Bloom Read online

  Bloom

  Title Page

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Epilogue

  From The Author

  Copyright

  Description

  HAVEN KINCAID is seventeen. After moving away from her friends before the start of her senior year, she struggles to fit in at her new school. When the boy of her dreams shows interest, she finally has a chance to be normal—but Haven is more different than she realizes. After a tragic loss and a deep betrayal, she is kidnapped by a sinister group that will do anything to extract a deadly ability she can barely control—even if they kill her in the process.

  COLTON ROSS is fresh out of high school. Driven by a desire to escape his abusive father and haunted by the memory of an absent mother, he moves to New York City to start over. When a favor for his friend backfires and he ends up in jail, Colton is bailed out by a mysterious businessman who offers him the chance to strengthen his new-found power and discover the truth about his past—a truth that will set him on a quest for insatiable vengeance.

  BLOOM is an action-packed fantasy adventure that tells the story of two young people surviving in a dangerous world. As their journeys unfold and collide, they must risk their lives to defeat an evil that threatens to destroy everything they hold dear.

  Cover by TJ Wright

  neechmonkey.carbonmade.com

  BLOOM Copyright © 2012 by Sam Best

  DEDICATION

  For every person who can tell the difference

  between reality and imagination

  and still prefers the latter.

  Blood rushed to Haven’s face as she ran toward the cafeteria exit, pushing past schoolmates holding full lunch trays. She planned to keep running as soon as she was outside, driven by embarrassment and rage and the terrible memories of the night she lost everything. She wouldn’t stop until she was far away from that place—from those people. She wanted answers. No more waiting, no more uncertainty. She would make the police find out who was responsible for ruining her life.

  Haven was halfway to the cafeteria door when a powerful heat blossomed on the back of her neck and ran down her spine. It spread outward, stretching to every part of her body. The blushing warmth in her face paled in comparison to the boiling heat that coursed beneath her skin. Arms, legs, torso, and head—every part of her felt like it was burning. She stopped walking and looked down at herself to make sure she was not actually on fire.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with her?” someone said from a nearby table.

  Haven tried to run, but her legs wouldn’t move. She tried to call for help but her voice caught in her throat.

  She looked down in horror as a bright blue ball of light formed around her right hand.

  Not here, she thought. Not now.

  Another sphere of light grew from the palm of her other hand until it completely encompassed her wrist and fingers. It looked as if she had stuck her hands into two large balls of blue light. Haven tried to run again, then realized that her feet weren’t touching the ground. She floated into the air and hovered next to a table, still rising toward the ceiling.

  The students in the cafeteria screamed and backed away. Several of them held up food trays for protection.

  The blue light from Haven’s hands turned to flames and spread to cover her entire body, like fire crawling over gasoline-soaked wood. She felt a tingling sensation on each of her shoulder blades and looked behind her as two huge wings of blue energy unfolded from her back. The tips of the wings touched the ceiling and burned black holes into its smooth surface.

  In the shiny plastic reflection on the bottom of the food trays that were being held up for protection, Haven saw a blue angel hovering above the tables of the cafeteria. Her hair floated around her head as if she were submerged in calm water.

  Her vision filled with light and she reached up to feel the energy pulsing from her eyes. The flames covering her body cracked like lightning and whipped back and forth violently—a thousand dancing snakes made of blue fire.

  Haven’s back arched and she screamed.

  1

  …Two Weeks Earlier.

  Haven Kincaid won a spelling bee when she was seven, a math tournament when she was twelve, and nothing else until the day she turned sixteen. Her parents thought their daughter would be happy to learn she had “won” the right to stay out until ten o’clock on a school night. It was a sign of trust, they said, since they were both so knowledgeable about what teenagers did and they were certain their little Haven never got into anything that would make them blush in front of a crowd.

  Now, just after turning seventeen, Haven spent most of her days wishing she had an apartment of her own so she could make the rules. Ever since her dad got his new job a year ago and moved the whole family from Flagstaff to Scottsdale, Arizona, she felt like she didn’t belong at home, at school, or anywhere else.

  Haven left behind a handful of friends that she had known ever since grade school—girls she was planning on graduating with and rooming with at college. Moving across the state was bad enough, but to do it right before her last year in high school was the absolute worst.

  Her family’s new home in Scottsdale was nice enough. It had two stories, which Haven always wanted, and was on a quiet street not too far from the downtown area. There was a small movie theater next to a smelly bowling alley not too far away, and she heard rumors that someone was building a miniature golf course.

  Yippee.

  Haven was at least thankful that she no longer had to share a room with her little brother, Noah, and that the new yard was a lot bigger than the old one—but she was still more than two hours away from her friends in Flagstaff. Those two hours could just as easily have been two weeks since Haven didn’t have a car and there was no way her friends were going to drive all the way down to Scottsdale just to hang out at a smelly bowling alley.

  If she had more than one close friend at her new school, she probably would have been happy. But Kayla Robertson, her closest, could only stay out until eight-thirty. Haven wouldn’t have her own car until her eighteenth birthday (when she was expecting to inherit her mom’s old junker once her dad “surprised” her mom with a new luxury model on their twentieth wedding anniversary), so her curfew may as well have been eight-thirty, too. Haven suspected her parents knew all of those things already and that extending her curfew to ten o’clock had been more of an attempt to distract her than anything else.

  Things hadn’t exactly been rosy around the Kincaid house for the past week. Haven was disrupting her classes at school out of boredom—nothing serious, but she had been sent to the principal’s office several times for making rude comments in the middle of lessons—and she was caught drawing a lopsided heart on the gymnasium wall with a permanent marker. She was trying to write a name inside of the heart before Coach Lawford saw what she was doing and took away the marker, but she only managed to spell out J-A-S.

  Up until then, Principal Ri
vera had only given her warnings for disrupting class, but said Haven was on a “slippery slope” and called her parents after the incident in the gym. They scheduled a meeting for later in the week—a face-to-face meeting—that Haven would be forced to attend.

  Haven’s room was small but had two windows since it was in a corner of the house. She and Noah had the two bedrooms on the second floor of their two-story home, and her parents had the largest bedroom—downstairs next to the den. The stairs were well-carpeted—enough so that when she was very careful, Haven could sneak up and down in the middle of the night without making a sound. She did that often to raid the fridge for ice cream whenever she couldn’t fall asleep. Opening the silverware drawer was another story. It squeaked loudly unless it was opened at a snail’s pace. Haven meant to stash a spoon away in her room for those sleepless nights, but she had forgotten yet again, and would be forced to use stealth to obtain her late-night snack.

  She walked quietly down the stairs, her feet padding into the carpet with each step, then crept into the kitchen, pausing briefly by her parents’ closed bedroom door to make sure they weren’t moving around. Hearing nothing, Haven stepped softly to the silverware drawer next to the sink, her bare feet making slight sticking noises as they peeled off the hard linoleum floor.

  She grabbed the metal handle on the drawer and started to pull it out as quietly as she could. When the drawer was halfway open, a small bubble of blue light formed just below the first knuckle of her index finger—it looked as if she was wearing one of her mother’s gaudy costume rings. The back of her hand glowed pale blue and small flames flickered across her skin.

  Well that’s new, she thought.

  It didn’t burn, whatever it was. There was no heat at all.

  The bubble on her index finger expanded as the thin fire on the back of her hand fed into it. After the growing bubble had absorbed all of the flame, it moved slowly from her knuckle down to her fingernail. She let go of the silverware drawer handle and the small sphere of light exploded like a tiny firework. The drawer slammed back into place and the metal utensils inside jumped and clattered loudly in the plastic drawer organizer.

  Haven covered her mouth with both hands to stifle a small scream.

  She held her breath and listened for the all-too-familiar sound of her parents getting up to see what she was doing out of bed so late at night. In the absolute silence, she heard soft footsteps in the grass outside, moving quickly away from the kitchen window. A quick shadow darted across the kitchen window and Haven gasped.

  Someone had been watching.

  2

  Colton Ross awoke late—the glowing red numbers on the cheap alarm clock next to his mattress read eleven o’clock. He lay there smiling, knowing that he felt better in that moment than he would feel for the rest of the week. He pulled aside his thin sheet and stood on the cold wooden floor.

  The uncurtained window next to his mattress showed him a view of the busy street below his apartment building. Businessmen and women walked briskly down the sidewalks, bumping into each other and generally ignoring the world around them.

  Colton rescued a dirty skillet from the bottom of a pile of filthy dishes and, after a thorough scrub, cooked three scrambled eggs for breakfast. He then took a quick shower and pulled on the cleanest t-shirt and pair of jeans he could find. Normally Colton rode his bike to the homeless shelter for lunch on his days off, but he decided to walk instead.

  He liked New York City because it was big enough to get lost in yet personal enough when he needed it to be. His new job at the shipping depot kept him busy for fifty hours a week or more and his spare time was steadily shrinking as the weeks passed, so he tried to make the most out of his occasional day off.

  After graduating high school six months ago, he had kicked around his hometown of Pittsburgh for a while before his friend Reece convinced him to move up to New York. After he settled in to the spare room in Reece’s apartment, Colton ditched his pickup truck for a bicycle and had barely thought about Pennsylvania since.

  When he emerged from the front door of his apartment building, the street was even busier than it had been just thirty minutes earlier. No matter what day of the week it was, Colton always seemed to have to travel against the flow of foot-traffic. Pittsburgh had been moderately better, but Colton had lived in the suburbs instead of downtown.

  His favorite produce stand in The Bronx was near the corners of Westchester and Castle Hill. The owner was busy topping off a heaping carton of bananas when Colton approached the stand.

  “Morning, Mr. Laretti.”

  “Mr. Ross! Good to see you, as always. Yet it is few and far between, yes? You must have the day off.” Antonio Laretti had bushy black eyebrows and a receding hairline. Standing on his toes, he was probably only five feet tall. He squinted up at Colton through thick reading glasses.

  “My first in two weeks.” Colton picked up two apples and inspected them for bruises.

  “Ah, yes, they work you too hard. I am also working too hard. But! People are needing their fruits and vegetables, yes? Where else they gonna get them if not from old Antonio!”

  “Thanks a lot, Mr. Laretti.” Colton handed him a dollar and took the two apples.

  “Of course, of course. Come back soon, I’ll have better apples.”

  Colton turned to walk away when movement in the cart of bananas caught his eye. He stopped to watch as the entire bunch slowly turned from bright yellow to dull brown, as if they were being coated with some kind of acid that burnt their peels.

  “Hey,” said Antonio, “what is this?”

  The bananas curled in on themselves as they darkened and shrank. Colton took a step toward the produce stand and the crate of oranges next to the bananas began to change as well. The round fruit withered like they were being drained of all their moisture, shriveling into dried husks right before Colton’s eyes.

  If it hadn’t been for a similar accident two months ago, Colton would have thought he was imagining the whole thing. It had only been a lizard back then, though—one small, barely-alive lizard he had been trying to carry from his bedroom to his backyard when it dried up in his hand and turned to dust.

  “You!” said Antonio loudly. He pointed right at Colton, his mouth moving up and down as he tried to form words. “You!” was all he could say. He pointed at Colton’s hands.

  The apples he purchased were rapidly shrinking, turning brown as if some invisible flame were cooking them in his palm. He dropped them like hot coals and quickly brushed his hands against his shirt.

  Colton knew what came next. Warmth gathered around his spine between his shoulder blades as heat bloomed within his body. It first spread up to the base of his neck, then back down his spine before flowing out to his arms and legs. Finally, it settled in his hands. His palms radiated with heat.

  “Mr. Laretti, I-I-I’m sorry,” he stuttered.

  “Get out of here, whatever you are!” hissed Antonio. “You ruin my whole business so you don’t come back, you hear me?! I call the cops if you come back!”

  Colton turned and hurried away as Antonio shouted curses at his back.

  3

  Haven went quickly to the kitchen window and looked outside. A harsh yellow glow from a nearby street lamp painted the wet grass in her backyard. A tall white fence bordered the yard, too high for someone to climb over (or so she thought), so if someone were back there, they would have had to walk all the way around from the front.

  There was a crunching noise from a large bush at the base of the fence. Haven strained her eyes to look into the shadows. A black cat shot out from the bush and hissed as it clawed up the fence, its fur raised and its teeth bared. It ran across the top of the fence, its body casting a quick shadow over Haven’s kitchen window as it passed in front of the street lamp.

  Haven watched a moment longer, still uneasy. Finally she sighed and tried to relax. She slowly pulled out the silverware drawer again, waiting for the blue light to burst from her hand. It did
n’t. She grabbed a spoon, then pushed the drawer back in with her hip and got a bowl out of the cupboard. Haven filled it to the brim with strawberry ice cream.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  She jumped at her father’s voice and turned around quickly.

  “Dad!”

  “Hi,” he said, smiling. He wore his white robe and what remained of his greying hair stuck out in every direction.

  “Hi.” She put the tub of ice cream back in the freezer and closed the door. “No, couldn’t sleep. Was I being too loud?”

  “Nah, I couldn’t sleep, either. I heard a noise and figured you were on one of your late-night ice cream runs.”

  “You know about that, huh?”

  “Your mother used to do the same thing right after—”

  “Dad, gross!”

  “What? I was going to say ‘right after she finished working the late shift at the hospital’.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, why the midnight snack? Something happen at school?”

  He walked toward the kitchen and pulled out one of the tall stools below the bar. The counter that ran along the back of the kitchen turned out from the wall and separated it from the dining room. Haven’s mother liked to keep that surface clear so someone could sit on a stool and use it like a bar.

  Haven’s father sat on his stool and smiled at her.

  “Dad, it’s late.”

  “So? You’re not going to sleep any time soon. Not with all that sugar, anyway. Come on, sit down. I’m a good listener.”

  She sighed and reluctantly pulled out the stool next to him, then placed her bowl on the counter and sat down. She ran her spoon around the inside edge of the bowl, scooping up the softer ice cream on the sides.

  “Is it boy trouble?” he asked.

  She made a sour face. “I am not talking to you about that.”