Intrigued, Van glanced back at the window and then continued to trail the eager little critter around to the back of the house. It scampered past the servant’s entrance and stopped just before the far corner, where it sat on its haunches and pointed its whiskery nose to a spot on the exterior of the house.
“Sorry, little guy,” Van said. “There’s nothing here.” To prove her point, she reached out and rested her palm on the white wooden shingles.
Under her touch, an outline of a door appeared. It had been camouflaged to blend into the house’s exterior, and Van, who had passed by this part of the house a million times, had never noticed it before. “It must lead to my father’s private rooms in the basement,” she murmured. “I bet it’s locked.”
She ran her hands over the spot where the doorknob should be and felt a rough edge. Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw a small, concealed disc with a horizontal bar. With the tips of her fingers, she grasped the bar, turned the door handle, and pushed. To her surprise—it opened!
Van hesitated, not sure she should go in. Her father prohibited anyone from entering his private rooms. She didn’t want to upset him.
A streak of white fluff zipped inside.
“Oh, great.” Now Van had to go inside to get this thing out of the house.
She stepped through the doorway and used her hand to feel along the wall for the switch, then flicked on the lights. The door snapped shut behind her.
Stunned, she saw an intricate stone carving that covered the far wall. Embellished with ivy, bursting stars, and varying cycles of the moon, it depicted two men and two women in togas enjoying a celebration. Unfamiliar writing lined the edge of the stone carving.
She blinked, staring around her, too distracted by her surroundings to search for the whereabouts of the little animal. The entire study had no windows, with a mess of loose papers, maps, pens, odd paperweights, quills, and scrolls scattered everywhere. A piece of scrap paper stuck out from the middle pile on the coffee table, bearing the same writing as the wall carving. Van tugged at the scrap, and something else slipped out of the pile. It pinged noisily, as it bounced off the aged mosaic tile floor. She bent and snatched it up: a gold coin imprinted with a fancy crest and the words Royal Balish Mint.
Balish again! She tucked the coin into her dress pocket, along with the scrap of paper. Her father would never notice their absence, not with all of this junk strewn everywhere. She glanced around the rest of the study.
A worn, oversized, leather-bound book lay open on his no-nonsense, solid oak desk. Van perused the yellowed parchment pages of a Native Island legends storybook, opened to a page about a tribal warrior princess named the Anchoress. She had been brought into being by the Creator of All Things. Van knew this silly story from childhood. The Anchoress’s magical powers were passed down to the first female in each generation, remaining dormant until the Anchoress heir was called upon to help fight during Dishora, the end of time, when evil would rise to destroy all Light. This book, however, contained realistic illustrations of horrible mud creatures rising from the earth that Van had never seen before. One picture showed a slimy, fanged mud-demon clutching a warrior with its claws, while it breathed fire, burning its victim to death.
Van slammed the book shut, sure it would give her nightmares.
Turning, she noticed the wallpaper adorning three walls of the chamber. Its repetitive yellow coin pattern stood out against a sepia-toned background. The design reminded Van of her real mother. Van knew little about Aelia but learned that she had collected coins.
The wallpaper, along with the Balish coin, gave Van an overwhelming sense of guilt. She was trespassing, and being in the study gave her the willies. The faint scent of bleach made the room even creepier. She glanced around at the clutter.
Whoever cleaned the room didn’t do a very good job, she thought. Or has it been searched, too?
But Uxa had said they hadn’t searched the lower level of the Manor yet. Maybe whoever had turned her father’s study upside-down had also accidentally left the outer door unlocked. Van moved toward the door and then remembered the little animal.
It was rummaging in the fireplace, sending dust and ashes spiraling into the air.
Van sneezed. “Stop it, you’re making a mess!”
She bent to scoop up the ash-coated animal and noticed an object lying among the charred logs. She looked closer, squinting—at a diary-size, partly burned book.
CHAPTER FIVE
Day 1: 2:15 a.m., Earth World
Van placed the little animal to the side of the fireplace and plucked the charred book from the still-warm ashes. She flipped the ancient hand-bound text from front to back.
Sudden pounding footsteps in the hallway almost made her drop the book. Uxa and her Grigori were coming to search the basement, and they probably had gotten the key to her father’s study from Genie. Van clutched the book and rushed toward the door she had used to enter the room. She yanked it open, then hesitated. The little animal. Her eyes darted around the study. It was nowhere in sight. She opened her mouth to call for it but didn’t know its name. Cat? Bunny?
The knob rattled on the study’s inner door. Van had run out of time.
She dashed outside and the door snapped closed behind her. Afraid to be seen passing the windows of the other basement rooms, she wedged herself into the immaculate shrubbery lining the walls of the Manor. She sat on the cool ground, no longer worried about dirtying her dress, and securely settled in to outwait Uxa and her Grigori, knowing they had already searched the yard.
The window above cast enough light for her to see, so she examined the charred book and then held it between her palms and closed her eyes.
Sometimes, when Van touched emotionally charged objects, she could pick up thoughts of the owner or get impressions of events that had happened around the object. This ability had been with her since childhood, and she couldn’t control it. Van opened her eyes. “Damn.” She got nothing from the book. She used her wrist to brush ash off the singed cover and could read part of the book’s title: **ridicus Lib***lus.
“Never heard of it,” Van muttered to herself—but she wasn’t alone.
“Mip?” said the little animal, which had returned, white and fluffy as ever.
So relieved that the cute little puff had made it out of the study, Van felt tempted to scoop it up and give it a big, squishy hug. She didn’t, though, because dangling out of its tiny mouth hung a ragged piece of material.
The animal flicked its head, waving the piece of cloth at Van. She used the edge of her dress to protect her hands and took the dirty fabric from the little thing’s mouth. She held it up to a beam of light. Jagged pieces of black material—most likely, a cotton-poly blend—surrounded a triangular black patch with a red-and-gold insignia. Above the patch, in red block letters, was the name “Rogziel.” It looked like it had been torn from a military uniform. Something dark and crusty rubbed off the patch onto her dress—“Ugh!” Dried blood! She tossed the repulsive patch aside and warily eyed the innocent-looking animal.
“Brwwp meep eerp!” it replied.
Is it . . . scolding me? Van thought incredulously.
As if in reply, the creature scurried from the hedge. Van didn’t care. It had been a long day, and her feet throbbed from walking in her new boots. She laid the book on the ground next to her, then rubbed her arms, warding off the night’s creeping chill. She sank down into a comfortable position and closed her eyes.
In her dream, she saw her father standing alone in his study. He held the ancient diary. Blood-soaked, he wore an unfamiliar black military uniform. He stumbled to the fireplace and mumbled, “Let us hope . . . no Lodian . . . ever lays a hand on this.” And he tossed the book into the fire.
She woke with a start. One of her hands lay face-up on the charred text. The patch hung out of the binding.
“What the—?” She wiped drool off her mouth with the back of her hand. Then, protecting her fingers with her dress, she pulled t
he patch out of the binding and dropped it to the ground, grabbed the book, and walked out of the hedges. Someone had turned off the light from the window above, making the shrubbery dark. All was quiet. Uxa and crew had long gone. Van felt safe to go into the house.
She entered the Manor properly, through the front door. She glanced into the sitting room, startled to see Genie there.
“H-Hi,” said Van, reflexively hiding the text behind her back.
Her stepmother sat on the sofa, motionless as a statue. “Go to your rooms,” Genie said, without looking at Van.
“What about—”
Genie turned her incredible blue eyes toward Van. “Vanessa,” she said, as if issuing a threat. “It is unladylike to ask questions. And look at you—you’re covered in filth, and that horrid hair—you are a ghastly mess, not fit to be seen. Now, go to your rooms!”
Van stomped up the main stairway, her nostrils flaring. She stormed down the third floor hallway and into her rooms. Her stuffed animals, pillows, and books lay a bit askew, but the Grigori did a good job of hiding that they had searched her rooms. Still, the idea of strangers rummaging through her personal belongings didn’t sit well with Van.
She slammed her bedroom door, not because anyone would hear it, but because it made her feel better. She chucked the text onto her white, hand-carved desk and headed toward the master bathroom. Then she noticed a dark spot on an oversized pillow on her queen-size bed. She looked at it closely and gasped.
The blood-stained patch! Again!
The window next to her bed was ajar. It had to be that little animal! She scanned her bedroom and tensed to see a ball of white fluff atop her Beowulf textbook. For a second, she thought it was the critter, but it was only Twinkle Toes, the stuffed bunny her father had given her for her fifth birthday, the last birthday he had ever spent with her. The living ball of fluff was nowhere in sight.
Obviously, the little animal wanted Van to keep the patch. She grabbed a tissue from her vanity and tucked the patch back into the binder lining of the text, along with the coin and the piece of scrap paper from her pocket. On the way to the bathroom, she tossed the “contaminated” pillow onto the floor. Luma, the greatest housekeeper in the world, would take care of it. Van could always count on her to stack the linen closet with fresh lavender-scented towels and to keep Van’s pink-and-white bathroom glittering-clean.
Van turned on the shower, peeled off her boots, and shimmied out of her filthy mini dress. As hot water steamed the bathroom, she twisted her backside toward the mirror and grimaced at the fat, worm-like scar running down the lower right side of her back.
Ken would never be attracted to her if he saw that ghastly thing. To make matters worse, whenever Van asked her father how she had gotten the scar, he would say, “It’s a birthmark.” Van knew this wasn’t the truth, but when she persisted, he got angry. As she got older, she stopped asking.
After showering, Van blow-dried her hair and changed into a matching cotton tank-and-shorts pajama outfit. Outside, the sky remained black. Van grabbed Twinkle Toes and lay on her bed, hoping to fall asleep. Yet too much of what had happened during the night kept spinning in her head. She leaped out of bed, sat down at her vanity, and picked up her enamel, boar-bristle hairbrush. She started brushing her hair ninety-nine times, as Genie had taught her.
Humph. Genie, she thought. Why won’t my stepmother tell me anything? Where is my father? Is he a traitor? What did all those code words mean—Living World, Lodians, Balish? Maybe the Balish, the word imprinted on the coin from her father’s study, were real people. Too bad Internet use was restricted on the island—though she doubted code words used by the Grigori would pop up on any Google search. The answers might be in that charred text.
Van put down her hairbrush at stroke eighty-eight and picked up the book. She plopped back onto her bed and flipped through the pages, some singed, others outright burned. She skimmed over the crudely drawn pictures and strange writing that, at first, seemed to be Latin. This would have been great, because she could read Latin. Instead, though, the writing appeared to be some kind of Latin-based language, a language Van had come across only twice—tonight, on the stone carving and on the scrap paper she had found in her father’s study.
Her mother popped into her mind. Everything Van’s family possessed—the Manor, money, status—came from her mother’s side. All of it belonged to Aelia. Not to Genie, not to her father, and not to Van. But because of Van, Aelia wasn't alive to enjoy any of it. Sometimes, Van wished she had never been born. She suspected her father felt the same. He rarely paid attention to her and had spoken to Van about her mother only once, at age eleven—on the day he had taken her quahogging.
Her father had rented a rowboat and paddled them to the nearest sandbar off Buzzard’s Bay, then dropped anchor. The sky looked bright and cheery, the water calm and inviting. Van breathed in deeply. From that day on, she would never forget how the salty scent of the blue-green ocean filled her with peace and contentment.
“It’s low tide,” her father said.
Van didn’t understand what that meant but smiled anyway, thrilled to be spending time alone with him.
Her father hopped out of the rowboat into the shallow water, and Van did the same. She thought it odd to see her father in swim trunks and not in his work uniform. But signs of his job remained on his body: the distinct markings of the Grigori—black tribal tattoos on the nape of his neck, bands around both upper arms—and long, thin scars along his jaw, neck, and chest.
He handed her a tool that looked like a spade, except with three claw-like prongs. He showed her how to use it to scoop up sand, sift it in the water, and then check whether it contained a clam with a hard shell, called a quahog. They used a rusted metal ring to measure its size. If the quahog was too small, a “baby,” it fell through the ring, and they tossed it back. If the quahog didn’t go through the ring, into the bucket it went, to be eaten later.
Sometimes they found a scallop. Large-enough scallops went into the bucket. One time, her father pulled up a spider crab, sending Van screaming back into the rowboat, nearly capsizing it.
Deep creases had formed around the corners of her father’s eyes—eyes so dark blue, Van could’ve sworn they were brown. He “saved” her from the scary creature by hurling it far away into the water.
It was the only time she had ever seen her father smile.
With morning fading into noon, they’d climbed back into the rowboat to head home, but her father didn’t start rowing. Instead, he stared at Van with a strange expression on his face. When Van caught his eye, he said, “You look just like her.”
She knew who he meant.
“I see her every time I look at your face . . . your eyes. You have the same eyes,” he said, his voice shaking.
Until that time, Van had no idea she looked like her mother. She held still, afraid if she breathed, her father would clam up tighter than the quahogs in their pail.
His cropped, rich brown hair glimmered in the waning afternoon sun, as he looked past Van. “She loved this island, your mother did. Never wanted to leave.”
So her mother had felt the same deep connection to the island that she did. Even this tiny scrap of information helped close the huge desperate gap inside her, one that could be filled only by learning more about Aelia.
Her father’s eyes glistened, as he focused on some far-off point on the horizon. “I loved her very much. Remember that . . . remember that.”
Van almost cried for him. She wanted badly to apologize for killing his beloved wife, her mother. Even before this day on the water, she had never questioned her father’s love for her mother. Not even after she was old enough to understand the rumors about him being a womanizer and how people questioned whether his relationship with Genie had started before his wife’s death. As far as Van was concerned, her father had been a widower with a newborn baby to raise. He needed help and thought it best for his child to be raised with a mother figure in her life. Enter
Genie.
“I wish I had something of your mother’s to give you. There’s . . . nothing left.”
Van wanted to ask if this was because Genie felt jealous of anything that had to with Aelia but chickened out.
He paused, as if wanting to say more, then reached out and grasped the oars.
Hoping to keep him talking, Van worked up the courage to ask him about the scars. “Do they hurt?”
He paused and again stared off into the distance. “Well, princess,” he sighed, “even old wounds still hurt sometimes.”
“H-How did you get them?” Van asked, desperately wanting to take away his pain. To hug him in a loving embrace. But she didn’t dare touch him.
“They’re the result of going someplace I wasn’t supposed to go,” he said briskly, then continued rowing.
In hindsight, Van knew he hadn’t given a real answer, only a veiled warning for her not to wander into dangerous, off-limits places.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Van shot upright, torn from her memories. Paley rapped at her window, perched on the bough of the giant oak.
Van slipped the text under the covers, as Paley crawled in and dumped her worn backpack on the floor. Paley slept over whenever she wanted to escape the confines of the orphanage, which was often.
She made herself at home, unselfconsciously changing into her bedtime T-shirt and shorts. “The other kids were making too much noise, still excited over Jaychund. I had to sneak out again, just to get some sleep.” She stared at Van. “Something wrong?”
“No,” Van said. She felt too confused about everything she’d learned over the last hour and wasn’t ready to share it yet. She shrugged. “I found out my father is in some kind of trouble at work.”
Paley unrolled the sleeping bag Van kept in her bedroom. “Pfft. He’s always in trouble. People love to hate on him.”
Shock of Fate: A Young Adult Fantasy Adventure (Anchoress Series Book 1) Page 4
