Fire and Bone (Otherborn #1)(55)

“Focus on your pulse and be in that moment again.”

I don’t want to think about it, but my mind fills with the emotions and sensations. My heart gallops faster as I remember the strange pull I felt toward Kieran, the terror when I realized I wasn’t able to defend myself, the warmth of my blood smearing my neck and chest, the chill of the asphalt against my cheek before everything disappeared.

A push of heat fills my chest in a sudden surge, rolling down my arms, along my abdomen and legs—

“Okay, breathe,” Faelan says urgently. His voice sounds farther away. “Come back.”

I open my eyes and see he’s across the room, staring at me. The heat in my body fades as quickly as it came, washing out like the tide. “What happened?”

“Did you feel anything?”

“Heat,” I say. “In my chest, then my arms and legs.”

He steps closer again, walking over to look at the book, reading something quickly. Then he turns back to me. “Your power washed over you, and flames coated your skin. It’s called the cadence, the time between the pulse and the release.”

“Excuse me?” I look down at my perfectly normal arms. That warmth was actual flames?

“How much time passed between you feeling the energy spark and the moment it spread through you?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know . . . maybe two seconds?”

His lips thin. Obviously, that’s bad.

“It’s a start,” he says. “The more you feel the process, the more you’ll be able to control it. Can you try again?”

“I guess.” I really just want to take a nap, but I need to figure this out.

“We’ll take a quick break,” he says, his voice turning gentle. “Drink some water, and we’ll start over when you’re ready.”





TWENTY-TWO

SAGE

As he reads over more of the squiggly lines, I drink my water and study his profile. He’s less tense, like he’s leaning into it all. I’m not sure if that should make me relax too, or put me more on guard.

Once I’ve had enough of a pause, we move back to our spots, and he has me close my eyes and go over the events in the alley again. And again. He asks me to try to be more aware of my body, my pulse, when the emotions come. Each time we go through it, he asks me to tell him more of what I was feeling last night, more of what happened. I don’t tell him everything Kieran said, or how those silver eyes hypnotized me, but I try to be as honest as I can. Each time, the heat wave takes over later than the time before. The cadence, as he called it, stretches out several more seconds until, on the third try, he tells me to open my eyes, and I watch the last of the flames slide over my arms before sinking back into my skin.

“Remember what your energy is, that it’s fire,” he says. “You need to become familiar with the element, inside and out.”

The orange glow crawling over me is surreal. It’s impossible to truly process what I’m seeing.

Fire. Coming from my own body.

There’s the strangest mix of thrill and terror in my gut.

After the fourth time, I’m totally exhausted. Faelan finally lets me take another break, pulling over a chair for me. As I drink more water and snack on some granola, he picks books out of the stacks on the desk and flips through them, then hands me a couple.

“We can’t waste time,” he says, “so let’s go over some of the hierarchy before tonight. It’s going to be too overwhelming at the ceremony without it.”

That doesn’t make me feel good. I’m already trying to pretend like it’s not all happening so I don’t have an anxiety attack. Faelan really needs to learn some social skills. I open the first book and see it’s in another language, like the big one.

“Can’t I just wing it tonight? I need sleep.”

“You’re fine,” he says, completely unsympathetic. He hands me a flat gray stone with a hole in the middle. “Now read.”

I look at the stone in my palm. There are swirls etched on the surface. “Is this some sort of riddle?”

He takes it from me and holds it up to his right eye. “Through the stone, read the book.”

Oh. Wait . . . what?

He hands it back to me, and I turn the rock in my fingers, then look through the dime-size hole down to the open book in my lap. The unrecognizable language shifts and becomes English. “Whoa, cool.”

“It’s an adder stone—or a hagstone, depending on who you ask. It reveals hidden things. Eventually you won’t need it, but for now it’ll help.”

I take it away from my face, and the script goes back to gibberish.

“Read as much of that as you can,” he says. “It’ll go over the power structures and how they work in our world. Basic, but vital.”

I start reading, popping a chunk of granola in my mouth every few minutes, and Faelan begins organizing the books on the desk. Eventually, he pulls up a chair beside mine and digs into one too. We read in silence for an hour or so before I start asking questions. He answers patiently but keeps directing me back to the text.

After another half hour, I think I’ve figured out the hierarchy of this place a little better. Maybe.

Apparently, there’s a high goddess named Danu who had a lot of children, five of whom became her favorites: enter the Penta. There are a bunch of other deities in the pantheon, but none are as powerful as those five. And since the children born of Danu can’t have kids with other deities for reasons of power balance, as Faelan explained it, they created their lineages with the humans. And now there are demigods and demigoddesses. Like me. Like Marius and the raven guy, Kieran. And, apparently, Faelan. And even within the demis there are rankings: a firstborn is a king or queen while the subsequent siblings are princes or princesses.