Umbrella…she hadn’t packed an umbrella.
“Hope you enjoy London.” He offered one last salutation in a faintly biting tone, before buckling for the bumpy landing.
Brits were all the same, their dedication to dental hygiene aside. Her father had been a master of words, saying one thing while meaning the opposite. Something as trivial as a hello could convey a dozen meanings. So while John Thornton in seat AC4 had a smile plastered on his face, he really meant, “Have a nice life, you bint.”
It wasn’t her fault he wasn’t pretty enough to join at the pub later.
Amie shuddered at the rain pounding against the thick Plexiglas. Hopefully the train station was close by. She hadn’t had time to plan much in her rush to meet the deadline on Uncle Henry’s plane ticket. Truth was, she would have rather shaved off the thick mane now frizzed about her head than spend five pounds she didn’t have on a new raincoat.
Drumming her fingers against the glass, she tried not to think about the cell phone stuffed into her pocket. She had turned it off before the flight to avoid the endless stream of calls pouring into her voice mail. Instead she tried to sort out whatever possessed her to do something so bonkers, as her dad would have called it. Maybe it was just writer’s madness. Whatever twisted Wonderland her uncle had waiting for her in the sticks of Northern England, there was still a deadline to be met. And she wasn’t about to let her career be buried six feet under before she’d had the chance to do some real writing.
Shame she didn’t have the time she needed to finish the War of 1812.
I really should think up a better title.
…
Thunder seemed not to deter the Heathrow Airport population, already decked out in their coats, umbrellas ready. In her lightweight holey brown jacket and jeans, toting only one carry-on and saddlebag, it was no wonder she was bearing the brunt of so many stares. Or maybe she was being paranoid? Letters from a godfather-like uncle hinting at mafia dangers tended to do that to a person.
Feeling a bit like a North by Northwest Cary Grant at the moment, she looked round for her exit. Henry had done little to aid this leg of her journey besides including a train ticket to the West Coast Main Line in his second letter. King’s Cross Station shouldn’t be too difficult to peg once she reached the city. The map of London she had hocked off the oh-so-helpful Mr. Thornton might have been less confusing if the letter’s instructions were vaguer. She dared a glance down at the separate, thin parchment while trying to avoid being bumped through bumper car heaven.
“You will find your first escort by way of a symbol. Look closely for it and do not worry. You will know the symbol the moment you see it. Remember, talk to no one. Trust no one.”
…
Rain couldn’t possibly pour in such copious amounts without bringing on the Flood. She had been trying to hail one of those strange black London taxis to no avail and was now effectively drenched. Her summer clothes were far too thin for this kind of rain. It was a biting enough chill, she wouldn’t have been surprised if sleet and hail were next.
Just my luck!
Holding her map so it was tented comically over her head and officially useless by the time it had finished agreeing to keep her dry, she looked for Henry’s symbol. The crowds had not let up. Blinking past the sting of ruined mascara, she looked for whatever it was she was looking for while her skin grew pruned and chilled. Of all the people pushing through the airport, she was the only one without some kind of protection from the storm…except him.
Forgetting to blink, forgetting to breathe, Amie gasped her disbelief. She could have sworn she had glanced across the street seconds ago and hadn’t seen him anywhere close! Yet it was undeniably him. He stood immobile in a sea of nameless sheltered faces. Rain had plastered his shock of black hair to his forehead and poured over an unremarkable face. His unsettling stare had formed a new intensity since their last encounter. Even in the distance, his eyes seemed to glow.
Cold gave way to heat, the kind of heat she had not felt in years, not since before the crash…
A taxi appeared before her feet with a screeching halt and splattered her with a wall of dirty water. Confused when she had been trying to get a taxi for the last hour with no success, she glanced around to find the person who had signaled it. Instead the taxi driver tapped his horn and through the foggy window a rough-looking man peered up at her.
When she looked to the street, her stalker and savior was gone.
Laughing as she let down her ruined map, she tried to shake the troubling feeling that this was all becoming way too real. Of course the mysterious tall, dark and handsome man vanished into the night, leaving the heroine in suspense over their next encounter. It was an easy line. She had used that line.
Thoughts of her would-be stalker were interrupted by another, louder beep.
Amie frowned, eyes falling onto the stickers littering the side bumper of the cab. “Keep your panty-hose on! I’m coming!” She froze when a very familiar symbol met her eyes, so tiny only someone intimately familiar with it would recognize the Celtic knot. She shivered. The strange interweaving crest she had seen a hundred thousand times in her memories was glaring her obscenely in the face. The same symbol she had only ever seen on her father’s old ring now hidden against her chest on a silver chain. The cool metal brushed recently healed skin.
Beep! Beep!
The horn startled her from her thoughts and something in her agreed with the cabbie’s insistence. The sooner she left this place the better. This was getting too weird.
Chapter 6
Blink of an Eye
In her dreams the orchard was always in bloom, the scent of apples fresh to her nose. The sound of her young laughter filled the air as she wove between a maze of trees. She had always been a scrawny thing ever since she was born. Though she was usually a head higher than the other children her age, the trees were much older and bigger.
A deep voice growled out seemingly ahead and around her, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!” A flurry of the giant’s robes caught the edge of her vision in the trunks ahead.
Amie screeched and grasped the nearest branch she could find, swinging herself up to hide among the leaves. Heart pounding in her chest, she tried to dampen her excitement and the prospect of her bones being ground in the beast’s bread. How deliciously horrifying!
A snap of the twig to her right caught her attention. But when she twisted her small frame to see it, a laughing, white-bearded face met her instead. His laughter boomed through the tops as he snatched her up and into his arms.
“Come to steal me gold, little runt?” he asked while tucking her into his side and leaping onto the ground. He had never been young, long as she could remember, but he was stronger than any giant.
Amie laughed and pressed her lips to his hairy cheek, enjoying the smell of leather and mint. “Aye!” With a sly hand she pulled his dagger from his robes. “Gotcha!”
The train jolted against the tracks, bumping her head against the glass she had been propped against, and jerking her out of her dreams. Disoriented, she frowned at her surroundings and struggled to fight the panic causing her heart to race. Closing her eyelids, she squeezed her palm and found the lost key between her fingers. Events of the past two days came rushing back to her, reminding her she was near the end of her journey.
With a groan she sat up, rubbed her eyes, finding black smudges on her palms. Blinking past the drugged-up feeling of jetlag, she was thankful to be the only passenger in this compartment. Casting a casual glance at the opulence Uncle Henry had provided specially for her, old-fashioned gold trimmings on cherry wood and soft cushioned seats, Amie wondered once more how she had been sucked into this J.K. Rowling fantasy. She could only hope her destination would be as cool as Hogwarts.
Don’t get your hopes up, Wentworth.
Amie had been granted a brief glimpse of the city on the way to King’s Cross Station. Taxis and fire-engine-red double-deckers littered the s
treets. She most enjoyed the blue Boris bikes half the populous seemed to favor. The scene reminded her of the one trip to New York she had made after the crash. London was a foreign madness, even if it was vaguely familiar to her mixed heritage.
After being dropped off at the train station, Amie managed to board the correct line. Mere minutes later, yet another letter was passed along to her by a confused looking passenger. The young man had said little before shoving the parchment nervously at her and retreating. Further instructions told her to get off at the next stop and board the next train.
She had felt ridiculous being one of a few people exiting at this halfway point between destinations. That is, until another train arrived from seemingly nowhere on the opposite tracks. It made no logical sense, but the conductor wore a badge with her family’s symbol on it, which had to count for something, right?
No sooner had she been led to her compartment and shoved her baggage on the rack, than she sank into her seat and gave into sweet sleep.
Holding her compact mirror to her face, she stared back in shock at her frightening portrait. Mascara had smudged during her dip in the London rain, leaving what looked like permanent stains. Was this why the cabbie and the conductor kept giving her so many discreetly odd looks?
She laughed at herself, wiped the makeup stains with trembling hands and fought back tears. She had just dreamed for the first time since she turned thirteen.
Before she hit puberty the dreams were easily passed off as the working of her subconscious mind. Father was always telling her stories of magic and his childhood in Silver Hollow. After all, her favorite books were fairy tales.
The dream had been so real…just like she remembered. When she turned thirteen her sleep was suddenly filled with people and places that acted out more like memories. And the moment she told Rusty about them, her father took her to the family doctor and gave her a prescription for sleeping pills. On the rare occasion she missed taking them, the memory-like dreams assaulted her with terrifying clarity. No longer pleasant, those dreams were filled with dark creatures that haunted them in the night and a castle on fire.
Annoyingly, just the thought of those nightmares made her eyes, her father’s eyes, begin to leak unnecessary tears. Amie had given up on crying her troubles away long before her parents’ deaths.
Something Father always said was, “Keep a stiff upper lip, Jessamiene, and the soggy world will seem just as dry and unaltered as your eyes.”
The last time Amie shed real tears was the first anniversary of the car crash. It was the first time since the funeral she had visited their graves. Faye and Jo were sandwiched on either side of her. Snow, the miracle of the South, covered the ground in wet icy sheets. By this time, Amie had moved past clinical shock and anger and on to the guilt. What if she had gone with them that night? Would they have come home later while she was introduced to more people? Would they have left an hour earlier because Amie complained par usual she had more than enough studying to do without wasting time rubbing elbows?
Faye and Jo carried some of the same guilt, they confessed. They had wanted a night out. They had begged her to drive them to the movies, instead of going to the party with her parents.
Amie worked through each spell of grief with the same philosophy. The only one at fault was fate itself, choosing to steal what security she knew. And deep down she knew even this was somehow a lie.
Fate had only served to tie her closer to the twins. Where would she have been all this time without them? They were the ones who encouraged her writing, who carried her with them through life. Still, her heart ached to know the pain she had caused them by splitting town. Avoiding the worried voicemails certainly waiting in her cell phone, Amie hadn’t turned on her phone since entering the airport. She knew if she listened to Faye’s angry protests and Jo’s concerns she would lose her resolve.
The letter she left at her apartment wouldn’t be good enough, she knew, but it was the best she could do on short notice. She had even called her agent and editor to let them know her sudden plans in case anyone wanted a turn at sleuthing. It wasn’t like she could wait for Faye to come to her apartment. She would have missed the time of the flight Uncle Henry had booked. Trying to explain to Faye in person would have risked too much. The twins didn’t know about Uncle Henry, or his letters. They didn’t know the “almost mugged before pepper spray” story was a lie. Not yet, that was. Frustration toward her Uncle grew. After all, there wasn’t any getting around, “Remember, talk to no one. Trust no one.”
The trust factor was understandable. Amie barely managed to trust her own agent and editor to get her books out there. Since her parents’ car crash it was a natural inclination for her to be cautious of strangers. But how was she supposed to cross the Atlantic without talking to a single soul? Keeping silent so far had made her feel like more of a foreigner than she already did.
Amie had never gone anywhere on her own in all of the ten years they were a makeshift family. Always one of the twins made themselves her designated chaperone. If Amie had learned not to trust after losing her parents, her best friends learned to be even more paranoid. Nothing could keep them from protecting their little nucleus. Two days ago she would have never left them in the dark, not after everything they had done for her.
The green eyes staring back from her mirror widened as her scar chose to suddenly ache. A chill lay thick on the new skin, piercing through her supernaturally mended heart. Fathomless black eyes hovered in her memory. She could almost still feel the cool blade of the knife and smell the pungent stink of her own blood.
Shoving the compact back in her saddlebag, Amie leaned against the headrest and watched the sun set over a horizon so different than the one she had left. Would she feel safe with her uncle at Silver Hollow?
Doubtful, Wentworth…
Whatever twisted place her father came from was bad enough he had reinvented himself just to cut ties. Growing up she had been used to her overprotective parents, though it was generally Dad calling all the shots. He had rarely let her spend time apart from them unless it was with the neighbors.
Her hand crept to absently trace the long white scar hidden beneath her t-shirt.
Uncle Henry’s letter had the tone of a man in fear of his safety. And it wasn’t a white tattoo she had etched across her chest. She knew she was in deep. Whatever mob war she had been swept up in she wanted no part of. But, much like the Godfather, once she was in she had a feeling she wouldn’t slip out. At least not without a bullet through her head.
Chapter 7
Impossibly Possible
It was official. She was completely mental.
She was standing on a rain-stained red train platform. Well, more like a small boardwalk connected to a shed than a platform. Still, the moment had taken a turn for the worse. No conductor had appeared to escort her off and the doors weren’t easy to forcibly shove aside. Still she was grateful to leave the Orient Express. Her luggage sat idly beside her now. Turning the hood of her jacket up, she wrapped her arms around her chest to ward against the gusty north winds.
Squinting up at the sky, she was wary of the thick gray clouds rolling overhead and the near-absent sun. As of yet she hadn’t heard any thunder or smell any promise of rain. Did rain smell the same in England as it did in America? At least it wasn’t boiling hot here like it had been back home.
Unbidden, thoughts of East Texas reminded her of the unfinished novel stored in her saddle bag. Impending deadline on her conscience, she longed for the days when she only wrote for herself. Storytelling was something she came by honestly, a gift from her father. Drustan had told her so many wonderful tales of the place he grew up. For a family which never owned anything more advanced than a record player, those stories and her imagination were all she had to thrive on. She learned later he had exaggerated greatly, of course. Her childhood fantasies were dashed the day she found that the place he had grown up was actually a small village in Northern England called Wenderdowne.
Ever since then she preferred fantasy to the hard real world. That was why writing gritty paranormal romance thrillers had been so easy a dish to swallow. Something stirred from the twist of the crag above. Had the car finally decided to arrive? Amie turned from the empty train tracks and peered either way down the road behind the shed, but could see nothing other than a persistent fog. Rolling her eyes, she murmured, “Great. Now we’ve entered into a Gothic Romance. Bring on the Heathcliffs and Rochesters…” Her short laugh died the moment she saw the high heads of two dark horses and the black carriage behind them. “You have got to be kidding me…”
The fog must have been playing tricks on her mind, because in the next moment the carriage was before her and the hunched-over man driving it tipped up his top hat with a gloved hand. “Afraid not, miss! So sorry to have kept you waiting! Hope it hasn’t been too long, aye?” His pale brown eyes twinkled brightly in his grizzled face.
Amie managed to shut her gaping mouth and inclined her head to the carriage door. “I’m riding to my uncle’s in that?” There was no doubt this was the mysterious Henry’s doing. It was right up there with his strange letters and her father’s old stories. Insanity must run through the family.
The man laughed and eased back in his seat. “Aye!” he said. “’Tis the idea, miss. Least those were my orders from the Master. You are the Lady Jessamiene of Wenderdowne, are you not?” Even his horses stood quietly and inclined their heads towards her then.
Amie blinked dumbly back. “Ah, yeah, I guess so, whatever Uncle Henry says,” she laughed. “Never imagined the old codger would give me this dramatic a welcome, though.” Noticing that the old man’s smile had turned a puzzled frown at her odd words, she changed the subject. Picking up her bags, she posed, “I’m guessing we have a long ride back?”
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