Dawn of Ash (Imdalind, #6)(76)

She smiled bigger, her little hand pressing against my cheek as she leaned into me, kissing me on the nose as she always had. The memories mixed with reality so thoroughly I couldn’t help it; I had to ask.

“Is this real?”

Rosy’s face fell, her brow furrowing as she pursed her lip in the five-year-old pout I had seen millions of other children do before and after her. My soul soared from watching it line her face.

“That’s a difficult question.” The reply came from beside me, the adult, masculine voice even more familiar to me than that of the child who was sitting on my lap. After all, his held centuries of familiarity, centuries of time together before everything had shifted. Then, after Rosy, after me, it had changed, and he had never been the same.

Yet here, sitting beside me, he was the same.

“Cail.” It was more of a gasp than a word.

“Hey, sis.” He smiled, moving from where he stood in the oddly distorted forest to sit beside us, leaves crunching, twigs snapping at his movement. “It’s been a while.”

He sounded so much like the man I had grown up with, the foolhardy and mischievous best friend who had practically raised me. There was enough pride in him to snap anyone to attention, but so much love and compassion hidden away.

The anger in his eyes that I had seen for so long was gone. The twisted smile melted back into the impish scowl he had always reserved for me.

“Cail,” I said again, fully aware I was caught on repeat. My eyes flashed between him and Rosy, the latter’s smile increasing with each glance, her tiny thumb continuing to play circles over my cheek.

“Wynifred,” Cail said with a laugh, picking up a twig from the ground before him, the mutilated thing vanishing into thick tendrils of smoke at his touch.

“Am I dead?” I asked, unabashed, the solitary logical answer falling into place with a jolt of adrenaline.

Normally, the thought would bring fear, but there, surrounded by my family, it didn’t seem like such a bad ending.

Cail smiled, however, his head pulling into a small nod. “No.”

“Then how…?”

“You were here before with Sain and Ryland…” He didn’t even finish the thought; he let it hang while my brain spun in circles around it as Rosaline leaned into my chest, wrapping her body around me like a little monkey. “We were here, too.”

“The blade.” My voice was hollow and monotone, a weird emptiness opening through my chest.

The calm smile he’d had faded into one of fear and anger, the sharp lines of his face reminiscent recoiling through me, reminding me of the person he had been for the past three hundred years.

“Yes.” His voice was as hard as the look that had overtaken him.

“I’m inside of the blade again.”

“Well, your soul is, yes,” Cail provided, his voice still a harsh line of pain. “Your body is another story.”

My body.

My body that was being forced to walk toward Edmund, the man who had sought control of my magic since the day the fire awakened. The man and his terrible daughter who had looked at me with eager grins, who didn’t even flinch when I screamed. They smiled, exactly as they always had: twisted, vile, malevolent.

I didn’t need any other explanation.

I knew.

I knew because I had seen Ryland under the same kind of control, seen him turned into a puppet, controlled by the same piece of blade that had brought me here last time, the same piece I had pulled from Ryland’s heart. The same blade sitting in my pocket.

And Sain knew.

He had seen where I had gotten the blade. He had told me to run, and I had trusted him, but I had seen him standing in that street, right by Edmund with that same haunting, out-of-place smile as before.

I should have known better. He was working for Edmund …

“What is he doing?” I asked, uncertain if I was referring to Sain or to Edmund—not that it mattered anymore.

“Walking around the cathedral, trying to make you show him the way inside.” It was Rosy who answered, her body not so much as moving from where she lay against me. However, her voice had lost all of the excitement, dragging in a kind of exhaustion that sent the mother in me into high alert.

“Rosy?” I asked, but she didn’t so much as move.

“She’s fighting his control,” Cail supplied, his voice awed as he leaned over to me, his hand soft as he ran his hand over the crown of her head. “She’s disrupting his connection.”

I looked between the two of them in confusion when a sharp pain shot through my hand. I gasped at it, lifting the culprit to eye-level, expecting to see some kind of bug or snake, but there was nothing there, not even blood, something I was sure I would feel running over my palm, over my arm.

“You can feel it, can’t you? Where the blade is?” Cail asked as he snapped another twig into smoke.

I nodded, confusion still rampaging over what exactly I was going through.

“That’s how he controlled Ryland. You know this. I was the one who impaled you with the blade the first time, after all.” Another snap of a twig, his fists tight around the two pieces in his hand. I didn’t need to look at his face, at the way his brow furrowed, to see his temper rising.

Hundreds of years ago, I would have calmed him. I would have shielded his heart. Right then, I sat, not convinced of what I was looking at or even which Cail I was dealing with.