Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(31)

Yes, it was something I had thought of barely moments before, but hearing it from someone else was a little too solid.

I swallowed heavily, trying to get the heavy lump out of my throat, yet it didn’t seem to want to move.

“I think you are as old or young as you want to be, but sometimes, when hard things happen, we have to grow up a little bit, whether we want to or not.” She stared at me intently, my heart racing even faster at the look in her eyes, at the little dimple that played around the corner of her lips.

“Risha!” Jaromir’s shout rippled through the courtyard as the boy intersected with Risha, tackling the beautiful woman out of sight, leaving me staring blankly into the courtyard as Jaromir began regaling her with everything that had happened over the past few hours.

I barely saw.

I barely heard.

I sat beside them, one word echoing through my head.

Guardian.



Scarcely a minute before, I had realized I felt like a parent to this boy. I had felt responsible. And now, with that one word, everything from before kind of fit into place.

Risha was right.

More than responsibility, more than some twisted parental relationship, sometimes you had to grow up and do what was needed of you.

Slowly, the idea cemented in my mind, becoming more familiar than it should have, the scene before me becoming a little clearer through the fog.

“Some marathon, huh?” Risha said as I looked up to where Jaromir was still occupying her, some weird pink smoke seeping from the palm of his hand.

I stared at them, watching her eyes sparkling as my stomach flipped again, the pungent smell of Jaromir’s magic filling my mind. It might have been the fumes from the smoke, but I was fairly certain being around Risha had turned Edmund’s voice off in my head.

Some marathon, indeed.





It was the cloaked figure right before me, exactly as it had been for the last month, flitting in and out of my sights in a horrifying parade of faces and purposes.

Except, this time, it was not sight. It was reality. It was a terrorizing reality I needed answers to. I couldn’t let them get away.

We had been close in the graveyard, and now he was right in front of us.

Inches from me.

The fabric rippled before me as the figure ran, frantic to escape, Ilyan feet from them.

They couldn’t get away.

Then, with a faint pop, they were gone. Disappeared into thin air.

“No!” I screamed as they left, my hand millimeters from pulling the cloak from their head, Ilyan inches from tackling them, the violet stream of his attack still moving uselessly into the darkness.

Moving right into me.

Ilyan and I shouted in unison. I sidestepped as he pushed a wave of counter magic after his attack, the black smoke swallowing it whole. I knew it was pointless, magical attacks didn’t work against mated pairs, but even though it wouldn’t hamper me, it would still hurt. I wasn’t in the mood for crippling pain right then, not with what had happened.

Not with what I still needed to do.

I needed to find out where they had stuttered to. We needed to catch up before it was too late, before we lost them.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, my magic stretching away from me, spreading through the city as I moved on to my next task without hesitation—desperately searching for any trace of the magic I had been tracking, eager to catch them. We were so close. I couldn’t let them get away.

I tried to control my breathing as the deep vein of the earth’s magic filled me, the force of it so much stronger than I had ever felt. My body swayed abruptly as it filled me, as my power reacted to it in a frightening wave of power.

At any other time, I would have embraced it, would have pulled it into me, but the power was too much. Besides, it wasn’t the heavy power of the earth I was interested in. It was the residue of the magic left behind, the vile and distorted power that we had been tracking.

“Can you feel them, mi lasko?” Ilyan whispered from beside me, his hand winding around my waist as he leaned against me, his chest pressing into my back, his magic filling me.

The addition of his power bolstered me with the supportive warmth I craved. The joining of our magic was a surge of energy that seemed unstoppable at times.

Closing my eyes, I let my magic move, speeding through the city, through streets I had never seen, through houses that lay in ruins, my mind, my magic searching for any trace of the cloaked man, of where he had gone.

Every other time he had stuttered, it was a quick search, but this time, he was gone.

“Nothing,” I said, my shoulders sagging. Ilyan’s arm continued to hold me against him as my eyes snapped open to the street before us. “There is nothing left.”

It was as Ilyan had told me long ago—stutters left nothing behind. I could find nothing. Although Edmund could somehow track that magic past the blackness of a stutter, that ability obviously did not lie with me.

“Nothing?” he asked, his voice shaking in my ear before he moved away from me, his hand still resting on my hip.

“No, I can’t follow the stutter,” I said slowly, the harsh reality of what had really happened slowly sinking in. “It’s like they … left.”

“Through the barrier,” Ilyan said slowly, his mind following right along with mine. “Someone can stutter through the barrier.”

Ilyan’s awe and dread moved through me, the emotion strong and frightening, and for good reason. It was more than a stutter; it was someone who could stutter through Edmund’s fish bowl.