The West Wind
Morgan Douglas
Copyright © 2016 by Morgan Douglas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published on Terra, Sol System, Milky Way Galaxy
Version 1.0 released February 2016
The exercise in perseverance you are about to read is dedicated to my friend Jen, without whom our heroine wouldn’t have French-tipped nails, a paint war, stand up to her father, or really, a book at all. It is dedicated to my friend Gabrielle, for being my biggest fan, whether of the novel I didn’t tell her I wrote until after she started gushing about it, or my poetry. And finally, dedicated to my mom, Debra, for being my proofreader and most reliable volunteer editor. After 36 years of marriage, she still calls my dad her knight in shining armor, so you can see where I get my romantic streak.
I love you all. Thank you.
Contents
Hero
Xander
Meetings
Camelot
Haunted House
Revelation
Complications
Trouble
Hellespont
The West Wind
Xanadu
Aftermath
In Medias
Momentum
Angels of Rain and Lightning
Burning Bright
Pacific
Consequences
Winter’s Cold Fingers
The Thorns of Life
Epilogue
A Note from the Author
Hero
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
-Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
A private dock stretched out into Vista Bay, a crescent shaped cove on the coast of California. A large island at the mouth of the bay protected the shore from the open sea. The dock and the house it belonged to were situated on the northern side of the island, facing one of the wide channels that opened up into the bay itself. The tide was in, cutting off the island and house from a town by the same name. A young woman lay on the dock. The sun warmed her, its gentle touch relaxing as it shone on her bronzed skin. Summer scents of citrus trees and the salt of the ocean hung in the air while sailboats, jet skis, and motor boats dotted the waters of the natural harbor like brushstrokes on a painting beneath a surreal blue sky. Her name was Hero.
The boat that usually bumped gently against the dock was gone. Hero’s mother had taken it to the high end shopping district of Pera Avenue for her third retail therapy appointment that week. She had tried to coax Hero into joining her, but her daughter had had enough of new clothes. For the week, at least. Hero smiled and rolled onto her front, undoing the strings of her bikini to prevent tan lines. The last summer break of high school had just begun in Vista Bay and she was going to take full advantage of it. Senior year seemed ages away.
She fell asleep with her mind full of summer dreams. Out on the bay, two jet skis turned toward the dock while Hero slept. She stirred as the thrum of the engines grew closer, but did not wake. A blond boy about 18 on one of the jet skis accelerated recklessly toward her. Just before crashing into the dock he made an abrupt turn. A wave splashed over the dry wood and the sleeping girl. Hero woke with a scream and rose to her knees, pulling her soaked towel up to cover herself. She glared at the laughing youth as the other jet ski pulled up with two more people on it, a boy with curly brown hair and a blonde girl with her hair in ringlets and perfect makeup in spite of being out on the water.
“Jeremy, you are such an asshole!” Hero exclaimed, dripping.
“Nice to see you too, Hero,” said Jeremy with a smirk.
“Hero! Hi!” said the girl from the other jet ski as she clambered up on the dock. “Here,” she continued, “Let me help you.”
“Thanks, Jaimie.” Hero carefully spread the towel out from arm to arm, making it into a screen. She gave it over to the newcomer so she could put her top back on.
“Jeremy, you jerk, stop leering,” Jaimie demanded without looking back at the boy staring at her backside.
“What?” Jeremy said, feigning innocence. “They don’t call it Vista Bay for nothing.”
“Evan,” Jaimie said expectantly of the teen driving the jet ski she had been riding. His elbows rested over the handlebars as he watched the whole scene, an almost imperceptible smirk tucked away in the corner of his mouth. Evan nodded and gave the accelerator a slight twist and bumped his machine into his friend’s.
“Hey! I just got this fixed,” Jeremy protested.
Evan shrugged. “Then stop staring at my girlfriend’s ass.”
Hero finished tying her top back on and stood facing away from her friends while Jaimie adjusted it for her. “What are you guys up to?” she asked to change the subject.
“Just riding,” Jeremy said.
“Oh? And here I thought you’d walked across the bay,” Hero said facetiously.
Jaimie interrupted before the conversation could devolve into a battle of wits. “I wanted to see if you were coming to Hellespont tonight. I made them bring me.” Jaimie said.
“Brian will be there,” Jeremy teased.
“Who’s playing?” Hero asked, ignoring him.
“Hmm. . . Someone from out of town. Who was it, Evan?”
“Hep Catz Alive, I think.”
“Oh, they played last summer. I might come, but I don’t have anything to wear,” Hero said.
The boys rolled their eyes. They had been friends with Hero since she moved to Vista Bay in middle school and they had seen her closet.
“I don’t think Payless has that many shoes,” Jeremy said.
“My bedroom is smaller than her closet,” Evan joked.
“You’re boys. You wouldn’t understand,” Jaimie said smugly, slipping one tan arm through Hero’s. “Come on, Hero. I’ll help you find an outfit. And maybe I could borrow a dress for the night? I won’t have time to go home and get ready if I stay.”
Jaimie leaned over and kissed Evan soundly goodbye while Hero held her by one hand to keep her from falling off the side of the dock. The jet ski rocked dangerously.
“Hey, where’s mine?” Jeremy quipped when they finished.
“In your dreams. See you guys tonight.”
Evan and Jeremy turned their jet skis in unison, the small watercraft roaring to life before they sped away back to town. Arm in arm the girls walked up a brick stairway to Hero’s house through fragrant terraced gardens spilling over with well-tended roses, hibiscus, and a riot of other vibrant flowers.
The house was two stories and expansive, built in 1930 near the end of the Spanish Colonial revival. Thick red clay tiles blanketed the roof above white stucco walls. As they stepped in through one of the graceful arched doorways into the house, Jaimie sighed a little. Hero smiled. She knew her friend thought of La Hacienda Noblé as a kind of dream home. The house had been named by the upper class white American family who commissioned it, in spite of the fact none of them spoke even a little Spanish. Hero thought the name was pretentious.
Hero’s room was on the second floor facing the bay, one of two master bedrooms in the house. Her parents, when they were both home, shared a room on the inland side of the house on the ground floor, giving Hero almost as much space as she could possibly want. After the girls entered her room Hero grabbed a fresh towel from the master bath and hung the damp one over the curtain rod to dry. While she dried her hair she went to the window an
d stared out across the bay. Directly opposite her house on the mainland was Bayside, an older district of Vista Bay that had fallen on hard times. Bayside was the reason her parent’s let her have the room with the view. Her father said it was an eyesore and lowered the value of the property. Hero thought it was quaint, in a dilapidated way. The houses were mostly run-down Victorians, which didn’t suit the more open-minded, carefree Southern Californians.
On a cliff looking out to sea and towering over the rest of Bayside stood a mansion. Bigger than La Hacienda Noblé, it was simply known as the Brighton House. Its address was 1 Brighton Lane, the only major street in the district. The old place had been abandoned when its last owner committed suicide in the 1970s and had remained empty since. Hero loved it. The summer of her freshman year, she and a few of her friends had snuck in past the no trespassing signs and boarded up windows to spend the night telling each other ghost stories. In the morning the sun had streamed through the upper windows and filled the halls with light. Not a single window in the manor lacked for a breathtaking view. Some looked out over the ocean. Others, the bay and town. From a room on top of a cupola that reminded her of a European castle, she felt like she could see the entire world.
The mansion remained uninhabited and untended because it was on the National Register of Historic Places. Any restorations had to be made according to plans filed with the Register, an enormous expense on top of an already unbelievable price. Hero’s father had considered purchasing the property, tearing down the old place and building anew, but gave up when he discovered that was impossible. La Hacienda was more his style anyway.
As she stared out the windows, she noticed that the place seemed brighter than usual, as though the light she remembered filling the house from the upper windows had burst its seams and spilled out into the world. Her brow furrowed as she tried to see it better, in spite of the distance.
“Hey, Jaimie,” Hero said to her friend, who was rifling through the walk-in closet. “Does anything seem weird to you about the Brighton House?”
“Huh?” Jaimie stuck her head out the door. “Who cares? That places is going to sit and rot until it falls down.”
“No, look,” Hero insisted.
“Really, Hero, we have more important things to do. Like pick out what you’re wearing tonight. And what I’m wearing. There’s nothing going on with that old wreck.”
Hero sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“What about this?” Jaimie asked, standing in the doorway and holding up a red vintage flapper dress and a pair of white heels with a peacock feather painted across the toe and up the side. Hero knew her friend pretty well. “No, I’m really not in the mood for the 20s. But it’d look great on you. You should wear it,” she urged.
Jaimie walked over to the full length mirror that rose from floor to ceiling on one wall and held the dress up against herself. She turned from left to right, her lips pursed.
“I don’t know, do you think it will look alright?”
“I think you’ll look so good Evan won’t be able to concentrate on dancing.”
“It’ll give Jer something to stare at too.”
“Jaimie!”
“What? I like being looked at.”
Hero laughed. “You’re incorrigible.”
Jaimie frowned at her friend. “I don’t even know what that means. But I like it. I’m going to own it.”
She grabbed a feather boa from a nearby vanity and threw it around her neck. “I’m incorrigible,” she announced to the world. Hero laughed again. Jaimie laid the dress down on Hero’s bed and turned on her with a wicked glint in her eye.
“Now, what about you?”
Xander
Xander dragged his suitcase off the air mattress lying in the center of his new room in the cupola of the Brighton House and dropped onto the bed. His butt hit the floor as he did. The air redistributed as he lay back with a quick exhalation of pain. His body, mind, and heart ached. Even though he had pushed his father into buying the old mansion and moving out to what seemed like a tiny, rural town after growing up in Seattle, it still wasn’t easy.
It had been sunny the day of the funeral. Nothing had ever seemed so wrong to Xander. His mother’s passing should have been shrouded, cloudy, wet, the way Seattle always was, the way she loved it. Washington had been Mom’s home, her place. She had loved the rain, loved dancing and playing in it. She said it was magical, that there was nothing depressing about water miraculously falling from the sky. When he was a little boy Xander had pointed out that it was the clouds that made rain, she had told him that they were miracles too, then taught him to find shapes in them. When the disease had taken her the frequent rain had become more than depressing, it had become unbearable. Both Xander and his father felt the weight of every drop like the fall of an anvil.
He rolled his shoulders back, feeling every inch of his strong, sore muscles. His dad, Zachariah McConnell, had been a big time contractor in Seattle who designed and built everything from mansions to office buildings to middle class suburban homes. Xander had been part of every project since turning 14. Zach refuse to build what he called “boxitecture,” his name for the typical residential home, leaving everything he touched unique in some way. He had become passionate about building green, energy efficient buildings and it had paid off in a big way. His father was a self-made, self-educated man, who had read more literature and textbooks than some college professors. Xander’s mother enjoyed reading less than his father and enjoyed moving more. When she could, she had dragged his father out on all kinds of adventures. A wry smile crossed Xander’s face as one of his favorite memories surfaced.
He was a little boy of six, and his mom had brought him to the Century Ballroom on Pine in Seattle for the first time. The music was loud with a bright, energetic sound that made him want to bounce. Light gleamed off the brassy metal of instruments he didn’t learn the names of until years later, and shined off the polished rosy wood of the piano and another tall, full-hipped stringed instrument that looked like the maid from Anastasia, one of his favorite cartoon movies. The cavernous room was full of people who had abandoned the seats around the edges to fill the floor with dancing. He remembered being amazed at how many different ways they moved, and how patient his Mom had been with his thousands of questions.
“What are they doing, Momma?” he would ask, pointing at one couple.
“That’s Lindy Hop,” she answered.
“What about them?” he asked, pointing again.
“That’s Charleston, and that couple over there with the girl with the feather in her headband, that’s tandem Charleston.”
“What does tandem mean?”
Xander let out a sigh so heavy it seemed to fill the room. He had learned to dance at the Century Ballroom and would miss it terribly. He took a deep breath and let the memory slip away again. Light streamed through the windows from which he and Zach had spent the day removing boards. The younger McConnell wasn’t much into interior decorating, but he could tell that they were going to need a lot of curtains. And soundproofing. Even now, at the highest point in the house he could hear the ocean. The wind whispered as it blew past. He smiled as he thought of the work ahead. He and his father would work on it together, perhaps hire a small crew, but they intended to do most of it themselves. Starting, at Dad’s insistence, with the library. Leave it to him to care more about his books than a comfortable place to sleep. I guess you don’t marry a woman who dances in the rain if you always want to be comfortable, Xander thought.
His dad knocked on the doorframe, stirring him from his nostalgic reverie. Xander looked up.
“Hey Dad, what’s up?”
“You sure you want the cupola? I’m not sure night will ever come in here, even during the dark of the moon.”
Xander laughed. “Reading Shelley again? That was a little dramatic.”
“I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” Zachariah McConnell quoted with a grin.
“We’re ce
rtainly in the right place for an ode to the west wind,” Xander joked as a breeze whistled through the house.
“We are, aren’t we?” His father laughed. “Do you want to go get something to eat, Tiger? I saw a pub downtown that looked pretty good.”
“Yeah, sure. Sounds good. We don’t have a refrigerator anyway.”
“Good point. Should probably put that on the list.”
“Probably above the library. You can’t eat books.”
“If books be the food of thought, read on.”
Xander rolled his eyes at the misappropriated Shakespeare. “Let’s go, Dad.”
Meetings
Xander stepped out of the pub and held the door open for his father. The streetlights had come on sometime during the last hour, along with the neon signs of bars, clubs, restaurants and the few stores still open. Across the wide, pedestrian only boulevard, a bright orange and white sign scrawled “Hellespont” across the length of a one-story, square building. He wondered if anyone in the town realized the name had nothing to do with hell. Probably not. Fake flames flickered behind the sign, so it didn’t really seem like the owner did either.
A group of people about his age walked through the doors and a trumpet bugled from inside as they did. The rattle of a snare drum and snap of a bass beckoned him and he recognized the song from the club before the door clicked shut. Someone was playing “Wanna Be Like You,” in the style of the Big Bad Voodoo Daddies.
The hospital lights were cold and the music soft, in spite of its frenetic energy. Xander held his mother gingerly in his arms, afraid too much pressure would bring her pain. She leaned into him, her connection softer, weaker than it had ever been. Her son was surprised at how light and small she seemed, though he had been taller for years. He shuffled his feet slowly, barely taking his weight off the floor and danced with her at half the time of the music. Though the movement obviously tired her, Sara McConnell kept pace with her son. A content but strained smile rested on her face but she managed to stay on her feet through the whole song. When it ended she wrapped her arms around her little boy, though his chest was probably wider and more solid than even his father’s.
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