The Heart of the Phoenix (15 page)

“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 looked 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.

She knew in one glance that she’d found the place she was looking for.

Ronan’s home.

There was a large dog bed snugged up against the wall to her right. It was dusty and dull with age, and stuffing leaked from a split seam. To her left she spotted a spill of junk... or what appeared to be junk at first glance. There was a tarnished gleam of brass, and she focused on a familiar object. An old filigreed doorknob. Penny started toward Ronan’s hoard, her eyes fixed on the relics he’d gone through such pains to collect in the wake of the Birdman’s destructive visit to Dogwood, and stumbled. The floor of the cavern was rough and uneven, and she had to watch her step as she crossed.

Her search uncovered several more of the doorway relics, along with some other junk she’d retrieved from Turoc’s tunnel beneath the landfill the day Katie and she had rescued Ronan from it. She found a cloak pin, and when she touched it a thick mist began to rise from the stone beneath her. She dropped the pin, and the second it slid from her hand, the mist dissipated and vanished. She found a few more mirrors, one cracked down the center and blackened by soot.

She also found what appeared to be several mundane items, a cigarette lighter, a key fob shaped like a Volkswagen Bug, and with a small shock, a short ivory spear she recognized as a tooth, the one Rocky had knocked from the monster Turoc’s mouth during last spring’s fight in Aurora Hollow.

There was an old iPod with enough battery life left in it to start up; she saw it was filled with nothing but music from Tom Waits before it ran out of juice and powered down. There was an old and dirty sock.

That’s my sock
, Penny realized. It was the sock she tugged off while escaping Turoc’s homunculi under the landfill. She’d used it to collect the last of the relics Ronan had rescued. The doorknobs had joined the pile, but one item remained inside. She upended it into her hand and was momentarily stunned by the beautiful object that dropped into her palm. It was a small square of opaque red stone that seemed to glow with its own weak inner light.

A loud squeak and the scrabbling of small claws against rock ripped her attention from the red stone, and it tumbled onto the pile as she stood and pointed her wand in the direction of the disturbance.

A small black shape, a rat she thought, raced across the cavern floor, passed within a few feet of where Penny stood on its way out.

She stood, forgetting to breathe for a moment, then stumbled forward on legs that felt unhinged.

A cairn of stones was piled up against the far cavern wall, and in the light thrown by her wand, Penny saw a thick fall of auburn hair hanging from between the stones.

As she drew closer, she saw more. A scrap of cloth peeking from a gap between stones, something narrow and white poking out from another gap, and the overall shape of the cairn, the shape of what lay beneath it.

Penny fell to her knees at the edge of the cairn, reaching for the wave of auburn hair, pausing.

Who is it
, Penny wondered.

Not
what is it
, because she knew what it was. The hair, a scrap of rotting cloth, the white bone of a finger, the shape of a body under a thin layer of stones, the closest thing to a burial in this hall of solid rock.

She pulled a stone away, revealing more of the hair, then another, and another. She stopped when she found the skull, empty eyes blindly watching as her tears began to fall.

“That’s her,” came a voice from the mouth of the cavern. “They took our mother, they killed her, and hid her away down here.”

Penny turned and found her doppelganger. She dared to hope that her appearance meant this was only another dream.

The girl was no longer a true mirror image. She wore simple, dark clothing underneath a black cloak. Her hood was down, revealing her fall of red hair, her pale, freckly face, and her own tears.

“Hello, sister,” the girl said, and before Penny could reply, she raised a wand of the same black wood the Birdman had once raised against her, and Penny’s world went dark.

Flanna hurried to where Penny lay, unconscious over the cairn of stones that marked their mother’s grave. There was no malice in her heart, and she tucked her wand into an inner pocket of her cloak before kneeling down over her. She lifted Penny’s head from her pillow of stones and held it for a moment, studying the face they shared. She wiped tears from the slack cheeks, then laid her back down.

Flanna looked at her mother then, what there was to look at, the hair and partially uncovered skull, and when her own tears began to well in her eyes again, she forced her gaze away.

She picked up and pocketed Penny’s wand, stood, and walked to the spill of junk piled against the wall. The thing she’d been searching Penny’s memories for lay right on top. A small blood opal box, its lid sealed perfectly by magic to contain the energy of the dangerous artifact inside.

Flanna didn’t know what was in it, but knew not to open the box. It belonged to her father, and had been stolen years ago by the outlaw Erasmus Pi. The Phoenix Girls were harboring the renegade monk now, another crime they would answer for.

Flanna put the blood opal box in a drawstring sack hanging from her belt and continued searching Ronan’s hoard. She found Turoc’s broken tooth, inspected the relic doorknobs, reading the shifting symbols etched into the brass until she found the one she needed. The tooth and doorknob joined the blood opal box in her sack.

She stood, straightened her cloak, and drew her wand. She wanted out of this tomb.

“Legota,” Flanna whispered.

The air shivered in front of her, starting at the point of her wand tip and rippling outward in a wave. For just a moment a circle of black rippling air spun like a giant disk in front of her, twirling at the tip of her wand. She envisioned the grove somewhere up above them, Aurora Hollow, and the inky blackness became a spinning doorway, a jump gate, to that place.

Flanna pocketed her wand again and hurried to Penny’s side. She struggled to lift her, then gave up and dragged Penny by the arms.

“Sorry, sister. I wish we could have met under friendlier circumstances.” Flanna felt a shiver of gooseflesh as she passed through the barrier. Penny’s muscles spasmed then relaxed as she dragged her through into the hollow. “I had to do it. I have to save you from the Phoenix Girls.”

“You did what you had to do,” said a voice in the hollow. “For your family.”

Flanna turned to find a tall man waiting at the edge of the darkness. He stepped forward, and the weak light of the night’s starry sky revealed him. A tall man, and muscular, short flame-red hair framed a face that was stubbled and stern. A long white scar ran up one side of his face. When he smiled, the scared side seemed to grimace instead.

“Yes, Father,” Flanna said. “I just wish we could have come for her sooner.”

“We thought she was dead,” he said. “The traitor Ronan kept her existence hidden from us, but we have finally found her.”

“Our mother is still down there.” For the first time Flanna’s voice betrayed anger. “They left her down there like an animal. They killed her and left her to rot.”

“And she will remain down there for a time,” he said, calming her. “Once our work here is finished she can come home with us, but they mustn’t learn we’ve come.”

He took her by the shoulders and looked down into her upturned face. Another tear, a tear of anger this time, wetted her cheek, and he wiped it away with a rough sweep of his thumb.

“You’re ready for what you must do?”

“Yes,” Flanna said. “I am.” She tugged the bag from her belt and held it out.

Tynan es’ Brom Fuilrix took the bag from her, opened the drawstrings and peeked inside. He smiled, and Flanna took an involuntary step away from him. Her father never smiled, and it looked out of place on his face. Made him scary.

He reached inside and removed the beautiful blood opal box.

“This must stay with you. Keep it hidden until it is time to use it.”

She took it from him, held it in the palm of one hand, careful not to touch the top.

“What do I do with it?”

“I will tell you when the time comes.”

She nodded, tucked the box away inside her cloak.

He gave his wand a casual wave in Penny’s direction, and she rose into the air like a marionette with cut strings. She bobbed and twirled in the air before them. Flanna grabbed her shoulders and steadied her.

“Please don’t be mad at her,” Flanna said. “She didn’t know any better.”

“She has caused a lot of trouble, dear one. She colluded with our enemies. She is responsible for the loss of my most loyal servant.”

“You can get him back, can’t you?”

He shook the bag hanging from his clenched fist.

“It is lucky for him that he left a piece of himself on the physical plane, and that you found the doorway relic that sent him through. I think it is possible to find him and bring him back.”

Flanna breathed easier. She didn’t like the old serpent, but her father valued him, and things would go easier for Penny if her father could repair the damage she’d caused.

“Please don’t be mad at her,” Flanna repeated. “Don’t hate her. “

“I could not hate her, dear one. I can only pity her, and hope she sees the error of her ways.”

Flanna nodded, relieved. Her father was not an emotive man, he ruled his kingdom with strength, not heart, and though he’d been very indulgent with her that night, she didn’t want to try his patience.

“I must go,” he said. “And so must you.”

He slashed his wand down through the air. It parted in a crackling purple line, opening before them until she could see the familiar circular stone room of the sepulcher, the vault where her family kept their most valuable and powerful artifacts. He guided Penny’s still unconscious and floating body through it, then followed her through.