Wait.
Ilyan’s phone.
His direct line.
I rolled over and kicked Talon, my magic surging through him. He jerked as I zapped him, my not-so-nice way of waking him up shooting him out of bed. He moved to get back into bed, grumbling at me for a moment, only to jump when the sound of the music hit his ears.
Talon’s fingers reached toward the phone as he sat down on his side of the bed. I chose to stay lying under the covers, my eyes focused on him.
Yes, it was the middle of the day where Ilyan was. Yes, he was free to call whenever he wanted. However, the fact that he would have known it was the middle of the night here, and he was calling the white phone that was a direct connection to Talon, set my nerves on fire.
Talon pressed the phone to his ear, the skin contact triggering the magic and completing the call.
“Ilyan?” Talon asked, his voice drowsy but still on edge, my mood mirrored in his clipped words.
I waited, reluctant to move, hoping for something exciting, but knowing, absolutely knowing that nothing positive was going to come out of this call.
“Princess Mudgy.” Talons voice was low, the statement making no sense to me. For all I knew it was a code word, and if it was a code word...
I watched Talon as he listened to Ilyan talk, his shoulders knitting together more and more, his body language spelling danger to me. Talon stayed silent as Ilyan spoke, his voice a mellow buzz that slipped through the air until the line went dead. Talon never said anything more after the code words, his silence only making me more nervous. He lowered the disconnected phone to his lap, his movements tense.
Talon didn’t turn to me; he didn’t say anything. He just sat with the phone in his hands, his knuckles white from clenching the small white box. I watched his broad shoulders flex, the tension never leaving, and found my own fears growing.
The silence was painful. I wanted to hear. I wanted to pry, but I knew it wouldn’t be right. I placed my hand on Talon’s back, willing him to turn and smile, but knowing it wasn’t going to happen.
“Meet you in my dreams,” Talon said tersely. Not once did he look at me as he lay down and opened his arms for me.
I was seriously on edge now. Whatever had happened was monumental enough that neither he nor Ilyan wanted anyone else to know what had happened. I laid down next to Talon and closed my eyes, letting the magic of the Tȍuha take me away to meet with him.
My mind pulled right into his, the large expanse of the Münzenberg Castle Courtyard surrounding us. Wispy projections of people walked around us as Talon’s memories fueled the Tȍuha. The castle was whole and intact as it once was centuries ago, the cobbles of the road pristine. I was never alive in this castle’s time, but this was Talon’s mind, what he envisioned our Tȍuha to be.
“Talon?” I asked as he wrapped his arms around me as we stood in the middle of the courtyard. His tense muscles strained against me as he held me, the movement not helping to ease my anxiety.
“They were attacked.” My body froze, my eyes flying open in shock. The tension that now flowed between both of us was too much to contain, and the people around us zapped into vapor, colors floating through the air as they disappeared, leaving us alone.
“Are they all right?” I asked. I didn’t want to hear the answer, I didn’t. I didn’t need to hear of injuries or brutal battles. I could already feel what hearing this had done to Talon.
He had reacted the same way a few years ago when Edmund’s men captured Ilyan. Talon had felt like a failure. He had been raised to guard Ilyan. It was his job, but Ilyan had dismissed him when he took me as his mate. No matter how much he tried, Talon could never move past what had been his entire life up until a hundred years ago. He still felt responsible for Ilyan, and blamed himself if anything went wrong. I knew he was doing it now, putting the words of guilt into his own head, even though there was nothing he could have done.
Ilyan was far more powerful than Talon. If Ilyan couldn’t protect himself, then nothing could be done. Except now, there was Joclyn too, and I had no idea if she was capable of protecting herself or not.
Talon shook his head no in response to my question, and I felt my stress intensify. His muscles tensed, his arms pressed uncomfortably into me as he lifted me off the ground to his eye height. I wasn’t surprised to see the sparkling sheen in his brown eyes, the tears threatening to escape from him.
“It’s not your fault,” I said before he had a chance to let the words he was painting himself with become more of a weight against him. He nodded once and held me against him again, his hold tight as his breathing slowed. He lowered me back down to the ground, releasing me.
He pulled away, the wetness gone from his eyes, his composure back. He didn’t show emotions like that very often, but when he did, it was my job to build him up and always love him. I would always do that.
“Does he know who betrayed him?” I asked as Talon moved away from me and toward the large, carved stone bench we always sat in. I followed him, my bare feet slipping against the slickness of the cobbles that lined the courtyard, before sinking into the hard, unrelenting seat next to his.
“No,” Talon answered simply. His hands brought my feet onto his lap, and he began to trace the dark marks that graced my left foot, the jagged swirls matching the ones that ran along the entire left side of my body.
“He wants me to watch for signs that someone might know what happened before we announce it. It’s probably our best chance at tracking whoever it is down.”
I nodded, not knowing how to respond. Everything Talon had said only re-affirmed that someone was inside of our perfectly protected shelter; someone who should not have been able to had gotten past Ilyan’s protective shield.
All it would take was one.
Get one of Edmund’s men inside, and then, like ants, the rest would follow. They would place themselves in dark corners and hide were no one else would go, waiting until the time was right. Then they would jump out and attack, and within moments, the last of the Skȓíteks would be gone. I had seen it happen before. There was a reason there were so few of the Skȓíteks left. It was probably the sole reason I still wasn’t fully accepted in these halls. I had marched against them once upon a time.
I shuddered at the thought, for once actually wishing I wasn’t so morbid.
“Are you okay?” Talon asked, his voice worried.
I ripped my eyes away from the blob of mud on the cobblestone path that I had been unwittingly staring at to smile at him, my smile more like a grimace. It seemed somewhat fitting, so I didn’t try to fix it.
“Who do you think it is?” I asked, avoiding his question and moving to snuggle into him. He welcomed me into him, his arms wrapping around me as he held me tightly to him.
“I don’t know, Wynny.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know how to phrase what I was feeling. I wished we could find the traitor, and fast. I wished I could tear their arms from their sockets and torture any of my kind they had let into the halls of Prague. It was my sanctuary now too, my home after my father had exiled me and my brother had tried to kill me. I felt my magic increase in eagerness beneath my skin, my heart thumping erratically in either excitement or fear; I wasn’t quite sure which.
“I will keep you safe, Wynifred.”
I froze, my breathing caught in my chest, my heart lost between beats. Usually, I would have screamed at him and clocked him upside the face for insinuating that I couldn’t take care of myself, I didn’t need him to protect me. I heard what he said between the lines; I heard how much he cared, and so, my frantic heartbeat continued. I listened to the sound of my full name on his tongue, the promise of my safety heavy on the air.
“You promise?” I asked, not needing to hear the answer. I asked because I knew that he needed to know that I had heard him, that I had understood.
“I will protect you above all else.”
“Even Ilyan?” I asked, unable to help the question and the accompan
ying laugh from seeping out of my lips.
“Even Ilyan. I took a vow to protect him the day he was born, but that vow was broken the day I sealed myself to you. It is the vow I made with you that is the most important bond to me. I will honor and protect that before all else.” His voice was serious, his tone so true and honest. I felt it melt into me, and our magic surged with the feeling of love.
As our magic intertwined and seeped into our souls, everything inside of me caught fire. I felt a dulled version of this connection outside the Tȍuha, but here, inside the Tȍuha, everything was heightened. It was a feeling we could only get here.
I was not sure how long we spent in the shadow of the castle, but before either of us was ready, we were pulled away, only to find ourselves in each other’s arms in the flesh, the door already being banged off its hinges. I sighed as Talon left me, his další v příkazu responsibilities already in full force, just as I assumed they would be.
He was gone most of the day, leaving me alone to attempt to clean the huge mess I had made when I had attempted to make dinner the night before, something I never do.
Talk about a nightmare. I had cut my finger off when trying to chop carrots. Yes, off. Luckily, I was magical, or I would have forever been walking around reverse flipping people off. As it was, I just reattached it. But, after the soup became inedible and more solid than it should have been, and I had burned the Galder – I remembered why I never heated food. It was better cold anyway.
The whole experience was a great reminder as to why I hated human food. It’s gross, and the texture is so off. I don’t know how or why, but humans can take a simple tomato and turn it into a slime-covered bit of goo. I mean, just leave it alone. Don’t touch it. Just put it in your mouth and eat it.
Humans eat weird food.
After I had cleaned the house, it became quickly evident that I needed to wash the lace tablecloth. After the finger-loss induced bloodletting, it was clearly required. Unfortunately, the dratted thing was bearing the label ‘hand wash only’.
Hand wash only!
Whoever had created such stupid fabric needed to be shown a washing machine. There was a reason that washing machines were created, and that was so hand wash only items need no longer exist. But some fool decided to make an un-natural fabric that needed to be hand washed only. Then another silly fool (ah-hem, Talon) decided to buy a bright white tablecloth for his lovely wife (that would be me) made out of said abhorrence of nature fabric.
I took the tablecloth down to the old guards’ chamber, the closest place that the freezing cold water of the underground spring ran. The dark grey stone of the cavern was jagged, unlike the rest of the tunnels we called home. The roughly hewn walls arched high above my head, the only light source a small collection of magical orbs that floated and bobbed amongst the shallow cavities of the stone ceiling. The green light that blossomed from above gave the room a dark glow that cast hundreds of eerie shadows around me.
The underground spring ran through the lowest level of the tunnels below Prague, well the lowest level that anyone dared to go to anyway.
This room and the ancient dungeon below were old relics of when Edmund had first declared war on all magic. In the beginning, the dungeons were used to house traitors, and Edmund’s men that Ilyan had captured but refused to kill. There had been at least ten of the Skȓítek army in here at any time, guarding the prisoners in the rooms below.
That is what the Skȓíteks were after all, an army. An army with the sole purpose of guarding the wells that sat in the lowest points of these caves.
The wells of Imdalind, the center of magic.
Ilyan and Edmund were the last ones alive who knew the way through the labyrinth of tunnels that led down to the muddy wells. Which is why it was so scary that someone could be letting Edmund’s people in here. If Edmund got in, he could stroll right down to the source of pure magic as if he were walking into a Denny’s.
Now, however, the dungeons were bare, the rooms below and the guard chamber I now stood in only a reminder of how the war had started and how many magical beings there had once been.
Putting the tablecloth into the water, I scrubbed the fabric before letting the majority of it trail away with the flow of the water. I held onto the corner, letting the white lace swirl through the freezing water. In only a few minutes, my hands had become a lovely red color, although I couldn’t feel the burning tingle of the cold. If my skin was threatening hypothermia, I had no idea.
Everything inside me had heated when my skin touched the stone of the floor I kneeled on. I had always reacted to the stone of these caves this way. It was as if my magic sensed the deep magic of the world that was hidden somewhere far below me and grew in response. As far as I knew, I was the only one who did that, but there weren’t many Trpaslíks around to ask. It could be perfectly normal, and I would never know. Besides, it definitely had its benefits. My personal explosion factor increased by ten when my skin was in contact with the stone. Not like there were many things to explode around here, but it was still cool.
“NO!”
I jumped – like, full on jumped – at the disembodied voice that bounced into the air around me. The high-pitched scream shot through my body with electricity that perked every hair on my arms to full attention, my heart rate jumping with the speed of a twenty thousand volt reaction.
“P-please, n...no,”
The woman was back, which meant that whoever was torturing her was back too. They were close, close enough to find me. Close enough for me to find them. I didn’t know why my heart was thumping so wildly. It was either the fear of discovery or excitement for the battle. I narrowed my eyes as my muscles tensed, definitely excitement. I dropped the wet wad of lace down to the stone floor and perked my ears toward where I could only assume the voice was coming from.
I took a step forward without thinking, my nerves on high alert, eager to attack. If only I could find her, I could end all this.
“I...I...w-won’t t-tell you!”
My head spun, the voice seemed to have moved from one area of the cave to another. This time, the voice echoed down a darkened hallway that led toward the dungeon. I looked at the dark cavern, my nerves mingling with fear. No way was I going down there alone. No way. For all I knew, that was exactly what they wanted. Last thing I needed was to run into someone in the dark and then accidentally collapse the cave with my magic. Yep, that would be just my luck.
Why did this voice, this woman, only seem to appear when everyone else was busy? It didn’t make sense. I needed to get Talon; we needed to find her.
“L-leave me a..alone,” her voice broke and stuttered as she once again begged for her life.
The timber of her voice was so close to that of the little girl that haunted my dreams that my heart tensed in a reflex reaction, the contents in my stomach spinning uncomfortably.
I pulled the tablecloth out of the water and went to take off toward the sparring hall where the pull of Talon’s magic told me he would be, but my wet Chuck Taylors squeaked on the stone on the first step. I froze, waiting to see if the noise would alert whoever was down there to my presence, but the crying remained. The last thing I needed was to scare her off again before I could get Talon, and we could investigate.
I began walking again, moving slowly this time until the volume of the crying had lessened enough that I figured I was out of earshot, allowing me to take off on a dead run toward the training hall.
The sounds of battle hit my ears before anything else, the grunts and explosions mixed with laughter as everyone enjoyed the spectacles of combat.
I barreled into the large hall and wove my way through the small groups of sparring Skȓíteks, each group covered by the shimmering orb of a shield. I worked my way through them, looking like a fool when I jumped at an explosion that rocked against a barrier near my head.
I smiled at the two Skȓíteks enclosed in the fighting space and made my way toward Talon.
“Hi, baby,” Talon
said softly when I ran up beside him. His face dropped at the look in my eyes and the transmission of my panic that I am sure he felt through our bond.
“I heard her again. I think she is in the old dungeons.”
Talon said nothing more before dragging me behind him out of the training hall and toward the underground spring.
His feet moved quickly, his gait and cumbersome shape unable to be quiet as we bounded through one dark tunnel and another before arriving in the same large cavern I had just left, the dark entryway to the dungeons staring at us hauntingly.
“Are you sure you heard the voice from down there?” Talon asked, his voice shaking, as he looked wide-eyed into the abyss in front of us.
I could only nod. Talon was scared, that alone was enough to freak me out. I had never been down there, but Talon had, hundreds of times I was sure. The place was probably full of more haunted memories than crazy, flesh stripped skeletons. Although, I was sure there was a few of those too, there always were in dungeons.
“You’re sure?” Talon asked again, and I felt my confidence waiver.
“Of course I am not sure, Talon. Her voice echoes around like an Olympic game of Ping-Pong. She could have been a mermaid in the water for all I know.”
“Don’t be silly,” Talon said, his voice still shaking, although less than before. “Mermaids don’t exist.”
Talon took a step away from me, toward the cavern, and I could feel his magic surge as he put on a small shield. Dude, he wasn’t thinking about going in there, was he?
“Talon?” I asked from behind him, my voice catching at the petrified anger on his face. “Baby, let’s go. We can’t hear her anymore; she’s gone.”
I pulled on him, but he didn’t move. I waited, but he didn’t respond. His eyes stayed glued to the dark opening as if they had been sewn there. It was creepy watching him stare at something so intently. My heart rate began to accelerate to match Talons, the quick pick up triggering a warning inside of me. I didn’t know how much I could take, my heart was beating too fast, and even I was starting to feel some creepy vibe from whatever was down there.
Eyes of Ember (Imdalind Series #2) Page 35
