Nearly drowning beneath anther starlit sky.
Standing on a spiral of water overlooking a city of steel and glass.
The pulsating beat of friendship and truth in the heat of a sweaty nightclub.
My chest heaved as I clawed at my clothes, tearing at my skin. Another splintering fracture, this one yawning wide, its depths unrealized: a pair of brown eyes, vacant in death, stared at me from behind my eyelids. My best friend. Another person I’d failed in my short life, another casualty of my living nightmare.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t go out there again.
Just because I’d killed Geoffrey and his blood-thirsty minions didn’t mean the organization that had repeatedly tried to wipe me off the face of the planet would stop in its mission now.
I staggered back, choking on panic and fear.
I needed to get out of here.
I needed to run.
But when I tried to fall back, my knees locked. The hairline fractures of my soul froze, then retreated, the cracks smoothing into glossy panes of glass. The bits and pieces I had left of myself curling together, eager to retreat into the numbness.
I tried to move again, take one more step, but couldn’t. Instead, to my horror, my hands raised of their own volition, a familiar dagger of ice forming in the cup of my palm. A dagger I wasn’t creating. I couldn’t breathe as I raised the blade to my throat, the point leveled at the hollow above my sternum. I stared down the sheen of ice into the blackness of the forest beyond.
“If you’re truly this weak,” whispered a voice in my head, one I’d only heard a handful of times before, “then why does death frighten you so?”
Chapter 2
“It would be so easy to end it all, right here, right now,” the disembodied voice spoke again. The sound rippled through me like wind through tree branches. “I’d even be willing to help you along.”
I swallowed and my throat nicked the blade. Aside from blinking and breathing, I was trapped. A hostage in my own body. An owl hooted from across the lake, unknowing and uncaring of my predicament.
“But I’m sensing resistance.” Lips like leaves brushed the shell of my ear. “As much as you want to run, part of you still holds back, am I right?”
I closed my eyes, wondering if it were possible for blood to skitter like goosebumps. This wasn’t the first time this woman had snatched control of my body, but it was the first time her presence truly frightened me. As easily as water flowing over rocks, she’d slipped in and snatched control of my body, all without me knowing she was there.
As if she heard my thoughts—which she very well could be—she said, “It’s not me you should fear. Reserve that useless emotion for yourself.”
I opened my eyes, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rising, nostrils flaring at the shadowy figure crouched before me. It was the first time I’d seen her in any sort of substantial shape. Until now she’d always lurked as an unwanted voice whispering in my ear, offering both snide commentary and biting advice in equal doses.
The woman—if she could be considered that—appeared more ghost than human: her body tangled in shadowy webs, her limbs spun of flowers and vines, the hand gripping the blade at my neck a mere twist of branches and bark. The moonlight brushing her face offered impressions of cheekbones and a slim jawline. Against the subtlety of her form, the bright glow of her violet eyes sent chills down my spine. She was enjoying this, enjoying my panic, my helplessness, my lack of control.
“Good girl. I knew you’d face me,” she cooed. Her tongue cradled her c’s and s’s, adding a hissing quality to her languid speech. “I knew I didn’t choose a coward.”
Ribbons of darkness flowed over her shoulders as she chuckled, her face tipped toward the sky. For all her amusement, her grip on the knife remained hard as stone and equally immovable. “Nothing to say for yourself?”
I stared down the length of ice, my lips pressed firmly together. She rolled her shoulders and, after a few moments that stretched thick as molasses, edged the knife back a half-inch with anther playful chuckle.
“Who are you?” I whispered, the words an echo of another time, another conversation with someone else who’d held me captive within my own thoughts.
The evening breeze blew the stale scent of standing water over us.
Like Geoffrey had maintained his silence all those weeks ago, she, too, failed to fill the yawning gap of our conversation. I wet my lips and tried again, holding her gaze with fierce determination. “What do you want with me?”
She lifted a branch of a finger to the area around her face where a mouth might be. “Such interesting phrasing. ‘With me.’ Not ‘from me’ or ‘to do to me.’ How fascinating you’d choose the phrase most accurate to my desires.” She wound a curl of midnight and smoke around the same finger in concentrated thought. “I want to revel in your accomplishments with you. I want you to reach your true potential. I want you to prove you’re hardly as useless as your many predecessors.”
The last sentence cracked like ice underfoot. I wanted to flinch, but couldn’t.
“I’m sorry, that may have been too harsh.” She didn’t sound sorry. She certainly didn’t look sorry as she crowded my space, our faces nearly touching. “I see many great things for you, Zara. I see someone full of potential. I see someone worthy of the lessons I’ve taught you.”
My jaw ticked before I locked it into place.
It was my first voluntary movement. Her control was slipping.
“You’re wondering ‘what lessons?’ It’s written on your face, plain as your nose.” She dragged the flat of the blade along the underside of my jaw. I sensed movement along my periphery but found myself caught in the prison of her gaze.
“Everything you know is because of me,” she purred. “Did you truly think you could master water so easily? With so little training? It takes years to learn the patience necessary to understand the complexity that is magic and even more time to understand how to wield it in any sort of effective form. The fact you’ve made it this far, with no grasp of what being a God means let alone knowing how to use that to your advantage, is purely based on my willingness to share information—to allow you to think that you were learning it all on your own.”
My heart squeezed and I barely held back a gasp. From the very beginning when I’d offered myself up to my magic, I’d thought it had embraced me as a God and found me worthy. I’d wrapped myself in the cadence of silvery voices that made up my magic, voices that always seemed to have the right answers, voices that were always eager to assist. Those voices that were laced with underlying laughter I now recognized.
It had been her this entire time.
A pinprick of a spider jumped from the edge of her finger to the bridge of my nose. I attempted to bring forth the veil of numbness I’d crafted to protect myself, but what I found instead was a mere figment of that icy barrier.
“Now, now. Don’t be so hard on yourself, though it is a quality I admire,” she sighed. “It’s the spirit of a fighter, of someone who won’t give up even when the going gets rough. It takes courage to face your mistakes, to analyze them, and to then set them aside—your lesson learned.” The blade twisted against my pulse. “It’s why, of all the minds in the world, I picked yours. Yours held a certain… appeal.”
“You still haven’t said what you want,” I growled, pleased with my boldness.
She gripped my hair, ripping at the strands so silver they were nearly white, and dragged my head back as she loomed above me. “I want you to continue with your quest.”
“You want me to find the God of Earth,” I clarified.
“I want you to be the strong, capable individual I slated you to be. Is that so difficult?” She dropped the blade and relinquished her control over my body, though she kept me locked in her embrace. The branches of her chest stabbed painfully into my ribs.
“What do you get out of this?” I asked.
“The continuation of my lineage.” Her eyes burned into
mine.
Purple eyes.
The ones from The Word.
“You’re Kaleal.” The Original God of Water.
“It took you long enough,” she hissed, the thorns of her fingertips dug grooves into my scalp. “You finish your mission, you find the other Gods, you save the world from itself, and I’ll leave you be—magic, friends, and all.”
“Just like that?”
“Deals don’t get much simpler, do they?”
“I’m not a fool,” I snarled. There was no way a God as ancient and as cunning as she would be satisfied with such a trivial desire. Kaleal smirked haughtily and released my hair. When she cocked her head, I heard the call, too: Rose hollering my name with marked exasperation.
The God’s eyes roved over me as her figure blurred, melding with the moonlight.
“No you’re not,” she purred, “which is why you’ll take the deal.”
She dissipated in a blur of cobwebs and leaves.
I hovered there, my hand flattened against my chest, relief flooding my veins with each heavy thud of my heart. It wasn’t that I doubted her existence, but more that I’d begun to question my own. Rose called my name again, her voice louder this time.
I found my voice and yelled back, amazed at how calm I sounded. In direct contradiction, my movements were disjointed and painful when I strode forward to find the pixie. It was as if my brain were trying to remember how arms and legs worked.
The more I walked, the more I seethed. I resented how easily Kaleal had stolen my body for herself. I never wanted to feel that utter loss of control again. My mere existence was barely my own as it was. At the very least, I deserved my body for myself, but until I found a way to get rid of Kaleal for good, she wouldn’t hesitate to take back that control again if she found it necessary.
However, I didn’t know how to exorcise her from my mind.
I also wasn’t sure what she was: a memory, a splintered piece of her soul, a ghost?
I needed more information.
The answer dawned on me when I spotted Rose ahead, hands braced on her hips. I carefully stepped over a small tree blocking my path.
Maybe the information I needed could be found at a temple of the Gods.
One of the two temples left.
I sighed, shaking my head. For now, it appeared Kaleal would get exactly what she wanted.
Chapter 3
Rose escorted me back to the cabin we shared, worry-lines fanning from her eyes despite the stream of sarcastic commentary flowing from her mouth. I knew how I looked: aquamarine eyes wide, hair tangled, skin scratched, and feverish. It was very different from the too-calm, too-quiet, too-carefully controlled zombie she’d forced to partake in human interaction over the past month.
For the first time in weeks, I’d truly sunk back into my own skin, dragged from the depths of the dark depression that had folded me in. I wanted to talk to Rose, wanted to tell her about what was going on, explain what had changed. I wanted her to know about Kaleal.
Yet every single one of the half dozen times I opened my mouth, nothing came out. The words with their sharp nails and biting teeth refused to claw their way out of my throat. Instead, they swirled in a pool of sap in my chest: trapped.
“Are you ok?” Rose finally asked, holding open the door to the cabin. It was one of several circling the outskirts of camp. “You seem quiet, even for you.”
I thought of Kaleal’s whispery voice, the spidery hands that clutched my arms, the chill of the blade against my throat, but a thin membrane smoothed over my airway when I opened my mouth. I settled for nodding. “I’m fine.”
A corner of her mouth lifted but her eyes remained somber. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah, go on to the party.” I waved at the door, heading to the bathroom. “I’ll shower real quick, change into something else, and meet you there.” I shut myself in the tiny room and slumped against the door with a sign.
I’d prefer you keep me a secret, for now, Kaleal whispered in my head. My neck snapped back and I saw my reflection in the small, oval mirror over the sink. Lurking in my shadow, I could make out the tendrils of wispy hair and the curl of claws on my shoulder.
They already know you’re inside me, I replied, curling and uncurling my fists. You revealed yourself to Finn and Ryder before, remember?
True, but they don’t really know who I am or that I’ve returned, do they?
Rather than respond, I slipped into the shower and turned on the spray as hot as it would go, attempting to drown out the thoughts that weren’t my own beneath the pounding torrent. It seemed to work, because the God kept quiet as I dressed, though I could feel her lurking in the back of my mind like an unwanted house guest.
I didn’t want to go to the party, especially right now. What I wanted to do was wrap myself in the icy cloak of numbness that had blunted reality for all these weeks and go back to bed. But I had a feeling that when I’d shattered, I’d also shattered the façade, and it wasn’t coming back. Besides, Joseph’s friends and family had gone to a lot of effort keeping us hidden from the Order. I owed them an appearance tonight. It wasn’t like I had any money to pay them for their trouble.
The soles of my worn, black Chucks squeaked on the wooden floors as I exited the bathroom. Joseph’s aunt had found them for me at a second-hand store after catching me staring enviously at the green high-tops one of the boys wore around the camp. Combined with boot-cut, dark-washed jeans, a clean blue t-shirt, and a forest green jacket, she’d nailed my style.
Too bad I didn’t feel like that girl anymore.
Around my neck on a simple chain, I’d strung two silver rings shaped in the forms of my water brand. They were two of three things my temple had managed to shepherd out when they’d saved me from the Order’s onslaught. I used to wear them all the time, but they seemed to channel the heat of my fire magic, turning wicked hot. When I’d shaken the hands of one of Joseph’s cousins, the metal had burned her and I’d removed the rings then and there.
I shook my head at the memory and tucked the jewelry beneath my shirt where they belonged. I shouldn’t even possess fire magic. Gods were only granted control over one of the four elements, and all four Gods were needed to save the world from whatever apocalyptic scenario was threatening existence as we knew it. Sometimes it was drought, other times famine, or things even more complex. In this instance, Joseph and I were pretty sure that stopping nuclear warfare was on our plate.
I tamped down the reddish magic nipping at my fingertips, wishing I understood why I had it and not air or earth magic. I’d nearly burned alive a month ago, but something had unfurled within me when I’d been sure I’d meet my maker. That something had not only saved me, but somehow unlocked the gift of flame that I’d never wanted. A gift I stubbornly refused to use, no matter how tempting it was.
I tossed a few things into my pockets and glanced around the cabin. Eight bunk beds with metal frames lined opposite walls of the cabin. It lacked both windows and decoration. I loved it and I’d miss the simplicity. But I needed to find the other Gods, I needed to save the world, and I needed to get control of my own body back.
I snapped off the overhead light and exited. When the sun had set, it sucked the warmth of the day with it. The chill of fall this far north was unrelenting, but I barely felt it thanks to my combined magics. I dragged my hand through my hair and moved in the direction of the bonfire through the trees. A twig snapped. My skin prickled. The sound of nightlife that normally saturated the woods was lacking, the silence expectant.
I gripped the hilt of the dagger concealed inside my jacket and scanned the darkness with careful deliberation. Magic hummed, ready to transform at will, but that wasn’t necessary, not tonight. I breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth.
“I know you’re there.”
A human-shaped shadow detached from the trunk of a tree. “I’d only just arrived when you came out,” Ryder said.
“Sure.” I forced myself to release
the knife, the third gift from the Water Temple, and held out a hand, my palm flat. He cocked an eyebrow. “That’s why you were lurking like a creeper.”
“I take offense to that terminology.”
“How would you classify it? Stalker?”
“More like casual observer,” he said. His golden eyes glowed as he shrugged off my order and bridged the gap between us. His long, calloused fingers slid across mine in a sensual way that spoke of familiarity I wasn’t comfortable with. I tugged him toward the fire. “I was coming to check on you. It’s rare for you and those damnable pixies to be separated for any length of time.”
Despite his words, Ryder and Rose were kindred spirits. If I weren’t as confident in my standing in either of their lives, their casual rapport might have made me jealous. I already struggled with my budding feelings for the cocky, quirky prince of darkness; I certainly didn’t have the time or the energy to worry about his emotions for anyone else.
He stopped and tugged me closer, walking us backward until my spine pressed against the slender trunk of a birch tree. The corner of his mouth tipped up, crinkling the thumbprint of his dimple, and he swept his hand along my jawline, tipping my face toward his.
No, I definitely wasn’t concerned about his feelings for anyone else.
Not when he was so patently transparent about his emotions toward me.
The hard length of his chest pressed against mine and he lowered his head until our noses brushed. His eyes, the amber-rimmed coins of gold I was secretly obsessed with, glittered knowingly as he brushed my cheek, smoothing my hair behind my ear.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you all day,” he whispered against my lips. My heart hitched. In my chest, smoke and flame unfurled as I allowed myself to sink into the decadence of his touch, his presence. I shuddered when his hand curled around the indent of my waist, drawing me closer.
“This doesn’t feel like talking.” I slid my hands up his chest, enjoying the steel of hard muscles wrapped in his shirt.
Fan the Flame Page 2