Glow of the Fireflies

Also by Lindsey Duga

Kiss of the Royal

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

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

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Bring Me Their Hearts

Mirror Bound

Toxic

Black Birds of the Gallows

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Lindsey Duga. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 105, PMB 159

Fort Collins, CO 80525

[email protected]

Entangled Teen is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Edited by Lydia Sharp and Judi Lauren

Cover design by LJ Anderson, Mayhem Cover Creations

Cover images by

Joseph Kirsch, Adobestock

TheFarAwayKingdom, Adobestock

dalomo84, Depositphotos

grandfailure, Adobestock

Interior design by Toni Kerr

Bring Me Their Hearts Bonus Content

Copyright © Sara Wolf

ISBN 978-1-64063-731-3

Ebook ISBN 978-1-64063-735-1

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition October 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Grandma.

And to Grandpa—I’ll miss you always.

There are places in the world

that are special.

Where you may wonder

is this Heaven?

Or is this Earth?

It’s in those places, where the lines between what’s real

and what’s not are blurred,

Where the boundary

between the physical and

astral plane becomes so thin…

That spirits dwell.

Chapter One

With every pull and kick of my breaststroke, trails of bubbles exploded around me, disrupting my otherwise perfect view of the opposite end of the pool. The crystal clear water meant that it was particularly chemically enhanced today.

But they always did that for meets. Nothing new or unexpected, just irritating for a girl with sensitive skin and already dry hair.

I came into the wall hard. My hand slapped against the touchpad and my fingers curled around the edge, stopping my forward momentum before I rammed my knees into the pool tiles. Throwing my head back, I came out of the water like a mermaid princess—cue magic sparkles—and took a deep, shuddering breath. Almost immediately, my pathetic lungs rebelled, as muted cheers seeped through my swim cap.

I threw my elbows onto the side of the pool, gasping and trying to get my wheezing under control.

How embarrassing. How not mermaid princess of me.

Here, Brye—here, Izzie said, and I didn’t have to ask what she meant.

Without even looking up, I accepted the inhaler from her, stuck it between my lips, and pressed down. I inhaled deeply and slowly to allow the medicine to reach my lungs.

In seconds, my breath was normal again. I stretched my neck back, dipping the top of my swim cap into the water, and felt the fresh, cool air tickle down my throat.

Asthma attack aside, I’d won my race. I heard the other racers come into the wall with large splashes a whole ten seconds behind me. Then the buzzer went off, signaling that it was time for the next swimmers to step onto their blocks…and that I needed to get out of the pool.

Izzie’s brown arm came into view, and I accepted her help, pulling myself out of the pool and then maneuvering through the throngs of other swimmers awaiting their races.

The sun beat down, reflecting off the surface of the pristine water and the white concrete, but the heat wasn’t completely unbearable yet. Summer league meets started early and went by quickly—fewer people and fewer races.

We came to the side of the pool with our gear on the benches, and Izzie tossed me a towel. Well, you crushed your time but at a cost… Are you okay?

I looked up from wiping my face to find her watching me with concerned eyes. Her goggles hung around her neck while her coiled hair remained tucked under a bright aquamarine swim cap with Joyner Jellyfish scrawled across it in an outdated eighties logo.

I gave a thumbs-up to my best friend and tucked my inhaler back into my bag. Yeah, I’m good. I was used to these attacks. I’d had asthma for as long as I could remember. Granted, that wasn’t as far back as most sixteen-year-olds.

Izzie’s lips twisted to the side in an I don’t believe a word you just said kind of way.

But she knew my limits. Or rather, she knew how stubborn I was, and she knew I wasn’t sitting out the next relay just because of a little asthma, so she didn’t argue. Not that she had time to give me her usual lecture, because Coach Brennan signaled from behind the lane blocks to line up.

The one bad thing about summer league was that there was hardly any rest between races. My muscles still screamed from my last race, but I told them to shut it and, instead, took a long pull from my water bottle before joining the rest of my teammates at the blocks.

The whistle went off, and Izzie jumped into the pool and got into backstroke start position. She pulled herself up on the block, hunching her shoulders and tensing the muscles in her arms and legs, ready to spring into the water and race toward victory.

Isabelle Jennison was the only person I knew who was not only good at backstroke, but also loved it. Personally, it was my least favorite stroke. I didn’t like how I had to trust my ability to count the exact number of strokes to the end of the wall just to be able to time my flip-turn perfectly.

But Izzie was perfect in her timing. Perfect in her turn. Perfect in her faith that she wasn’t going to run into the lane ropes or bang her head into the wall.

At the sound of the buzzer, Izzie sprang backward, propelling herself down into the water then dolphin-kicking her way to the surface. Immediately, she drew back her arm into a long stroke, rotating her shoulder and gliding her hand through the water as her other arm broke the surface. Her arms were like a windmill, and she was already ten yards ahead of her opponents.

As Izzie did her flip-turn and headed back toward the block, Jamie readied herself for the dive, her hands following Izzie’s progress down the pool. At the exact moment when Izzie touched the wall, Jamie’s feet left the block, diving in a beautiful streamlined position and gliding into her breaststroke. I stepped up on the block to take her place and watched as her opponent gained on her.

The antsy feeling that we were going to lose crept up my already exhausted legs. Inching my feet to the edge of the block, I curled my toes around the painted wood as Jamie crossed the halfway mark too slow—achingly slow.

My stroke was the butterfly, and I was good at it. State record time both years, so far. Monica, the freestyle swimmer behind me, was similar to Jamie in that she had great form but not much speed. There was no way she’d be able to catch us up. We’d lose for sure. I hated relay races for that reason. Relying on someone else to win made me anxious and restless. In my individual races, I controlled my time and my placement. If I lost, it was on me.

And now it came down to me to pull us ahead. To win.

Gritting my teeth, I bent low, pulled back, and waited.

Usually I didn’t bend down until the final seconds out of sheer habit. When I was younger, I worried that if I bent down far enough, the back design of my swimsuit would reveal the four long scars stretching across my lower back. But after years of being self-conscious about the marks, I’d finally accepted them as a part of my identity.

As Jamie was coming in, I exploded off the block, hitting the water with a light splash and dolphin-kicking up into a strong butterfly. My arms came around in a wide arc, launching my upper body out of the water, and I gulped a breath before tightening my core and diving back in.

My stroke was fast, and my form was precise, pulling us ahead by an entire lap. Monica barely had to do any work to finish out the race, and by the time we helped her out of the pool, we were all high-fiving each other for our easy win.

After the last race, the swimmers had the opportunity to use the pool for a cool down, and I always took it. A few lazy laps helped calm my pulse and relax my muscles. On my final lap, I took off my goggles. The chlorine stung my eyes, but it was worth it in these last few seconds of practice to see the underwater world without the filtering of a lens. Forgoing the stroke entirely, I dolphin-kicked toward the bottom, submerging myself into its dark depths..

When the pool was mostly empty, I liked to play pretend. While many little girls would start swimming because of their love of mermaids, I believed in different magical water creatures. I could never put a name to them because they were without shape or form. Instead, they were merely clouds in the water—more of a presence or energy that filled me with calm and a sense of longing.

I never told anyone about them because I knew they lived inside my mind and not inside a rec center pool. If anything, they were something like an old memory—an unfamiliar concept. Sometimes they would be darker or lighter, varying shades of blue and aquamarine, sparkling from the filtered sunlight.

So I allowed myself to pretend, in these peaceful underwater moments, that I could see them, even though they were nothing more than the lingering remnants of a childhood imagination that I couldn’t much remember.

I tilted my head back, my face breaking through the placid surface with one last, strong kick.

Izzie stood over me, arms folded, a towel already wrapped around her waist. Coach said our relay was disqualified. We lost.

She didn’t even wait for me to ask why, but with a sinking feeling, I already knew.

Your false start. You left the block too early again.

…

Go ahead, say it, I said, closing the door to Izzie’s Honda CRV then stuffing my swim bag at my feet. I kept my towel around my shoulders, using it to squeeze the ends of my light-brown hair.

Izzie pushed up her reflective aviator sunglasses and checked her rearview mirror before shifting into reverse. It wasn’t until she had pulled out of the same parking spot she parked in every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday that she finally responded. I’m happy to give you the same lecture over and over again, Brye. But at some point, I just have to accept that I can’t change you.

Here we go, I muttered before taking a swig from my water bottle and then shoving it into the cup holder.

"Briony, you know I love you. You’re practically my soul sister, but you suck at being on a team. In any capacity. She took a moment to sigh dramatically. You didn’t need to start so soon. You could’ve pulled us ahead, and Monica could’ve wrapped up the race. She’s not that slow. You need to trust your teammates. This is just like when we tried to play doubles in tennis and you wouldn’t let me get in a single swing—you had to go for the ball every time."

I know, I know. I raised my hands in surrender. I was lucky swimming was a mostly solo sport, because Izzie was right. I was terrible at passing the ball to teammates or formulating any kind of strategy where I had to rely on others to do their part.

Group projects in school were the same. I preferred to do most of the work myself, not trusting my peers to do their share, sure they’d make us fail.

Dad would say it was because I was independent.

Mom wouldn’t say anything. Because she wasn’t here to say it.

You forgot your lotion, didn’t you? Do you want to use mine?

Izzie’s question pulled me out of my head. My skin was red and chapped, large red welts decorating my hands and arms.

The chlorine had been especially bad today.

Covering them with the towel on my lap, I shook my head. No, I’m fine. Yours is scented. It’ll make it worse. Besides, I can wait.

Doesn’t look like it, she muttered.

Iz, I’m fine. I nodded toward the stoplight. It’s green.

As Izzie made a left turn instead of a right, I raised an eyebrow at her. Where are we going?

You DQ’ed us. We’re going to get ice cream.

I cracked a smile. DQ doesn’t mean Dairy Queen.

Well, it should. Get me a cookie-dough Blizzard and your disqualification is forgiven.

I snorted, shooting my dad a quick text that I’d be getting home a little late. Deal.

…

Two Blizzards and a medium fry later, Izzie and I were still in the parking lot of Dairy Queen, discussing plans to see the latest summer superhero movie, when my phone started buzzing.

Dad’s face came on the screen and I couldn’t help a feeling of impending doom. Dad was a decent texter. He only called if it was bad news or something really important.

Preparing myself, I pressed the accept button. Hey, Dad.

Hey, sweetie, how was the meet?

I thought about my disqualification and the hefty amount of guilt that made my chest turn cold—though that could’ve been the ice cream. It was hot, and now we’re at Dairy Queen, I said, deflecting.

I see…well, are you and Izzie about done?

Um, pretty much, why?

Just come home and we’ll talk.

Closing my eyes, I leaned my head back in my seat, feeling my stomach drop. Dad, you know I hate it when you do this. Just rip off the Band-Aid and tell me the bad news.

He was quiet for a minute. Your grandmother broke her leg.

I blinked, not having expected that reply at all. Well, that…sucks.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Izzie raise a quizzical brow, but I ignored her and waited patiently for Dad to continue, because that couldn’t be the only reason he was calling.

My only living grandmother might as well be a complete stranger to me. She lived an hour and a half away in a valley deep in the Smoky Mountains, trapped in her own little reclusive world. Dad and I never tried to contact or visit her, even though it had once been our home as well. When I was ten, we’d left and moved to Knoxville and never looked back.

For a few reasons.

Yes, it does suck, Dad agreed, his sigh making a crackling noise through the receiver. One of Willa’s—your grandmother’s—friends called me. Mrs. Farrafield. They play bridge together. Anyway, Mrs. Farrafield said Willa needs a caretaker…

Slowly, my jaw loosened, my mouth falling open in realization.

Oh, no.

Dad went on. Normally, I’d take some time off work and you could stay with Izzie while I help her out, but I’ve got a major business trip and…

I dropped my face into my hand, reading the subtext in his words. There goes my summer.

Sweetheart…this is your only living grandparent.

Yeah, my grandparent who I don’t remember and haven’t talked to in six years.

I lifted my gaze, as if some brilliant excuse was written on the roof of Izzie’s CRV. How long would I have to go? I asked finally.

We can talk about it. But a month, likely.

I heard the or more he didn’t say.

Okay, Dad. I’ll be home soon.

After a quick I love you and bye, I hung up, and Izzie started rapid-firing questions.

What’s wrong? What happened? Where do you have to go?

My grandmother broke her leg. I have to go take care of her for a month. My voice had slipped into a robotic tone. Maybe more.

Izzie gasped and then took up the anger that I should be feeling. What? That’s like your whole summer! What about summer league?

I shrugged, trying to cover the fact that my hands were shaking by shoving them under my thighs. Giving up my summer was one thing, but going back to that valley was something else entirely. Just the idea of it made me jumpy.

Wait, your grandmother…so she’s your mom’s…

I nodded, my stare fixed blankly ahead. Yep.

Izzie didn’t say anything after that. She just started the car, probably regretting bringing up my mom—the woman who abandoned me and my dad after the fire that left me with scars and amnesia.

Chapter Two

The minute I walked through the door, I was hit by the smell of lemongrass chicken. It was my favorite dish, but a lot of work, so we didn’t have it often. Really, Dad only made it for two things: my birthday and when he felt bad about something.

Making me give up my summer to take care of a woman who hadn’t wanted to see me for six years definitely qualified as a lemongrass chicken occasion.

Before heading back to the kitchen, I raced upstairs to put my swim bag away and slather my skin with all-natural Vitamin E lotion. There were even more large red patches now. They were itchy and inflamed, as if my skin was furious with me for allowing so much chlorine into my system.

I’d always had sensitive skin—for as long as my shortened memory allowed—and over the years of trial and error with perplexed doctors, I’d found I could only use certain all-natural brands. My body reacted badly to anything else.

Dad didn’t like seeing the rashes. One time, after a particularly bad reaction in eighth grade, he had threatened to take me off swim team entirely. I’d panicked then. I’d finally made some friends through swimming, and the sport calmed me in a way that few things had back then.

And the flames from my past couldn’t get me underwater…

Since then, I had developed the habit of applying lotion as soon as possible afterward, only sometimes I accidentally forgot to pack it.

Heading downstairs, after my red welts calmed down to a subtle pink, I entered the kitchen and threw myself into a chair at the old wooden table.

Dad glanced over his shoulder as he stood at the stove. Hey, honey. I hope you didn’t spoil your appetite with ice cream and Oreos, he said with a chuckle.

I had, but that’s why leftovers were a thing. I liked to think I was practicing for college. Rather than answering, I focused on why I was getting this fantastic dinner in the first place. "Are you sure she’s going to want me there?" I asked, tracing the warped pattern in the wood with my index finger.

Dad turned back to the chicken sizzling in the lemongrass butter sauce and flipped it over in the pan, causing a cloud of steam to rise from the stovetop. She’s your grandmother, Brye.

So? That doesn’t mean anything. Think about Mom.

I knew my words were harsh before they’d even tumbled out of my mouth.

Dad winced, his arm jerking slightly, sloshing the sauce and causing another billow of steam. He turned down the burner and moved to the counter littered with vegetables that still needed to be sliced.

Wordlessly, I stood from the table and walked over to my dad, wrapping an arm around him and resting my head on his shoulder.

Sorry, Daddy. I’m just…

He patted my arm gently. I get it, Brye. I’m asking you to give up your summer, and summer league. If I were you, I’d be upset, too. But she’s old and needs our help. And whether or not she wants you there, she’s your grandmother. Don’t forget…her daughter left her, too.

After losing the first ten years of my life, I hoped to never forget anything ever again.

As we prepared dinner together, both of us unusually quiet, I tried, for the millionth time, to remember more about Firefly Valley. But just like the other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine times, I couldn’t.

Firefly Valley, where my grandmother lived—and where I was born—wasn’t only where my mother had left us. It was also where our first house had burned down…with me still in it.

The fire that left me with no memories, a future without a mother, and a cluster of scars on my lower back still haunted my nightmares. Flickering flames, searing heat, thick gray smoke, and a voice calling my name over and over again…

It was partly why I loved the water so much. Why I got into the pool regardless of the way the chlorine bit at my sensitive skin. Because it gave me comfort to know that fire couldn’t reach me there.

I never told Dad about the bad dreams because he’d get that look on his face, full of pain and regret.

It wasn’t his fault, though.

In fact, no one knew whose fault it was. The firefighters had said it was a freak accident, unable to even pinpoint the origin of the fire after a week-long investigation.

Going back to the place of so much grief and so many mysteries—like how the fire started, why my mother had left only a few months after the incident, why the scars on my back didn’t look like they were made by burns—had me riddled with anxiety.

And yet…I was also insatiably curious. My childhood was practically nonexistent because of the fire. Who had I been before my life got a hard reboot?

Of course, if I told my father any of that, he’d worry even more. I didn’t want that. He’d been through enough.

We both had.

So I would get through this summer with a sunny caretaker attitude reminiscent of Mary-Freaking-Poppins.

Hey, I’ve got an idea, Dad said, breaking our silence. Why don’t you see if Izzie wants to go with you?

I paused in cutting my chicken. Do you think Willa would be okay with that?

The way I see it, she’d be getting two caretakers for free. I’m sure it’ll be fine. And don’t call her Willa. That’s disrespectful, he said, then took a sip of his iced tea.

I didn’t know what else to call her. And I had my doubts everything would be fine, but if he was giving me the okay to bring Izzie, there was no way I would pass that up.

…

Um, hell yeah, I wanna go! Izzie shouted.

Wincing, I jerked my phone away from my ear then brought it back to my cheek with a relieved laugh. Iz, are you sure? Think of what you’d be giving up. That’s a whole summer without social media or a Starbucks within walking distance.

"If I stay here, I’ll be giving up a summer without you, and that is simply unacceptable."

Izzie’s tone was joking, but I knew that on the rare occasions when she said touchy-feely stuff like that, she meant it.

What about summer league?

It’s not like it’s the school team. They’ll be fine. Besides, summer league is for keeping in shape, and we already have rockin’ bods, so no worries there. Oh! We can go hiking in the mountains!

I turned over on the bed, kicking my legs up in the air, and laughed. I loved my friend’s optimism, and she also seemed to understand, without me even having to tell her, that this was a delicate family situation. It was a phrase I’d often heard her mother use.

Mrs. Jennison said it every time I’d wake up in the middle of the night during a slumber party and cry for my dad to come pick me up, when most people felt I was "too old for that type