Hear Me

by Viv Daniels

  The quarry hadn’t shut down, but for a while people feared it might, after Beemer’s disappearance on the night the bells had begun to ring. Since no body was ever uncovered, and he’d never left a will, they placed the quarry in trust with the town until the mystery was solved. Deacon Ryder they’d found wandering the cliffs near the quarry a day later, babbling like a madman and embracing everyone he saw. Ivy heard somewhere that he’d set himself up in a city down south as a faith healer who cured through hugs.

  At least he wasn’t her problem anymore.

  Many people did leave the town in those first few months, so afraid of the lies they’d been told about the forest. But more chose to stay, as if helping the forest folk that night had taught them more about humanity than three years of trying to define it ever could have.

  Although the bells might have helped, too. Their sonorous chime rang through the town day and night for a week, drawing wonder and curiosity from all who heard the marvelous music. Then, at last, their song wound down, like an echo in a valley, and the bells went silent, hanging like ripe golden fruits from limb and pole.

  Everyone had missed the sound. It wasn’t long before people started claiming the bells for themselves, tiny pieces of peace and love to hold up against the darkness.

  Ivy, it turned out, had her own.

  Archer came into the kitchen, his arms full of evergreen boughs to decorate the mantel. He stomped the snow off his boots. “Counted twenty new trees this trip,” he announced as he shrugged off his coat and grabbed the woven cuff of redbell from its hook near the door. “And I think someone made friends with every robin in the forest.”

  Behind him, a little wool hat bobbed just at the level of the countertops. “Hi, Mama!” the girl chirped, peeking up at her. Wild, red curls corkscrewed out from under her cap, but her eyes were pure black.

  “Belle,” Ivy warned. “What have you been up to?”

  Archer dropped the boughs near the hearth and looked over. “Belle, my sweet. I told you to clean that up before we got home.”

  Belle hung her sweet head, playing idly with her necklace of braided redbell stalk. “Sorry, Papa. I love you.” When she looked up again, her eyes were blue.

  Ivy put her hands on her hips. “What were you showing her?”

  Archer gave a guilty grin. “Levitation. How else was she going to talk to the robins up high?”

  Ivy sighed. “She’s going to scare off the tourists.”

  Belle laughed. “Just the scaredy cat ones.”

  River had assured Ivy that in time Belle would be able to cast a permanent glamor on her eyes, though Archer argued that she shouldn’t have to. It was little more than a side-effect of the magic which still held her father in its grip on the night she was conceived. Belle’s magic, Archer insisted, was nothing but light.

  Ivy wondered if he’d still think that when Belle reached her teenaged, rebellious phase.

  “Exactly.” Archer slipped his arms around his wife’s waist and kissed her. “And we don’t want scaredy cats in our shop, do we?”

  Ivy gave him a playful shove. “You’re impossible.”

  “No,” he corrected. “I’m magical. And so is Belle. And you’re stuck with us.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  Her own tiny Belle, ringing night and day as a constant reminder of the love she shared with Archer, the one that had brought him out of the darkness for good.

  She bent down to address her daughter. “Want some cocoa?”

  The girl grinned. “Yes, please!”

  “Go wash your hands.”

  Belle scampered off to the bathroom and Archer leaned in again. “Don’t I get any?”

  “Only if you’re good.”

  “Ivy-mine,” he scoffed. “I’m always good. You know that.”

  This time when he kissed her, it was deep, and a rush of images flooded her mind, a heady mix of memories and promises of what they’d do later, after Belle was in bed and they had some time to themselves.

  “Always good?” she asked, peppering kisses across his throat.

  “All right,” he admitted, and buried his face in her hair, breathing deep. “Mostly. But you love me, anyway.”

  Yes, Archer. Always.

  “On, on they send, on without end,

  Their joyful tone, to every home.

  Ding, dong, ding, dong…”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * Thank you so much for reading Hear Me. If you liked this book, please consider leaving a review.

  * Would you like to hear about my future releases? Sign up for the Viv Daniels Newsletter. You can also check out my website at http://vivdaniels.com.

  * This story was a long time in coming. Its earliest genesis was during a happy autumn night in a tropical hotel suite with dear writing friends Erica Ridley, Elissa Wilds, and C.L. Wilson, whose beautiful holiday anthology, One Enchanted Season, contains their inspiration from that evening. Buy it today!

  I would also like to thank Justine Larbalestier, who first loved the idea from the other side of an ocean; Carrie Ryan, who discovered the right ending on a hike around a lake; and Holly Black, who saved the plot in the midst of a midnight blizzard.

  For K.A. Linde, my beta reader extraordinaire, a crown of redbell for looking at a million covers and helping me find the perfect title, and for coining the phrase, “the reverse Angel” to describe Archer’s plight.

  Gratitude to Heidi Joy Tretheway, Megan Erickson, Brenna Aubrey, and my other NAAU! friends for helping me with various aspects of production.

  Thank you also to Lisa Christman, who stepped in at the last minute with a spectacular editing job. I’m so glad I got the chance to work with you.

  And finally, thank you, reader. Stay warm. And be glad I didn’t kill the dog.

  * Turn the page for free excerpts from the first novel in the Canton series, One & Only, as well as the first book in the upcoming Island series.

  ONE & ONLY

  CHAPTER 1

  I was six years old when I found out my father had another family. I knew he didn’t live with my mom and me, but that wasn’t so unusual in my neighborhood. He came by a few times a week and always got me presents on my birthday and Christmas. Whenever he visited, he gave me money for ice cream at the corner store. I was too young to understand he just wanted me out of the apartment. That time, though, I was taking a nap when he arrived. I woke up and heard him in the bedroom with my mom, so I thought I’d fetch the ice cream money from the wallet myself. His wallet had pictures in it. Pictures of him and a blonde woman and a little blonde girl about my age. There weren’t any pictures of Mom and me.

  There were rules I knew I had to follow. Like how I wasn’t supposed to say “that’s my daddy” if I ever saw him outside of the apartment or if his picture appeared in the newspaper. When I had my appendix out at eight, he didn’t come to visit, though the wing of the hospital I stayed in had his name on it. But he paid for my braces and my clothes and the babysitter he’d hired to watch me that time he took my mom to the Caribbean.

  When I was fourteen, I saw my sister again. I was on the track team that year, and we had a meet at her school, across town. I was walking back to the bus to grab my backpack while I waited for my next event, and came across a tennis meet going on, too. I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of the group of slim, tan, blonde girls on the court, except I saw my father in the stands. He was shouting her name—Hannah—and cheering. Every time she scored a point, she’d preen in his direction. I folded my fingers through the diamond links of the fence separating the path from the court and watched her play. She was way better at tennis than I’d ever be at sprints or hurdles or whatever other event the coach assigned me to. But Dad hadn’t been there when I won the county science fair in the fall, either.

  If Dad saw me near the court that day, I never guessed. But it wasn’t long after that that my mother reminded me of the truth. “You need to be more careful.”

  “Huh?” I said, mouth full
of spaghetti, head full of my Algebra II problem set.

  “It’s only natural to be curious about…her. You think I haven’t wanted to see myself?”

  Her? “You mean Dad’s other daughter?” Or his wife?

  “But we can’t. This apartment doesn’t pay for itself. Neither does the food you eat or the clothes you wear.” Mom’s art didn’t pay for it either. Sometimes, when she was in between commissions, she worked at clothing stores or as a secretary. Never for long, though. Whenever it got in the way of her latest project, the whole grind of a 9-to-5 gig killed her creativity, and Dad always stepped in. “Steven has been really good to us. He doesn’t have to be.”

  “Actually, he does,” I replied with all the surety a fourteen-year-old girl could muster. “It’s the law.”

  “The law wouldn’t give us half of what he does on his own, Tess,” my mother scoffed. “He helps us because he loves us. He loves you. You’re his daughter.”

  I thought about the way Dad had cheered Hannah on at the tennis match. Dad was my father in this apartment. Nowhere else. I hardly even looked like him. I looked like Mom, with her dark hair and pointy chin and figure like a Hollywood star out of an old black-and-white movie. Only my eyes were Swift—large and bright, with that indeterminate color that wasn’t blue or gray or green or brown. When we’d studied genetics in Biology, my lab partner had been stumped until our teacher told him to put down “hazel.”

  “We owe him a lot, Tess. And if we hurt him, we’ll lose everything else.”

  ***

  I didn’t understand what that meant until three years later, when I got accepted to Canton University. Dad’s alma mater. All the Swifts’ actually, for nearly a hundred years. Like the hospital where I got my appendix out, it had buildings bearing his name. It also had one of the best bioengineering departments in the country—thanks to a generous endowment by Canton Chemicals, one of the few businesses in the town that my dad didn’t have his fingers in—and they wanted me.

  I figured Dad would be proud. Even if we had to keep it secret, I was following in his footsteps.

  “Canton?” he’d said when he came to the apartment the week after I got my letter of acceptance. “I don’t understand. Did you get a scholarship?”

  “No.” Something very cold starting winding its way through my belly. “I figured with loans and—”

  “I don’t like the idea of you going into debt for your schooling, Tess,” he said. My mother beamed and squeezed his arm. “Tell you what I’ll do. If you go to State and take that ‘bright futures scholarship’ they give kids with your SAT scores, I’ll pay for everything else. Room, board, books—whatever.”

  “Oh, Steven!” my mother gasped and laid her hand on his arm.

  I looked at the Canton acceptance packet in my hand. The glossy cover was filled with pictures of smiling, happy students on the grassy quad, the soaring archways of the Swift Library, a kid practicing violin and another with safety goggles shielding her eyes as she filled a beaker with a glowing compound. The bioengineering department at Canton boasted a Cole Award winner, two recipients of a Sloan Fellowship, and a state-of-the-art lab. Graduates of the rigorous programs went on to top-tier medical schools and PhD programs. I’d researched the program at State, of course, since it was my back-up school. It was solid and respectable but not nearly so well-regarded, and I’d have to fight hordes of other students for the higher-level classes and access to the labs.

  But Canton meant private school tuition. Even with loans, would I be able to swing something so pricey?

  “What do you say, kid?”

  “What if,” I began slowly, “we set aside that money to help with Canton tuition, instead? If I went to Canton, I could live here. That would save some money…”

  Dad’s lips became a tight, sharp line, and his eyes looked like hard chips of granite. “That wasn’t what I said. I said, if you went to State, which is basically free, I’d pay for your living expenses. Provided you keep your grades up, of course.”

  That wasn’t a question. My grades were always up.

  When I didn’t say anything, he sighed and shook his head at me. “You always seemed like a really practical girl to me, Tess. I’m going to let you think it over for a bit. You sleep on it, okay? I know you’ll choose the right thing. State is the place you belong.”

  I slept on it, as Dad asked, and more than that, I made up a detailed spreadsheet of the costs associated with each option. I was good at spreadsheets. Like he said, I’d always been a practical girl. But when I presented it to my mom the next morning, she barely glanced at the tallies I’d so painstakingly budgeted.

  “Tess,” she said, shaking her head at me over her coffee cup. Over the years, her lipstick had left an indelible stain on the rim. “You don’t understand. This isn’t money your father is giving you for college. It’s money he’s giving you to go to State.”

  I pointed at a few figures. “But if you look here, you can see—”

  Then my mom sighed, exactly as my father had. “Sweetie, it’s time you started to face some facts. You’re going to be eighteen next month, and your dad won’t be required to give you a cent, legally or otherwise.”

  If Mom had hauled off and slapped me across the face, it wouldn’t have stung any more. And it must have shown on my face, too, since she softened things with her next words.

  “I know you think the program at Canton is something special, but I also know that you’re an excellent student, and you can make your time at State work well, too. If you go to State, it’ll make your dad happy, and if you do really well there, it’ll make him proud. And maybe he’ll help with grad school or med school or whatever you want to do next.”

  I looked down at my spreadsheets, aligned so neatly on top of the Canton acceptance package.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I did. I’d understood when I was in the hospital at eight and had my braces off at twelve and stood outside that tennis court at fourteen. Steven Swift made the rules, and we played by them.

  I chose State, and Dad wrote a check, but I didn’t think any of us were fooled. When I was the runner-up in the state science fair that year, my mom was there to cheer me on, but Dad didn’t even send flowers. When I was named a regional Siemens competition finalist, my name—Teresa McMann—appeared in a national newspaper, and though my mom had the page framed and hung in our hallway, I secretly hoped Dad wouldn’t notice—lest he say anything about the $3,000 scholarship that came with it.

  He might not owe us anything anymore, but we still owed him everything.

  ***

  Read the rest of One & Only now!

  ISLAND ESCAPE

  CHAPTER 1

  June 25, 1989

  Kalina St. Claire tugged her bikini top into place, squared her shoulders, and marched out of the stateroom and onto the sun-drenched deck. Everything glowed, even through the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses. The deck of Bradley’s father’s yacht was made of gleaming wood instead of blinding white fiberglass, but the South Pacific sun bounced off every metal rail and boom and winch with a cruel sort of sparkle.

  She knew the deckhands were paid to keep things clean, but did they have to scrub everything until it shone? Even the wet wood seemed brighter than it had any right to.

  “Look who’s showing her face!” called her friend Lisa, lounging on a deck chair with some trashy novel. Lisa checked the watch laying on her towel. “And it’s only two o’clock.”

  “Local time?” Kalina replied. “I’m still on LA time.”

  “It’s six PM in LA, hon,” said Tiffany, who occupied the lounge chair to Lisa’s left. “It gets later going east.”

  “London,” said Kalina. “I meant London.” She’d been in London only last month, then Paris, Monaco, Morocco, The Seychelles, Hong Kong… who gave a shit what actual time zone she was in? Everywhere she was was the same schedule — party all night, sleep all day, check out the beaches or the shops or the clubs if she was
up for it. The last time she’d kept track of her hours was during her first attempt at freshman year in college, and that was…

  The boat hit a wave and Kalina shot out her hand for balance as the hammer inside her skull grew insistent. “Please tell me it’s vodka-tonic-thirty.”

  “Tough luck again, sweet pea,” said Lisa. Her parents were some kind of Texas oil family, and occasionally the country came out of her. “There was a mix-up with the service schedule. We’re on our own at the bar this afternoon.”

  Tiffany glared at her and Lisa fell silent.

  Kalina swallowed back a throat full of bile and crossed to the outdoor bar. Glass, check. Ice cubes, check. Vodka… as she reached for the bottle, she saw a half-finished vial of coke that must have somehow slipped behind the bar. Even better. The stopper was shaped like a little snowflake, which was probably someone’s idea of a hilarious joke.

  Kalina drew out a line on the glass serving tray and grabbed a cocktail straw. A little bump was all she needed this afternoon.

  She sighed as the coke whizzed through her sinuses and muffled the hammer. Ahh. Who needed vodka when you had cocaine? Okay, time to get the party started. Kalina and her girls needed bellinis. She rooted through the bar fridge for champagne and peach nectar, mixed up a pitcher and joined the girls back at the lounge chairs with a tangle of stemware clutched between her fingers.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked as she started pouring drinks. Lisa demurred — a lifetime of southern cooking had left her with a tendency toward a fat ass — but Tiffany took a drink, and so did Mirelle and Stevie, who had just joined them on the deck, their hair wet from a jet ski ride.

  “Tim and Jorge are downstairs in the video room with the Nintendo,” Lisa explained, “and Decker and Bran are off the stern fishing.”