Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)(43)

The ground was rough underneath my bare feet, each little stone, each pine needle and stick pressing into the soft tissue in painful little points. It was more than pain, more than pressure of the foreign objects. It was power.

I had rarely worn shoes up until Ilyan had wiped my mind, and what little power that remained of the fire magic had become uncontrollable. Now, though, I had regained control, I had regained power, and with each slap of my bare feet against the earth, my power spread away from me, fanning through the soil and undergrowth like a virus, searching for magic and burning away whatever traces we left behind.

With Ilyan’s plan carefully laid out in my mind, there wasn’t any question of what we were supposed to do. However, now Thom had planted an obnoxious amount of doubt inside of me, and despite the fact that I could see the red line of Ilyan’s instruction stretch before me, I was suddenly wondering if it was the right choice, if there was a better way.

My jaw locked together in frustration as the doubt and confusion continued to swirl around in front of me while my magic moved through the soil. I tried to focus on it instead of my sudden query, but with how fast I was running, my magic was constantly losing contact with the ground, making it impossible for me to scan very far. Sometimes, I wished I could feel people next to me like Ilyan did or whatever Jos did with her tiny smoke people that grew out of maps.

“Let me at her!” Ryland’s voice ricocheted from behind me.

I ground my heels into the ground in a mad attempt to stop, to rush back and help Sain from whatever monster had erupted from the boy. Dead leaves and dirt streamed before me as though a bomb had gone off in front of me, the thunder snapping above us in a crack of simultaneous light and sound.

I flinched at the eruption, a tree no more than ten yards away going up in flames as I raced back to Sain. Even before I reached them, I could tell this task was going to be impossible. I needed to take lead, to try to watch the forest for attacks, but Sain could barely hold onto Ryland. The boy was fighting him with all his might, his body taking on the same jerking motions it had before, his hands clawing at his hair, his body slamming into the many trees that surrounded us as sparks of color flew from his fingertips.

He himself was a bomb.

“Kill her!” he roared, his voice breaking through the forest so abruptly I was sure someone would hear. “I need to kill her.”

Throwing up a sound barrier in a mad attempt to keep us hidden, I ran at him in a tackle, my shoulder ramming into his chest and taking him to the ground like I was some sort of bulky football player and not the wiry five-foot-three-inch Trpaslík I was.

He went down with a thud, the abrupt attack pulling him out of his insanity enough that he looked at me with wide eyes, the fear I knew all too well staring back at me. It was a pleading I understood taking over the fun loving boy I had met in the drama room all those months ago.

“I’m not going to kill you, Ryland,” I answered his unasked question through gritted teeth as I placed my hands against his face, letting my magic travel right to his heart and smothering it with the same shield I had used on Cail for centuries, the same shield I had used on him only a few days before.

This time, however, it didn’t seem to be enough. Just as Ilyan’s bind hadn’t been.

Edmund was too close, the madness they had wound in him too deep.

I watched the desperate need to escape his own mind lessen to only a slow boil, but the madness still remained, his voice babbling nonsense, his hand digging into the dirt as his eyes darted around me.

My heart clenched as I watched someone I cared about fight these endless demons. Watched him writhe, knowing there was nothing I could do to help him.

Knowing just being there was not enough.

“Ryland,”—his name was a snap in the air as his eyes darted back to me, the bright blue filled with the same ice Edmund always had—“I know you can still hear him, but you can hear me, too. Can you focus on my voice? On Sain’s?”

My heart beat wildly as I stared at him, my foot pressing against the ground as I scanned the forest for signs of an attack, for any sign that we had been seen or heard. Luckily, we seemed to be in the clear so far, something that was both comforting and disturbing.

Surely someone must have heard that.

My mind watched the forest while I kept focus on Ryland, grateful when his breathing began to regulate, when the manic movements began to slow, and his powerful body began to relax underneath me.

“Good.” I hadn’t realized how tightly my muscles had wound themselves until that moment. The release of fear was almost like a breath of fresh air.

Of course, it couldn’t disappear completely, not with the way the sky was constantly ripping itself apart, the way it shook with the distant battle, the sky flashing in colors of war I was trying very hard not to acknowledge, not to accept that we could be headed into the same fray.

My stomach knotted together. Tension built further as I felt a pulse of power, a jolt of negative energy just on the outskirts of where my magic could reach, someone standing there.

Pacing.

Waiting.

As if they knew where we were, knew how far my magic allowed me to scan the forest. And knew right where to stand in order to go undetected.

“Good,” I repeated the word again like it was on repeat even though I was no longer looking at Ryland. My focus was far away, drifting through the trees I now stared at, as if I would somehow be able to see miles away, see who stood there, waiting for us.