BOOK SUMMARY
Scarlet is a sixteen-year-old girl with no friends living with her single father. The one thing her life has none of is excitement. That’s until she meets a naked stranger beside the lake. Then everything changes.
Scarlet discovers that she is not just an ordinary sixteen year old. In fact, the fate of the world rests on her shoulders, and it seems like she’s one of the bad guys. A weapon.
Pretty soon, Scarlet is going to miss her old, boring life, but will have to accept that it is gone forever. At least she’s made a friend –a demon named Sorrow. He’s one of the bad guys too. Only evil can save her now.
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“You struggle with your demons and you conquer them”
Kinky Friedman
“Teenagers. Everything is so apocalyptic.”
Kami Garcia
“The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be Brave. Live.”
Buffy Summers
~ Chapter One ~
Shards of broken glass glinted in the mud as moonlight cast its silvery web across the lake. The smashed beer bottle was just another of mankind’s dirty footprints trodden carelessly into nature’s delicate face. How could a person spoil such beautiful scenery so brazenly? It raised many philosophical questions—like, why did people not understand that their homes didn’t end at their doorsteps? The entire world was their home, to share and respect, but they were wrecking it one broken beer bottle at a time.
In his 100% white cotton shirt with nylon buttons, Ainsley was as much to blame as anyone for leeching the earth, but at least he tried to be mindful of the environment. His litter only went in a bin, he recycled enthusiastically, and he never killed a spider if he could help it. His latest car was a hybrid, for Heaven’s sake. While he might not be perfect, at least he was doing something.
Ainsley considered picking up the jagged beer bottle and disposing of the shards before they sliced open a child, or some magpie attracted by the glinting light, but he decided the risk of cutting himself was too high. It was the middle of the night, and the lake was almost pitch-black. The last thing he needed was an infection from a grubby piece of glass after just receiving the all clear from the hospital.
At just forty nine years of age, Stage 2 pancreatic cancer had come as a shock—a meteor of dread out of nowhere. He’d always been so healthy and spry—barely even a cold in as long as he could remember—so The Big C had been the last thing he expected. What on earth had he done to cause it? As a trained chef, hygiene had always been a priority to Ainsley. A non-smoker, and a rare drinker, he was just one of the unlucky. He had done nothing to earn his death, but the cancer didn’t care. The terminal-disease-winning lottery ticket had his name on it.
At first he had assumed he was a goner, and the look on his GP’s face had reinforced that gut feeling. Cancer was the end, he thought. A free pass straight to Heaven—or wherever else a person was destined to go. His life had ceased being numbered in years, and was now ticking down in days—perhaps in hours. The doctors had told him to put his affairs in order—just in case. Yeah, whatever, just in case. ‘Get your will sorted,’ was what they really meant. Time to choose the casket you want to spend eternity in. The more you do now, the less your ex-wife and daughter will have to be bothered with. The thought of leaving his teenage monster, Claire, had been the thing to finally break him. They might barely speak at the moment, but he loved her. For the first ten years, he and her cantankerous mother had raised their daughter together. It had been nice, and his little girl had been sweet. Perhaps she would be again, once the teenage hormones wore off, but he wouldn’t be around to see it. He would be rotting in a deep hole.
But his diagnoses hadn’t turned out to be a death sentence after all. For Ainsley, cancer had been six months of demoralising chemotherapy, followed by keyhole surgery that he was able to walk off in a day. In hindsight, he realised that the oncologists and surgeons had never moved beyond mild concern. For them it had all been entirely routine.
He was recuperating already, and could feel his body regaining strength every day. His biggest problem was insomnia—which was why he was wandering around the town’s lake at two in the morning—a lonely summer night with nothing but nature to comfort him. It wasn’t half bad. The solitude of deep night mixed with the gentle swaying of the trees around the water’s edge was about as serene as life could get. It was easier to appreciate such simple things now that he had escaped the slithery clutches of death, but it had also become much harder to tolerate people ruining it—like when they left behind broken beer bottles.
The bottle continued to offend him enough that he was forced to hurry along the path. The grassy embankment along the water’s edge was peppered with lumpy shadows—geese and ducks sleeping with their pointed heads tucked beneath their wings. Not wanting to disturb their feathery slumber, Ainsley gave them a wide berth.
On the lake, he saw the ghostly visages of a pair of swans. They seemed to be patrolling the waters, like sentries on a battlefield. There was also other movement. The water seemed to be bubbling. Boiling.
Ainsley scratched his head. “What the Hell?”
The birds on the embankment woke up and began to make noises, wings flapping.
The water foamed.
Ainsley couldn’t help himself. He hurried down to the edge of the water to try and get a closer look. The frothing continued, sending more birds into panic. Something emerged from the water below. The glistening shape broke the surface and started heading towards the bank.
Ainsley felt a tug in his guts, reminding him of the cancer that had recently dwelt there. What was happening? What was he witnessing?
The mysterious shape reached the embankment and flopped onto the mud. Under the shimmering moonlight it resembled a beached seal, but once it spread its arms and legs out, Ainsley realised that it was a man.
A hallucination, surely. It couldn’t be real.
Was Ainsley’s cancer truly gone? Maybe it had spread to his brain.
The soaking wet man was naked, but visibly alive. He clawed at the soft mud like a newborn coming into the world, but his pristine golden hair was unsoiled. His muscles bulged, even in the shadows. A Michelangelo sculpture come to life.
Ainsley dared approach, and knelt down next to the man. Reaching out a hand, he hesitated when the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood erect like soldiers on parade. But this stranger needed help, so he ignored the pang of anxiety, and reached his hands out to grab the naked man’s shoulders.
It was like grasping hot coals.
Ainsley yanked his hands back and yelled. The remaining geese on the bank took flight across the water. The stranger climbed to his knees, continuing to rise until he was at full height. The man was a juggernaut, seven feet tall and sculpted from white marble. His eyes were so blue that they caught the moonlight and shone like torches.
“Are you okay?” Ainsley managed to ask, looking at his burned hands but seeing they were now fine. Had he imagined it? “Your skin… I could have sworn…”
The stranger looked around for a few moments, but then tilted his head and seemed confused. “Who are you?”
“My name is Ainsley. What were you doing in the lake in the middle of the night?”
The stranger looked back at the water behind him and allowed his thin lips to slide into a scowl. He brought his hands up in front of his face and rotated them slowly like they were foreign objects�
��slimy mud covered them. “Earth,” the naked giant said with a sneer. “The stink of it offends me.”
“It’s just the lake,” said Ainsley, feeling a little offended by the comment for some reason. “Can be a bit pongy in the summer, I’ll admit. The smell of nature can—”
“Cease your noise, human. My ears tire of hearing it.”
Ainsley didn’t know what this man’s situation was, but it became quite clear that he was unhinged, and possibly even dangerous—unfriendly, at the very least. The fact that he was naked seemed to elicit no explanation from the man, and that in itself was abnormal behaviour. It was the middle of the night and no one was around for half a mile. Ainsley suddenly became acutely aware of that fact. “I, erm, should be going, sir. I hope that you’re okay.”
He was about to walk away when the hulking, naked stranger grabbed his arm. It began to burn immediately—even through his shirt cuff. What scared Ainsley most was that the man’s skin began to shimmer, eventually changing colour and shape until it resembled the exact clothing that he, himself, wore. The being had altered his appearance to match Ainsley’s!
“Where is The Spark?”
“I-I-I don’t know what you mean. Please, let go of me.”
The stranger tightened his grip. “The Spark, where is it? I hear its call. It is near. Where?!” He bellowed the last word and squeezed harder, snapping bone.
Ainsley screamed in agony. “I-I swear, I don’t know what you’re… what you’re talking about.”
The stranger bared his sharp, square teeth—everything about the man was square. “Then you are without use to me.”
Ainsley thought the stranger was about to let him go, but instead he found himself engulfed in flames, enduring the worst pain he could imagine. He ran down the bank, arms flailing and mouth wide and screaming, but by the time he leapt into the water, his broken arm could do nothing but flap helplessly. His leg caught in the reeds, which tightened like grasping hands and held him under the water. In agony, Ainsley inhaled lungfuls of muddy water.
It would have been better if the cancer had taken him.
~ Chapter Two ~
Scarlet Thomas picked up the dusty tome and turned it over in her hands. The title read: The Prophecies of Noy. She said, “You really do sell some strange junk in here, Mr Chester.”
The owner of the Little Treasures Emporium, Mr Miles Chester, gave her a dry chortle, which was the closest he ever got to mirth. “I run a trinket shop,” he said, “not a newsagent—the more peculiar the junk, the better. Please be careful with that book, Scarlet. It was written before your great great grandparents were born.”
Scarlet placed the book down carefully. “Then I’m pretty sure it’s out of date.”
Mr Chester picked it up from where she’d placed it on the table and ran a hand over the cover affectionately. “The older something is, the more you should respect it. Many of the prophecies in this book are still yet to happen, so it is very much not out of date.”
“Prophecies? You mean, like, fortune telling and stuff? Like that Nastradittus guy?”
Behind his thick spectacles that sat on his long, pointed nose, Chester rolled his eyes and looked like a miserable, old grump. “Nostradamus—and yes, this book is very similar to that man’s work, except that these prophecies were foretold by a 16th Century Florentine monk named Vincent Noy. His predictions have been almost unfailingly correct.”
Scarlet scoffed. “I don’t believe in that stuff. Nobody can predict the future. Most people can’t even guess what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he placed the book down on the counter, “but this item is priceless all the same, and it is for my personal collection, so I’d like you to place it inside one of the book bags, please.”
“Sure thing, Mr Chester,” she said. The bags were on the shop floor, so she left the back office area and went out to where her gangly coworker, Indy, was standing around aimlessly and chewing his nails.
Indy was a year older than her—had already left school—but maturity-wise he was still twelve. He worked at Little Treasures full time, while she only worked a couple evenings a week (a little longer, now that school was out for the summer). He was an odd looking kid, with skin too dark to be white, but neither was he black. His black hair ran straight and long, while his nose was wide and round, like a clown’s honker. None of his features seemed to match up, but he still managed to be quite handsome, all things considered. His personality, however, was a mixture of juvenile and childish, with a hearty dose of immature. He even had an awful tattoo of a red and white umbrella on the back of his hand from some videogame about zombies. She gave him less than a year before he regretted having it done.
“Hey, Scar. You gunna take the till so I can go drain my Singapore noodle?” He did a little dance on the spot and clutched himself.
“I’ll come cover you in a minute, Indy,” she said. “Mr Chester wants me to do a job for him first. Can I grab one of the book bags, please?”
Indy grabbed one from the pile beneath the till counter and held it out to her. “Don’t be long, or I’ll pee down my leg. You’ll have to mop it up.”
“You can mop up your own pee, Indy. I’ll be five minutes.”
She returned to the back area and saw that Mr Chester was now sitting in his office with a steaming mug of tea in his hand. The man would be unrecognisable without spectacles on his face and a warm brew between his fingers. He was as stuffy as a blocked nose, but Scarlet’s boss was always polite and never gave her a job she didn’t like—he cleaned the toilet himself and never let anyone touch the sink. Indy said he had OCD, and could only relax about things being clean if he had washed them himself. Suited her just fine.
The book of prophecies was still on the desk, so she flicked the plastic bag open in her hands and went to retrieve it. When she thought about people believing in such silly things, she couldn’t help but chuckle. Prophecy. It was like star signs—so vague they were always right. Today you will be met with challenges. Give life your all, and you shall succeed. Scarlet rolled her eyes. There was a sucker born every minute.
She opened up the book’s cover and leafed towards the back. The pages were stiff and yellow, many contained images nestled amongst the text. Curiosity had made her open it, but she found herself pausing to examine a faded pencil-sketching of two tall oblongs with what looked like flames at their bases. Near the top of the two oblongs was a pair of grey sparrows. Immediately, her mind went to 9/11. It was an event that had always haunted her—it was the day she had been born. Having a birthday on such a tragic day meant that there were never any parties or celebrations for her. Nobody wanted to have fun on September 11th. Her father had tried in the early days, but as a single parent, planning birthday parties was always secondary to trying to get his head around menstruation and training bras. They had spent the majority of their relationship being awkward around each other. By being both mother and father, he had lost out on being a dad.
A sick feeling struck Scarlet suddenly. She almost keeled over and puked right where she was standing, but managed to take a few deep breaths and send the nausea packing before it got to her. Something about the old drawing had made her feel unusual. The words surrounding it were not in English, so she had no idea what the drawing was actually supposed to be, but she couldn’t dispel the image in her mind of that fateful day. Those planes floating in the air… Those buildings falling down like kid’s building blocks…
Scarlet couldn’t look at the picture anymore. She flipped ahead another couple pages until she found a different illustration. This one was even stranger than the last. What the previous drawing had lacked in details, this one made up for, in abundance. The illustration was of a young girl, and even in black and white, her hair shimmered, and her freckles leapt off the page. At the bottom of the sketch was a crudely inked carpet of stars that made it look like the girl was standing on a cloud of magic. It reminded Scarlet of her own reflection, and she
almost, for a moment, imagined she was looking at a picture of herself. She shook the silly thought away before it had time to take root.
“I thought I told you to wrap that book up? I don’t want it to get dusty.”
Scarlet flinched, closed the book with a slam, and turned to face her boss. “Sorry, Mr Chester, I was curious. Where did you get it from?”
“A collector. It’s worth a pretty penny, so please get it covered and placed on my private shelf.”
“Right away.” She slipped the book inside the plastic bag and pulled the zip-lock closed. Then she crossed the room and slid it onto the shelf beside an old copy of the Koran Mr Chester had purchased last week from the town’s mosque. Mr Chester was mad about old books, but she saw nothing but dust and hard to read words. Better to collect something useful, she thought, like records. At least you could play those—if you had a record player.
Mr Chester had returned to his office now, but he seemed to be keeping an eye on her. She’d only been working at the shop for a few months, but she enjoyed it and felt like she was doing a good job. Her dad wanted her busy during the evenings and holidays, and a job was what he had decided would be the right distraction. Life experience, he had informed her, would do her a lot of good. She didn’t have any friends after having moved to the town of Redlake just six months ago, so she had to admit that it was nice having something to do when she wasn’t at school. Also, the money was pretty great. It might be minimum wage, but it was the first money that had ever been entirely hers. Soon as she was seventeen, she was going to splash it all on driving lessons. Long as Mr Chester didn’t fire her first, of course—he was still eyeballing her from the office.
What did I do? I thought he liked me? Now he’s looking at me like I spanked his dog.
Mr Chester had been a substitute History teacher at Scarlet’s new school. One day, while he had been covering for Mrs Flowers, he’d spoken about a new shop in town he would soon be opening. Having been looking for a part-time job at that exact moment, Scarlet had begged for a position—and got one! She’d only been able to do so many hours at first, but now that school was broken up, she could work longer. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on all that money.
Wings of Sorrow (A horror fantasy novel) Page 1
