Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(49)

Seemed legit.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, her eyebrows unified in a deep furrow.

“One could hope,” I said with a shrug, falling to my knees to begin digging her out of the pit I had trapped her in. “And I will. I will hope that Edmund will take the strength of his son’s wrath from me and that I will survive this unfortunate incident.”

“Oh, boy.”

“It is the only chance we have to save us all.” Laying the melodrama on thick, I swept my hand over my shoulder from where I knelt below her, letting a bit of an American accent shine through the dull shadow of my Czech one.

I expected her to chuckle, but she sighed, a bit of a groan escaping with the sound. Just like that, the playfulness in my voice evaporated.

“Oh, bother.” The eye roll was obvious in her voice. “If only it was that easy.”

“It might be; you never know.” I could hope.

“Oh, I know.”

She was dejected, and I didn’t blame her. Sometimes, Joclyn’s sights had a habit of putting a damper on any situation. All she saw was what was coming. She forgot to look at where she was. She forgot the future wasn’t supposed to be known; it wasn’t set in stone.

“You can’t see everything, you know,” I whispered as I continued to pull a rock away from her partial tomb, her legs shifting around as I worked and she tried to free herself.

“I’ve seen too much, Wyn. I know you can’t see everything. No one can, not even a Drak. But you can see too much. Sometimes, I think I have.”

With a snap, I looked up to her, a warning of temper rumbling through me as agitation twisted through my spine. “So have I, Jos. We’ve all seen too much.” My voice was dead. It barely got above a whisper before it was swallowed by the vastness of the room. “It may not be the future, and it may not be what’s coming, but I’ve still seen too much. I’ve seen years of Edmund killing and destroying and hurting and manipulating and…”

Mommy? Can you see me? Why didn’t you come for me?

“I’ve seen my own daughter murdered before my eyes. I’ve seen the blood running over her cheeks as I screamed, fighting to get to her as she pleaded for Mommy to rescue her.”

Joclyn was staring at me from where I still crouched below her, her eyes as wide as saucers while the truth of what I was saying hit her.

But I didn’t see that.

I saw Rosaline: her eyes wide and despairing, her cries soft and defeated as she was taken from me.

I pushed the memory away, looking away from the woman before me, from the concern in her eyes, and went back to removing the rocks with renewed vigor—or would it be furious frustration?—freeing her in ten seconds flat.

“He deserves to pay for that, Wyn. I’m ready for all this to be over, but I’m not really ready for everything that comes between now and the ending I’ve seen.” Her voice was low and garbled, the consonants blending together so much I was having a bit of trouble understanding her.

“I know,” I said as I moved to stand, the dust in the air making it hard to breathe. “But you have to get through the bad in order to find the good.”

“There isn’t a lot of good around us right now,” she sighed. Both of us knew how hard that was to find right now.

“What did you do before there was magic?” The volume in my voice caught us both off guard. “When it was just you and no magic and no sights and no Drak, when it was just us going off into the night to crash Ryland’s graduation party?”

“We crashed Ryland’s graduation party.” She repeated my words back to me in an answer that was so sarcastic that, for a split second, she actually sounded like the teenager she was.

I tried to restrain the eye roll, but it came, anyway. In that way, we were a lot alike.

“Did we know if we were going to succeed?” I asked, plowing on in a desperate need to get to my point.

“No.” A tiny bit of a groan. At least she was catching on, even if she didn’t seem happy about it.

I plowed on before she had a chance to stop me. “Did we have a definitive outcome?”

“No … But, Wyn, we … We didn’t succeed.”

I smiled at how fast my set up had worked and turned to her with that same sly smile, the look on my face frustrating her more, and she groaned again.

“You’re right. We didn’t. We failed. But did the world end?”

She said nothing; she glared at me with those wide eyes, the silver so full of irritation I couldn’t help laughing, something that pissed her off more.

“No.” It was a growl more than a word.

I laughed harder.

“Did we keep trying?” My voice rose in excitement as I drove my point home.

The lines in Joclyn’s forehead increased with every word. She needed to stop that. We might be immortal, but that didn’t protect against wrinkles. I mean, had she seen Dramin?

“Did we keep fighting?”

She knew the answer to all of these as well as I did—yes, yes, we did—but I could already tell she was firmly standing her ground, too stubborn to say it, too scared to admit what came after.

“But what if we fail this time, too?” Her voice was a whisper.

“Then we try again.”

“But the sights—”