by Tricia Barr
Tricia Barr
Cover art by: Okay Creations
Copyright 2017 Tricia Barr
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
Worldwide English Language Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form,
including digital and electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without
the prior written consent of the Author, except for
brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names,
places and incidents either are the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Also by Tricia Barr:
THE AMARANT SERIES:
The Amarant (Book 1)
THE BOUND ONES SERIES:
Ignite (Book 1)
Submerge (Book 2)
Haunting black ashes covered the floor, echoing the horror that had happened in this once holy place. The smell of burnt flesh still hung in the air, even though it had been weeks since the incident.
Vincent Mallick was a handsome and sturdy man of fifty-seven years, with salt and pepper hair thinned slightly by age. The skin on his face was a map of the interesting life he had lived as a member of the High Council of the Four Corners, the ancient society to which he had devoted most of his life. But nothing in all his years with the society could prepare him for the horrifying sight before him, or its implications.
The ritual to remove the Elements from their vessels and place them into a new one took place three weeks ago. Vincent had been in the Headquarters in Prague with the rest of the High Council, awaiting word of victory after centuries of research and hunting. But no communication had come from any of the members. Out of clemency, the Council waited three days, and then out of fear, waited seven more, too afraid of what the silence meant. Finally, they sent Vincent to inspect.
“Mr. Mallick,” one of the young male members hailed. “What should we do about him?”
Vincent Mallick turned to see the boy kneeling over the stiff, motionless body of Dexter Mauldiv, his former apprentice. He had raised Dexter from boyhood after his parents, both loyal members, died in an earthquake—one of Earth’s most destructive calamaties. Dexter had been given the best tutelage the society could offer and was the epitome of all the Four Corners stood for. And now he was nothing.
“Oh, my poor boy,” Vincent sighed, coming to kneel beside his beloved protégé.
Dexter’s body was pallid and shriveled, seemingly lifeless, but his skin was warm and his pulse betrayed that he was indeed alive, but only just. His lips were cracked and dry, his skin the color and thickness of one extremely malnourished. He had obviously not eaten nor drunk in a long time. That he was still alive as a miracle. His face was expressionless and unresponsive, as though he was unaware that any of them were there at all; but his eyes, which were wide open, were the eyes of one screaming on the inside.
“Dexter?” Vincent said, shaking his shoulders.
Dexter still did not react. His eyes didn’t appear to be looking at anything at all. He was but a shell of himself. What had been done to him?
“Sir?” the boy next to him asked.
Vincent was deeply shaken, but he snapped back to business easily. “Uh, yes, put him on one of the stretchers and get him to a physician,” Vincent instructed. “Show me the surveillance tapes, I want to see what happened here.”
The boy nodded and the five other members did as they were told. Vincent watched as Dexter’s helpless body was lifted up onto the stretcher and taken away. Dexter was supposed to be their answer, their salvation. He had been the perfect choice. Of course, Vincent, in his old age could not take on the task, for he would likely die before they could accomplish any of their goals with the power they sought to take from the Bound Ones. But if Vincent could not do it, Dexter was the obvious second choice to be the new vessel. Dexter, whom Vincent had raised and groomed to be the Four Corners’ Grand Master, the apple of the High Councils’ eyes… No longer.
Once Dexter’s body had been safely removed, Vincent followed two of the members to the security room to watch the video feed. Since no one had been here since that day to operate the equipment, the video from that day was the most recent. They didn’t have to rewind very far. In the fuzziness of rewinding, Vincent caught sight of a terrifying image on the screen.
“Stop!” he said. “That’s it.”
The operator pressed play, and all drew in to watch the video.
They were watching the beginning of the ritual. Four young people were strapped to the stretchers as hooded figures all around them chanted. The electrocution began and the prisoners began to writhe and cry out. It all looked good so far. But wait! The orange-haired girl in the bottom right stretcher wailed loudly and angrily, and suddenly, to Vincent’s horror, all of his faithful brethren ignited from within and burned until they were nothing but ashes settling to the floor. Vincent covered his mouth in shock. He wanted to look away but he could not, for Dexter had been spared Fire’s wrath. The orange-haired girl’s restraints singed away and she was approaching Dexter, whose flight attempts were thwarted by suddenly appearing walls of flame. The orange-haired girl reached out to grab Dexter, and then he fell backward, in the exact same position in which they found him.
Vincent cleared his throat of the emotions that tightened and dried it, then said, “Can you roll that back and play the audio? I must know what she did to him.”
The operator rewound it and turned up the volume.
“You will never speak again,” the orange-haired girl said to Dexter with a voice filled with hatred. “You will never move again. You will see nothing and you will hear nothing for the rest of your life. You will be a shell of your despicable self, and you will have to suffer for the rest of your days with the shame and guilt of what a terrible person you are until it eats you alive.”
The video played on, but Vincent saw nothing else. Amazing the power Fire wielded. Amazing and petrifying, quite literally. She had to be stopped. This was exactly why the Four Corners needed to release the Bound Ones and reclaim the power they had given them. Powers such as these should not be in the hands of ignorant, whimsical children. It was only by chance that the Bound Ones had never developed their powers to use them against the world in all their history. The Four Corners had to act now before the Bound Ones used their powers in the modern age.
“The Bound Ones know of their powers now,” Vincent said to his pupils. “We cannot allow this. Remove the artifacts—the dagger, the necklace, everything. They’re no longer safe here.”
The Egyptian sun was white hot, smothering all in a numbing warmth, and she could not get enough of it. But she couldn’t enjoy it at the moment. She needed to move swiftly away from the palace. She had it. She had what they had been searching for all this time. Now she must get to their hiding place, a place where no one but them would ever find it.
She gracefully floated past guards, nodding coyly as she did, past towering carved and painted columns, past other harem girls loitering with their beautiful foreign cats or rodents, past fine and gorgeous luxuries she was risking losing now, and it was well worth it. She exited the palace and clandestinely slipped the item into the sack on her Persian horse. Then she climbed up, smacking his rear to send him into a mad dash through the city and toward the desert.
>
After an hour of fierce riding, she arrived. The place was well hidden amongst the rocky, sand-covered mountains of the ancient resting place of the pharaohs. It was impossible to see unless one knew what to look for: the slightest of cracks, so narrow and almost invisible from the ground. She buried the rope of her horse between two heavy rocks and made her way up the precipice, careful to hug the item against her breast so as not to drop it. It was far too valuable to risk damage.
Once at the entrance, she squeezed through the crack in the mountain face and disarmed the booby traps they had set. She stepped into their tomb, or treasury as it were, and, just like every time before, the beauty of it took her breath away. In this room were thousands of years of history and riches beyond even the pharaoh’s wildest dreams. There were solid gold and silver statues of Isis, Horus, Anubis, and various other deities. Countless magical scrolls from all over the known world filled shelves stacked from floor to ceiling. The tomb was a mess of jewelry, weapons and trinkets they had collected all this time, all in search of this one precious relic.
She saw her reflection as she passed the full size serpent-framed gold mirror they had taken from Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb. Her fiery orange hair was long and tussled from the rough ride. Her amber eyes were rimmed in thick black kohl, and her fair flesh, which had been tanned a golden brown by the Egyptian sun, was adorned from head to toe in the finest jewelry and cotton that barely covered her very slender body. Her body was only half the reason the pharaoh and the nobles were falling all over her, and how she managed to get the information she needed.
She turned away from the mirror and walked down the center aisle, past all of their treasures, to set the item in an even more secure spot, so that even if someone did somehow manage to get past all their traps, they wouldn’t be able to take this…
Phoenyx opened her eyes to the soft morning light that painted the room, her ears filling with the sounds of college life that were trespassing into their private space from the outside world.
“Good morning, beautiful,” a wonderfully smooth English-accented voice said beside her.
She looked up at Sebastian’s handsome face. His jet black hair was adorably messy, and he was wearing the jackass smile that she loved.
She curled up into his arms and snuggled against his chest, and he planted a kiss on her forehead.
“Good morning,” she greeted in return.
“How did you sleep?” he asked. “I don’t know about you, but after last night I slept like a baby.” His voice was thick and husky as he spoke, and she could see the bump in the sheets that the memory of last night’s play was erecting.
She giggled and resisted the urge to reach under the sheets, knowing that, if she did, they’d be in bed for another hour and would both miss their first class.
“I slept really good. I had that dream again,” she said, the images still fresh in her mind.
“The Egyptian one?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “It just seems so real, so vivid, like a memory.”
“Well, in our case, it could be a memory,” Sebastian said. “Describe it to me again.” He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at her.
She did the same. “Ok. Well, it starts out with me riding on a horse through the desert to some tomb in a mountain, and I’m carrying… something… something that I gather is really important. I just can’t see what it is, it’s wrapped up in some kind of cloth. And when I walk into this tomb, it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There’s more gold in there than King Midas’s palace. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”
“Well, I’ve had a lot of dreams of Egypt, but I can’t remember anything about a tomb in a mountain,” he said. “I wonder what it was you were carrying. Especially if it was more important than a tomb full of gold.”
“I wish I knew. Oh, and you should have seen how I looked! I actually looked like an Egyptian princess or something. My hair was still red, but really long, and I was still white but with a really dark tan, and honestly I would kill to have the clothes I was wearing, which were mostly made of gold. I’m sure I would not be allowed in class dressed like that, though.” They both laughed.
“Hmm, I’m thinking I’d kinda like to see you in this Egyptian outfit. It sounds very sexy,” Sebastian purred, raising a thick black eyebrow.
She closed in and said, “You definitely would not be able to resist.”
“Am I ever?” He closed the distance between them and kissed her, just teasingly enough to make her want to take control. But she pulled away.
“No, Sebastian, what about my dream, focus,” she laughed, putting her hand against his chest to hold him back.
“Yes, and what about my dream, of making love to you before breakfast?” he said, pulling her closer and kissing her neck.
She squealed—he knew her neck was her Achilles’ heel. “But we’re going to be late to our classes,” she whined, trying not to enjoy his feather-soft lips on her second most ticklish spot, and really trying not to think about how they would feel on her first.
“It’s only English 101, and, as you can tell by my English accent, I’m already an expert.”
She giggled uncontrollably as he continued kissing her neck, and she stopped resisting. As he climbed on top of her with his perfectly cut swimmer’s body, she figured, Eh, what’s one missed class? It’s not like her professor would notice an empty seat in a room of two hundred students anyway. Besides, sex with Sebastian was way better than breakfast, and way more interesting than Greek Philosophy, which was her first class. She wrapped herself around him and let the bacchanal begin.
* * * *
When Phoenyx and Sebastian were finally able to pull themselves away from each other, they both rushed to get dressed so they could make it to their second classes.
“My Practical Math class is completely on the other side of campus, so I really do have to leave now,” she said before kissing him goodbye and skittering out the door.
As soon as she entered the hallway, she saw the handsome blonde bespectacled Skylar walking by. She had the walk-of-shame look to her and she knew it, her short orange hair so mussed that it didn’t even fall in front of her face as she bent slightly forward to slip her last ballet flat on.
“Ah, so I take it you and Sebastian took the morning to study,” he said slyly, giving her a squinted sideways glance as he said the word “study”. “So glad I have my own room.”
She blushed and tried not to frown. “Why, so you can have your own ‘study partners’ over?” she teased, air-quoting.
He laughed. “Hardly. I don’t have the time for studying, I’m using all my time for—well—actually studying. Hmm, that didn’t make much sense, did it?”
“Well, I think if you actually did a little bit of studying every now and then, you might be able to relax,” she said.
“Who has time to relax? Or study? It’s only a month into the semester and I’ve already got two exams this week.”
“Oh crap, exam!” she exclaimed. “That reminds me, I gotta go!” She spun around him and waved with a quick “bye” before she sprinted through the hallway toward the stairs.
How could she forget? She has a quiz today, right now, in Practical Math! She was usually a wiz at tests, so hopefully the fact that she hadn’t studied a single thing wouldn’t completely screw her up. She had just been so preoccupied with Sebastian this weekend—well, for the past month, really.
Her life had completely changed since escaping from the Four Corners. She had always known of her power to compel people—to make them do or say whatever she wanted just by touching them—but her imprisonment by the Four Corners had taught her that she was one of the Bound Ones. She was Fire magically bound inside a human body. She wasn’t afraid of her powers anymore, although it wasn’t exactly like she went around starting fires everywhere. She had simply accepted that Fire was a part of her, and she now had the confidence that came with it. Not to mention, she actually had real fri
ends now, three of the very best friends, the other three Bound Ones.
Lily, who was currently away at Washington State University, was Earth, and she had the power to heal wounds and illnesses and to make plants grow. Skylar, whom she just bumped into, was Air, and he had the power to hear the thoughts of others and to move objects with his mind. And Sebastian, her beloved, sexy, wonderful Sebastian, was Water, and he had the power to create illusions, and of course to manipulate water.
Sebastian was the biggest and best change of all. She had gone from being alone and totally sworn off the idea of love to being in a near storybook perfect romance with her very own real life soul mate. Alright, so maybe meeting while being imprisoned in a dungeon wasn’t exactly a fairytale, and their romance was more like something out of an erotic novel. Ever since the semester started and they were living only a few doors away from each other, they had been stuck to each other like glue. She hadn’t really spent much time in her own dorm room, mostly because her roommate was weird and smelled funny, kind of like Fritos. She couldn’t figure out how Sebastian managed to get a dorm room all to himself, and last minute no less. She may be able to compel people, but Sebastian was just a super smooth operator—in so many different ways.
She blushed, although that could just be from exerting herself to run across campus in time for her quiz. She got to the classroom three minutes early and used every second of that time flipping through her notes, absorbing every snippet of information like a knowledge sponge.
The room filled in and silence fell as the T.A. passed out the quiz. There were only ten questions on it, and all multiple choice. She skimmed through the questions and exhaled in relief. This would be a piece of cake. She’d had nothing to worry about. She just needed to make a mental note not to forget a quiz again.
The quiz was over in ten minutes, and Phoenyx handed her quiz to the T.A. with confidence.
