TODAY, WE ARE DELIGHTED TO BE HOSTING AUTHOR, KATHRYN WILD, WHO IS SHARING CHAPTER ONE OF HER NOVEL, 'FIREBOUND' - FIRST BOOK IN THE FIRE SERIES: THE GUARDIANS #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat
- Eva Bielby
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Firebound is the first book in the five book series – Fire Series: The Guardians. It is available to
buy on Amazon.
Book Blurb:
Suddenly, a strange tattoo appears on Abigail's shoulder, the morning after her 16th birthday.
The tattoo is quickly explained when she is told that she is the heir apparent to an underground
world that has been controlling the elements for centuries. As she learns more about her new
world and her own hidden natural fire abilities, more secrets are discovered, including ones about
her mother’s death. Abigail is left with the choice of backing the seemingly corrupt system she
was born into or turning towards the radical rebels who want to overthrow the Guardian Elite.
*****
Chapter One
The old necklace burnt in Abigail’s hand. The feeling licked over her fingers as she held it tighter, almost crushing the pendant. Necklaces shouldn’t burn. But there it was lighting up her hand, the same way that striking a match directly against her palm would have done. She repeated the mantra in her head: necklaces shouldn’t burn. Abigail let her mother’s old necklace slip back through her fingers and settle back into place. It sat in its normal position round her neck, just as it should be and not burning anymore. She ran her thumb along her fingertips. Apart from the papercut on her ring finger, they felt the same, not burning, or even burnt, not hot or even that warm. Just normal. She reached up to touch the necklace again. Her hand heated up. She pulled away and kicked out at a pile of dirty school shirts, scattering them across the red carpet.
This was stupid. She was just being stupid and way over-sensitive. She kicked out at what was left at her dirty laundry pile, sending t-shirts flying. Gold didn’t just randomly heat up, at least not without something causing it to. Flames didn’t just spring up out of nothing, unless maybe you counted the way fire had engulfed her mum’s car last year. This was just the anniversary coming up. It was just her mind playing tricks on her. It couldn’t be anything else. She wouldn’t let it be anything else.
Abigail took off the necklace and carefully placed it on her overflowing desk, next to her history coursework which she hadn’t started yet and was due in thirteen days ago. She didn’t need any reminders of her mum tonight if she wanted to have a good time and she was determined to have a good time. Tears over last year’s car crash could wait for at least another day. Her gaze drifted back to the necklace as she threw more clothes out of her wardrobe. She had worn that necklace almost every day for the last year. She felt naked without it on, unprotected, unprepared. She gulped. She couldn’t wear it and put on her act of being normal tonight.
Her fingers traced the necklace’s symbol on her neck. Her spine chilled. She could almost feel her mum’s presence in the room, lecturing her about the mess. A small smile formed. At least she could find ways to remember her mum even if she wasn’t here. And one of those ways was wearing her necklace, her symbol. Her eyes looked back over to it, lying on the desk. Her smile grew a little. The sun from the window caught the opals on the golden necklace, making them look like flickering flames. She dropped her smile as she shook her head; her mind and the lights were playing some serious tricks on her today.
She was royally losing it. And that nonsense with her necklace would cut her off from the crowd if she lost it. She was normal, no she was better than normal. And she would stay that way, necklace be damned. She was popular. Or at least she had been. No, she still was. The necklace hadn’t heated up; the symbol hadn’t flickered in the light. There were no flames. Just a stupid overactive imagination. An imagination that could be easily dismissed when she got out of the house.
Abigail gulped turning her attention back to something uncomplicated, like what to wear tonight. She kept her outfit simple: trainers, jeans and a hoodie. She turned to the mirror, giving her appearance a final once over. She looked okay. Her trainers didn’t have their usual crust of mud at the toe and there weren’t any unintentional extra tears on her jeans. She’d do. Apart from her hair. She yanked at it. Her red hair flickering, like a fire spluttering into life, as she let it fall out of its messy school day plait and halfway down her back. Ignoring another trick of the light, she headed for her bedroom door.
She paused as she reached the bottom of the stairs. The noise had been masked by the sound of the television coming from Holly’s room. Her sister had been watching some stupid news programme that had been commenting on the storms battering the north of Scotland. Her feet followed the voices and the closer she got the more she wanted to hear. She paused again, her hand on the kitchen door. Her teeth dug into her bottom lip. She held her breath. Not daring to move. But not able to go anywhere else.
By the sound of it, she should be listening to what was going on in the kitchen. It hardly mattered and was pretty sure that she hadn’t been invited to join the conversation. It was about her. Her phone buzzed again and she pulled it out of her pocket with her free hand. Jordan. He was outside. She swore. He hated waiting. She pocketed the phone and her other hand moved off the door. She should head out to him. But. But. Her hand found its way back onto the door handle, wrapping around it. That was her dad’s voice in there.
Relief rushed through her, filling up her lungs with air. Her dad was home. Maybe all her deliberate fights, detentions, and days in isolation at school had worked. He must still care. He’d come home. Maybe the days of conversations with his voicemail were over and he’d stopped burying himself in work and disappearing on business trips. In the last year, he had so often got home late into the evening and then shut himself in his office until after midnight, before making sure he was out early the next day. But right now, he was here and not locked away from them, instead he was in the kitchen arguing with her grandmother. Abigail paused, processing that thought. That was even stranger than her dad actually being home. Her grandmother had been banned from the house following a huge row just after Beth’s eighteenth birthday. Six years ago. And then when her grandmother had tried to come back in again, the day following her mum’s funeral, she’d been kicked out again.
“Abi is my daughter; she is nothing, nothing, to do with you.”
“No, she is everything to do with me. She is my Heir and as of today, she is of age and you can’t do anything to stop that anymore.”
“How many times? She is not your Heir.” Her dad sounded out each of the words. “She is my daughter and I won’t have her involved in that mess.”
“Just look at her, Thomas.” Her grandmother’s voice was the opposite to her dad’s, calm and controlled, but she too sounded out each word. “Stop and look at her. She is just like her true ancestors. Her brown eyes, her red hair, that is my lineage in her. Even Julia accepted that. You can claim Bethany and Holly all you like, but that girl is mine. Abigail is my Heir, she is part of my world, and the sooner you accept that then the sooner we can stop wasting time.”
A thud sounded against wood and the noise ricocheted through the air and pushed Abigail’s breath back down her throat. Her hand stayed frozen on the door, not wanting to push or pull it away. That wasn’t her passionless dad in there. Not the man that responded to his daughter being involved in a fight by putting a note on the fridge with the dates that she was grounded for and an explanation that she had lost that week’s allowance. It was more like the man who had screamed on the touchlines as she had flung herself into a tackle on the football pitch or had bounced up and down uncontrollably as she sprinted towards the finish line on the track. It was the man that she had given up on having back, her actual dad and not the robot he had become since last December.
“We rejected that world when you killed off your last Heir. You won’t treat my little girl the same way.”
“She is hardly a little girl anymore.”
“Sylvia, let me make this clear. You will not get your hands on her. You will not treat Abi the same way that you did Julia.”
“Julia made her own choices.”
“So will Abi, without your interference. You will not hurt her. You will not train her. She is not your Heir. She will not place one foot in that world!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Thomas.” Her grandmother’s laugh bounced off the closed door. “You never had a say in this. You should have never been involved in it. I can only thank the Spirits that I now get to make up for my daughter’s mistakes.”
“GET. OUT. OF. MY. HOUSE.”
Abigail moved from her frozen position. The words hadn’t made sense. Heirs. Worlds. Multiple worlds at that. But that didn’t matter. This wasn’t a time to stop and think about all that. Her dad and grandmother were fighting on the other side of that door. They weren’t going to be in there for much longer. She wasn’t going to waste that. Or let them disappear.
She rushed into the kitchen and headed straight for her dad, hugging him and dropping all the guards that she used to protect herself. “Dad.”
“Happy birthday,” her dad said pulling his stiff arms away. He smiled at her but it didn’t seem right. His smile tightened, there was barely a curve to his lips. It looked forced and she had offered enough fake smiles herself to know when someone didn’t mean it. “Shouldn’t you get going? You’ve made plans with your friends, right? You shouldn’t keep them waiting, Abi.”
Abigail glanced down at her phone, it was showing another three messages, before ignoring them to focus on her dad.
“I could cancel.”
“It’s not like you to let your friends down, Ab, and we haven’t got anything going on here. You’re best off going out.”
“Guess so.”
She looked down, focusing on the phone and taking her time to reply to Jordan’s message that she would be right out. She didn’t want him to see her face right now. She needed time to recompose it and put back on her ‘I’m fine’ act. His early appearance obviously had more to do with a fight with her grandmother than wanting to see her. Abigail forced herself to smile, hopefully looking less fake than her dad’s had looked and turned to look at her grandmother.
“Hi, Gran.”
“Happy sixteenth,” her grandmother crossed the room. She held Abigail’s face softly for a moment, letting her hand linger on her right shoulder as she pushed Abigail’s hair out the way. Her grandmother pulled her into a hug and whispered, “Permissum incendia suscipio.”
“What?” Abigail said.
Her grandmother smiled, the first genuine smile in the room, or at least it looked like that. “Don’t worry about it; you have nothing to worry about now.”
“Time to leave, Abi.”
“But.”
“Time to go.”
**********
Kathryn Wild Bio:
Neuro-spikey writer, fantasy geek, history nerd, football fan and amateur photographer.
Kathryn Wild is a history nerd and a fantasy geek. She is a football fan (Sheffield Wednesday) and loves to travel and see more of the world. Despite being dyslexic, Kathryn has always loved books, writing and generally telling or listening to stories.
Kathryn grew up in Sheffield, before doing her degree in Bangor (Wales) and her PGCE in Newcastle. She has taught and lived in England, Thailand, Switzerland and Spain. She has previously worked in the voluntary sector in Yorkshire and her current ‘day job’ is a national role in the public sector. She lives in South Yorkshire with her two cats.
The original idea for Firebound and the following series came when Kathryn was travelling around Asia in 2009. Kathryn was in Cambodia visiting Angkor Wat. During an evening with nothing to read until the second-hand book shops opened in the morning and nothing in English on the TV, she started to dream up her own story and the character of Abigail appeared.
After over ten years of hard work mixed in with day jobs, the story is now complete and she hopes you have enjoyed reading it as much as she enjoyed writing it.
Her published works are as follows:
Craft books:
365… Writing Activities Series
365… Questions to Ask your Protagonist – published in 2025
365… Questions to Ask your World – published in 2025
365… Questions to Ask your Plot – published in 2025
365… Writing Prompts – published in 2025
Fiction books:
Fire Series: The Guardians (Young Adult Fantasy)
Firebound (book one) – published in 2022
Fire Heir (book two) – published in 2023
Fire Rebel (book three) – published in 2024
Fire Elite (book four) – published in 2025
Firebrande (book five) – to be published in 2026
The Complicated Death of Julia Cooper (prequel) – published in 2025
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COMING SOON: On Sunday, 30th November, we are delighted to welcome author, Jennifer Burkinshaw, who is sharing an excerpt from her novel, 'Igloo'.
