Page 17 of Iridian (Chromatic Mages #3)

Rosabel La Rouge

The first few days passed by in a blur. I still felt like I was on the run, like someone was right behind us, chasing us, like eventually, we were going to get caught. No way to help it—I’d been on the run for so long now that it had become the only way I knew how to exist.

Taland helped, though.

He was at peace when we were together, and he was there to smile at me and kiss me every time I woke up with a start, sweating and breathing heavily from one nightmare or the other. But he was there, and the nightmares had no chance against his touch, and they faded by the third night completely.

By the end of week one, I’d become perfectly comfortable.

We spent almost every waking second together. That first day when we fell asleep with sunrise, Taland had been to the nearest town, which was over an hour and a half away, apparently, to get supplies and groceries possibly for the next two months, if not more. He came back long before I woke up, so I didn’t even notice he was gone.

“I wasn’t alone,” he said, and I knew he meant those soldiers. Those men that didn’t look like men at all, but I didn’t blame them. They’d spent the last seven hundred years being dead and buried under a mountain.

But despite everything, I was glad they were here now, that they kept him safe. Kept us safe. We never even heard it if someone came close to the wards of this safe house, or if they tried to get through. The soldiers took care of it. I was blissfully unaware, and Taland no longer even paid it any attention.

He joked and said they were our fairy godmothers, and I was tempted to believe him. He sometimes went out there to check on them, and sometimes I went with, but they never seemed any different—visually speaking—and that seemed to please him.

Yes, Taland was at peace—but only when we were together.

When we weren’t, some… strange things happened.

He’d gotten electronics, too, when he went shopping while I slept. A laptop and two tablets, no phones but a couple of games, subscriptions to most streaming services, and though 5G sucked up here sometimes, it worked the better part of the day. We ate and watched shows and movies, and we had a lot of sex, too. We went on walks and on hikes, and we spent time at his favorite place as much as we could—a waterfall with crystal clear water that fell into this pool on the other side of the mountain from the safe house. It wasn’t big by any means—maybe about fifty feet wide—and tiny fish lived in there, but it was perfect. The waterfall went on to pour into a bigger pool down the mountain, but we had no desire to go explore it when we had everything we needed barely a ten-minute hike away.

It was there that I noticed something off for the first time.

I was lying on the biggest rock at the edge of the pool with a towel underneath me and a pillow under my head, sunbathing. The sound of the water was perfect in keeping me distracted, not letting me think. It was loud, but loud was good. We didn’t much need to talk, Taland and I, not when we came to swim.

Which was why I found it odd to hear his voice when I was almost sleeping while the afternoon sun kept me warm.

I opened my eyes, blinked the stars away, looked at where that voice was coming from, certain that the sound of the water falling was making me hear things. It wasn’t.

Taland, who had been relaxing in the water, was now on the other side of the pool, sitting on a rock at the edge, talking to himself. Yelling to himself—or rather, at the thin air in front of him.

I stood up, heart in my throat, wondering if maybe there was somebody there that I couldn’t see, that was invisible, because Taland was waving his arms around and those white eyes of his were focused ahead where only the trees began maybe six or seven feet away, and there was nothing else. Not a soldier from his army, not anybody else.

Yet he seemed so fucking frustrated, I could have sworn his fists were shaking when he raised them.

“Taland?” I whispered, so low I couldn’t even hear my own voice through the sound of the waterfall.

So, I tried again, this time screaming out his name as loud as I could.

Taland heard.

He stopped, froze in place for a split second, then turned to me so fast I was tempted to think I’d imagined it. He slid from the rock and into the water—it was hip deep around the edges.

And he… smiled at me.

“Sweetness,” he said, and I read the word on his lips rather than heard it.

I shook my head, looked back to where he had been sitting. “Who were you talking to?” I asked—screaming still because he would not hear me otherwise.

Taland was surprised. His brows shot up and he shook his head, too.

“Over there,” I said, pointing my finger to where he’d been sitting a moment ago as he slowly came closer to me, walking in the water, keeping close to the edge of the pool. “Over there—who were you talking to just now?!”

Taland looked behind, right to where I was pointing, but when he turned to me again, he seemed perfectly confused.

“I wasn’t talking to anybody, sweetness. There’s nobody there.”

The worst part? He meant it.

He meant those words and he believed them.

A bad feeling settled in my gut in that moment, and from then on, it only intensified.

From then on, I watched Taland more closely, and I saw a lot more.

Two days later at about ten p.m., we were lying on the couch in the living room, the laptop on the coffee table while we ate cherry-flavored ice cream. Taland had woken me at five a.m. that morning with kisses and touches and a hard cock begging for my attention, and we’d been up a while. We hadn’t gone back to sleep at all, so we were both kind of slow the whole day, which was perfect. We decided to sleep early, too, right after we finished the movie, but then Taland needed to use the bathroom, so I pressed pause and stretched while he was away. I had a smile on my face, a full heart, and a really full stomach, too.

Seriously, I had probably gained a couple pounds in the last five days alone.

My smile fell, though, when Taland was gone for longer than usual, and that scene at the pool was still playing in my head every now and again. Even though I’d tried to convince myself that it was nothing, that I had been the one seeing things or that Taland had just been messing with me, my gut knew. That’s why I got up and I went to the bathroom to check on him.

I heard his voice the moment I stepped into the hallway.

“Taland?” I called, hoping maybe he was talking to me or calling for me or something, but he wasn’t.

He wasn’t calling for anyone—he was arguing with someone in a hushed voice, in a language I had never heard before. It sounded familiar, though, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, maybe because of the sheer panic that took over me completely—either because someone was here, in the bathroom with him or because Taland had never before mentioned that he could speak foreign languages.

And it didn’t stop.

“Taland?” I said louder when I couldn’t take it anymore and I was already thinking about the bracelet he kept in the bedroom because he didn’t want it on him all the time, how fast I could go and grab it, how fast I could attack someone if it came to it.

I tried the door— locked .

Which was funny because we didn’t lock doors.

But before I could run for the bracelet and break that thing to pieces, the lock turned and Taland opened the door, a small smile on his face.

“Couldn’t wait to see me, could you,” he said, grabbing his face in my hands, coming in for a kiss like he normally did.

Except I moved away—of course, I moved away. I pushed him to the side and walked into the bathroom, sure I’d find someone, anyone sitting there on the toilet or in the shower or on the fucking sink, but there was nobody there.

I looked up at the walls surrounding the tub area—had someone climbed up and jumped to the other side?

“Sweetness, what’s wrong?”

Taland was right behind me.

I turned to him, trying to keep myself under control. “Who were you talking to, Taland?”

His smile dropped like I’d just slapped him across the face. “Nobody.”

Impossible, my mind insisted. “I heard you. Right now—I heard you talking to someone, Taland. In a foreign language, and I didn’t know you knew foreign languages! And why the hell did you lock the door?!”

His arms were already around me. “It’s fine, baby,” he told me. “I promise you nobody was here. I wasn’t talking to anyone, I swear it.”

Again, he meant it, which was the problem. Because he swore it and he believed that he was telling me the truth and I knew that either I was completely losing it, or…

“Hey, look at me,” Taland said, and I blinked the tears away to focus on his face. He looked concerned, but nothing out of the ordinary. “It’s fine, baby. You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re fine.”

He repeated that to me over and over again and took me straight to bed, held me in his arms, kissed me and caressed me until I slept—maybe because I was tired or maybe because I just wanted the night to end, to escape this absurdity. All the while he whispered to me that we were perfectly fine.

That was the first time that I didn’t believe him.

Day ten.

We’d never gone so long without something happening, without being found by someone, being chased by someone—or without one of us disappearing into thin air. Nobody had come to bother us, and life was so simple, so beautiful, everything I’d ever dreamed to have with Taland. Just the two of us watching movies and eating delicious food, sleeping together, being together—and that waterfall was an added bonus I never even knew I needed.

Even though I missed Poppy and Cassie and Taylor, I had Taland. It was the perfect getaway, better than anything my imagination could ever come up with.

Or maybe I should say almost perfect .

Small things haunted me, not just having heard Taland talking to the air twice now, once in a foreign language that I was sure was Portuguese because I’d been doing some research online— without admitting it to myself—whenever I could. It was the way he sometimes stared at something in the distance, too, and his entire body locked down and he wouldn’t respond to me when I called for him.

One morning, I woke up to find him staring out the window, and I had to fucking slap him across the face for him to come to his senses, then swear to me that he had been sleeping, that he hadn’t been looking at anything or anyone.

And, while I had been gaining weight, eating more each day, he didn’t. In fact, I was pretty sure if we had a scale it would be telling us that he lost a lot. His cheeks were hollowed out and the bags under his eyes were bluer than usual, and I could have sworn I could touch his ribs when he was on top of me. I could make them out perfectly on his back, a lot more than usual.

Something was definitely up, but I was too busy fighting with myself for those ten days to allow myself to admit it. To allow myself to look into it deeper, maybe confront Taland, figure out if he really didn’t know what was happening or if he was just lying— what for?

I didn’t have it in me to face that music yet—or even the possibility that I had lost my mind somewhere in the process of running for my life or trying to make sure Taland was safe. It wouldn’t have surprised me, now when I thought back to it, but in those short, blissful days, I wasn’t ready for any of it.

Until night twelve.