Kiss of Fire (Imdalind, #1)
Rebecca Ethington
To My Grandmother—
Who loved to read and loved to hear my stories.
You always told me I could write, and strangely enough it turns out I can!
To My Papa—
Who taught me what true love really is.
Prologue
Everything changed on my fifth birthday while my parents were in the backyard hanging the “Happy Birthday Joclyn” banner that was surrounded by yellow and blue streamers. The colors danced through the trees as the wind blew them around. My parents laughed and joked as they decorated while I danced in the doorway as I waited for my friends to arrive.
I stopped to watch a brilliant blue trail of glitter as something small flew around me. I only caught a glimpse of wings before a sharp stabbing pain shot into the right side of my head. It left me feeling like I had been slammed against a brick wall. The sensation burned like acid that spread quickly through me. I dropped to the ground as the pain coursed throughout my body. The hot current flowed under my skin like boiling water in my veins. My vision faded to black as the sensations grew into a torrent that split my bones apart. A buzzing silence filled the world around me until the sounds of my own screaming filled my ears.
I remember my mother panicking alongside me; my father on the phone with 911. I remember the sound of the ambulance siren, my vision a never-ending black, and my body filled with the stabbing agony that incapacitated me. Trapped in my prison of unrelenting tortures, I drifted in and out of consciousness. No matter what the doctors did, what medicines they pumped into me, the pain didn’t go away. I couldn't move past it; sometimes I couldn't stop screaming. Eventually, I slipped into a coma.
The first thing I saw when I woke up was my mother's face filled with worry. My father looked sick with fear. Even at five, I knew something was wrong. I had been in the coma for months, and no one knew what had happened. The only signs of anything having changed were a change in my eye color, from green to a colorless silver, and a small mark that appeared right below my right ear. It was the size of a penny, the skin vivid red and raised like a brand, while in the middle a small indistinguishable figure stood out in vivid black. I ran my finger over it for days. It didn't hurt, but it was ugly. The doctors assumed that I had been bitten by some sort of bug and had an allergic reaction, but deep down, I knew that wasn't right. Besides, something like that wouldn’t have affected my eye color.
I wasn't the only one to doubt the doctors; my father doubted them, too.
I went home the next day where my mother covered me in blankets and provided enough ice cream and cartoons to last me a month. She got time off work and took care of me like she had never done before.
I almost believed the mark didn’t really matter… until the fighting started. It was weird to hear them yell. I had never known my parents to fight before; they had always loved each other so much. My father had become obsessed with the idea of the mark, convinced that the mark I now had on my neck was something different, that it meant something. He rambled and yelled about it. He spent hours at the library and days on the Internet. The grinding noise of the modem dialing-in wound on my nerves; some nights I couldn't sleep. The fearful face he had the day I woke up never left him. He wasn't the same man, but I still loved him. My five-year-old self would crawl up on his lap and plead for everything to be okay; I would promise him that I didn't hurt. I thought he believed me… until the day he disappeared.
I heard them screaming for the last time from the security of my bed with my blankets pulled high over me. I cried as they screamed at each other and gasped at the crashing that rocked the doors in the house. That night, I cried myself to sleep. When I woke up, my father had gone, and it was all because of me.
My mother didn't talk about it for months. Her heart had broken; I think my heart broke, too. Even at five, something inside me had changed; I knew I was different. Part of me knew that my father was right and that the mark did mean something. It was also the reason he left; the reason my mother and I were alone.
At five, I hid that part of me away.
One
My long board clicked rhythmically down the sidewalk as I moved. The warm wind of early summer tugging against my dark hoodie, pulling at the long strands of black hair that had fallen out of my hood. I didn't like traveling in front of the houses in this part of the neighborhood. I normally took the back alley, but today, some road crews were working on pot-holes and I had to make my trip in front of the giant mansions that littered the hills of the east side of the city.
The rich ladies, with their upturned noses, liked to look out their windows at me as if I were somehow infecting their perfect little world with a contagious disease. They looked at me like I was poor—which I was—a menace—which I wasn’t—and like there was something wrong with me—which I wasn’t even sure of. Normally, I would laugh at their response to me, but I didn't like them taking so much notice. Chances were, they would complain to my mother's boss, and she would get in trouble, again. It wasn't my fault the road crews decided to work on the alley, but it's not like “His Grace” would care.
My mother had worked as Edmund LaRue’s cook for almost ten years now, having taken the job after my father took off. Mr. LaRue—or King Edmund as I called him—was an arrogant, greedy, self-righteous man who kept to himself. He probably had more secrets than rooms in his house, if that were even possible. However, as much as I despised him, he paid my mother well, so I didn’t complain.