The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  He charged through the homunculi, leapt over them, taking hit after hit. Penny fired from her perch on his shoulders, took down another of the Red Guards, then threw up a shield in front of them. A barrage of spells ricocheted back at their casters, and another one fell. Penny shifted her wand in her grip, and pushed, a trick she’d discovered quite by accident in another fight not too long ago. The remaining guards scattered as if struck by an invisible wrecking ball and Ronan swatted the few that dared to rise again aside almost casually.

  Penny leapt from Ronan’s shoulder and crouched over her father. His eyes were closed, and he did not move.

  “Dad!” She grabbed him by the collar of his rough prison shirt and shook him. “Wake up!”

  She had wondered about this man her whole life, had longed for his return and then hated him in turn, and now that she had him, she did not want to lose him.

  Torin opened one eye, squinting up at her, then opened the other when he saw it was safe.

  “Relax, Little Red,” he said, sitting up and dusting himself off. “I was just trying to stay out of your way.”

  Penny helped him up, and when he was on his feet again, threw her arms around him.

  He hugged her back, lifted her from her feet, whispered in her ear.

  “I sure do love you, Little Red. I’m glad we found each other.”

  “Me too, Dad.”

  “Very touching,” Ronan barked back at them. “Could we do this another time, perhaps?”

  Rocky tugged on her arm, as if in agreement.

  “How much further?” Penny asked

  “Not much,” Torin said.

  “Okay,” Penny said. “Follow my lead.”

  She rushed ahead of them, sprinted through the parting ranks of wild homunculi. She called on the inner fire and felt it respond at once. The flames burst from her body, roared along the outstretched lengths of her arms.

  She ran screaming down the hall, her strange companions charging after her, and their remaining opposition fled before them, scattered down side corridors, behind closed doors, or simply cringed against the wall as they passed. When she reached the final door, Penny planted her feet wide before it, focused all of her anger and frustration over the past few weeks and released it in one blow that singed the thick black wood of the sepulcher door, shattered it in its frame.

  Penny stepped inside, letting her flame gutter and die as she saw Tracy standing before a giant spinning globe, reflected in its shimmering silvery surface.

  “You made a lot of noise getting here,” she said, then peered past Penny at the chaos and devastation in her wake. “And you brought your friends. Very good.”

  “I’m sure there’s a good explanation for all of this,” Torin said. He glared at Tracy, but Penny saw he kept his wand pointed at the ground.

  “There is, but it’ll have to wait,” Tracy said. “We have urgent business on the other side.”

  She pressed her hand against the silvery globe, and the surface rippled into transparency.

  Inside of it she saw Aurora Hollow, and Flanna, sitting alone with her face in her hands.

  Tracy stepped through without another word, and the image of the other world inside it rippled and distorted.

  Penny took Torin’s hand, then Ronan’s, and they stepped through.

  PART 3

  The Heart of the Phoenix

  Chapter 15

  The Long Way Home

  Reggie Parker sat outside their room and watched the ghosts come out of the Lava Lake’s hot springs, thinking about Zoe and her friend Penny, who had been acting strangely out of character even before he and Dana had left town.

  They are teenage girls, he reminded himself. Girls that age argue. They change and grow apart.

  But he didn’t think that was what he was seeing here. They had been happily reunited friends when Zoe had returned, and they weren’t average teenage girls. They were Phoenix Girls, their friendships and loyalties strengthened by trials none of their uninitiated peers could comprehend. Zoe had told them all about Penny months before he’d met the girl, they’d been inseparable since the day they met.

  And he’d liked her, liked her a great deal, she had a pure, bright spirit. He’d sensed her dislike of him and Dana the day they’d met, and he had understood it. In her mind they had abandoned Zoe in a strange place with an unpleasant old woman who didn’t want her. Penny wasn’t aware of the circumstances that had forced the splitting of the family, the madness he’d kept hidden from Zoe.

  He’d been able to help Dana once they were on their own, and had found pretty much what he’d expected. Dana was a girl with special talents and perceptions who had grown up in a place suffused with magic, like her cousin Janet, but she’d not been able to cope with things she saw and felt. She was a failed Phoenix Girl, unable to grasp her power, but unable to let it fade, struggling with the secrets she knew, then doubting her own memories and perceptions when the Phoenix Girls had ceased to exist. Convinced she had imagined a childhood of wonders none of her old friends remembered.

  Oddly enough, seeing the ghosts of Lava Lake had been therapeutic for his wife, knowing a few special others could see them too. It had become a favorite respite for her, and they stayed whenever they could.

  He had not yet told Zoe about her mother’s history with the Phoenix Girls, or Dana about Zoe’s present involvement with them. He was afraid it might be one revelation too many for Dana, who was only now coming to trust her senses and memories again.

  The ladies in his life were both sleeping now, and Reggie had the night to himself. He used his solitude as he had every night since Zoe’s return, he closed his eyes and looked inward toward his memories of Dogwood, Clover Hill, and Aurora Hollow.

  Zoe wouldn’t tell him what had instigated the split between her and her best friend, the girl who was very nearly a sister to her, but he had promised Erasmus his help in the event of trouble, which the strange man insisted was coming. His daughter was involved, for good or bad, so he would keep that promise.

  When he opened his eyes again he was standing on the front porch of Penny and Susan’s home. He was too far away for a physical presence in Dogwood, but not too far to spirit walk. The first thing he noticed, as late as it was, Susan’s car was not in its usual spot in the driveway. The second thing he noticed, the house felt deserted, abandoned. With a thought, he moved inside. He checked the rooms, all with the swiftness of thought, and found them all empty, though there was something to give him pause in the attic bedroom. The wardrobe door stood open, and past the hanging blouses and coats was the fire lit interior of a wooded clearing. Inside he heard quiet sobbing.

  The next moment he stood above the short, steep trail down into Aurora Hollow, and found Penny sitting below him on one of the boulders ringing the fire pit, but the thing that caught his eye was just beyond her, a spinning, silvery bubble, a crazy fun house mirror that threw distorted reflections.

  While he watched, it swelled slightly. The bottom, which had floated an inch above the earth, now appeared to sink several inches into it.

  Contact with the earth slowed the spin, disrupted the thing’s uniformity, created ripples and eddies that spun off with apparent randomness, and the silvery sheen faded into opacity. There was a suggestion of motion, activity inside it, and then a hand pressed into the surface from the inside. Opacity became transparency, rippling out from the point of contact, and Reggie Parker saw a woman in black step through into the hollow from inside the sphere.

  It’s a doorway, he thought, but to where?

  “Flanna, look at me,” the woman said, and the girl looked up. There was confusion, hurt, and distrust on the face, tears streaming from the green eyes. Penny Sinclair’s face, Penny Sinclair’s eyes, but she had responded to that other name.

  Flanna?

  “You lied to me,” the girl said. “You let me think he was my father.”

  “I did,” the woman in black said.

  “Why?” The girl stood and adv
anced on the woman. The hand holding her wand trembled. “He killed my mother!”

  “He did,” the woman agreed. She did not back down from the girl’s fury, or respond to the threat when the girl raised her wand.

  “Why?”

  “To keep you safe for this day,” the woman said, and took a step toward the girl. “I love you, Flanna. That was never a lie.”

  “Don’t touch me!” Flanna screamed. The wand shook in her hand, but did not waver.

  Reggie watched the exchange with mounting anxiety, unable to interact with a spirit body so feeble with the distance. He might make himself visible to them, but to what gain?

  The opacity of the sphere cleared again, and he watched as more figures spilled from it. What appeared to be a hundred misshapen gray monkeys, a tall man-beast with the head of a fox and a plush orange and white coat, a skinny man with long red hair and beard dressed in rags, and a shorter figure, a girl with a scorched and leathery head.

  Reggie stumbled back a step at the sight of her, would have cried out if he had a voice.

  “Flanna, don’t,” the girl shouted.

  Flanna’s eyes moved to the newcomer. Her wand hand lowered.

  “Penny?”

  “Hi, sister.” She reached up and peeled the burnt and blackened leather from her head.

  She was different, thinner, her cheeks sunken, her long mane of fiery hair cut down to no more than a few inches that stood in clumps from her head, but it was Penny.

  Reggie understood, not all of it perhaps, but enough.

  Reggie Parker closed his eyes, and they opened back in Oregon, from his seat outside the room at Lava Lake.

  He watched the ghosts caper in the night, and thought about what to do next.

  * * *

  “Zoe, wake up.”

  Zoe heard the voice in her half-sleep but couldn’t find any meaning in the words, so she decided to ignore them in the hopes they would go away.

  “Hey, Zo.” A large blunt finger prodded her between the shoulder blades, so she flopped over onto her back, opened an eye, and nearly screamed at the sight of her father’s face looming inches above hers. “Wakey, wakey.”

  “What is your problem, Dad?” She yanked her pillow from beneath her head and pressed it over her face. “Mmfff gomf nuuu.”

  Reggie chuckled and pulled the pillow out of her hands.

  “Outside girl, we need to talk.”

  Zoe groaned and rolled out of her cot bed, then stumbled in the wrong direction for a moment before her father redirected her toward the door.

  “Shhh,” he said, casting a glance at Dana asleep in the room’s queen bed. “Don’t wake your mother.”

  Zoe plopped into his chair by the front door and he joined her. They watched the ghosts for a moment, and when one of them spotted him and glided their way, he spoke to it in the native Nez Perce language. There seemed to be a whisper of a reply before it drifted away.

  “Our people used to come here before all of this.” He gestured all around, and Zoe took it to mean more than just the resort, but the nearby town. “White traders came and built all of this. The resort used to be a hospital, then an asylum.”

  “A lot of ghosts,” Zoe said. “Why am I awake and looking at them?”

  “I had a peek in on your friends in Dogwood tonight,” he said. “There’s something you need to know.”

  * * *

  Reggie finished his story, and for a while Zoe didn’t respond or reply. The only indication that she hadn’t slept through it was her constantly roaming eyes. She didn’t mind the ghosts at a distance, but when they came too close she got antsy.

  “Do you understand what I just told you?” He wondered if she was still nursing her grudge, even knowing it wasn’t Penny that had driven her away. “It wasn’t Penny. I think Penny has been away for a while. She looked half starved, and someone had cut her hair off.”

  Zoe nodded that she did indeed understand, and kept her silence.

  “What are you thinking about?” Reggie asked his daughter.

  She looked sideways at him then back again, fetched a deep sigh that almost sounded like a sob.

  “I’m thinking it didn’t take much to make me abandon my friends.” She stood and turned for the door.

  Reggie blocked her path.

  “We need to talk.”

  “No,” Zoe said, “I need to get my wand and go back now. I’m going to find that Flanna girl and kick her...”

  “Zoe? Reggie?” They heard Dana’s voice on the other side of the door. A moment later she stepped out to join them. “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine, Dana,” Reggie said. “We were just talking about going back to Dogwood tomorrow. It’s time for Zoe to get back to school, and I thought you might like to spend some time with your cousin while we were gone.”

  Zoe glared up at him for a moment, then looked back at the ghosts. She wouldn’t be there as quickly as she wanted, but they were going back, so she accepted it.

  “Aren’t they peaceful,” Dana said to Zoe, following her gaze. “I love to watch them too.”

  “What do you think, Dana?” Reggie redirected her attention gently to the matter at hand. He was willing to go back and face whatever trouble had come to Zoe’s new home at her side, but wanted Dana somewhere out of the way, safe. She was in no condition to grapple with the supernatural. She was only just beginning to accept that the formative experiences in her past were not fantasy, and he was afraid witnessing more magical mayhem was more than her fragile grasp on reality could handle.

  “Jan?” She brightened at once. “That would be good.”

  She had always loved her cousin Janet, had hero worshiped her as a child and young woman, and thought her career as a punk rock singer was the most exciting thing anyone had ever done. She had learned not to bring up the Phoenix Girls or magic with Janet, whose memories of that part of her life had been stolen when Zoe was an infant and Dana herself had been on the reservation with Reggie.

  “Janet Beale,” Zoe said, suddenly very interested. “Manic Jan from The Blowhards? She lives around here?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of her,” Dana beamed at her daughter. “Are you a fan?”

  This was news to Reggie. He couldn’t remember ever visiting Janet with Zoe in tow, or even discussing her in front of his daughter.

  “Not exactly,” Reggie said. “She’s in northern California, Eureka. It’s a short side trip, but we’ll put her on the bus in Salem or Eugene, then drive north. I’ll call first thing in the morning and see if I can find a load.”

  Reggie half expected Zoe to protest the delay, but she kept silent.

  He wondered...

  “Go back to bed,” Reggie said, and kissed Dana on the cheek. “We’ll be in soon.”

  She smiled and laid her head against his chest. “Okay.”

  She stopped at the door and turned back to them.

  “I sure love having you back with me, Zoe, but you’re supposed to be in Dogwood. I know it, and I think you know it.” She frowned, then looked down at her feet before speaking again. “I dreamed that the fair came to Dogwood, and they had monsters. I know they’re not real, monsters that is, but it’s that time of year, for the fair I mean. It’ll be there soon.”

  It would, Reggie realized, probably in the next day or so to set up, and on Monday the fair week in Dogwood would begin.

  He thought about last year’s fair. They had been almost to the East Coast when the stories of kids missing in rural Washington reached him. He’d called Dana’s mother, the unpleasant woman, to check on Zoe, but he hadn’t heard the whole story until after he’d included himself in Zoe’s strange circle of friends.

  The mysterious Red Magician Tovar, very reminiscent of the troupe of traveling magicians who used to visit with the fair in years past, had been a manimal from another realm that sometimes spilled over into this world, and apparently Dogwood was one of the places they sometimes spilled into.

  He knew Penny’s mother had
taken up with a member of that traveling band of magicians, and there had been no small amount of trouble as a result. That had been when the Phoenix Girls had disbanded, losing all memories of their secret lives and powers, and had gone their separate ways. The only person he knew who had retained their memories of the Phoenix Girls and their magic was Dana.

  There was no doubt in his mind that Penny and her newly arrived sister were the products of that union between Diana Sinclair and her red magician, but where had the sister been all these years?

  Dana had slipped back inside while he lost himself in thought, and his daughter finally brought him back to the present.

  “You know who Janet Beale is, don’t you?”

  Reggie smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah, I know what she was.” He thought about telling Zoe the whole truth about her mother, her wild talents and her inability to control them. Her short affiliation with the group Zoe now belonged to, and the memories she retained, the memories that had led her to doubt her own sanity.

  He decided against it, for the time being at least. It was late, and they would be getting a very early start. He could tell her once Dana was safely on her way to her cousin Jan.

  * * *

  Zoe was the first out of bed for once, shaking her father awake even as his alarm went off, and was in the shower steaming her lethargy away before he’d rolled out of bed. She had fought the urge to just use her wand and zap straight back to Dogwood for nearly every waking moment before finally sleeping, and she fought the urge as she showered, dressed, and then rejoined her mom and dad.

  I could be back in a second.

  Aside from missing her human friends, she also wanted to see Ronan again, and she was sure the big fox-headed man her father had described could be no one other than her furry little friend in his real body. It also sounded like Penny had returned from wherever she had been with one of the Reds at her side.

  Had she found her long missing father?