by Liz Delton
THE STARLESS GIRL
Book 1 of Realm of Camellia
By Liz Delton
The Starless Girl
Copyright © 2019 by Liz Delton.
All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: May 2019
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
www.limitlesspublishing.com
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-64034-581-2
ISBN-10: 1-64034-581-7
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
For Julian.
Table of 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 One
The Fox
Kira Savage was not afraid of the dark.
She had never been afraid of it, not since she could remember. But tonight, it was not the darkness that made her spine shiver as she followed Ms. Elm up the path to the house on the hill.
The wind howled out of the night, pelting them with rain. The rain didn’t bother her, either; it washed away the tears that had long since dried on her cheeks.
Ms. Elm, it seemed, was quite afraid of the dark, and Kira had a hard time keeping pace with the narrow woman. She hefted her suitcase again and peered up at the large house that was to be her new home. It was nothing like the brownstone walk-up she and her mother had lived in until today.
A small porch lamp spilled warm yellow light onto the rain-drenched hillside. Ms. Elm had raced for the light since they left the car parked down on the road. The old house had no driveway, only a worn dirt path leading up to it. Rivulets of rain carved through the path and around the rocks unearthed by the deluge.
No, Kira wasn’t afraid of the dark. It was what she now saw in the darkness that terrified her.
It had started that very afternoon: first, her mother hadn’t returned from work, and now shadows were no longer shadows, and the night was no longer night.
She could see light in the darkness.
Kira paid almost no attention to Ms. Elm’s commentary and clucking as they hurried into the warm house. Her new caretaker whisked her into a bath, dry clothes, and her new room—her new life.
Later, she found herself buried deep in the blankets of her new bed, her eyes crammed shut. She knew it was not normal to see in the dark, to see light instead of darkness. Everything that should have been safely encased in black shadows was now dimly glowing, as if filled with faint starlight.
She didn’t know how she would ever sleep again.
The old house groaned from somewhere in its depths, and the wind picked up outside, whistling sinisterly past the shutters. She flung back her blankets and sat up but did not open her eyes. She took a deep breath. And another. But still she did not open them.
There was a loud clang from a pipe under her floorboards. Her eyes snapped open. Having safely settled into the blackness behind her eyelids, she was jerked back into the nightmare light. The small room Ms. Elm had afforded her glowed with muted starlight.
She squeezed her eyes shut again. What was wrong with her? She had never heard of people seeing light in the dark like this before. Slowly she peeked one eye open. The wooden bed frame still glowed. She rubbed her eyes, wishing it would go away.
Was she somehow cursed? She couldn’t help but think this was horribly connected to what happened to her mother. The two events seemed linked in her mind, no matter how much she told herself they weren’t. She squeezed both eyes shut once more, tensing every muscle in her body, willing it to go away. When she could no longer hold it, her breath exploded out of her, and her eyes opened again.
The shadows under the windowsill sparkled with starlight. She flung the covers back and jammed her slippers on—she had no trouble finding them with her new sight. She padded softly over to the window, not wanting to wake poor Ms. Elm in the bedroom below. It wasn’t her new caretaker’s fault she was suddenly cursed.
It was cold by the window. She pressed her forehead against the glass pane and stared out into the night.
What had happened to her? This morning she had been perfectly normal. This morning, her mother had been alive.
Would she have seen the glittering shadows when the sun was out? She would find out tomorrow, she supposed. She drew in a deep breath and let it out, fogging up the glass, and blurring the starry landscape outside her window. The rain had stopped, but Kira could see the grass on the hillside blowing in the stiff wind. Perhaps tomorrow in the daylight, it would go away, and everything would be normal again. As normal as it could be.
With daylight to look forward to, she started to feel slightly better. That would at least answer one of today’s horrible questions. The question of her mother, however…that could not be solved with the coming morning. Could never be solved. Everything blurred as her eyes filled with tears.
She was about to turn back to her bed when she saw something glowing on the horizon. It was getting brighter. She rubbed away the moisture on the window and brought her face right up to the glass, peering closer at the source of the light.
Was it a normal glow? Or was it this new strange light? She snorted at the absurdity of her own thoughts and had to clear her breath from the window again. She stared at the glow, desperately hoping the source of the light was something normal—someone with a flashlight coming up to the house maybe, or something equally less frightening.
The bright light crested the hill, and Kira’s stomach plummeted. The shining head of an animal appeared over the ridge. A glowing animal made entirely of light. Kira quickly wiped more condensation from the glass as she tried to decide if it was a cat or some kind of dog that paced sedately toward the house, shining as if it had swallowed an entire star. The rest of the hillside glowed with the muted light of Kira’s strange new ability, which was nothing compared to this animal steadily advancing upon the house. Somehow, she felt like it was coming for her.
As soon as she had the thought, the thing stopped and stared. At least, Kira thought it stared. The thing had no eyes, only dark recesses where eyes should be. It looked straight toward her window. Too late to hide, she froze on the spot.
It looked like some sort of cat. She and the animal stared at each other for a long time. Was it a ghost? Kira wasn’t sure if she believed in ghosts, let alone ghost animals. Finally, it twitched its big bushy tail and turned around.
Fox.
The word drifted into Ki
ra’s frozen mind. Still rooted to the spot as if under a spell, Kira watched the shining fox walk back the way it had come.
When the fox’s glow had finally faded, and the hill was no more than wet grass faintly illuminated with starlight, Kira stepped away from the window.
She had never been more excited for morning.
Chapter Two
The Door
When Kira woke the next day, she immediately recognized the feeling of waking in a new place. As her brain slowly registered which new place she was in, and why, she jerked painfully into consciousness. Her eyelids flew open to reveal the tasteful but sparsely decorated attic bedroom in Ms. Elm’s house. She was no stranger to new places; in her thirteen years of life, she had lived in just as many places, if not more.
All the events of yesterday began to pour into her waking mind, flooding her with the memories of leaving her mother’s house as Ms. Elm hastily packed a case. The starlight that seemed a curse to her eyes. The glowing fox on the ridge. The latter two now seemed like they could very well have been a dream.
She sat frozen in her new bed, sleepily trying to make sense of the day before. The strange light she had thought she’d seen was gone—if it had ever been more than a dream. The bright sunlight streaming in from her window made it easy to brush the idea away.
It was the other event of the day before that she couldn’t dismiss so easily, the reason she had been dragged to Ms. Elm’s house all the way up in North Noxbury, Massachusetts.
At first, no one would tell her what had happened. All she knew was that her mother hadn’t arrived home from work at her usual time, and several long hours later, a tearful Ms. Elm had arrived at the door with a police officer.
The officer smelled like coffee and towered over Kira in the entranceway to their apartment. She had to tilt her head up to listen to him. Ms. Elm moved closer to Kira, but she drew against the wall, waiting to hear what the officer said.
Dead, he told her. Her mother was dead.
Kira had no other family, so the police had contacted Ms. Elm. She was a family friend of her mother’s they had met years ago, during one of their many brief stays across the country. Apparently, her mother had listed Ms. Elm as Kira’s only remaining family, and Kira didn’t contradict the officer when he said so. It wasn’t as if she had anyone else to turn to.
The police officer finally offered Kira meagre details as they all stood in the doorway. Her mother had been found dead in Central Park by someone going for a jog. They didn’t know the cause yet. Kira remembered sinking to the floor at some point and did not catch the rest of the conversation.
Instead, her eyes darted around the apartment. Her gaze landed on the dirty teacup her mother had left on the coffee table this morning, the book right next to it, a folded receipt in place of a bookmark. The tiny details that were all that was left of her mother.
Ms. Elm knocked on her bedroom door only moments after Kira had finished changing out of her pajamas. She was soon whisked down to breakfast and hurried out of the house and into the car. As they drove away from the house, Kira wondered if Ms. Elm intended on keeping her too busy to think.
They drove down long roads that hugged around and down the hills of North Noxbury. Just before they entered the center of town, they passed a thick forest, which Kira couldn’t help but stare into. Would she see starlight in its shadows? They flew past it, and she turned her head away from the window with a sigh.
“I thought we’d visit the school,” Ms. Elm finally said as they pulled up to the one-story brick building. Kira shrugged. She had known the way things would go once she awoke in the big house on the hill. She and her mother had moved so many times she had lost track, and she knew the routine well. The school was always first.
Kira couldn’t remember staying in one place longer than a year. She was always starting over. Her mother would get restless if they stayed put too long. Sometimes Kira wondered if her mother was looking for something.
She followed Ms. Elm’s swinging handbag into the building, less concerned about starting at a new school and more worried about what had happened yesterday. What had happened to her mother? And had the light and the fox just been a dream?
If only her mother’s death had been a dream, even if it would be a horrible one. And to make things worse, she seemed to be cursed. What would happen when the sun went down?
She was spared further dark thoughts by the secretary in the school office asking her and Ms. Elm a series of questions. Kira was more than prepared to answer, and the rhythm of the interview was almost soothing, she had done it so many times. About halfway through, however, Ms. Elm put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and she jerked away, suddenly realizing that it wasn’t her own mother sitting beside her.
As they were given a quick tour of the school, Kira found herself staring into shadows beneath bookcases, behind doors, and inside desks, searching for the mysterious light. All shadows seemed to be in perfect working order, however, so she began to think it really had been a dream.
After the school office had given them all the paperwork they needed, Ms. Elm suggested Kira wait at the library across the street while she went over to schedule an appointment at the doctor’s office.
“I won’t be long,” Ms. Elm assured her after steering her through the double doors of the library.
“I’ll be fine,” Kira replied with a small smile. She was used to being by herself, and this entire town was about as big as the street she had lived on in New York until yesterday.
She was drawn to the bookshelves and was soon examining the spines and covers, all thoughts of Ms. Elm and the school set aside. She forgot, for a few blessed moments while gazing at the books, about the terrible thing that had happened to her mother.
The library was quiet, like most libraries were. She slid one book after another off the shelf to study them. When a particularly interesting one caught her eye, she tucked it under her arm and headed for the front desk. The desk was right next to the glass doors, and as Kira reached the desk to put her book on the counter, a bright glare caught her attention.
She jerked her head to look out the doors but only saw a car pulling up to the front of the library. Her heart racing for no apparent reason, she jumped when the librarian asked, “Do you have a library card, my dear?”
“N-No,” Kira said. “I’d like to get one, though,” she added, more confidently.
Kira put a hand on the book, almost to reassure herself. She had thought the glare outside was more mysterious light, like the fox from last night. She sighed in relief when she finished and slipped the book from the counter, thanking the librarian.
She decided to go outside and wait for Ms. Elm. Book clutched to her chest and her new library card in her pocket, she crossed the parking lot to a small park. A few wooden benches sat on the edge of the trees. She peered into the woods as she sat down. She held her breath as she examined every shadow she could see, all of which seemed perfectly shadow-like. She puffed out her cheeks and let the breath go, unsure if she had been wanting to see the light or not.
Finally, she opened up her new book. Before she could read more than a sentence, her head snapped up at something she’d seen on the edge of her vision.
It wasn’t glowing, not like the fox. It was doing the opposite of glowing: It was made completely of darkness, like dense black smoke.
Not twenty feet in front of her stood an immense creature, made entirely of shadows. It was larger than the largest dog she’d ever seen, yet that was what it most resembled. It had no tail, and its clawed feet left enormous footprints in the soft ground. Its eyes were dark pits. Its jaw hung open, revealing a row of great shadowy teeth. The lips were curled back in an unmistakable growl.
It stalked toward her. She closed her eyes for half a second, begging for the strange thing to disappear. “Go away,” she muttered. “Don’t be real,” she pleaded and opened her eyes.
It had gotten closer. Kira scrabbled off the bench and dashed b
ehind it. She backed away, hugging the book tightly to her chest to keep her hands from shaking.
She was definitely starting to think she was cursed.
The beast made a sudden movement toward her, and she flung the book at it. The book sailed through the air, its pages parting and flapping in flight. Instead of hitting the creature squarely on the face as she had intended, it fell to the ground, sinking through the creature as if it really were made of smoke.
Kira stumbled back toward the trees, thinking fast. If the creature wasn’t solid, then it couldn’t hurt her. But what was it doing here, and what did it want with her?
It opened its mouth in a roar, and suddenly the wooden bench was reduced to pieces by one of its enormous swinging paws.
So it was solid—if it wanted to be. She turned and ran into the woods.
Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the creature follow, bounding around the trees. Kira realized it must still be solid to need to dodge trees, so she sped up, not wanting to end up like the wooden bench.
She hated North Noxbury. It hadn’t been until she’d arrived here that she’d begun to see light in the darkness—and now, dark-creatures in the light. Perhaps she wasn’t cursed; perhaps it was only this place. But why was the creature coming after her?
Thorns and sharp twigs snagged at her hair and clothes and raked her bare arms. Why was this creature after her? At least she wasn’t imagining things; nothing imaginary could have smashed that bench to bits. She tried to think over the sound of her panting breath and thudding footsteps.
It wasn’t until she was feet from it that she saw the door.
A tall, beautiful, wood-paneled door stood in the middle of the woods, completely surrounded by vines covered in purple flowers. It stood without support from anything Kira could see, besides the vines. Elaborate carvings decorated the frame, and the doorknob was surrounded by magnificent bronze work.
