by Blythe Baker
A Supernatural Secret in Faerywood Falls
Blythe Baker
Copyright © 2019 by Blythe Baker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Description
Newsletter Invitation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
About the Author
How to lift a curse ...
Marianne has finally had a breakthrough in her quest to uncover the truth about her parentage and her own magical abilities. With help from a restless ghost, it looks like the truth is within her grasp.
But when a lost book of spells reappears and a deal with a cunning spell weaver backfires, Marianne finds herself scrambling to solve yet another mysterious death – one that could reveal more than she wants to know about a man she’s come to care for...
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1
The air was cold. As I drew in breath, it was as if my lungs were coated in tiny, fractured crystals of ice. Rain clouds hung low in the sky, a blanket of shadow draped across the horizon. The air seemed to quiver with impending thunder, and heavy and humid, it clung to my cheeks, tangled with my eyelashes.
The ground was painted with stretches of dark grass, like a paintbrush swept across the landscape. Trees clawed against the sky, as thin and sharp as daggers, bending in the swirling wind.
Hunks of stone jutted out of the earth like teeth, almost glowing in the darkness surrounding them.
I wandered up to one, gazing down at it.
Matthew Stuart
Born 1896 – Died 1945
A beloved man, father, and hero
I walked to the next.
Elizabeth Rightner
Born 1901 – Died 1942
Life’s greatest joy is to know love
I blinked, slowly walking past more and more stones with names and dates scrawled into them.
A sudden light in the distance made me look up. The earth around me seemed to be racing, and yet, I moved slowly, each movement heavy and drawn out.
It was the shape of a person. A woman, with long hair.
She was bright against the harsh darkness of the churning sky. Her hair was untouched by the wind that surged over the grass in eddies, striking me and fluttering my own tresses.
I took a step toward her, and a voice echoed across the distance.
“Marianne…”
Who was Marianne? Was that me? Was that what I was called?
For some reason…I couldn’t remember.
I took another step.
“Marianne…why do you seek me again?”
Again? What did she mean again? I’d never seen her before…had I?
Magic, strong and pure, rushed through me as I made my way even closer to the woman. Whispers and distant shouts pressed up against my mind, calling out to me, trying to distract me.
“Marianne…come this way.”
I was trying. Why did it feel like I was wading through cement? I couldn’t seem to get any closer to her. Every step I took, it was as if time itself was widening the distance between us.
I tried to open my mouth, but felt suddenly mute. I had nothing to say.
Compulsion drew me forward again, and I turned to step down another row of headstones.
I blinked, and a snarl caused me to open my eyes again.
A silvery, glowing face was hovering directly in front of mine, with bared, pointed teeth, wild tendrils of hair, and white, blank eyes.
Screaming, I fell over backward, landing in the cold, brittle grass.
“You dare to summon me again?” the face asked, a hundred voices rolled into one, some deep, some high, some growling.
I shook my head. No, I wasn’t the one who’d summoned her.
What was she?
“I have already given you the information you sought,” the bright, silvery woman said.
Yes…she did. The memories came upon me.
I had been here before. I’d seen her face before. Except –
I looked back up, and the woman had turned from a vicious monster into a beautiful young lady, with long hair and sopping wet clothes as if she’d fallen into the lake…
But the dark circles under her eyes and the sallowness in her cheeks told me that she’d died that way.
“What do you seek?” the woman asked.
I…I couldn’t remember. Why did this seem so…important? Why was I remembering her, now of all times?
I struggled to my feet, dusting the dirt from my pants. I looked up at the hovering woman, whose eyes were locked onto me.
“I remember you…” the woman said in her echoing voice. It sounded as if she spoke to me from the bottom of a well. “You want answers, don’t you?”
Answers. Answers to what, exactly? Questions, of course. But what questions?
I blinked.
There were too many questions to answer.
My gaze shifted down to the stone that the woman hovered in front of. A name, clear and freshly carved, was reflected in the stone.
Isabella Delvin.
It was as if I was being assaulted with images. The graveyard. A dark night. A ghost. Whispers of people talking about a spirit frightening locals. A confrontation…
I gasped as if drawing breath for the first time.
“You’re the one who can tell me about – ”
Pain, white hot, shot through my hand.
“Ouch!” I exclaimed, grabbing onto my wrist and staring down at my throbbing palm.
There was nothing there.
The pain only intensified, though, causing my knees to buckle. I fell to the ground, and the scene around me began to disappear like water being sucked down a drain.
The colors, the wind, the clouds…everything, including the ghost, faded away.
“Come find me, Marianne…I shall give you the answers you seek.”
And everything went black.
One heartbeat.
And another.
Suddenly, I sat straight up, gasping for air.
And when I opened my eyes…I found myself extracted from the graveyard, with a coppery fox in front of me.
Marianne, calm down, she said to me, her black eyes as bright as polished stones as she stared at me.
Panting, I reached up and brushed some hair from my eyes. It clung to my forehead, which was slick with sweat.
Bright light pressed against my eyes, making me close one, and squint the other against the glare.
“What…what happened?” I asked. My mouth was dry, like it was full of cotton.
You were sleeping, Athena said, staring intently at me. Dreaming. And not just dreaming.
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes.
As I woke up, my memory started to come back to me. Slowly, but it was happening.
Something strange occurred, Athena said. Magic at work.
I looked down at her.
She was perched on my quilt, resting between my legs as she gazed up at me.
I looked around. I wasn’t in the cemetery. I was in my cabin, lying in my bed. My pillow was lying at an odd angle against the floor, as if I’d shoved it off the mattress in the middle of the night. Bright, morning sunlight flooded in through the windows; I’d forgotten to close the blinds the night before.
I pressed my pointer finger against my temple, frowning. The inside of my head throbbed. “What do you mean, magic at work?” I asked.
I don’t really understand it, Athena said. I was sleeping, too, and all of a sudden, my own dreams began to change and shift…and then, I saw you standing there in the middle of the cemetery, talking with that ghost, Isabella Delvin.
I blinked. “So it really was her…”
But it was like your dream was bleeding into mine, Athena said. That’s never happened with us before.
I pulled my legs in closer to myself, and pursed my lips together. “It’s starting to fade already…” I said, my brow creasing. “I do remember the graveyard, and it was dark…and Isabella…was that actually her?”
That was the name on the headstone, Athena said.
“I didn’t see you at all,” I said.
I think it’s because I was seeing your dream, not the other way around, Athena said.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that happening,” I said.
It must be our bond, Athena said. I know that the longer magic users and their familiars have a bond, the more interconnected they become.
“That’s…mind blowing, really,” I said. “I’m sorry I did that, even though I had no idea it was happening.”
Don’t worry about it, she said. What is strange to me is that this is the first time it’s occurred. And like I said, I felt magic in there.
“Why would that matter?” I asked.
Have you ever dreamt with magic influencing it before? Athena asked.
I shook my head. “Not that I know of, no. Do you think it means something?”
Athena blinked up at me. What do you think?
I thought back on the dream. Everything had seemed so…bizarre, so abstract. It was similar to my memories of what happened that night in the cemetery, and yet, it was completely different in other ways. The way things kept changing moment to moment, for one thing.
“She kept talking to me like she didn’t recognize me,” I said. “But then at the end, she told me that she had the answers I was looking for.”
I heard that part, Athena said.
My heart skipped. “You don’t think…” I said.
I rolled out of bed and headed toward the sink to brush my teeth, my mind working in overdrive.
I don’t think, what? Athena asked, hopping down off the bed and following me into the bathroom.
“You don’t think the dream was trying to tell me something, do you?” I asked. “The only reason why I ask is because you said it had magic in it. And now that you mention it, I thought I felt magic, too.”
Well, I guess it’s possible…Athena said.
I squirted some toothpaste onto my toothbrush and looked at my reflection in the mirror. “Isabella is the only real link that I’ve ever had to finding out who my biological mother really was,” I said. “Ruth Cunningham didn’t know anything, and if she did, she never told me before she died. And the baby blanket ended up being a dead end, too. Isabella is the only one who actually knew who my mother was.”
Yes, but you put her to rest, Athena said.
I scrubbed my teeth, before turning around and looking at Athena, who was now perched on the top of the toilet tank, her front paws perfectly straight and together. “I can’ summon ‘er agai’?” I asked.
Athena turned her head slightly to the side.
I spit the toothpaste out. “I couldn’t summon her again?” I asked before putting the brush back in my mouth.
I don’t know, Athena said. I know as much as you do about ghost speaking at this point.
I frowned at my reflection. “Isabella recognized my mother in me. She said I looked like her. Maybe she actually knew her when she was alive.”
I shook my head in frustration.
“I wish she’d talked to me more that night…” I said. “It probably would have saved me a lot of headaches since then.”
I scrubbed at my teeth again for another minute or so, the determination rising within me.
“I need to call her back from the grave,” I said. “I need to learn who she was once and for all. But how?”
Maybe you could ask Mrs. Bickford if it’s even possible? Maybe her husband knows?
“Not a bad idea,” I said, running my brush under the cool water coming out of the faucet. “I wonder if she’d be willing to talk about it with me. She just got home from the hospital. I don’t know if she’s going to have the strength to deal with stressful things.”
You could frame it as simple curiosity, Athena said.
“True,” I said. “But the other problem is that Mrs. Bickford’s gift is to talk to the ghosts, not to summon them from the afterlife. That’s probably going to require a totally different gift than Mrs. Bickford’s…”
I stared into my own silver eyes in the mirror. I looked like my mother, huh? If Isabella had been the one to say it, and she’d appeared to me in my dream last night, then maybe it was a sign of some sort. “I’m not the kind of person to believe in dreams. I don’t believe they can tell the future or anything like that…but the magic in the dream tells me there was some clue in it. Something I need to solve,” I said.
I turned and looked at Athena, a smile crawling up my face.
“And I think I might know what to do about it.”
2
“Hey, Mr. Terrance,” I said, stepping into the large, open lobby of the Lodge. It was only mid-morning, and it was likely that a lot of the guests were still sleeping. This was their vacation, after all. Who wanted to get up when there was a perfectly cozy bed to stay in all morning?
I knew that a lot of the guests had checked into the Lodge in anticipation of the first snow falling in the mountains. Faerywood Falls was surrounded by mountains on all sides, and the Lodge itself sat at the base of one of them. There was always snow way up at the top, but with winter right around the corner, many of the Lodge’s annual ski visitors were making their reservations and coming in early so as not to miss the first snow of the season.
“Good morning, Miss Huffler,” Mr. Terrance said from behind the front desk. He looked like he was busy reordering the nameplates on the lockers where guests kept their belongings when they didn’t want to drag them out hiking or skiing with them. “How are you this morning?”
“Fine,” I said, walking up to the counter. “Hey, is Bliss around somewhere?” I asked.
“I just saw her pass by here briefly, heading toward her room,” Mr. Terrance said. “She was wearing her Forest Friends garments. She and the rest of the troop took the girls out camping last night.”
“Oh, I forgot about that,” I said. Bliss was probably exhausted. “Could you call up to her room and see if she’d be okay with me going up to see her?”
“I’m sure it won’t be a problem, but I will see what she says,” Mr. Terrance said.
He grabbed the phone and dialed her number from memory, his gaze distant as he waited for her to answer.
“Hello, Miss Bliss,” Mr. Terrance said. “I have Miss Huffler here to see you. Would you like me to send her up?”
His eyes shifted to me as she spoke, and he nodded.
“Wonderful, she’ll be there in a moment,” he said, and hung up.
“Thanks, Mr. Terrance,” I said.
“My pleasure, Miss Huffler,” he said, and he turned back to his job.
Athena sniffed at the air as we turned the corner and headed toward the main stairs. That Mr. Terrance seems like such a mysterious man, she said.
“My aunt trusts him,” I said. “And he seems harmless enough.”
Oh, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him, she said. I just can’t get a good read on
him. Is he Gifted? Or not?
“I’ll have to ask Aunt Candace,” I said as we wandered up to the second floor landing.
We headed all the way to the top floor, where Aunt Candace and Bliss had their rooms. There were only a few guest rooms up here, but they were the executive suites that only the wealthiest of guests could afford to stay in. That meant it was often very quiet this high up, and it allowed Bliss and her mother to have some privacy living in the Lodge.
Athena and I reached Bliss’s door, which was closed, and stopped in front of it. I raised my hand and knocked three times.
The door was pulled open, and the smiling face of Bliss greeted me on the other side. “Hey, Marianne,” she said, her green eyes bright. “And Athena,” she said, staring down at the fox standing beside me.
Athena wagged her puffy, black-tipped tail like a small dog.
“Hey, Bliss,” I said. “I know you just got back from your Forest Friends camp out, but I needed your help with something.”
Bliss pushed the door all the way open and wandered back into her room. “Wow, Marianne, you’ve got that look on your face,” she said.
I frowned. “What look?”
“The, I need to do something and I need to do it now sort of face,” Bliss said, sinking down onto her bed, which was unmade. She stretched out on her stomach, pulling one of her pillows underneath herself. “So, what’s up?”
I sat down in her desk chair, which was right beside her window. I noticed her Forest Friend’s vest was draped across the back of it. I tried not to think about Mrs. Bickford’s daughter who had died so tragically some weeks ago…or the teenage girl who was responsible for the death.
Athena hopped up onto the trunk that Bliss kept at the foot of her bed, circled around a few times, and laid down, her eyes focused on me.