Free Starfire Angels (Starfire Angels: Dark Angel Chronicles Book 1) by Melanie Nilles

Keepers. ["Let someone else try."]
    ["You would prefer to give someone else a
chance?"]
    ["Yes."]
    ["You're next in line and completed your
training. It's your turn to be judged."]
    Padina's eyes glossed with tears. ["I don't
want to. I know I'm not worthy."]
    ["Unless you've hidden something from us, I
see no reason to consider you unworthy. Is there something you
haven't told me?"]
    ["No, Keeper Saffir."]
    ["Then touch the Starfire for judgment."]
The gentle but firm command bordered on a tone of demand, but
Saffir made no move to reprimand her charge.
    Padina reached out to the crystal and
hesitated. After a few seconds, she closed her eyes and touched
it. [You do well to fear us,] voices in unison said, or
implied with feelings that translated to words. [But we intend
no harm. We wish to understand, and in exchange will share
ourselves, so understanding may happen.]
    Padina lifted the crystal in her hand.
Behind her, all others knelt.
    ["Congratulations, Crystal Keeper Shartrael
Padina. I had no doubts."]
     
    Raea opened her eyes as the marks on hers
and Elis's hands faded. Why did the visions always come of her
mother and one of the two men in her life? What did they want her
to understand?
    The second vision needed no interpretation.
Her mother never wanted to be a Crystal Keeper, but the Starfire
wanted her.
    Elis squeezed her hand and let go.
    "What happened?" Raea asked.
    "They showed you what you needed to
know."
    "Did you see it?"
    His smile answered her question.
    "Did you see the other times?"
    "No."
    "Why this time?" She looked at her
hands.
    "Through the Starburst marks, the energy can
flow, either out as pure energy, or between Keepers."
    Okay, put that way it made sense. They acted as
conduits for the Starfire's energy. Something else occurred to her.
"So, how did you speak to them yesterday if your gloves cover your
marks?"
    Elis held out his palm and traced the
tapering, jagged lines of aquamarine to the last knuckles before
his fingertips on the index and middle fingers of each hand. "The
gloves don't cover all of it."
    "But you weren't touching my hands."
    He shrugged. "The energy can still pass
through. I couldn't hear them but they must have recognized me. To
be honest, I wasn't sure it would work."
    They recognized him? That must have been why
whenever he touched her, she had visions. Why? Why him? What
were these beings trying to tell her?
    "Continue working with the resonance. Find
it and let it go. Learn to turn it on and off." The instant he said
it, his marks glowed. They faded to normal a couple seconds later.
He made it look easy. "It'll become second nature soon enough. The
Starfire wants you to succeed. It needs your protection, Raea. It's
all but helpless without us."
    "Could've fooled me."
    His smile infected her. "If not for the
connection to you, the Starfire would be a decorative crystal." He
sat up on the bed close to her, but not too close, a thoughtful
expression on his face.
    ["Our ancestors thought it was just a
lifeless rock when it first appeared over six thousand years ago.
They discovered it had enormous power potential, and that the
energy was unlike anything else. A scientist named Heffin made the
connection to another dimension. From their work, the idea for
Heffin's Gate was borne. It was a noble idea, generating what
humans would call 'wormholes'—holes through the Starfire's home
dimension that allow instant travel between two points in our own
universe.]
    ["Unfortunately, that much power tends to
attract greed. Wars were fought to control it. After a thousand
years, Heffin's Gate was to be turned on an opposing city, to send
it into the other universe. The Starfire shattered. It broke into
the four shards we have today. But, in the process, it sent out a
wave of energy that touched all those within Heffin's Gate and
blended its energy with their genes. That's how the Keepers came to
be. The Starfire refused to be a tool of destruction. It made the
Keepers as a way to