Riftmender, p.1
Riftmender, page 1
Table of Contents
Riftmender (The Bloodlender Trilogy, #3)
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
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
RIFTMENDER
BOOK III OF THE BLOODLENDER TRILOGY
Zoe Perrenoud
Riftmender
Print edition ISBN: 978_99987_893_5_7
E-book edition ISBN: 978_99987_893_4_0
Copyright © 2023 Zoe Perrenoud. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Fay Lane.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law.
BY THE AUTHOR
The Bloodlender Trilogy
Bloodlender
Timebender
Riftmender
More Bloodlender Stories
The Watchmaker’s Daughter (read here for free)
Oathtaker (coming soon)
In loving memory of Veva
CONTENTS
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
Chapter Thirty-Four
Oathtaker
Acknowledgements
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
I didn’t know who I was anymore.
I still remembered my name, but whenever someone spoke it, I took a moment too long to respond. My body housed my mind like a wooden box might contain a pretty trinket, the two of them touching but disconnected in all the ways that mattered. If someone were to reach in and pluck out what was left of me, I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Wouldn’t know what to reach for and hang on to, or how to reel myself in. Wouldn’t even know what I was looking at. Those missing parts had existed once; I felt sure of it, but I couldn’t find the trail of breadcrumbs that would take me back home to them.
Invisible birds had pecked everything away.
Even my dreams made no sense. They stayed with me for a day, sometimes two, before succumbing to the inevitable void. The latest one had featured a boy with two faces. We’d been walking down a dimly lit tunnel, his name on the tip of my tongue, but his appearance had shifted the second I’d opened my mouth to ask. Green eyes to brown. Light hair to dark. His lips had moved in a silent question I didn’t have the answer to. My lack of response had seemed to bother him. He’d stalked to the end of the passageway, where he’d turned at the last moment to block my way. His looks had changed again. Green gaze burning with rage, he’d lunged for me and wrapped his hands around my neck.
‘Give up,’ he’d whispered in my ear. ‘We all need to make sacrifices, and it’s your turn now.’
I’d jerked awake to find my own fingers clawing at the base of my throat.
A flicker of movement outside snagged my attention and I wandered to the window.
Snow. A few flurries danced on the wind, swirling in the yellow glow of the streetlamp by the house opposite, reluctant to sink to the damp ground. Below, a steady trickle of strangers hurried along the pavements. Men and women in smart coats, their heads buried in tightly wound scarves. Tired parents herding their kids to school. The owner of the greengrocer’s next door, a pile of boxes in his arms. I thought about pounding on the glass to see what would happen. Would someone hear me over the din of the waking city? Would they care?
Fist raised, I paused.
What was it Papa had called me yesterday?
Dangerous.
He’d said more, but I couldn’t remember the details, and the not knowing gnawed at me from the inside. You wouldn’t want to hurt someone, would you? I retreated into the shadows and studied the slate-grey roofs instead. Smoke curled from several chimneys to melt the flakes before they could fall. A couple of months ago, a big wheel and several thrill rides had disrupted the skyline for a while, gleeful screams floating through the open window, but I hadn’t been allowed to go to the fair.
Or the shops.
Or even beyond the front door.
Strange, how that memory hadn’t faded, while so many others had.
A knock on the door snapped me out of my trance. Rita, cheerful as usual. ‘Sophie, are you awake?’
I mumbled that I was.
‘Breakfast is ready.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
A note of apology crept into her tone. ‘Your father’s moved your training session up. You should eat something.’
Ah yes. Training. The only thing I was allowed and encouraged to do that didn’t involve eating, sleeping, or staring listlessly out of the window. Every move and trick my father had shown me was etched into my muscle memory, even though I struggled to recall our discussions. He was teaching me to be a Bloodlender. A blood magician like himself, capable of sparking fire with the power running through my veins.
Dangerous, indeed.
I changed into a simple grey tracksuit and emerged into the corridor, feet clad in the trainers Rita had given me. She leaned against the wall, her knitted rainbow jumper at odds with her auburn hair, and smiled when our gazes met.
‘I can find the kitchen on my own,’ I muttered.
‘Of course you can, Maus, but I don’t mind waiting.’
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. She wasn’t unkind, on the contrary, but she was always there. Hovering with a cup of tea at the end of my training sessions. Chatting about the weather, her words laced with an accent I couldn’t place. Germanic, perhaps, but she spoke French with the confidence of a native. She owned a vast assortment of garish clothing, yet the lines around her dark brown eyes had me guessing she was in her fifties.
During our moments together, Rita talked and talked, but she never answered any of my questions. Because of that, and also because she was Papa’s friend, I couldn’t bring myself to trust her. The feeling must be mutual. Why else would she follow me around?
‘There’s fresh croissants,’ she said as she led the way into the kitchen and leaned in to kiss a surly-looking Gustav on the temple. Her husband grunted and curled his fingers around his cup of coffee. His waist-length black hair, threaded with grey, was tied back in a ponytail.
‘Morning,’ I said.
Another grunt. I sat and reached for a pastry. While I preferred Gustav’s silences to Rita’s monologues, something about the heaviness of his stare creeped me out. As if he’d been burdened with the world’s darkest secrets and let them fester beneath the surface, poisoning him from the inside.
‘Where’s...?’ I trailed off, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Speaking the words “my dad” out loud made me want to gag.
‘Waiting downstairs,’ Gustav muttered.
My turn to grumble. ‘Already? I don’t get it. We’ve been here for months and nothing bad’s happened. What’s he so paranoid about?’
Gustav and Rita shared a glance. ‘Your father’s just trying to keep you safe,’ Rita said. ‘He has his reasons.’
‘Which he won’t share with me.’ Or maybe he had and I couldn’t remember.
‘He’ll tell you when the time is right.’
‘And when do you think that’s going to be?’ I stared at them, but Rita’s cheeks turned pink and she picked at a thread on her jumper, while Gustav’s attention reverted to the depths of his coffee. ‘This is wrong, you know. You could get arrested for kidnapping.’
They could, but
‘Sophie–’
‘Forget I said anything.’ Croissant in hand, I retrieved a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water, which I downed in one big gulp. ‘Have a nice day.’
A quiet rage bubbled inside me on the way to the training room. Smooth, painted walls changed to rough stone as I descended the narrow staircase beneath the house. Shivering against the sudden chill, I tore chunks out of my croissant and forced myself to chew them. Every mouthful required more effort than I wanted to give, but Papa tended to forget about lunch. Not that I could recall the last time I’d enjoyed any of my food. Rita was a good cook, but to let myself savour it would amount to giving in. My father might take it to mean I’d accepted the situation, and I couldn’t have that.
Not until he told me what we were doing here.
‘You’re late,’ he called before I reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘Blood.’
I picked up a bowl on my way in and cradled it to my chest while I used the sharpened edge of a fingernail to nick the back of my arm. Dark red oozed from the cut with a swirling shimmer. Reaching out with my mind, I seized control of my blood before it could drip onto the floor. The next part was trickier and had resulted in several explosive splatters, during our first few sessions, but I’d got the hang of it by now. As if I were handling a ball of clay, I shaped the desired quantity of blood into a graceful sphere and floated it into the bowl.
‘Why does it matter if I’m late?’ I moved to the middle of the training space. ‘It’s not like we ever go anywhere.’
Papa stood by the shelves in the far corner, fiddling with his pocket watch, his own bowl of blood ready to go. ‘You need to take these sessions seriously, Sophie. They’re important.’
‘Why?’
‘Your physical fitness has improved, but your control over your powers is still questionable. You might be able to access the full breadth of your magic, but you hardly have a clue how to use it.’
And whose fault is that? He’d disappeared, leaving me to grieve him for years before he’d turned up again without an explanation. Now, instead of mending our broken bond, he made me bleed into a bowl so he could push me to the darkest depths of my being through gruelling exercises and twisted mind games. Anger, fear, sadness... I did what I could to control them, but he always found a way to get under my skin.
Nothing I did was good enough, no matter how hard I tried to please him.
‘That doesn’t explain what we’re doing in this house,’ I snapped. ‘Can’t we get a place of our own?’
‘Soon.’
‘Are we even still in France?’
My father’s mouth twitched. ‘We’re safe. It’s the only thing that matters.’
‘So everyone keeps saying. But there’s nothing–’
‘Do you know what I went through to get you here, after the fire?’
The fire? Something fluttered in the depths of my memory, like a moth evading my grasp. Such stirrings usually turned into headaches, but I crossed my arms and forced myself to look Papa in the eye. ‘What are you talking about?’
He sighed, as if tired of the discussion already. ‘The day you discovered your powers. You don’t remember?’
‘I remember Vichy. I had a life there. I–’
Oh. The fire.
My fault.
Well, not all my fault, but the details didn’t matter now. With a groan of protest, my mind tried to fill in the blanks, conjuring a vision of my mother in the middle of our old kitchen. Crimson flames crackled in a deadly circle around her, bathing her face in a red glow. She opened and closed her mouth around nothing, her words smothered by the rising smoke. Heat licked at her feet, her hands, her hair, as if to erase her, and her eyes turned wild with pain. Her panicked gaze darted around the room, unable to find me, and then... nothing.
My hand flew to my mouth. ‘I–I didn’t mean to do it. I–’
‘I know.’
‘But Maman...’
Papa shook his head and looked away. I gaped at him and braced myself for grief to stab me through the heart, but... again, nothing. Or rather, a tired kind of sadness, as if I’d gone through the motions before and my body had nothing left to offer. You knew. You might have forgotten, but deep down, you knew about this.
‘How did–’
‘You fell and hit your head,’ Papa said before I could finish. ‘The fire brigade found you just in time.’
Huh. That might explain the memory problems. A traumatic event, a bad fall, the loss of my mother... but instead of prompting a flurry of answers, the revelation left me feeling hollow. Shouldn’t he take me to see a doctor, if the damage was that bad?
‘I’d been keeping an eye on you and your mother from afar, in case anything like this happened,’ he continued. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’
‘Where were you before?’
‘In hiding.’ Papa hesitated for a moment. ‘The Vessel were after me. It wasn’t safe to contact you.’
‘The Vessel?’ Another flutter, fainter this time. No images. ‘What’s that?’
‘An organisation of Bloodlenders.’ His gaze turned to steel when I lifted my head, hope flaring in my chest. ‘They can’t be trusted, Sophie. They’re the ones who tried to kill you.’
My stomach dropped. ‘Someone tried to kill me?’
‘In the hospital, after the fire. It’s a miracle I got you out in time.’
‘Why? What did I ever do to them?’
‘You’re special,’ my father said quietly. ‘Special in a way that makes you dangerous. You aren’t bound to the Gods like the rest of us. The Vessel are afraid of what you might do.’
Dangerous. There it was again. I thought of Maman and swallowed hard. ‘And what’s that, exactly?’
‘Anything you want.’ His tone remained light, but the tension in his shoulders told a different story. ‘Anything at all.’
Really? Butterflies invaded my gut. ‘Does that mean I can walk out of here? Go back to Vichy? See Tante Adèle and–’
‘NO!’
The word boomed around the basement, making my ears ring. Cheeks flushed red, Papa squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath while I stared at him in shock. Looks like you’re not the only one struggling today.
‘No, Sophie,’ he added after a moment. ‘The Vessel are watching. They haven’t harmed Adèle and her family... yet. The best way to keep our loved ones safe is to stay away from them.’
‘But they’ll be worried!’
‘No.’ His tone evened out and the colour faded from his face. ‘They won’t.’
Everything inside me went quiet. ‘W-what do you mean? What did you do?’
‘What I had to.’
I waited, frozen in place.
Papa sighed. ‘As far as they know, you died from your injuries shortly after the fire.’
No. Head shaking, I stumbled backwards, one hand reaching blindly for the wall. But the kids... I pictured their little faces, happy as they always were whenever I told them a story. Tears tracked down my cheeks, hot and heavy. This was cruel. They wouldn’t understand. If he meant it when he said I could do anything, then–
‘You’re powerful,’ Papa said firmly, ‘but you’re not invincible. If the Vessel catch you, they’ll kill you before you can spark a single flame.’
‘Then what?’ I spat the word out, hating the helpless panic that pulsed through my body. ‘What do we do? Keep hiding for the rest of our lives? I don’t want to live like that! This place is driving me insane!’
‘I’m working on a solution. I–’
‘No.’ My hands curled into fists. ‘I’m done here. I’d rather take my chances with this Vessel.’
Pent-up fire roared in my bloodstream. I whirled and stalked off towards the stairs, but months of training had honed my senses, no matter how little Papa appreciated my efforts. My ears picked up a faint rustle, followed by a brief crackle of fire. I ducked a second before his flames scorched the air above my head.
‘Hey!’ I yelped. ‘You can’t–’
Another tongue of heat lashed at my right side. I threw myself in the opposite direction and reached with my mind for the blood in my bowl, but he attacked again and all I could do was dodge out of the way. A spark hit my cheek with a fierce sting that didn’t fade when I brushed at it with my sleeve.
My father smirked. ‘You were saying?’
‘Stop it!’
