“How’s a man supposed to get ahead paying money like that?” Dad was all for making sure middle class American families had plenty of spare income, and he did his best to make sure they spent it at the chain of resorts for which he worked.
Mom didn’t answer. Instead, she posed a problem of her own. “I’m right in the middle of that shipwreck scene. Should I let my protagonist get picked up by the Coast Guard right away? Or should I leave him to float about Lake Michigan for a day or two? Hmm…if only there were freshwater sharks.”
My brother walked into the middle of this exchange. He was tanned and toned, fresh from the beach with a towel draped around his neck. A shake of his head spattered the kitchen with tiny water droplets. “I love this island,” he sighed. “Sunny and a balmy eighty-two degrees. If I were at home, I’d be digging snow out of my deck chairs right now.”
“What’s scarier, Bobby,” Mom asked him, “a jail cell or the fear of drowning?”
He tipped his head to one side and wiggled a finger in his ear. “Neither, but if you worked a ferret into the plot…those beady little eyes and nasty, sharp rat teeth...” He made exaggerated nibbling motions.
“Ferrets aren’t rodents, dear,” Mom said. “They bite like a dog.”
“Did you mean that to be reassuring?” he asked
“You’re afraid of ferrets?” I smirked. The image of my Adonis of a brother fleeing a small animal struck me as highly amusing. “Since when?”
“Since forever, you little punk. Ever see one?” He gave an involuntary shudder.
“What’s going to happen when the government takes all our money, eh?” Dad fumed. “Do lawmakers ever stop and think about that?”
Dad’s head was bent over his paper, displaying thinning blond hair. The tropical sun had burnt the back of his neck to a crispy pink. I was cursed with the same fair coloring, but after my skin peeled for the forty-seventh time, I got pretty good about applying sun block. Mom and Bobby looked like islanders with their dark complexions.
Six years older than me, Bobby was a successful motocross racer who made enough in endorsements to purchase a beautiful home in the Colorado Rockies, but he’d spent most of January with us. My sister, Jessica, on the other hand, never left law school for anything.
“Maybe if I framed my hero and let him take the rap for blowing up the boat,” Mom mused.
“Put a ferret on the boat before you blow it up,” Bobby suggested.
I sighed and inserted my earbuds. I never should have attempted to do schoolwork at the kitchen table.
The doorbell rang. Bobby admitted Elena, who was followed by her beefy guardian angel, Ranofur. He and Mike kept a low profile at school, but months ago Elena and I decided to tell our families about our secret adventures. I’m not sure Dad believed half of them, but my mom had a heyday putting them into a children’s novel—after I was safely home, of course.
“Hey,” I called, stacking my books. “Mike isn’t with you? He ditched me just before fourth hour and I haven’t seen him since.”
Elena was looking over Bobby’s bare chest with appreciation. “Is this what you’re going to look like when you grow up?” she asked me. “Maybe I should be nicer to you.”
“Oh, shut up,” I replied.
She grinned and stuck out her hand. “You must be Bobby. Taylor wouldn’t get your autograph for me when I asked for it.”
“Elena, right?” Bobby asked, shaking her hand. Then he cuffed me upside the head. “I always give autographs to pretty girls, bonehead.”
I groaned. This was once of the hazards of having a famous brother. “Elena’s only fourteen,” I reminded him, “and she’s taken.”
“Fifteen,” she interjected, like the few months she had on me made some kind of difference.
“Have you two had dinner yet?” Mom asked, setting the mac and cheese on the table beside a can of peaches.
Ranofur held up a hand. “I’m fine. Thank you, Mrs. Davis.”
“I ate, too.” Elena smiled. “But thanks.”
Mom turned to me.
“I’ll grab some later. We’ve got work to do. Come on, you guys,” I said and led them to my room.
Elena sat cross-legged on the foot of my bed, but Ranofur maintained his usual vigilance, taking up a position at my window. “Mike is still disappearing?” he asked. I could hear the disapproval in his voice. During the calm that followed our defeat of the pirate, Bartholomew Swain, Mike had gotten into the habit of checking out for long stretches of time.
Elena chuckled. “Taylor’s probably safer for it.”
Ranofur didn’t laugh. “Taylor is the Chosen One. He shouldn’t be left alone.”
“But Swain is dead,” she reminded him, “and nothing’s happened for months. I haven’t even seen a Swaug since before Christmas.”
I shuddered at the thought of the tentacled monsters. It was true we’d been going a bit soft lately. If it hadn’t been for Ranofur, Elena and I probably would have given up our weekly weapons training sessions last semester.
“I still don’t like it,” Ranofur spoke.
Mike chose that moment to enter, passing straight through my bedroom wall with his laptop bag slung over one shoulder. It looked rather out of place with his costume.
“Forget your blue suede shoes?” Elena quipped, looking him up and down.
Ranofur didn’t give him time to answer. “Where have you been, Agent Amikim?” he barked.
Mike reeled at the unexpected sharpness. “The boss sent me those files from ancient Babylon,” he whined. “They got overlooked somehow when I set up the new filing software. I’ve got to get the encoding up to date and enter them in the system.”
“Funny,” I drawled. “I got three FarmVille requests from you this afternoon.”
Ranofur’s face darkened. “You left Taylor alone so you could play on Facebook?”
Mike backed up a step, his shoulder twitching involuntarily. “I just took a little break. It gets tedious setting up those encryption files.”
Ranofur crossed his arms over his chest, each bicep as big as a gallon milk jug. “Are you aware that Taylor was attacked today?”
Mike waved him off. “Just a little misunderstanding with Elena’s boyfriend. No harm done.”
“What about the other attacks?” Ranofur asked.
“Er…what other attacks?” Mike glanced at me.
“If you’d stuck around for drama class,” I told him, “you would have been treated to quite a production. Of course, if you’d been there to do your job, maybe my face wouldn’t be this lovely shade of blueberry.”
Mike finally noticed my bruises. He sank down beside Elena, his own face pale. “What happened?”
For a long time, I’d resented the fact that I’d been assigned a guardian angel unfit even to walk an old lady across the street. It seemed so unfair that Elena, who’d never even been mentioned in prophecy, had been given one so efficient and capable. But Mike wasn’t such a bad guy, really. At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself at moments like these.
After I explained about the fight with Doug and then Erich, he seemed not to believe it. “But those are your friends,” he protested.
“They still are. They just went out of their heads. Same as Damian,” I explained.
“I called Damian after school today,” Elena said with a careless wave. “He’s fine. So are Doug and Erich. This meeting is a waste of time.”
“I’m glad they’re all right,” Mike said. “But why would they all go after Taylor in the first place?”
“That’s what we need to find out,” Ranofur rumbled.
“We know they were all at Giovetti’s last night,” I volunteered. “Elena was there and saw them.”
“But I was there, too,” she pointed out, “and nothing weird happened to me.”
“Maybe you have some sort of immunity,” I speculated.
She scoffed. “Immunity to what?”
I shrugged and sank onto my desk chair.
&nbs
p; “We also know that water ended all three episodes,” Ranofur mused. “As soon as they got wet, each boy snapped right out of it.”
I jerked my head up, struck by a sudden memory. Mike met my eye and we said the word together. “Swain!”
“How do you figure?” Ranofur asked.
“Remember how Swain bewitched that motorcycle gang last spring?” I asked, squirming on my seat in my excitement.
Mike finished my thought. “When we dumped them in the water, they didn’t remember a thing!”
“Hellfire did,” Elena snapped.
I had forgotten about the old Baptist preacher. “You’re right.” I clicked my fingers. “And he told us every single one of the bikers had been given a knife made of Raybold steel.”
“The metal used by angels.” I could see Mike turning over the thought. “Maybe that’s the common factor. Maybe humans react to it funny.”
Elena rolled her eyes. “Where would Damian, Doug, and Erich get Raybold steel? Giovetti’s doesn’t exactly make their silverware of the stuff. Besides, Taylor and I handle it all the time and it doesn’t bother us.”
“It didn’t affect the preacher, either,” I pointed out. “Maybe he has the same immunity.”
“This isn’t a disease, Davis.” Elena frowned. “Damian and the others were just hypnotized or something.”
“What’s with you, Elena?” I asked. “You came blasting into the office with big news this morning, but now it’s like you’re trying to pretend nothing’s wrong.”
“There isn’t anything wrong!” she insisted. “This is all just one big coincidence.”
“It’s too big to be a coincidence.”
She lifted her chin. “Then maybe it was food poisoning. Just let it go and this will probably all blow over.”
“What did you order last night, Elena?” Mike asked.
“I split a pizza with Damian.”
“And you’re fine?”
Her mouth made a thin, hard line. “I have a very strong constitution.”
Ranofur wrapped a huge arm around her shoulder and gave her a gentle squeeze. “What’s wrong, Elena?”
She stepped out of his embrace, her eyes blazing. “You all are trying to turn this into some ridiculous conspiracy theory. This isn’t supernatural. It’s not a repeat of what happened before. It can’t be. Swain is dead.”
I looked at her in confusion. “What happened to the Elena who was going to stick it out no matter what, even when I quit the mission last spring?”
Her lip quivered. She clamped down on it with her teeth. “Everything’s different now.”
“Is it?” Ranofur spoke very gently. “Elena, the things that mattered then are at risk again now. If we don’t pursue this, you know what could happen.” He tipped her chin up so she was looking in his eyes. “It’s our duty. We have to see this through, because innocent lives are too precious to gamble with.”
Elena seemed trapped in Ranofur’s gaze. I saw the briefest flicker of fear and sorrow. Then her face hardened. She wrenched herself free of the angel’s touch and stormed out the door, slamming it behind her without a backwards glance.
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My sister’s gone.
No body. No evidence. No motive.
Only my guilt remains.
Michelle Isenhoff writes for children and adults. She loves roller coasters, big dogs, high school football games, cycling, swimming in big waves, old graveyards, and wearing flip-flops all winter. Her dream vacation would include lots of castle ruins, but so far she’s had to settle for pictures on Pinterest. Once an elementary teacher, Michelle homeschooled combinations of her three kids for twelve years. Now that the last of them has graduated to public school, she writes full time and feels like she’s on a perpetual summer vacation.
MichelleIsenhoff.com
Taylor Davis and the Flame of Findul. Copyright © 2013 by Michelle Isenhoff. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Cover image by D. Robert Pease of www.WalkingStickBooks.com.
All rights reserved.
Edited by Amy Nemecek.
Candle Star Press
www.michelleisenhoff.com
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