The Heart of the Phoenix (26 page)

The Phoenix Girls’ intervention had smashed their plans in a night of utter chaos. Failing to procure Aurora Hollow, Grant had tried to destroy it, as he had done other gateways, but the Phoenix Girls had prevented that. Grant had died, his son had been imprisoned, Ernest Price discredited, and Penny herself had thrown the terrifying familiar, Turoc, into the formless space between worlds. Only Flanna’s discovery of the old monster’s broken fang and the right doorway relic in the cavern hoard, and her father’s great skill, had saved her father’s familiar from a slow annihilation as body and spirit both were slowly absorbed into the sub-matter of formless space.

It seemed her father would have to accept a more passive role regarding Aurora Hollow and the dangerous Phoenix Girls when the traitor Torin’s former familiar Ronan was returned to them. Mental interrogation revealed the existence of a long lost, and long sought, artifact her father called the Chaos Relic, or sometimes the World Breaker, a dangerous but powerful object capable of closing the door between worlds forever. After weeks of intrusions into her twin sister’s mind, Flanna had learned what she needed to find the hidden relic.

She had done everything he’d asked of her, she had made him happy, made him proud of her, and when her work here was complete she would go home to her family. She would go home to her sister, and try to make her understand that she’d only done what she had to do.

Penny was smart, she had met her father now, finally knew the fate of her mother and who had caused it. Penny would forgive her, and after fourteen years, they would be family again.

But first, there was Ernest Price to deal with.

She crossed the blackened field and ducked through the barbed wire fence around his backyard.

Still loitering in the back of Flanna’s mind, Penny got all of it.

* * *

Penny opened her eyes and found her father in a silent huddle with Ronan.

“Guys, I know what they’re planning.” She unfolded her legs slowly, wincing as the muscles tried to cramp, then stood to stretch them out. They broke their huddle and waited for her to continue. She had their full attention. “I know why they sent Flanna to Dogwood.”

Penny told them everything she’d picked up from Flanna while she walked to Price’s house, and waited while her father stood apart in a brooding silence.

“Flanna has the World Breaker?” Ronan spoke when the silence grew too uncomfortable. “She has the Chaos Relic?”

Penny nodded. “They interrogated you. Didn’t you know?”

“A magical interrogation can be subtle,” Torin said. He rubbed his face, ran his fingers through his beard, sighed. “Who did you see before they brought you here?”

“Yaegar,” Ronan said. “He questioned me for a while, then knocked me out when I wouldn’t speak.”

Torin nodded, frowning.

“Burning Aurora Hollow would not destroy the link to the sepulcher,” Ronan said, switching to a subject that clearly interested him more. “It’s a primordial gateway. It cannot be severed.”

Torin barked a short, sharp laugh.

“That was never his intension, whatever he told the family or Flanna. You heard him recite the Blood King’s catechism when he came to taunt us?”

“What catechism?” Penny didn’t like the utter defeat in his voice. “Was it what he said in that other language?”

“
Conquest through Chaos
,” Torin recited. “It was the Blood King’s catechism.”

Ronan seemed to understand.

“He wants to finish the Blood King’s work,” Ronan said. “
The old plan
.”

“What plan?” Penny was fed up with ambiguities.

“Tynan never wanted to cut the ties between the worlds,” Torin said. “He wants to bring them together and make them one.”

Torin sat and resumed his earlier brooding.

“The Blood King was obsessed with reconquering the Old World, but the only way he could have accomplished his conquest was to merge the two worlds into one and take advantage of the chaos of conflicting geographies and physics, the chaos of disintegrating civilization. It would begin in Dogwood and spread to every corner of our worlds.”

“It would create a new reality,” Ronan said. “A reality ruled by chaos, and whoever ruled the chaos would rule that new reality.”

Penny was speechless.

“Erasmus taught us from our early childhood, and he knew Tynan was dangerously ambitious,” Ronan said. “Which was why he stole many of the House of Fuilrix’s most dangerous relics when Tynan ascended and he left the family’s service.”

“And the World Breaker can do that?” Penny managed at last.

“Yes,” Torin and Ronan said together.

“The World Breaker is a relic from the universe’s earliest history, a leftover of the breaking symmetry that transformed a lifeless void into a million physical universes.” Torin spoke like a man reciting a learned lesson.

“Our worlds happen to be very close to each other, very similar,” he continued. “Because of primordial gateways like Aurora Hollow that link them.”

“This sounds like one of Erasmus’s science lessons,” Penny said, skeptically.

“It was,” Torin said. “He was always a big fan of your science, and he was better at it than most of your scientists.”

“He was also a fan of history,” Ronan said. “He believed that the Blood King killed the Phoenix because he knew she would stand against him, as she had during his other destructive conquests.”

“The Phoenix
was
a real person then,” Penny said. She wasn’t sure her brain could handle many more revelations.

“She still is,” Ronan said. “She exists in Aurora Hollow, where her body died. She has been directing you for generations.”

“Directing us toward what?”

“Who knows,” Ronan said. “To resurrect her, to share her knowledge, revenge against the Reds.”

Penny had no more questions, she was already beginning to regret the ones they had answered for her.

“You need to try again, Penny,” Torin said after the silence stretched out. “She’s about to do a horrible thing, and you might be the only one who can stop her.”

* * *

Rooster saw Flanna coming before his father did, and charged from the house to meet her.

“
You can’t come here
!” he screamed at her as he ran, fists raised before his reddening face, his split and swollen lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. “
Get off my property
!”

Flanna ignored him and kept walking toward his house, right hand in her pocket and closed around the tiny wand she’d found in the basement. When he had closed the distance between them to mere feet, she drew and fired. The spell was a weak one, as she’d expected coming from the miniature wand, but was powerful enough to stop the boy. He stumbled and slowed, his arms dropping to his sides. Then his legs wobbled and buckled beneath him, and he fell in a heap to the dirt.

Flanna walked past him without comment, without looking down, and with only a smile in response to his renewed bellow of panic as all feeling and control drained from his limbs.

The back door of the huge Price home banged open, and Flanna waited to see if she would have to take down Ernest Price’s other son, or if the man himself would come out to meet her.

It was the man himself, and if Rooster had been angry to see her walking calmly across their backyard, his father was livid.

“
You get the hell out of here
!” Ernest ran outside in a pair of dirty slacks and a stained white t-shirt, his hair a disheveled mess, his face covered in a ragged growth that could not properly be called a beard. He stopped his charge when he saw his son lying twitching in the grass, and bellowed his name. “
What did you do to my son
?”

“He’ll live,” Flanna said, and when Ernest resumed his clumsy charge, she raised the tiny wand, cupped in her palm to hide it. A purple bolt of lightning arched out toward Ernest and crashed into the ground in front of him, missing his feet by inches.

The man stopped, his hair dancing on end, and did an amusing little jig where he stood.

Flanna smiled. It was really quite amusing. The smile vanished quickly though. She had no taste for what came next. Despite everything she knew about the Phoenix Girls, she liked Susan and did not want to see the woman hurt.

Before Ernest could recover and resume his bellowing charge, Flanna flicked a coin in the air toward him, then held it aloft in the air before his face. As his jittering came to a stop he noticed the coin, gold with the sigil of the House of Fuilrix on one side, and a man’s face in profile on the other. Ernest Price would not know the face, but he did know the sigil, the looping intertwined knots, and he recognized the coin. This wasn’t the first like it he had seen.

“You?” He reached up slowly and took the coin from the air, turned it over to inspect it more closely, as if he didn’t trust his first impression.

“Me,” Flanna said. She produced the small wooden box from her pocket and held it out to him. When he made no move to take it, she nodded in encouragement. “This is for you. You have a job to do, and you’ll need it.”

He gulped, nodded, and inched forward slowly until he was close enough to take the box from her palm. He immediately backed off a step, and when he saw Rooster rising from the ground behind her, stuffed the box deep in his pants pocket.

“Go inside, Tucker.”

She heard the boy moving toward her from behind, then stop.

“But, pa...”

“Inside,” Ernest said again.

Flanna stood silent until Rooster passed her. He paused at the threshold of his house and looked back at her.

Flanna smiled and pointed at the door.

The sight of her pointing finger made him jump in place, and he was inside with the door closed between them a second later.

“Do I need to worry about anyone else sneaking up on me?” Flanna didn’t want any witnesses to what was about to transpire.

“No,” Ernest said. “It’s just Tucker and me.”

“Where are your wife and James?”

“James is in town and... she left. She’s with her mother.” He blushed a deep red. “What do you want me to do?”

Flanna told him.

The rest of the week passed without event. Flanna stayed at the house on Clover Hill during the day, did the schoolwork that Zoe brought her, relying heavily on notes from Katie and a lot of studying from her books to tackle subjects she had never encountered in her education at the citadel in Galatania. They had meetings and practice in Aurora Hollow along with Erasmus, Bowen, and Katie’s brother Michael, who had been appointed interim Sheriff of Dogwood County. Michael was participating at Katie’s insistence, but was less than thrilled with the discovery of his hitherto unknown abilities. He seemed to view them as an insult to his good sense.

Zoe was still living in the house on Clover Hill, but not speaking to Flanna. If Zoe had told them about her kiss with Trey, they had decided not to mention it.

Trey had come by after school for the first few days of her suspension, and she’d ignored his knocking until he’d gone away, and when he’d showed up the next Saturday morning Zoe had answered the door. After a very brief exchange that Flanna could not hear from her attic window, Zoe had slammed the door in his face, and Trey had stayed away.

On Flanna’s first day back at school she was applauded as she walked down the hallway to her first class.

“Have you seen Rooster yet?” Penny’s shared memories identified the girl as Jodi Lewis, a friend she shared with the other Phoenix Girls, but not one herself, nor privy to their secrets.

“No,” Flanna had been watching out for him, just in case he’d rediscovered his guts, but didn’t honestly expect any trouble following her visit to his house. “Is he looking for me?”

“I think he’d take another week off if they’d let him.” Jodi laughed. “He won’t look anyone in the face. I’ve never seen him so well behaved.”

Flanna saw the truth in this a few minutes later as she rounded a corner and came face to face with him.

Rooster looked up in time to avoid running into her, uttered a sharp little
eep
sound, and went the other way in a hurry.

There was laughter, a slap on the back from someone who was gone too quickly to identify, and generally too much attention for her liking, but by the time lunch arrived the unwanted attention was ebbing.

Her first class after lunch was with Miss Riggs, as unpleasant in reality as she was in Penny’s memories, but Flanna kept her head down, and Miss Riggs ignored her through the entire class.

Trey corned her before her last class and pulled her into the mostly empty library. Flanna could have easily shaken his hold, but his touch stirred feelings she had done her best to ignore following their kiss the previous week, and so she went along with him.

“Look, I’m sorry Zoe is upset,” he said, and he did sound sorry.

Not upset enough
, Flanna thought. She shrugged, kept her eyes on a poster just behind his left shoulder.

Feed your brain
, the poster advised.
Read
!

“I didn’t think she liked me,” he said. “She always ignored me so I just gave up on her.”

“She didn’t know she liked you until she saw us,” Flanna said, a lie, but easier than the truth.

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” She read his expectation on his face, a small grin he couldn’t conceal.

No
, she thought. She wanted to kiss him again.

“Yes,” she said. She was there for her father, to do a job, and would return the moment she was allowed. Her father would not appreciate her becoming distracted, especially with some boy of whom he would never approve. “I think that would be best.”

“Oh...” Trey seemed at a loss for words.

Flanna pulled her hand out of his grasp and left him there. Back in the hallway she saw one of Penny’s old school rivals, Tori, smirking at her as she walked with a group of friends to her class.

She found Zoe waiting for her at the bike rack after school, and as Flanna braced herself for the confrontation, she saw Tori and her friends hovering close-by, whispering at each other and giggling. When she reached Zoe, a large group had formed around them, hushed and expectant.