Page 14 of Iridian (Chromatic Mages #3)

Rosabel La Rouge

Birds sang— what a nice sound to wake up to , I thought.

The air was light going down my throat, and I could have sworn there was sunlight falling on the side of my face and on my shoulder, all the way down to my hip. I felt it, felt the heat like a soft, fuzzy blanket, and I wished I could move a little to my right just to feel it everywhere on my body as well. Except I was too lazy. Too tired. I just wanted to listen to the birds singing and sleep a little longer.

Or a lot.

I could really, really use this break, but even so, the memories started to come back to me slowly.

I remember how Taland had come through the doors in Madeline’s office at the mansion, and how I’d thought for sure I was dreaming. How he’d sat there and basically saved me from the Council by bargaining what he knew.

I remembered him in my room, in my bed, naked and delicious and smiling at me, his eyes full of light just like always when he was looking at me. When he was happy.

And I remembered him fighting beside me in that awful place, too, that looked like a construction site in a valley between mountains but wasn’t. Nobody had constructed anything there—David Hill had dug up the ground to search for the skeletons of a dead army, and he’d actually found them.

I’d seen them, had fought him, had tasted the magic, his blood on my tongue, and dirt, dirt—all that dirt.

Then…

Kill them all.

Three words that rang in my ears and chased away the beautiful song of the birds. My eyes finally opened as my heart picked up the beating, and the pieces of the puzzle in my mind connected, and I finally saw the bigger picture. I finally saw where I was the last time I was awake, whose hands had been on me.

Armor, helmets, bracelets, white eyes—I sat up with a scream stuck in my throat that didn’t even let me breathe properly now. I blinked my eyes possibly a thousand times to convince myself that I wasn’t in that fucking grave between the mountains, but instead I was surrounded by trees and birds and sunlight.

And Taland.

It took me a moment to notice him standing not fifty feet away from me in a wide pathway between large green trees, his back turned to me. It took me a moment to see where I was, understand that there was no danger near me anywhere, convince myself to allow the birdsong to calm me down a bit so I could think straight. The air was light here, indeed, and it smelled like flowers. I wasn’t wearing my jacket, only my shirt and jeans, and most of the dirt and blood on my hands had been cleaned, but more remained. Under my nails, in the cracks of my skin. All of it remained to remind me of what had happened, as if to prove to me that all of it had really been real.

I sat up, reminding myself to breathe, to shake the numbness out of my hands, to not panic or fear because Taland was right there—alive and standing between those trees, looking out at something. And I was alive, too. Though my limbs were weak and numb with anxiety, I didn’t think I felt any pain, at least right now.

My clothes, though. Goddess, they were a mess of dirt and blood, and the memories of how I came to be covered in so much blood were right there suddenly, at the center of my mind. It was like I was reliving the whole thing all over again, like I had my arms wrapped around Hill, like he exploded between them and threw me off the damn landing.

A muffled cry escaped my lips before I could catch it with my hands, but it was loud enough in the quiet of this forest we were in.

Taland heard.

Taland turned and looked at me.

A whole new kind of terror took hold of my body and mind and heart.

My eyes rolled in my skull and I passed out again.

Minutes, or maybe years later, I came to. Felt the slow breeze, and the sunlight now on more than half my body. The birds were still singing, and the air was still featherlight.

My mind still insisted that what I’d seen—minutes or years ago—was real.

Taland with his hair back and his skin pale and his eyes white.

The same shock and fear pulled me awake violently, and again, I sat up, hands to my heart to keep it inside my ribcage. It wanted to fly out right now— right now. It wanted to stop beating, too, with the same intensity.

Taland was sitting about ten feet away on the wooden railing of what was a porch to a house I’d never seen before, with large trees and large leaves falling all over the roof and the pillars. The top of the railing was as thick as a bench, probably on purpose, and that’s where I was lying, too, though on the other side of the low stairs that led to the porch.

On the other side, so far away from him, yet I could still see with perfect clarity that his eyes were white.

Like white spheres, white marbles stuck to his skull. No color. No iris. No pupil. Nothing but white.

“Baby, don’t be afraid of me.”

If he’d have slapped me in that moment, I’d have probably been less surprised.

“You…you…” I shook my head, swallowed to wet my throat. “You’re a damn fool .”

When I made to move, to stand up from that railing, I didn’t actually think my legs would hold me, but they did. When I walked as fast as I could I didn’t actually think that I’d ever make it all the way to Taland, who had also stood up and was looking at me like he expected me to fall unconscious again.

Tears streamed from my eyes when I wrapped my arms around his neck and fell against his chest and I held him to me with all the strength I could muster. He was alive and it was him —his face and his voice and his warmth. He’d made it. We’d made it. Somehow, in some fucked up way, we’d actually made it and we were here, wherever here was.

He kissed my hair and buried his face on my neck and breathed in the scent of me like I smelled better than the air. The birds sang louder, and they came closer and sounded more cheerful—or maybe it was just me. We stayed there for a good long moment, soaking up each other’s warmth, allowing our hearts and minds to calm down for a bit.

“You passed out,” Taland whispered eventually, and I could have laughed.

“You have white eyes.”

“I thought you were afraid.” And he sounded horrified by the fact.

“I am. ” I let go of him to lean back a little, to see his face, half of me sure that I’d only imagined it, that his eyes would be the same as always. Dark and rich with color and secrets and sparks that could make the stars jealous.

They weren’t.

“Of course, I’m afraid, Taland. You have white eyes!” As if he needed me to remind him…

He squeezed them shut and shook his head, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “I thought you were afraid of me. ”

This time I did laugh even if the sound was awful and chased the birds nearby away. “I figured that much when I didn’t wake up in your arms, asshole.” I rose on my tiptoes and kissed his lips, both to feel him all the way and to ease this terror that had gripped me by the throat.

“I’m sorry, sweetness. I…I didn’t know how you’d react,” he whispered, and his eyes were still closed as he caressed my cheeks and pushed my hair back.

“Look at me,” I said, and it took him a while to open his eyes. It took him a while to look at me.

I couldn’t even tell you how I knew that he could see me when his eyes really were purely white. I couldn’t tell you how I knew that I was at the center of his focus, but I did. I felt it.

I shook my head, battling that terror still. “ Why are your eyes white, Taland?” I sounded breathless because I was.

Again, he closed his eyes and tried to lower his head, maybe because he still thought I was afraid of him.

“No, don’t!” I said and pushed his chin back up again. “I’m not afraid of you, Taland. I couldn’t care less what color your eyes are, but I need to know that you’re okay.”

That I even had to tell him that was ridiculous, but right now neither of us were really thinking straight.

He smiled again and it looked painful. “I’m fine. I promise, I’m fine,” he said.

“Then tell me why. Can you… see ?” I thought he could, but I still needed to hear him say it.

“Better than ever, actually. I can see every color of your hair. Every speck in your eyes. Every single freckle that my normal eyes missed.” His hands were on my face and he traced his thumb on my skin like he really was witnessing wonder.

“How?”

“I…” He shook his head. “I lost it, sweetness. They were going to kill you. They were holding you down and I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t get there in time—and even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything against them on my own. So, I just…lost it. The spell was there. I picked it up and I chanted. I didn’t think—whether it would work or not, I didn’t think.”

Again, that bitter laughter came out of me—poor birds. “You…you brought back an army of dead soldiers for me.” And wasn’t that just fucking wonderful ?!

He touched his forehead to mine. “I’ll bring the sky down for you, too, if you want.”

All those tears that slipped out of my eyes made my view of him blurry. “Let’s just leave the sky alone for now.”

He kissed me with his breath held and his whole body frozen, like he, too, wished we could just stop right there forever, in that moment, in that place. But we couldn’t stop time, unfortunately for us, and so eventually, we had to face the voices in our heads. We had to face our reality.

“Talk to me,” I said, my lips against his still, our hands on each other. “Where are we? What happened at Perria? Where are the others?”

The images flashed in front of my eyes as I spoke—of the Council and his brothers, and Zach carrying Aurelia in his arms.

“We’re in another Selem safe house, the only one they have on a mountain that I know about. We’re on Mount Rhoden in Virginia, about two hours away from Perria,” Taland said. “The others are all alive. I made sure the IDD and the Council were gone before I left them and took you away.”

Took me away.

I stepped back, the feel of those hands around my arms suddenly in the center of my mind. “Where…where…” I couldn’t even bring myself to ask, but Taland knew exactly what I was trying to say, so he answered.

“They’re here,” he said, and how was I still standing?

“They’re here,” I repeated, just to make sure I’d gotten it right.

He nodded. “They’re…around.”

I drew in a deep breath. “I—” want to see them, I was going say, to go against every single instinct in my body and say those words that were absolutely not true. I didn’t want to see any dead soldiers come back to life. I didn’t. Not now and not ever.

Except I knew I had to.

Taland cut me off, though. “Shower first. You’re covered in his blood and I can’t keep looking at it. Then we eat.”

Goddess, the relief I felt could have been funny.

“ His blood,” I said—again, just repeating it because I was too scared to even say his name.

Taland nodded and stepped back, took my hand in his. “Hill’s blood.” I could have sworn those eyes darkened when he said his name, or maybe it was just my imagination.

Goddess, it was so strange to look at him like that. His entire face had changed. Had become…less human. I always knew that eyes made the most difference, but I’d never seen a face like this before.

Well, except for those soldiers…

“He’s dead.”

“He exploded.”

“Cheining,” I said with a sigh—one of the most brutal kill spells out there.

“The bracelet worked for the both of us at the same time,” Taland said, raising his right hand to show me that the bracelet, in fact, was right there. And he was just as dirty as me. He hadn’t showered, and I would bet anything that he hadn’t eaten without me, either.

“Is it the same?” I asked because those soldiers had had bracelets around their wrists, too, and they’d called up magic— without chanting, if I recalled correctly.

“Kind of,” Taland said, but before I could ask what that meant, he added, “Let’s shower and put on some clean clothes first.”

Again, that relief.

“What time is it?” I asked, and the wooden doors engraved with pretty flowers and chipped paint in all colors were right there in front of us now. Taland pushed them open, and I looked back at the trees surrounding us on all sides, but luckily, they’d didn’t let me see very far in case those dead soldiers were there somewhere. Around, like Taland said.

“Just after eight in the morning,” he said. “Welcome to this safe house, sweetness.”

Shivers ran down my back. Those words awakened another memory in me, so when he walked inside the house, I remained outside still and said, “Do you promise to not disappear on me for any reason in the world while we’re here?”

His lips stretched into a wide smile. Those eyes made him look like a fucking alien for a moment.

“I promise, baby. I am never going to disappear on you again for any reason in the world.”

I released a long breath, both because of how he looked, and what he said. “Good. Then it’s good to be here.” It really, really was.

The house, just like the first safe house of Selem he’d taken me to, was on the smaller side. Here, the hallways were wider, full of light, the walls dotted with small windows everywhere. The rooms were bigger, too, and it smelled clean even though the furniture was covered in white sheets. Taland didn’t stop in the three rooms across from one another that we passed, but when we turned the corner, he headed for the wooden doors at the end of the corridor.

The bathroom was unlike any I’d ever seen, and I stopped by the door again to take it in. Half of it was outside, and those big branches and leaves curved over the low wall that surrounded the bathtub area. Birds and geckos on the walls, rushing away at the sound of us. On the left was the toilet, the shower on the right.

“It’s safe,” Taland said. “I checked every inch of this place. We’re safe. The wards are working. Nobody can get to us, baby, I promise.”

I stepped inside on the dark grey tiles. “It’s not that. It’s just… wow. I’ve never seen a half-open bathroom before.”

“This whole place is very beautiful. I’ll show you my favorite spot later,” Taland said, and maybe it was just the exhaustion he must’ve been feeling, but his voice was duller than normal. It lacked the excitement he spoke with normally.

“Are you wounded?” I asked when he began to pull my shirt off.

“No. I’ve done healing spells.”

He threw my shirt back and began to unbutton my jeans. I touched the bracelet around his wrist, and he reacted instantly. Looked up at me—again, it was so fucking weird that he had white eyes, and weirder yet that I could feel it when he was focused on me. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said, then moved behind me to unclasp my bra.

I looked to the side. “Did you just freeze because I touched the bracelet, Taland?” Because it seemed to me like he did.

A deep sigh escaped him, and he rested his forehead to the top of my head. “I’ll explain everything later.”

“No, not later.” I turned to face him again. “If you’re going to tell me that you’ve turned into a power-hungry asshole and you now won’t let anybody even touch that thing or take it?—”

He raised his hand, took the bracelet off, threw it in the marble sink near the toilet.

“I am an asshole, but not a power-hungry one. And I don’t care about anybody touching that thing as long as you don’t.”

I flinched until the bracelet settled on the marble and stopped making so much damn noise.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s dangerous.” I opened my mouth to argue, to ask, but he didn’t even let me. “Shower. Now .”

It was a damn order, and my body had a way of obeying him without much caring about what I thought on the matter. So, before I knew it, I was standing under the shower while he was kneeling in front of me, taking my boots and my jeans off, and lastly, my panties.

His hands moved up my legs, and I could have sworn that he looked at every inch of my body as if for the first time, even if he had no pupils for me to be able to even tell where his focus was.

Talking now would be pointless—he’d just insist on waiting, and to be honest, when he turned the water on, I no longer felt the need to want to know everything right now. I just stayed under the shower and allowed myself a moment to breathe while the water washed away most of the dirt and dried blood, and I watched Taland take his own clothes off and join me. It wasn’t sexual, that moment—at least not as sexual as usual, and we just hugged each other for a good long while, rocking slightly from side to side, then in slow circles.

“What’s going on, Taland?” I said after a while. The words slipped from me almost accidentally because I was still trying to pretend that my tears weren’t actual tears, just water from the shower pouring on us.

“Things…escalated,” Taland whispered, then kissed the top of my head.

“You brought a dead army back to life.”

“They tricked us. Betrayed us. Which I saw coming, but I thought they wouldn’t act while we were still on the battlefield.” His hold around me tightened as he remembered.

And I remembered, too. I remembered that bitch Helen Paine when she gave that order— kill them all.

Goddess, if I was ever face-to-face with that woman again…

“My grandmother basically told me she wanted me to become the director of the IDD when we came back.” More tears. “I wonder if she knew. If she just said it to throw me off, to distract me from what was coming for me.”

“Does it matter?” Taland asked.

Unfortunately, it does, I thought. “It doesn’t,” I said.

“I’m going to rub this dirt off us now, baby. Can you just stand there under the shower for me?” said Taland, stepping back. And I pretended he thought it was just water on my cheeks, not tears, too.

“When we’re done, we’re going to sit down and eat, and we’re going to talk, okay?”

Not like I had any choice, but I nodded anyway.

Then I stood there and cried in silence while Taland scrubbed every inch of my skin clean, then proceeded to clean himself, too, until the water turned cold. We used the old towels that kinda smelled like rain on the rack near the door, and finally, when I dared to look at myself in the mirror over the sink, I was clean.

No dirt, no blood, just me.

I didn’t cry again.

We got dressed in clothes we found in the rooms. The brown pants and white shirt I had on were a size too big, but they worked just fine because neither of us wanted to wash or dry the same clothes we’d fought in. I’d rather wear anything else.

Taland dried our washed boots and socks, and then he took us to the kitchen, which had a large glass door on the third wall that slid open to let you out onto another narrower porch that wrapped around half the house.

From there, I could see just how far up we really were, and the mountain on the side of which this house was built was so incredibly green—and steeper than I realized. I could make out no sign of civilization—not even a road in the distance.

The food wasn’t ideal—canned tuna and frozen vegetables that Taland put in an air fryer, but there was plenty of it, at least, and our full bellies had us feeling a bit closer to normal within the hour.

But even after we ate, we just sat there on the chairs by the dining table that Taland had dragged to the porch, and we looked out at the view, at the green trees and the clear blue sky. We breathed in the air and listened to the birdsong.

We just existed in those moments, with no attachment to the past or future. That was all we had.

Unfortunately, it was time to get back to reality once more.

“It’s probably too late to say this, but you really shouldn’t have done that,” I said after a long time.

Taland chuckled—it brought out my smile.

He continued to chuckle, and so, of course. I joined him ten seconds in. We laughed together at the utter absurdity of our situation. What a fucking nightmare…

“I don’t regret it, though,” Taland said eventually.

“Not even the part where your eyes turned white?” I said, to tease him, but I was also genuinely curious.

“Not even that part, no,” he said, and again, he sounded so… depressed. I wasn’t used to it. In fact, I hated it.

I reached for his hand across the table. “You did what you had to do.”

“I did,” he said. “I am not going to let anybody near you again. Nobody deserves to even be in your presence, let alone order an end to your life.”

Is it wrong that I loved him for saying that?

Yes, probably. But did it make me feel like the most important person in the world? Also, yes, so…

I just changed the subject. “It’s the Council—what the hell did we expect?”

“Oh, I expected them to turn on us, just not right away.”

“The same second Hill died,” I said, flinching at the memory. They hadn’t waited for us to even go back to Headquarters, or the city, or even to our fucking cars.

“I’m glad for it. If we’d gone back, I couldn’t have stopped them.”

I looked at him. “If we’d gone back, we’d have had a chance to escape. You wouldn’t have had to…” The words didn’t come because I had no idea exactly what Taland had done—or rather, what it had done to Taland. “Can you explain it to me? How could you just… awaken them? What exactly does that mean? Are they… yours now? At your command?” And what the hell were you thinking, getting yourself in this kind of trouble?! was what I didn’t say because I didn’t want to make it harder on him.

After all, he’d done all of this to protect me. And needless to say, I’d have done the exact same thing in his shoes.

Taland took a moment to think as we looked out at the trees. Goddess, it was so peaceful here, I never wanted to leave this place. But then again, I suspected the key element to many places I never wanted to leave was his presence.

“Hill employed the soul vessels he’d collected,” he eventually started, and I had to interrupt him already.

“I still have no idea what exactly that means.” And I couldn’t wait to start learning about magic— for real. Not what they taught us in high school or the IDD training academy—for everything magic could actually do.

“He basically gave an energy source for the soldiers to latch onto, to come back to life, something to use to…exist. Those little lights he sent into them contained life energy, and through it the soldiers could recover everything death took from them through the centuries. Flesh and blood and skin—and a functioning mind.”

I flinched, both because the explanation made sense—our souls were what kept us alive, too—and because it didn’t. Because how in the world could a soul still work on seven-hundred-year-old skeletons?

“He had everything prepared, thought through every single detail, and sweetness…” he squeezed my hand until I looked at him, and it was still a shock to see those eyes. So strange. Beautiful, but so damn strange. “He would have succeeded if you hadn’t stolen that bracelet.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks. “I didn’t even know what the hell I was doing,” I muttered because it was strange to be complimented for theft, too.

“My little criminal,” Taland said with a grin that didn’t last, but it was the exact same grin as always, and I appreciated it. It reassured me that he was okay still, just…a bit changed.

“Like I said—he had everything prepared. They even found the bones of Titus, the same guy who made them with his curse, together with the spell to basically call them to service. He planted the bones inside each soldier before he planted the soul vessels, and so the army was actually capable of moving and performing magic exactly like before. Then all he needed was the actual magic to make his call.”

“The call you made instead.”

“The spell wasn’t complicated, believe it or not. Very standard necromancy, not even close to what Hill did to plant the soul vessels in them,” Taland said.

“And where are those spells now?” I dared to ask.

“Burned them—all three of them,” he said. “Destroyed the Script of Perria, too, though I suppose it’s useless now. The Army isn’t there anymore.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. “So…it really happened. You really… really awakened the Delaetus Army.”

“I did,” Taland said.

“Why are your eyes as white as theirs?” This I asked in barely a whisper, and when Taland flinched, I added, “Not that I care about the color of your eyes, Taland, but I want to know what it did to you. I want to…I want to know the side effects.” Because no magic came without cost. That much we’d known since forever.

“I…” Taland paused for a good long moment. “I hear them, sweetness.”

My stomach dropped all the way to my heels. “Hear them how?”

Taland stood up. “Come on. Let me show you.”