Kiss of Fire (Imdalind, #1)(60)



My rested body and serene mood lasted only a moment until I realized the reason I had woken up in the first place. I could hear frantic yelling from the other room, the voices raised and lowered dramatically as they yelled at each other in Czech. Wyn and Ilyan were not angry though; they were panicked. The sound increased as a door opened and I watched Wyn walk out of the hall, a large bag draped over her back, an even bigger suitcase clenched in her other hand. The bags were so large in proportion to her body it looked like she would topple over at any moment. She caught sight of me staring at her and both parcels came crashing to the ground.

“Oh, thank all!” she sighed, her accented voice still sounding odd in my ears. She rushed over to me, placing her hand right against my cheek. I looked at her in confusion, still unable to take my eyes off her dark tattoos.

“Ilyan! She’s awake.” She looked at me sadly, realizing that I was looking more at the dark marks on her face than at her. “I would hide them, Jos, but it hurts too much and I need to be able to focus right now.”

“Good,” Ilyan’s voice carried from the other room. “Is it hotter than before?”

Wyn removed her hand from my cheek and moved the heavy pile of blankets from off my torso. The removal of the weight increased the soreness I felt.

“Sorry,” she cringed.

She placed her hand against my chest, pressing Ryland’s necklace against my skin. My jaw tightened as the hot stone made firm contact. How could I not have felt that before? The ruby burned against me, making my whole chest feel as if it was on fire. The second Wyn released the pressure of her hand, the heat lessened, but I could still feel the necklace’s intense warmth from within Ryland’s sweater that they had placed me in.

“It’s hotter,” Wyn called back down the hall where Ilyan was.

I heard Ilyan swear in English before he appeared at the end of the hall, his hair pulled back into a pony tail and the knees of his torn jeans caked with what looked like dirt and blood.

“We are out of time. Get that stuff to the car; I’ll be down with her in a minute.”

Wyn obeyed, grabbing the large bags as if they weighed nothing and disappearing out the door.

Ilyan rushed over to me and stripped the top most blanket off the pile that covered me and laid it on the floor. When he removed the blanket, the aches increased just as they had when Wyn removed half of them a moment before.

“I’m sorry, Joclyn, but they have found us; we have to move now.”

My heart plunged. I knew beyond a doubt who “they” were: Cail, Timothy, Edmund… Ryland. I kept my head about me this time, the magic-induced sleep seeming to have helped me cope with the reality of Ryland’s association with the man who would stop at nothing to kill me.

“Ryland?”

“I don’t know, Joclyn. He could be with them. He could be… I just don’t know.” Ilyan stripped the remaining blankets from over me, causing my body to tense with deep aches that overtook me.

“I am sorry, Joclyn. I would do this gently, but we really do not have the time. I had hoped to have your spine healed before we moved you, but Edmund has other plans.” He kneeled down beside me and ran his hand down the right side of my face, his thumb resting on my mark. I expected a jolt or a pain like that which had accompanied Ryland’s touch, but instead, I felt nothing.

“I need you to be as quiet as you can. I can’t take the pain away right now; you need to be strong.” He slid his arms underneath my body and I knew what he meant. My body wasn’t as close to being healed as I had thought. With the heavy blankets gone, the aches and pains covered every inch of me. I felt like I had been thrown out of a third story window, which I had been.

I tried desperately to keep the majority of the sound in my throat as Ilyan lifted me and placed me on the floor on top of the blanket he had laid there. I lay like a rag doll, my body unwilling to move.

As Ilyan straightened me out, I caught a glimpse of fleece pajama bottoms—the same ones I had been wearing in my dream with Ryland. My heart caught, instantly aware that Ryland was right; it wasn’t a dream. If it wasn’t a dream, then what had happened to Ryland?

Ilyan wrapped the blanket around me tightly, like one does an infant, and then prepared to lift me. My body tensed as his hands began to slide underneath me.

“Ilyan,” I pleaded, “I can’t”

“You can, Joclyn. You have to. If we don’t leave now, they will kill you. There are too many of them for me to fight on my own. You are the last of the Chosen Children; the last one between Edmund and his “perfect” world.” He slid his hands under me and lifted me to his chest in one quick movement. I groaned as we moved, allowing too much sound to escape my lips.

“Do it for Ryland, Joclyn. He may need you soon.”

I clenched my teeth. I thought of Ryland, the way he twitched and writhed as his father fought his way into his brain. Ilyan was right; someone had to save Ryland, too.

I turned my body into Ilyan as he ran out the door of the apartment and down the stairs toward the small parking garage that sat below the complex. I kept my teeth clenched as my body jostled around, my hands wrapped around the blanket. I focused on my tensed muscles in an attempt to ignore the sharp pains.

I could tell when we entered the garage; Ilyan’s footsteps changed to a flat gait that echoed around concrete walls. He walked straight to the black Mazda he always drove, the rear driver’s side door opening on its own before we even reached it. He leaned over and placed me in the center of the back seat.

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