Iridian (Chromatic Mages #3)

Chapter 1

Rosabel La Rouge

My hands were so numb I hardly felt them attached to my body. Voices called out my name, but I was drowning in this never-ending darkness, and no matter how hard I tried to break free, I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the light.

I wondered, is this what it’s like to die?

Then I thought, no matter; Taland is okay.

My memory was perfectly functional. I remembered exactly what had happened, how I’d come to dive into this darkness, and as absurd as my mind insisted those events were, it also knew that they were real. That all of it had happened.

I, Rora La Rouge, had gone into the Devil’s very lair and had offered him my bracelet in exchange for Taland’s life, thinking it would be easy to walk back out of there. And maybe it would have been if not for the fact that the Mergenbach siblings of Selem had barged in uninvited.

That’s when everything had gone to shit.

Even now, in this state that I was, a part of me couldn’t help but wish they hadn’t. A part of me couldn’t help but wish the exchange had happened, that I’d put the bracelet into Hakim’s hand, and that Seth and I had taken Taland away from that house, that neighborhood, the damn country.

Even knowing what was at stake, I wished it with all my heart.

I guess it’s a good thing wishes don’t really mean anything.

That voice called my name again—or maybe it said something else; I couldn’t be sure. My mind still raced with memories and possibilities, with what-ifs, like always.

Sometimes I wondered if I was my own worst enemy.

Sometimes I believed it.

But, eventually, I began to recognize the voice.

It wasn’t people like I first thought—just one person. Just one woman who’d made me sweat ever since I was a little girl, who’d showed me how little the word family could mean, and how much of your life depended on the actual individuals you considered that. Just that one woman who’d made me feel like I was never enough, like there was something wrong with me, like I wasn’t worthy of love and affection and patience and understanding, and I’d gone out into the world to search for it without even understanding what I was doing.

It was that woman’s voice that called me, and that’s the reason I both wanted to stay in the dark forever, and why my mind, guided by fear and panic that were completely out of my control, shocked itself awake. Wherever Madeline Rogan was, that’s where I needed to be the most alert, figure out how to get the hell away from her, as far and as fast as I could.

It was instinct, so deeply ingrained in me by years and years of neglect that I reacted even when unconscious. Or maybe it was just the spell she was chanting?

A spell—not my name. She wasn’t calling for me to wake up. The harsh Iridian words that left her lips in a rush sent a red-hot shock throughout my system, yet I was still confident that it was just the thought of her being near me that had pulled me out of unconsciousness first.

Either way, my eyes opened.

A white ceiling over me. My chest rose and fell so fast. My hands were indeed completely numb, and I couldn’t blink or move at all for a good minute while my thoughts raced.

That ceiling—I knew it. That smell in the air, the faint scent of the sweet perfume lingering—I knew it. The warmth, the weight of her presence near me—I knew it. And even if I didn’t want to believe it, I knew exactly where I was, too.

In the mansion, in Madeline’s office—and she really was there with me.

“Look at me.”

It was an order, one my eyes obeyed without my need to even think through what I was doing.

Madeline leaned down, closer to me. Her face came into view and our eyes locked.

I stopped breathing.

She, to me, was the boogeyman come to swallow me whole.

“Can you see me?”

I couldn’t speak.

“Can you sit up?”

My lips refused to move.

Cold hands wrapped around my wrists. She pulled me to sit up the next second.

The room—her office, indeed—tilted in front of my eyes. My stomach raged, my insides threatening to come right out of me if the world didn’t stop spinning so fast soon.

“Breathe,” said Madeline, and if I could ever trust my own thoughts when she was around, I’d say she sounded concerned for a minute there. Concerned—about me.

Which was how I knew that I was hearing things.

But I breathed because I needed to make sense of the fact that I was here, at the mansion, and not in Silver Spring, in the Devil’s lair. I needed to make sense of the fact that Taland wasn’t with me, or that I wasn’t at the IDD Headquarters, or even locked in a cell, maybe in the Tomb.

The room steadied and my stomach no longer twisted so violently a few seconds in. Madeline, wearing one of her crisp red suits that was spelled to never hold a wrinkle—at least I was pretty sure of that—sat next to me, on the same couch on the right side of her office. Her hair wasn’t as perfectly combed as usual, her eyes were wide, her red lips parted, and for a moment there I thought maybe her hands were shaking, but it couldn’t be. This was Madeline Rogan, former director of the IDD. Her hands didn’t shake over anything.

“Can you understand what I’m saying?” she asked me, and I instinctively moved, bobbed my head up and down to say that I did.

She wasn’t relieved. “Do you know where you are?”

Again, that same movement, but it was getting easier on my neck.

My mouth opened to speak, but I realized my throat was too dry and there was pain everywhere on my body. Everywhere, but especially on my left thigh, where Hakim had stabbed me with that knife.

Chaos, chaos, I need to get Taland out of here, chaos ? —

“Rosabel.”

Madeline’s voice rang in my ears. I blinked and even the pain took a step back to let me focus on her, this absurd fear I had of her initially stronger than everything else.

But…it was just Madeline.

And I was an adult now, was I not? I could remind myself of that as many times as I needed when I wasn’t operating on pure instinct— just Madeline.

“Where is he?” I said, even if my voice came out a mess, and my neck hurt, and my chest hurt, and everything fucking hurt .

“You mean, the Tivoux boy?” Madeline’s arched brow revealed the wrinkles on her forehead.

“Yes, Grandmother. Taland—where is Taland?” Because we’d been in Silver Spring, in the Devil’s lair, and I’d brought him out of that ruined house. Radock had been there—I’d left Taland in his hands.

You can let go now. I got him— that had happened… right ?

A deep sigh escaped Madeline’s lips, and she closed her eyes as if she were suddenly exhausted.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Rosabel?” she whispered.

A part of me wanted to start laughing and ask her, what the hell do you care?

But another bigger part of me knew that this was not important. She was not important.

So, I tried to move, tried to stand, tried to get the hell out of there. Except the sharp pain that came from every limb as well as my ribs stopped me. Pulled me back. Held me down as the shock froze me in place for a moment.

Fuck.

“I’m going to do a spell on you, heal you, and then we’re going to talk, you and I,” Madeline said.

“No, I—” have to go, I wanted to say, but she didn’t let me. The words were at the tip of her tongue. When she started chanting, red flames sprung on her hand, and extended to me instantly. It must have been a fourth-degree one because the effect was immediate.

My eyes closed involuntarily. A long breath left my lips and the warmth that spread through me from the magic was like falling on fucking clouds while the sun shone all over me. Warmed me to my bones. Relaxed my muscles and took my pain away. Some of it, maybe even half.

I’d have been tempted to think that stranger things had never happened than Madeline actually doing a healing spell on me personally, but they had. Much stranger things—like the Bluefire siblings with halos over their heads, and rooms that were in two places at once, and Alejandro Ammiz and David Hill…

Yes, stranger things had definitely happened, and when Madeline was done chanting, I opened my eyes again to find her on her way to pour herself a glass.

With her whiskey in hand and her sharp eyes unblinking, she ordered, “Speak.”

Except I didn’t want to speak, did I? I wanted to run the hell away from this room, and never mind that the wound and the blood loss had taken a lot of energy out of me, and that my body needed sleep and food. Never mind that I had no idea what had happened after I’d passed out or how I came to be— again —in this fucking mansion—never mind! I made to stand up even though my vision had become blurry around the edges.

Unfortunately, I didn’t even make it to my feet before I heard her whisper again and felt her magic.

It was cold this time, and the flames basically slammed me down on the couch again. They faded soon, but the magic they carried wrapped around my hips like a thick piece of rope and held me down. Even if I’d had my full energy, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything against it. And my magic?—

“Stay, Rosabel,” said Madeline, coming toward me slowly as she sipped her whiskey. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me exactly what happened—in detail.”

I looked down at my hands, my fingers empty. “Where’s my ring?” I asked. “Where’s my…” bracelet?

I wore the same clothes I’d had on when I went to Silver Spring, to that house. Ruined and bloody and dusty and torn, my jeans and shirt, though my boots weren’t on my feet anymore. Nobody had changed my clothes and I’d left my ring in my pocket before the fight, but my bracelet had been around my wrist. It had been around my fucking wrist but now I could see that it wasn’t because my jacket wasn’t on me, either, and my sleeves were completely torn.

My stomach fell and fell, and my magic raged together with me— where the hell is my bracelet?!

“You had nothing on you. Your ring wasn’t on your person,” Madeline said as she sat on the coffee table in front of the couch and crossed her legs. “You can’t do magic, Rosabel. And you’re wasting my time— speak . Tell me what happened. Tell me everything.”

I shook my head. “I…”

To look into those amber eyes had always fucking terrified me, but now it did for a whole other reason. Now, I was terrified because she really wouldn’t let me go and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it without my ring. Without my bracelet. Where-where-where the hell was it? Had it fallen off me while I was dragging Taland out of that house? Had I lost it somewhere and didn’t see it? Had somebody taken it from me?

Had she ?

My eyes scrolled down Madeline’s body and to her wrists—nothing but a gold bracelet she always wore on the left hand. Then I looked at the table, at the office, what I could see on the other side from her desk’s monstrous size there in the middle.

My bracelet wasn’t there.