Fire & Flight, page 14
It was all so...curious.
The room was as it had been when she first put her back to it. As her eyes swept over each of the stone pillars and the rest of the ballroom, the sconces blew out one by one. Before the candles of the chandelier had extinguished with a hiss, Nyla caught a glimpse of someone leaning up against a nearby pillar.
“You know, I never thought you’d be here again,” the shadow said as if they were old friends who had drifted apart.
Nyla didn’t say anything. She couldn’t say anything as her mouth went bone dry. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. Her skin began to buzz. Her stomach quivered before a lead weight settled deep within it.
The figure disappeared from her sight. Nyla tried to follow the voice with her eyes as he continued to speak in that same, even tone that would’ve hinted at vague disinterest had she not known any better. That tone held the same sort of patience and restraint that predators practiced when they baited their prey. And then, just before the prey realized they’d been duped, the predator struck. She wondered if he could see her through the dimness because any time she thought her eyes had caught a glimpse of him, the voice sounded from across the room. He was difficult to track, his voice flitting across the room with his unseen movement, seemingly surrounding her.
Nyla expected the worst at any moment now. Her fingers brushed against her hip, but found only the hem of her oversized shirt. The reduced visibility made it difficult to find exactly where the exits were, not that she’d been that concerned with noting them beforehand. At least she sort of knew where he was; that predatory voice and villainous monologue gave him away.
“I also didn’t think you’d come into your powers; I mean after all: it’s been years and no sign of them. I’d thought we were wrong about you. But then the ogre—now that was something! Reduced it—straight to ash!” The man paused, as if considering something. “It’s a shame to waste so much power. And yet here we are.”
Nyla could picture him extending his arms out to motion at the room around them, and when her eyes finally landed on the spot his voice had come from, he vanished into thin air. Unlike before, he allowed a lapse in his monologue, completely blinding her to his possible whereabouts. Nyla gulped. She needed him to say something or do something, just anything to make his presence known to her.
“How’d you know about the ogre?” she asked. Her voice was timid and exposed every ounce of fear that pounded in her veins. The shadow let out a maniacal howl that might’ve been a laugh. The sharp sound rattled Nyla’s ears, but at least he’d responded. Her eyes flicked in the direction the noise had come from.
“Does it matter?” he sneered. “Besides, didn’t the precious little Fortune Falls show you that? Surely, you must know who I am by now, Nyla.”
She tried to place his voice to a time when she might’ve heard it, but no memory came to mind. The fact that he knew about the Falls and could guess what they’d shown her made her stomach flop. Scarlet eyes flashed before her memory. “You’re…you can’t be…no, it’s not possible…”
“Isn’t it, though? I mean, you’re here.” The voice came from somewhere off to her right. Nyla turned to face his voice as he stepped around a pillar there.
The soft, disjointed glow of the moon gave just enough light to catch the steely gaze of his scarlet eyes. Nyla sucked in a breath and held it. Her whole body went rigid. A hateful hum began to simmer just below the surface of her skin. Unadulterated loathing flooded her heart as he began to speak again.
“I’m Cedric, by the way. Though I suppose introductions don’t really matter now.”
He strolled closer, and with every step forward, Nyla took a step back until she was met with the firm hardness of a pillar. As she started to move off to the side in an attempt to keep some space between them, Cedric pulled a wicked-looking dagger from the hilt at his side.
Nyla’s throat closed up, but she still managed to croak, “Why? Why me, my family? What could we possibly have done that warrants being murdered?”
“Nothing personal, really. Well, it’s a little personal with you…with Astrid.” He lunged at her. The knife glinted in the moonlight. Nyla barely whirled out of the way before it could strike her chest.
Cedric recovered quickly and swiped at Nyla again. He was too strong for her to deflect the blow entirely, and the blade sliced the skin of her collarbone and shoulder. She hissed through her teeth as her hand moved instinctually to staunch the flow of blood. Cedric never gave her the chance, though, as he attempted to stab her again.
The resentful hum in Nyla’s core grew to a crescendo. Their movements slowed to the point where they barely moved, or at least it seemed as though to Nyla. She deflected his next attack, gripping his wrist with a sharp twist, and kicked at him. Consumed by the image of Cedric at her mercy, by her victory, by her need to survive, by the image of her safety, Nyla grasped the hatred sizzling in her bloodstream.
Just as she’d planned, Nyla landed a powerful blow to his gut.
A purple light exploded when her foot made impact. The hum that had built up inside her had worked its way through her body to her foot and disappeared with the light, the magic.
Time sped back to reality again. Shocked, Nyla lost her grip on his wrist as Cedric was sent flying backwards.
He landed on his side with a thump and skidded to a stop on the marble floor. Nyla stared at his form and waited to see the rise and fall of his chest. After a moment, he still hadn’t moved, so Nyla turned and began to make her way toward an exit.
“Enough games!” Cedric’s hard voice rang through the ballroom. Nyla turned. Goosebumps prickled her skin. “I am finishing this!”
Nyla didn’t have time to ask what he meant by that. Her eyes widened as sickly red lightning burst from his fingertips and raced toward her with a ferocity she had never seen before.
She squeezed her eyes shut and threw her arms up in front of her to protect her chest and face. It didn’t matter as the magic slammed into her with the force of hurricane winds. The air was knocked from her lungs as she went flying backwards. Nyla hit the wall behind her with a hard crash.
Pain blossomed in her back and head. It spread to every inch of her body. The plaster cracked, and bits dropped to the ground like snow. Even the sconce and windowpane, both of which Nyla had luckily avoided hitting, had rattled due to the impact. She crumpled to the floor, her eyes closed. The chandelier in the center of the ceiling swayed, the crystals quietly tinkling.
She must’ve looked pathetic, doubled over on her hands and knees as she wheezed. The stars behind her closed eyelids finally disappeared as the pain receded to an ache and instant bruising.
Part of her waited for the final blow; another simply struggled to gain some sense of feeling that wasn’t throbbing flames of pain.
But the final part of her, the much stronger and stubborn part, needed to defeat him like her lungs needed oxygen. All of the grief and bitterness that Nyla had lived with for years now rose up like bile. It bolstered her and washed away the agony that made her body wail. Nyla forced herself to her feet. She was wobbly, but an iron-like determination flooded every fiber within her.
That grief and bitterness and abandoned feeling that she’d known for so long that it was almost a familiar friend morphed into a weaponized hatred that burned hotter than a thousand suns.
The air around her crackled and popped. Crystals from the chandelier above shattered. Shards of glass fell like rain. The victorious smirk that had graced Cedric’s chiseled face was quickly replaced by an all-consuming terror.
Jagged bolts of static sparked from Nyla’s fingertips. Her hands clenched and unclenched. Nyla’s entire being tensed with an adrenaline and power she had never known before.
“You will never hurt anyone like you’ve hurt me. I might not know what the hell is going on, but that doesn’t really matter because no matter what you do or how powerful you are, I am going to stop you, even if it means killing you!” she spat, each word punctuated with a venomous grit. She stalked closer to Cedric, who shrank and backed away from her.
He regained his composure and prepared to strike at her again.
Nyla lunged forward and wrapped her hands around his neck. Her weight dragged them both down at the suddenness of her attack. His hand ensnared her wrist while his other one came up to strike the side of her face. Nyla sprang up and out of the way, her better judgment fighting against the itch in her blood. It gave Cedric just enough time to turn over and sputter, coughing, heaving air into his lungs.
She kicked him hard in the side.
“Ya know, for someone who’s supposed to be more experienced at using magic than me and apparently far older, you don’t seem to be trying to win. But then again, who I am to judge how to be evil?” she taunted. The purple sparks returned to her hands. Her gaze shifted from Cedric’s doubled-over and kneeling form to her hands.
She didn’t know what it meant, only that she wanted to blast him like he’d done to her earlier. With her hands raised and arms outstretched, she hesitated. Her father had always said to fight back against your nightmares.
Was that all this was, a nightmare?
Nyla didn’t know. Her mind seemed to scream that all of this, and Astrid too, was simply a nightmare. A long, exaggerated nightmare influenced by Fortune Falls’ visions and heightened by the weariness of traveling.
Cedric slowly dragged himself to his feet. His eyes flashed as they met hers. Energy started to flow through Nyla’s body and concentrated in her hands. Purple lightning leapt from her fingers, barreling straight toward her enemy, just as Cedric had fired his own scarlet magic at her. The red beam hit Nyla in her lower abdomen and sent her skidding across the floor.
All she heard was a booming thud of an impact on the far wall, almost instantaneously followed by the crumbling and rattling of plaster, the sconces, and the stone of the pillars. Bits of debris fell to the marble floor with a hard plop.
Nyla blinked away the stars from her eyes and inhaled. Sharp pain flared up all over her body. There was a moment that she lay there, a little stunned and breathless, contemplating whether or not she had broken anything. Surely, there’d be a lot of bruising and soreness.
She twisted herself until she could see how Cedric fared, but was met with an empty ballroom. It didn’t appear as though he’d been hit at all, and it was, apparently, her magic that had caused the damage to the stone pillar across the room. Not sure if she was safe for now or not, Nyla ran her fingers over her body to see if she could feel any broken bones.
Her shirt stuck to her chest, the slash from Cedric’s knife mostly forgotten until now. She groaned as she prodded the tender flesh there. At least the blood had stopped flowing. If Nyla could better see the gash, she would know that it wasn’t deep enough to warrant stitches, but it would definitely leave a nasty, jagged scar.
Woozily, she got to her feet. Any adrenaline, magic, and energy she’d had had vanished just like Cedric. She struggled toward the nearest pillar and leaned against it for a while. While Nyla was certain now that she hadn’t sustained any major injuries—which was a miracle in and of itself—there were several pressing issues that she still faced, one of them being where had Cedric run off to?
There was also the matter of where she was and how she’d gotten here.
With a long, ragged breath, Nyla pushed off of the pillar and slowly made her way toward a pale light that had appeared. As she got closer, she realized that it was candlelight from a servants’ area adjacent to the ballroom. The doorway was a hidden panel directly behind one of the carved stone pillars by the musicians’ platform. It must’ve been forced open during one of the blasts that shook the room.
Cautiously, she pushed the door open and stepped into a narrow, though seemingly endless, butler’s pantry. Her eyes scanned the stretching room for danger. Sconces lit the way into a kitchen beyond the long pantry with its counters and cabinets on either side to stage things for great feasts and balls. She followed the lit chandeliers like she had with the smoke in the Shadow Forest. As Nyla tentatively strolled through the long pantry with weak footsteps, she peered at the contents of the cabinets on either side.
Fine sets of flatware for every season were stacked as far as the eye could see. Every so often, she passed a wheeled ladder that went from the base of the cabinets to the ceiling, which was maybe half the height of the ballroom’s. Three-legged teacups sat atop their saucers, each pair stacked on top of another until there wasn’t any more room on that shelf. Serving dishes of all shapes and sizes, some of which Nyla was certain weren’t even Tenebrese, lined other shelves.
When the butler’s pantry finally ended, she passed through a doorframe with a broken pocket door. Nyla had to turn sideways to fit through the narrow opening. She had no strength left to try and force the door back between the walls.
The kitchen was smaller than she expected, but it was still bigger than the entire first floor of her childhood home. Her eyes swept over the spacious center island and cupboards. Dust and cobwebs hung in the air. One web stretched from a pan that hung from a rafter to the corner of a window near the ceiling. The candlelight was dimmer in this room, as if the dust had squandered some of the light. Nyla continued on anyway.
The next doorway she came to led her into a long, stretching hallway. This must have been one of the main passageways, she reasoned. Like the hallway she had found herself to be in with Astrid, this one had paintings and tapestries galore between picturesque windows. Candelabras were lit on one end of the hallway, and that’s the direction Nyla headed. She only hoped that it led her back to her bed at the inn…wherever that was now.
The hallway spilled out into a great foyer. On one side, presumably the front, towering oak doors with oversized, wrought-iron handles stood proudly. On either side of the curved steeple doors, a pair of medieval suits of armor stood at attention. One held a spear in its gloved hand while the other held a battle-axe in each hand, its arms crossed over its chest.
Nyla’s eyes were wide as she crept into the center of the open foyer. She could make out a hallway on the other side, past the doors, but her attention was quickly stolen by the majestic staircase in the center of the foyer. The wide staircase dominated the back wall of the room. Its steps were covered in a plush, wine-colored carpet that led to a spacious landing before the staircase split into two.
Instead of continuing down the hallway into the other wing of the building, Nyla approached the steep staircase and began to climb. The soft light of the candles and lit sconces gave plenty of light to see by, sparkling off the wooden floors, warming the otherwise chilly room.
Nyla took her time on the stairs, weighed down by heavy limbs. It didn’t seem like she had lost that much blood, but she also didn’t know if magic would have any weakening effects on her body. And she’d used a lot of magic in her fight with Cedric.
What exactly was it that he wanted with her anyway?
Her legs protested another step. She gritted her teeth. Her hand grasped the banister until her knuckles turned white, frozen in place about halfway up the staircase. Her temple throbbed. When Nyla glanced up to see how much farther she had to go before she reached the landing, her eyes froze on the large stained-glass window.
The window was divided into four sections by wrought iron, with noble crests adorning the corner panes that flanked the wrought-iron circle in the window’s exact middle. There, a single lilac bloomed eternally. The image struck a chord in Nyla’s memory.
Hundreds of precious memories flooded her mind then. Things like when she’d stood on her older brother’s shoes and they’d danced and laughed in the ballroom—the same ballroom Cedric had attacked her in—or when she and her twin had raced down the hallway of paintings, their laughter reverberating down the hall, thousands of games of hide-and-seek or tag, exploring every inch of the abandoned estate as if it were their own castle, spending hours in the library with Derek while he poured over tome after tome or—
Tears pricked her eyes. All this time, through all of these changes in her life, Fortune Falls and its visions, all of it had led her to her childhood playground. A place filled with memory upon memory of freedom and exploration and laughter. A place that was their secret, kept under guard by knowing smiles. A place she’d found by a happy accident when she’d gotten disoriented in the woods while playing ‘predator versus prey’ with her friends, a secret she’d only shared with her brothers. They would have brought Lydia one day too, but the walk was too far for her, and their parents weren’t fond of their children playing in the abandoned estate they assumed to be only a crumbling ruin. She stared through bleary eyes and an overwhelmed heart up at the window, torn and uncertain. Why would the Falls show her all of that? Why would her dreams bring her here?
That sickly heat and the sensation of twisting and snapping bones overcame her. Nyla collapsed on the stair, nearly hitting her head on the one before her.
Everything went black.
A different sort of heat, a clammy one, plagued her body. Extreme discomfort and sharp aches consumed her just like the nonsensical nightmares that filled her subconscious.
Hope
Metal clattered against the wooden nightstand and fell with a quiet thud to the floor below. Cedric’s limbs were like anchors. He staggered, slapping a heavy hand down against his nightstand before he collapsed in on himself. The soft carpet jarred his knees. Cedric gingerly wrapped his arms around his torso. Every breath felt like it could be his last.
He knew it wasn’t, but the assurance didn’t soothe his cracked ribs or bruised back. His breath came in short, clipped pants. Cedric’s lungs craved more, though.
Who knew Nyla had that much power? Cedric cursed himself. He should’ve known after she incinerated the ogre.
