Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)

The shard.

I couldn’t let anyone know I had it. They would take it away. They would take my daughter away. They would use her soul against someone else. I couldn’t let that happen.

The tension in my body grew and the fear escalated as I shoved my hand into my pocket, letting the shard stay there in what I hoped would be safety.

“Wyn?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” My voice sounded dead. “Ry woke up, so I put him back out. I figured that’s better for now.”

I tried to bring as much life back to my voice as I could, but I wasn’t sure it was working. Everything around me was moving in slow motion, my magic flaring abruptly as I over-critically inspected my surroundings. Everything from Thom’s sleeping form to the dust mites seeming untrustworthy.

What was happening to me?

I understood a basic need to protect something so precious. However, paranoia had never been my thing.

I shook my head again and pushed the emotion away, glad when it slipped from me, taking some of the tension with it.

“Dramin’s asleep, too.”

At the mention of Dramin, my mind pulled away from the shard of the soul’s blade, right to the conversation before—the shrouded words Sain had uttered the moment I had walked through the door.

“Does that mean you are going to tell me now?” My voice still shook with residual anxiety as Sain’s focus snapped to me. His eyes were sad as I pulled him right back into the conversation I was sure he had hoped I had forgotten.

“Tell you what?”

“Don’t treat me like a fool, Sain. You may be one of the first, but that doesn’t make you any better than the rest of us.”

“That is a debatable opinion.”

“And yet, you are capable of ‘making mistakes’ like the rest of us.” My voice was laced with teenage angst, but I let it flow, grateful when his eyes narrowed disdainfully at me. “Stop playing games, Sain.”

He continued to glare at me, his eyes harder than I had ever seen them. The same fear was back in his eyes, but I didn’t look away. I didn’t dare.

“I have made a terrible mistake,” he began again, his voice shaking with the same horrified fear that ran over his features. “I thought they were gone … but they aren’t. They are going to find me.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he just stood there, staring, his hands shaking ever so slightly.

“Who is going to find you?” I was scared to ask, scared of the answer, scared of what it might mean for us, and why he wanted us to run.

“He—” Sain’s words fell from the air as the door below us opened, the yells of the Vil?s rang clear as the heavy footsteps echoed up the stairwell, large and heavy.

“He’s found me. He’s going to kill us all.” Sain’s voice growled through the dark as the door opened, my magic reacting before I had a chance to stop it.





Nineteen


A ribbon of flame streamed from my hand like someone had embedded a flame thrower inside of me, the powerful attack intercepting the door and turning it to dust.

I expected the attack to move beyond the wood panel, into whoever had entered the dingy space, but it flattened in mid-air as though it had hit a glass pane, the ribbons of heat and flame fanning out into spirals of harmless smoke. The rings dissipated into nothing, revealing the scowling, blonde-haired man behind it.

Well, darn it all.

I should have known better than to react, than to destroy one of our only lines of defenses from whoever came through the door. With how Sain was talking—words of death and destruction and someone coming to “get” us—I was a little too high-strung.

The sounds of the Vil? massacre weren’t helping too much, either.

“Wynifred!” Ilyan’s voice was a snap of scolding as he walked into the room with Joclyn right on his heels, her expression torn somewhere between humor and shock.

Part of me wished she would laugh, if only to break the tension. If I laughed, it would be my head, but she could get away with it.

“Sorry, Ilyan.”

He glowered at me as he walked into the room, his eyes scanning over everything quickly as his face continued to darken.

I could only guess how this looked to him—Sain and I facing each other as if we were about to attack, Thom and Ryland unconscious on the floor, and a still fresh pool of blood glittering in the corner.

“What happened?” His accent was thick, and while part of me wanted to recoil in expectation of his temper, the other side only stood up taller, facing him as my eyebrow arched uncomfortably.

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