The story continues in Wolves at the Door, available now,
https://bit.ly/wolvesdoor
Author’s Note
The story of Jacqueline Talbot has been stewing around in my brain for a very long time. The first inklings of a plot came about almost twenty years ago, when I met a man named Joe and his adorable little daughter. Joe was the nicest person you could meet, but there with a sadness to him, and a sense of mystery. Every person who knew him was told a different tale about his past, kind of like a mellow, likeable version of Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight. That mystery got my wheels spinning.
Soon after he disappeared from my life, never to be heard from again, my imagination took over. First came his tragic backstory, which was partially laid out in my novel Silas. Then came the idea that his daughter, whom I renamed Jacqueline, would be at the epicenter of the world I would soon create.
Sure, it took nearly two decades to get there, but better late than never, right?
The true inspiration for this book, however, is my daughter, Legacy. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been in high school, after all, and the world is a much different place now than it was back then. It was Lily who guided me through the intricacies of teenage interactions and friendships, youthful interests, high school social hierarchies, and modern speech patterns and slang. As writers, we use whatever tools we can to make our stories believable. The fact that she was the same age as these main characters when I first started writing wasn’t an accident.
In the end, this series is my love letter to her. My way of taking all my fears for her safety in a dangerous world and placing those fears onto characters who wouldn’t just persevere, but overcome. It is a story of female empowerment, of love and loss and strength in the face of great odds. As with shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in my opinion the greatest television series ever created), it is the trials and tribulations of youth presented as the fantastic. It’s about mistakes and determination and the way that the world seems to revolve around you when you’re a teenager. Only in Jacqueline’s case, that just might be the truth.
So thank you, readers, for taking this journey with me. I hope I gave you an enjoyable ride. I ask that you leave a review at whatever outlet you purchased this book from, as reviews are part of the lifeblood that fuel an author’s success. And if you feel the need to contact me, do so at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing your words, as I truly appreciate any and all feedback.
With that, I bid you adieu, my readers. Be sure to check out the next book in this series, Wolves at the Door, which is now available at all major retailers.
WOLVES AT THE DOOR
Link: https://bit.ly/wolvesdoor
Turn the page to read a sneak peek of that very book.
WOLVES AT THE DOOR
The Infinity Trials Book 2
Preview:
Chapter 1
Jacqueline Talbot laughed even though her shredded winter coat hung off her in strips; even though the entirety of her was awash in pain; even though the blood trickling from the cuts in her palm formed a series of small pools on the floor. Her laughter gradually died down, the buzzing energy that had given her strength while she battled the beast slowly ebbing away. Suddenly, she felt tired.
Aunt Mitzy sat in her recliner, gently massaging the bruises on her face. The beautiful woman, the last family Jacqueline had, winced as she rose to her feet. She whistled, and Mr. Mancuso, their neighbor, stood up from across the room. He considered her with curious eyes.
“Fran, please take that thing outside,” Mitzy said, pointing at the dead demon splayed atop the ruins of her entertainment center. “And make sure Edwin burns it properly. If not, it might come back.”
“Of course,” the older man replied.
“Oh, and try to get everyone else on the same page.”
“I will.”
Mr. Mancuso went over to the dead monster, lifted its legs, and dragged it out the door.
Mitzy beckoned Jacqueline closer, grabbed her hand. “Now let’s see that,” she said, turning the hand over, examining the cuts Jacqueline had gotten from the shard of glass she’d jammed into the demon’s side. “Not too bad. Not too deep. Sorry your birthday ended this way.” She gave a forced smile. “At least you can learn to drive now.”
Jacqueline stared at her aunt. “Mitzy, what’s going on?”
“Where to start?”
“How about with the vampire guy,” Jacqueline said.
“Vampire guy?”
“Edwin.”
Mitzy used her scarf to wrap Jacqueline’s bleeding hand. “Oh, Edwin. Not really a vampire, but that definition works as well as any. He’s my…bodyguard, I guess you could say.”
“He’s not very good at his job.” She pointed at her aunt’s bruised face.
“Well, he can’t be everywhere at once.”
“He’s a monster.”
“Not all monsters are bad, sweetie.”
Jacqueline scanned the trail of blackened blood leading out the door. “What about that thing? The other monster? Obviously bad, right?”
“Tripura? Oh yeah he was.”
“You called him a prophet.”
“Yup,” Mitzy said. “An ancient thing that follows a long-dead god. Not entirely surprising he turned up, since he did the last time things started going wonky too. But that was fifteen-hundred years ago, so I was kind of expecting someone else.”
Jacqueline backed up a step and tugged on her hair. “What’re you talking about? How do you know this stuff? Who are you?”
“I’m your aunt, sweetie. That hasn’t changed.” Mitzy leaned in close and whispered, “But this isn’t the time or place. Look over there. Someone needs help. I’ll call an ambulance.”
Jacqueline turned. She’d forgotten about her friends. The Otaku Clan remained by the foyer, Neil, Olivia, and Ronni lingered in the foyer with shovels in their hands and jaws slackened, while Annette seemed to be taking in the scene with the sort of cold calculation Jacqueline had come to expect from her. Jordan slumped in an easy chair, his normally deep brown complexion gone waxen and pale as Andrea shook him.
Jacqueline rushed across the room. Andrea stepped aside so she could kneel in front of the injured young man. The entire right side of Jordan’s body was covered in blood. His eyes were half-mast, his head flopped, and he let out a groan.
Just seeing him in such a helpless state broke something in Jacqueline. “C’mon Jordan, wake up,” she whispered. She touched his forehead. He was burning up. She rose up on her knees and kissed his cheek. When her lips touched his flesh, his eyes rolled toward her and he gave the hint of a smile.
“So now you care…” he murmured.
“Of course I do,” Jacqueline said, and she really did. In the past, Jordan had made her feel otherworldly and fragile, as if she was something to be worshipped and coddled instead of an actual human girl with real feelings. But he didn’t look at her like that now. He was hurt, he’d lost a ton of blood, and in his exhausted eyes she saw all the thoughtfulness and adoration she hadn’t seen before. She wondered if something had changed for him, or if he’d been this way all along and she just hadn’t been awake enough to notice.
Awake…
Jacqueline sat back on her haunches and allowed Andrea to once more tend to Jordan’s wounds. Her other friends came up behind her. Comforting hands touched her shoulders, caressed her back, fingers were run through her hair. They all knelt down around her, four wonderful teens who’d become not only Jacqueline’s friends, but her fellow witnesses to the fantastic. They shared an embrace. None talked, but they didn’t need to. The warmth of their touch meant everything.
Oh, how Jacqueline loved them.
The authorities arrived a short time later. Paramedics lifted Jordan onto a stretcher and brought him to a waiting ambulance. Jacqueline went outside to watch them go, amazed to find that not only was half the neighborhood, most of whom Jacqueline had never met before, gat
hered around Mitzy’s driveway, but no evidence remained of the nightmarish demon that’d birthed itself right in the front yard. The disturbed snow was smoothed over as if nothing had happened. Edwin and Mr. Mancuso had disappeared into the night with the monster’s corpse.
Mitzy told the police it was an attempted home invasion. She gave vague descriptions of the perpetrators, showed off Mr. Mancuso’s shotgun and told them she’d been the one who fired on the crooks, and shielded Jacqueline and her friends from answering any questions. Investigators went inside and took pictures. Neighbors stood out there in the cold and corroborated Mitzy’s story. None of them seemed like they trusted the cops at all.
Eventually, come three in the morning, the cruisers left and the neighbors filed back to their homes. Andrea offered to drive the rest of the Otakus home, and one by one they climbed into her car. Annette was the last, fiddling with the frayed ends of her white hair. Call me, she mouthed, and Jacqueline nodded. Her friends were really handling all this stuff well, considering they’d just seen a real live monster. Annette then slipped into the back seat and shut the door. The car zoomed off into the night, leaving Jacqueline alone with her aunt.
The two of them stood in silence. An arctic wind blew, and Jacqueline wrapped her ruined coat tighter around herself to try and stave off the cold. Mitzy looked at her house.
“Gonna need to fix that,” she said. “It’ll be drafty with no window.”
“Mitzy, can I ask you something?”
“Not yet. First, you need to tell me what happened tonight. After that, I’ll answer any questions you have. Come on, let’s go where it’s warm.”
They climbed into Mitzy’s sedan, which still sat jackknifed in the road. When her aunt turned the key, blessed warmth blew from the vents. Jacqueline looked straight ahead, wringing her fingers together while she thought over the night’s events. How had everything come to this? She glanced at her aunt, who sat patiently in the driver’s seat and stared at the road. The purple welts on her cheeks and forehead looked glossy in the light of the full moon. The cut on her swollen lip had scabbed over. A rock fell in Jacqueline’s gut. She wanted to apologize so badly. After all was said and done, Mitzy was still here and Mal wasn’t.
The thought of Mal made her tear ducts activate.
Mitzy looked at her and smiled softly. “It’s okay, sweetie. And I’m sorry. I didn’t run away, you have to know that, but what happened to me doesn’t matter. What I need is to know what happened with you. What went on tonight?”
It took no further prodding than that. Jacqueline spilled her guts, telling her aunt all about Mal, the boy who used to live in her compact and had been her only friend for nearly six years, about the immense strength she’d started feeling, about the strangeness of her dreams and visions. Mitzy listened intently, never once interrupting. Jacqueline got to the part about what happened at the old haunted house down the street. Once she finished, she shook all over. She saw Mal’s face in her mind, his awkward smile, his silvery hair, his words of love.
“So you went to the Coppington place,” Mitzy said.
Jacqueline nodded.
“What did you do? You didn’t touch the mirror in the basement, did you?”
Jacqueline’s eyes widened. “You know about the mirror?”
“Just answer me,” said Mitzy, her tone suddenly stern.
“I did. It’s…it’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“I kinda broke it.”
“Shit.”
Mitzy threw the sedan into drive and peeled off down the street. Jacqueline tensed as the car zipped through the darkness, until Mitzy finally realized she hadn’t turned the headlights on. Jacqueline watched her aunt mutter to herself. She turned sharply onto the next connecting street.
They arrived at the Coppington estate, and Mitzy skidded to a stop on the side of the road. She grabbed a flashlight from the glove box and trundled onto the snow-covered driveway, stepping in the footprints Jacqueline and her friends had created earlier that night. “Come on, Jackie!” she yelled, and Jacqueline followed, laboring with each step.
Mitzy stormed into the manor house, the light of her small LED flashlight leading the way. Jacqueline entered behind her, the second time she’d stepped foot in this house in less than four hours. Yet she felt a strange sort of normalcy this time, like she belonged here. The walls didn’t sag, she didn’t see things out the corner of her eye.
And there was no buzzing.
It was only once they reached the basement that Mitzy paused to take a breath. She stood in front of the wreckage of the mirror, one hand firmly planted on her hip, and shined her flashlight first on broken bits of wood and mirror, then over to the two strange, now-ruined devices that’d been attached to it. Both piles of debris looked different than Jacqueline remembered after she’d destroyed them, too perfectly aligned almost, but then again how could Jacqueline know for sure what they’d looked like? She hadn’t been thinking straight at the time.
In a way, she still wasn’t.
For a long time Mitzy said nothing, until finally she ran a hand over her face. “You said a boy named Mal told you to do this,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Jacqueline replied softly.
“Who was he?”
“The love of my life.”
Mitzy glanced at her, frowned. “You’re fifteen, Jackie—”
“Sixteen.”
“You don’t know what love is.”
“I know Mal loved me.”
“You don’t really know Mal, or how he knew the things he did. He didn’t have your best interests in mind.”
“He said the same about you.”
At that, Mitzy puckered her lips. “So that’s why you went off on me that night.”
Jacqueline cringed. “Pretty much.”
“You know I’m not a drug dealer, right?” Mitzy’s expression softened in sadness. “That wasn’t pot you found.”
“Then what was it?”
“It was just…something else.”
“Oh. That’s helpful.”
Mitzy kicked a stray board, and the broken bits of mirror beneath it clinked away. “There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know, Jackie. So much. I should’ve come to you sooner, then none of this would’ve happened.”
“Shouldn’t you be happy?” asked Jacqueline. “I got rid of the mirror. No one can use it now.”
“Just what do you think this mirror did?”
“It opened portals to different worlds.”
“Mal told you that?”
“Yeah.”
“Figures.” Mitzy turned to her niece, grabbed both her hands. “Whoever Mal was, Jackie, whatever he meant to you…it was all a lie. And this is your proof. The mirror didn’t open portals, at least not in the way you think.” She held her hand, palm down, over the destroyed mirror. “Where this house is right now is what you’d call a ‘narrows,’ an area where the walls that keep this reality separate from the others are thin. A soft spot between universes. It’s all science stuff I don’t really understand, but it’s real. This mirror was a door when needed to be, but mostly it was a plug.” She stepped back and looked around. “Now that plug’s gone. Now the door’s stuck open, and I’m going to have to get Edwin to close it. It’s quiet at the moment, but that won’t last. Anything that wants to come through, will.”
“Come through? From where?”
“From just about anywhere. Another Earth, or maybe someplace even darker.”
“Then why would Mal want it destroyed?”
“Who knows?” Mitzy said gravely. “All I do know is he’s put you in danger.”
Jacqueline knelt on the packed dirt floor and hung her head. Had Mal really lied to her? Was his love a sham? He just made a mistake, she tried to tell herself. He was confused.
But she wasn’t sure what she believed. She started to cry.
Mitzy sat down beside her and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I really am. I know this is hard. I k
now you’re confused, and I promise you’ll have answers, but you need to be strong. You need to be the woman you were meant to be.”
“And who’s that?” Jacqueline sniveled.
“Someone strong enough to save mankind.”
Jacqueline’s head cocked to the side.
Mitzy reached out and stroked her hair. “You’ve felt it. The changes inside, the fits of anger, the sudden strength, the feeling that there’s something in you larger than you can hold, begging to bust free. You’re an important girl, Jackie, the most important girl in the history of the world. I know it, and so did your dad.”
“He did?”
She nodded. “He knew you were special, and he knew there’d be people out there who’d want to destroy or enslave you. That’s why he burned down that church—not because he’d gone insane, but because those people had planned bad things for you. Your dad sacrificed himself so you could go on, otherwise you wouldn’t be right here, right now, talking to me, with an actual shot at a future.”
Jacqueline sat back, shocked. It all sounded so unbelievable. Her heart raced, but at least for the moment she wasn’t thinking about Mal.
“They’ve been around since the dawn of man,” Mitzy continued. “Waiting, watching, and preparing for your birth. They’re bad people, Jackie, and they won’t rest until they’ve gotten what they want.”
“Who are they?”
“The same people who did this,” her aunt said, pointing at the bruises on her face. “People like Alex Cottard and his friends and family, which includes pretty much a quarter of this town.”
Jacqueline thought of the book Olivia had taken out of this very basement. There’d been a list of names in the back of that dusty old tome, Talbot and Cottard among them. “My dad’s parents, my grandparents,” she said in a moment of revelation. “They wanted the same thing. That’s why dad ran away from them.”
Mitzy nodded.
“Oh wow.”
Her aunt inched closer, draped an arm over her shoulder. “I know this is a lot, sweetie. I know it seems overwhelming. But I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll tell you everything in time, teach you what you need to know. It’ll be dangerous, yes, but you’ll handle it. You’ll succeed. You have to.”
Boy in the Mirror Page 33
