Lumen
Lumen
Blood Luminary #1
Joseph Eastwood
Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Eastwood
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author, addressed “Attention: Permission,” at this address: [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Joseph Eastwood, Don’t Judge a Book, Cover Art and Design
For Fran and Eve, because they’ve been there for me from the start, this book is for you two!
Also, for the people who have supported me thus far and have “liked” my Facebook page before I had anything published. It’s been really encouraging to have so much support for something that seemed like a dream.
I’d also like to say a huge thank you to Tasha, as she’s been asking and asking for me to release this. As well as being a fantastic driving force behind me getting this finished.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
It’s normal for a child to die on Templar Island. It’s natural selection. Each child born had energy flowing through its blood, but only some lived to manipulate it and keep the flow of energy in order. Natural selection is pure; it will spill blood to clean away impurity, even if it had been in the form of a new-born.
The little boy, Daniel, played with his miniature blue aeroplane, running around the coffee table in the middle of the living room. The toy sat on his fingertips as he jumped around trying to make it fly. His father told him that it could.
“That was my favourite toy too,” the boy’s father said, sitting back in his chair with a smile. “Your
great-
granddaddy gave me that when I was little. He told me he got it from another island. A large island, far
far
away from here.”
A burst of laughter came from the kitchen. “Erik, don’t fill the boy’s head with nonsense, nobody has ever set foot off Templar,” his wife butted in.
“It’s true, Roan,” he grinned and rolled his eyes, then set them back on his son. “We don’t have them, but there’s somewhere that does. Is that what you want to do when you’re older Daniel? Fly in one of them?”
Daniel continued to play with the toy, his arms outstretched as he ran around barefoot, pushing up on to his tiptoes. He watched the toy on his fingertips with awe and bated breath, letting the little air in the back of his throat tingle and dance around in his lungs.
“Daniel,” his father said, leaning forward on his chair, trying to catch his son’s eye. “Daniel, look at me.”
Daniel continued to run around, circling the tree stump coffee table, over and over, while his father watched him, wanting to talk more about his grandfather and about the peculiarities of the childhood he had and the stories he’d been told. He sighed, sitting back into his chair, reflecting on those tales. Daniel knocked his father’s concentration when he began ducking and dipping with the aeroplane and his blissful smile. He called out to his son again but it went unnoticed, as did a fine piece of white string trailing off behind him. Erik reached out and caught a strand of it. He observed the thinning thread and rubbed it between his forefinger and thumb, his eyes fluttered shut and his fingers fell numb, he was relishing in pure energy. He opened his eyes again, to see the mess his son was creating; the string had become thick, and falling thicker by the moment. And then first fluffed feather slipped out of the back of Daniel’s t-shirt.
He couldn’t take his eyes off his son. “Roan,” he called out to his wife.
“Erik, please stop fretting, he’s not gone deaf,” she chortled in her gentle tone.
He turned his head to the kitchen quarters, keeping watch in his peripherals. “Just come through—I—I need you to look at something.”
She huffed. “Okay, what is it?” she poked her head around the doorway. There was no doubt that she’d answered her question, but she had a thousand more swollen in her throat. She locked eyes with her pasty-faced husband and couldn’t look away.
He cleared his throat. “It’s his change. Right?”
“Of—” she cleared her throat, “of course.” She shut her eyes and forced a deep breath, wondering if she‘d ever regain herself. She pressed her fingers into the collar of her neck and swallowed hard at all the stressed vowel sounds inside.
“What’s—” he started, and turned to see his wife’s calm ignorance.
She moved her hand to her chest and opened her eyes to see her son still running around. Her glistening tears, ready to pop, shaded her violet eyes, and as her bottom lip trembled, she sunk her teeth into it. She wavered on the balls of her feet and then the first specks of blood marked the back of her son’s white t-shirt.
“Hun,” Erik said.
Their little boy continued to run around, his t-shirt tore at the seams and fell to his waist like excess skin. It revealed two thick white stumps of bone at the top of his shoulder blades that had sliced through his skin, and around the base, little pockets of blood dribbled down his back.
His mother nearly fell, resting herself against the chair and reaching around for her husband’s hand. She blinked at a few tears and took another deep breath. “He’s fine.” Their son continued to run around with his aeroplane in tact on his fingertips. And the blood continued to drip down his back and freckle the floor, and the thin feathers were now growing in bunches at the bone and then falling out in clumps, falling behind him.
They watched him as he moved around in the syrupy air, his movements locked in slow languid strokes, letting the last couple of seconds settle in time as minutes. A cacophony of coarse crunches broke as Daniel fell to his knees and his aeroplane came loose and crashed into the wall ahead. He dropped to his chest in a small pile of feathers. The protruding bones on his back crumbled and congealed with the blood, making a paste against the feathers.
Roan kept a tight grasp of Erik’s hand, tightening as Erik tried to move from his seat. “We don’t want to intervene,” she said, sniffling, and taking a tight hold of her necklace; a small star with seven spokes, her grip strong enough to draw her own blood.
Erik closed his eyes and shook his head. He massaged the bridge of his nose, trying to push the tears back. Daniel screeched and his limbs flailed for a moment. “Daniel.” Erik dropped to his knees beside his son as his wife’s arms flopped to her side, she watched; the whites of her eyes turned pink, as a nurse she'd been taught about controlling her emotions. “Hush, Daniel, hush,” he said cowering over his son. He stared up at his wife. “They can’t. They can’t decide his fate. We have to do something, Roan. We have to help him get through this change.”
She pinched at her lips with her teeth and rolled her eyes. “No.” she grabbed her husband from under his arm and pulled him back to his feet. “No.”
Blood started to pool inside Daniel’s ears, thickening and drying; engulfing sound. His eyes were screwed shut, but beneath them it had become scratched film. Trapped inside the skin, like it wasn’t his skin anymore, and as a cough shook this skin-tight vessel, bloodied phlegm broke the lips, tainting them. He pulled away. This wasn’t
his
fight.
Chapter One
Daniel’s light yellow feathered wings unfurled from his back and threw him to the ceiling. It was an innate feeling as his fingers slipped into the grips of the worn away brick. He stayed, shaking, trying to control his breathing, before looking around and finding himself back in his bedroom.
His mother burst into his room, panting. “Daniel,” she said, holding a hand against her chest, “get down from there, we have a guest.”
Daniel’s fully formed wings started to molt away; the feathers danced around in the air until they touched the floor and the skeleton of the wings thinned back into his body. He closed his eyes and took a tighter hold of the brick as his body filled with ecstasy.
“I’m not going to repeat myself,” she said, shaking her head at him.
“Well you don’t understand what it feels like,” Daniel said, releasing his fingers from the ceiling and sighing, he fell straight to his bed, half of the feathers bounced off while the others started attaching themselves to his skin. He lay there for a moment, taking in the rush of energy as his mother watched. “I wish you could live
that
nightmare, for just one night.”
“Daniel, you know I hate to see you in pain, but this man is a very special guest. Come on, honey. Get dressed and come down, we’ll be waiting,” she said, closing the door as she left.
He lifted his head and all he could see were feathers, there wasn’t a part of the floor that hadn’t been covered. He swung his legs around and faced himself in the wall mirror across from his bed. He noticed he wasn’t wearing a t-shirt; the t-shirt he’d been wearing was now on the floor in two pieces, laid beneath the mass of feathers.