The Heart of the Phoenix (34 page)

“I thought Torin was in line to take over the family,” Susan said.

“He was until one of their cousins found poison in his private chambers. The same poison that killed King Brom.”

The tale of Torin’s crime spread quickly in the Fuilrix citadel, a crime that would remove the last obstacle to his ascension, and raise a Phoenix Girl to the station of queen.

“The killing of a family member is more than just a crime,” Torin said. “It’s a reminder of the Phoenix’s curse against the Blood King, it’s an abomination.”

May your house be ever divided
, Penny thought, recalling the Phoenix’s final words in Erasmus’s telling of the old story.

Tracy waited patiently through this latest digression, then continued.

“Tynan gave me a choice,” Tracy repeated. “I could watch my friends die, one by one, before he finally killed me, or I could join him, betray my friends, but save their lives. I would have to leave this world and never return. I was a tool to use against the Phoenix Girls if they ever did return, and a trophy, Tynan’s living proof that he had finally rid both worlds of the last influence of the Phoenix.”

She had agreed, but had done more than steal her friends’ memories, she had saved them, stored them in the crystal spheres of the memory tree.

“We were broken,” Tracy said. “Di was gone and our circle was weak.”

She looked at Penny with clear admiration.

“But we’re not broken now. You brought us back.”

“We are broken though,” Penny said. “Zoe’s gone.”

Ronan spoke, and the derision in his voice cut.

“Faithless child. I thought you knew Zoe better than that.”

Penny glared at him.

“She will be back,” he said, as if it was self-evident.

“I don’t see how we’re better off now than we were fourteen years ago,” Nancy said. “The gate is wide open now.”

“They’re already here,” Flanna said, and closed her eyes to avoid the sight of all the accusing faces turned toward her. “The carnival arrived last night, and
he
is with them.”

“Yes,” Tracy said. “But we have a hundred guards standing at the gate, and he was counting on a few clueless girls as his only opposition.”

“The gate’s growing,” Penny said.

“It’s not a gate,” Erasmus said. “The boundary between the worlds has torn wide open, and the tear won’t stop until it has encompassed all of this reality.”

“That’s been his goal all along,” Tracy said. “When Penny and her friends banished that avian back to your world, Tynan learned that the avians had found you and taken your hoard of stolen relics. He realized the World Breaker must still be in Dogwood, so he sent Turoc to find it, and to secure the hollow.”

“Is that who Price and Duke were working for?” Penny saw Susan’s temper rising, and thought Duke was lucky to be dead and out of her reach.

“Yes,” Tracy said. “Penny and her friends stopped them.”

“Who is Turoc?” Susan asked Tracy, but Penny answered.

“Giant snake man. Four arms, huge fangs, bad personality.”

“I hate snakes,” Nancy said and shuddered.

“You’ll probably get to meet him soon,” Tracy said, and squeezed Nancy’s hand. “Along with the mercenaries he sent after Erasmus.”

“So we get to fight Tynan and his mercenaries on this side, defend the hollow against reinforcements from the citadel, and find a way to save two worlds from a growing tear in reality?” Erasmus had passed sarcasm and gone straight to full-fledged fatalism.

“I think that about sums it up, old friend,” Ronan said.

“You should have let the mercenaries have me,” Erasmus said. “I’d be dead already and this wouldn’t be my problem.”

That cheerful remark killed conversation for a moment, and that was when the power went out.

The lights dimmed and died, the glow of digital displays on the television and DVD player winked out. The hum of the refrigerator, so low it was almost subliminal, was noticeable only in its absence.

In the new darkness of the house, they noticed the glow from without.

Dawn had come.

“Where’s my mirror?” Penny said, rounding on Flanna. “We need Katie and Ellen.”

“I left it in Bowen’s shop,” Flanna said. “Where...” She couldn’t finish, and turned away from Penny’s hard glare.

“Where Price met with us?” Bowen seemed less than thrilled at this information. “Was that your work?”

“It was Tynan’s plan,” Flanna said.

“You just carried it out for him,” Michael said, matching Bowen’s hard look with his own.

“Leave her alone,” Torin said, stepping up beside Flanna and putting an arm around her. “She thought she was avenging her mother and protecting her people from the aggressive incursion from your world.”

Penny pushed away her own hard feelings for Flanna. “Tynan kidnapped her after she was born and told her he was her father.” Penny caught Susan’s eye, then her aunt Nancy’s. “He told her that you killed her mother. She learned the truth last night. Cut her some slack.”

After a moment, Susan sighed and nodded. Nancy’s anger seemed to ebb as well, and she joined Torin on Flanna’s other side, squeezed her shoulder.

“Okay, moving on,” Nancy said, and Flanna relaxed visibly. “What do we do now?”

“We get my mirror back so we can let Katie and Ellen know what’s going on.”

“No,” Michael said. “I don’t want Katie involved.”

“She’s already involved,” Tracy said. “She’s been involved since that avian slaver tried to kidnap her last year.”

“And she’s better equipped to defend herself from the Reds than you are, sonny,” Bowen said. “We need all the casters we can get on our side. “

“Casters?” Michael looked confused and irritated in equal parts.

Bowen rolled his eyes and waved an imaginary wand.

“Yes, we do,” Tracy removed another of the crystal spheres from the memory tree, Zoe’s aunt Janet, and stepped outside with it. Now only Diana Sinclair Fuilrix’s remained.

Penny pulled the curtain aside and watched her smash it. A moment later she returned.

“I was hoping you would all be here when the time came, but it may still work. If she brings Dana we can arm her too.”

“Dana?” Penny almost shouted. “Zoe’s mom?”

“She used to be a Phoenix Girl,” Susan confirmed. “Her magic was less predictable than ours. It scared her. She quit after Janet joined us.”

“Tynan never knew about her, and she was long gone when everything in Dogwood fell apart,” Tracy said. “I was spared tracking her down.”

“Are there any more surprises you’d care to spring on me?” Penny grumbled, but also smiled. She wondered if Zoe knew about her mother; wondering about her absent friend wilted her smile.

Ronan said she would be back, and Penny could only hope he was right, but she had two closer friends who had no idea what was happening, and when Tynan’s Traveling Reds arrived their ignorance wouldn’t save them from him.

“Where’s my wand?” Penny said, passing the black one she’d taken from the citadel to her aunt. “It was our mother’s, and I want it back.”

“In your room,” Flanna said. “I’ll get it.”

Flanna fled the living room, and with a look back at her father, Penny followed. “We’ll be right back.”

* * *

Penny climbed the folding steps into her room and found Flanna bent down, retrieving her mother’s old wand from the floor in front of her bed stand. Irritation flared, seeing her mom’s wand treated so shabbily, but she forced it back down. She had decided to forgive her sister, and constant fits of temper weren’t going to help them.

“Penny, I’m...”

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry.” She took the offered wand, happy to have it back in her hand. “I forgive you.”

She strode past Flanna and tapped her wardrobe door. She opened it carefully, found the break room of Golden Arts dark and deserted. She stepped through, and Flanna followed.

“Here.” Flanna walked to the corner where she’d hidden it and handed it to Penny. “You call your friends, there’s something I have to do.”

“Whoa, what?” Penny grabbed for Flanna’s arm, but missed. “Where are you going?”

“He’s here already. I did what I did last night so the last of the old Phoenix Girls and the traitors,” she paused, seemed to reconsider her words, and began again, “so Ronan, Bowen, and Erasmus would be out of his way when he arrived. He’s expecting me.”

“So what?” Penny felt confusion and outrage at her sister’s words. “After everything you learned, you’re going back to him?”

She reached for Flanna again, but her sister skipped deftly out of her reach.

“Yes, because we need to know how many family and allies he has with him. We need to know what he’s planning for the town, and if I don’t find him, he’ll come looking for me.” She slipped her wand inside her black robe and reached for the door. “He thinks you are all out of his way now, so you have time to make a plan, and I can help by being your eyes when I rejoin the family.”

Penny thought she knew where Flanna was going with this, and found herself in reluctant agreement. She saw only one problem.

“Won’t he know we’ve escaped?”

“No. They are cut off. The only way to communicate between worlds is at the portals.” She took Penny’s hand and squeezed it. “I am sorry for everything I did. I plan to make up for it now, and to pay him back for our mother. Go back, get your friends, and then try to find me. It should be easy now that we’re in the same world.”

She smiled, and Penny felt an answering smile of her own.

“I wish we could have grown up together,” Flanna said. “When this is over we have fourteen years of catching up.”

Flanna opened the door to the main shop floor and bolted through it before Penny could try to stop her again.

As Penny watched her depart, she thought,
But only if we survive this
.

Only if we win
.

* * *

Penny resisted the urge to sneak into the storefront for a peek outside. As much as she wanted to know what was happening in town, if the wrong person spotted her she would give them all away.

She closed the door behind Flanna, tapped it with her wand, and opened it again on her bedroom. With downtown safely behind her, she took out her mirror and called to Katie. When a minute passed with no reply she remembered Katie was not speaking to her, and tried Ellen instead.

“What?” Ellen’s face popped into view, and Penny saw she was no less angry. Ellen’s scowl would have made Katie proud. Then she saw Penny’s face, the chopped hair, sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, and her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God, Penny! What happened?”

“I can’t explain right now, but you and Katie need to come to my house,
now
. Don’t go into town, just come over.” Then, as an afterthought, “Bring your bikes. You might need them.”

Penny said goodbye and tossed the mirror on her bed before Ellen could ask more questions, and before going back downstairs decided she had time to change. She wasn’t wearing the rags Tynan and his goons had put on her for another second.

Five minutes later she was back downstairs to find the adults arguing about what to do next.

“I don’t have cause to arrest or detain them,” Michael almost shouted. “At least nothing the city council would believe.”

“Well we can’t just let them march into town and set up,” Susan countered. “They’ll be at the hollow before the day is over.”

“I’m certain they’re already here,” Tracy said. “The key to stopping them is to stop
him
.”

Tracy turned to Torin.

“How did he get that scar on his cheek? He didn’t have it during the Traveling Reds last performance in Dogwood, but he had it eight months later.”

“I don’t know,” Torin said. “No one does. He visited the sepulcher one day, locked the door from the inside so no one could disturb him, and when he came out at the end of the day it was there.”

“You know my theory,” Erasmus said. His old bar stool stood in the center of the room, and he sat atop it, spinning in slow circles. It hadn’t been there when Penny went upstairs, hadn’t been in the hollow either. She wondered where he kept it when he wasn’t spinning on it.

“Yes,” Torin said, rolling his eyes. “But we’re going to save that as a last resort, when all of the sane theories have fallen through.”

“Well I wanna hear his theory,” Nancy said. “Because I think we’ve already run out of sane.”

Penny slipped into the room, unnoticed in the heat of the debate, and sat on the floor next to the couch.

“Mr. Pi thinks Tynan is possessed by the old Blood King,” Bowen said. “A voluntary possession akin to psychic symbiosis.”

Erasmus smiled, nodded, spun in another circle.

Tracy considered that, then said, “Why would he allow that?”

“Tynan was curious about the crazy old king’s lost magic. According to the family histories the Blood King collected magic from all of the known lands and beyond while he was exiled,” Torin said. “He refused to share most of his knowledge, and died with it.”

“It’s possible,” Ronan said. “Many of the Blood King’s artifacts were kept in the sepulcher. A powerful spirit can leave traces of itself on treasured possessions.”

“A revenant,” Erasmus said. “And it wouldn’t be the first time. More than a few of you crazy Reds searched for the Blood King’s lost magic and lost your minds in the search.”

Penny closed her eyes and found her sister almost at once. She saw downtown Dogwood in her mind, but it was hazy. She couldn’t be certain if it was her sister, or just imagination.

“Say it’s true,” Torin allowed. “So what? How does that help us?”

“If he’s been communing with the spirit...” Tracy began, but Erasmus interrupted.

“Not a spirit, just a trace, a piece left behind. It has memory, but no life of its own away from a host.”

Tracy nodded impatiently.

“A fine distinction, I’m sure,” she said, then continued on with her point. “If he’s grown too dependent on the symbiosis, separating them could weaken him.”

“The heart,” Penny said with such a start that she was forced out of her sister’s head. “He was wearing the heart of the Phoenix around his neck.”