as she confided in me about her father and how she didn’t trust him.
She had stood in that hallway and looked at me, begging for me to understand her. At the time, I couldn’t. I had been locked in that prison with him. I had escaped the city with him. He had saved me. How could I not trust someone who had gone so far for me? She just didn’t like her father was all.
Then why was it grating on me right now?
“What did you do wrong?” I asked the question slowly, knowing he still hadn’t answered me, my mind still fighting against the ill-placed doubt as I sought for understanding.
Sain looked at me, his eyes darting to Dramin’s before coming back to mine in obvious confusion. It was a look that was so out of place for a Drak that it took all my strength not to laugh.
“What was your serious mistake?” I asked again, hoping that repeating the phrasing would jog his memory, but he only continued to stare at me, his wide eyes dropping briefly before he jerked, the moment so fast I was sure he had been zapped.
“Dramin,”—Sain’s voice rumbled in the deep, heady tone that I had grown used to, the sound combined with the lingering smell of salt and soot sent a chill through me—“there is a room over here if I remember correctly. I think it’s time you lie down.”
My brow wrinkled in confusion as Sain stood, Dramin didn’t so much as say a word as his father pulled him to standing. He half dragged, half assisted him to a room I was sure hadn’t been used in a decade and would be so dust covered you wouldn’t be able to tell the rats from the dust bunnies.
I watched them go, the confusion only growing before I shuffled across the floor to sit beside Thom, part of me expecting him to roll over and grin at me the way he had for so long, but he still slumped against the wall, his body contorted awkwardly.
Like he was dead.
That iron fist punched me in the gut as the thought shoved its way back into me. My hand pressed against him on instinct, my magic plunging into him in desperation to feel something, to feel some trace of an injury.
Still, there was nothing.
No sign of an attack. Nothing to heal.
It didn’t make any sense.
If he had been attacked as Sain had said, there should be some sign of that happening, some trace of what had hurt him and was keeping him trapped in whatever this was. I couldn’t even find a bite, however.
The tension that had taken up residence in my chest tried to dislodge itself, but it wasn’t working, so I sat, listening to the low buzz of Sain and Dramin’s voices. The nondescript argument came through the old door and supercharged through my agitation.
I reached for Thom’s hand with a shake, only to freeze as my fingertips moved over a dozen raised bumps on the palm of his hand. Turning his hand over, my eyes widened at what appeared to be slowly growing boils, and my confusion grew.
I had searched his body for injury. I should have felt this. I should have seen it. Even as I stared right at it, there was nothing there to feel.
I clung to Thom’s hand as I tried to pick out something, anything, that would give me a clue as to what was going on. On what game Sain was playing at.