The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves
Title Page
Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Part Four:
The Unwanted Winter
Volume One
Of
The Saga of the Twelves
Richard M. Heredia
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This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This book may not be re-sold. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblances to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Richard M. Heredia
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All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.
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Cover Art by Amygdala Design.
http://www.amygdaladesign.net
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Books by Richard M. Heredia
The Saga of the Twelves:
(https://www.facebook.com/TheSnowmanSeries?ref=hl)
The Unwanted Winter
Winter’s Fury (Reboot January 2014)
The Shroud of the Lesser (Coming Sept. 2014)
The Shadow Seed Series:
(https://www.facebook.com/TheShadowSeedSeries?ref=hl)
The Misbegotten
Estefan’s Death (Coming Summer 2015)
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For Antonio, Elissa and Michelle
For Raquel
And, for Christine
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Acknowledgements
I would like to give my deepest thanks to my Creative Team, for always being available to me when I needed to brainstorm or bounce an idea back and forth. The three of you – Antonio, Elissa and Michelle - were a major factor in the completion of this work. I will always consider myself indebted to you for all the insight, all the readings, and all the corrections in the quest to make certain all the pages were perfect.
A special thanks to Raquel A. Rodriguez, who has always been the spirit behind this story, the one person that always wanted more, even back when it was only a thought and without form. You were always the catalyst, the cornerstone of my inspiration to re-tell this story after the eighteen years it sat idle in my brain.
Thanks to my wife, Maira Ayala, for giving me the freedom to follow my dream and for never getting in the way. Mostly, my love, thank you for motivating and keeping me determined to finish this project down the stretch when it mattered most. Without that nudge, I don’t think I could’ve done it.
Thanks to my mother, Petra Heredia, for always listening to me and helping me grow. You always let me write without in impediment, even when I was a little boy with a giant dream.
Lastly, warm thanks to all of my Facebook friends and pals (you know who you are!), who consistently gave me encouragement and support, always eager to comment on my progress and prod me to keep at it. Your support helped me get this done.
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The Unwanted Winter
Volume One
Of
The Saga of the Twelves
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~ Prologue ~
Interstate Highway 40
Friday, August 20th, 6:04 pm…
Marianna White Horse sat in the middle seat of the middle row of her parents’ Suburban, staring through the windshield at the clouds on the horizon. Her beat up, ancient-looking MP3 player was in her lap, a pair of newer-looking earbuds stuffed in each ear. She was listening to the latest Lady Gaga album, mulling over the gigantic cumuli-nimbus formations before her, lost in thought.
She’d downloaded the music from the family computer moments prior to its’ dismantling and packaging for the move to Los Angeles. Though, ‘Gaga wasn’t her favorite artist. She had decided to listen to her now – right now - because her father absolutely hated her. She had inputted the album into the ‘player on purpose, hoping her father would discover her listening to the outlandish tunes and beats, screaming of sex and homosexuality. It was her plan, her hope, he would try and tell her to change the playlist. It would create the perfect opportunity, the right moment, for her to let him know just how much she disapproved of the family’s move from the only home she had ever known. She would howl at him, make him understand just how much she hated having to leave the only street she’d ever played. She would explain with her last breath how much she regretted leaving the only school she had ever attended. She would scream at him, “I’ve been forced to leave everything behind, dammit!”
It was all she had ever known after all. She would yell and fume until she had no more breath, by god! Why do we have to leave now? Shit! she fumed. If he so much as looks at me funny, I’m gonna pick a fight!
They were traveling west along I-40, making good time at a steady eighty-five miles an hour, having passed through Winona about a minute earlier.
Now, they were about 14 miles out of Flagstaff, the city with the highest elevation in the state of Arizona. It was a quaint, drowsy community nestled over seven thousand feet upon the vestiges of the San Francisco Peaks – themselves, the remains of eroded stratovolcanoes, dead ages ago.
She had done the calculations in her mind. Since they’d been on the road for about an hour and fifteen minutes, she guestimated they were now over seventy-five miles from all she was used to, all she had ever liked, and all, she was certain, she could ever manage to love.
Love! Not like I’d ever find that again. Her eyes played along the huge, billowing forms, towering above the raised land surrounding the small city ahead. There was always some sort of overcast about those peaks. Every time she’d come this way in the past, she’d seen them obscured by a myriad of overarching cloud cover. Ah, there’s one that looks like a giraffe with its’ neck bent backwards.
It was true; Holbrooke, Arizona wasn’t the most glamorous placed to live. And, by comparison, the city they were moving to was arguably in the top five most glamorous cities on earth. This was undeniably accurate, but still, to her, the small town of ten thousand souls had been enough. She’d been happy there. She had good friends - loyal and lifelong. Friends she’d gone hiking and camping with nearly every weekend, especially during the summer months, when it was so hot. They could sleep atop their sleeping bags in just their tank tops and shorts - comfortable, free. They never had to worry about any weirdo’s or whack-jobs bothering them, even when they were way out in the boondocks. Her life had been simple and carefree. She had embraced it fully.
In town, they could walk the streets at night and still feel safe. Everyone knew everyone else, whic
h made abhorrent behavior difficult to mask. Her parents had often left the front door unlocked just as often as they locked it.
That was the honest truth.
Now, speaking fairly, there were drugs here and there about town. Though, it was mostly marijuana or “X” (which was so rare her and her friends hardly ever got the chance to even look at one of those pale blue pills), and what the hell, right? Getting high now and again never hurt anyone. It wasn’t too terrible a thing, right? Besides, it wasn’t habit forming, she told herself silently, sitting there in the suburban, trying her damnedest not to forget where she’d come from. She wouldn’t forget. You assholes can’t make me forget! She promised.
Far ahead, the clouds were obliterating their current shapes, recreating new ones.
Sitting there, in the car, watching the landscape fly pass, her mind kept wondering. She couldn’t recall who had told her weed was benign or when they’d said it. In the end, it didn’t matter.
She and her friends weren’t potheads or stoners, like the kids she’d seen on her Fathers’ worn out VHS copy of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A movie she was certain her father kept around because half way through it, Phoebe Cates comes out of a pool with her perfect rack bared to Judd Reinhold. Her tits were glistening and sparkling in the sunlight. How could anyone forget that?
What a bunch of shit that was, she mused as one particular cloud became a sailboat – a small one with a single mast. She’d already experimented with the effect upon herself, in similar conditions, in the bathroom mirror, after taking a shower. Her curiosity had been peaked by a recent viewing of the movie. Well, it probably didn’t work on me, because I don’t have sexy-ass tits like Phoebe. She smiled to herself, but stayed silent. Maybe only impressive racks glisten in the sunlight.
The sailboat sailed away.
No, she and her friends weren’t potheads. They might partake now and again, to get a party started, but, even then, they used it in moderation. It was in short supply in the isolated environs of her hometown. They couldn’t have become stoners, even if they had wanted to. Holbrooke was just a different kind of place. What else could one expect?
There was no denying the facts. There was no need for her to think things over. She was convinced Holbrooke was indeed a decent place to live.
So why had her father messed everything up? Who cares about having more money or a better job or a bigger house with nicer things…?
Well, maybe the notion went too far, but still that wasn’t the point, god damn it!
With the lyrics “…I want your psycho, your vertical step…” blasting in her ears, she shifted her small body into a different position, giving one of her butt cheeks some relief. Sitting in the same fashion for an extended period of time, always played havoc with her rear end.
Marianna was small for her age – sixteen - but all of her immediate family was small, except for her youngest brother Samuel. He seemed, up to this point in his ten years of life, to be the only one of them growing at a more normal rate. He had already passed her sister Lillian in height and she was three years older. Before long, he would be as tall as her fourteen-year-old sister Mary-Beth!
In a worldly sense though, it wasn’t a big feat, because both of her sisters were only four foot six and four foot eight, respectively. Marianna herself was a mere four foot ten and was already about the same size as her mother. She knew her days of growth were long gone just as they were for her older brother David, though he was the giant of the family.
Standing at an impressive five foot three, her brother was exactly half an inch taller than her father. Although, her dad would say adamantly, he and his eldest son were exactly the same height, by god! She smiled at the thought; those were his words to the letter.
Then she remembered she was mad at him. Her smile vanished.
Ahead, one cloud became what looked like a doghouse, another some sort of Japanese kite.
Marianna had dark hair, cut at the shoulder and layered back away from her face, parted down the middle with natural highlights of a lighter shade of brown interspersed. Her hair framed a pair of brown eyes, a broad face typical of a Native American, though she was a half-breed. Her mother was Caucasian.
This was circumstance that had caused a dust-up of some magnitude back in the ancient days of covered wagons when her father asked her mothers’ father for his daughters’ hand in marriage. Her grandpa Henry must’ve been somewhat opened-minded back then, because with only slight urging from his daughter, he had relented and allowed the marriage to go forth.
But that was eons ago!
Though she was small, Marianna wasn’t sick or harboring some debilitating disease - she was just short. She had a figure, filling out nicely as the years progressed. It was merely in miniature when compared to other girls her age. Thus, her womanly features - which would look extremely small on say her best friend, Agnes, who stood five and a half feet tall - looked just right on her body. Because of this, Marianna never let the extremeness of her petite form bother her. Over the years, she rather liked it when people commented on how tiny she looked; saying the overall smallness of her enhanced her beauty. In time, she had become a novelty to others, of which she enjoyed as well.
This growing celebrity, though limited, did in fact bring many boys around. Both her age and not, they wanted to take her out on a date or attempt a quick kiss when she wasn’t expecting one. Most she had rebuffed. Some she hadn’t. She didn’t mind making out with a cute guy now and again. To her, it was how one passed time in their small town, since there weren’t many things to do. She didn’t whore around or anything, not by a long shot. Despite the fact she wasn’t holding out for marriage or because of religious reasons. She just hadn’t met the right person thus far. She knew, when she was brutally honest with herself, if she was to meet the right person, she might “give it up” - as Agnes liked to say.
Besides, with the limited amount of cute people in Holbrooke, she often figured she would meet that special person later on in life. Maybe she would meet him when she was in college, but never in the midst of her quaint hometown, and never this soon.
This proved genuine until a few months ago… when she’d met one such boy.
He was a different sort, funny and open with his emotions, strong and masculine when he needed to be, but more likely to crack a joke and laugh when things got tense. He wasn’t like other boys she flirted with or “scammed” with on some camping trip. He wasn’t the guy who sometimes lost control himself, who sometimes grabbed at her like a piece of meat, forcing her to pull away and staunch his overzealous ardor. She disliked boys like that and seldom let them kiss her again, but this was before she had met this boy. Before she found herself intrigued to the point where she’d pursued him, eager to know more about him. For the first time, she had come across something new, something interesting and alluring at the same time. It was him she had come to want.
And now, he was something she’d been forced to leave behind, against her wishes, to her bitter consternation.
He had been someone she felt with time, she could’ve fallen in love with. Not the childish, puppy-love she had experienced when she was younger and less experienced like her bothersome sisters. This could’ve been real love, the slow kind, the long kind, the type that grew on you over time until one day you woke up knowing the realness of it, the rightness of it. It was the sort leading to a longer relationship, one with a deeper type of comfort. Coupled with time, this could’ve led her down the road to the physical act she thought of often, but never in the context of herself as a participant. The timing had never been right. The feelings had never been there, the possibility of it seemed remote.
Until now.
Well, now everything was all screwed up now! Shit!
Her eyes followed a new set of clouds flowing lazily toward the peaks before them. These were darker, more forbidding, bringing with them the promise of rain.
This freakin’ sucks! She shook her head in disgust, looking out th
e window to her left, unwittingly following her brother David’s gaze. She was no longer content to peer at the stupid conglomerations in the sky.
The boy’s name was Ricardo. He was a Hispanic kid of medium height, who she’d watched through the window at school, when he ran on the track below from where she sat. She had done so many times, while she was in English, bored out of her mind. She wasn’t sure when she’d taken to looking at him, and only him, when the boys track team went through their stretching routines, their warm-ups and finally began the first of the days’ hard drills. They would do this every day before the period ended, marking the end of her final period.
It took her about three weeks to get the courage to go out and watch the rest of his practice from the pitiful seven-tiered seats they had the audacity to call the bleachers. About a week and a half after, he had come up to her and asked her, through a sideways smirk from the corner of his mouth, why she watched the team workout.
She told him, she hadn’t come down to watch the team, which made him grimace in confusion.
He’d asked her why would she sit in the blazing Arizona heat and risk losing a million brain cells.
She replied with the first overly forward remark she’d ever made to a boy. She told him, she was out there, in the heat, every day, watching him.
The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves Page 1