The Crimson Brand

by Brian Knight

  Penny, Katie and Ellen stood too, the whispered conversation stopping.

  For a few long moments they could only see the silhouettes of the passengers. Zoe’s anxiety grew, became almost tangible. Then both doors swung open at once, and two people climbed from the high cab of the semi: a short, dark-haired woman who descended slowly down from the passenger side; and a tall, muscular man who leapt down from the driver’s side. They swept the doors shut, and Zoe’s hurried breathing stopped for a second.

  “Mom … Dad.” Just a whisper at first, breathless, almost inaudible. “Mom! Dad!”

  Heads turned from all around at the outburst, but Zoe was blind to them. She sprinted toward the approaching figures, clumsy in her excitement, almost tripping as she vaulted the curb to the street. She didn’t notice Penny and the others rushing to keep up, didn’t see Susan and the Wests abandon their spot—marked by a half-circle of folding chairs and a cooler—to follow.

  The approaching figures, the short, pixyish dark-haired woman and the tall, muscular man, never altered their pace. They approached their daughter at an easy, almost lazy pace, but when she reached them at last, the man bent down and opened his arms wide.

  Zoe threw herself into his open arms, and Penny marveled that he remained upright. He enclosed her in a spirited embrace and swung her from the ground, spinning her through the air.

  Zoe’s exhilarated laughter overwhelmed the low drone of machinery and the babble of the onlookers.

  For a terrible moment, Penny was insanely jealous.

  Then she saw Zoe’s face as her father lifted her high, as if she were no more than a toddler and not a budding young Amazon, and Penny’s jealousy vanished in a bright, hot blush of shame.

  She didn’t realize she had stopped until she saw Katie and Ellen join the happy reunion, Zoe’s father setting her back on her feet and her mother swooping in for her turn.

  Susan stopped behind her, put a hand on her shoulder, startling Penny.

  “Worried?” Susan asked almost casually, and Penny felt the heat rise in her cheeks as she blushed again.

  Had she been that transparent?

  “Yes,” she said simply, and hoped Susan would let the subject drop.

  Susan did, and as the Wests joined them, Katie’s father in the lead and looking as uneasy as Penny felt, they walked to join the happy family reunion.

  * * *

  That night was Penny’s first night alone in a week, and though she missed Zoe, she welcomed the solitude. She sat on her bed, wide awake, though it was late and she had a funeral to attend the following morning, looking through the old photo album again. The Conjuring Glass sat at the end of her bed, the obscuring fog swirling expectantly it seemed, waiting for Penny to resume exploring the past. Her small mirror sat on her nightstand.

  Her table lamp threw a small, bright spot of light over her, glaring off the glossy plastic photograph sleeves.

  She flipped the pages again, not knowing precisely what she was looking for until she found it, a photo of the mystery girl. She slid it from the album and examined it.

  “Who are you?”

  “Penny?”

  Penny almost screamed in shock, dropping the photo and tipping the album off her lap as she kicked her blankets aside. One of these days she supposed she’d get used to being disturbed in the middle of the night by disembodied voices.

  She tripped over her own feet sliding out of bed, landed hard on the floor, and cursed silently. A snort of laughter sounded from the small mirror on her night stand.

  Not bothering to get up, Penny reached blindly and grabbed at the mirror, bringing it close to her face.

  Ronan grinned at her. “Fancy a chat?”

  * * *

  Penny stepped into the hollow, casting a fire into the stone ring even as she pulled the door closed behind her. She searched for Ronan and found him peeking through the mouth of his cave. When he stepped out, she saw that his fur had grown in to cover the singed spots, as thick as ever. He looked healthy, strong. A moment later he confirmed her assessment by bounding across the creek in a single leap, a leap that carried him straight into Penny.

  Unlike Zoe’s tall, muscular father, Penny didn’t have the size or strength to remain upright. Ronan knocked her to the ground and sat on her chest, laughing with joy and sounding more like the Ronan she had met almost a year ago than he had in a long time.

  “I am so very proud of you,” he said at last, bumping the furry crown of his head against Penny’s in a rare show of affection. “You’ve all done so well.”

  “We had some help,” Penny said, and returned Ronan’s head bump with one of her own.

  Ronan grinned, gave a little bow, and jumped from Penny’s chest, allowing her to sit up. He settled next to her and turned his head to regard her, and though a trace of his smile lingered, Penny could see he was becoming serious.

  “I imagine I missed a few things during my recuperation,” he said after a short pause. “I would appreciate you bringing me up-to-date.”

  He had missed a few things, important things, and Penny had every intention of filling him in, but first ….

  “You go first,” Penny said, unable to suppress her grin. She was determined to beat the hairy little nuisance at his own game for once. She had been dying to know just how he’d come back after dying so convincingly in her arms. “How did you come back? We saw you die. I felt you die.”

  “Very well,” Ronan said, unperturbed. “The body that died in your arms, the one you’re seeing now, is only a projection.”

  “What?” Penny’s ability to believe the strange and unusual had expanded considerably in the past year, but this was simply too much. Projected images didn’t nip playfully at your pant legs or knock you to the ground when they jumped on you. Projected images didn’t leave a wet streak across your cheek when they licked you. “Are you trying to tell me you’re not real?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Of course I’m real.”

  “Then what are you ….”

  “This,” Ronan said, indicating his restored body with a backward glance over his shoulder, “is only a physical projection into your world.”

  “My world?” Penny found her capacity for belief stretched a little more. “How many worlds are there?”

  “Countless,” Ronan said. “Many worlds, and all connected.”

  Penny glanced at the patches of night sky she could see through the hollow’s willow canopy. “You mean like Mars or Jupiter?”

  “No,” Ronan said, shaking his head. “Those are only planets. The worlds are much more than just different points in the same night sky. They are everything … all the same, but all a little different, and all connected.”

  “Are you talking about parallel universes?” Penny had read enough science fiction and fantasy stories to know where he was going, even if she wasn’t quite ready to believe him.

  “Not necessarily parallel, but universes, I suppose.” He seemed to consider this for a moment, then dismissed it with a shrug. “Close enough.”

  Penny digested this for a moment, or attempted to, then gave up and nodded. Sometimes with Ronan it was just best to take things on faith.

  “The real me … well, you might find me a bit frightening.” He grinned. “When my body died my consciousness traveled back to the real me. It took some time and not a little effort to rejoin you here, and I feared I would be too late.”

  “Ohhh-kay,” she said, and reminded herself to take it on faith. “So we went into that tunnel and rescued you for nothing?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Ronan said. “Had this body died with me still inside it anywhere other than here, I would have been lost. Aurora Hollow is a thin place, a place where the worlds almost touch. I never could have found my way back if you wonderful girls hadn’t brought me here.”

  “Oh.” Penny felt a chill overtake her at the statement. It had been very close then.

  “I owe you girls more than my life. I owe you my exis
tence.”

  Penny had no words to reply.

  “Your turn now,” Ronan prompted. “Have you girls gotten into any new trouble?”

  Penny nodded her assent. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  There wasn’t as much as Ronan had thought. The only unpleasant surprise was Michael’s inclusion in the secret, but Ronan accepted it, if only because he didn’t have a choice. His pleasure at Ellen’s decision to join them eclipsed his annoyance.

  “And how about your other new friend?” Ronan asked.

  “Rocky!” Penny called out, and what at first appeared to be a piece of the solid stone wall above his cave and leapt out, caught the end of a willow whip, and swung over the creek to land at Penny’s side. The homunculus considered Ronan briefly before turning its large green eyes up to Penny.

  Ronan goggled for a moment, then burst into fresh laughter.

  “Don’t pay any attention to mean old Ronan, Rocky,” Penny said, patting Rocky’s head.

  Rocky closed his eyes, a satisfied grin stretching his wide, gray face, practically purring with contentment.

  Zoe and Ellen thought Rocky was adorable and treated him like a new pet, but Katie was not happy with Aurora Hollow’s newest resident. Penny thought that Katie would come around eventually, maybe when a few months had passed without Rocky trying to strangle any of them, but in the meantime she seemed prepared to tolerate him for Penny’s sake. She had, however, insisted that Penny put some clothes on him.

  Katie needn’t have bothered with that demand. Penny wasn’t about to let the little gray man run around naked all the time.

  Rocky stood before the still-laughing Ronan in a pair of shorts salvaged from Zoe’s old Raggedy Andy doll and a set of crisscrossing rope suspenders. The Phoenix Key hung around his neck, the safest place Penny could think to keep it.

  Relatively safe, she amended silently.

  Her time in Aurora Hollow was a lot of things, amazing, magical, unpredictable, but safe was not one of those things. Thinking about the old photograph album back in her room and the girls who had once called Aurora Hollow their own, all gone now, dead or scattered, Penny supposed it had never been safe. Probably never would be.

  But it was hers. Hers, Zoe’s, Kat’s and Ellen’s, and they had saved it.

  Penny knew their victory against the monstrous Turoc was not the end of the danger. She knew there would be more trouble to come, and though she feared losing Zoe, they were still all together … The Phoenix Girls and Ronan.

  That peaceful and happy moment was not the end, only a happy interlude, but Penny was willing to take happiness wherever she could find it.

  The end … for now.

  About Brian Knight

  Brian Knight lives in Washington State with his family and the voices in his head. He has published over a dozen novels and novellas and two short story collections in the horror, dark fantasy, and crime genres. Several of his short stories have received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. The Crimson Brand is his second book in The Phoenix Girls series.

  Photo by Judi Key