Chapter 4 #4
The injured fae was lesser—flat-nosed, with two short black horns protruding from his forehead. What remained of his tunic had burned away, exposing the full extent of the damage beneath.
My gaze caught there and refused to move.
Dragonfire had ravaged him. The burns stretched across nearly all of his chest and stomach in terrible, sprawling ruin, the flesh there darkened and split in violent, uneven seams so catastrophic I couldn’t understand how he still lived.
Where the skin had broken apart, there was none of the raw, living red I might have expected, but a terrible brown, as though the fire had cooked him far beyond the surface.
Even the few untouched stretches of skin had shrivelled beneath the heat, pulled taut and wrong across the hard shape of his ribs, as though he’d melted against his own bones.
The sounds that escaped him would haunt my nightmares.
Rasping, wet pulls of air slipped from him with every labored breath, the only sounds he could make through a throat so ravaged by dragonfire that screaming was no longer possible.
My stomach turned violently.
Had I looked like that?
Had Aedric carried me in that state? Had he lain beneath murky skies flecked with falling ash, my ruined body tucked against his side while he held me through what we’d both believed were my final, agonizing moments?
The people of Solmire…
This.
This was how they’d died.
How I should have died.
Sairus snapped his fingers at me. “Heal him.”
My eyes burned as the stench of his charred flesh reached me, the smell horribly familiar. I’d smelled it before. On my own blistered body.
I pushed myself to my feet, numb. I had no idea what I was doing.
“Just like we practiced,” Aedric breathed, rising to stand beside me. To steady me. To brace me.
“We didn’t practice healing,” I whispered.
“We practiced touching your magic. Bending it to your will.”
My eyes found his, and I knew I must have looked wild. Afraid.
“Shape it,” he said softly, cutting off the protest before it could leave my mouth. “Tame it.”
His gaze held mine.
I can’t.
“You can.”
I closed my eyes.
Inside me, my magic stirred—coiled tight, like a serpent sleeping in a deep, black pit. When I reached for it, it reared, slithering back into the darkness.
Please, I thought.
I remembered how easily it had come that night in Solmire, after the ball, after Sevrien’s attack.
How it had spilled through me, knitting wounds closed as though they had never been.
I lifted a trembling hand and hovered it over the dying faerie.
I reached for my magic. Tried to coax it forward.
Guide it into him the way I’d watched the healer do with Aedric, willing it to rise, to answer me.
Nothing happened.
“Try again,” Aedric urged.
I nodded, swallowing hard, and reached deeper. I remembered the rush of Rìan’s power when I’d grabbed onto it, how it had filled me completely, how it had touched every part of me at once. I tried to pull that feeling back.
It didn’t come.
“I can’t,” I whispered to Aedric, turning to him, panic clawing at my chest.
The disappointment in his eyes cut me deep, though he cupped the side of my face gently. “We’ll practise. You’ll learn,” he said quietly, brushing his thumb across my cheekbone. “You’ve done it once already for yourself.”
I fought the sob threatening to erupt from me.
Even if I learned, it would be too late for this male.
“How did you do it, then?” Calantha propped her elbows on the table, staring at me past the twitching body as though his suffering were beneath her notice. “How did you heal?”
“I don’t know.” My voice broke. “I don’t know.”
Sairus’s gaze slid to Aedric.
“You mean to use this Eidra to strengthen our power?” He scoffed. “She can’t even properly wield her own. Perhaps you’re right about her after all.” He flexed his fingers. “Allow me.”
Black fire suddenly flared before him, gathering into a concentrated tourbillon like a small tornado before suddenly piercing through the male’s chest and vanishing. The body arched, the faerie’s face stretched in a silent scream, a horrible gurgling sound rising in his throat, and then… nothing.
His form went slack. Lifeless.
“A merciful death, my Lord, for one who suffered so,” Sairus sniffed.
Dark red began to seep slowly from the faerie’s ears, nostrils, and mouth, dark and viscous against scorched skin.
More welled at the corners of his closed eyes, slipping downward in dark trails while the same awful fluid spread through the back of his trousers in a widening stain.
Heavy drops struck the tabletop with sluggish, sickening taps.
I stared, horror rooting me to the spot as understanding slid into place.
Gods.
Sairus had melted his insides.
Hysteria clawed its way up my throat. I whirled on Aedric, eyes wide, but he was already looking at his uncle, rage simmering beneath the surface, sparks flickering dangerously across his fingertips.
“Get out.” His voice dropped to a whisper ripe with the promise of violence.
Sairus inclined his head and rose.