Page 29 of Burn of the Everflame

I moaned with relief when my stomach spasmed and an acrid burn hit my tongue. There was little in my belly to come back up, but it did, along with one wilted, yellow-red petal.

My body shuddered, the lingering effects of adrenaline and nausea mixing with near-hysterical laughter and no small amount of fear. It had been on my tongue only a second, in my stomach for little more. Was that enough to be lethal?

I scraped savagely at my lips. “Shit shit shit.”

“Such language,” a voice crooned.

I froze.

“Did your father teach you to speak that way?”

I whipped around, nearly tumbling backward, but there was only Perthe’s gravestone and the tall, fluttering grass.

“Hello?” I called out.

I crept forward, peering at the nearby Lumnos pier. There was no boat docked, no sign of visitors to be found. But that voice . . . I was certain I’d heard⁠—

“Wrong direction, girl.”

I sucked in a breath. The first voice had been rich, masculine, with a teasing lilt. This voice was female and annoyed—and it had come from further inland. I spun again to the Temple, but there were no living souls to be seen.

I scrubbed a hand down my face. “I really am going crazy.” I shook my head with a nervous laugh. “Thank the gods no one can hear me.”

“We always hear you, Diem.”

That voice.

That voice.

I’d heard it before. In a bedroom, in a palace, from a body to which it didn’t belong.

My heart hammered uneven drumbeats—one calm, one racing. A rustling sound caught my attention near the Temple, and I took off running until I reached its steps. “Who are you?” I shouted.

“The real question is, who are you?” a fourth voice taunted, this one seeming to somehow come from above.

My head jerked up to the dais. The godstone obelisks atop the arches stretched into the sky, each one topped with a cauldron of flames.

But the flames weren’t flickering—they weren’t moving at all. Each fire was suspended in an impossible pause.

I held my breath, eyes wide, as I crept up the Temple steps. When my gaze broke above the platform, a scream strangled in my throat. Nine figures stood in a circle wearing robes of moonlight silk.

Ice-white hair. Silvery, stardust skin.

And matching eyes of smoky grey.

A woman with a kind face and a heartbroken gaze stepped forward from one archway—the one carved with a crescent moon in a fiery sun. “Hello, Diem,” she said. “There’s no need to be afraid.”

“Who . . . who are you?” I rasped.

But I already knew the answer.

Her patient smile said she knew it, too.

“You know us as the Kindred. And we’ve been waiting a very long time to meet you.”

9

LUTHER