Silver Hollow (6 page)
“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 brin
g
ing 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 vanishe
d
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-hos
e
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 met
al brushed recently healed skin
.
Beep! Beep!
The horn startled her from her thoughts and
something in her agreed with the cabb
ie
’s insistence. The sooner she left this place the better. This was getting too weird.
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.
A
mie 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 streets.
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 du
ring 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
. A
fter all
,
her favorite books were fai
ry 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
s
he 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 parent
s
’ 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.