by Brian Knight
Copyright ©2013 by Brian Knight
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN: 978-1-936564-72-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-936564-73-6 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012956362
Printed in the United States of America
JournalStone rev. date: March 8, 2013
Cover Design: Denis Daniel
Cover and Interior Art: M. Wayne Miller
Edited By: Norman L. Rubenstein
Dedication
To Norman L. Rubenstein, Godfather of the Phoenix Girls, and my own girls, Judi Key and Ellie Knight, who inspire me more than they know.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my friends, in and out of the business, who have encouraged and believed in me, even when I didn’t. Trent Zelazny, Monica O’Rourke, Jenny Orosel, Shane Staley, Larry Roberts, Tom Moran, and the many others. Special thanks also to Shawna, Judi, Ellie, and Chris.
Extra special thanks to everyone whose contribution added a little extra magic to this story – Christopher Payne, Norman L. Rubenstein, Jenna Meadows, M. Wayne Miller, Hannah Walthers, and Judi Snyder.
PART 1
Accidental Magic
Chapter 1
The Night the Magic Died
Four girls walked through the darkness, led by memory and moonlight to a familiar and secret place. They did not speak; the only sounds were the dry whisper of wind through tall, wild grass, and the occasional sob or sniffle as emotions peaked.
Everything had changed that night.
The echo of babbling water joined the wind, then overcame it, and the trail dipped into a darker valley. The canopy of a grove below was visible in the moonglow. The four girls’ silhouettes vanished into the shadows of the trees.
Moments later there was a flash of light in the heart of the grove, and a fire lit it from within.
They sat on boulders circling the stone fire pit and stared into the dancing flames, determinedly not facing each other.
Then one of them did look up, a girl in her late teens with waist-length blonde hair, fresh tears streaming from her wide brown eyes. She scanned the down-turned faces of her friends.
“It’s our fault. We should have been there. We should have known.”
A second girl, tall and athletic, with bright green eyes and thick auburn hair jerked her head up, glaring. “It’s not our fault! She could have asked us for help, but she didn’t. We would have gone. We would have helped her.”
The third, a mousey girl with brown hair and small brown eyes nestled behind thick glasses said, “She was trying to protect us. She felt responsible for us, because …”
“I don’t need protecting,” the second girl said. Her face was wild with anger, feral in the firelight.
The fourth, sitting furthest from the fire and hidden in shadow, spoke. “Stop it! Stop fighting. You’re only making it worse.”
“Can it get any worse?” the blonde girl asked.
A moment of silence followed her question.
“It’s getting weaker,” the fourth girl said. “I can hardly feel it.”
“That’s what he wanted,” the auburn-haired girl said. “Break the circle, kill the magic.”
The blonde girl rose and paced in front of the fire. “What are we going to do?”
The auburn-haired girl stood and reached inside her jacket, pulling out a slender, wooden wand. Its tip sparkled crimson in the flickering firelight. She gripped it in both hands, and snapped it in half.
“We let it die,” she said. “I’ve lost too much tonight. Besides, we owe a debt now. We have to live long enough to repay it.”
“Yes,” the others spoke as one.
One by one, they stood and drew their wands, snapping them in half.
“Hurry,” the girl hidden in shadow said. “We have to get back.”
The auburn-haired girl pulled a burning stick from the fire and held it like a torch, lighting her way from the fire pit to the nearby creek. The others followed as she stepped carefully down the path to the water’s edge, to the base of a huge old tree whose roots wound and twisted into the water. There was a long scar in the bark where lightning had once struck it, a deep, wide crack where one of its huge twin forks had sheared away. The auburn-haired girl reached into it, her arm disappearing to the elbow, and withdrew a small wooden box, like a treasure chest.
She handed her torch to the blonde girl, pulled a large brass key from her pocket, and opened the chest. Inside was a small, battered book, its hard leather cover worn and curled at the edges. She dropped the halves of her broken wand into the box, and held it out to the others, who did the same.
Finally, she drew a second wand from her jacket, and held it up to the torch light. “I can’t do it,” she said, her voice catching on the last word. “It was hers. I can’t break it.” She dropped it into the chest and slammed the lid shut.
Crying out with anger, she hurled the chest across the creek, where it bounced into the open mouth of a small cave in the solid granite wall, vanishing in the darkness. A second later the key followed it.
The girl in the shadows moved forward, as if to run for the thrown chest and key, then stilled.
“It’s over,” the auburn-haired girl said. “Let’s go.”
They all rose and turned to go, except for the fourth girl, the one in the shadows. She moved forward only a single step, and stopped. Another figure, tall, red-haired, and with a ragged scar running down the right side of his face from temple to jaw line, stepped from the darkness and stopped beside her. He looked down into her face, eyebrows raised.
She grimaced, turned back to the others, and drew a wand hidden inside her jacket. She pointed it at their backs and closed her eyes.
There was a flash of blinding white light.
Then darkness.
Chapter 2
Little Red
Penny Sinclair came out of the old nightmare in her usual fashion, jerking awake with a gasp and throwing a hand in front of her eyes to block out that blinding flash of light. Slowly she became aware of her surroundings, not a country grove in the dark of night but the back seat of a bus.
Even as reality asserted itself, the dream faded from her mind. As always, only the barest sense of the nightmare remained, and th
e knowledge that she’d had it many times before in the past four months. The four months since her mother died.
Penny lowered her upraised hand and saw strange faces, all turned toward her. Curiosity was plain in some expressions, irritation in others, but most regarded her with naked sympathy, even pity.
Except for Miss Riggs, who sat beside Penny with her nose pressed in an open book, as oblivious to Penny as she had been on the flight in from California. Miss Riggs responded to Penny’s few attempts at conversation with terse, single word replies and impatient grunts.
Penny ignored the stares and peered through the window past her silent traveling companion. A passing car threw a glaze of brightness over the glass, and as it faded she found her own reflection, bloodshot green eyes, her long, curly red hair mussed from a day of hard travel, staring sadly back at her for a moment.
It was hard to believe she was hundreds of miles away from the city she’d lived in her entire life. The view through her window was achingly familiar. It could have been any of a hundred northern California roads she’d traveled with her mom.
The bus slowed as it passed a low, wild hillock, then slowed further as the wild grass blurred into a field of early summer wheat. Penny’s California daydreams evaporated into her new Washington reality when a weathered sign passed in front of her window.
Welcome to Dogwood, Washington – Home of Harvest Days.
Penny closed her eyes, sighed, and when she opened them, they were rolling to a stop in downtown Dogwood.
“Welcome home,” Miss Riggs said, catching Penny’s eye. She watched her with a familiar, narrow-eyed scrutiny, as if studying a picture she didn’t much like.
Penny couldn’t muster the strength for a reply, could barely muster the effort to stand when Miss Riggs rose to her feet. Hugging the bag that held her last few possessions, Penny waited for Miss Riggs to step past her, and followed her down the narrow aisle.
They were the only two to exit the bus in Dogwood, and no one waited at the curb to get on. A few moments after Penny stepped down onto the sidewalk, the door swished closed behind her.
Penny watched the silhouettes of the passengers through the bus windows as it moved into the distance, wishing she were still with them, driving into the orange summer dusk for cities and towns unknown.
I could have my pick, Penny thought wistfully. Anything but this.
The bus followed Dogwood’s short Main Street and turned with it in front of an elderly looking school building. Then it was gone.
“Stuck here now,” Penny whispered, feeling small and lost. Moisture stung the corner of her eyes and she wiped them away before Miss Riggs, or the growing number of gawkers gathering at porches and storefronts, could see her tears.
“What?” Miss Riggs regarded Penny again with those sharp, hawkish eyes.
“Nothing,” Penny said, and followed her to a rundown white VW Bug sitting alone at the curb a block away.
The woman arrived at her car a block ahead of Penny, and stood holding the passenger door open, tapping her foot impatiently.
Penny controlled the impulse to turn and run the other direction, all the way back to San Francisco if she could manage it, and walked a little quicker, sliding into the back seat of the Bug and cringing as Miss Riggs closed the door behind her.
“Little Red,” Miss Riggs said unexpectedly, startling Penny from her thoughts.
“Huh? What?”
Miss Riggs did her sigh again, it was a sound Penny was learning to loath, at once theatric and weary, and shot Penny a cross look through her rearview mirror. I don’t know why I even bother trying, her expression said.
“Susan says your nickname is Little Red.”
Penny nodded, surprised, and a little irritated. Little Red was her mom’s nickname for her, and no one else ever used it. She didn’t even know anyone else knew about it.
Penny was born prematurely, and had been small all her life. Her mom called her petite, which didn’t sound like a bad thing to her. The kids at the group home called her pipsqueak, runty, or the ginger hobbit.
Little Red had always been just between Penny and her mom, and coming from Miss Riggs’ mouth, it sounded more like an insult.
“I can’t hear you nod, you know,” Miss Riggs snapped, though she could obviously see her in the mirror. “The polite response would have been ‘Yes, Miss Riggs.’ A little elaboration would have been nice as well, since I’m attempting to get to know you.”
Penny bit her lips, cutting off the first reply that came to mind, and forced as polite a response as she could manage once her anger began to ebb.
“Yes, Miss Riggs, my mom called me Little Red. I don’t like other people doing it though.” She ended on a sharper note than she’d intended, and decided to keep her mouth shut from then on before she got herself into trouble.
The silence held for a few minutes before Miss Riggs broke it again. “Susan is anxious to see you. She jumped through a number of hoops to get you out of that orphanage, you know.”
All feigned friendliness had left her voice. It was dust-dry and sharp as a whipcrack.
“She didn’t have to,” the woman was quick to add. “She agreed to be your godmother when you were a baby, but she doesn’t even know you.”
Penny bit her lips again. She didn’t trust her mouth at that moment.
“Susan is generous to a fault, and there never has been a shortage of people willing to take advantage of it.”
Penny could hold her tongue no longer.
“I didn’t want to come here,” Penny shouted. “I didn’t ask for my mom to die, and I didn’t ask for anyone’s help!”
Penny took a savage satisfaction in Miss Riggs’ stunned expression. Her eyes were open so wide it looked like they might fall out of their sockets. Her mouth stretched so tight it almost vanished.
Penny knew she should stop, she was probably already in trouble, but she couldn’t. The words kept flowing, bitter water from a broken dam.
“Who are you anyway? If Susan is so anxious to see me, why didn’t she come get me? Why did she send you?”
For several tense seconds Miss Riggs offered no reply. There was no sound at all except the unhealthy-sounding rattle of the old VW Bug as it sped over rough country pavement.
Penny turned away from the pinched face reflected in the rearview mirror, two conflicting emotions battling in her head, making her want to scream. She was ashamed at her outburst; she didn’t like other people seeing her lose control. But a deeper part of her relished the shocked expression on Miss Riggs’ face and was not a bit sorry.
Penny watched the field outside her window. The orange dusk had deepened to a violet twilight. Downtown Dogwood was at her back now, though she could still see the school building when she craned her neck to look back. She hoped the ride would end soon.
“I am Susan’s sister. Her older sister,” she said, regaining her calm, if disdainful, tone. “Though she so seldom chooses to take my advice that it hardly matters.”
“The reason I was blessed with the thankless chore of fetching you from the arms of orphanhood,” she continued in that same dry, hateful tone, “was because she had to work today. Since I did not, she took advantage of my very limited generosity.”
The car slowed, and for a moment, Penny thought the woman was going to stop and let her out right there, in the middle of nowhere. Instead, they turned a sharp left at a sign that read Clover Hill Lane and started up a steep gravel path. Penny ignored the pinched and frowning face in the rearview mirror and peered through the windshield, straining at her seat belt to see the climbing road.
Something red and furry leapt from the grass, landing on four legs in the center of the gravel road. It paused there as the twin beams of the car’s headlights fell over it, and turned to face them.
“Look out!” Penny said, but Miss Riggs ignored her and drove on. Penny clamped her eyes shut, not wanting to see what would happen next, waiting for the fatal thump as the little car’s bumper
hit the animal, but the thump did not come. She opened her eyes again and spun in her seat, scanning the road behind them. The angry red glow of the car’s rear lights revealed nothing. No dead or injured animal lay in the dust and gravel. No live animal sprang back into the grass to escape them.
Penny faced forward again, her heart still racing a little, and the house at the top of Clover Hill came into view.
Chapter 3
Susan
To Penny, who had only ever lived in apartments in San Francisco, the house on the hill looked like a mansion. It was two stories tall, topped by a peaked attic that towered above everything and regarded the wild countryside with a single round window like an eye.
Penny wondered how far she’d be able to see from that window. Their apartment in the city was on the ninth floor, but in a place where every building is tall, you can never see far. Penny determined to make an exploration into the attic, if just for the view.
She wondered if her mom, who had apparently grown up in this town, had ever viewed this same countryside from such a high place. As always, the thought of her mom brought her tears back to the surface, dousing her natural curiosity with grief.
Miss Riggs pulled parallel to a stone pathway that ran through a slightly overgrown lawn to the house’s front porch, and Penny grabbed her bag, pushing the door open and sliding out onto the dusty driveway.
The Bug was in motion again almost immediately, giving Penny barely enough time to shut the door and jump back a step. With a single, quick wink of her brake lights, Miss Riggs descended the winding driveway, and was gone.
Penny lingered for a moment on the first stone of a path through the grass, taking a longer, more thorough look at the house. Absorbing the sense of this strange new place that was now, for good or bad, her home.
