The Heart of the Phoenix (3 page)

Ronan stood nearly ten feet tall with a muscular humanoid frame covered in sleek red fur. He wore a loose and tattered poncho and loose fitting short pants, the garb of a desert dweller, though his home was far west of the heat-blasted desert sand-scape where they stood. His vulpine features were partly obscured by the hood of a sand-crusted cloak, but his snout was open in the familiar foxy grin, and his yellow eyes seemed to glow in the darkness under his hood.

Erasmus fought the urge to rush his old friend and embrace him, remembering that he was still annoyed with the medaling old fox, but couldn’t quite kill the grin on his face.

“What are you doing out here?”

“I’ve been close,” Ronan confessed. “And a little birdie told me you were in some distress.”

The miniature Plumed King darted out from beneath Ronan’s hood and perched on the tip of his snout, glaring down at the monk.

“You’re welcome,” it snapped, then flew back inside the upended top hat resting in the rubble of the disintegrated north wall.

Erasmus grimaced down at the Cardinal’s prone form and gave it an irritable kick. “I’m running out of places to hide, old friend.”

“You know what the solution is,
old friend
.” Ronan looked at the doorknob in Erasmus’s hand, then the horizontal door currently serving as a table. There was a hole in the wood near the locking tongue, but no knob.

“I was desperate… it’s not an idea I embrace.” The monk regarded the scattered unconscious bodies lying around them, then the tattooed man standing docilely behind him, wand in hand and waiting for orders. “Why don’t you be a good fellow and run along. Make sure no one bothers us.”

The tattooed man nodded and left them alone.

“How long will he be working for you?”

Erasmus took a moment to consider. “A few seconds of eye contact is usually good for a few minutes, but that one is so dumb he’s barely sentient. Could last for hours.”

“Then may I suggest a hasty escape before the Cardinal’s lackeys regroup and make another attempt?”

Erasmus shrugged, resigned, and fitted the spike at back of the doorknob into the hole in his horizontal door. “So where are we going then?”

Ronan chuckled. “I’m heading west again. You’re going somewhere a little more… distant.”

“I’d guessed that much,” Erasmus snapped.

“Remember the avian that captured you and stole your collection of relics?”

“How could I forget?” Erasmus hugged himself, as if trying to massage a sorely bruised ego.

“You’re going to meet the girls who defeated him and took all those dangerous toys away.”

“The Phoenix Girls?” Erasmus sounded almost curious.

Ronan nodded.

“I haven’t been to Dogwood in years.” The smile returned, but wilted quickly. “What new trouble are you about to get me into?”

Ronan only smiled and gestured toward the door.

Beneath them, the Cardinal began to groan.

“I suppose we should kill this one,” Erasmus said, but without any real enthusiasm.

“We should, but we won’t,” Ronan said. “The King might do it for us when he fails to bring you back.”

“The King?” Erasmus had not expected that. “I thought the avians were looking for me.”

“They are,” Ronan said. “But King Tynan is the one who hired the Vulture to find you.”

The Vulture was the name of a large gang of outlaw nomads that called this desert home, though if there was an actual Vulture no one outside of the gang had ever seen him. The fat red avian currently snoozing on the ground behind them seemed to be the one in charge.

“Help me drag them outside. If I’m leaving I’ll need to cover my exit, and it will look better if these fools survive.”

Ronan was apprehensive. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

Erasmus held up the old iPod and grinned his ear-to-ear grin. He could have tried to explain, again, what happens when Old Earth electrical gadgets encountered this world’s much stronger electro-magnetic field, but Ronan didn’t have a mind for science.

“I’m going to make a great big hole in the ground, and hope everyone thinks I was blown to dust along with my home.”

A few minutes later they stood in the open air, sand blowing around them, unconscious bodies scattered, the tattooed man standing in the far distance keeping guard. The avians who had escaped could be back with reinforcements at any moment. It was time to part.

“Be safe, and don’t call too much attention to yourself over there,” Ronan said.

“I know how to keep a low profile, Ronan,” Erasmus said, twiddling his recovered wand in one hand while his living dreadlocks straightened and snugged his tall black hat more securely on his head. One by one they slithered back under the cover, the last pausing for a moment to wave goodbye at Ronan. “Can I expect to see you on the other side?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Ronan said, flashing his vulpine smile. He turned away, then back to Erasmus. “Tell your bird goodbye for me. I like him.”

Erasmus scowled at Ronan’s retreating back, then scurried back down the recessed entrance to his half demolished home.

He hesitated only a moment, looked around, then shrugged. No matter how much he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to miss the place.

He turned the knob, one of the old relics stolen by that bounty hunter avian and returned by Ronan only a few months before, and then opened the door and lifted himself up and into the frame of the door that led to another world. He removed the doorknob and dropped it in a pocket, pushed the power button on the old iPod, and dropped it onto the rubble-covered floor.

Erasmus vanished through the doorway, and it slammed shut behind him, once more just a table.

On the floor, the iPod began to play several songs at once. The screen glowed brighter and brighter, then began to shiver and smoke. Then it exploded.

When Erasmus’s would-be kidnappers awoke, the adobe was indeed nothing but a crater, a hole at the center of a debris field.

One of the senior avians, a crow so old his feathers were beginning to gray, regarded the Cardinal gravely.

“Weren’t we supposed to bring him back alive?”

The Cardinal clutched and twisted at the chain hanging from his neck as if he wished it was Erasmus’s throat. Then he pointed at the tattooed man, standing at the edge of perception and looking very confused, and said, “I blame him.”

The old crow nodded agreement. He liked that idea.

Penny knew she’d changed a lot over the past summer. She’d grown taller, nothing like Zoe, but seemed at least to be catching up to her other non-amazon friends. She had also slimmed down, shedding what Susan called
baby fat
from her legs, stomach, and waist, while filling out in other areas. She was a bit of a late bloomer in that regard, but was neither excited nor dismayed that her body seemed to be making so many changes without her permission. The bigger changes had happened a few years before when she was still in California, and she had too many things on her mind to obsess over her new feminine curviness. The outside of her body was finally catching up with the inside. That was all.

Even her face seemed to be changing, the slightly pudgy face of the child that was slimming into the more angular face of the woman she would become.

The new figure mostly changed nothing, because she was still just Penny, but the new way the town boys looked at her whenever she made it into town was just creepy. She caught them staring sometimes and had to fight an urge to jab their eyes out.

Then there was the thing with Trey, that boy who had chased Zoe for so long but who had finally given up on her. Penny had been slightly jealous of the attention he’d always shown Zoe, and pleasantly surprised when, after Zoe’s departure that summer, he’d started noticing her.

The kiss had also been a surprise, more like an ambush, but the biggest shock had been her first response. Though she’d never kissed a boy, she found herself kissing back. She’d ended it then, and in a hurry, and had avoided Trey ever since. She had tried to avoid thinking about him too but had been less successful. After a lot of agonizing she had decided to wait until Zoe had returned, to make sure she would be okay with Penny and Trey,
before
there was a Penny and Trey.

She had told no one else, not Katie, Ellen, or Susan. It would be bad enough having to talk to Zoe about him.

If all of this new insecurity was another symptom of her changing, then she would rather just skip it.

Penny knew she had changed, but seeing that change standing right in front of her, a perfect doppelganger standing only a few feet away and speaking to her, was uncanny.

* * *

Is it a dream
?

It didn’t feel like a dream, but it didn’t feel real either.

She was in a cave, small distant sounds echoing endlessly around her. Dripping water, the skittering of small claws on stone, a dislodged pebble. The light was low, but there was enough to see the girl standing a few feet away, facing her with the same curiosity. A face Penny knew well from her own mirror.

“Is this a dream?” Penny and her lookalike spoke at the same time, then smiled and laughed in unison. They took hesitant steps toward each other, paused.

“Who are you?” Penny reached a shaking hand toward the other. The doppelganger flinched back, then held her ground as Penny touched her cheek and ran a finger through the thick red hair falling over her shoulder. She was real enough, no phantom.

“Who do you think I am?” The girl relaxed visibly as Penny withdrew her hand, but continued to regard her with an intensity that made Penny want to squirm.

Penny bit back the first retort that came to mind,
If I knew I wouldn’t have asked
, and considered the question. She scrutinized the girl, a mirror image dressed in the same denim capris and tank top as herself, and Penny was again shocked by the changes she’d gone through in just a few months.

“Are you me?” As soon as the question was out it seemed the obvious answer, and she decided it was a dream, or something very close to one.

“You
are
me,” Penny rephrased the question as a statement of fact, then nodded to reinforce it. “This is a dream.”

“If you say so.” Her doppelganger seemed almost indifferent. “So is it my dream, or yours?”

“Mine!” Penny almost shouted. “If you are me then this is my dream.”

“If you say so,” the girl repeated, and shrugged.

“What are we doing here?”

“How should I know?” Penny’s doppelganger said, then vanished. Dimly, just another echo in the dark and empty place, the girl’s parting words found Penny’s ears.

“It’s your dream.”

* * *

“Hey, wait!” Penny shouted, but she was already out of the dream. She stood in her pajamas, shouting at her own reflection in the Conjuring Glass, the large magic mirror she’d liberated from a murderous humanoid bird shortly after moving to her new home in Dogwood, and which now hung on the door of her attic bedroom wardrobe.

She closed her eyes and clung to the last shreds of her dream, already fraying around the edges and well on its way to unraveling, and wondered what she’d been conjuring.

* * *

An hour later Penny was showered, caffeinated, and eating a buttered bagel when the phone in the hallway rang. She dropped the last quarter of her breakfast onto her plate and ran to catch it before it could disturb Susan.

Susan’s workdays started earlier than ever since her shop had burnt down with half of downtown Dogwood. She’d had to downsize, no more books or magazines, but she was keeping the office stationery business alive, barely, by storing product in the basement of their Clover Hill house and taking orders from her home office in the unused second floor bedroom. Penny helped where she could, loading orders into the old van Susan drove now, the old Falcon that was parked at the far end of the dirt and gravel turnaround and hadn’t moved all summer, and some days she helped with the deliveries.

The stationery business was a shrinking concern. Most of her old customers now ordered online or from the box stores in Centralia. Only the local businesses whose offices hadn’t burned down along with Susan’s the previous spring still ordered from her. Susan was desperately hanging on to what remained of Sullivan’s, but her business seemed to be shrinking weekly.

Penny hooked the phone from its cradle on the second ring.

“Hi Kat.” She waited for a second for Katie to respond. “Kat?”

“How did you know it was me?” Katie sounded surprised and exasperated in equal measures.

“I don’t know. Just did.” And Penny didn’t either, she
had
just known. It had been happening a lot lately with all of them, knowing when one of the others was calling or coming over, knowing what one of them was about to say or ask before she even opened her mouth. They seemed strangely in sync with each other… except for Zoe, who had been gone most of the summer, and who Penny hadn’t heard from in over two weeks.