Bitter Ashes (Bitter Ashes Book 1) (19 page)

xx

By the time James finally returned, my hands and arms had lost feeling, and my feet felt like ice cubes. I'd stopped bleeding, and the blood that I'd lost had gelled to a sticky, cold mess on my side.

“I've spoken with Aislin,” he began, then paused as he looked me up and down.

I noticed that he held a pair of hiking boots in his hands, and I sincerely hoped they were for me.

“And?” I asked quietly.

“
And
,” he continued, “she says to name your terms.”

“I don't understand,” I replied.

James shook his head and smiled. “Neither do I, but that was her reply. I'm pretty sure that beats any other offers you have at the moment . . . if you really do have other offers.”

I glared at him, but my eyelids were so heavy it probably just looked like I was about to fall asleep. “Get me down from here,” I demanded.

James didn't move. “So we have a deal?”

“Yes,” I sighed before I could think better of it.

It was probably a bad idea putting my trust in a woman I'd never met, but it was an even worse idea to wait for Alaric to save me.

Instead of letting me down, James put the boots on my feet and began lacing them.

“If we have to run, I don't want you complaining about your poor, girly feet,” he explained.

I didn't reply. Having shoes to run away in would be nice. I could suffer a few insults if it meant shoes on my feet.

James unshackled my hands, then had to take most of my weight to keep me standing. My limbs felt like jelly, and my torso felt hollow. When it became clear that I couldn't stand on my own, he finally just lifted me up into his arms.

“We have to find the charm before we can leave,” he stated.

“Take me next door,” I ordered.

James didn't move. “Next door?”

I sighed. I was starting to feel like I might throw up. “No one tells you anything, do they?”

James grunted. “I'm the hired muscle. All I need to be told is who to torture, and when, not why.” He said it like it was something he had been told, but not necessarily something he agreed with.

“I'm going to use the hearts of all of the people you tortured to find the charm,” I explained.

James nodded, either not picking up on my disapproval or not caring. I was betting on the latter. Regardless, my explanation got James to move, and it also confirmed my suspicions that there were more hearts.

I had to wrap my arms around his neck to brace myself while he used one hand to open the door. The feeling was returning to my limbs, making them ache more than my side, which was beginning to go numb in contrast.

We walked through the doorway like nothing was out of the ordinary. As the resident torturer, no one would question James moving one of his victims to the adjacent torture room.

We made it to the next room without a hitch, and suddenly I was nervous. The wall where I'd seen Estus remove the heart of the previous executioner looked smooth and solid, but there had to be other drawers within the stone. Of course, there could have only been the one, and the other hearts might be somewhere else. If that was the case, we were screwed.

“What now?” James asked.

I turned my head to look up at him. “Do you know how to open the drawers?”

He stared at the wall. “Who do you think put the hearts in there to begin with?”

He carried me over to the wall without another word, then wrapped one arm more tightly around me so he could use the other to smooth a finger around one of the wall's stones. I could hear a soft click from within, then the stone popped out of the wall. James pulled on the drawer to reveal a fresh-looking human heart. It didn't exactly beat, but the smooth muscle of the heart rippled and twitched in irritation at being disturbed.

I looked down at the heart, not sure what to do. I could feel the heart's physical pain distantly, as if it was stuck in the memory of having its body destroyed. Beyond the pain I felt hatred, violence, and jealousy. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that the heart had belonged to a terribly unpleasant person.

I unwrapped one of my arms from James' neck, forcing him to put both of his arms around me once again. I hovered my free palm over the heart, searching for . . . something. At first all I could feel were mixed emotions, then I heard it. It was like a soft voice whispering in my ear, but I couldn't make out anything that it was saying.

“Open them all,” I demanded.

“What?” James asked, startled that I'd finally spoken.

“Open all the drawers,” I replied.

I wasn't sure what I was doing, but some sick compulsion told me that I needed to see all of the hearts. I could feel them fluttering within the walls like trapped birds.

James let me down to my feet and helped me to lean against the wall. It hurt to use the muscles in my side to keep myself erect, but it was a distant pain, drowned out by the whispering of the hearts as James began to open the drawers.

I could feel their pain, but it was more than that. Most of the hearts had been taken from their bodies years ago, some over one-hundred years ago. I could feel each heart's age along with its plea to be released.

As soon as James opened the final drawer he retracted, rubbing at the goosebumps on his arms. “What are you doing to them?”

“I'm not doing it,” I replied softly. “They want to be released.”

“Well you better do whatever you plan on doing quickly. If this energy continues to grow, Estus is bound to feel it.”

I knew the thought should have worried me, but my brain didn't seem to be working right. All I could think about were the hearts. Their whispers were becoming more clear as they begged me to set them free. My body ached to answer them, but I needed to find the charm first.

As soon as I thought it, the hisses and whispers grew together until I could hear just a few clear voices calling out to me.

A picture formed in my head of a place I had never seen before. A great tree was surrounded by what appeared to be burial mounds. The mounds throbbed in my mind like something alive. The voices of the hearts began to whisper in unison, “
The Charm
.”

I nodded my head and could feel myself smiling.

“I can hear footsteps,” James rasped suddenly. “We need to go.”

“Not yet,” I said distantly.

“Maddy,
now
,” James ordered.

Ignoring him, I walked closer to the hearts, no longer feeling the pain in my side. I reached my hands into the drawers and started releasing the hearts one by one. Each release was a relief to me, yet at the same time, pressure began mounting in the air. I could feel energy swirling around me as each heart was set free. A part of each spirit left, while a part remained behind to swirl around me.

The door opened just as I touched the final heart. I turned to see Estus framed in the doorway, with two nameless men at his back. Their forms seemed foggy to me as I tried to look at them through the pulsing energy.

“What have you done, Madeline?” Estus asked calmly.

“I've undone your wrongs,” I said simply.

With a thought, I sent a portion of the energy rushing forward. It collided with Estus and his men, hitting them like a semi-truck. The three of them flew backward into the hallway, hitting the stone wall with enough force to make it shudder slightly.

“The charm isn't here,” I said to James. “We need to go.”

He rushed over to pick me up, but I stopped him with a palm on his chest. “I can run,” I said simply, and it was true.

The energy from the hearts had healed the wounds in my side. In fact, I felt like I'd just woken up from a perfect night's rest.

Taking me at my word, James darted forward and I followed. We ran past the crumpled forms of Estus and his men, and further down the hall. We were going in the same direction we'd gone when Sophie and I helped Maya escape. I remembered the vine-filled room vividly. I also remembered Sophie disappearing through the vines, abandoning me to my fate.

James reached the door that led to the vine room to find a new, shiny padlock on it. Sophie had melted the last one, but she had taken the tool she used with her. I reached James' side and held a hand toward the lock. It popped open without a hitch.

“How did you do that?” James asked in disbelief.

“It won't last long,” I explained. I could feel the energy from the hearts dissipating with each use. Knocking Estus down had taken a far greater deal of energy than healing my side or opening the lock.

James threw the lock to the ground and pushed open the door. This time, he pushed me to run ahead of him as more footsteps thundered down the hallway behind us.

“Don't wait for me,” he ordered as he turned to close the door and hold it shut.

“I wasn't planning on it,” I replied just before I took off toward the vines.

I could hear the sounds of fighting as I ran at full speed down the hall. A few tendrils of vine became visible amongst the broken stones of the hallway, letting me know I was getting close to my destination. Adrenaline pulsed through me as I entered the room only to find that the vines had been destroyed. Giant heaps of cut foliage littered the room, and the thick stumps of the vines appeared burned.

Not knowing quite what I was doing, I threw the last of my borrowed energy at the burned stumps. For a painful second, nothing happened. Then a shiver of movement pulsed through the still connected vines. Slowly, they began to writhe and grow before my eyes, healing just like my stab wounds.

James reached my side as the vines finished filling out. He grabbed my hand and flung us forward, just as more forms piled into the room. I braced myself, worried that we would go face first into the stone, but the vines reached out and caught us. Within seconds we were engulfed in the swirling mass. I held onto James' hand for dear life as a tingling sensation overcame my entire body, and then we were in the middle of a forest.

“We need to move,” James said as he helped me to my feet. He was a mass of cuts and bruises, but none of his injuries looked serious.

I ran off ahead of him, not really worried about what direction I was heading, as long as I was heading away from where we'd arrived. Using the last of the heart's energy on the vines had taken a toll, and my legs and lungs began to burn with exertion. The forest was chilly. Distantly I remembered that I had been kidnapped in early October, so the cold, autumn air made sense. We ran with no signs of pursuit until we reached a large, icy-looking river.

“Get in!” James demanded as he reached my side.

“We'll freeze to death,” I argued, but it did me no good as James grabbed my arm and threw me into the river.

He dove right in after me, and began swimming downstream with perfect swimmer's form. The icy water was a shock, and it was all I could do to doggy-paddle after him and keep my head above water in the strong, rushing current.

We went downstream for what seemed like hours, but was probably only ten minutes, traveling swift and far, profoundly exceeding the speed of foot travel.

Relief flooded me as James finally swam over to the bank and lifted himself out of the water, but I overshot the area where he had gotten out as the current rushed me too far forward. James had to run along the side of the water and snatch me out when I finally got close enough.

I curled up into a shivering heap as soon as I was free of the river. My lungs and skin burned painfully. I shut my eyes against the tears that stung my skin like mini drops of fire.

After a minute, I opened my eyes to find James standing perfectly at ease above me, completely unaffected by the cold.

“What are you, superman?” I asked through my chattering teeth.

“I am Vaettir,” he said simply as he surveyed our surroundings.

“Yeah well so am I, but I'm also currently an ice cube.”

James looked down at me with a raised eyebrow. “We all have our gifts,” he said cryptically. “Let's keep moving.”

I just stared at him. My body had given all that it had to give, and there would be no more moving for me for at least a few hours, and that would only be after I got warm.

When I didn't move, James sighed and crouched down to lift me into his arms. He took off at a steady jog away from the river. It was strange being carried around by someone I'd grown to thoroughly loathe. He'd taunted me since I'd first arrived at the Salr, and that was the least of his sins.

The hands that held my body aloft had tortured and killed countless people. He might have been acting on orders, but that didn't change the fact that he'd enjoyed every bit of it.

Now this sadistic murderer was my only lifeline. He was the only person I had left to trust. It was just me and the Devil, running through the woods.

J
ames ran with me in his arms for hours, never seeming to tire. My black dress was finally almost dry, but the remaining dampness from our narrow escape down an ice cold river still made me shiver. I attuned myself with the bumping up and down of James' gait, finding it surprisingly tolerable, though it would have been nice to know where we were going. I imagined at some point I would be delivered to Aislin so we could find the charm, an object that would somehow allow one of the Vaettir to rule all others, but I was too weak and delirious to ask.

I felt myself slipping in and out of consciousness, and my bleary thoughts turned to Alaric. He'd claimed that his betrayal was the only way to save me, that if we both ended up in a cell, he wouldn't have been able to rescue me. I called bullshit. We could have fought our way back to those vines to follow Sophie and Maya out into the human world. I'd made the right choice in taking James' offer. He might terrify me, and he might have tortured me, but he worked for the other side. From what I'd seen of Estus' little clan, any side was better than his.

The trees above us faded in and out of view as I warred with my heavy eyelids. The October air of the forest that would have been pleasant had I been dry, chilled the damp parts of my clothing in an almost painful way. The only warm part of my body was the side pressed against James.

It seemed odd that he was carrying me like a bride on her wedding day, rather than in a fireman's carry, but the uneven weight distribution didn't seem to fatigue him, and I was more comfortable that way, so I didn't complain. My long, dark brown hair was caught between our bodies, but I didn't complain about that either.