“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t get any more out than that.
He smiled, wide and clear, as if he knew what he had done, as if he had been planning it for years and was proud of it. Seeing that look, seeing the playfulness in his eyes, a look that was so distinctly him I couldn’t have a hope of recreating it within my subconscious, I knew it was him. I knew it was real.
All of it.
“Be happy, Wyn,” he whispered, his voice soft in my ear as Rosaline’s laugh echoed around us, the sound bringing joy and hope to me unlike any time before.
Light and warmth seeped into me then, moving through me in a wave of calm that took the heaviness of the dream away.
I stayed still as the warmth left my skin, a chill moving over me. The smell of damp air and sandalwood permeated everything around me.
I tried to turn toward Talon, to move a little, but the lightness in my body had departed, leaving me with the heavy weight of exhaustion and residual pain. I knew at once I wasn’t going to be moving anytime soon.
A deep groan escaped my lips. The irritation of being trapped as well as being weak a death sentence. At the sound of my irritation, a relieved gasp filled the air around me, a gasp that was not mine.
My eyes snapped open in alarm at the sound, my heart beating a million miles an hour as they worked to adjust to the dimly lit space. The heavy buzz of agitated voices filled the air as my eyes went to the man who hovered above me, his cheeks stained with tears and long ropes of his hair pulled away from his face.
“You’re awake,” he gasped as the loud buzzing of voices disappeared into nothing. His lips twitched into a smile so rare I was sure no one had seen it in centuries.
I stared at him—at his eyes, his dimples, and the face that I had memorized hundreds of years before. My heart pulsed once in an emotion so strong it almost felt out of place given what I had left, what had happened, and the way my soul and heart and life had been split into two pieces of me.
Be happy, Wyn.
“Thomas.”
Two
I had fallen asleep clinging to his hand, our fingers intertwined in a hold that was more friendship than passion. It was a grasp that was exactly what we both needed—a hand to hold, a reminder that someone was there.
When I woke, his hand was still there, the calloused skin rough and slightly sweaty from holding onto me for so long.
The room glowed with a few lanterns that were scattered over my desks and tables. The flashes of lightning blended with a slight orange glow, giving everything a haunted look and far too many shadows for my liking. Seeing Dennis DeYoung and the rest of Styx with half illuminated faces was a bit too much for me. Nothing should be allowed to mar his beautiful face, strictly speaking.
I stared at the poster as the abbey roared with the incessant thunder that the pained soul of the earth was reigning on us. I looked at all of them, at the necklaces that hung from the ceiling, and the brightly colored walls. My eyes moved from place to place as my mind slowly began to wake up. Everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours came back so quickly it began to mash together.
Shifting my weight, I brought my hand to eye height. The shadows of the marks that were once so dark they looked like ink were now shadowed, making me wonder if I was seeing them properly, if I was remembering them the right way.
If I was remembering anything the right way.
Even through the ache in my body and the vivid imagery of a shadowed Talon standing before me, the reason we had come here slammed into me, my breath heaving as I gasped. I tried to sit up, although it became crystal clear it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
“Wyn?” Thom’s tense voice ripped through my panic.
My eyes darted to him, narrowing dangerously as I tried to dispel the level of confusion I was having.
“I need to get to Ilyan,” I gasped, knowing I was speaking irrationally yet unable to stop it in my half-awake fog. “Tell him what happened … in Prague. What Edmund did.”
“He already knows.” Thom’s voice was full of regret, a dark cast moving over his features as he looked away from me, his hand tightening around mine. He sighed. “Sain told him last night.”
The tension in my chest left as quickly as it had come. I should have been happy that I had been spared that conversation, but I couldn’t be. Not with the way Thom stared into the darkness, his shoulders hunched and broken. Not with what I knew Ilyan had been forced to hear about Talon, Ovailia, and the city he had protected since he had first come into power and even before.
Thom sat beside me, lost in his own thoughts as he always was when he was brooding.
Part of me wished he would say something, to talk, to ask him a million questions, to dig into his soul and discover everything that happened over the past hundred and fifty years. However, there was another part that wanted to curl up in a ball, cry, mourn, and ask this seemingly unfamiliar stranger to leave.