Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)(6)

Shifting my weight, I brought my hand to eye height. The shadows of the marks that were once so dark they looked like ink were now shadowed, making me wonder if I was seeing them properly, if I was remembering them the right way.

If I was remembering anything the right way.

Even through the ache in my body and the vivid imagery of a shadowed Talon standing before me, the reason we had come here slammed into me, my breath heaving as I gasped. I tried to sit up, although it became crystal clear it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

“Wyn?” Thom’s tense voice ripped through my panic.

My eyes darted to him, narrowing dangerously as I tried to dispel the level of confusion I was having.

“I need to get to Ilyan,” I gasped, knowing I was speaking irrationally yet unable to stop it in my half-awake fog. “Tell him what happened … in Prague. What Edmund did.”

“He already knows.” Thom’s voice was full of regret, a dark cast moving over his features as he looked away from me, his hand tightening around mine. He sighed. “Sain told him last night.”

The tension in my chest left as quickly as it had come. I should have been happy that I had been spared that conversation, but I couldn’t be. Not with the way Thom stared into the darkness, his shoulders hunched and broken. Not with what I knew Ilyan had been forced to hear about Talon, Ovailia, and the city he had protected since he had first come into power and even before.

Thom sat beside me, lost in his own thoughts as he always was when he was brooding.

Part of me wished he would say something, to talk, to ask him a million questions, to dig into his soul and discover everything that happened over the past hundred and fifty years. However, there was another part that wanted to curl up in a ball, cry, mourn, and ask this seemingly unfamiliar stranger to leave.

And that was part of the problem.

I had thought I had it all figured out before in Imdalind when Sain and I had fought our way past Edmund’s army. I had thought I had managed to find a middle ground between the person I was for the centuries when I did Edmund’s bidding, when I smuggled information for Ilyan, and the person I had been for the last hundred years with Talon.

Nevertheless, there were too many parts of me now to have anything be that easy—the part that killed for sex and money, hunted, spied on my own people for centuries; the mother, the mourner, the lover; the part that loved Talon; the part that loved Thom.

Sitting here with Thom, in the room I had decorated with Talon, was making that abundantly clear in that irritating, “pretending REO Speedwagon is a decent band” kind of way.

I was sitting amongst band posters and brightly colored comforters, a life that felt unfamiliar, while staring at the man who owned my heart long before I had taunted the shadowed figure behind the tree.

I sat, looking at the way Thom’s lips twitched as they always had, seeing the bright blue of his eyes that were so much more expressive than Ilyan’s ever could be. I was having trouble finding the line between all the different parts and lives of me.

“I’m sorry, Wynifred,” Thom whispered into the dark chill of the room, his eyes not deviating so much as a millimeter from mine.

I jumped at his voice while the sky cracked with light again. My body ached at the quick movement, a groan escaping like a slow leak. Everything hurt.

While I was grateful for whatever Jos had done to save my life, it also seemed to be the equivalent of getting hit by a Mack truck covered in protruding knives. And probably a herd of deer following. I was sure, if I looked close enough, I would find a few hoof shaped bruises.

“Why?” I regretted the question the second I asked it. I regretted the way my voice snapped as it always had and the anger that flowed freely behind that one word.

I opened my mouth to apologize, to take it back, but Thom only smiled at me, his bright white teeth flashing in a straight line behind slightly chapped lips. I started at the response, my heart beating fast in confusion before it sunk in—the reason for his smile, and why my knee-jerk reaction seemed so comfortable to him.

It was me.

The me he knew, anyway.

The knowledge only made my stomach flip, my body shaking in exhaustion as I looked toward the faded poster I had purchased on the Fleetwood Mac world tour.

“They said you had changed.” Calm washed through me at the slight laugh in his voice, the familiarity seeping deep into my bones. “I’m glad to see it’s not too much.”

“I have changed.” My voice was distant as I my focus dodged from the faded poster to the goofy picture of Talon and I that had been framed in the 70s, back when every picture came out sepia toned and far too yellow. We looked like we had taken a bath in yellow mud, and it didn’t quite wash off.

I stared at that picture with the calm rhythm of Thom’s breathing the only sound in the room.

It was true. I had changed. There was no denying that. However, it was more than that. More than just someone growing up, learning more about themselves and how to survive within society.

“I had a different life … a hundred years…” My voice faded away as I looked from the picture back to Thom who still looked at me with unexplained awe in his eyes, as if I was back from the dead. Of course, I guess that was true no matter which way you spun it.

The thought sent a shiver of tension up my spine, picturing the image of Talon standing in the white shadows of my dream.