Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: Ella
Ella
Thanks for Reading
About the Author
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: Ella
Ella
Ella
Ella
Ella
Ella
Thanks for Reading
About the Author
Flame Kissed
Seeking the Dragon: Book I
by
Alexis Radcliff
Books by Alexis Radcliff
Seeking the Dragon
Flame Kissed
Flame Bound
Flame Stirred
Flame Stoked
Flame Slain
Copyright © 2017 Alexis Radcliff
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission in writing from the author.
Prologue: Ella
My earliest memory is of flames.
I remember waking to smoke and heat, the air thick with ash and the curling, choking scent of burnt timber. My older sister Fiona touched my wrist and urged me from my bed with a frightened look and a finger against her lips. I didn’t understand why silence was necessary, but I nodded and crawled behind her on hands and knees toward the stairwell, staying under the smoke as much as I could. Every few feet I had to stop to rub my hands into my stinging, watering eyes and then hurry after Fiona, trying not to lose sight of her as we made our way down the hall.
At the top of the steps, she paused and peered down. I could tell something was wrong, and a sickening feeling roiled through my stomach. Creeping up beside her, I followed her gaze to see flames swirling through our downstairs living room, engulfing the furniture and licking at the edges of the stairwell.
“I’m frightened, Fiona…” I whispered. “Where is mother?”
She squeezed my hand and said only, “Shush, Ella. She sent me for you.”
An inhuman roar ripped through the night, louder than any noise I’d ever heard before, and shuddered the very foundations of our burning home. The walls shook, the staircase trembled. Somewhere below us something large crashed to the floor. My father’s treasured bureau of antique weapons? The flames leapt higher.
I folded in on myself and clutched Fiona’s hand all the tighter, frozen in fear, but the sound pushed my sister into action. She yanked me down the staircase towards the terrible flames, ignoring my wailing protests, and pulled me to our front door. As we arrived, it flew open. My mother stood before us in in the doorframe, her white silk nightgown swirling and singed, her golden hair floating like a halo around her face. The night behind her was alive in shades of red and orange, and another inhuman roar sounded, different from the first. A challenge and an answer.
“Quickly, Fiona,” my mother said. “The cellar. Go now. You’ll both be safe there.”
She pointed past us, back through the swirling flames, to the brass-handled door beneath the stairs. I began to cry and shake. I didn’t want to go deeper into the burning house. I didn’t want to huddle in our cold, dark cellar. But Fiona obeyed my mother immediately, clasping my hand with a grip like iron and pulling me toward the cellar anyway. I glanced over my shoulder and cried out as my mother turned her back on us with a look of grim determination and dashed out once more into the hellish, fiery maelstrom surrounding our house.
My sister threw open the cellar door and forced me through the dark opening first. I tumbled onto the staircase, trying to keep my balance, and then Fiona followed me in and slammed the door closed behind us. Our house was old, a relic of earlier times, and our rickety wooden stairs descended into an unfinished basement of stone. We huddled together on the steps, Fiona with her arm around me, whispering into my ear to try to comfort me, while still more roars and crashes sent tremors through the house above us. I don’t know how long we waited there together, but soon the sounds quieted, leaving only the steady burning crackle of the blaze.
Then a high shriek tore through the night, reaching us even in the depths of the cellar. It sounded like my mother.
I licked my lips and stared at Fiona with wide eyes. I didn’t ask the question that was on my lips, because I was too frightened to hear the answer.
“Stay here,” Fiona told me.
I clutched at her sleeve as she rose, lifting a hand to the doorknob.
“No,” I begged. “Please don’t leave me here. Please, Fiona.”
But Fiona shook me off. “I’ll come back for you,” she said. She cracked the door, wincing back from the flames that still roiled outside of it. Through the crack I saw that our living room had now become an inferno. Fiona looked at me again, her eyes serious. “Whatever happens, you need to stay hidden, Ella.”
I can still remember the terror I felt when I wondered what she meant by “whatever happens,” but before I could give her an answer, she’d slipped through the doorway and closed it behind her.
That was the last time I ever saw my sister.
I couldn’t have been more than four years old when it happened, and more than a decade later I still remember waking up that night with Fiona as clearly as if it was yesterday, even if I can’t remember what happened next. My memories are just blank after she closed the cellar door. I must have fallen asleep, or passed out, or blocked the trauma. My next recollection is of passing through the doorway of the smoking ruin of what had once been my family’s home, carried in the arms of a yellow-coated firefighter.
It was morning then, and the sun crested over the top of the blackened trees. Our property was torn to pieces, burnt tree limbs and ash everywhere.
The firefighter set me down in the back of an ambulance, threw a blanket around my shoulders and gave me cold water to drink. He stared at me with his kind blue eyes, held my hand and told me I was going to be okay. That it was a miracle I’d survived.
When I asked for my mother, his face fell. He said I shouldn’t worry about her right now. He told me again that everything would be okay, and I believed him.
I’ve never forgiven that man for his lie.
In the weeks that followed, they passed me from stranger to stranger, a whirlwind of strange faces who weren’t my mother, father, or Fiona. I slept on cots in unfamiliar rooms while unfamiliar adults whispered in concerned tones over me, and none of them would answer my questions. It was nearly a month before anyone told me the truth.
I found myself sitting on a brown leather couch one drizzly, gray afternoon with a plain-faced woman who called herself Dr. Keller. She sat across from me and explained in a hushed, apologetic tone that my family was gone and never coming back. I didn’t understand. Fiona had told me she’d come back for me, after all. I couldn’t believe that this strange, cold woman with a pinched expression would know better than Fiona whether my family was returning.
She nodded patiently with a sad smile and asked if I knew what it meant to die. As a child of four, it was a foreign concept. Even after she’d explained it, I couldn’t accept it.
They couldn’t just be gone. Life didn’t work like that. I expected any minute that my mother and father would burst through the door with Fiona, claim me as their own, and take me back to my old life. Our house would be rebuilt. Everything would be the way it was again.
But it never happened.
I was adopted by the Denton family, a loving couple with a daughter about my age and a boy of six, Katie and Matthew. They took me in and bought me a new bed, new clothes, new everything. I stayed in Katie’s room, but I missed my old family. I missed Fiona most of all. I stormed around their house and asked them questions all the time in those early months, demanding answers. How did they know my parents were really gone? What if they’d escaped somehow? And why wouldn’t they help me go out and try to find them? I blamed them for keeping me away from my parents, even though now I understand how silly that was.
Whenever I’d try to talk about the night of the fire, about the roars I’d heard and Fiona and my mother sending us back through the flames, Mr. and Mrs. Denton would share a meaningful look and the room would get very quiet. “Ella,” Mr. Denton would tell me. “You’re confused. What you’re remembering must have been a nightmare. I know it’s hard to understand, but you have to accept it: Your family is gone. We’re your family now.”
“But how do you know?” I’d insist, my tiny fists balled at my sides, chin thrust out, staring up defiantly at this giant of a man.
I remember the time that Mr. Denton finally sighed and crouched down in front of me, pain dancing in his eyes, and put two massive hands on my shoulders.
“Because they found three burned bodies in the wreckage, Ella,” he said.
It was the first honest answer anyone had given me, and finally I understood.
I burst into tears. Mr. Denton wrapped me up in his strong arms, held me, and let me cry until I couldn’t cry any longer.
Ella
My fingers fluttered over ivory keys, picking out the composition I’d been working on for months. It came to me in bits and pieces. At first I’d just hummed it and sang it wordlessly to myself, but it was like a fading dream; half-remembered and indistinct. Slowly I’d worked it into something more solid with the help of my piano. It was finally beginning to sound like a real song, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it sounded so familiar.
“Are you just going to work on your music all night?” My sister Katie leaned against the doorframe of the room, frowning at me. I squeaked and dropped my hands to my lap.
“Katie!” I said. “You surprised me.” I could feel the heat in my cheeks. I wasn’t ready for anyone to hear my work yet; not before it was a little further along, anyway. “I was kind of planning to, yeah.”
She rolled her eyes. “Ella. It’s Friday night. Do you really want to spend it cooped up here at home? Come to Chris Johnson’s party with me. Everyone is going to be there.”
I pushed away from the piano and stretched. Katie was always going to some party or another, and she often tried to get me to come along. It’s not that I was afraid to go or anything; somehow I just always ended up being bored and standing by myself against the wall, pretending I was reading my texts, feeling invisible. The parties made me feel like even more of an outsider: I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, and I didn’t care who was having sex with who this week.
But that was just me: Ella Denton, the weirdo; the different one. My adopted family had done their best over the years to give me as normal a life as possible. The Dentons had always been kind to me. They’d tried to make me feel included, tried to make me feel like one of their own children, but I’d always felt a little bit set apart from Katie and Matthew. I think part of what made it hard was that I’d been old enough at the time of the accident to have strong memories of my birth family. In some ways, it felt like betraying them to embrace the Dentons.
Haverey Falls isn’t a huge town, and everyone knew my story. I’d dealt with the whispers since I was a child, and as the years passed and the story faded into local legend, I’d taken center stage in the tale.
Isn’t she that girl whose whole family got burned? Kids at school would whisper to each other. The one they found in the ashes of the old house? Curiosity and even sympathy got old after a while, and you get tired of getting stared at all the time real fast.
“I don’t really feel like going out tonight,” I said. “Thanks though.”
“You never feel like coming out,” Katie complained.
I shrugged. A night in with my piano sounded just as fun, and I was right in the middle of a great book that I was looking forward to finishing. When you spend most of your life with everyone thinking you’re strange, you learn to entertain yourself.
“What’s so bad about that?”
Katie rolled her shoulders and huffed as though I’d just said something completely ridiculous. “It’s… it’s antisocial! What are you going to do next year at college? Just spend all your time alone in the dorms?”
I winced. It stung because I knew she was probably right. I’d already been accepted to Gilroy, a private art college upstate, on a music scholarship. I was excited about the music, but not so much about the prospect of having to socialize in a totally new setting with totally new people. You’d think I’d be excited to be exposed to a whole new crowd of people who didn’t know anything about me, but the idea of being so anonymous made me feel even more alone. I wanted to have people around who knew me, liked me, and didn’t throw curious stares in my direction when they thought I was looking the other way.
I tapped idly with my pinky on the highest notes of the piano scale, plucking out random chirps. “That’s a long time from now.”
“Graduation is in less than six months, Ella. Summer will be over before you know it.”
“I’ll be fine.” I knew I would be. I’d always been okay before, hadn’t I? “I can call you if I’m lonely, or Matthew, or…” I blushed, trailing off.
An amused smile spread across Katie’s face, and she came to sit next to me on the bench and poked me on the shoulder. “You were about to say ‘Nick,’ weren’t you?”
I poked at the keys some more. “Maybe.”
Nick was my brother Matthew’s best friend growing up, and he’d spent so much time hanging out with us that my parents had treated him like a fourth kid. His parents weren’t around much, and the Dentons would often set a place at the dinner table for him without even asking. He had curly brown hair and deep blue eyes, and he’d always been so nice to me despite the two-year age difference between us. Matt treated Katie and me like the annoying kid sisters we were, but Nick never did. He liked to invite us along to watch them play sports with the other neighborhood boys.
Katie chortled. “I knew you still had a thing for him!”
“I don’t have a thing for him!”
“That’s an awfully quick protest, lady.” She grinned. “Why haven’t you called him?”
I plunked my hand down on the lowest notes and frowned. It was a dumb question. Why on Earth would I call my older brother’s friend? I’d seen him maybe twice in the two years since he’d graduated and gone off to college, and even then it had only been in passing. I missed him a lot, but we both had our own lives. What would we even say to each other now?
“He’s probably busy,” I mumbled. “Why would he want to talk to me anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s make a list.” She held up her fingers dramatically and ticked them off as she spoke. “Maybe because he’s been awkwardly flirting with you ever since you hit puberty, or because of the many, many hours you spent playing together in Matt’s treehouse as kids, or because of how he wheeled you around that whole summer when you broke your leg and you guys watched every DVD we had.” She grinned, lowering her last finger. “Or maybe because you’re not-so-secretly in looove with him.”
“That was all forever ago!” I sputtered. I wondered if my face was as red as it felt. “And I’m not in love with him, you jerk.”
Did I have a crush on him? Okay, yes. Had it been hard to watch Nick cycle through girlfriends all the way through high school while I watched from the sidelines? It had. Did I miss him now that he was off having exciting adventures that I knew nothing about? Absolutely. I just tried not to think about all the smart, pretty college girls that p
robably threw themselves at a hot football player.
“You know his school is right down the road from Gilroy, right?” Katie said.
“Is it?” I asked, trying to sound innocent. “It didn’t occur to me.”
The look Katie gave me made it obvious that I’d failed. “Uh-huh. Right.”
I hunched my shoulders, feeling ridiculous. It’s not like I’d picked Gilroy because it was close to the college where Nick was at school on a football scholarship. “Is it really that obvious that I have a crush on him?”
“Probably not to the boys, but I’m your sister. So duh. Yes.”
I sighed and threw Katie a sideways glance. “Okay. Maybe I do have a little thing for him.”
“So tell him! He obviously likes you. You know what would be way better than spending all your time alone in the dorms? Having a hot football-star boyfriend to go to parties with on weekends.”
Leave it to Katie to focus on the parties. That wasn’t what I wanted at all. The best times with Nick had always been when it was just the two of us: laughing at a movie together on the couch, or talking about all the exciting adventures we wanted to have. That was what I missed.
“I was thinking about it,” I admitted cautiously. “Mom told me that Matt invited him along for our Colorado ski trip in a few weeks.”
Katie gasped. “It’s perfect! Oh my gosh, Ella. You need to do it.” She hit me on the shoulder. “I can’t believe you weren’t going to tell me about this.”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t sure I’d have the nerve to talk him about it. He makes me feel like I have butterflies in my stomach.”
“That’s a good sign!” Katie insisted. “This is great. I’ll help you. We just have to get you two alone together. You’ll confess your feelings for him, he’ll confess his for you—it’ll be just like a story.”
I smiled at Katie. Her enthusiasm was infectious. And it would be nice to have her help in distracting Matt. One of the reasons I hadn’t been able to talk to Nick in forever was that Matt was always hustling him away whenever he was home visiting. Our Colorado trip ensured that we’d be trapped together for at least a week in the ski lodge. There had to be at least one opportunity to get Nick alone in there somewhere. I started to get excited.
Flame Kissed (Seeking the Dragon Book 1) Page 1