Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(75)
I didn’t need to ask how he knew what I was planning, how he knew my concern over the loose end I had released inside of Ilyan’s confines. I had seen the black of his eyes, and if he said I would succeed, then I would not doubt it.
My smile stretched.
“Wait for me outside,” I instructed.
His own disreputable smile matched mine before he swept from my side, departing through the solid door without a second glance, leaving me to wonder, once again, exactly who he was.
I watched the door close before turning back to the scatter of people whose eyes were still focused on me, although fear had begun to take the place of curiosity.
Not that it mattered, anyway. In no more than a few short minutes, all anyone would hear was their screams.
“Mommy.”
I knew that voice. I knew the joy behind it, the calm. I knew the excitement and the way it was just about to laugh.
I had heard it so much in my life that I could not forget it.
I had heard it enough in the last few months, too. Then, it was different. Then, it was frightened and haunted. Then, it was smeared with blood.
This was not that.
This was beautiful.
“Mommy?” It came again, like she was calling to me—to me. Wherever I was, whoever I was.
I was having trouble keeping track of it. Despite knowing the voice, everything else was foreign and confusing.
I had been here before, I realized. I had been in this white, shapeless space. I had been in this place where my body was nothing and everything.
How had I gotten here?
The last thing I remembered was the city and running away from the cathedral in an attempt to save my friend, to save myself, to save my daughter. I remembered the dimming light of the sun, a strange pull taking over me. I remembered Edmund’s greasy smile as I walked toward him, unable to control it, unable to stop. The shard in my pocket, the thing I had left the safety of Ilyan’s cage for, had betrayed me.
It was more than that, though.
It was the sound of my scream that reverberated through my ears, the painful pressure of a stab in the center of my hand. It was seeing his smile, feeling his hands on my body, knowing I no longer controlled it.
I no longer controlled anything.
Until this moment, when that voice—the calm, beautiful voice of my daughter—pulled me out of the painful prison and into this void, this familiar space of nothing and everything, of nobody and everyone. I was floating amongst it, part of it. It was strangely calming.
“Mommy?” The voice came again, eagerness I didn’t recognize pulling through it. “I think she can hear me this time!”
A garbled voice I couldn’t quite make out cut through the fog in answer, the sounds oddly distorted as they ran over me.
“Okay,” Rosaline’s little voice squeaked. “Mommy, open your eyes. I’m here.”
Eyes.
I didn’t have eyes. I was nothing, the same as when I had felt this before with Ryland and Sain …
Like a battering ram, it hit me—the memory of that moment, of Sain telling me to find my body, of promising I really existed, that this comforting mist of nothing wasn’t me.
I wasn’t me.
But that voice…
That beautiful voice…
It was real.
And if I was real, if this was real …
I opened my eyes.
I opened my eyes to the dark grey stare of my daughter, to her little, upturned nose, to the dimple that sprouted on the right side of her face when she smiled, to the curtain of dark hair that fell around her cherub face.
She looked at me with this amazed shock, with so much happiness flowing through her that the last memory I had of her meant nothing, and this happy, little girl, this girl with the dark eyes so expressive they took your breath away, was all there ever was. Everything else was a cruel nightmare.
“Rosaline?” The single word broke away from my shock, soaring from behind the mind-numbing disbelief that had filled me.
“Mommy!” she screamed with tears running down her face, long streams of salt water that ran over my cheek and pooled in my hair as she fell on top of me. The lanky strings of her arms wrapped around me in a familiar embrace I had never thought I would feel again.
“Rosaline!”
I couldn’t think beyond the numbing happiness that had overtaken my body, the way my heart swelled and throbbed and ached and screamed, and every emotion and every fear and every impossibility flew out of me like a thousand blood-soaked birds. They were stripped from my bones and ripped from my soul.
The guilt of failing my daughter, the fear of never seeing her again. The pain of loss. The agony of a love never returned.
It all fell away.
She was right there, in my arms.
And none of those things mattered anymore.
“Rosy,” I sobbed. “My darling girl.” I wasn’t even convinced the words were distinguishable from my cries. Neither of us cared.
Rosaline sobbed harder, pressing her face into my neck in the burrowing motion that was so her. “I’m so glad you can see me this time!”
“This time?”
“Yes, when you were here before … I tried … You couldn’t see … But now you are here!” She pulled away then, smiling through her tears with the same joyful light I had always loved.
I fought the need to pull her back into me. The elated weight in my heart was so unfamiliar I didn’t know how to handle it. It was going to explode out of me. In some ways, I wouldn’t have stopped it. That way, Rosy could feel it, too. Looking in her eyes, I was positive she already could.