Spark of the Everflame (Kindred's Curse, #1)

by Penn Cole

For anyone who has ever been told their spark shouldn’t burn so bright and for all the people who loved them precisely because it did.

Only one thing is certain: my mother’s disappearance on that hot, cursed afternoon set off a chain of reactions so unexpected, so far-reaching, that even the gods themselves could not predict the consequences that would later come to pass. And so it’s there that my story begins.

The unnecessary cruelty of it had set my temper ablaze. Every patient’s death lay heavy on my soul, but this boy had been so young, his death so preventable, that I couldn’t help feeling the weight of it on my shoulders. It had lit a spark deep within me, a need for justice, that I was struggling to ignore.

Though I ignored them, my hands sat casually on the hilts of my blades, rising and falling with each sway of my hips. A silent warning.

It’s never the enemy who attacks outright who will strike your killing blow, he’d taught me. It’s the one who hides in the shadows and waits. The one who strikes when you’ve finally looked away. Those are the true predators to fear.

That had been my own saving grace. When the brown eyes and auburn hair I was born with unexpectedly turned colorless at the onset of puberty, it was my plain face, gangly body, and general mediocrity that eventually convinced everyone I had not been a Descended child in disguise.

I’d never taken a life before. As a healer, I’d sworn a vow to help, not harm. And I didn’t want to be like the cruel Descended, playing god as I dealt out death like a deck of cards. But if my own life was on the line...

As a child, I’d once imagined the shadows were a tangible thing, a great blanket I could wrap around myself to hide from the world. I found myself doing the same now, silently begging my old friend the darkness to keep me veiled.

“Those eyes—a gift from your father, aren’t they? Your real father.” I froze. “And that’s not the only thing he gave you, is it?” My head whipped back to her. “What are you talking about?” “That mother of yours thought she could hide it from the world. Thought she could hide it from you with that little powder of hers. But secrets like that can’t stay kept forever.” Her focus turned skyward, taking in the scattered beams of bloody sunlight around us. “And it appears the Kindred are done waiting.”

She glanced again to the visible sliver of crimson sky, then gave a great sigh, rolling her eyes before meeting my gaze. When we meet again, remember this moment, child. How I could have made you kneel. How I could have made you beg.

“When forgotten blood on heartstone falls, then shall the chains be broke,” she crooned. “Life for life, old debt requires, or eternal be his yoke.”

More days passed with no answers. Then weeks. Then months. And still... she did not come home.

“I love you.” My temper dissolved at his gentle words. This generous, thoughtful man who had given up everything all those years ago for me and my mother—he was not the real reason for my anger. I tried desperately to remember that.

My whole life, I’d tried to convince myself I didn’t care what others thought or did, but with the lifting of the fog, I was beginning to realize that I very much did care. And I was sick of pretending otherwise.

The man’s gentle, soothing voice was a far cry from the severe tone he’d used with me. I finally dared to bring my eyes up to study his face. Instantly, every thought flushed from my head. Olive skin. Blue-grey eyes. A long, uneven scar. Him. It was him.

We stared at each other for an enduring moment, blinking and wordless. As the world around me materialized back into view, I became acutely aware that every face in the room was turned our direction. I looked down at the injury and carefully peeled back the gauze. My eyes went wide. The wound was gone. Not closed—not healing. Gone.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I brought this man into my life, it would open a door I could never again close. And judging from the knife-blade edge to his voice and the suffocating intensity of his presence, this was not a man I wanted wrapped up in my world. If he’d been willing to kill my mother to keep her silent, what might he do to the rest of my family if he believed we knew his secrets, too?

“If I wanted to hurt those children, I would have let your darling Princess Lilian bleed to death. We mortals could have stayed home and let all three of those children meet their ends. Instead, we saved them—and this is how you thank us?” A muscle ticked in his jaw, but he said nothing. My lip curled. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to wash up. Seems I made a mess while saving your people.” I whipped on my heel and stalked away. I waited until I was in the washroom and heard the soft click of the lock sliding into place before I slumped to the ground and burst into tears.

Until now, I hadn’t allowed myself to accept she might truly be gone. For my family’s sake, I had always played along with the pretense that she was alive somewhere and would eventually come home. But sitting here, in the royal palace, surrounded by Descended—the very situation my mother had spent a lifetime trying to keep me away from—felt like the turning of a page. A goodbye. Life after Auralie Bellator. Five minutes, I conceded. You get five minutes to feel sorry for yourself. Then you get up, and you get back to work. I tilted my head back against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes. With a shuddering breath, six months of pent-up grief crashed into my shattered heart.

How strange, to live my whole life only a brief distance from such breathless excess, and yet be entirely disconnected from it.

“If she doesn’t fulfill the bargain, then her life would be forfeit. She would be executed by the Crown.” The room began to spin. Suddenly the shadows were too bright, the silence too loud. I fumbled for words. “But... the King—Teller says he’s unconscious. If he dies... maybe no one else knows. Maybe—” “Prince Luther knows. He’s the one who negotiated it with your mother on behalf of the Crown.”

She’d kept so many secrets. From all of us, but especially from me. Her daughter, her firstborn. If anyone should have known the truth, shouldn’t it have been me? Before Teller, before even Father, it had been the two of us, alone in the world. An unwed mother and her bastard infant. A part of me hated her for it, even though I knew she had done it for me. I knew in my heart, my soul, that my mother would do anything to protect me. Keep any secret. Make any deal. Tell any lie.

When the sky turned black and the men in my family were lost in dreams, I gathered all the bottles in my mother’s supply and slipped outside to the water’s edge. One by one, I hurled the moon-shaped jars into the sea. One by one, they hit the waves and sank forever to a watery grave. Each quiet splash felt like the creaking open of an old, heavy door, its iron hinges rusted from ages of disuse. I said a prayer to the Old Gods to make me ready for whatever lay beyond.

I was so angry. Angry at my father for acting as though my mother’s disappearance was a momentary hiccup. Angry at my mother for making a fool’s bargain. Angry at myself for letting my life get away from me, for not standing up and demanding the truth when I’d had the chance. But more than anything, I was angry at that abominable Descended Prince.

But the ensuing months had changed us both. Our sweet naivete had fled town right alongside my mother. We’d both grown harder, angrier, our souls calloused from life and loss. Though I still cared for him as deeply as I ever had, I was no longer the laughing, carefree girl he had fallen for—and when I looked in his eyes, I struggled to find the tender-hearted boy I’d once known. I wasn’t sure exactly where that left us now.

But I was made of swinging fists and rash words, my edges too jagged and my temper too hot. Nothing about me was delicate.

And I didn’t want gentle or delicate. I wanted to burn.

Even when Henri’s arms curled around me and the rise and fall of his chest slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep, I stared at the depthless midnight sky, my thoughts as turbulent as they’d ever been, and I burned and I burned and I burned. And I wondered how long I had until the fire in my soul burned me alive.

“One of you will be mine. Tell me, Diem Bellator—who do you choose?”

A blinding flash glowed red through my clenched eyelids. A yelp—followed by a soft hiss. Then deafening quiet. The acrid stink of singed fur burned the inside of my nose. I dared to open my eyes. Hanging in the air was a cloud of ash, a million particles floating like delicate snow to dust the glittering black stone fragments now scattered along the forest floor. The wolf was gone. No. Impossible. The wolf had been right there. I had seen it, I’d smelled it. I looked down at my hands again. They still shone with that same bizarre light, now fainter and fading fast. Understanding crashed into me. I had felt these things once before in my life, a long time ago. A time I’d tried desperately to forget.

Maybe he was right—maybe there’d been no strange sensation, no glow, no cloud of ash, no body burned out of existence. Maybe I’d simply been so rattled by the events of the past few days that the old fears of my youth had stirred from years of hibernation.

Crouched in the shadows, watching and waiting from afar, were the memories of a missing mother, a dangerous Prince, and a cloud of ash that had once been a snarling wolf.

No matter how many times I’d made this trek, I was always surprised at the severe change in landscape between the two kingdoms. The leafy forests of Lumnos, now abundant with autumn’s flame-colored foliage, gave way so abruptly to the rocky flatlands of Fortos that it almost seemed as if the magic that reigned over the realms was infused into nature itself. And perhaps it was. Teller had once mentioned something about the Descended’s abilities being tied to the soil of their realm of origin—or as they called it, their terremère.

“You know how every realm has two kinds of magic? Light and shadow in Lumnos, stone and ice in Montios, sea and air in Meros, and so on.”

In Fortos, it works differently. The female Descended always get healing magic, while the male Descended get the power to kill—they can make your body decay right in front of their eyes. Makes them tough to beat in a fight. There are some who aren’t fully male or female and have both types of magic, but I hear that’s rare.”

My distinctive appearance meant I might never be able to leave the safety of Mortal City, where enough townsfolk knew my mortal heritage that being mistaken for a Descended was never more than a passing risk. In a world where mortals survived by blending in and avoiding attention, I was a walking red flag.

Prince Luther’s sharp, calculating glare flashed unbidden in my mind. The reminder of him standing so close to me in that hallway, the way it affected me, the heat of his touch and the coldness of his gaze, made my heartbeat stutter.

As much as I tried to justify it all away, I knew my symptoms were returning. The same symptoms that had haunted me all those years ago—visions, feelings I couldn’t explain. The belief that I was doing things I shouldn’t be able to do... Magic. I had hallucinated that I had magic. And for a brief, terrifying time, as the brown eyes and auburn hair marking me as a mortal had faded from my features, I’d even believed myself to be a Descended.

“Merely knowing that powder exists is enough for the Crown to order your execution, girl. I don’t know what that mother of yours was up to down in Lumnos, but you need to stay far away from it.”

Fight, the voice inside me echoed. A tingling sensation coated my skin, and the world around me went dark as a hazy image shimmered in my mind’s eye. I was standing on a battlefield aflame with silvery fire, clad in armor of deepest black that concealed mud and gore, the speckled evidence of war. My bloodied hands bore a great gold-handled broadsword whose onyx blade was veined with scrollwork that seemed almost illuminated from within. I swung the blade around me in slow, menacing circles that dared my enemy to approach. A shadowed figure stood nearby, and lifeless bodies—Descended and mortal—lay in a broad ring at my feet, as if they’d been thrown back by the force of a massive explosion. My face was grim, undaunted. Sad, I think—but strong. Unbreakably strong.

War is death and misery and sacrifice. War is making choices that will haunt you for the rest of your days. You fight to protect, or to survive, but never for the joy of killing, no matter how brutal your enemy.

It was a creature of its own, this thing inside of me. It was a lit match that eternally wavered above the pile of kindling that was my shredded soul, a drumbeat that called my temper to arms at every provocation.

Fight. My eyes squeezed closed. I... I wanted to hurt him. Break his bones. Claw his skin until he bled. The thought horrified me. Captivated me. Purred to me.

I’d always been a spitfire, and proud of it. An unbreakable spirit in a world that wanted me to be quiet, small, subservient. But no longer was that spark manifesting in courage or innocent mischief. Now, it had become something destructive. Something deadly. And if I couldn’t learn to control it soon, I feared it would destroy me—or the people I loved most.

I’d almost lost him, and I hadn’t even known it. I’d been off somewhere teasing Teller, or perhaps working at the center, and all the while, Henri had been a few miles away, resigning himself to certain death. I fumbled for the right words to comfort him, to convince him I could never judge him for it. I, of all people, knew what it was to be so consumed with anger that everything else was cast aside and forgotten. But that would require admitting a secret of my own.

The voice kept demanding that I fight. Maybe instead of fighting someone, what I needed was something to fight for. Maybe I could channel the temper smoldering inside me and direct it somewhere it could help someone, instead of slowly burning me to ash.

“My little tree club is run by a woman.” “Really?” I straightened. “In Lumnos?” I could imagine that happening in some of the more progressive realms, but Lumnos and its dated traditions had always been a challenging place for women who wanted something other than being a wife and mother, as honorable as those sacred roles may be. “Who is it? Do I know her?” “I can’t say. No revealing anyone’s identity, remember?” My shoulders slumped. “Would I get to work with her?” “I hope so,” he said, his eyes softening with some inscrutable emotion. “She is a force to be reckoned with—just like you.”

I feel like its her mother.

There was one substance I’d learned could be lethal to the Descended: godstone, a rare material that could only be made by the Kindred. If formed into a projectile or blade, a serious strike could be instantly fatal, and even minor blows risked an infection from its lethal toxin. Though harmless to mortals, its effects were ferociously destructive to Descended, a gruesome and painful death with no known antidote.

But what really stole every word from my lips was no feat of architecture, but the creature that guarded it. Like a living, breathing gargoyle, the beast reclined on a landing high atop the palace walls, its furred tail swishing idly as two glittering eyes skimmed the surrounding lands. A gryvern. I’d heard stories of them in school and seen their likeness stitched and carved into various materials around the realm, but to see one with my own eyes felt like walking into the pages of a fairytale. The spiked, scaled head of a sea dragon. The wings and front talons of an eagle. The body of a lion. Kings of the sea, sky, and land—all transformed into a single beast. The fearsome amalgamation was the stuff of nightmares, unlike any other creature in our world.

Maura’s trembling body pressed into my side. Though I forced myself not to react out of sheer stubborn pride, I finally admitted she was wise to be scared. This display of power, terrifying in its strength and savagery, was made all the more so by Luther’s stony indifference. He was observing the man’s torture at his hands with an unsettling detachment that left me thinking all the stories of the monstrous, heartless Descended were even truer than I’d thought. But as I watched the man bleed and burn under Luther’s chilling control, I didn’t feel scared. I felt... captivated.