The Heart of the Phoenix (10 page)

“What,” asked Erasmus, “is a punk rock singer?”

“Someone who sings punk rock,” Bowen said.

Penny remembered the photo of the unknown Phoenix Girl at Zoe’s grandmother’s house. “Is she related to Zoe?”

“Yes,” Bowen said, seeming lost in remembrance. “A cousin I think.”

“Enough questions for now,” Erasmus said before the girls could ask another. “We’ll meet back here at midnight for your first lesson.”

Penny, Katie and Ellen all perked up.

“What’s our first lesson?” Ellen was still catching up to Penny, Katie, and Zoe, and seemed excited to finally be on even footing with them, at least for these new lessons.

“History,” Erasmus said, and nodded to Bowen. “You’re all woefully ignorant, about... well, everything. Bowen can remedy some of your more glaring deficiencies.”

“Don’t be rude,” Bowen said, echoing Penny’s thoughts, if not the exact words she was thinking.

“Don’t tell me what to be,” Erasmus said.

“It’s his only talent,” Katie said. “Everyone has to be good at something.”

Erasmus scowled and shook his white wand out to cane length again and poked the door with it. The low sound of traffic on Dogwood’s Main Street sounded muffled through the door. Someone honked, and someone else honked back.

“Midnight,” Erasmus repeated, opening the door into Golden Arts. He stepped through, Bowen following closely with a wave at the girls. “And bring the tall one this time.”

* * *

Penny spent the rest of the afternoon alone, perusing the stack of material she’d rescued from the basement while Susan was gone. There was another photo album, smaller than the one she had already, a few notebooks, a folder of school essays and papers her mother and aunt had saved, and a half dozen yearbooks. Two of the yearbooks lay on her bed, set aside after brief inspections.

She’d found her mother and aunt easily enough in them, once on a page featuring the sixth grade class, and another with them as sophomores. They looked a lot like her, but with auburn hair instead of Penny’s bright red. She also found Tracy West, but not Susan. It had taken her a few minutes to remember that Susan was younger, and Penny finally found her a few grades below. She was easily recognizable, only younger and smoother faced. The biggest difference was her hair, which had been very long, falling down to below the photo’s edge. The illusive Janet was nowhere to be found in either.

Penny searched the remaining yearbooks until she found the newest, and went straight to the senior page. Her mom and aunt were there, along with Katie’s aunt, but she didn’t find Janet until she’d turned to the junior’s page.

Janet Beale resembled the girl in her mother’s old photo album, long black hair, pale skin, and thick round glasses. Not Penny’s image of a punk rocker, but people change, inside and out.

The only punk she’d ever listened to was the Ramones, she wasn’t familiar with Janet Beale, but a quick internet search before Susan came home would remedy that.

Penny stashed the liberated books under her bed and hurried downstairs to the computer station, typed in a search, and found more than she’d expected. Janet’s stage name was Manic Jan, and Penny had heard of her. Her hair was still black, though with blood red streaks and highlights, and instead of glasses Manic Jan wore a pair of black steampunk goggles. Her band, the Blowhards, had five records, and was currently on tour.

Penny printed her biography page and was folding it when she heard Susan’s car pull up to the house. She tucked the printed page into her pocket, exited the webpage on Manic Jan and the Blowhards, and ran out to help Susan bring in the empty boxes from her deliveries.

* * *

Penny met her doppelganger again that night in her dreams, not in the cave or the hollow, but in her room.

“Tell me more,” the girl said, and sat down next to Penny on her bed.

Penny had already told her so much, she couldn’t remember where she had left off or where to begin again.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.” The girl looked beyond hungry for information, she looked starved for it. “I need to know everything.”

Penny was stuck for a place to begin, and after a few moments of silence her double, her other half, seemed to guess as much.

“Lean closer,” she said, and took Penny’s face between her hands.

They leaned together, forehead to forehead, and closed their eyes.

“Two bodies, one mind,” Penny’s other half said, and for a while, they were.

* * *

Penny awoke at midnight to the sound of her own name called quietly in the room where she slept alone, and realized she was late for her meeting at the hollow. She fumbled her mirror out from under her pillow and found Zoe’s face looking back at her.

“Come on, slacker. We’re waiting.”

“Okay, I’m here,” Penny said as she closed the door behind her. She tried to ignore the narrowed eyes and impatient tapping of Erasmus’s cane in the dirt. “Sorry.”

“No trouble,” Bowen said. “I was filling Zoe in on my story.”

Penny turned to Zoe, eyebrows raised.

Zoe shook her head in silent bewilderment.

Katie sat with her eyes closed, not sleeping but clearly wishing she were.

Ellen yawned loudly.

“Let’s get on with it,” Erasmus said. “The short one needs her sleep.”

“Sit and spin,” Penny advised.

“That was quite rude,” Erasmus said, but gave her a nod and a smile, as if he approved.

Bowen coughed.

“Well, you are the Phoenix Girls.” Bowen spread his arms to encompass them all. “But you don’t even know who the Phoenix was... do you?”

“No,” Penny, Zoe, and Ellen said.

Katie forced her eyes open and gave her head an apathetic shake.

“Then your first history lesson will be the legend of the Death of the Phoenix.”

“Sounds exciting,” Zoe said.

Penny liked a good story as much as anyone, but at a quarter past midnight she was going to withhold judgment.

Bowen produced an old cloth-bound book from an inner pocket, thumbed through to a place he’d marked. He told the story, and the girls awoke fully to hear it. They listened with the attention of children hearing a new favorite story for the first time, and Penny at least couldn’t shake the feeling that the story as Bowen told it was not the whole story... that it was still happening, and that she was now a part of it.

* * *

The Death of the Phoenix

A long time ago when the worlds were much younger and still close together, like the rooms of a great castle, the Phoenix walked among the many races of people. She carried with her a living rod from the tree of life, and wherever she went she brought light, magic, justice, and the knowledge mankind and his brother races required to rule themselves wisely. She did not rule, but taught the worthy among others to do it.

The Phoenix was beautiful, powerful, and wise, and though she wasn’t a goddess, she was immortal. She was not infinite, but nearly so.

Most of the people of the many worlds loved her, but some did not. Some who wished to rule, but were not worthy, wished to destroy her for her interference. Many did try over the long centuries of her life, but all failed.

The Phoenix’s greatest enemy was Tarvus the Red, exiled prince from the land of Galatania, both despised and feared in his former country. Known as the Blood Prince, Tarvus the Red’s hunger for violence and power led him to betray his father, the rightful king, and ignited a civil war that left the great kingdom on the brink of ruin.

Only the Phoenix’s intervention saved the people of Galatania from enslavement by the tyrant Tarvus. She drove the Blood Prince and the shattered remains of his army from the land and returned the disposed king to his throne. For many years the Phoenix’s peace endured. Tarvus the Red, Blood Prince of Nowhere, did not return.

Shortly before the death of the old king and his good son Artaius the Red’s ascension to the throne, news reached Galatania that the Blood Prince was finally dead, and the last of his army killed in the far east by the bird people.

But Tarvus, Blood Prince of Nowhere was not dead. A clever and patient man, the Blood Prince waited. He watched her from afar, for he was learned in the vilest of the magical arts, and studied the Phoenix. He discovered her deepest secrets, the source of her power, and the secret behind her immortality. At last he laid his plans against her, a trap set up to snare her at her weakest and most vulnerable.

At the end of one of her long cycles, for life itself was a cycle, always beginning again where it ended, the Phoenix sought her sanctuary grove, a place of power and renewal. Frail and weak with many decades, she found one of the doorways between the worlds and went to where her old body could die in its own flames and be reborn from the ashes. For a time she would remain helpless, an infant with all her millennia of knowledge, but the native creatures of that place were always helpful, rescuing her from solitude and taking her to a place where they lived. The strong, red-skinned natives of that land always expected her, for they were deeply tuned to the cycle of the worlds, and raised her as if she were one of their own until she was grown enough to resume her endless, wandering life.

The Phoenix found her sanctuary grove, her place of rebirth for time out of mind, and prepared herself for the flames, but Tarvus the Red waited in ambush and struck her down with his own dark magic before she could defend herself. The curse the Blood Prince put on her withered her form and ate the flesh from her bones.

As the Blood Prince bent over her in gloating triumph, she slashed at him with her ruined and skeletal hand, leaving a gash across his cheek that scarred him forever. With her last breath, she pronounced her own curse upon him.

“May your house be always divided, your kingdom always besieged. May your face forever wear the mark of my hand, and may my face be the last that you see.”

Tarvus the Red was afraid, convinced that her dying curse would end his life, but the Phoenix turned away from him and dragged her withering body toward the creek that ran through her sanctuary grove, and with the last of her strength, drove her rod into the ground at the water’s edge.

The Blood Prince watched as the dying Phoenix turned from flesh to bone, bone to dust, and dust to nothing, until only the shriveled, beating muscle of her heart remained on the ground before him. Though he struck the heart with the darkest magic he knew, nothing would still its beat. The Phoenix’s heart was too strong. So he turned it to stone, and when at last it stilled, he bent to claim her rod of power.

Hard as he drew upon it, the rod would not pull free. She had driven it deeply, and the earth would not relinquish it to him.

The Blood Prince returned to his old land, with the Phoenix’s stilled heart as a trophy, to regain his lost kingdom.

The Phoenix did not return, but being immortal, could not truly die. Her spirit lingers on in her sanctuary grove.

The Blood Prince, now Blood King, was a tyrant, and the Phoenix knew his tyranny would ensure the first half of her curse against him. Only her return would complete it.

The Phoenix waits endlessly, restlessly for those who might bring her back.

* * *

The story ended and the hollow fell into silence for almost a full minute before anyone spoke.

“That’s almost like a creation legend,” Katie said. “Is it apocryphal?”

“Apocryphal?” Penny slid from the fog of a good story and back into the present.

“Made up,” Zoe elaborated.

“Has to be,” Ellen said. “Good story though.”

“Why does it have to be apocryphal?” Erasmus was quickly distinguishing himself and the resident grump, jabbing his cane in Ellen’s direction as he snapped at her.

Ellen slid sideways off her perch near the fire pit and stepped away from his pointing cane, knowing all too well what the cane actually was and not wanting him to shoot her on accident.

“My great grandfather fought the Blood Prince when he tried to invade the South Islands.” He dropped his cane’s tip back to the dirt and began to twirl himself on his stool again. “And my Uncle Bilge said he saw the Phoenix when he was a boy. Said she did a flyover one evening when he was out alone, harvesting jellyfish.”

Erasmus ceased his spinning and frowned for a moment.

“He was a sociopath and a liar though, so he might have made the whole thing up.”

“I’d call it a romantic accounting,” Bowen said. “It’s a historically accurate account of a war between two Fuilrix brothers.”

“Between Tarvus the Blood Prince and Artaius?” Penny was thinking privately that her family was even more messed up than Zoe’s.

“Yes,” Bowen said.

“And the Blood Prince won in the end,” Zoe asked, “dooming the people of Galatania to an eternity of darkness and tyranny?”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” Erasmus sounded supremely irritated.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Bowen said. “A decade or two at most. He had a son who inherited the kingdom when he died.”