Joss the Seven

by J. Philip Horne

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  THE COPS SHOWED up the next day. We had Mara and Isabella hidden upstairs in my room when my dad invited the detectives into the house. Dad had anticipated they’d be coming by, and drilled Janey and me on how to discuss Battlehoop, and called Thomas and went over it with him.

  Detective Young and Detective Malick sat on the couch, a man and a woman, each holding a pen and small pad of paper, while Janey and I sat on a couple chairs we’d pulled in from the kitchen. My parents sat on their recliners. It felt like there was enough nervous energy in the room to start a lightning storm.

  “So, Joss,” Young said, “Where were you yesterday?”

  Dad had told me to be polite, but answer every question with as few words as possible. “Here at home,” I said.

  “I’d thought you were in this, uh, class at Battlehoop,” He said.

  “I was.”

  “But not yesterday. Why not?”

  “I felt bad,” I said.

  Young glanced sideways at Malick, and she sat even further forward on the couch. “That squares with what we heard from some of the other members of the class,” she said. “Janey, I heard Jordan kidnapped you. Can you describe what happened?”

  “It was terrible,” Janey say. “He was so calm about it, I didn’t know what was happening, but he grabbed me and dragged me over to his car. Just threw me in the back seat. The door handles wouldn’t open. I really did try to get out.”

  “How did you escape?” Young asked, and Malick frowned, her mouth open, ready with another question.

  “I didn’t,” Janey said. “He just got angrier and angrier, and then he dumped me out of the car near our neighborhood.” A big tear tipped out of her eye and traced a line down her cheek. “I was so scared. I ran all the way home.”

  “Are you okay, honey?” Dad asked. That was her cue. Janey started crying in earnest.

  “I think that’s enough for now,” Mom said, rising to her feet.

  “We have some more questions,” Malick said. “About the class. How they got involved.”

  Janey cried louder. It was an incredible performance. Mom waved the detectives toward the front door. “Of course,” Mom said. “I can answer any of those questions for you. Let’s just step outside to talk and give my daughter some space.”

  Both detectives frowned, but Malick gave a small shrug and Young nodded in response. They both stood.

  “Shouldn’t take long,” Young said.

  “However long you need,” Mom said. “We’re here to help.” With that, Mom led them outside. Janey’s tears stopped like a switch had been flipped.

  “How do girls do that?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Dad said, “but your mother has used it to great effect a few times to get out of speeding tickets.”

  “It’s a girl thing, Joss,” Janey said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  We both ran upstairs to let Mara and Isabella know we were in the clear. They were sitting side by side in the guest bedroom bed, looking intently at Mom’s laptop.

  “Whatcha looking at?” Janey asked.

  “Planning a route to drive home,” Mara said.

  “So how much money did you end up with, anyway?” I asked.

  “Enough,” Mara said.

  “Lots,” Isabella said at the same time.

  “Enough,” Mara repeated, giving Isabella a small frown. “And we’ll be going out to spend some of it as soon as the coast is clear. We need to go back and get my car as well.”

  “More shopping,” I said, my voice flat.

  Isabella’s eyes sparkled. “Yes! Do you like the shopping also, Joss.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he meant to imply,” Janey said. “But I do. Can I go with you?”

  Mara shrugged. “If your parents are okay with it. I’m not sure your dad wants me responsible for either of his children any time soon.”

  Mom came back in after about fifteen minutes and gave us the all clear. Janey asked about the shopping, and it turned out Mara was right, but Mom had a private discussion with Dad for a while, and then he agreed. An hour later, the house was quiet. I messaged Thomas to see if he wanted to come over.

  In brief sentences on my phone, he told me about his encounter with the police investigators, his mom’s intervention, and how his mom had left for an important meeting and he was home alone. I texted him back.

  So is that a yes? You’re coming over?

  An hour later, Thomas knocked on the door. I opened it and waved him toward the stairs. We headed up to my room.

  “What took you so long?” I asked. “Thought you’d be here half an hour ago.”

  “Had a couple things to take care of,” he said. “Where is everyone?”

  “Mom and Dad are downstairs, probably in their room. Neither of them went to work today. Janey went with Mara and Isabella to shop. Mara’s trying to get them set up so they can leave in a couple days and have what they need for the trip and basic living once they get home.”

  “And Janey went on purpose? Shopping?”

  “I know!” I said. “Women. Hey. You heard from any of the others?”

  “Yeah, I talked to Frankie after the cops went by his house,” Thomas said. “They went straight from my house to his. He told them what he knew. We talked for a while. He was so relieved to hear Janey was okay. He thought Jordan still had her when he’d been killed. He didn’t know Jordan had ‘dumped her off in our neighborhood’ and whatnot.”

  I smiled. “Good enough. How’d he look?”

  “Like a raccoon. Two black eyes.”

  I winced. “I need to get to know him better, don’t I? He’s a good guy.”

  “He is,” Thomas said. “I knew you’d see it one day. Hey. I’ve got something.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ziplock bag. It held a ratty looking folded up piece of paper. Something tickled my memory, but I couldn’t place it. Thomas waved it in front of me and raised his eyebrows. Apparently, he thought I should know what it was, too.

  “It’s making me think I should know what it is,” I said, “but I give. What is it?”

  “I swung by Beckler Park on the way here. Checked that hollow in the tree.”

  It clicked. “Bobby Ferris! I told him to leave me a note in the tree if he needed help. Wait. How’d you know about that?”

  “You told me, doofus. Here.” He held the bag out to me.

  I stared at it. Why had I expected everything I’d done this summer to just pack up and go away? Bobby Ferris. I wondered how the past few days had gone for him. Hopefully better than the ones before.

  I reached out, hesitated, and took the bag. “This should be interesting.”

  I opened the bag and pulled the paper out. With careful movements, I unfolded it and held it so Thomas could read along with me. It was written in a messy scrawl that was barely legible.

  Bobby here. You told me to write if I needed help, so I’m writing.

  My dad’s done good the past few days, but it’s been hard. He’s going to see it through. That’s what he said. He’s going to do the right thing.

  But he’s in big trouble. I always wondered where his money came from. He didn’t have much, but he never worked. Now I know. He was doing stuff for some sort of criminal organization. Dad needs to get away from them. Get a clean start. You can help with that, right?

  “Well, that’s a pickle,” Thomas said.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” I said. “Where do you get these expressions?”

  Thomas frowned and stood up straighter. “My dad. Everyone knows what it means to be in a pickle.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “Well, if we’re in a pickle, it’s a pickle for another day. For now, Joss the Seven is signing off. I’m just Joss until further notice.”

  Thomas nodded. “Good idea. Hey, after everything that went down, there’s just one thing we forgot to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  He held his arm out,
forearm angled on the diagonal. I smiled and banged my forearm into his.

  “Battlehoop!” we both yelled.

  Keep reading for a two-chapter preview of

  The Lodestone

  by J. Philip Horne

  When twelve year old Jack Paris feels the small jaws of a creature that shouldn't exist clamp down on his leg, life as he knows it in small-town northeast Texas comes to a sudden end. Miss Edna, his foster mom, is forced to take him and his friend Sally to a world she secretly forsook two hundred years before to save his life. There Jack discovers that an evil wizard needs him for unknown purposes and will stop at nothing to capture him. The wizard pursues Jack and Sally through forests and under mountains on the other world, and even across Kansas back on Earth.

  With all their hope placed in Miss Edna, she suddenly disappears, leaving Jack and Sally to carry on without her. It soon becomes clear, however, that the events of the present are tied to Miss Edna's past, and the children begin a desperate effort to find her before all hope is lost.

  When Jack finally realizes why the wizard needs him, he learns that to live and love, you sometimes have to be willing to die.

  Flip the page for a two-chapter preview of The Lodestone.

  Chapter 1 of The Lodestone

  Vines

  Jack Paris’s arms prickled with sweat as he walked to the bus stop. The Texas sun ruled the morning sky, raining down heat. Jack shivered and jerked his head around, looking, but saw nothing.

  His breath came in quick bursts as his feet carried him forward by force of habit. Past five houses and one empty lot. He’d taken the same steps from Miss Edna’s house to the bus stop for the past four years. Something was different this morning. Something evil.

  The school bus rumbled up to the corner and let out a loud gasp as it pulled to a stop. Jack rushed up the steps into it and looked around. The boys all sat in a cluster toward the back. Sara wasn’t there, leaving an empty row since no one ever sat by her. Everything looked normal. He stepped forward and took his usual seat by Sally, who didn’t bother looking up from her book as he flopped down beside her and kicked his backpack under the seat in front of them.

  The bus accelerated forward and around the corner, heading back the way Jack had walked. He stared at the worn gray seat-back in front of him and tried to contain a growing panic. As the bus pulled past Miss Edna’s house, Jack’s skin crawled with a sensation of hateful watching. The shock froze him in his seat, rigid and breathless, and then it was gone as the bus rumbled down the road.

  “Boys are so gross,” Sally said, scrunching her nose up and looking at him with girl disdain. “It’s not even that hot yet. How did you manage to get so sweaty?”

  Jack tried to respond, but his throat and jaw were still clenched tight. I’m not sweaty, he wanted to say, but at that very moment he felt a bead of sweat on his forehead break free and become a trickle, slowly winding down between his eyebrows and along his nose until it reached the tip and hung there like the overripe pears in Miss Edna’s backyard.

  “Fine, Jack, just sit there cross-eyed looking at your nose. Real mature.” With that, Sally made a show of turning away from Jack and back to her book.

  “I, I don’t know why I’m sweaty,” Jack said as he wrestled his jaw into submission and wiped the sweat from his nose and forehead. “Hey, Sally, did you just feel something weird as we pulled past Miss Edna’s house?”

  “First off,” Sally said, not looking up from her book, “I’m not talking to you at the moment. Second, the only weird thing going on this morning is you. Third, why can’t you call it your house? I know she’s not your mom, but you’ve lived there for years.”

  Sally spent the rest of the ride reading her book while twirling a curl of blonde hair just behind her left ear. Jack sat still and breathed, gradually calming down. When Brad gave him an elbow to the back of the head as everyone shuffled off the bus, it was reassuringly normal. Jack always liked to exit last, which was fine with Sally since it gave her more time to read.

  The school day dragged by as though seventh grade itself were grinding to a halt in the sweltering late May heat. Back on the school bus that afternoon, Jack plopped down beside Sally and tried to sit so that none of his skin touched the vinyl seat as the bus’s air conditioner roared ineffectively. He tensed in anticipation when the bus turned onto Maple Street, but Miss Edna’s house flew by uneventfully. The bus jerked slowly to a stop at the next corner, and Jack grabbed his backpack and headed for the door.

  As he walked back up the street toward Miss Edna’s small, overgrown yard, his steps slowed and his eyes restlessly scanned all the nooks and crannies of the houses he passed. Something felt wrong. When he reached the edge of Miss Edna’s yard he stopped, dropped his backpack to the ground, and strained his mind to understand what he was seeing. In a flash of inspiration he realized that it wasn’t what he was seeing, but what he wasn’t seeing. There was no motion or noise. No squirrels, or birds, or bugs. It was dead calm.

  Jack panicked. Leaving his backpack to fend for itself, he made a dash for the front door, ripped the key from his pocket, and fumbled the door open. Inside he slammed it shut, locked it, and sat down hard with his back to the door. His head slumped between his knees and he tried to get his breathing under control. A minute later, he looked up and found eight pairs of feline eyes staring at him.

  “What’s going on, Peppers?” Jack asked the black-and-white patched cat he considered the leader. “It’s freaky out there. And why are all of you sitting in here?” Jack stopped and counted them again. Eight. He looked from cat to cat. Peppers, Hopper, and Moses. Cleopatra and Antony together off to the side. Juniper, Loki, and Houdini. “Hey! Where’s Roscoe? Why are all of you sitting here staring at me with Roscoe missing? Go find him! Go!”

  Jack jumped to his feet and waved his arms at the cats, but they calmly ignored him and stayed put. Giving up, he headed to the kitchen, grabbed an apple to munch on, and started doling out food to the nine cat-bowls spread along the floor near the back door. Doing normal things calmed him down and helped him think.

  Jack went back to the front door and paused in front of it. His backpack was out there on the sidewalk. It would make sense to go get it, if thinking about it didn’t make his stomach clench up toward his throat. Why was he scared?

  Jack forced himself to name his fear. “I’m scared of the missing squirrels and birds and bugs, and of a creepy feeling that no one else feels.” The door listened placidly.

  “Boy, does that sound stupid when you say it out loud,” Jack muttered as he unlocked the door and swung it open. All the cheerful little noises of life greeted him. Bugs, lizards, birds, squirrels. Even the Smiths’ dog two doors down was barking its head off. He stood for a moment and drank in the sounds and motions, then marched out and retrieved his backpack.

  After working through his homework, Jack checked the clock. There was half hour until dusk, and Miss Edna wouldn’t get home from the county hospital until full dark, so he had time for a quick trip to the bluff to clear his head. He grabbed a bottle of water and a flashlight from the kitchen, and headed out the back door. Jack followed a narrow stream that ran behind Miss Edna’s house, through the neighborhood, cutting under streets in giant culverts, and out into the east Texas scrub beyond. A well-worn path had been cut through the bushes and scrub trees surrounding the stream by years of neighborhood children following the water. Soon he was past the last house and cutting the corner toward the small river into which the stream emptied what little water it had to offer.

  Half a mile ahead the hill lurched above its surroundings, an affront to the east Texas flatness. It rose a hundred feet in a sharp crescendo to a hilltop with a steep bluff overlooking the riverbed. Jack had felt the pull of the hill like a slow, implacable tide in his gut ever since Miss Edna had moved them to the small town of Hillacre after taking him into foster care in Paris, Texas. If he concentrated, he could feel the gentle tug of the hill and turn toward it even when the
y visited the Wal-Mart fifteen miles down the road in Turner. Jack felt like he and the hill belonged together.

  He wound his way around the thickets of scrub trees that dotted the land to the base of the hill and ran up its back to the lonely, huge red oak that stood at the summit. Gasping for air, he collapsed onto the ground at the side of the tree. The air up on the hill was better, stirred by winds that the ground below fended off with a layer of hot, rising air. With the help of the breeze, Jack caught his breath and sat up. He was sitting beside the tree near the edge of the bluff and looked out for miles over empty east Texas land to the south. To his right, partially obscured by the tree trunk, the sun was just slipping below the horizon, but dusk was a drawn-out affair in the summer, so he could still see for miles. The tree sat within a few feet of sharp incline straight down to a rocky riverbed, and its roots could be seen from below fighting to hold on to the side of the bluff.

  The vines were what really drew the eye. Huge, ropey, tropical lianas draped the oak, humbling it under their weight. Six of the vines hung down from upper limbs into the empty space beyond the bluff over the riverbed. Those vines made even less sense than the hill, and no one in town seemed to know why they were on this one tree in all of Texas. They hung much farther out than he could hope to jump, and even if he could jump far enough, he wasn’t sure what he would do next, hanging out there over empty space.

  “One day,” Jack said to the vines, “I’m going to run like the wind across this hill, jump out over the empty, and catch one of you.”

  “Then one day,” the tree said in Sally’s voice, “you are going to smash your body all over those rocks below.”

  Jack leapt to his feet and raced around the tree to find a smirking Sally sitting with her back to the trunk, a book in her lap. He gathered his breath for a retort when a sharp, explosive crack sounded, followed a moment later by a gust of wind that knocked Jack to the ground.