Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)(2)

Moved.

I kept the scream inside, kept my breath steady and fought against the pressure that consumed me, the pain that, try as it might, my magic couldn’t defeat.

I had felt fear before—fear when I was chained in the bowels of Imdalind, fear when I had worked as Ilyan’s liaison for two hundred years. Regardless, this fear … This fear was bound in agony and heartbreak. It rumbled through the earth with such supremacy that I was amazed I hadn’t felt it before, that I hadn’t understood. Sain hadn’t been speaking of the battle that was coming. He hadn’t been warning me of the camps that surrounded us.

He had been speaking of me.

I was almost out of time.

“If I can only bind the curse, not send it into Edmund, and I die before my father, then the curse will be unbound, and it will be unstoppable. Wynifred will die. To save her life, my father must die first.”

Thunder drowned out the whisper of my voice as I repeated the words that my darling brother had said so many centuries before, the day he had made the promise to keep me safe, the day Ilyan had made the promise to keep him safe.

Neither had happened.

Now Cail was dead. Dead before my father.

Dead before Ilyan could save him.

And the curse was unbound, and now I was to die like all the others.

But how?

I had killed my father, bound the stone into his belly, fused his throat shut, and thrown his body into the pit where I had lost the only man who had ever truly loved me. He should be dead. The curse should have unbound itself days ago. I should have been set free, which could only mean one thing.

Cail had been wrong.

Even if Timothy was the first to die, I would still die. The Zánik curse would always unbind itself, and I would be cursed to face the traitor’s death, the most painful demise that my kind offered. To literally be burned from the inside out.

The thought, the knowledge of what was about to happen to me, wound up my spine in a ribbon of horrific, agonizing fear that I didn’t want to accept, that I didn’t want to acknowledge.

I called out in a shadow of pain as I collapsed against the tree, my hands wrapping around the rough bark as I tried to support myself, my whole body seizing under the attempt.

Turning toward the old man, seeing his dark eyes, the sadness of what was going to happen, I froze, my eyes wide as I begged for an explanation I knew he couldn’t give me, help I knew he couldn’t offer.

He looked at me with sad eyes that echoed the truth I now understood. I was going to die. And, judging by the dark, hooded look he gave me, he had known all along.

“We are running out of time.”

“Sain?” My voice was a gasp as I reached toward him in a plea for help I knew he couldn’t give me.

My fingers were distorted and broken as the lines snaked over my skin in haunted movements, a heat that I hadn’t expected seeping from the waving lines, seeping into me.

We stood in an unmoving standoff as the answer neither of us wanted to accept passed between us. There was nothing he could do.

I felt it—the pain, the agony—as it dispersed over my body, the once bound curse seeping it’s toxin into me, slowly killing me with the curse that I had willingly carried around for centuries. I tried to fight it, to press my magic against it, but I already knew it was no use.

“Sain.” The word was a whimper, a plea, a promise. It was a sound ground in agony. The last word I would speak before the heat grew into an agonizing peril, before my legs gave out underneath me, and my vision faded to black.

I wasn’t sure if I had fallen. I wasn’t sure if he had caught me. For all I knew, I had fallen through the earth and was trapped between layers of rock and stone.

Within moments, the world around me had become nothing except pain and pressure. Heat wound its way through me like knives and rope. I couldn’t tell where I was. I couldn’t distinguish my body from the pain, my voice from the screams, my thoughts from the heat.

The curse had covered every part of me. It had taken me away until all that was left was the curse.

There was only heat.

There was only pain.

There was only death.

I was the curse. I was the pain. There wasn’t a me anymore.

There was only Zánik.

I tried to fight it, to bring my magic forward, to control my own power against the agony that raged through me, yet nothing was there. The ability—the magic that had always been so powerful, had always been so capable at destroying—had, in essence, been destroyed.

I tried to find something to focus on. My breathing, my body, my soul, but I didn’t seem to be anymore.

“We need to get you to Joclyn,” the words flitted to me through the darkness I was trapped in, the voice distorted by my own screams, by the boiling water that I was surrounded by. Heat and darkness and what my mind tried to acknowledge as television static were all I knew. Static that cut in and out like the signal was broken, but the only station that was coming in was that of my own agonizing shouts.

I didn’t want to listen, anyway.

I didn’t want to see.

If only I could get away from it. If only I could escape the pain that had trapped me in a place that was only pain, where mind and body didn’t matter anymore. I had lost them somewhere along the way.

Strangely, I didn’t care, either.

If I couldn’t feel them, it made the pain less. It made it so the heat could devour me. I almost preferred it that way.