Fire Dance

By Kailin Gow

From the ALA YALSA Award-winning author of the Bitter Frost Series, now in production as a worldwide game, comes

The FIRE WARS SERIES

Winner - Teen Books 2012 Green Book Festival


5 out of 5 Stars - "Overall The Fire Wars by Kailin Gow completely blew me away, I knew it was going to be good, but good was such an understatement, It was flipping amazing! This is a must read for anyone that loves mythology, an amazing romance, and a heart ripping love triangle." - Haley, YA-Aholic

5 out of 5 Stars - "This book is a step outside of the normal dystopian with its mythological twist but is a better book for it. Anyone that loves a good mythology will adore this book!! - Tiffany, Escaping with Books


DESCRIPTION

The threat to Aeros Island and Earth has come earlier than believed. Mackenzie was forced to join the Water Gods, crushing whatever hope the Fire Gods had in stopping the Erosion from claiming the remainder of Earth. As she discovers another side to her, as her powers emerge, she finds herself challenged beyond anything else to make the most difficult decision in her life, a decision that could change the fate of everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sparklesoup Inc.
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597482813

Kailin Gow

It's official! Read about Kailin and her books being adapted into films and tv series here: https://filmdaily.co/obsessions/kailin-gow-loving-summer/ FIND OUT MORE ABOUT KAILIN GOW AT: https://linktr.ee/KailinGow including how to get a free book from her! Kailin Gow is a million-selling international and USA Today Bestselling author of over 680 published books! She writes in many genres under her name and other pen names. She has been an invited speaker on Book Expo America, appeared on CBS News about writing books with social issues, and the Top 15 National radio regularly on women's issues, women in film and Hollywood, and leadership. She holds a Masters in Management from USC and degrees in Social Ecology, Criminology, and Filmmaking. She is an author influencer on Instagram, owns a podcast network with multiple channels, is a multi-award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, actress, and host. Her books have been made into games, animated short films, and series. Currently, a number of her book series have been optioned, are in development, or pre-production, including her YA Fantasy Sci Fi Thriller FADE (which has been optioned) and Red Genesis (also optioned) by Netflix producers. Kailin Gow is a regular guest in radio and television on women in Hollywood and filmmaking, naming the top Women Execs to Watch. She is a judge in film festivals, writing contests, and is also a voting member in the Academy Awards. AWARD-WINNING INTERNATIONAL MILLION-SELLING AUTHOR, PRODUCER, AND TV PERSONALITY Kailin Gow is an internationally-recognized multi-award-winning multi-genres USA bestselling Asian American author and woman director/filmmaker who has written and published over 400 books under Kailin Gow and her pen names. She is both traditionally-published as well as indie. Considered a digital publishing pioneer, her books have been downloaded over 10 Million times around the world. She is known as one of the most prolific authors internationally who not only writes novels but screenplays fast, but of world-class quality they win prestigious awards like the ALA YALSA Awards and Los Angeles Film Awards. Besides having gone to law school, she holds a Masters Degree in Communications Management from USC and Drama/Film and Social Ecology Degrees from UC Irvine. She has also been a longtime member of TED Talks. She is the first Asian American author to have sold over 1 million books and to be featured on Amazon.com's homepage as an indie Author Success Story. Her success as an Indie Author and advocate for Indie authors during the early Kindle days has inspired many to take a plunge to become authors. The first Asian American woman who is independently published to appear on Amazon's homepage as an Author Success Story, she also represented Amazon as an author spokesperson during Amazon's Kindle Family Launch press conference in Santa Monica and at Book Expo America where she was an invited speaker. A digital publishing pioneer, she was one of the first authors and publisher to publish digitally back in 2001. Prior to becoming a full-time author and filmmaker, she worked as an Exec in Legal and Production at Walt Disney Company, a writer/producer for Cable Television, an Exec at high tech start ups, and Exec at Fortune 100 Hotel and Travel Corporations where she has managed and trained hundreds of employees on world-class service and operations. She has also been a professional model, a tour director, journalist, re-organization consultant, a secret mystery shopper/consultant for top brands, and professional speaker who has been an invited speaker at Book Expo America, Girl Scouts, Asian America Heritage Week, and more! FUTURIST AND SOCIAL INFLUENCER A social influencer, she has over millions of views on her YouTube channel and her Vimeo channel with over 1.5 million views on her Bitter Frost trailer and award-winning animated short film alone. She is a judge on writing contests for writing incubator social sites, has been a member of TED Talks, and is one of the most quoted modern living authors today. She has also been regularly published as a contributor on Fast Company magazine on articles about publishing, leadership, business, and social issues. https://www.fastcompany.com/1800256/social-media-and-future-publishing-industry

Book preview

A NOTE FROM THE  AUTHOR

Thank you for choosing to read The Fire Wars Series.  As the 3rd book in this series, Fire Dance is definitely about action. Lots of it.

It’s also about finding the true potential within.

I encourage anyone who read the Fire Wars series or any of my books to trust in yourself and in the beautiful and amazing person you have within you. It may take a journey to find this person, but when you find her or him, it is worth it.  Take care!

Kailin

DEDICATION

To my English teachers in high school who introduced me to Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and the world of literature, thank you. 

Prologue

I had never known that deities walked our shores, that creatures of myth lived side by side with us, sleeping and eating and breathing alongside us. I had never known that the world we lived in, the world of Aeros, the world of water and flame that since the Erosion had threatened to implode upon itself, was anything other than the product of science, product of the real. We lived in the real world, I thought, the one where every night news channels showed images of new floods, of the earth collapsing into the sea. The one where the country that was once called America was known ever after as the Archipelago, because where rivers once ran through it now there were oceans. This was the product of something complex, something geological, something scientists and politicians understood but the average citizen did not. That is what I had grown up learning. Just like any child. The world that we live in is a world that can be quantified, or can be explained. Charts, graphs, textbooks, scientific studies – these were the things that made the world go round. Certainly not sprites or fairies, dryads or demons – those things did not exist. We believed in them as children, some innate instinct alerting us to all the teeming life and myriad truths that haunted our world, until adults told us it was time to move on. Everything could be explained – the Erosion, the flames in the distance, the way that – no matter where you were in the world – the air always smelled and tasted like salt. And when I first learned that the atavistic forces, the ancient powers, the flame-crowned Mars and Neptune with his trident and his chariot of seahorses, were real, I was astounded. Shocked. Overwhelmed. Or was I?

As the water rushed up to my calves, the sea bitter and briny as the surf sprayed in my eyes, my mind flashed back to another time, a time I could only hazily remember. A time when...I had been here before, I said. Once, when I was a child, I had known deep down inside me the secret of these seas, the secret of the world that I lived in. I had known the truth, deep down in the parts of my soul that transcended thought or reason or even common sense: we lived in a world that was composed of two parts. The first part – the everyday, the commonplace. Things that could be explained, boiled down, proven scientifically. And the second part – the veil that lay like a shroud between us and the infinite, the veil of mystery that separated us from something bigger, more mysterious, far more powerful than we were or could ever hope to me.

I was seven years old when it happened, that moment that first planted the seeds of knowledge within me that age and adolescence had forced me to suppress. It was a bright day in early summer in Angel Island. The Erosion was still relatively new – the world had only just started to recover from its devastation ten years earlier. Shops, houses, buildings were springing up again, but slowly. We were still used to more simple pleasures. Sitting in the sun, stretching out our legs in the salt air by the seaside, gathering mussels and clams to supplement our meager meals at home. All that has changed now, of course. Now hotels and skyscrapers are taller than they ever were; the world has been rebuilt. But I can still remember the smell of fresh fish in the morning, the constant trawling for food, that characterized life in Angel Island back then.

A lazy Sunday afternoon. My mother had taken me to the fishing pier, along with a girl called Lisa, a chubby sweet blonde girl with an enormous smile and strawberry dimples in her cheeks. We sat on the pier, dragging our feet in the water, sucking on rock candy and staring out onto the ocean's horizon, taking in its strange beauty.

What do you think is out there? Lisa asked me, turning towards me with wide eyes.

Dunno, I remember saying. Probably more water, I guess.

I read in a book once, said Lisa. About mermaids.

Don't say that – you can't read!

Can too!

Can not!

We continued on like this for a while, laughing and joking, teasing one another.

I heard there are mermaids out there, Lisa said again. "With long tails like fish and bodies of ladies. And sometimes men too. But usually ladies. And I heard there are sharks and dragons and seahorses and big lizards with tongues that breathe fire and dolphins...

You're making this up!

"Nuh uh! My mommy read me this book called The Little Mermaid, and she said..."

I remained unconvinced.

No such thing, I said. If there were any mermaids or anything like that, why wouldn't they come out to the shore?

Maybe they're scared. Scared of humans.

Nuh uh! If I was a mermaid I'd want to see humans all the time. To make friends with them. I'd be pretty lonely if I was just out there in the middle of the ocean all by myself. The ocean was so vast, so huge, an endless expanse that seemed to stretch out beyond the horizon and into the sky. Certainly no place for friendship, for kindness, for sitting on the pier eating rock candy. As I looked out at the sea, all I could think about was how lonely it was. I felt terribly small all of a sudden, as small as the minnows that darted at our toes in the water.

My mother had gone out to get us more rock candy, leaving us alone on the pier.

I want to go exploring, Lisa announced suddenly. Let's take a walk.

We shouldn't, I said. Mom said to wait here.

Are you chicken? Lisa got up and started running towards the water. Don't be chicken.

I'm not! I cried, running after her to the end of the pier. You're the chicken.

Lisa belly flopped onto the deck, looking down. Look! she cried. "Mussels – a whole bunch of mussels under the pier. I bet they're delicious."

My mouth started to water at the smell. Steamed mussels were without a doubt one of my favorite foods back in those days.

Lisa leaned off the pier, reaching for the mussels, but couldn't reach. They're close, she cried, closing her eyes as she strained. But I can't get to them.

I looked down to where the mussels glinted tantalizingly in the sunlight. I'll try, I said. I'm taller than you, so I can reach further.

I leaned over the edge, stretching my hands towards them.

Careful, Lisa said.

But I was feeling cocky. Lisa had accused me of being a chicken, after all, and so it was naturally my job to prove that not only was I not the dreaded chicken, but that I was, in fact, stronger and faster and more adventurous than she was. With all a seven-year-old's regard for consequences, I leaned towards the water, pushing myself further and further out.

Only a little further, I murmured. Just a bit closer...

Be careful! Lisa shrieked, putting her hands to her mouth. You don't want to get hurt, Mac...

But I didn't listen. I slid further down the pier, my whole stomach and torso dangling over the waves. The water sprayed in my face, getting in my eyes.

The fall happened so fast that I didn't know what was happening. All of a sudden water was in my eyes, in my ears, in my nostrils, filling my lungs. Everything went white; I started to flail, panicking, but as I opened my mouth to scream more water flooded into my body. I could feel the undertow pulling me down – deeper, deeper, far away from the pit. I could hear Lisa's screams, sounding eerie and disembodied from underwater; I could just about see her shrieking for help, her body distorted by the reflection of the waves, before the ocean pulled me into the deep, overwhelming me, taking control.

I couldn't breathe, couldn't think. I didn't know how to swim. At all once the sheer loneliness and emptiness of the sea seem to wash over me; my body and my brain electric with the pain of breathlessness. I was utterly alone out here – the water had come to claim me for its own. Terror seized hold of me; I began to shake, unable to struggle as algae and seaweed wrapped its arms around me, tangling me under.

So, this is what death is like, I remember thinking.

And then I felt them. Two strong arms around me, smelling sweetly of salt and tropical flowers – strong women's arms: tanned, taut, powerful. Arms that were pulling me away from the seaweed, away from the depths. I turned my head and craned my neck to get a look at her, but the sea made everything misty and hazy; I could barely make her out. All I could see was a faintly golden glow, an ethereal beauty that looked somehow familiar...

Mom...? I tried to speak, but the water flooded my throat.

But no, this couldn't be my mother. This woman was taller, easily six foot five, with an enormous Amazonian frame, a strange golden glow about her that gave her an ethereal appearance at once beautiful and terrifying. There was something about her – she wasn't normal, wasn't human. Her whole body seemed alive with an electric force of power that went beyond mere mortal strength.

But I didn't have much time to take her in. In an instant, the woman had pushed me with such force that I flew up from the depths out of the water, breathing in a whole mouthful of delicious oxygen as the wind carried me straight to the shore. In an instant I was in shallow water, able to walk, making my way towards the beach a few hundred meters from the pier.

I was uninjured, but shaken. What had just happened to me? Who was this woman – and why was she so strong? The way she'd thrown me out of the water – no ordinary woman could do that. She was utterly unlike anything I'd ever seen. And yet something about her was familiar – too familiar – an energy, a beauty, that reminded me of my own mother...

Mackenzy! My mother was rushing toward me from the pier, Lisa following close behind, along with a lifeguard. "Mac – you scared the living daylights out of me! Don't you dare ever do that again, okay, or I promise you, Mac, you are so...grounded."

But her angry words were belied by her tight embrace – the arms that wrapped tight around me in a hug of utter relief. And when her arms wrapped around my shoulders, making me feel so warm, so safe, I knew – I knew – that there was some connection between these arms and the arms that had saved my life. The woman in the ocean was connected, somehow, however strangely, to my mother. For years I had filed the incident away in my subconscious, tried to forget about this strange woman and what it meant for her to have this power that somehow reminded me of my mother.

But now I knew. At the edge of battle between the rebel Water God Abzu and the peaceful Neptune for control of all the water kingdom, my mother had transformed once again. Watching my mother swimming through the turbulent waves, breathing effortlessly underwater, her strong arms dividing the waves as she prepared for battle, I knew that it had been my mother who had saved me that day at