A Chill in the Flame (Villains #1)

Fifty-three

Fifty-three

Rain. Moss. Trees. Wood. Mud. Rain. Rain. Rain. Cold. So fucking cold. How was it this cold?

“Where are we?!” Tyr gasped through the onslaught of ice-cold rain that greeted them.

“What?” Ophir blinked wildly around, trying through the torrential downpour to figure out where she’d taken them. It was as though she’d been tossed into the snow in her underthings. Her skin pinked against the frigid rain, showing early signs of pending hypothermia. She recognized nothing. The earth, the trees, even the smell was unfamiliar. She sputtered through the storm, wiping away at the water that threatened her eyes.

“Can you burn the door?” Tyr shouted through the rain.

“Not in the rain!” Her words came out in a frantic whine. She trembled against the cold, her thin, gossamer desert attire clinging uselessly to her in the frigid rainfall.

“Block it! Block it now!”

Yes, she could do that. She summoned a stone, allowing it to shoot up from the earth below it, blocking the door so that it could never open again. The creature on the other side succeeded in banging against the door, a single, razor-sharp claw scraping uselessly in a high-pitched ring that resonated through the rain. It cried out in horrified, bloodcurdling frustration as it found itself unable to pass.

The silence that pressed down on them was deafening. The forest was a dense, lush green unlike any she’d seen before. The tree trunks were enormous. The scent was vaguely pine, though she didn’t recognize any of the vegetation around her. She looked to Sedit, who seemed to be happily chasing after a bird.

“Dwyn?” She knelt to where Tyr had roughly left the unconscious woman on the forest floor. She checked her pulse, and though faint, it was still there. Her black hair was plastered to her face, her neck, her shoulders as the rain drenched every inch of her. The flowing fabric of their gowns suctioned to their bodies with the rain, chilled gooseflesh running down their skin.

“It’s a paralytic,” Tyr said, rain dripping off his brow and chin as he reached out to her. “It won’t kill her. Though it is useful to know she can’t use her borrowed powers when it’s in her system.”

Ophir’s eyes flashed a deep shade of ochre. “Are you making jokes? About this!” She pointed a shaking finger toward Dwyn. “This was the drug in my system—this was the drug…” Her voice broke off as a wave of tears hit her.

He softened, kneeling beside her. Even if he’d wanted to lower his voice, the deafening rain wouldn’t have allowed it. He put a hand on her back. “I’m so sorry, Ophir. I know. I was there that night. The drinks…”

“Who was that woman? The woman who poisoned us?”

Rain doused him, pouring over his hair, his face, shrouding him in a thin veil of ice. “That was her husband. The man is a shapeshifter. They…disagree.”

Ophir sank more fully into the mud, her gauzy lavender gown soaking up the chilly, wet earth and sticking to her.

“Ophir.” He said her name gently. “Can you make a shelter? Blankets? You’ll freeze to death in that.”

He was right. They couldn’t stay exposed in this storm.

“And Dwyn,” she agreed. “She needs a roof over her head to rest and heal.”

She coughed through the pummeling rain as she looked at the paper-thin material that had been so perfect for the desert only moments before. It clung to Dwyn’s immobilized curves, revealing her chill, her shape, her deathly pallor. Ophir closed her eyes but not to concentrate. She didn’t want to see anymore. She’d seen enough. She’d done enough. She kept her eyes closed as she waved a hand, certain that if she opened her eyes, she’d see that she had somehow managed to fuck up blankets. Maybe she’d made them out of barbed wire or knit them together with baby teeth instead of thread. She never made anything good. She never made anything right.

Ophir dropped her head into her hands as the tears flowed freely.

She’d done this. She’d done all of this.

She’d brought Caris to Berinth’s party.

She’d created the serpent.

She’d told the demon familiar to pursue Berinth and to do whatever it took to terrify Caris’s murderers once those responsible had stepped into the public eye. It had arrived to follow her command. And rather than fix it, she’d been utterly helpless. She’d been weak and worthless just as she’d been the night of the party. Only this time she didn’t have the rose-scented drug in her system to blame.

She had no one to blame but herself.

The weight of a soft, warm blanket draped around her shoulder as Tyr wrapped her up. She sniffled, opening her eyes to see him cover Dwyn, however begrudgingly. He wasn’t dressed particularly warmly either. She made a few more things, some that worked and others that didn’t. A shelter in the forest kept them safe from the damp, misty rain. A fireplace quickly burned it down as if it were little more than a tinderbox, forcing them to escape the shelter until she made a new one. It was a struggle to find the patience necessary to try again, but once they were under a roof and within four walls once more, she found a safer, more controlled way to manage her flame within a manifested structure.

She’d expected Sedit to be bothered by the chilly forest due to his amphibious skin, but he showed no signs of discomfort. Tyr had enough discomfort for all of them.

She wasn’t exactly sure what he was feeling. Was he angry with her for the monsters she’d created? Was he disappointed in her for her failure to save others, for her inability to command or control her demons? Was he angry that they were now in the middle of a cold, empty forest with no idea where they were or where they were meant to go?

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly from where she sat on the small, oddly shaped cot she’d created.

He looked confused. Tyr left the fire, and rather than sit beside her, he took a knee in front of her. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Ophir.”

She shook her head. “The monsters—”

He took her hand between his, looking up into her eyes from where he stayed on one knee. “This life you’re living is something that has happened to you, not something you’ve done. You’re doing the best with what you’ve been given, and it is not your fault that evil people have been put in your path.” He shot a pointed glare at Dwyn with his final word.

“You blame her for my manifesting, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I blame her for a lot of things,” he said honestly. “But I don’t blame you. Not because I think you’re some innocent damsel incapable of being frustrating, or cruel, or shortsighted—”

“Is this a pep talk?”

“I’m not finished. Or selfish, or—”

“Okay, I think that’s enough from you.”

He smiled, and she returned it, even if it was neither warm, nor reached her eyes. “You’re your own person, Ophir. You have agency. You make choices and those choices have consequences, and I see why you want to shoulder that guilt. I understand why you think this is your fault. But there were puppeteers behind this, Princess. Whether Berinth and his crew, or Dwyn and her contribution to your manifestation, you can’t be blamed for things you were pushed into.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Well, I was inside of you less than twelve hours ago.”

She shook her hand free, and he grinned. That earned a real smile, even if it was accompanied by a disgusted eye roll. He got up from the floor and sat beside her.

“Will she be okay?” Ophir asked, staring at where the shadows from the fireplace moved over Dwyn’s unconscious form. They’d kept her wrapped in the blanket and close enough to the fire to stay warm, but she hadn’t moved once since the drug had taken her under.

He nodded. “Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure she’ll be fine.” He looked at Ophir’s face, and seemed to understand that half of her fear had nothing to do with Dwyn, and everything to do with Caris, the drug, and the cycle of history and time as it collapsed in on itself. Once again she’d been defenseless as a man in power took away someone she cared about.

“I never want to smell another rose for as long as I live,” she said quietly.

“I’ll see what I can do about that. In the meantime, we need to be thinking of our next steps. We need to figure out where we are, what happened in Tarkhany, and whether or not there will be any retaliation. The king and queen of Farehold have been hunting you from the moment you slipped away from the castle. If your husband-to-be has any scouts out for you, we also need to have eyes on Raascot. Now that you’re filling the southern continent with unkillable demons, I’d suggest we go to Sulgrave, but…”

“The Blood Pact.”

“The Blood Pact.” He nodded quietly.

“Berinth is dead, but her real killers are still out there,” Ophir whispered. “I don’t think I have any other purpose, Tyr. I don’t think I can sleep, I don’t think I can breathe again until they’re dead.”

To Ophir, it looked as if his eyes had unfocused on a memory. It was lost on her that he was looking directly at Dwyn.

“I have an idea,” she said, sighing. “My ideas never work out.”

He touched her back again. “Yes they do! Look at this…house. Look at Sedit.” He gestured to the creature that slept near Dwyn’s unconscious shape, though he frowned unconvincingly at the demon. He’d always hated her hound.

She looked around at the ramshackle shelter that was better suited for centipedes and mold than humans or fae. She looked at her gray, amphibious hound as it slumbered. “You make an excellent point. Everything I create is perfect. And on that note.” She sighed, getting down from the bed as she created a map of the continent. It turned out rather impressively, intricately detailed with names of kingdoms, cities, rivers, forests, and landmarks. “So far, so good.” She sounded almost encouraged. She closed her hand into a fist, focused her intention, and then opened it.

She frowned at the object.

“Is it a top? Like a spinning top?”

She threw it on the map angrily. “It’s not supposed to be!”

Ophir crossed her arms as she looked away, defeated. The top had begun to spin the moment it landed, swirling around the map as it wandered about the continent. It crept from the desert, spinning like a tornado as it wound its way through Farehold, shifting its direction north of the border. The top began to slow as it reached the northeastern edge, just beyond the mountains. It idled until it tipped, landing.

“Are we outside of Gwydir?” Tyr breathed, looking at where the top had landed just outside of Raascot’s capital city.

She shook her head. “There’s no way. I don’t know how it’s possible. I don’t know how any of this”—she gestured around—“is possible. I’ve never heard of doors taking you to new places—not in mythology, not in religion, not even in wishful thinking. I’ve never heard of travel like this, not even in lore. How could Dwyn have known?”

Tyr looked at her where she rested, happy reddish-orange fire illuminating half of her face and body while the other was obscured in shadow. The comforting smell of smoke had filled the rough-hewn cabin.

She almost didn’t look evil while she was asleep.

Almost.

“Well, Princess,” he said quietly, “what would you like our next move to be?”

“I’m torn,” she said, voice matching his. It held little emotion, so low that it was just above the crackle of the fire, or the gentle breathing of Sedit.

“Between what?”

“Aubade is up in arms, and between Caris’s murder and my disappearance, they’re falling apart. Tarkhany was besieged by a monster moments after Tempus tried to poison the only remaining heir to Farehold. Raascot has been suffering under the weight of the migrations. I feel like I’m standing in the woods looking down two very distinct paths. If I take one of them, I do what Caris would have done. Everything is so volatile, so precariously poised, that change is inevitable. I could heal the land. I could facilitate peace. I could unify the continent.”

“And in the other?”

She paused, closing her eyes as she envisioned her fork in the woods. Voice muted with low conviction, she said, “I tear it all down.”