Shimmer (Wicked Woods #2)

by Kailin Gow

“Well, you’ll just have to get in the mood for them, won’t you?” He retrieved a folded flyer from a pocket and passed it to Briony. “I saw this earlier, and I thought you would be perfect for it.”

  Briony unfolded the flyer to find herself staring at a notice announcing auditions for the school’s production of Little Red Riding Hood.

  “Kevin, I can’t act.”

  Kevin raised an admonishing finger. “Now stop that. Just remember what I said about being able to do anything.”

  “Except act,” Briony shot back. “Seriously, Kevin.”

  “But you have the perfect experience for it.”

  “What experience?” Briony had to admit, despite everything, she was finding herself at least a little interested.

  “Well, who else here has spent her time wandering through a dangerous wood, looking out for big bad wolves while on the way back to their elderly relatives?”

  “So much for normal,” Briony said. “Besides, something tells me that if a big bad wolf came calling on Aunt Sophie, she’d have a new wolf-skin rug. Particularly if she found out that he had just called her elderly.”

  “Come on, Briony,” Kevin insisted. He stood and pulled Briony to her feet with him. “You can’t tell me that it wouldn’t be good to be involved in something.”

  Briony thought about telling him no, but she stopped herself in time. The part of her that was rejecting the chance felt far too much like the same one that was trying to cling on to her old life. Maybe Kevin was right. Maybe she did need to adapt, to do something new. Still, she could see at least one obvious problem.

  “Kevin, the auditions for this have already started. I missed out on the cheerleading because I didn’t have time to learn the routine. How am I going to do any better here?”

  “Really? My guess is that you missed out on the cheerleading because Pepper Freeman is too stuck up to ever let you in. I do pay some attention to what’s going on in this school, you know.”

  “Okay, maybe,” Briony said, “but that still doesn’t mean I can waltz into someone else’s auditions late and hope to get a part.”

  “Why not?” Kevin asked. “After all, you’ve got a teacher on your side. Now come on.”

  He set off, not letting go of Briony’s hand, forcing her to follow. He led her on a direct route to the school’s auditorium, only letting go of her arm once they were at the door. From the inside came the sounds of someone acting, or at least of someone shouting their lines slowly.

  “Thank you Ida dear,” a woman’s voice said, “I think possibly I’ve heard enough there.”

  Briony followed Kevin in. The auditorium was not huge, and it had the look of somewhere that hadn’t had much attention since it had been built a decade or so before. There was a stage at the front, where an assortment of students Briony mostly didn’t know were going through lines with the aid of their scripts. In front of the stage stood a middle-aged woman who seemed, for some reason Briony couldn’t work out, to be under the impression that she looked her best in a garish assortment of brightly-colored layers. She looked over as the two of them entered.

  “Oh, hello Mr. Dante. Who’s this?”

  “This is Briony, Miss Smith. She was just telling me how she was far too awful to ever get into your play.”

  “Is that so?” She turned a scowl onto Briony. “Well, dear, I think you’ll find that I get to decide whether you’re awful or not. I am the director here.” A smile broke through, and Miss Smith lowered her voice. “Seriously though, you can’t be any worse than Ida. Now, grab a script from the pile, do your best to get familiar with… oh, let’s go the whole hog and have you read Red’s part for now, and we’ll see how you do in twenty minutes or so. It should give me time to persuade Ida that she’d like to help behind the scenes.”

  It reminded Briony a little of Claire. Plenty of enthusiasm, no hint of nastiness, and also no chance to say no. Before she knew what she was doing, Briony found herself picking up a badly photocopied script and doing her best to remember Red Riding Hood’s lines. By the time Miss Smith called her over to read, Briony hardly felt ready.

  Still, she gave it her best try, leaving her script at the side and trying to project the right emotions. There was the note of obliviousness for the parts where she was supposed to be walking through the forest, then the confusion over her ‘grandmother’s’ odd appearance, then fear at finding a wolf. Though there, Briony couldn’t help a little note of defiance. After all, if she had found a wolf had eaten Aunt Sophie, it wouldn’t have had time for all this “The better to eat you with” business.

  Afterwards, she looked to Miss Smith. “Was that all right?”

  “All right?” Miss Smith clapped her hands. “It was wonderful. It seems we have our Red Riding Hood. Be at rehearsals tomorrow lunchtime.”

  Briony left, slightly stunned by the speed with which it had happened. She had the lead? Just like that? Kevin met her outside the auditorium.

  “You see, I told you you’d be good. Apparently, Miss Smith was amazed that you’d memorized the script. How did you do it?”

  “Oh, I just tend to remember things I read,” Briony said. “My parents used to say I was born with a photographic memory.”

  Kevin laughed. “You say that like it’s nothing. So you’re a fearless vampire slayer, you can act, and you have a photographic memory? I told you that you were special, Briony.”

  Chapter 14

  The strangest part about the next few days was how quiet they were. Well, possibly quiet wasn’t the right word for it, because they were more than busy enough to leave Briony exhausted at the end of the day. There was her schoolwork to think about, and her work at the diner, and plenty of rehearsals for the play. Apparently, Miss Smith had decided that they needed all the practice they could get.

  There wasn’t, however, much sign of activity from either vampires or werewolves. George and Aunt Sophie kept up Briony’s training as best they could, but there weren’t any reports of attacks around the town, or even of vampire sightings. Where normally, the Preservation Society would have found itself called on to check on reports of vampires at least once or twice in the week, now they found themselves left with nothing to do but wait.

  At first, it worried Briony a little. It felt unnatural, coming after so many strikes against them, and she could not help thinking of it as the calm before the storm. Still, as days slid into one another with no sign of violence, Briony started to let herself relax just a little. If Wicked’s various supernatural denizens felt like taking a vacation, she wasn’t about to take it for granted. It wasn’t like she was short of things to do after all.

  The rehearsals for the play took up a lot of her lunch times, and Briony found that she enjoyed getting into her part, making the most of her time on stage. She even liked helping the others there with their parts, and found herself making friends with people she had only noticed before as faces at the back of some of her classes.

  Much like Maisy and Steve, they did not seem to care that Briony didn’t fit in with the popular crowd. Most of them hardly seemed to notice that there was a popular crowd. They were all far too busy trying to make the school production of Little Red Riding Hood the best it could be with no discernable budget, a cast whose enthusiasm mostly outweighed their acting ability, and a set that occasionally fell over if they did not tie it in place properly. They might have been vaguely aware that there were people who did not spend their lunches making sets or arguing over stage directions, but they didn’t particularly seem to care.

  Miss Smith was very encouraging through it all, telling everyone that they were doing wonderfully well, injecting enough enthusiasm into proceedings for about three people, and almost never getting annoyed when things went wrong. She was particularly encouraging towards Briony, saying that she had a knack for her part. Briony found herself pleased by the praise, though she also recalled Kevin’s joking comment about her having experience when it came to running away from wolves.

  Briony continu
ed to see a lot of both Kevin and Fallon. In fact, most of the time, it seemed that whenever one of the Dante Brothers wasn’t around, the other was. Kevin resumed his old habit of coming to the diner while Briony was working, ignoring the occasional cautious looks George gave him. Fallon found her between classes or at lunch. Each seemed determined to ignore the attention the other was paying Briony, treating her like she was going out with whichever one of them she happened to be with.

  Biology classes were still tense, though after the near fight in the first one, it had settled down into more of a sullen tension than outright arguments. Kevin still picked out Fallon for awkward questions, but Fallon was able to answer most of them without difficulty. Briony guessed that he was taking special care to prepare, so that his brother would not be able to make him look foolish in front of Briony. So that it didn’t spark any more arguments between the two, she took care to sit apart from Fallon in the class, leave before Kevin could talk to her at the end, and generally stay as neutral as she could.

  Briony knew it was not an arrangement that could last. At some point, she would have to decide between the two, if only because it wasn’t fair to keep both of them wondering. The trouble was, she genuinely could not make up her mind. Fallon was closer to her own age, and she liked him a lot, but Briony could say that about Kevin, and in any case, there wasn’t the risk of being bitten that came with dating a vampire.

  Briony wished that she could talk it over with someone, but there weren’t many candidates. Maisy was increasingly busy with the cheerleading squad, because Pepper seemed to be determined that the new intake would be up to speed well before the next game. Most of her new friends in the play probably wouldn’t have reacted well to mentions of werewolves or vampires, and as for Aunt Sophie, Briony wasn’t sure that this was an area where she wanted to ask.

  Briony did briefly ask Jill, her fellow waitress at the diner, for whom she had agreed to do some babysitting. Jill needed to go out one night, and had to find someone to look after her daughter Sarah. Briony had agreed readily. The toddler played around the base of the sofa in Jill’s home, laughing at something Briony could not guess at. Briony had asked then if she could have Jill’s advice.

  “So what’s the problem?” Jill asked.

  “There are these two boys…”

  “Let’s see, that would be the cute werewolf you showed up to George’s boat with? And…”

  “His blonde vampire brother.”

  “Ah. And I thought I was the only one who could end up with problems when it came to men. So you’re trying to decide between them?”

  Briony nodded.

  “And, let me guess, you think you really like both of them.”

  Another nod.

  “Well,” Jill said, “I’m probably not the best person to be giving advice on picking the right man, given how quickly Sarah’s father ran off, but it seems to me that there’s a lesson there. Finding someone you really love is important, but you have to be sure that it goes beyond that. You have to be sure that they will still be there, still be the right person for you, later on too. Anyway, I have to get going, or I’ll be late.”

  “Where are you going, anyway?” Briony asked.

  “Evening classes.” Jill smiled at her as she said it. “What, you didn’t think you were the only one round here working up to college, did you? Some of us are just a little older than others.”

  She was out the door then, leaving Briony to spend an evening looking after Sarah. It was fun, and the toddler was no trouble, going to bed and getting straight to sleep after Briony read her a story. If only everyone in her life was so cooperative.

  Unfortunately, Briony was not too sure whether Jill’s advice solved anything for her. She had the feeling that both Kevin and Fallon had the potential to be great boyfriends, even if they both also had the potential for problems too. As far as Briony could see, there was nothing for it but to keep going as she was, hoping that a solution would present itself.

  Things went on as normal then, with the rounds of training, school, the play and the diner running into one another until Briony was too busy to think about anything very much. Not the two boys. Not her vampire family. Not anything. With days so full, Briony spent most of the week getting home to Aunt Sophie late, having something to eat before going straight to bed, and collapsing into sleep almost straight away.

  By the time the weekend arrived, Briony was ready for nothing more strenuous than sleeping late to try to recover. She was sleeping like the dead when the doorbell chimes went off, waking Briony while she was still trying to pretend that the outside world didn’t exist. Briony heard the muffled sound of footsteps outside her room.

  “Briony,” Aunt Sophie said, “are you awake? That vampire of yours is here with your two young friends. They’re saying something about going over to the amusement park.”

  Briony groaned as she remembered.

  “I could tell them that you’re too lazy to get out of bed, if you’d like.” Trust Aunt Sophie to have no mercy on her.

  “I’ll be down as quickly as I can,” Briony called, struggling from bed to find that it was well past the time she would normally have woken. She showered and dressed in record time, practically running downstairs to find Fallon, Maisy and Steve waiting for her in the living room.

  “Are you ready to go?” Fallon asked.

  “Just about.”

  “We thought you’d forgotten,” Maisy said. It was good to see her after spending so little time with her and Steve at lunch.

  “I had, sort of. Are we driving down together?”

  They did, in the end, and Briony had to admit that the day was a fun one. The amusement park wasn’t particularly large with just a dozen or so rides and some stalls in between. Several of the larger rides weren’t even running, closed during what was a quiet season for out of town tourists. Even so, it was fun, and it wasn’t like they had to in long lines for any of the rides.

  Steve and Maisy spent most of the time curled close together on the rides, while Fallon was a little more circumspect, slipping his hand into Briony’s whenever he could, and stealing a kiss at the end of the park’s roller coaster that did almost as much to take her breath away as the drops and turns had. After that, they wandered around some of the stalls, and Steve had a try at the coconut shy. Only once he had missed half a dozen times did he declare that he’d had enough and let Maisy have a try. Briony smiled to see her friend hit first time.

  Briony surprised herself by trying an old-fashioned test your strength machine. She didn’t quite make it ring, but after all the training she had been doing recently, she certainly did a lot better than she had thought she would. When Fallon took his turn, the main difficulty for him seemed to be making things look harder than they were. More than human strength was just so unfair, sometimes.

  They arrived home alright, and Briony finished the week the happiest she had been in a long time. The best part was that the week that followed was almost as good. Not that it featured anything as special as their double date. Day followed day, and nothing happened. Things were almost… ordinary.

  Now, if only it could stay that way.

  Chapter 15

  The week of the play arrived, and Briony found that she was starting to get nervous about it. What if something went wrong? What if her costume suddenly would not fit, or everyone forgot their lines simultaneously, or she caught a cold? Briony found herself smiling, because when her life had slowed down to the point where the worst she had to worry about was the prospect of things going wrong with her play, things were definitely going well. It was nice not to have to deal with vampires and werewolves for a while.

  Well, most vampires and werewolves anyway. It was a Friday night, and Briony had promised Kevin that she would let him take her to dinner as part of her current ‘give both Fallon and Kevin a chance’ policy. It was going to be somewhere a little out of town, apparently, because Kevin was still pretending to be her teacher, and they wanted to avoid aw
kward questions. Briony had managed to get the night off from George just for this date.

  Unfortunately, Kevin hadn’t told her what kind of restaurant it was going to be, so Briony didn’t know whether she needed to dress up or not. On the one hand, she knew that Kevin would probably find her beautiful no matter what she wore. On the other, it was always nice to have an excuse to dress up a little, and she would probably feel very stupid if she wandered into a nice restaurant wearing the wrong thing. But wouldn’t Kevin have mentioned it if she needed to?

  Briony sat in her room with her closet open, trying to make a decision. She had just about decided to stay dressed as she was, in casual jeans and a dark sweater, when a tapping noise came from the window. Could it be Kevin? Briony shook her head at that thought. Why would Kevin sneak around like that?

  There was only one way to find out, so Briony made her way over to the window, picking up her silver bladed cross on the way just in case. What she saw through the glass when she opened the curtains almost made her drop it again. Jake was out there, level with the window with no sign of a ladder to support him. Her half vampire/half werewolf brother was hovering in midair.

  Briefly, Briony dragged the curtains closed, threw herself back onto the bed and tried to ignore the whole thing. Maybe he would just go away if she… no. The tapping on the window came again, louder this time. Reluctantly, Briony dragged herself over to the window once more, opening the curtains for another look. Jake was still there. He mimed tapping an imaginary watch. Apparently, he didn’t have all night.

  Briony took a deep breath and opened the window, though she was careful not to invite Jake in. He had said himself that he did not have perfect control, and brother or not, Briony knew she could not risk it.

  “Jake? What are you doing here?”

  Jake licked his lips nervously. “I needed to see you. I know I shouldn’t, but…”

  He left it at that, but it was obvious something was bothering him. He looked almost the same as he had when a couple of kids at their last school had started picking on him and he wanted Briony’s advice. Though somehow, this seemed more serious.