The Crimson Brand

by Brian Knight

  “Whatever,” Joseph said, casting another look over his shoulder, this time toward his camper on the hill.

  “Trust me, son, you don’t want to meet these guys.”

  “Anything else?” Joseph said. “I’d like to get a few hours of sleep before I have to stand guard again.”

  His father shook his head. “Nothing else, unless you have something to report.”

  “Come on, Pa, this place is too far out of town for kids to come playing around, and no one else gives a fart about that stupid carnie trailer.”

  “And you’re sure no one can get to it without you seeing them?”

  “No way,” Joseph said. “I moved it right into the middle and spent two weeks building a junk maze around it. I have security lights at the front gate and at the entrance to the maze. No one is getting through without me knowing.”

  No humans at least, Ronan thought from his low place in the tall grass. This was all news to him, and all very troubling.

  The labyrinthine arrangement of old furniture and appliances made more sense to Ronan now, as did the wrecked trailer’s placement at its center. Fortunately for Ronan, he was small enough to slip through gaps that no human could have.

  “What’s so special about that wreck anyway?” Joseph asked.

  “Even I don’t know that,” his father said, then laughed. “And I don’t care. All I care about is no one getting into it.”

  “No worries then,” Joseph said and sighed again, casting another longing look at his camper.

  “Alright, go get some rest,” the man in the black suit said, and Joseph turned to face him again, content, if not happy.

  “Thanks. How about next time you’re going to be this late we just wait until morning?”

  His father backed a few steps away from the fence, then stopped and frowned. “Joe, you know I love ya, but don’t tell me how to run my business.” Then he was off without another word, setting the same unhurried pace away from the fence and back up the hill.

  Joseph watched him for a moment, then went his own way, back into the maze he’d built around the burned-out trailer and out of sight.

  Ronan sat still for a few minutes, watching the stranger in black climb the low hill and drop down the other side. As stealthily as he could manage, he followed the man.

  * * *

  Once on the other side of the hill, the man produced a flashlight and followed the gently bobbing beam over the barren terrain. Ronan followed, staying only close enough not to lose the man’s scent, and perhaps a mile later stepped onto a narrow and rutted dirt road. The man’s scent veered off to the right, and Ronan followed. A few minutes later another camper came into view, much larger and cleaner than The Garbage Man’s. As he approached it, the man’s light illuminated a large black truck, a small shed, and a bulky propane tank.

  Ronan waited until the man was inside, then investigated.

  A generator hummed inside a small shed, feeding power to the strange man’s mobile home. The alerting scent was no stronger now; the thing that made it had been here but was gone now. Slowly, keeping outside the large circle of light cast from the camper’s windows, Ronan circled the spot. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but was sure he’d know when he found it.

  And he did, in a second, smaller shed on the other side of the camper. The shed was empty except for the gas fire pit in the center; a scratched marble basin filled with crushed lava rocks. There were no flames, and the lava rocks exuded only a low, residual heat. It had been cooling for some time. Scattered among the rocks were the brittle remains of a clutch of mottled gray eggs, small sharp shards of shell that looked like stone. There was no sign of the creatures that had hatched from them, but Ronan thought they must be close. A dozen or more he guessed.

  Amid the hatched eggs lay a whole one, its stone shell unblemished and intact.

  It was worse than he had thought.

  Someone on the other side knew The Phoenix Girls were back, and was taking a personal interest.

  Ronan crouched just inside the partially open shed door for a moment, then slunk inside and leapt up onto the marble surface and put his ear to the egg. Something moved inside.

  Runt of the litter, he thought, but still alive.

  Ronan picked the egg up between his teeth and leapt back to the ground, stepping carefully outside. When he was sure he was still alone in the night, he bolted into the darkness again and sprinted toward town.

  This is not good, he thought again.

  The girls would have to work harder if they were going to be ready for what was coming, and Ronan had to convince them of that without telling them more than they strictly needed to know. They weren’t ready for the whole story yet, especially Penny and Katie. Their friendship was too new, too fragile. It might not survive.

  Sometimes the truth didn’t set you free. Sometimes it destroyed you.

  Chapter 2

  Birthday Girl

  Penny Sinclair awoke the morning of her fourteenth birthday with tears on her cheeks and the feeling that she’d fallen back in time, all the way to when she’d last seen her mom out the door of their apartment in San Francisco to her taxi ride out of Penny’s life. It was to have been a one-and-a-half-hour flight to Los Angeles. Diana Sinclair never returned. Her company’s jet had lost its engines and fallen out of the sky, crashing into the ocean just in sight of LA. With no other living relatives, Penny had ended up in a children’s home in San Francisco before her mother’s old friend and her godmother, Susan Taylor, brought her to the small town of Dogwood, Washington.

  Penny had dreamed about that day a lot in the past few weeks.

  The one-year anniversary of her mother’s death had passed a month ago without mention, though Susan had treated her as if she were especially fragile and had not commented when Penny went to bed that night hours before her usual, and usually enforced, bedtime. Zoe Parker and Katie West, her best friends, hadn’t known that there was anything special about the day, other than that it was a Friday, and had been irritated when she’d told them she didn’t feel like doing anything after school.

  At the time it had seemed right to ignore the day until it just went away, seemed like the only way to handle it, but now, the day she was supposed to celebrate her birthday with her friends and Susan, her new mom by default, it felt wrong. Not as if she’d simply tried to forget that day but actually had forgotten it.

  Penny remembered that she wasn’t alone in her attic bedroom and wiped the moisture from her eyes and cheeks before Zoe could see it. Zoe was new in town, too, living with her grandmother, Margery White, while her parents, Dana and Reggie Parker, drove around the country in a semi-truck. Margery, who was one of the crankiest people Penny had ever met, kept company with a pack of similarly cranky old women Susan called The Town Elders.

  Zoe’s time in Dogwood was supposed to have been temporary, so her parents could save money to set up a new home. More than a year had passed since they left Zoe in Dogwood, however, and the arrangement was beginning to look more and more permanent.

  Zoe’s grandmother was not happy about it. She hated Reggie, whom she referred to as That Indian, and seemed less than fond of Zoe, who favored her Native American father more than her Caucasian mother.

  When Penny’s eyes were dry and it felt safe to face another human being, she sat up and found Zoe in her usual haphazard sprawl, half beneath the sheets of her attic bedroom’s second bed. Zoe was an active sleeper, and any morning that she woke up still on the bed was a lucky one.

  As Penny watched her, Zoe snorted loudly and flopped onto her stomach, kicking tangled sheets to the floor. She seemed only one flop away from joining them.

  I should probably wake her up before she breaks something, Penny thought, but lay back and closed her eyes instead, wanting another fifteen minutes of dreamless sleep before she had to begin the day but not daring to hope for it.

  Penny dozed but could not shut her mind down. She thought about the past few weeks of drama and c
omplications as her eyes slipped shut, and the memories followed her into sleep.

  * * *

  Zoe’s birthday had come three weeks before, and her grandmother had surprised everyone by throwing her a party. She’d made a real effort to be nice to Penny, whom she didn’t approve of, and absolutely doted on their other best friend, Katie, whom she obviously did.

  For three hours, Zoe’s grandmother had preserved a neutral face as a handful of Zoe’s school friends milled around the little house, ate cake, and watched Zoe open presents. There was Penny, Katie, Jodi Lewis, Ellen Kelly, a girl in their grade who’d played Dorothy in the school production of The Wizard of Oz that winter and could still be seen wandering the halls between classes singing “If I Only Had A Brain,” and Trey Miller, a tall, muscular ninth-grade boy with olive skin and a smile that made the girls walk into walls and forget how to talk.

  That both Trey and the normally aloof Ellen had come to the party was the talk of Dogwood school the next day, and many sullen looks followed Zoe through the halls.

  Ellen was friendly and well-liked, and though she usually rebuffed most attempts at anything beyond casual friendships, she seemed determined lately to ingratiate herself into Penny, Zoe and Katie’s little gang.

  Half the girls from the eighth to tenth grades were crushing on Trey, and it was becoming painfully obvious to them that he was interested in Zoe. Zoe appreciated his kindness, and understood her classmates’ jealousy but denied that Trey had feelings toward her.

  “He’s just happy to find someone with a little color in this town,” she insisted, making it clear that she considered him a friend who just happened to be a boy and not in any way a boyfriend. Trey’s family was new to Dogwood, too; his was father a dentist in Centralia, the closest thing to a real city within easy driving distance.

  The party had ended abruptly with a call from Zoe’s mother, the former Dana White, who, unknown to Zoe, was supposed to be a surprise guest, along with her father. After a brief shouting match with Zoe’s mother, during which it became clear that the birthday party was also supposed to be a farewell party, her grandmother sent everyone home. Reggie and Dana Parker had changed their minds about returning to Dogwood and were now headed for the East Coast.

  As far away from her as they can get, Zoe opined a few days later at school.

  For the next week, Zoe had been sullen and standoffish, and Penny had resolved to lighten her own dark mood and try to cheer Zoe up. Penny didn’t know if her attempts had anything to do with it, but Zoe’s mood eventually lifted just in time for Katie’s to take its place in the dumps.

  Katie’s father, whose fourteen-year-old grudge against Penny’s mother and long lost and recently discovered aunt seemed to have expanded to include Penny herself, was becoming more outspoken against their new friendship, which unfortunately included controlling the time Katie spent with Penny and Zoe. These limits were proving to be very untimely, because they also restricted the time the three could spend at the secluded canyon grove, Aurora Hollow, near Penny’s old family home.

  Katie’s frequent absences were beginning to raise their fourth, secret friend’s hackles, both figuratively and literally. Ronan, the strange talking fox who haunted Clover Hill, where Penny now lived, and Aurora Hollow, was increasingly insisting that they spend every free moment they could at the hollow for much needed magic practice. Though being constantly bossed around by a creature that shouldn’t even exist was beginning to get on her nerves, Penny knew he was right.

  Aurora Hollow wasn’t just special because it was the one place that Rooster, Penny’s closest neighbor and least-favorite person in Dogwood, never managed to find and torment them, though that was one of its major attractions. Aurora Hollow was also where they’d discovered something even stranger than Ronan, and even more fantastic. Aurora Hollow was where they’d discovered magic and were learning, too slowly it seemed, to use it.

  Unfortunately for Penny and Zoe, who had almost a half-year head start on Katie, there was nothing else for them to learn until Katie caught up to them. The Secrets of The Phoenix Girls, a curious old book that was much more than just a book, refused to show them anything more until Katie learned what Ronan called the Elementals. She had learned her first three quickly—water, earth and air—seemed in fact to have a particular knack for water spells, but she’d developed something of a block on the last, fire. As hard as she tried, she just couldn’t master it, and her diminishing practice time wasn’t helping. So until Katie broke through her block, Penny and Zoe were mostly reduced to practicing stuff they already knew. The few new things they had learned had been without the book’s help, but were still pretty neat.

  Zoe had a particular feel for making stuff grow. The lush canopy of braided willow limbs that covered Aurora Hollow was her handiwork. Penny could do really interesting things with fire, though whenever the creative spirit took her she had to constantly remind herself they were surrounded by flammable trees. Katie was also good, not to mention shrill, about reminding Penny to be careful, so these days Penny only played with fire when Katie hadn’t come with them. No need to be a showoff, especially with Katie’s persistent failure in that area.

  What Penny, Zoe and Katie really wanted to figure out was the Birdman’s trick with doors, the one that had allowed him to enter the children’s rooms through closets and kidnap them. Though Penny had no urge to drop in on random people, it would be a handy way to get to and from Aurora Hollow without the tedious hiking. They even had their own door right there, a leftover from the Birdman’s visit.

  “That is a bit beyond you three at the moment,” Ronan had said when she’d asked him how to do it, something she didn’t often resort too. Ronan preferred for them to figure stuff out on their own while he lounged around and offered droll observations. “You have to learn how to walk before you can fly.”

  Flying … now that would be fun!

  * * *

  “Hey, Penny?”

  Penny heard the voice and recognized it, even in the nearly perfect blankness of her half-sleep, but ignored it. It was a part of some emerging new dream, had to be since Katie wasn’t allowed to visit her house.

  “Pssst … are you there?”

  If it was an important dream it would start making sense any time now. No need to worry.

  “Hello … hello … helloooooo ….”

  Penny groaned and rolled onto her side so she could slap the snooze button on her alarm clock. Instead, her hand fell on the mirror next to it, a small oval in a pewter frame.

  “I see you,” Katie said, her voice muffled, and began to giggle.

  Not the alarm clock, and not a dream, which could mean only one thing. Penny was awake.

  She groaned again and closed her fingers around the small mirror. She fought a brief urge to chuck it across her room and steal a few more minutes of sleep and sat up instead. No need to break irreplaceable magic mirrors just because they sometimes interrupted perfectly good sleep.

  One of the useful things she and Zoe had been able to learn while waiting for Katie was how to use the mirrors Tovar had left behind. The big one, which Penny kept shoved under her bed reflective side down, could see through any of the smaller ones anytime the viewer wanted. If Penny spoke Zoe’s or Katie’s name into the small one she carried with her, they could hear and respond through theirs, which was great, because there was no cell-phone signal at Penny’s house, much to Katie’s irritation, and electronics in general didn’t work in Aurora Hollow.

  Penny forced her eyes open, blinking against the sun, risen higher since her last experiment with wakefulness and now stabbing its too-bright light all over.

  “Penny, hurry up.”

  “Alright.”

  She rubbed the last of the sleep from her eyes and flipped the mirror over. Staring at her from inside was not her groggy reflection but Katie’s bright and cheerful one.

  “Kat, just because you’re a morning person doesn’t mean you have to try to turn me into one.” Pe
nny was tolerant, not one to judge another’s imperfections, but even she had her limits.

  “Morning person?” Katie sounded slightly offended. “It’s almost noon!”

  She seemed to realize how loudly she was speaking and looked furtively over her shoulder.

  Penny checked her bedside clock and noticed that Zoe’s bed was empty.

  “Ten thirty is not almost noon.”

  But it was time to rise and shine … if she had to.

  “I’m coming over today,” Katie said, then looked over her shoulder again to be sure no one was eavesdropping.

  “Your dad changed his mind?” Penny somehow doubted it. A man who can nurse a fourteen-year-old grudge against a dead woman took his grudges seriously, and Katie’s continued glances over her shoulder confirmed her suspicions.

  “Are you kidding?” Katie’s buoyant mood seemed to slip a notch, but she brightened again almost at once. “Michael’s covering for me.”

  “Michael?” Penny knew Michael by face but had never spoken to him. He was Katie’s brother, five years older and something of a town hero. Star quarterback in a championship game against Oakville, a town to the west that Dogwood hadn’t been able to beat before he joined the team, or in the few years since he’d graduated. The Dogwood varsity football team had one thing in common with Katie’s dad; it knew how to hold a grudge. Oakwood was smaller, but seemed to contain the right genetic pool to produce good football players, and they consistently crushed Dogwood.

  Instead of making his play for football stardom, however, Michael had joined the sheriff’s department as a deputy. Katie didn’t hold that against him though. Just because the sheriff was next to useless didn’t mean that Michael was.

  “Kat, if you don’t start making sense I’m going back to sleep.”

  “Dad thinks Michael’s going to Olympia today and that I’m going with him.”

  Penny understood, and smiled. “You’re going to be in so much trouble if you get caught.”