Haven Lost

by Josh de Lioncourt

  Contents

  Synopsis

  Title Page

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  To Begin …

  Part One: Faceoff

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two: Starting Lineup

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Three: Five for Fighting

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Four: Penalty Kill

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Five: Offside

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Six: Into the O-zone

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part Seven: In the Box

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Part Eight: Power Play

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Part Nine: Breakaway

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Overtime

  Acknowledgements

  More by Josh de Lioncourt

  About the Author

  Legends never die …

  Sixteen-year-old Emily Haven, heroine of the girls’ hockey team at Lindsey High, has spent her young life keeping two secrets: her rapidly deteriorating home life and the seemingly supernatural power that makes her a star on the ice. When she begins seeing visions of a ragged boy reflected in mirrors and shop windows, a series of events unfolds that tears her from twenty-first century Minneapolis and leaves her stranded in another world with horrors to rival those she has left behind. Lost amidst creatures of fantasy and legend, she is forced to confront the demons of both her past and future to unravel the riddle of the mysterious boy and embark upon a journey to uncover long forgotten histories and the dark, cloaked figure in the shadows behind them all. Caught between opposing forces of a war she does not understand, Emily must find new strength within herself and, above all, the will to remember her friends.

  Haven Lost

  The Dragon’s Brood Cycle

  Volume 1

  by Josh de Lioncourt

  Cover illustration by Max Naylor

  Copyright © 2018 Josh de Lioncourt

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real events, locales, mythical creatures, or actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental or are used fictitiously.

  For my daughters, friends, and loved ones

  “The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.”

  —Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

  Part One: Faceoff

  “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”

  —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

  “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  “The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.”

  —Socrates

  Chapter One

  Emily swerved to the left even as she continued gathering speed, dodging the bigger girl who moved to block her progress. She felt the cold air as it swirled around her. She felt the smooth flow of the ice as it slid nearly effortlessly beneath her skates. This was it. She could feel it. That sweet thrum in her muscles and the low, distant whine in her head, as comforting as an old familiar sweater.

  Just ahead, only one defender stood between her and the net. She could get around her, but she was running out of room. She’d have to be quick and sure. There was no time to think; only time to act. And, of course, acting was all there was when she felt this way.

  With another burst of speed, she swung the puck around the defender to her left and propelled her body around and to the right. As she and the puck found each other again behind the scrambling girl, Emily chanced a glance up at the clock. Three seconds…

  The crowd was on its feet, roaring. She couldn’t even hear the hiss of blades on ice beneath her anymore. She swept the puck around her body and, in one fluid movement, pulled back for the shot.

  She’d always had a great shot. The coach had told her it was the best he’d seen in his twenty-six years of coaching the girls hockey team for Lindsey High. This time was no exception. She let a rocket go. It flashed past the netminder, who never even twitched.

  Emily was already raising her fist in triumph when, nearly simultaneously, she heard the puck ring off the far post and the sound of the horn, ending the game.

  It hadn’t gone in. They were still down by a goal—and it would stay that way. The game was over. They’d lost.

  For a moment, she continued to coast on her skates toward the goalie, then abruptly turned to the right, missing the other girl by inches.

  It hadn’t gone in. She’d known it would—known it—but it hadn’t. She spun around as she reached the dasher boards and stared at the traitorous post. Another inch to the left, and they’d be heading into overtime right now. They could win in overtime. They hadn’t lost a game in OT all year long. Instead, the spectators, mostly boys and girls from school and a smattering of parents and teachers, were already filing out of the stands. Some were celebrating. Some were commiserating. All were gathering up their things and leaving.

  For a while, Emily stood against the boards, clutching her stick to her chest, and simply waited for the other players to get off the ice. It was as though a pillar serving as the foundation of her world had tottered, leaving her to stumble and stagger as the ground tilted and swayed crazily beneath her, the deck of a ship in rough seas.

  She was still staring at the net when she heard the familiar sound of steel on ice echoing through the now silent arena. Coach Anders was skating toward her, a look of friendly concern on his face.

  She started moving then, skating to the far side of the rink to avoid the coach, making her way to the bench and locker room beyond. She didn’t want to hear the old stuffy platitudes about how “it’s not whether you win or lose…” and so on. Bullshit. It was always about whether you won or lost. The old axiom was just what you said to make the losers feel better about lacing up their skates the next time the puck was dropped. She knew better. Either way, that wasn’t the point.

  She trudged into the locker room, dripping snow from her skates. She hung her stick on the rack without looking and went straight to her locker, not meeting anyone’s gaze. Casey was already there, nearly finished changing out of her hockey things.

  “C’mon Em,” she said, catching sight of Emily’s face through the visor as she pushed her blonde hair behind her ears. She turned to study her friend more closely.

  “C’mon what?” Emily snapped, throwing herse
lf down on the bench beside Casey. She undid the buckles of her helmet and tossed it down between them with considerably more force than was necessary.

  “You were bound to miss one eventually,” Casey said in a low voice. “It’s over with now. It won’t be hanging over you anymore. You might not miss any others for the rest of the year. So we lost. We lost last week too. Shit happens.”

  For a moment, Emily thought about arguing, thought about telling Casey that it wasn’t that simple. She had known she was going to make that goal. She had known. And then, it hadn’t happened. It didn’t work that way—at least, it never had.

  Instead, she decided it was better to let Casey think she was just moping than to convince her friend she was crazy. Maybe she was. Who ever heard of a hockey psychic, anyway? Maybe that was all bullshit, too.

  “Want to go for hot chocolate or something? I’ll buy,” Casey offered, standing and stretching her arms behind her back.

  “No…thanks though.” Emily struggled to keep her voice normal. “I’m just going to change and head home. I’m tired.” It was a lie, and not a very good one. They’d been friends too long to make the words anything less than transparent. Emily wanting to go back home to her drunk and drugged out mom and stepdad held about the same plausibility as a jellyfish wanting a vacation in the Sahara. But Casey let it go with nothing more than a troubled look.

  That look said more than any words, and Emily was suddenly filled with a rush of such gratitude toward Casey that she got to her feet and hugged her. Startled, Casey stood stiffly for a moment, surprised. Emily wasn’t usually the hugging type, but after a moment, she relaxed and squeezed back.

  They broke apart, and Casey straightened her shirt awkwardly. Emily looked away, feeling uncomfortable and not exactly sure why. She studied the scratched and dirty numbers etched into the door of her locker. Casey coughed, and Emily met her eyes again.

  “Well…got my phone,” Casey said. “Call if you change your mind.”

  “Yeah. Thanks. I will.” The two friends stared at each other for a moment longer, then Emily dropped her eyes and muttered, “Sorry, Case.” Casey made a flapping gesture. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ that gesture said. Emily smiled. She might’ve looked longer—harder—at her friend, had she known what was waiting for her in the next few hours. But she didn’t know. The knowing didn’t work like that either. It never had.

  “See ya,” Casey said as she swung her schoolbag over one shoulder and headed for the door. Emily watched her go.

  She moved slowly after the door slammed behind Casey, stripping out of her gear and dressing herself in civilian layers against the snow she’d be facing outside. The other girls chattered and changed around her, departing in twos and threes. Some glanced her way as they went, and a few even told her she’d had a good game. She smiled and nodded and quietly wished they would all just let her be. By the time she was slipping her feet into her sneakers, the door was closing behind the last of the girls, and she was alone with her thoughts.

  Casey called it “the groove”—those moments leading up to one of Emily’s spectacular goals, when she could dance around every other player on the ice, knowing every move to make to evade them and light the lamp for Lindsey High. To her, it was normal. No big deal. They’d been playing hockey together for almost ten years, and Emily had never disabused her friend of the notion.

  But Emily knew that what she felt in those moments was not normal at all. It couldn’t be explained away with new-age mumbo-jumbo. It went beyond that. To Casey, Emily had found her groove and had missed a goal. It was bound to happen once in a while.

  But Emily had always known when that next goal was coming. Never once in nearly ten years had she ever missed one when that feeling had electrified her muscles and seeped into her marrow. Never—until now.

  She sat listening to the silence for a moment, resting her head in her hands. Everyone was gone. They’d want to lock things up soon. She needed somewhere she could think and try to make sense of it on her own.

  She stood, swinging her backpack onto her shoulders, and started down the long row of lockers toward the door. She had her savings in her bag; it wasn’t safe to leave them at home, not with her mother constantly ransacking her room for drug money. She’d been saving up for a new pair of skates for months, but she supposed that spending a couple bucks on a coffee on the way home couldn’t hurt much this once. She could sit and pretend to do her homework at a table in Starbucks and give herself a chance to think about…whatever it was that had happened. It was hard for her to even approach the thought in her mind yet. She felt as if the only stable part of her life in these last few years had suddenly and irrevocably betrayed her. It had.

  As she turned the corner at the end of the row, she glanced into the full-length mirror hanging on the wall—and froze.

  In the mirror, just a few steps behind her, was a boy. He looked to be roughly her own age, dressed in torn and dirty clothes that may have once been jeans and a jacket, though it was hard to tell now beneath the multitude of patched and stitched up places. His hair was long and unevenly cut, pulled back behind his head and tied with a leather thong. On his face was a look of such exquisite sadness that, though she was certainly startled, Emily was not immediately alarmed.

  She spun around to face the boy, wondering as she did how on Earth she hadn’t heard him creeping up behind her in the silent echo chamber of the locker room.

  There was no one there. The long row of lockers stretched out in front of her, still, silent, and she was very much alone.

  She knelt quickly, looking under the benches on her right. Nothing. Only an abandoned sock at the end of one row. Nowhere else for anyone to hide either.

  She looked back at the mirror. Only her own confused green eyes stared back at her, framed by her plain dark hair. Had she imagined the boy? Had it been a trick of the light? She frowned up at the fluorescents above her, casting their clear and unforgiving brilliance on everything below. Not very damn likely.

  She shook her head. Stress from the…incident…on the ice. She thought she’d seen a boy in the mirror. Obviously, she hadn’t. Best not to think about it too hard.

  She squared her shoulders and headed for the door again, walking just a little faster than was usual for her. She suddenly didn’t want to be quite so very much alone.

  By the time she reached the door, she was nearly running. She hurtled through it and collided with someone standing just outside. She bounced off the large body and nearly slipped in the melting snow that dampened the tiles beneath her.

  A pair of large, strong hands clasped her shoulders, steadying her on her feet, and she looked up to find herself staring into the face of Coach Anders. He offered her a small smile, the familiar mischievous twinkle in his eye beneath the crow’s nest of graying hair.

  “You sure are in a hurry. Determined to avoid me, too, I guess.”

  Emily flushed. “No, sir…I just…” she floundered, searching for a lie, but he only shook his head at her.

  “Don’t, Em. I know you don’t want to talk to me right now. Probably you don’t want to talk to anyone much. That’s fine. But I want to talk to you for a minute or two. Humor an old man, won’t you? I won’t keep you long. Would you come down to my office?”

  He was giving her an out. He could have easily ordered her to come with him, but he was leaving it up to her. Somehow, that made all the difference.

  “Okay,” she said and followed as he led her down the hall and into his tiny office.

  Coach Anders’s office was, to the outside observer, utter chaos. An enormous metal desk took up nearly all the space, with a chair on each side of it and a dented file cabinet shoved into a corner. Emily wondered, not for the first time, if he actually had anything in that old cabinet. It was so tight behind his desk that it seemed anyone trying to get the cabinet open would have to climb up onto the desktop to have enough room to slide the drawers open. Since the desk was piled high with papers, hockey equipment, off
ice supplies, and mounds of other detritus, much of which looked like it dated back to the 1970s, getting up on the desk without causing a minor catastrophe would be a challenge in itself.

  The image of her coach crouching amidst the clutter of his desk, trying to lean over and pull open one of those drawers, filled Emily’s mind for a moment, and she grinned in spite of herself.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a mess.” Coach Anders squeezed around his desk and dropped into his chair, motioning for her to take the only other seat across from him.

  “No, it’s not that…it’s just…” Emily broke off, sitting on the edge of the cold plastic chair and looking around.

  “Yes, it is. One way or another, it is. Don’t tell me the picture you had in your head. I’m sure I don’t want to know. But every colleague, student, or parent who has ever stepped through that door has always had that same silly grin on their mug within three seconds of catching a glimpse of this…” he waved a hand to indicate the chaos at large. “It may not look like it, but I know where every damn thing is in here. It isn’t pretty, but it works.” He leaned back in his chair, tried to put his feet up on the corner of the desk, and caused an avalanche of papers to fall off the other side and into Emily’s lap. They both started laughing, and he put his feet back on the floor as she scooped up the papers and attempted to balance them atop a mostly empty box of Kleenex. She wasn’t at all sure where the papers had started. There didn’t seem to be a spot for them on the desk anymore.

  “Sorry…sorry!” he said. “That was not a good illustration of the point I was trying to make.” Emily grinned at him and sank back into the chair, feeling relaxed for the first time since missing that goal…

  That thought, unbidden and bitter, broke the spell of the moment, and the grin fell away from her face. Anders saw it but did not comment at once. He only surveyed her across the mountains, hills, and valleys of debris that made up the landscape of his domain, seeming to study her closely.