Scorched Treachery (Imdalind, #3)
Rebecca Ethington
Wyn
Chapter One
It was the same dream. Always the same dream. I had been having it since Cail first marked my skin with the curse, the night Ilyan saved me from my father.
The dream usually featured a beautiful little girl dancing in a meadow. She danced through the tall grasses with flowers in her blonde hair. After about twenty years, I began wondering if it was some repressed memory, but I didn’t have blonde hair. My hair was dark; it always had been.
With time, it became clear that I was not the little girl. Instead, I sat and watched her with some guy sitting next to me. I would like to say the guy was handsome, but he was not Talon. No guy could hold a candle to Talon. Talon was tall and built like a football player. This man was sinewy, his coloring lighter. Besides, the mystery guy from my dreams was dressed like Henry the Eighth and there was nothing attractive about that. He looked like a peacock. It didn’t look good then, and it wouldn’t look good now. Not like anyone would dress like that now.
The dream had always started the same; I sat next to the man in my dreams as he talked, his lips moving, but no sound coming out. Then the dream would morph. The girl, the man, and I would move from the meadow to a village, then to a marble lined room, and then to the darkness. It was in the darkness that I would begin to hear sound. The only sound the dream ever had was in that room, when the little girl screamed as Edmund tortured her.
I would hear the screaming and see the man as he fought to save her, and in the back of my mind, I knew I was fighting too.
The dream was the reason I had never consented to try to have children with Talon. Not only was pregnancy a strange and uncomfortable prospect, but I was scared of what Edmund would do to a child. Everyone was. It was the same reason so few children were born. People had seen what Edmund had done to his own children. It was not worth it to risk him doing the same to their own.
Up until a few weeks ago, when we first heard the screams of the woman in the tunnels below Prague, the screams of my dream had always ended in the dark room. But, the more the woman yelled, begged and screamed, the more my dream changed. It lengthened until I watched the little girl succumb, her screams dwindling to nothing.
The screams in Prague continued, however.
We could only listen as the woman pleaded to and fought against those who attempted to make her give away Ilyan and Joclyn’s location.
No matter how hard we looked, we could never find them. Our failure to find them, combined with Ovailia’s decision to keep the information from Ilyan, led to her removal as the dal?í v p?íkazu and the replacement of Talon in the ruling position. Something I was not happy about.
Now, he was gone all the time, and the screams of the woman still echoed through the halls.
So, the new ending to my dreams stayed. The screaming moving from one person to another before I would wake up and scowl at the high ceiling of our room.
Except this morning. This morning, I was rudely awoken by the blasting of Ilyan’s phone playing ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’.
Wait.
Ilyan’s phone.
His direct line.
I rolled over and kicked Talon, my magic surging through him. He jerked as I zapped him, my not-so-nice way of waking him up, shooting him out of bed. He moved to get back into bed, grumbling at me for a moment, only to jump when the sound of the music hit his ears.
Talon’s fingers reached toward the phone as he sat down on his side of the bed. I chose to stay lying under the covers, my eyes focused on him.
Yes, it was the middle of the day where Ilyan was. Yes, he was free to call whenever he wanted. However, the fact that he would have known it was the middle of the night here, and he was calling the white phone that was a direct connection to Talon, set my nerves on fire.
Talon pressed the phone to his ear, the skin contact triggering the magic and completing the call.
“Ilyan?” Talon asked, his voice drowsy but still on edge, my mood mirrored in his clipped words.
I waited, reluctant to move, hoping for something exciting, but knowing, absolutely knowing that nothing positive was going to come out of this call.
“Princess Mudgy.” Talons voice was low, the statement making no sense to me. For all I knew it was a code word, and if it was a code word...
I watched Talon as he listened to Ilyan talk, his shoulders knitting together more and more, his body language spelling danger to me. Talon stayed silent as Ilyan spoke, his voice a mellow buzz that slipped through the air until the line went dead. Talon never said anything more after the code words, his silence only making me more nervous. He lowered the disconnected phone to his lap, his movements tense.
Talon didn’t turn to me; he didn’t say anything. He just sat with the phone in his hands, his knuckles white from clenching the small white box. I watched his broad shoulders flex, the tension never leaving, and found my own fears growing.
The silence was painful. I wanted to hear. I wanted to pry, but I knew it would not be right. I placed my hand on Talon’s back, willing him to turn and smile, but knowing it wasn’t going to happen.
“Meet you in my dreams,” Talon said tersely. Not once did he look at me as he lay down and opened his arms for me.
I was seriously on edge now. Whatever had happened was monumental enough that neither he nor Ilyan wanted anyone else to know what had happened. I laid down next to Talon and closed my eyes, letting the magic of the T?uha take me away to meet with him.