Chapter 11 #3
At first, a flicker of flame was all she spotted as she glanced at the hand she used to reach for the key.
Lory didn’t yield to examine where it came from, already used to the racing of her pulse as she imagined a hundred ways of telling Falcrest what a prick he was for locking them up.
But it didn’t stop there. Heat spread over her skin, climbing up her arm, until she could no longer ignore the flames dancing along her tunic, nibbling on the fabric with each passing moment.
Like a river of gold and orange, they expanded to her shoulder, chest, and back, the heat increasing with every panic-bated breath.
Eroth, save her. A few more heartbeats, and the flames would eat away at her skin.
The agony would set in at any moment. This was the poison.
It had to be the poison. Whatever was in the air made her burn, and the flames now consuming her entire body were proof Falcrest was ready to kill her after all.
He’d just waited for the right moment. He didn’t even need to be present to eliminate her.
If only she could get out of there, the poison would wear off, and she’d stop going up in flames.
With her full weight, Lory threw herself at the door and grabbed the key, ignoring the searing sensation as the fire spread over her face. Her hair, her eyebrows, her skin—all of it would burn, melt. She’d die in this room.
“Lory!” Aiden’s shout convinced her she wasn’t hallucinating.
The door didn’t budge, her hands too slippery on the key to turn it—or the key turning into liquid in her grip.
Wide-eyed, she watched the melted metal drip into a shimmering puddle at her feet.
“What’s happening?” The fire blurred her vision, enclosing her like a cloak threatening to suffocate her or to eat her alive—she couldn’t tell which scenario scared her more, but panic was a living, breathing beast inside of her, and there was nothing she could do as the flames seemed to pour over her with every beat of her straining heart.
“Lory!” Aiden was next to her, his hands reaching through the flames like he was immune to the all-consuming heat, like he didn’t fear the fire.
Then his hands touched her wrists, locking around them as he sent a storm of ice over her body like a layer of cool fabric.
“Are you all right, Lory? Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know. I can’t feel—” Anything. She couldn’t feel anything but the barrel of smoldering embers that seemed to live inside her chest as she struggled for every single breath.
She should have been screaming in agony, but her body was numb, as if the ice had suffocated her senses as much as the raging flames.
Aiden was about to peel the frozen ashes that were her shirt off her arm to check for burns when the door burst open behind them, clipped steps racing through the room they’d left behind, and Falcrest appeared behind Frost, his dark eyebrows knitted together over his furious, ash-gray eyes.
“I told you to get out of here, not to set yourself on fire, Vednis,” he barked, ripping her from Aiden’s grasp to sling her into his arms, already moving toward the door.
Aiden followed closely, explaining in bursts of words what had happened, while they made it up the torch-lit staircase.
“I swear she caught fire on her own. She didn’t even get near the torches.”
Falcrest took the stairs two steps at a time, Aiden never falling behind as he watched over Lory with that new, concerned Frost side Lory had yet to get used to, but her body had gone numb, the pain of burns contained beneath the layer Aiden’s magic had formed, or her brain already compartmentalizing it, blocking it out while it could—while Falcrest’s gaze found her face every other moment as if checking whether she was still alive.
No matter how deep the shock ran, she couldn’t ignore the way her side was pressed against the hard lines of his chest and stomach, and his arms were slung around her shoulders and knees, securing her uncomfortably close.
If it wasn’t for the scowl spreading on his features as he caught her staring, she might have believed she’d escape pain if she only focused on the feel of his movements, but this was the man who’d locked them up in a room and filled it with a gas that eventually made her go up in flames.
As if reading her mind, he shook his head.
“People don’t just catch fire, Bellmont.
” His tone was only slightly winded from carrying her, and smooth as velvet as he threw an implicit accusation at the ice wielder—and all the more dangerous for it.
But while his voice was all calculated captain, his face told a different story.
Whatever had happened, Falcrest wasn’t happy about it.
When they reached the top of the stairs, Falcrest turned right, striding with purpose along the hallway on the end of which, Lory remembered, the Medica quarters were situated.
“Bellmont, clean up and return to the training grounds. Tell Hand Sil that Vednis is still with me.” He stopped so abruptly Aiden nearly bumped into him as he pivoted, facing the ashling.
“Don’t tell a soul what you saw.” The or else didn’t need to be spoken; it was clear in his growl as he sent Aiden off without room for discussion.
Only when the ice wielder was out of sight did Falcrest continue his mad pace toward the Medica quarters, where he barged into Hand Nahrit’s office without knocking, laying down a squirming Lory atop the Medica Hand’s desk.
Nahrit leaped up from his chair, opening his mouth to protest, but Falcrest was faster. “Second-degree burns on her hands and shoulder. Some on her neck. Her face and scalp are all right, but it will be painful to peel the tunic off her chest for sure.”
“What happened?” Nahrit was already bending over the desk, examining Lory’s hands, shoulder, and neck in the order Falcrest had stated her injuries.
The pain she was expecting to set in remained a simmering sensation in the background, like a hum threatening to break into full-blown noise.
“I’m fine,” she got out, her breathing barely strong enough to push the words through her gritted teeth.
Falcrest held her down by the collarbone with one broad hand. “You are not fine, Vednis.” With his other hand, he was already picking at the collar of her tunic, carefully peeling it aside.
“How did she get those injuries?” Nahrit prompted while Falcrest lifted the edge of the collar inch by inch, cringing slightly when Lory groaned in admission of the pain finally catching up with her.
“Torch.” Falcrest didn’t look up from his task as he reduced what had happened to the barest of bones and weaved in a lie. “She caught fire, and I was too late to stop it.”
Not that he’d tried to. It was Aiden’s work that she was still alive. Without his ice magic, she would have burned to ashes.
Ashling, indeed. A pile of ashes; that was what she would have been without Aiden Bellmont.
Nahrit’s responses were swallowed by Lory’s scream as Falcrest pulled the tunic off her shoulder with what felt like half her skin, and the world spun in her blurring vision.
Falcrest’s gray eyes were the last thing she saw as she blacked out completely.