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-consumingheat, 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—whileFalcrest’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.” Theor elsedidn’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 hebarged 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 notfine, 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.
Twelve
“Tell me, Lory…”Falcrest’s voice slithered over her body like tendrils of black ink, smooth and cool, easing the agony that was her skin. “What is it like to be consumed by fire?”
Lory was faintly aware of standing in a dark chamber… No, not a chamber but the room Aiden and she had nearly escaped from before she’d gone up in flames and nearly incinerated herself—but when she glanced down, not a single tongue of fire was licking up her body. Imagination. This had all been a figment of her imagination. Or had it?
As she scanned the room for Aiden, she realized he wasn’t there. But Falcrest was, prowling along the wall that had lifted when Lory’s and Aiden’s daggersset off the mechanism. His black uniform—the same one she wore—showed off the powerful lines of his body, the casual elegance of each deliberate step as he watched her study him. “See anything interesting there?” A mocking grin ghosted across his face, hair moving as if on a phantom wind. “I’d rather you focus on yourself—you know, with all that heat going on.” With a flick of his hand, he gestured at her person, and had it not been for the orange glow rising from Lory’s skin, she would have asked him what he was talking about. The burning sensation had almost disappeared, as if Falcrest’s presence blanketed the worst of the pain until only the thrill of the heat remained.
“Have you lost your voice?” His tone wasn’t harsh, not like the tone of the captain ordering her in training, but an unfamiliar challenge lingered in the velvet layers of his deep timbre—one that made Lory want to stick out her tongue at him.
Falcrest slowed—stopped—looking her over with those cold gray eyes as if she were a particularly fascinating riddle. His hand lifted to her face as if to brush back strands of her hair dancing on the same phantom wind that was making black strands dance on his forehead. An inch from her cheek, he paused, waiting for Lory didn’t know what, and the glow she’d noticed from the corner of her eye intensified into hues of gold as the fingertips of Falcrest’s other hand skated the edge of her jaw. “Is it getting a little hot?”
