Blaze of Secrets (Asylums for Magical Threats 1)

She’d spent half the night lying awake, replaying events from the day: Jaxton’s touch, the way he needled her to forget about her troubles, the odd flares of heat between them. She’d tried getting up to read, but after staring at the same page for ten minutes, she’d given up and gone back to bed.

Eventually she’d fallen asleep, but then she’d been plagued by images of him nipping at her lower lip before kissing his way down her throat, to her breast, where he’d taken her nipple into his mouth and sucked hard.

Even remembering it now made her skin tingle and her lower body tighten. It might have been ten years since she’d last had sex, but her body still remembered the feeling.

Garrett moaned, snapping Kiarra out of her sex dream to focus back on his care. Even as Garrett calmed while she hummed, he continued muttering unintelligible nonsense. The only word that she understood was a name: Marzina.

Then, out of the blue, he fisted the blankets with his hands and mumbled, “Why did you betray me, love?”

She nearly stopped humming at the heartbreak behind his words.

It seemed that Garrett had also had a rough time of it. First he’d been betrayed by someone he trusted, then broken by experimental trials too horrible to ponder. She hummed louder, and Garrett calmed again.

He was only one out of hundreds, if not thousands, of first-borns who’d been abused and broken under the AMT system.

Kiarra would never forget the first broken person she’d seen inside the AMT, on the way back from her yearly medical exam. A girl, no more than fourteen, with a vacant expression, scratches covering her neck, and scabs on her head where her hair had been torn out. They’d tied her hands to her sides to prevent her from harming herself further. As a guard had escorted her down the hall, she’d slipped free for a few precious seconds to ram her head against a steel doorframe. Hard. While Kiarra had been shut back into her cell before the girl had died, the news had traveled fast. F-368 had died within minutes of the event—some said with a smile on her face.

After watching the girl’s actions, Kiarra had decided to fight for her sanity and find a way out. The dead girl’s family, and others like hers, needed to know what was happening inside the Cascade F-block. The High Council might be using fear to “persuade” parents to give up their children, but Kiarra wanted to believe that parents would fight the cruelty she’d seen if they only knew about it.

She’d only changed her mind, and attempted to kill herself, when staying alive would’ve caused more harm than good. But now that she was out of the AMT, surrounded by people who might even help her, Kiarra was once again determined to expose the AMT’s actions. She needed to become stronger, build a network, and find a way to attack the issue.

Once Kiarra was sure Garrett wouldn’t wake back up, she eased out of his room and went to hers.

Garrett had reminded her of what was important. She would forget about what had happened with Jaxton and what Cam had told her about their parents. Too many people needed her help—but in order to help them, she needed to focus on training and becoming strong enough to have a chance of success.

She looked through the clothes Neena had given her and had started to decide what to wear when someone banged on the door. The handle turned, but after Jaxton had barged in earlier, Kiarra had learned to lock it.

There was another pound on the door before she heard a shout.

“Kiarra, let me in.”

Jaxton needed to calm the fuck down.

But he had every right to be pissed off. The periodic emergence of the Four Talents was always followed by one thing: some sort of catastrophic disaster. And not just any kind of disaster, but one that threatened not only the existence of both humans and Feiru, but also the exposure of elemental magic.

Each of the Four Talents was a master of their element, to such a degree they could both heal and destroy; all other first-borns only had the ability to do one or the other.

There was only one Talent for each of the elements, meaning that Kiarra would be the Fire Talent. He had no idea about the identities of the Earth, Water, and Wind Talents, but now that Jaxton knew the Talents’ abilities were emerging, DEFEND would have to find the remaining three.

Never before had all Four Talents been gathered in time to fully prevent whatever was coming; they could only stop it from worsening. The Black Death in the 14th century had been a case in point.

The increasing appearance of latent abilities—dormant and rare powers that only emerged when the Talents started to awaken—also made sense. The Four Talents needed the equivalent of a Secret Service to keep them alive. Many Feiru would do anything to have a Talent under their influence, especially in the current politically charged times. This made the Four Talents targets.

Maybe the AMT enforcers were after Kiarra because she was a Talent. It would’ve been easy enough to condition her to believe that her abilities were gone, allowing the AMT to reawaken them when needed.

The lock clicked and Kiarra opened the door a crack, but after one look at his face, she retreated into her room.

The sight of her face once again flared his anger. Jaxton pushed his way into her room and cornered Kiarra against a wall with his arms. “You’ve been lying to me,” he said coolly, proud to sound more civilized than he felt.

Kiarra didn’t flinch from his gaze. “Care to tell me what I’m supposed to be lying about?”

He leaned in closer. “Stop playing games with me, Kiarra. I know you can gather fire.”

She poked his chest with her finger. “I already told you, I can’t.”

“And you’re still lying to me.”

Kiarra stilled and narrowed her eyes. “Not being able to feel the elemental energy in the air is like being forced to breathe through your mouth. You can do it, but it doesn’t feel quite right.” She raised her chin. “Wait for the test results from my blood. You can apologize to me later.”