From Spirit and Binding Read online

  From Spirit and Binding

  An Elements of Five Novel

  Carrie Ann Ryan

  Contents

  Preface

  Praise for Carrie Ann Ryan….

  FROM SPIRIT AND BINDING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  A Note from Carrie Ann Ryan

  About the Author

  More from the Author

  From

  Spirit

  And

  Binding

  * * *

  An Elements of Five Novel

  By

  Carrie Ann Ryan

  From Spirit and Binding

  An Elements of Five Novel

  By: Carrie Ann Ryan

  © 2019 Carrie Ann Ryan

  978-1-947007-86-4

  Cover Art by Charity Hendry

  * * *

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person or use proper retail channels to lend a copy. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination.

  * * *

  For more information, please join Carrie Ann Ryan’s MAILING LIST.

  To interact with Carrie Ann Ryan, you can join her FAN CLUB

  Praise for Carrie Ann Ryan….

  “Carrie Ann Ryan knows how to pull your heartstrings and make your pulse pound! Her wonderful Redwood Pack series will draw you in and keep you reading long into the night. I can’t wait to see what comes next with the new generation, the Talons. Keep them coming, Carrie Ann!” –Lara Adrian, New York Times bestselling author of CRAVE THE NIGHT

  * * *

  “Carrie Ann Ryan never fails to draw readers in with passion, raw sensuality, and characters that pop off the page. Any book by Carrie Ann is an absolute treat.” – New York Times Bestselling Author J. Kenner

  * * *

  "With snarky humor, sizzling love scenes, and brilliant, imaginative worldbuilding, The Dante's Circle series reads as if Carrie Ann Ryan peeked at my personal wish list!" – NYT Bestselling Author, Larissa Ione

  * * *

  "Carrie Ann Ryan writes sexy shifters in a world full of passionate happily-ever-afters." – New York Times Bestselling Author Vivian Arend

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  Carrie Ann Ryan's books are wickedly funny and deliciously hot, with plenty of twists to keep you guessing. They'll keep you up all night!” USA Today Bestselling Author Cari Quinn

  * * *

  "Once again, Carrie Ann Ryan knocks the Dante's Circle series out of the park. The queen of hot, sexy, enthralling paranormal romance, Carrie Ann is an author not to miss!" New York Times bestselling Author Marie Harte

  To my readers. I know you’ve been waiting.

  FROM SPIRIT AND BINDING

  NYT Bestselling Author Carrie Ann Ryan continues Lyric’s prophecy in this breathtaking sequel to From Flame and Ash.

  * * *

  In her quest to unlock four of her five elements, Lyric has watched those she loves fade into ash and ruin. Bearing the weight of much loss and heartache, she and her team try to regroup and journey back to the only home Lyric has left—the Obscurité Court.

  * * *

  With the future uncertain, and the one person who could help her control her new powers missing, Lyric has never felt more lost. But as the pieces begin to come together in an epic unveiling she wasn’t prepared for, she’ll have to remember why she was called upon to become the Spirit Priestess in the first place.

  * * *

  The King of Lumière wants revenge for his lost brother, but he also wants so much more. With a missing king, a lost prince, and a few unexpected allies, Lyric will have to battle more than one enemy, and face countless unanswered questions with regards to a prophecy previously lost to the Maisons.

  Chapter One

  Lyric

  * * *

  The world had ended, and still, I stood in silence. Others were screaming, shouting my name.

  Yet.

  Silence.

  The world must have ended, because Rhodes was dead.

  The world had clearly ceased, because Easton had disappeared right in front of me.

  And if the world hadn’t ended, then perhaps this was a dream.

  It had to be a dream.

  I knew my dreams, knew they came at me from all sides, from all edges of the world, and pulled at me until there was nothing left.

  Yet this wasn’t a dream.

  I knew it in my soul.

  “Lyric?”

  I blinked at the voice, so soft when it was normally full of steel. I looked over at Aerwyna—Wyn—and swallowed. Her dark hair had come out of its braid, and she looked more disheveled than I’d ever seen her before. Between the two of us, it was usually me with my blonde hair out of sorts, my body covered in mud and blood. Wyn was a warrior and yet had more grace and poise than most people I knew.

  Today, however, we both looked wrung-out—at least, she did. I felt as if I’d been beaten and bruised. And I felt lost.

  And now…now…I had nothing. No thoughts, no breath, no…

  “Lyric,” Wyn snapped, putting her hands on my shoulders and forcing me to focus on her and not on the nothingness threatening to overtake me.

  I shook myself out of my thoughts and looked at her. “I’m okay.” I whispered the word and held back a curse at the weakness I heard from my lips. I was not weak. No one would allow me to be. “I’m okay,” I repeated.

  Wyn gave me a tight nod, even with her face pale and covered in cuts and ash. “Good. Because we need to figure out what to do next.”

  “Where did Easton go?” I asked, voicing the question that had been circling in my mind over the past five minutes as everyone around me moved to do other things.

  It didn’t make sense. Then again, nothing made sense anymore.

  The battle of the Water Estate was over, and the Lord of Water was dead, as were so many of his people—and ours. My friends from the Obscurité Kingdom, as well as those in the Lumière, who had fought by my side, were mostly unharmed, though only mostly.

  We had lost so much, and I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do next.

  I had known when I came back to the Maison realm—the realm that was not of the human world but sat upon it—that things would be different. That I would be different.

  I just hadn’t known it would be like this.

  When they told me I was a Spirit Priestess, the one that could unite the realm and help save everyone from impending doom, it hadn’t felt like this. I had thought I
would be able to do something. This didn’t feel like anything. Instead, it felt as if I were two steps behind, trying to catch up with the world around me.

  Because the Lumière and the Obscurité were enemies, two sides of the realm that had been fighting for centuries. They’d fought before the Fall, the great battle that had taken their first two kings, the monarchs that ruled during the great war and had fractured the realm into pieces.

  Now, it was five hundred years later, and I was a Spirit Priestess, the one who was supposed to somehow glue those pieces back together. That’s all they’d told me, everything I had seen. Except it didn’t make any sense.

  Because I was supposed to do this with the people who had helped me by my side.

  And now, the two most important ones were gone.

  Rhodes, the son of the Lord of Water, had died, sacrificing himself for me. Killed by his own father no less.

  He was gone, thrown off a cliff by Air Wielding infused with bone magic—the taboo powers created by the sacrifice of death—and had sunk to the bottom of the sea, surrounded by everything that had ruined us.

  He was gone, and I hadn’t had time to grieve. Because I had been forced to use all I had to take out the Lord of Water and protect everyone else. To protect the realm itself.

  And when I thought we were safe, when I’d thought to grieve while holding on to the one person I thought I could love more than anything else in the world, Easton had been taken away from me, as well.

  Not killed, or stabbed through the heart like before, not thrown off a cliff like Rhodes. Just warped out of existence. I still didn’t understand. The fact that I could even think the words that he’d been stabbed in the heart before just told me how much we’d gone through over the past year plus. Yet it had all been for naught. He was gone. And I had no idea why.

  “Where is Easton?” I asked again, pulling myself from my convoluted thoughts. There would be time to go over what had happened here on the battlefield later, moments to count our missing and our dead. There would be opportunity to mourn. Though first, I had to try and understand what had happened right in front of me.

  Because I had discovered just a few moments ago that Easton was my soulmate, the one person in the world who was meant for me. And I had thought he knew it, too. Then, something had come over his eyes, and he bluntly stated that I couldn’t be his. That he would never love me.

  And while it had hurt, had torn into my soul as if his words were a carving knife, I knew that something was wrong.

  Then, suddenly, he was tugged away, a rope of shadow and smoke pulling him from me.

  I had seen it. Had felt it course through my veins as the elements I Wielded pushed at me for control. But I had never seen magic such as that.

  “I don’t know where Easton is. We’re going to figure it out. We need to get off this battlefield, and we have to make plans.”

  “I know. We need to go home.” I whispered the last word, and Wyn’s eyes widened as she nodded.

  “Home.”

  “To the Obscurité Court. That’s home.”

  I had been born in the human realm. I hadn’t even known that the Maison realm existed for most of my life. Somehow, over the past months, the Obscurité Court had become home. Yes, those of the Lumière Kingdom had been the Maisons I met first. The ones who had drawn me close and befriended me. Rhodes and his sister, as well as a few others.

  Though it was the Obscurité Court, the one I had thought was home to my enemies for so long, that had proven to be my home. Those there had trained me, and they seemed to understand what I had to accomplish. Or maybe they just understood that I needed time to figure out the prophecy.

  That was where I belonged now, even if I wasn’t sure it would always be the case.

  We needed to gather our forces. And we needed to leave.

  Rhodes sister came up to them then, her hair flowing in the wind, dirt covering her dress, though I’d never seen her dirty before in my life.

  “Okay, we’re going,” Rosamond said as she raised her chin. She was Rhodes’ sister, older by almost two centuries. It was odd to think that the Maisons could live for what felt like forever. And yet all of them that I’d met so far looked as if they were my age, either nineteen or in their twenties. Even their parents and the dead at our feet appeared young, as if no time had passed. Only those who lost their Wielding looked as if they aged.

  I remembered an older woman from the caves, one who had been a Seer just like Rosamond. That woman had Seen herself saving me at the cost of her life many moons ago. She’d lost the rest of her Wielding thanks to the Fall and the two crystals that brought the realms together. The crystals were dying, and because of misuse by others, the realm was stripping the Wielding from its own people—their lives along with it. So, the woman had aged, and yet she had used her last bits of power, her remaining vestiges of life, to save me.

  I would never forget her, even if I hadn’t really known her.

  She had been one of the first steps to me realizing who I was, even if it didn’t feel like I had any answers anymore.

  “We’ve already planned,” Lanya, the Lady of Air said as she raised her chin. She was Rhodes’ and Rosamond’s grandmother, and stood next to the body of her fallen husband, the Lord of Air.

  She looked so strong, so graceful. But I knew she was broken inside. Though not the same kind of shattered as I was because I didn’t have centuries of love and connection, all of which she had just lost.

  Nevertheless, she was strong, and if she could do this, then so could I.

  “I will go back to the Air territory and do what I can to collect the necessary forces and get us prepared for battle. Because this is only the beginning. It seems it’s always only the beginning.”

  “I will go with you,” Rosamond said. “Even though I’m the last of my line…” Rosamond’s voice broke as she said it, and Luken, an Air Wielder who had been best friends with Rhodes, reached out and gripped her hand.

  She squeezed it in return and gave him a sad smile. “Since I am the last of my line, I suppose I am the new Lady of Water. However, with my uncle, I don’t know if that’s accurate. Regardless, I know I have to be with you. It’s time for me to go with you.”

  Their uncle, the king of the Lumière, had been fighting against the Obscurité for as long as he’d been ruler. Longer, since his father had been the old king, who had died during the Fall when the realm fractured. None of us knew exactly what side he was on. We had a feeling it wasn’t going to be on the side of good and fate, though.

  Because that was the problem with being a Spirit Priestess. Not everybody wanted me to fix the realm. Some liked the power they had, or didn’t believe I could do what the prophecy said. And while I had doubts in my own abilities, I had seen too much to believe that I didn’t have at least something to do with bringing everyone back together again.

  “And, of course, I’ll be there, too,” Luken put in. And I knew he wasn’t just thinking about trying to protect Rosamond or even me. The love of his life had died in front of us only a year before. My best friend, Braelynn. She had come back as my Familiar, yet she wasn’t the girl she’d once been. Braelynn was currently in the Obscurité Kingdom with Easton’s uncles.

  I swallowed hard, trying to push all those thoughts back. I didn’t want to think about that. I just needed to put one foot in front of the other and get there. And then I’d figure out what to do next.

  That was how I had been functioning for the past year or so. Longer if I thought about it. One step at a time, and then I would find my place.

  “We’re going back with you,” Teagan added, putting his arm around Wyn’s shoulders. Teagan was a Fire Wielder. In fact, he was the son of the Lord of Fire, a man I had met last year. He was Easton’s best friend, and a fellow warrior, along with Wyn.

  I looked down at the corpses and lost at our feet and noted that they had brought Arwin’s corpse with them.

  Arwin had died to protect me. A young Earth Wielder
who was just learning, but such a strong warrior.

  The plan was to bring his body back to the Obscurité Kingdom with us. There had been so much loss. But we would make it—we didn’t have a choice.

  “Okay, gather what you need…” I looked over and paused, my voice trailing off. I had forgotten that I’d burned everything to ash.

  It was me. My powers had done that.

  No one looked at me with disgust though, at least not among my friends.

  I could still remember the horror on the faces of those who were either against us or those outside of our core group that had been fighting for us.

  Because I could now Wield four elements. Air, Earth, Water, and now, Fire.

  I’d found my fourth element. It had broken free from my soul deep down below the sea when Rhodes’ father had tried to drown me, Easton, and Rhodes by chaining us to the bones of those the Lord of Water had murdered over time.

  I had unlocked my fourth element under duress, and I couldn’t control it.

  Even now, I could feel all four of them competing for the top power—Water sometimes trickling from my fingertips with puffs of Air.