The Akasha Chronicles
Emily’s House
Emily’s Trial
Emily’s Heart
Natalie Wright
EMILY’S HOUSE
Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Natalie Wright
EMILY’S TRIAL
Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Natalie Wright
EMILY’S HEART
Copyright © 2013 by Natalie Wright
Published by Boadicea Press 2013.
For any questions about the novel or the author, please refer to contact details at:
NatalieWrightsYA.blogspot.com
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Book Cover Art copyright © Phatpuppy Art
Book Cover Design © Cheryl Perez
Formatting by Polgarus Studio
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book.
Edition: December, 2013
For Sarah.
Emily’s House
Natalie Wright
PART ONE
The Order of Brighid
“Possibility is the secret heart of time.”
-Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, by John O’Donohue
Prologue
The whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of that infernal machine. Its bellows pump up and down as black, tarry sludge is sucked up the tube and into the holding tank.
She lies on the bed like a robot corpse, tubes and lines going in and out of her body. Her once rosy lips are pale, tinged slightly green. Her once vibrant emerald green eyes are closed, sunken into the eye sockets. Her once strong body lies still and shrunken. Only her hair looks the same, flowing like a red wave across the white shore of the pillow.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
I stand at the door and gingerly peek in. I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to see her like that. I don’t want the putrid odor of dying people stuck in my nostrils.
I don’t want to go in, but I’m sucked into the room anyway. My legs feel powerless against the invisible force that draws me in. I flail my arms and try to command my body to obey me and run from the horrid scene.
But I’m in the room anyway, drawing ever closer to the bed.
Whoosh, whoosh.
What is that tarry black stuff? Is it being sucked out of her body? Or put in?
I’m close enough to touch her, but I don’t want to. The last time I touched her I saw a vision of her taking her last breath. The last time I touched her, I saw her die. I don’t want that to come true. And I don’t want to see her die again. The first time I saw her die I ran and ran, trying to escape the vision. I don’t want to touch anyone ever again.
But my hand reaches anyway, a mind of its own. My mouth opens to scream, but nothing comes out. My lips are locked open in a soundless “O.”
My hand quivers as it reaches in slow motion toward the sleeping body that bears a resemblance to my mother. Is she still in there? Or has the cancer stolen the last of her?
My fingertips shake as they touch her hand. The skin on her hand is as thin as an onionskin and shows the blue-red blood vessels beneath.
As soon as my fingers touch her hand, her eyes pop open in a look of terror. Her mouth is open in a scream. But it’s not a human scream. It’s the loud whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of that tar-sucking machine.
She sits up. The long, wavy red hair flying about her head is the same, but the face is no longer my mother. It looks at me with large, solid black eyes, devoid of light or emotion, staring out of a bare skull. Her hand is no longer covered in thin flesh but is instead the hand of a skeleton. The hand of bones grips me hard.
I pull and pull to get free of the monster, but it has me. I’m caught in its grip.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
I finally wake, dripping in sweat. My mouth is still open in an “O,” the scream still caught in my throat.
I awake once again from the same ghastly dream I’ve had for the last seven years, only to find myself in a house of nightmares.
1. A RUN-IN WITH MURIEL THE MEAN
It sucks to see your mom die twice.
That’s what I was thinking while I walked home that day. The second day in my life that everything changed.
The day started out normal enough. Getting a D on my math test. Trying not to trip over my own too-big-for-my-body flipper feet on my way to lunch. And getting handed a report card that felt like a bomb that was about to explode in my backpack.
“Muriel the Mean is going to kill me,” I said to my best friends, Fanny and Jake. We ambled ever closer to my house of doom. My stomach knotted itself up, and the all-too-familiar feeling of dread took over as we got closer to my house.
My house. Once it was filled with my mom’s laughter and singing. Her colorful paintings once decorated the walls.
My house.
It wasn’t really mine anymore. It was Muriel’s. And Aunt Muriel had filled the place with dove-grey walls and meanness and fear.
My mom died when I was seven, and she took her laughter and her singing and her colorful paintings with her.
She took something else too. Something that I’d kept secret, even from Fanny and Jake.
For as long as I can remember, I could read her thoughts. It was like a radio station playing in my head. All I had to do was tune in my receiver, and there she was. The ‘Mom Station’. She could read my thoughts too. It seemed like the most normal thing ever. Mom let me know that it wasn’t normal and that it was best to keep it between us, so I did.
The day she died, I held her hand as that horrible tar-sucking machine whooshed away. Then her station went off the air. I never heard it again.
Inside my head, it was so quiet and lonely. I was seven years old, and it was the first time in my life that the only thoughts rolling around in there were my own.
To make it all worse, my dad turned into a zombie and my Aunt Muriel came to live with us. Dad’s work at the university takes most of his time, so he thought my old widowed aunt (fourteen years older than my dad) could come live with us. “It’s a win-win,” he had said.
Only it wasn’t a win for me. Muriel is meaner than a dog chained in the hot sun with a choke collar on. I’m not sure why she’s such a heinous person, but she is, so I call her ‘Muriel the Mean’.
Seven years living with a zombie who used to be my father. Seven years of Muriel treating me like the bastard fourth cousin of a retarded rhino. I felt as if I was slipping away. I felt like if something didn’t change, I was going to disappear completely.
“Maybe I should just keep walking,” I said. We were a couple of houses away from the sidewalk leading up to my front door. “You know, run away.”
“You can’t do that,” said Jake. His voice sounded panicked. “I’d miss you too much. Besides, where would you go?”
“Then tell me
how I can deliver this to Muriel the Mean and not end up dead.”
“Let me come in with you,” offered Fanny. “If she lays a hand on you, I’ll go banshee on her.”
“Fanny, we’ve been over this before. I’d love to let you go gorilla on my Aunt Muriel, but I can’t let you do that. You have too much to lose.”
She shut up about it. She knew I was right. Even though we were only freshmen, Fanny was a shoe-in for at least one sport scholarship, and we all knew it. Spending time in juvenile detention for beating up my aunt would waste that dream for her.
“I don’t know Em, maybe you should just go with the direct approach. That’s usually best,” said Jake.
“Best for what nub? Getting her butt kicked? No, I suggest the time proven method that has worked for generations of kids,” said Fanny.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Lie.”
Fanny’s suggestion had considerable merit. Problem was we were at my house, and I had no lie in my head. I had planned no strategy for how to hide the incriminating paper in my backpack from Muriel.
“I’ll see you guys later?” I asked.
“Yep, and I’ll help you with your algebra homework,” said Jake.
“And I’ll be over to keep Jake from boring you to death,” said Fanny. “We’ll meet at your tree later.”
“Wish me luck.”
“Good luck, Em,” said Jake.
“Hope you live to see me later,” Fanny joked as they both walked away.
Fanny’s joke, like most humor, had a core of truth. Aunt Muriel wouldn’t actually kill me, but when displeased with me, which she was just about all of the time, she’d make my life miserable.
I walked lightly across the creaky wooden porch of my house, trying not to make a sound. My hand hesitated on the door handle. Once I would have bounded in with laughter to a kaleidoscope of color. That day I crept with dread into a house of monochrome.
I finally opened the door. Muriel waited for me just inside. Not a good sign.
“Okay, let’s see it,” she said.
“See what?”
“Don’t be cute. You know what. Hand it over,” she snarled back.
I dug in my backpack and brought out a wrinkled piece of paper. Muriel snatched it from my hand and pored over it. When she finally looked up, I thought for sure her eyes would incinerate me on the spot.
“If you were smart you wouldn’t have come home with this. It appears that your grades do reflect the sum of your intelligence which, I’m sorry to say, is not a terribly large sum.”
“Then I must get my intelligence from your side of the family,” I replied. I know. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sometimes it’s like my mouth has its own brain and just shoots stuff out. Stuff likely to get me killed.
Crack!
I should have seen it coming. She hit me so hard I swear she made snot shoot out of my nose. My backpack fell, and stuff flew out all over the floor. Blood trickled from my nose over my upper lip. I didn’t want to cry in front of Muriel, but tears welled up in my eyes anyway.
“Pick up this stuff,” she hissed.
I bent down and shoved all my stuff back into my backpack. My nose bled so much that it dripped all over the wood floor in the entryway.
“Now look at what you did! You clean that up and go to your room. I don’t want to see you until morning. And for God’s sake, stop sniveling.” Muriel turned and stomped out of the room.
I wanted to run away. I wanted to run and run like I had that day back when I was seven. Run and run until I was far away from that house and Aunt Muriel and Zombie Man. Run until I fell over.
But I didn’t run. Instead, I pulled it together enough to clean up the blood, snot and tears off the floor. I ran upstairs to my room, shut the door, and shoved wads of toilet paper up my nostrils to stop up the blood. I flopped down on my bed and I kept crying.
It wasn’t the wailing or hiccupping to catch your breath kind of crying. That’s how it usually was for me. No, that day it was a long, slow, stream of hot tears kind of crying. And they weren’t all tears of sad. A lot of those tears were mad tears. Really mad tears.
You probably think I was mad at Muriel. And I was a little. But mostly I was mad at my mom, Bridget.
It had been seven years since she died, and I was furious at her. The more I cried the more I thought about how she had up and left me. And the more I thought about how she cut out on me, the madder I got. And the madder I got at her, the more I cried. I was starting to hate my mom as much as I hated Muriel.
“Mom, why did you leave me?” I whispered to the emptiness around me.
The silence of my room was suddenly filled with a low hissing sound.
“Mom?”
No answer, just a low hiss that sounded like steam coming through an old radiator. What the heck is that? I opened my window and listened. The hiss came from my old tree house, still perched in the large oak outside my window.
I went to my bathroom and wiped the tear tracks from my face. My eyes were red and puffy and my face blotchy from crying. I pulled the wads of toilet paper out of my nose and put on a clean T-shirt. I went to my window, opened it up and eased out onto the large oak branch.
I didn’t know it then, but scooting myself across that branch was the beginning of a long journey.
2. EMILY’S VISITOR
Before my dad became a zombie, he built a large tree house in an old oak in our backyard. Neither he nor Muriel bothered to tear it down so it remained wedged amongst the large branches of the old tree.
My legs were still a little wobbly from my run in with Muriel, but I stayed low and climbed across the branches until I got to the tree house. The closer I got the louder the hissing noise.
I sat on the limb at the opening to the tree house and looked in to see what was making the noise. The inside of the tiny house was dark and dusty. The only light came from the small opening that my body was blocking. I couldn’t see anything in there. I crawled inside. My five feet six frame barely fit through the hole that had been made for a small child. Once inside, I couldn’t stand up but had plenty of room to sit. I sat to the side and waited for my eyes adjust to the darkness.
The hissing grew louder, and after a few minutes, I saw a faint light appear in the middle of the tree house. The light hovered in front of me. It started small like the light from a mini flashlight. It grew to the size of a softball and as it grew, it became brighter.
I thought Aunt Muriel had knocked my head around good and that I had a concussion. Great, now I’m losing my hearing and seeing weird lights.
I blinked my eyes, rubbed them and tipped my head and tapped the other side, like you do when you’re trying to get water out of your ears. Nope, didn’t work. I still heard the hissing sound and the light ball continued to grow. Soon it was about the size of a large dog. Then the hissing changed. It became a low, slow hum. The light got so bright I had to shade my eyes from it.
Suddenly, POP! The bright light disappeared, and the humming became low and soft, more of a droning background noise. I squinted my eyes to see through a misty, silvery fog. What’s there?
I saw the outline of something. As my eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, the image became clearer. What I saw made me want to scream.
I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. If I screamed Aunt Muriel would find me and I’d have more trouble. I thought about shimmying back across the tree branch and into my room. But something about the thing drew me in.
Before me stood a small furry creature. It was about four feet tall but seemed fully-grown. Its head was doglike, with a dog nose and whiskers, but its ears were more like a wild boar. His eyes were the oddest thing about him. They were large and dark brown, almost black, but seemed to be stuck in a perpetually sad look, with bags and wrinkles underneath.
The creature’s body was hairy all over like a dog, but he had hands like a man and wore clothes. He wore a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a brown tweed vest top
ped his dark brown wool flannel pants.
I should have been scared. I mean an alien creature had just landed in my tree house. But I figured I was hallucinating. Aunt Muriel had whacked me hard. Anyway, his eyes were so warm and with his cute little tweed vest, he didn’t frighten me.
“Can you see me, child of Brighid?” said the creature.
“Yes, I … I see you, whatever you are,” I said.
“I am Hindergog, Bard of the Order of Brighid, keeper of the tales of the High Priestess, servant to her majesty in the Netherworld,” he said.
“Well, I guess that answers it.” After I said it, I realized my sarcasm. I enjoyed being a smart aleck to my aunt, even though I’d pay for it. But I immediately regretted being so smirky to the strange creature.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic with you. My aunt always tells me that I have an awful mouth.”
“There is nothing awful about you, daughter of Brighid. It is your lack of training that is awful,” he said.
“Training?”
“You have reached the age of fourteen Beltane fires, have you not?”
“Well I don’t know anything about Beltane, but I’m fourteen years old.”
“Then you are four years late for the start of your preparation. But there is no time to waste. We must start now. You are the last in the lineage of the Order of Brighid. You are the only one with the powers to defeat Dughall the Dark One, but you require training,” Hindergog said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And that is truly strange because you are a figment of my imagination and you’d think I’d know what my own imagination is talking about.”
“Daughter of Brighid, I am not of your imagination.”
“Then you are real?”
The Akasha Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set: The Complete Emily Adams Series Page 1
