Page 13 of Iridian (Chromatic Mages #3)

Rosabel La Rouge

Hill is dead-Hill is dead-Hill exploded!

My eyes popped open, and my panic reached its peak before I’d taken my first breath. I could see nothing but brown at first, and something awful was on my tongue, and my body felt like it had been through the fucking sewer—but I was awake. I could hear voices, could understand that I was conscious. I could remember, could think back to the reason why I was here, almost completely paralyzed, with blood and dirt in my mouth and eyes, forcing myself to draw in air.

David Hill was dead. He’d exploded while I had my arms around him still, when I’d taken him down for fear that he’d make it to his feet again and would somehow survive. He didn’t, though—that bracelet made sure of it. The magic that came from both Taland and me made sure that not only his heart, but his entire body came apart.

The bracelet that wasn’t on me—I felt it, even now. Felt the absence of it around my wrist, and before I even knew what the hell was around me, I felt vulnerable without it. Weak.

Hands on my arms, pulling me to the side, then putting me on my back. A blue sky was over us and I saw masked faces, two of them. Navy colored masks—IDD soldiers, and one of them was saying something, trying to get me to respond. The best I could do right now was blink my eyes and try to clear the view. Wait for Taland to come down here and get me so we could disappear.

Because Hill was dead and there was a good chance his blood was in my mouth and nose, even eyes, and we could leave now. We could get away, run to the edge of the world, be alone. It had worked— Goddess, it worked! —and I could cry with happiness. With relief. With gratitude.

It had worked, our plan, and now everything was over.

Thinking back now, I wish I hadn’t been so utterly happy then. It almost felt like I jinxed the whole fucking thing—but I digress.

The soldiers pulled me up by the hands even before I was able to tell them that I could. That I wasn’t dizzy. That I wasn’t going to fall unconscious again. But wasn’t it a miracle that I’d even survived? I’d fallen from so high up. The magic of the explosion had pushed me right off the edge and I couldn’t hold on.

Then…Zach and Aurelia.

I remembered the voice— Grab my hand! —and Zach’s face, his wounded arm. I remembered Aurelia trying to make it to me when her legs didn’t even work at all. I remembered how they’d tried to save me but all that blood on my leather jacket had made sure I slipped right through Zach’a fingers—yet I’d survived. From that rock the fall wasn’t long, and I’d survived.

I was alive and Hill wasn’t, and that was all that mattered.

Until I was pulled up by the same soldiers who were still speaking and I still couldn’t understand. I was pulled up all the way to my feet, and both of them held my weight because, turns out, my legs couldn’t really carry me. Not yet, anyway.

But finally, I forced myself to focus, to push down the thoughts in my head and reach for my face to wipe the dirt from my eyes, and I focused on my ears, too.

I’d fallen in the valley, indeed, and the first thing I saw in the distance was the soldiers. The fucking soldiers of the Delaetus Army, with their flesh and their armor on, their eyes closed as they remained perfectly still. Another wave of relief crashed onto me—Hill had managed to use his soul vessels, but he hadn’t awakened them. He’d needed the bracelet for that, and the bracelet was ours. Mine and Taland’s, and even if it wasn’t on me right now, he had it, so it was okay.

Tears in my eyes when I raised my head to look at that protruding piece of rock where we’d fought. Goddess, it looked even higher from down here. And I was laughing and crying at the same time to see Taland standing at the edge of it with his hands on his hips as he watched me.

Alive. I couldn’t see his face from so far up, but I knew he was looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking: we made it, baby. We fucking made it.

As if he read the thoughts in my mind, he raised two fists to the sky.

Laughter burst out of me, and I imagined he was laughing, too. Fuck, I couldn’t wait to kiss his face, to wrap my arms around him already. I couldn’t fucking wait for someone to heal me—and him, too, because he’d fought just as much as I had—so we could get the hell away from this place together.

Except…

“Rosabel.”

The voice held my heart prisoner for a good beat, and I looked down to find none other than Helen Paine with her sword in her hand, with George on one side and Natasha on the other. She looked like shit, too, her white clothes covered in blood and dirt, but the others didn’t have a speck on them.

Regardless—it was the look in Helen’s icy-grey eyes that made me pause.

“Where is the bracelet?”

The bracelet, the bracelet, the bracelet— I raised my head and looked at Taland again.

Taland who wasn’t holding his fists to the sky anymore but was simply looking down from the edge now.

My jaws opened, but I found I was going to need a moment to be able to speak.

I never really got the chance to answer before I heard the screams.

Aurelia’s screams as she and her brother were being dragged away from the rocks where they’d fought the Devil, and they had definitely won because he wasn’t laughing. But now those soldiers wearing their navy uniforms were dragging them both away, right through the edges of the valley and back where we first came from, where more soldiers were coming, jumping into the valley with their guns and their wands and…

Radock and Kaid and Seth, bloody and on their knees.

I did a double take because there was no way I was seeing right. There was no way that the Tivoux brothers would be forced to their knees and held there by a dozen soldiers, with cuffs around their wrists, all bloody and dirty, when Kaid and Seth hadn’t even been in the fucking fight. Just like George and Natasha, they hadn’t been in the fight—so why were they bloody?!

Why were they being held to their knees?

“Very well,” Helen said. She stepped back, waved her sword around as if to show the aftermath of the fucking massacre—the blood and the bodies and the body pieces, too. Most of them wearing those white uniforms. Most of them soldiers of Hill.

“Kill them all,” Helen said—loud and clear so that her voice echoed and every soldier in that valley and around it heard.

And I thought, wait, wait, hold on a minute…

But she didn’t. She just raised her sword toward that landing where Hill died. Where Taland was watching, waiting…

“And bring me that bracelet!”

She turned around to walk away.

My thoughts clashed onto one another, and Radock had his head up and he was laughing, and the soldiers who’d been holding me up until now put me down on my knees, too.

There was still a part of me that insisted this wasn’t happening, or that it was simply a prank, or that Helen was messing with us or something. There was still a part of me that refused to accept that she had said those words at all.

But she had. Of course, she had said those words, had ordered her soldiers to kill us all when we were wounded from the battle, when we’d barely gotten out with our lives. Of course, she would order the soldiers to kill us because she had soldiers. Soldiers that my grandmother sent here for her, lots and lots of them—countless.

What could we do against all of them now?

I raised my head and I screamed at the top of my lungs, “ TALAND! ”

Tears streamed from my eyes because I was weak and I couldn’t even stand on my own and my magic barely even slithered inside me because I’d exhausted it. Radock laughed, and Kaid tried to stand up, and Aurelia screamed and screamed while they dragged her and her brother away—and I just wanted Taland to make it.

Goddess, was that too much to ask? Can he just make it? Because then all of this wouldn’t have been for nothing. Because if he climbed that mountain and disappeared somewhere far away, then neither of us would have died in vain.

Except…Taland wasn’t by the edge of the landing anymore, looking down at us.

My heart leaped, and another scream left my lips when I imagined they’d gotten him, too. The panic, the fear gave me energy, and I tried to stand, tried to jump to my feet and run all the way to him, except the guards holding me down didn’t let me. They put their hands on the back of my neck, pressed the warm tip of a wand against my right cheek, and a gun barrel on my left.

Over-over-over, my mind insisted, and my Goddess, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to. I refused.

Then…

“Madam Paine!”

A soldier called her name before she’d made it out of the valley together with the rest of the Council. He was already by her side and he was pointing up the mountain, and she raised her head to see.

He was pointing up the mountain where Taland had been just a moment ago.

My heart paused again, this time for longer.

And just like that, the entire world changed once more right in front of my eyes.

Taland was still there on that landing, and even though I couldn’t see him well enough because he’d stepped back a bit, I could still see his raised arms.

“ Stop him! ” someone called—Helen and Flora and Ferid—all of them.

Stop him, stop him, stop him!

Then a rainbow burst out from the landing, and it was coming from Taland’s hands. He was wearing the bracelet and he must have been chanting, must have been trying to attack these soldiers holding us down.

I wanted to tell him not to bother—we were too far, and his magic couldn’t reach us in time. Save yourself, Taland! Run!

Except his magic, all those bright colors that looked even brighter now that the sun was getting ready to set, weren’t coming for us . No—they moved toward the other side of the valley, toward the edge of the mountain across from where he stood. Toward the ground on its other side, lightning fast.

Screams erupted all at once. Guns fired. All kinds of magics took over the sky, aimed at that landing, at Taland.

Then his magic, all the colors, fell over the motionless soldiers of the Delaetus Army.

The ground groaned. The sky darkened. The mountains seemed to be screaming, too, but none of it made any difference.

The soldiers opened their eyes.

My mind was empty. The screaming and the chanting, and the protest of the ground and the mountains stopped for a short second.

Everything just… stopped. Watched. Waited.

Then Taland stepped to the very edge of that landing again, and it was dark now, so I barely saw the shape of him against the grey sky. I barely saw his hand outstretched, the colorful flames dancing on his fingers—and I barely saw it when he moved it up.

The screams started again.

The soldiers of the Delaetus Army moved.

“ Attack! ” called someone—could have been Helen or Flora or whoever, but every single soldier who’d been holding us down, who’d been in that valley or by the edges of it, was already running.

Running to meet the seven-hundred-year-old men who had been just brought back from the dead and who were marching in unison toward them.

I could hardly believe my eyes, and I’d have thought I’d lost my mind, had gone insane, or maybe that this was only happening in my imagination, except everybody else was seeing this, too. Everybody else was reacting the same way. I risked a glance at Radock, where he had been kneeling with his brothers, laughing like a maniac, and our eyes locked for a moment.

He saw, too. They all did.

Then there was magic. Colors of it, bright and beautiful and fucking deadly, this time coming from the soldiers. The soldiers who were moving together still, raising their hands at the same time, not with weapons but with magic.

IDD soldiers fell. Like their strings had been cut, they fell all over the ground, and there was no blood and no wounds that the eye could see, but none of them moved again. I couldn’t really tell if they were breathing because the more of them fell, the better I saw the soldiers—the dead soldiers who were alive. The dead soldiers whose eyes were white spheres without a pupil or an iris, but who saw just fine as they broke formation and started to move in either direction as IDD soldiers kept attacking them with their magic—bullets were useless against them, it seemed. Whatever wards they wore on their skins couldn’t be penetrated by them.

The magic hardly worked, too. The soldiers spread and fought those who attacked them, and more were coming, possibly over a hundred IDD men running into the valley while they shot their magic, but it wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t be enough, I realized.

And then I noticed four of them were coming toward me from all around the massacre going on right in front of my eyes. I was too shocked to speak, or to even make sense of this thing, but I somehow stood up, like my instincts insisted that I needed to protect myself from these creatures. I needed to move, to do something, run or fight—because they were coming for me.

Except they didn’t.

Needless to say, I was too weak to even call up a spell, even if I’d had my father’s ring on my finger. So, all I did was stand there as the soldiers—four of them wearing helmets, white marbles for eyes, and bracelets around their wrists—came for me, surrounded me on all sides, then…

Turned their backs to me.

Tears spilled from my eyes, though I’d been sure that I was too shocked to cry. The soldiers were right there within my reach if I had enough control of my body to raise a hand right now. Their backs were turned to me and their hands were raised in front of them as they waited, completely motionless, for any IDD soldier who wanted to come and attack them.

Attack me .

My knees shook and I looked up at the sky, at Taland still standing there at the very edge of the landing, looking down at us. He saw everything and he stood there and waited, and I had no voice left in me to even whisper, let alone to call out his name again.

Goddess, this couldn’t be happening, yet my eyes insisted that it was. My eyes insisted that the IDD soldiers were retreating and that at least fifty of them were on the ground, dead now, motionless. The rest who had tried to fight the Delaetus Army were moving back, out of the valley, around the mountain where we came from.

There, atop the edge was Helen Paine and the rest of the Council, and I could have sworn her eyes were on me. A part of me wished I had enough energy to give her my middle fingers. That fucking bitch! Kill them all, she’d said, and with such ease. Kill them all, after we’d risked our lives in this fight. After we’d almost died to stop Hill.

Look at us now.

She’d made Taland raise the dead fucking army himself.

She’d made Taland bring the Delaetus Army to life, and now four of them were around me like fucking robots, ready to kill anyone who dared to come close. Another dozen of them were practically chasing the IDD soldiers who were moving back up the incline of the valley as fast as they could, while the rest just stood there in the middle, in perfect formation, motionless, watching with their colorless eyes.

Too much .

Radock, Kaid, Seth—Zach was with them now, too, with Aurelia in his arms—and they were all smiling. Laughing. No soldiers had created walls around them, but they were surrounded by the bodies of the IDD ones who’d been keeping them down, had been about to kill them just moments ago.

Too much! my mind screamed, and I looked up again, hoping to see Taland, but the sky was almost completely black.

The soldier to my right turned toward me, and his face— my Goddess, his face. It shocked me and wiped my mind clean, and by the time he grabbed my arm, my legs had let go of me.

Whether I died right now or didn’t made no difference to me in those moments. The darkness was pulling me under faster the better I felt those hands around my body—the hands of a man who’d been dead for seven hundred years.

In my mind, I screamed and thrashed and cried and ran.

In reality, I just let go again.