Shadow Blade

“I think I have the right to know the name

of
the person making demands of me.”

The Nubian’s lips tightened. “My name is Kevin. Kevin Lambert.”

Kira snorted. “I find it hard to believe that ‘Kevin’ was a common name four thousand years ago.”

He remained silent while their waiter brought their drinks and left. Then he leaned forward. “My name is Khefar, son of Jeru, son of Natek. And yes, I was born more than four millennia ago. Now that the introductions are over, may I have my dagger back?”

“I need you to answer some questions first.”

A muscle in his right cheek ticked. “I want my blade back.”

Praise for the writing of Seressia Glass,

an
author whom Romantic Times calls “phenomenal”!

“Hits hard and sexy with an emotional edge. . . .”

—
Romantic Times
about “In Walks Trouble” in

Vegas Bites: Three of a Kind

“Almost impossible to put down.”

—The Romance Reader about

No Commitment Required

“An easy, fun, scary read.”

—R.A.W. Sistaz about
Dream of Shadows

SERESSIA

GLASS

SHADOW

BLADE

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Designed by Ester Paradelo

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Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-4391-5679-7

ISBN 978-1-4391-6900-1 (ebook)

To Paula, my editor, and Jenny, my agent.

Thanks for believing in my story!

And to the fabulous Stacia Kane—you rock!

And a special thanks to L.A. Banks for

your
enthusiasm and encouragement.

This wouldn’t have happened without any of you.

She comes like the hush and beauty of the night,

And sees too deep for laughter;

Her touch is a vibration and a light

From worlds before and after.

—Edwin Markham, “Poetry”

Prologue

K
ira sat on a rough-hewn bench with faded tapestry cushions, her back against the gray stone wall of the hall. Thick glass windows were set into the corridor walls every few feet in a vain attempt to brighten the cold, desolate passageway. She didn’t know what this place was; she’d stopped caring and paying attention once she’d realized her parents were sending her away. She’d tried to stop caring about that too, but it was harder.

She knew they were on an island as they’d had to reach it by boat. They had then climbed a steep hill dotted with rocks and windswept grass to reach what looked like a sprawling sun-bleached castle perched atop a cliff set against a sky the same robin’s egg blue as the water. Now, as she sat alone in the shadowy hallway, the sun and the sky and the sea seemed to have disappeared. The “castle” felt more like a prison than a palace.

She huddled in the oversized navy blue all-weather coat that had become her protection from the world ever since she’d hit puberty a few months before. Across the hall from her bench, a heavy wooden door separated her from the adults deciding her future—but not from their words.

“We can’t do this anymore!”
Her adoptive father.
Loud, but his deep voice shaking with
anger .
 . . or fear. “She put our daughter in the hospital. Gilly’s still in a coma!”

Kira flinched,
then
focused intently on her hands, encased in thick garden gloves with cuffs secured to the ends of her shirt sleeves by duct tape. The tape had been her idea, and her father hadn’t disagreed. Her jaw still hurt from when he’d hit her, the one and only time he’d ever touched her. She’d deserved it, though, because of Gilly.

Gilly, who was afraid of thunderstorms at nine years old.
Gilly, who’d been taught for the last five years not to touch her strange older sister but had come into Kira’s bedroom anyway because she was more afraid of lightning than the way Kira’s hands sometimes sparked blue.

Lying in bed, semicomatose after retching half the night, twelve-year-old Kira had been exhausted from reliving every painful step of how her dinner had gotten to her plate. Eating had become a nightmare. The only food she could keep down were fruits and vegetables she picked herself, everything else came with confusing flashes of emotion and life from every individual who had handled it, processed it, packaged it, stocked it, sold it . . . Meat was unthinkable.

But all the gardens in their community had been depleted as winter approached and Kira had been so desperately hungry she’d tried to eat, despite the consequences.

Kira had been too sick that stormy night to realize her sister was
there,
had crept into bed with her to escape her fear of thunder and lightning. Kira hadn’t known she’d shifted and touched Gilly. Hadn’t realized even when she’d dreamed she was Gilly, thinking of how her older sister must be a magical fairy princess and would someday take them both back to fairyland. Only her mother’s screams had shocked her out of sleep, her father’s hand knocking her out of bed and to the floor when she’d bolted upright. Only when she saw Gilly’s limp form cradled in her mother’s arms did she realize that something, everything, had gone totally and finally wrong.

“We’ve done everything we can do,” her father
continued,
his voice thickening. “But
she .
 . . she refuses to listen to us, and her . . . problem . . . just keeps growing. Bethany’s at her wit’s end.”

Kira had tried. Tried to do what they wanted, tried to make them happy so they would keep her. For four years she’d kept expecting them to change their minds, these people who had rescued her from the orphanage. She’d always thought of Gilly as her sister, from the very beginning, but it was only this year she’d really begun to consider them all family. Only this year had she finally begun to believe that she belonged.

Then she’d gotten her period and her life had gone to hell. Twelve years old and her life
was
over.

It had started to hurt to wear clothes if she didn’t wash them herself, to have anyone else come into her room and touch her things, to eat processed food that so many had a hand in creating. No part of her skin could touch anything or anyone else without crazy images filling her head and tiring her.

It was worse with her hands, especially when they started to glow. Her parents had bought her gloves, of course—all sorts of gloves—pretending she was starting a new fashion trend but really to protect themselves from Kira’s touch—a touch that was, at first, like an uncomfortably heavy static charge but had progressed in the weeks following her menarche to being more like a high-voltage electric shock, a shock that somehow
drained
the recipient. Everything had become so hard that staying in her room had been the safest thing.

“We can’t help her,” her father’s words came through the door. “We certainly don’t dare touch her anymore. Not after what she did to Gilly!”

Kira slapped her hands over her ears, trying to escape the sound of his crying but unable to escape her own thoughts. She’d almost killed her sister. Why didn’t he just say it like he’d said it that night, tell whoever he was talking to that she was a freak, a monster, and that she couldn’t be around normal people? That they were afraid of her and what she might do next? She knew what they thought of her, had seen it all when her father had hit her.

Make it stop. Please, someone, make it stop!