Read Cursed by Fire Online

Authors: Jacquelyn Frank

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Paranormal, #Fantasy, #General

Cursed by Fire

BOOK: Cursed by Fire
13.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She did not know it or think it, but she was a natural when it came to kissing. She thought she didn’t know what to do, but instinctively she did, and that made the kiss almost painful in its perfection. She tasted so good that he growled low in his throat, pulled her mouth up tighter to his, and then licked her between her lips.

She was startled by the introduction of his tongue. She had seen others kiss in such ways, but seeing it and doing it were two very different things. It somehow seemed far more intimate than what had just transpired had felt. Her heart was clamoring in her chest from the riot of emotions and worries that were stampeding through her.

“Enough!” he said on a low rumbling huff as he gave her a little shake. “Your taste tempts me and I will have the whole of it.” His mouth sealed to hers again and this time he thrust his tongue past her teeth. She was prepared to hate it, prepared to be repulsed … but she was shocked to find she liked his taste as well, and the way he tangled their tongues together was so very hot and erotic to her. Illicit. Temptingly forbidden.

As she absorbed all this, she went completely boneless against him. The softening of her body only heightened her awareness of the hardness of his. He stood strong and dominant, feet braced apart, and his mouth devoured her in demanding sweeps of his tongue.

“There’s a sweet girl,” he breathed against her lips. “Ah, you have a fine flavor and I can feel the heat buried inside you.” He drew back and looked down into her eyes. “Yes, you’ll do very nicely,” he assured her. “And then some.”

Cursed by Fire
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

A Ballantine Books eBook Edition

 

Copyright © 2015 by Jacquelyn Frank

 

Excerpt from
Cursed by Ice
by Jacquelyn Frank copyright © 2015 by Jacquelyn Frank

 

All rights reserved.

 

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

 

B
ALLANTINE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

 

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Cursed by Ice
by Jacquelyn Frank. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

 

ISBN 978-0-345-53493-4
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54990-7

 

Cover photograph: Claudio Marinesco

 

www.ballantinebooks.com

 

v3.1

 
CHAPTER
ONE
 

The heat was unbearable, searing and constant, burning his skin until it crisped. He could smell the aroma of cooking flesh and knew it was himself that he smelled. It was all too familiar, singeing and sinking into his nostrils, a vile stench he would never forget. Would never be allowed to forget. As usual, the metal around his wrists burned first, glowing a hot red … as though it could melt away or be smelted along with his flesh. But it never melted away; it held true time and time again. He had torn at his manacles, strained against them. Every time the fire came, he prayed it would melt his hands away first, allowing him to slip free.

But that was not how things worked here. There was never going to be freedom for him. His was an eternal damnation. He had sinned against all the gods and they, who usually warred amongst themselves, had come together to see him punished. That was how deeply he had sinned.

Dethan and his brothers had been chained, entombed in these forsaken caverns, and their immortal lives, the ones they had dared to wrest from the secrets of the gods, were now their curse as they died again and again. Death by fire. Or rather, as near to death as was possible
for an immortal. Dethan suffered and singed and crackled to a crisp until his lungs could no longer breathe in the flames, until his marrow boiled within his bones and until his chains held only a desiccated corpse turned mostly to ash.

And then the flames would subside, and slowly, ever so excruciatingly slowly, his body would heal. Flesh would rebuild itself along the lines of his bones, cell by cell, one healing piece of sinew after another. Immortality repairing itself, birthing him new again, making his skin supple and whole, and preparing him to be fresh and healthy, and ready to be burned all over again.

The chains he wore went around his forearms in gauntlets from wrist to elbow, and for good measure a bolt had been shot through them, spearing through the flesh and bone of each forearm from one side to the next, making certain there was no way he could slide free. Not that it was necessary. These were chains forged by gods. If you were dressed in the chains of the gods, there would be no freedom from them until the gods decided to set you free.

He laughed, the sound hollow in the echo of the abated flames. But the flames were growing again; he could hear them with his newly healed eardrums. He had long ago ceased begging the gods for mercy. They had not heard him, although he had screamed it for hours. For days. For turnings. For ages. He no longer knew how much time had passed, and it had ceased being important to him. Nothing was important to him. His lot in this existence was merely to burn and to suffer. Again and again, over and over.

You thought you deserved eternal life. Now see what your ambition has won you. See it. Feel it. Deserve it
.

No. No one deserved this. True, his crimes had been brash and arrogant, but they had been crimes of hubris,
not unabashed wickedness. He had never been evil incarnate.

But he dared not think that he was blameless for his lot. No. Nor did he dare blame the gods. Oh, he had cursed them. Screamed their names and damned them. Renouncing them one moment and yet pleading to them with utter devotion mere hours later. Such was the nature of torment like this.

But he had not tried to bargain for his release or promised to be the most devout of men should they set him free. No. He knew that freedom would now be wasted on him. His mind was so scorched, so torn, it was nothing but a wasteland.

No. He would simply sit here and burn. He did not even think of his brothers any longer. How often he had wished he could turn back time, wished that he had heeded Garreth, who had tried one last time to recall them from the task they had set for themselves. But by then they had almost reached the mountain’s pinnacle. By then they had already fought and killed two manticores, vile powerful creatures with the head of a Sholet lion, the torso of a man, and a powerful cat below the waist. Its tail was that of a Bytwyte scorpion. Its massive arms were capable of great strength, and each of its wings was tipped with savage talons meant to rip the flesh from a man.

But more alarming than the frightful creatures Dethan and his brothers had faced was that they had almost frozen to death, exposed on the face of Mount Airidare. Garreth had been dying at their feet from the crippling cold, and the only way to save him had been to continue onward in hopes of finding their prize.

At the heart of it all had been nothing but selfish desire for the power of immortality. As warriors, they had faced death every day and without fear, but what they had wanted was the glory of being invincible. Like the
demigods, the gods’ own children, or the special heroes that had been awarded immortality as a prized gift for their service to the gods.

They had first tried to obtain the gift through their deeds—winning battles and waging war, overtaking heathen lands and building monuments to the gods, teaching their ways to the untaught. They had converted land after land into the lands of the shield goddess or the god of peace and tranquillity. But the gods had been unimpressed and had offered no reward for their service.

And now he knew why. He knew it was because they had never really done any of it in the name of the gods. They had done it for their own ends and no other reason, and the gods had seen through them.

The four brothers had grown tired of waiting for the gods to get around to rewarding their so-called faithful servants and instead had researched a tale, told to them all through their lives growing up, about the hero Gynnis, who had climbed a great mountain and had found atop it a fountain of gold and gems, and within that fountain had been the waters of immortality. One sip of these waters and they would be gifted with youth, health, and life everlasting. The waters would heal all wounds, new and old, they would erase the hardest years from face and form, and again … bestow life everlasting.

And through much work, much research, much capturing of holy scrolls from holy cities, Jaykun had finally concluded that the fountain was on Mount Airidare. It could not be anywhere else, for all other mountains had reportedly been conquered by other men and there had never been tales of success of finding the fountain. No mortal other than Gynnis had ever gained immortality by drinking its waters. So by process of elimination and
by the use of many signs and landmarks in those holy scrolls, they had known it would be there.

After days of deadly progress, days when they could have and should have failed dozens of times, they had seen the pinnacle and there, running free and gleaming of gold and gemstones, had sat a fountain where water should’ve been frozen solid, but was not. They had been in the thinnest air the world had to offer—that was how far up near the field of heaven they had climbed. They could barely breathe, it was so thin.

But laying eyes on that fountain had been like a bolt of pure oxygen and exhilarating, revitalizing energy. Just from the sight of it.

And still Garreth had tried to stay them. Upon seeing it, he had hesitated and asked them to rethink this, had claimed a sense of foreboding. But they had ignored him and had pressed on, and in the end all four of them, even Garreth, had drunk deeply of the fountain’s waters.

It had truly been the most miraculous thing Dethan had ever known. His battle-scarred and weather-frozen body had healed before his very eyes. Frostbite that had claimed at least three of his fingers had reversed itself, revealing warm, pink flesh once more. Old battle wounds, like the one that had nearly dismembered his left leg from the rest of his body, had healed, the tightness and pain he had dealt with every day since evaporating with alacrity. The scar had disappeared from beneath his many layers of clothing. He had not needed to see it because he had felt it. And in the reflective surface of the fountain’s waters he had seen the years melt away from his face, until he looked as he had looked fifteen summers past, a younger man in the prime of his life, no more than thirty, no less than twenty-five, from what he could see. Garreth, previously near death, had sprung to his feet, laughing and full of life once more.

BOOK: Cursed by Fire
13.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott
Spice and Secrets by Suleikha Snyder
Only in Her Dreams by Christina McKnight
Perchance to Dream by Robert B. Parker
Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
The Tying of Threads by Joy Dettman
The Viceroys by Federico De Roberto