Winter's Dream (The Hemlock Bay Series) (5 page)

I was surprised when Sophie and the headmaster just got up and left, shutting the door behind them. “I’m Hazel,” the lighter haired one said, “and this is my sister, Viola. We aren’t exactly your great-aunts but we are family and we’ve come to take custody of you.”

“That’s not even possible, you’re being tricked. Those papers were blank. Blank!”

They looked at me closely. “No, they weren’t.”

“Oh lord,” I muttered under my breath, “how many humans can one jinn brainwash?”

Their eyes snapped open wider at that. “What did she say?” one hissed to the other.

“Well, look at her? How did we miss that? She’s been
touched
by one.”

They got up from their chairs and I rose from mine and started backing away. “Look at her hair,” one of them said.

“And her face,” the other agreed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled, my back slamming into a book case.

They finally seemed to take notice of me, really see me as a person. “What have you gotten yourself into, dearie?” the light haired one asked.

My response was interrupted by the opening of the door. Sophie looked at us curiously. “All set here?”

The sisters nodded while I shook my head. I was ignored.

“Well then, just this last matter and it looks like you’re free to go,” Sophie said with a fake little smile. She handed another sheaf of papers to the sisters.

“Other matter?” Hazel asked.

“Yes, about the other girl.”

Hazel looked over the papers and her face lit up. “Oh, right.”

I moved to look over her shoulder and once again saw blank papers in her hand. Freaking Jordan and his lies!

My fuming was interrupted by the pleasant “aunt”. “Do you have anything to pack, dear?” Hazel asked. I shook my head, wondering who she really was and what was going to happen to me if I had to leave with her.

“Bixby?”

I snapped my head up at Minnie’s voice.

I looked from her to the sisters. “What are you doing here?”

“Who are you? Is everything okay?” She looked from me to the sisters. Everyone was glancing around, uncertain of what was going on. Except me. I knew what was going on. Jordan had interfered again, after promising he wouldn’t, and I had a new mess to clean up in addition to the last one.

I chose my words carefully. “Well, I guess I have some family coming to claim me,” I said uncertainly.

“Me too,” she said slowly.

She and I looked from each other to the sisters to Sophie. Finally I asked, “You’re taking both of us?”

Hazel looked at the blanks sheets in her hand again. “Why, we sure are!”

Minnie squealed in delight then burst into tears. “I didn’t even know I had family, much less that you were part of it,” she cried, grabbing onto me.

But those papers are blank, I wanted to say. I wisely kept my mouth shut and in my heart cursed Jordan again. I couldn’t guess what he had gotten me mixed up in and now Minnie stood to get hurt.

“You two pack your things up while we finish signing papers,” Sophie snapped. Minnie grabbed my hand and ran back to the entrance into the “school” as if she were afraid they would change their minds in the time it took us to grab our toothbrushes.

“I can’t believe this,” she squealed, hugging my hand to her chest.

“Minnie,” I tried to warn.

“Where do you think we’re going?” she asked, throwing her soap and toothpaste into a plastic shopping bag.

“I have no idea, but I need to tell you something,” I said, trying to catch her attention as she whirled around the dormitory.

“The aunts kind of look old fashioned, don’t you think? Well, I mean, obviously they’re old, but I like their dresses and long braids pinned up like that … I hope they don’t live in an apartment—not that I would mind, anywhere is better than here.”

“Minnie,” I said, trying to form the words to explain what a huge mistake, what a huge trick this all was, but when she spun back around to me with her eyes shining and giant grin digging all the way back to her ears my explanations dried up.

“I just never thought I would get out of here. I know what I did to my dad was wrong but they don’t know what he did to me. My choice was to stay there or get locked up. I had to pick locked up, even though I never thought I would get out. And now we have
family
, I have you, and we’re going home.” Tears were spilling down her cheeks. My heart broke a little for her. I was going back to Hemlock Bay and she was going somewhere safe, wherever that was.

“Let’s just be careful,” I said lamely. “We don’t really know them so we’ll watch each other’s back, okay?” I was going to kill Jordan. All his promises of playing by my rules had been just as false as everything else he had ever said.

She must have seen my grim expression. “Oh, Bixby,” she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me back down the hall towards the office. “It’s going to be great, you’ll see.”

Our send off was less than great.

“I hope I don’t see you here again,” Sophie said as way of good-bye, “but I won’t hold my breath.”

And with that I walked out the front doors of what had been my prison for a month. The yard looked just as ugly on the outside as it had from the inside but the air was fresher, lighter, and I gulped in deep breaths. The light was harsh and speared through the branches of the bare trees. A thin layer of crunchy snow and frost covered everything in washed out tones, even the fallen leaves littering the edges of the parking lot. It was a false, forced winterscape and reminded me how quickly Jordan could turn.

Still, I couldn’t help but smile—I was free, sort of.

“Over here,” Hazel said, leading us to an old station wagon. With my fingers on the chilled metal handle, I hesitated, looking around my frosty surroundings. Was I supposed to go with these women? Were they taking me back to Hemlock Bay or was Jordan going to jump out and supposedly save the day?

“Bixby?” one of the aunts asked. “You okay?”

I nodded and opened the door to settle into a dusty seat. The window was open just a crack and I left it, letting the frigid wind push back my newly grown curls. My breathing was becoming faster and shallower and I struggled to calm myself. Despite all his promises of love and better behavior, I couldn’t trust Jordan. Yet here I was driving off with two strange women who had obviously been manipulated by him.

No one said anything as we pulled onto the main road but I could see the blissful grin on Minnie’s face from the corner of my eye. I sat up a little higher in my seat as I saw the entrance for the main highway leading back to Hemlock Bay and calculated in my mind how long it would take until I was back home.

We flew past the entrance ramp. My head snapped around and I watched it fade behind us. “Uh, I think you passed our turn,” I said.

“No, we didn’t,” said the aunt who was driving with white knuckled hands clamped on the steering wheel.

“Um, yeah, Hemlock Bay is about two hours that way, back there.”

The other one shook her head. “Oh no honey, you aren’t going back to your house, you’re coming to ours. Viola and I are going to be watching over you.”

Panic began to slide around in my belly. “No, that’s not possible. I need to find my brother, I need to check on my grandma—”

“Your grandma is in a nursing home and your brother is old enough to take care of himself,” the mean one, Viola, snapped.

My breakfast jabbed hard at my throat and with my watery eyes squeezed tight I managed to force it back down. My thoughts sluiced around as badly as the contents of my stomach. “Okay, we need to get a few things straight,” I said, trying to keep anxiety from my voice. I glanced over at Minnie who seemed totally oblivious to the conversation. “You are being tricked. You are just a means to an end. I tried to tell him not to interfere, but I really have no say in what he does—”

The nicer one, Hazel, turned around in her seat and locked her steely grey eyes on mine. I could see fine smile lines around her mouth but she definitely wasn’t smiling then. “What are you talking about?”

The wind from my cracked window was freezing the moisture from my eyes into my lashes. “Those papers were blank. Someone was trying to help me get out of there. And I appreciate it, really. But I don’t belong with you, I need to go
home.
”

Now it was Viola’s turn to glare at me over her shoulder. “First off, don’t ever believe anything one of them tells you. Second, we are not just a means to an end, we are cousins of your great-aunts and you do belong with us. If we had any idea your mother was gone and your grandma was too ill to train you we would have come for you much sooner.”

“Train me?”

“Oh my word,” Viola muttered. “All this time that town has had no protection, no one watching over it.”

“What town?” I asked, the hairs on my arms starting to stand up.

“I don’t know what you call it,” she snapped. “You dream about a town, right? Go back to it all the time?”

I nodded, my goose bumps going down my legs. “Nightmare Town,” I whispered.

“Well, you were supposed to be guarding it. And I have no idea what mess we will have on our hands since you haven’t been. My word, Hazel, she probably doesn’t even know who she is!”

My throat was dry but I managed to push out the words. “I’m a Gatekeeper.”

“See, Viola,” Hazel said pleasantly. “Her mother or grandmother must have told her something.”

I shook my head. “No, David did.”

She turned back around; her eyebrows drawn in tight over her eyes. “And who is that?”

“A jinn.”

The car swerved and then jerked back into our lane, snapping all our heads from side to side.

“Well, damn it,” Viola said. “This is going to be an ever bigger mess than we planned for.”

You have no idea, I thought.

Chapter Five

T
he remainder of the drive
was filled with silence. My panic turned to cold calculation to numbness as we continued on. Every mile took me further from my home. At least we seemed to be sticking close to the big lake. I tried to remind myself my chances of finding Linc and freeing Grandma had risen considerably but the distance wasn’t the only thing making silent tears slip down my cold cheeks. I really thought my dad was going to come through and get me out of that hellhole. I had thought I would be going home, to my house, and be able to patch my family back together right away.

The aunts never pulled onto a main highway, just kept driving down old two lanes. We passed through a few towns with one traffic light then veered off even further into the country. Neighborhoods disappeared and the houses became fewer and fewer. The land was overtaken by miles of frozen, churned dirt, and occasionally we would pass a worn down barn. Eventually we turned onto a dirt road and very far out I could see what looked like an Amish community.

The tears came heavier now and were pushed back into my hair by the thin, cruel wind cutting in through the cracked window. The idea of having to wait longer to find Linc, to wait longer to apologize to him was killing me. There was no way I could just walk home from here, wherever “here” was. I hadn’t even seen any traffic in case I got desperate enough to hitchhike. No buses or cab services would come out that far from the last town we had been through. My chances of finding my brother and seeing my grandma had doubled when I left juvie but had been cut by each mile I was taken away in the old, dusty car. I cursed Jordan again for interfering. He could never make anything right as he didn’t even know what right was. I wanted to hurt him and I wanted to know what possible reason he could have for getting me sent out into the middle of nowhere.

Minnie grabbed my hand and gasped, interrupting my anger. “Look,” she breathed as we slowed to pull into a long driveway. Mature oaks lined the dusty drive and we drove for several minutes before we emerged from their shadows. A giant farmhouse took over my entire field of vision.

The house was old and somehow mismatched. Some farmhouses were restored to a regal, Victorian look. This one, while not in shambles, was not someone’s labor of love. The blue siding had faded to a dusky grey and the wraparound porch sagged in places. There were no lovely hanging baskets or wicker rocking chairs or centennial flags. Some parts were clearly not original to the house. There were off color additions shooting off the sides or seeming perched atop the second story. It was massive but not imposing. Instead it just seemed confusing and that impression reminded me of my own house in Nightmare Town. A little twinge of pain tweaked my chest.

“Welcome to the farm,” Viola said, pulling in front of a faded red barn larger than the house.

For very different reasons, Minnie and I sat speechless in the backseat while they got out. Between the house and the barn I could make out a corral and from the barn I could hear the noises of farm animals.

“This is, like, a real farm,” Minnie whispered, as if she had never seen one before. Maybe she hadn’t.

“We are in the middle of nowhere,” I whispered back, refusing to be distracted from my ultimate goal—escape.

Hazel motioned for us to get out of the car. “Come on, we don’t bite.”

“But the turkeys do,” Viola said, “so watch it.”

Minnie looked around before sprinting to the porch, her plastic shopping bag clenched to her chest.

I followed more slowly, taking the whole place in. Despite being mismatched and worn down, I could tell it was well taken care of. The windows sparkled and lattice under the porch had been recently painted bright white. The steps didn’t creak as I walked up them and the screen door on the side of the house didn’t squeal when opened. As much as I wanted to hate it, I couldn’t. It was warm and inviting and smelled like apple pie.

The aunts ushered us into a huge kitchen, admonishing us to remove our shoes. “Martha is very firm about that,” the nicer one said with a smile.

Minnie and I were totally out of place in our matching ugly blue scrubs. All around us hardwood floors gleamed. The floor and cabinets alike were a warm shade of honey. The appliances were old fashioned but clean and shiny. Over the butcher block island hung an ironwork grid with fake ivy wound around it and copper pans hanging down. Even the teakettle was had been cleaned to a mirror-like perfection.