Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)(71)

The room felt heavy and hollow as I waited for him to speak, the walls closing in until I was positive it was only us. Even the screams that echoed through the old wooden walls were a woeful memory.

Nothing could be worse than that.

Could it?

“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he repeated the words again, and the fear only grew. The meaning I had missed was a branding iron against my soul, and I flinched.

What had he done?

What had he done to make him so scared? To cause both Thom and Dramin to be so injured?

This couldn’t be his doing? There wasn’t any way.

“What!” the word exploded out of me as I moved over to Sain, the sound of my knees scraping against the dust-covered floor loud in the silence.

Sain flinched as if he had been punched, and I froze. The movement was so similar to Ryland, to Joclyn, that it made me wonder what I was seeing. As quickly as the movement had come, however, it was gone. Even though the fear continued to hold him, he still looked like Sain.

My heart raced as I stared at him, waiting for an answer that never came. With each second of silence, my panic grew, my anxiety tensing through me in a vice-like pain, pleading for answers.

“What did you do?” I asked the question again as he continued to wilt before me. The way he moved made it clear he wasn’t going to tell me anything, no matter how hard I asked.

Stupid Drak!

Fighting the need to punch him, I stepped away with a grunt as a gentle groan from beside me pulled me out of my anger and to the ancient beside me, the old man whose life I had ruined so many centuries before. I had vowed to keep him safe, to get him through this, yet he sat there bleeding.

I took one last look at Sain, my dark eyes flaring in anger before I rushed to Dramin’s side. His skin felt like ice under my hand as I pressed it against him, my ability rushing right to his neck, to the gaping wound there and the tiny bits of poisonous magic that was already infecting him.

My eyes snapped to his at the realization, the fear only adding to the panic I already felt. A scream rang loud and clear from right outside as I looked at him, wishing there were words to say.

He had been bitten by one of the rats. One of Edmund’s little weapons. I didn’t know if there was any way to reverse what was done or what it would do to him in the first place.

Normally, the bites sent you into a coma fairly quickly, but he still sat before me, very much awake, his painfully weak magic not so much as reacting to the infiltration.

“Dramin, I—”

“I am fine, Wynifred,” he cut me off, his weak voice riddled with a plea that he didn’t need to speak aloud, an acknowledgement that, Drak or not, he had known all along.

He had known from the moment the sky had exploded with those things. Hell, he was a Drak, so he had probably realized it long before.

My heart tensed in an anxious vice at the knowledge, the unwanted fact ripping through me. I had wanted to save him, to find a way to make up for what I had done. I knew he was accepting defeat, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up yet.

I wasn’t going to tell him that.

I nodded once in understanding, and his face cracked into a sad, little smile as I pooled my magic in his neck, around the open wound that blood still poured from, and began stitching the skin back together. The process was slow and arduous as I fought against the tainted magic that was inside of him, fought against a wound that didn’t seem to want to go back together.

“I can fix things as well as I can destroy them,” I said as the bleeding stopped, the skin continuing to weave itself together until it was nothing more than a fine, pink line, sealing the poison and the possible death sentence inside.

“One neck is hardly worth the trouble.” He sighed.

My pride prickled a bit at the depth of his deceivingly kind voice.

“It is to me.” I could barely get the words out. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he repeated, his frail hand moving over mine in a motion that looked more like a slow motion memory replay than reality, the pressure heavy and somewhat calm as he looked at me and tried to comfort me without magic.

He looked even frailer in the weak light of the dust-covered room if that was possible. His eyes were wide and searching, an emotion behind them bleeding into me in words I could almost understand even if he didn’t say them.

“Dramin?” I was surprised at the shake in my voice, the way my hand clung to his arm, a fear I didn’t fully understand moving into me.

He said nothing. He only looked at me with the same confusion I felt, the screaming and panic from outside seeping through the shuttered window like a fog.

I felt more of a responsibility toward this man than I had anyone before, with the exception of one. Despite keeping him alive, saving him, wasn’t going to repay what I had done, it was all I could think of to do. And this felt like a failure.

Combine that with the desperate look that covered his eyes, and I couldn’t stop the dread, the guilt, from winding its way up my spine and latching itself onto my shoulders like a hundred ton weight.

He opened his mouth to speak, the fear in his eyes growing for only a moment before the loud boom of Sain’s voice shook through me, my muscles tensing back to the panicked knit.

“It is not the way of the Drak, son,” Sain’s voice boomed from behind me with the depth of sight that I had heard before—with the deference he always seemed to think he was owed.