The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  “Put them on,” Erasmus snapped when Zoe and Ellen didn’t hurry to don their new robes. “Kat and I included a few surprises for you.”

  Penny wondered when the two of them had found the time to conspire on these surprises, or when their association had evolved into a casual one. Out of the four of them, Katie was the slowest to trust, and she’d not started with a high opinion of Erasmus.

  Penny inspected her robe while the other girls slipped into theirs, and discovered a surprising number of pockets both inside and out, including long, narrow pockets inside the sleeves. For her wand, she assumed.

  Penny tested the right sleeve wand pocket and found it a tight fit for hers. Zoe, Katie, and Ellen’s wands were new and straight, but Penny’s, the first working wand they had started learning with, was twisted and bent, grayed with age and long use. She thought it was made from a length of the old ash trees exposed roots, and its bends and twists made it an awkward fit for the robe’s sleeve pocket. She also thought it would make for a slow draw if she ever needed it in a hurry.

  “Nice, huh?” Erasmus seemed to be enjoying himself more than usual. He set his cane aside and took a step toward Penny. He reached for her with his right hand.

  Penny shouted in surprise as her wand slipped loose of her sleeve and leapt into his waiting hand.

  “Hey!” Penny shouted in indignation.

  Katie, Zoe, and Ellen squealed with laughter.

  Bowen chuckled, and Michael rolled his eyes.

  “It’s a simple spell, and will come in very handy for a fast draw,” Erasmus said, placing Penny’s wand back in her hand.

  A few minutes later they stood in a row, Erasmus, Bowen, and Michael standing off to the side.

  “Draw,” Erasmus barked.

  They drew, and four wands shot from four sleeves... and went flying into the trees and out of sight.

  “Good work,” Erasmus said. “Next time try to catch them.”

  A half-hour later Erasmus pronounced their progress satisfactory.

  “We’re going to skip your book tonight, girls. We didn’t bring big brother here just to watch.” One of Erasmus’s dreadlocks slipped out from beneath his hat and pulled a wand from inside his coat. “Take it, Sheriff. We’re all anxious to see what you can do.”

  Michael took the wand, careful not to touch the dreadlock, and held it out in front of him like a dead mouse.

  Katie covered a grin behind her hand.

  Erasmus coached Michael through what he called the basics: fighting stance, the elementals, and shielding. Michael flubbed them all, accidentally set fire to his own shoes, couldn’t conjure more than a breath of wind, and let every minor spell Erasmus sent his way through his feeble shield.

  Penny suspected he was too wound up and self-conscious to do it well, but he was at least doing it.

  “Not bad,” Erasmus said, “for a first attempt.”

  Everyone else remained respectfully silent, including, to Penny’s surprise, Katie.

  “I think it’s a waste of time,” Michael said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Neither did we,” Zoe said, then blushed and looked away when Michael smiled at her.

  “Don’t give up,” Ellen said.

  “Give it a little more time,” Penny said.

  “How am I supposed to look up to you if you give up so easily?” Katie asked. “Seriously, don’t be such a sad sack.”

  “One more thing before we call it a night, girls,” Erasmus said, and Penny noticed Katie’s grin widen.

  Another of their surprises?

  “Put your hoods on,” Erasmus said.

  They did.

  “Woah!” Ellen shouted. “Where did your heads go?”

  Penny assumed they were seeing the same thing as her, figures in black robes and empty hoods. Inside their raised hoods, where their faces should have been plainly visible, was nothing but darkness.

  “Shadow charm,” Erasmus said, bouncing on his heels and clearly pleased with himself. “When your hoods are up no one will be able to see your faces... I invented it.”

  “Impressive,” boomed a voice from above.

  There was a full second of total silence. No one moved, no one breathed.

  Then they turned as one, the girls and Erasmus drawing their wands, and saw a huge grizzly bear standing on the high ledge above the hollow, looking down on them.

  * * *

  Penny screamed, Katie dropped her wand, and Ellen stood and stared in blank horror.

  “Hi Zoe,” the bear said, and poked its head through the part in the willow limbs framing the trail into the hollow. “Don’t shoot, Sheriff, I’m not here to eat you.”

  “Dad?” Zoe lowered her wand and craned her neck toward the phantom figure standing high above them. “Dad? What... how... what?”

  Erasmus gave a squawk of surprise and sprinted up the hill, his wand leading the way.

  “What are you?” His stubby legs pumped frantically to propel him up the crumbling slope. “What do you want?”

  Erasmus topped the hill, and stumbled as the bear pushed past him and loped down into the clearing.

  “I wondered where you were sneaking off to every night,” the bear said, and Penny recognized the voice now, though she was having a tough time believing it. “I watched you walking through those doors, but wherever it was you were going, I couldn’t follow. I should have known.”

  Reggie, the grizzly bear, looked at Erasmus, who was struggling down the slope into the clearing again.

  “Surely I’m not the first dream walker you’ve met?”

  “Zoe, why didn’t you tell us your dad is a shaman?” Bowen inspected the massive bear with clear excitement. “What else can you do?”

  “Yeah, Zoe. Would have been nice to know.” Erasmus slid the last few feet down into the clearing. “Any more surprises for me?”

  “I didn’t know,” Zoe said.

  Reggie winked at her and ambled between Penny and Ellen.

  Ellen gave a little scream and stepped away.

  “I wish someone would tell me what the hell is going on,” Michael said.

  “I would if I knew,” Katie said.

  “Let the shaman explain,” Erasmus growled and boosted himself back onto his stool.

  “The shaman will explain some other time,” Reggie said. “But no more sneaking around, Zoe. This isn’t my first go-round with the Phoenix Girls, and if there’s a fight coming, it won’t be my first fight either.”

  Before Zoe or Erasmus could respond, Reggie was gone.

  * * *

  At first Penny didn’t know she was dreaming. She only knew it was late, dark, and that she was waiting for someone. She was in the hollow, in her pajamas, the small oval mirror clutched in her hand.

  “Tovar?” A familiar sharp-featured face and hair so red it looked like flames appeared and stared up at her in momentary confusion.

  And Penny remembered. She understood. She was reliving her memories of a time almost a year ago when she was first learning magic and facing a monster she had no hope of defeating. She turned her head to the left and found the other half of her, her dream doppelganger, looking into the mirror now, acting out the past events as if for the first time.

  “This isn’t what I need,” she told Penny, and turned away from the door. The scene around them went dark, even the mirror in her hand vanished. “You saw something, you did something, and you can’t remember. It’s in there, and we have to find it.”

  “What?” Penny was tired of the long days, the late nights, and waking up from these freaky dreams feeling like she hadn’t slept at all. “What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded as out of patience as Penny felt. “If I knew, we wouldn’t have to do this.”

  “So what now?”

  “We do it again!”

  Penny hesitated at the tone of her voice, frustration, almost anger, and her doppelganger grabbed her by the arm and pulled her forward.

  Penny re
laxed, resigned, and they put their foreheads together again.

  “Two bodies, one mind.”

  * * *

  She felt the tears on her cheeks as she relived Ronan’s rescue from Turoc’s lair beneath the landfill, fighting the evil yellow-eyed homunculi, her wand and a dirty sock stuffed full of the relics he’d gone down into that dangerous place to rescue.

  She knew what would come next, the terror of being trapped in a crumbling earth tunnel beneath the collapsing debris, the narrow escape, and the heartbreak when they thought they’d lost Ronan. She had never forgotten that, never would, and she didn’t want to relive it.

  “Penny?” A voice, but not her doppelganger’s, and not Katie’s. Katie is still leading them upward toward the surface, panting with her exertion, not speaking. “What are you doing?”

  It’s Zoe, but Zoe wasn’t down there with her. Zoe was on the surface rushing to rescue them with Ellen.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder, and Penny screamed herself out of the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel, screamed herself awake, and found herself facing the open wardrobe door, one foot poised to step inside and into Aurora Hollow.

  Penny wrenched herself free of the arm on her shoulder and spun, raising her wand. She had expected to find her strange twin had somehow followed her out of the dream, but it was Zoe.

  Penny sighed and stumbled to her bed.

  “What was that about?” Zoe closed the door on Aurora Hollow, keeping a wary eye on Penny.

  “Sleepwalking.” Penny put her wand down and flopped backward onto her bed.

  “You never used to do that.” Zoe also relaxed and laid back down.

  Penny thought about telling Zoe everything. The dream twin, the searches through her memories for something lost.

  Instead she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

  If she dreamed, she did not remember it.

  * * *

  The rest of the week, the last of their summer vacation, shot by them like an arrow. Penny’s exploration of the cellar and its artifacts of her mother’s life in Dogwood came to a stop as they moved her stock from storage to Taylor and Pi. Reggie and Dana took time off from driving, staying in their sleeper cab on Penny’s property to help Susan. Reggie questioned all four of them until he got the whole story, then filled them in on his story, and his connection to the Phoenix Girls.

  As a kid, Reggie had dreams that sometimes came true. Sometimes he dreamed of people, and for just a few seconds he would be with them. More than once the person saw him before he vanished, and would tell him the next day. Inexplicable things happened to him, inexplicable to him anyway. One night he dreamed of a reputedly haunted island on the Clearwater River, Hog Island, a place he’d seen a hundred times from his car on the highway, but never had the courage to visit, and then found himself standing on its shore. He’d started up an old and overgrown trail toward the island’s center when his grandmother appeared in his path.

  “This is not a good place, Reg.” She reached out with a pale, translucent hand, took his. “Come with me.”

  She’d taken him to her home, a place he remembered and loved well from his early childhood.

  They’d talked until morning, and many nights after, in their spirit bodies. She died two years after their first spirit walk, and he had been alone with his secret.

  He had traveled through Dogwood as a teenager on a trip to the coast, and had felt the power of the place surge into him, a magic stronger than anything he had ever felt before, and had canceled his plans to explore the town. Reggie had stayed in Dogwood, and eventually discovered Aurora Hollow, the Phoenix Girls, and Dana.

  “But why a bear?” Zoe seemed to have swallowed his story without so much as a burp, but his choice of spirit animal seemed almost to offend her.

  “I like bears,” Reggie said, and shrugged.

  Erasmus defied all expectations by welcoming Reggie into the expanding circle surrounding the girls, and questioned him relentlessly about his abilities.

  “You should stick around and meet Ronan when he comes back. He could teach you a few things,” Erasmus told him one day while they were gathered in the break room of Golden Arts during a rest from unpacking stock at Taylor and Pi. “He’s one of Galatania’s most accomplished shamans.”

  “Ronan is a shaman?” Penny and Zoe shouted in tandem.

  “What?” Katie said.

  Ellen raised her eyebrows, looking mildly impressed, but not surprised.

  Erasmus’s reply was terse, impatient. “You’ve watched him perform magic?”

  They all nodded, not willing to elicit more of the old Erasmus attitude with a verbal reply.

  “Have you ever seen him use a wand?”

  That time they didn’t even bother to nod.

  “Yes, Ronan is a shaman,” Erasmus said, and dropped the subject.

  Penny thought about mentioning her dreams to Erasmus, her strange doppelganger, and the apparently fruitless search for her lost memory, but only for a second. She’d never done magic without her wand, so whatever was going on in her dreams, it wasn’t some hitherto unmanifested shamanic ability.

  The late night practices continued, and the dream meetings with her other half followed them, and on the final Saturday night of her vacation, Penny’s doppelganger finally seemed to have found what she’d been looking for.

  * * *

  Penny was reading her copy of The Aikido Student Handbook when the voice came from under her bed. She’d been excited to start Aikido practice when she got the book for her last birthday, but hadn’t been able to get back into the habit. It just wasn’t the same practicing from a book. Still, it might not be a bad idea to brush up on the basics if trouble was on the way, as Erasmus seemed to think.

  “Penny.” It was a familiar voice, but not one she’d expected to hear coming from under her bed.

  She peeked over at Zoe’s bed and found her friend in her usual haphazard sprawl across the balled up sheets.

  Penny slipped to the floor and lifted her sheets for a peek, and found nothing but the Conjuring Glass, which she’d taken to stashing under her bed again after her reflection started acting out.

  “Penny, where are you?”

  Penny shushed the voice and slid the mirror out.

  The reflection on it was hers. She squinted one eye, stuck out her tongue, and her reflection followed suit. She waited for her reflection to begin to act on its own, as it had before, and after a few more seconds it did.

  Penny’s doppelganger winked, grinned, and leaned in closer to the glass. This time Penny followed her lead and leaned closer.

  “It’s time for you to learn the truth, Penny. Come to the hollow and find what they’ve been hiding from you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Penny felt a cold weight settle into her stomach, a physical dread that seemed to drag her down. “Who’s hiding things from me?”

  “There’s a secret in Aurora Hollow. It belongs to you, and the Phoenix Girls hid it there. The old ones who are gone now. They took something from us, and I think I know where it is.” Her smile was gone now. She looked sad. “Come find it with me.”

  Penny awoke with a start, sat up in bed, searched the room and found herself alone, except for Zoe, who snorted and flipped over onto her side, facing away from Penny.

  Penny rose and dressed as silently as she could, slipping back into her dirty clothes from the day before. She pulled her wand from inside the top drawer of her bedside table and went to the wardrobe.

  It was still a few hours until daybreak, she still had a few hours alone to find what was hidden out there.

  To find the secret of Aurora Hollow.

  * * *

  The hollow was dark, but the surface of Clear Creek was alive with starlight. Penny looked up through gaps in the green willow canopy at a black sky speckled with the brightest stars she’d ever seen. It was like the night sky in a dream. She wondered briefly if she had awakened straight from one dream and into another. When she look
ed back at the water she saw her reflection, rippling in the waves, looking back at her. She waited, and her reflection tilted its head and looked out across the surface of the water.

  Penny followed its gaze to the entrance of Ronan’s cave.

  I should have known.

  Still half believing she was in a dream, Penny waded through the cool water, her reflected face remaining where it was until she dashed it away. She crouched at the cave’s entrance and peered down into true darkness.

  She heard a crumble of stone, pebbles breaking free from the granite wall before her, and fell backward in panic, landing painfully on her backside.

  Rocky dislodged himself from the stone above and dropped to her side. He peered into the darkness of the cave, took a step toward it, as if he knew her destination.

  Of course he knows, she thought.

  “No,” Penny said, feeling the fluttering of her heart in her chest and willing it to slow. If she were to venture below, she’d need to banish her fear, and at that moment she felt as if she were made of fear. “You stay up here and wait for me, okay.”

  Rocky turned his expressive green eyes on her and folded his spindly arms over his chest.

  “You stay, Rocky,” she repeated, and he backed away in submission, seeming to melt into the stone as his back pressed against it. After a second Penny couldn’t make out his form, even his miniature coveralls seemed to have turned to stone.

  Ignoring a cramp of claustrophobia, Penny made a light with her wand, crawled into the darkness, and descended down into Ronan’s cave.

  * * *

  The decent was steep but short, and the tunnel opened up on a wide cavern. Penny couldn’t swear it was the same cavern she’d dreamed about for the past several weeks, but her slow walk through the empty darkness had a quality of deja vu. She moved her wand from side to side as she progressed, but its light revealed nothing but rough and unadorned stone. After a few minutes, she came to a sharp turn, and as she rounded it, the cavern opened up into a small chamber.