Telmaine

Telmaine reached the wall of warehouse thirty-one, slapping against it with both hands, and bent over involuntarily, breathless. She hadn’t run like that since her girlhood; indeed, she’d never run like that, even in her girlhood. Horror stories were to be shared huddled with her cousins in the library. Those cousins seemed to have an endless supply of the kind of magazines that her mama forbade her to read. There’d be hot cocoa to warm chills, cream cakes to stifle shrieks, and the certainty that squealing aloud meant possible confiscation of the magazine and heaped scorn from the elder cousin she worshiped. Worlds away from standing with the cold horror of the Shadowborn magic streaming down on her like an icy rainfall. She reached through it with longing: <Ishmael.>

She found him immersed in his own horror, remembering a Shadowhunt long ago, and a woman who died saving his life when he fell in thrall to the Shadowborn himself. She had been his first love, the woman he should have married but for his exile. The scars on his face were a brand of grief and shame.

She hardly needed Bal’s insights to tell her why Ishmael should be thinking of this now.

She withdrew her awareness from him and, leaning against the wall beside the door Gil had told her about, sought her daughter. Found her, immediately, just within the walls. Florilinde huddled on the floor of the corner of her room beside her chamber pot, knees drawn up to her chest, weeping silently, sick and frightened. She had vomited on herself and on her bed, and dreaded her captors’ punishment.

Telmaine felt her power surge with murderous rage. She swept the interior of the warehouse, seized the four minds therein and slapped them down into unconsciousness, twisted the door handle and threw her shoulder against the door.

And the magic surged as the interior of the warehouse exploded into flame.

“Ishmael!” she screamed.

Florilinde’s terror became absolute as her bed erupted with fire. She scrambled to her feet, beating upon the locked door like a little bird against a cage. Telmaine reached in with her will and seized upon the nearest man to her—<Free my daughter!>—but he was already burning in the fire that had bloomed from the fabric and springs of his chair, writhing mindlessly in the flame’s embrace.

<Telmaine!> Ishmael’s mental voice was raw with the effort of projection. <Push the flames and heat back. Push them back like this—> A mental gesture, a demonstration of something he hadn’t the power to do himself. She caught his gesture and cast it out into the real world, and a still cavern opened up in the midst of the flames. <Yes!> said Ish. <Open it up more. There’s too much turbulence, too many reflections, and you don’t want to trip.> Behind that calm, calm mental voice, he was fey with terror for her. <You’ll not keep this up for long. Go, go quickly.>

She stepped forward, into the cavern within the flames, and let flames sheet down behind her. She was aware of the heat, but at a remove. Steadily, hardly daring to think lest the bubble enclosing her life burst, she walked forward, following her sense of Florilinde. She was blind to sonn with the chaos of the fire, nearly deafened by its raging. Around her, timbers creaked and burst. She heard Ishmael’s stifled thought that with this heat, the warehouse would not stand for long without collapse; she felt his desperate need to not distract her, his certainty that if her concentration wavered, she would be dead before she could draw breath to scream.

Within the roil of flame reflection, something solid loomed: a door. Ish said, <It’s a bolt, blessed be. . . . It will be hot.>

<Can I cool it?> Without even waiting for his answer, she reached out and thought of ice, thought of cool mountain streams, thought of ice cream, thought of cold pouring from her hand upon it. When her fingers touched the bolt, it was dewed with condensation. She forced it back and opened the door.

Florilinde threw herself against her, beating at her in a frenzy of terror. Ish said, <Sleep her, quickly.> Telmaine held her daughter against herself, hand across her forehead, until she went limp. She staggered as she hefted her, realizing as she buckled under the small weight of her child how little physical and magical strength remained for her for the return journey. Ish said, <Use her if you have to, but carefully. And use me.>

<I don’t need . . .> She was straining now, feeling the effort of pushing back the flames, and carrying her daughter, and setting one foot before the other.

She felt his fear for her intensify; his mental voice was fierce. <You must. I am not losing you.>

She caught the vitality tendered, drew on it, even as she felt the weariness growing in him. Step by weary step, she retreated through the fiery chaos, guided now by Ishmael’s sense of direction, since there was no child’s presence to steer by. Her skirt caught on something; she sonned the obstacle, dragging it free. It was a burned, bent stick, jutting at an angle from a larger mass within the flame.

Ish said urgently, <Keep moving!>

One more step and she realized what it was: the charred remnants of a man’s leg. Her concentration failed. The bubble burst. Ish screamed in her mind as he reached across the distance between them to, for a heartbeat, hold away the inferno alone. She seized the burden from him, her magic tearing at his, and felt his consciousness go out like a candle, leaving her utterly alone in the midst of fire.

She never did remember how she took the remaining dozen steps to the door. She stepped out of the doorway into the air, into the fine spray of the fire hoses, the globe of flame unraveling upward from around her. Through the wild ripples of heated air and water, she perceived the crowd, and for a moment felt sheer social panic at the thought of so many witnesses—and then realized that they must sonn her against the turbulence of fire even more poorly than she sonned them. With a steadying step, now that the immense drain of magic had ceased, she angled her walk along the side of the building and out into the milling gathering beyond the edge. No one accosted her; their faces were all turned to the fiery chaos of sonned flame. In her arms, Florilinde stirred and whimpered, and she touched her lightly with magic, soothing her, as she continued to ease through the crowd. Several sonned her, smelling smoke, she realized, smoke and the charred and scorched places on her dress. She did not return their sonn, did nothing except navigate through the crowd, Florilinde held tightly in her arms. Anyone who accosted her, she thought, would regret it.

She crossed the bridge against the press of spectators too excited by the fire to pay much attention to her. The trams seemed to have halted with the sirens, and walking the pavement was much easier. Florilinde stirred again, whimpering, and suddenly she vomited over Telmaine’s bodice. Telmaine paused, laid her chin against Flori’s clammy forehead, and sank her awareness into her daughter’s body. She found no injury, no inflammation, only a residue of wrongness—they’d fed her spoiled food.

And if they had not, she would have been lying on her bed when the Shadowborn trap exploded, and Telmaine could no more have saved her than she could have saved those men.

She reached the Upper Docks Circle unmolested, and—sweet Imogene—the carriage was still there, with the coachman standing in his seat and straining to hear what was outside his sonn. Telmaine said in a hoarse rasp, “Help me.”

He nearly refused, concerned for his upholstery; a brush of her fingers through her burned-away glove told her of the conflict within him, between a father’s compassion for a sick child, and a breadwinner worried about feeding his own children from his slender profits. She realized she had no reticule; she had dropped it—she did not know where. The loss of Bal’s love knot pierced her, but dimly. She said, “I’ve lost . . . my money. But if you get me to the ducal palace, I’ll ensure you’re paid. I need to report to . . . I need to report to Master Blondell.” It was a threadbare inspiration, but it sufficed. The coachman hesitated, and then shed his cloak and laid it inside the carriage—a gesture of kindness, she realized, warmth for the whimpering, trembling child. He helped her lift Florilinde and then herself aboard, and asked no questions, for which she was deeply grateful. As the carriage began to move, she rocked her bundled daughter gently in her arms, ignoring the slime of vomit covering her bodice, and waiting for Florilinde to know her once more. And tried desperately not to think of that last sense of Ishmael, suffering her draining, making that impossible reach to save her, and going to ash in her mind.