House of Phoenyx
S. C. CLARK
Copyright © 2015 by S. C. Clark
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. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
S. C. Clark
[email protected].
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Acknowledgements
Melissa Koop, my editor, lover of books, and closest childhood friend, thank you for taking my poor excuse for grammar, punctuation, and spelling and turning it into something that people can read. You are, by far, the smartest person I have ever met and I’m so thankful that I had the pleasure of meeting you when we were still tweens. If you believe in everything happening for a reason then I think that this author/editor relationship we have now may be why we bonded over the X-Files so long ago. Thank you for not teasing me mirthlessly about some of the truly ridiculous things I have said/written and I hope that with your new career as an editor you will remember that my books should always be moved to the top of the editing pile For more information about Melissa Koop or to contact this excellent, amazing, remarkable, astonishing, wonderful, incredible, marvelous, mind-boggling editor please visit www.houseofphoenyx.com.
A second thanks goes to Tashona Jones who created the artwork I use at the beginning of my chapters, on my covers and throughout my website. You are a truly amazing artist! Thank you for taking what I had in my head and putting it down on paper even when I couldn’t find the words to describe what I was thinking. I hope you enjoy these books and find that the end result was worth all the changes For more information about Tashona Jones or to contact her please visit www.houseofphoenyx.com.
∞∞∞
Dedicated to the people
who inspire me every day
and are found in the pages of this book.
Preface
That was how the story ended…without a last entry in the journal to indicate what had happened to the people whose lives were written down in it. Mila laid Mason’s unfinished fourth journal down and swiped a tear from her eye as she yawned. It was past her bedtime, but because it was her birthday, and because the journals had been given to her as a birthday gift, her mom Josephine was overlooking the fact that she was still awake.
Mila drew in a deep breath and picked up the first memoir from the second stack. She had just finished reading Uncle Mason’s journals, and now she was moving onto Aunt Savannah’s memoirs. She wanted to start with Savannah but had instead begun with Mason, hoping that by reading his first, the impact of what had happened and the story she already knew wouldn’t be as hard for her to handle as reading it from Savannah’s perspective.
Mila had always thought she shared a connection to Savannah, different from the one she shared with her Aunt Percaline and her Uncle Lucas. Before her sixteenth birthday, her mom, with help from the other members of the house, had kept the journals and memoirs hidden from her, fearing that they were too adult to read. It was her mom’s way of shielding her from the events that led up to the day the apocalypse ended and from the heartbreak she was inevitably going to feel.
She traced her fingers down the gold cased cover of the book and opened it to the first page where a picture of Savannah, Aunt Percaline, and Uncle Lucas, was taped. The picture had been taken before they knew who they were or what the Underworld was. This was Savannah’s world and Savannah’s memoir, and if she learned anything from listening to stories about Savannah, this story would be about the people that meant everything to her and how all of them: the phoenix, the Gargoyle, the prophet, and Savannah, who was the kitchen sink of supernatural creatures, came together to save the world.
Mila drew in another deep breath, knowing that this book went farther back than Uncle Mason’s, and began reading…
My name is Savannah Golden and I’m an orphan. Well, technically I’m not an orphan because my sister is my mom. Not in a back woods, Arkansas-type of way either. I don’t subscribe to werewolves falling in love with babies or witches dating their brothers. Eww! This is NOT that type of story.
My sister Percaline adopted me when I was twelve years old after our mother Selena was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Percaline and I share a mother, but have different fathers. I’ve never met my father and I don’t know his name. I don’t know his name because my mother never got it from him. This isn’t one of those types of stories either.
In my mother’s last days she told me that my father was a man who had followed her into a bathroom at a bar, locked the door behind her, and raped her. Now for all of you that haven’t been keeping up, I was the walking, breathing, tangible evidence of what was probably the worst night of my mother’s life. When my mother told me this I had the natural response of any twelve year old kid…I was heartbroken. I had so many questions: Since I was born out of anger, would I grow up to be angry? Did I carry a rapist gene? Would I snap one day and make a once-strong person a victim? I felt worth less than everyone around me. I shouldn’t have been alive and I shouldn’t have been allowed to live.
In all her wisdom, my mother wouldn’t let go of me. Even in her weakened state, she was stronger than me. And that was it. My mother, terminally ill with breast cancer, held onto me with every fiber of her body and it was then that I realized that she had never been a victim. She was a survivor and the strongest person I have ever met. She had told me about my father in confidence, not for her, but for me. This was my secret to share with anyone I deemed necessary, when I deemed it necessary.
Percaline and I were as close as two sisters could be with a seven year age difference, even though Percaline had to take on the role of my parent when she was only nineteen, but I still didn’t tell her my secret. I wanted it to stay between Mom and me. Besides, I was pretty sure that during my mother’s dying days she also spoke to Percaline about her father, who was also out of the picture. Percaline hadn’t shared her father’s information with me either. Maybe she was ashamed, but honestly he had to be a better man than my old man even if we had never met him.
I don’t mean to be all Debbie-downer on you and I don’t want you to think that I’m some poor girl who’s never had a minute of pure happiness in her life because that wouldn’t be true. So far, with the exception of a couple of road blocks, I’ve had a great childhood. It might not be what you would consider typical but it has been great nonetheless.
Growing up I had two significant father figures. One was my Uncle Jon, my mother’s brother. The other is Lucas, my sister’s best friend. It was my mother’s idea to have Percaline adopt me. Percaline was eighteen at the time the paperwork began and I can remember there being some discussion about Uncle Jon adopting me; not because Percaline didn’t want me, but because Jon was a true adult. My mother always had this uncanny ability to know what the future had in store. I don’t know that she was psychic, or if she was just really good at listening to what her intuition was trying to tell her. At any rate she wanted Percaline to adopt me and she asked that Uncle Jon look after the both of us. The paperwork for the adoption took almost exactly a year, which is how long it took for my mother to die once she had been diagnosed. Percaline took custody of me while
Uncle Jon struggled to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads.
After my mother died, Uncle Jon’s demons surfaced. Uncle Jon was a carpenter by trade and had been working overtime at a loft downtown when he received the call from Percaline telling him that his sister was about to pass. Earlier that day the nurse had falsely assured him that my mother was sleeping peacefully and that tonight wouldn’t be her last. Of all of the things my Uncle Jon wanted to accomplish at the top of his list was being there with her when she passed. He didn’t want her to be alone, or with strangers, and he didn’t want us to be alone either.
Mom, Percaline, and I had moved into Uncle Jon’s place once the medical bills started to pile up. I can remember her death day like it was yesterday. My mom turned to Percaline and me, holding one of each of our hands in hers, and told us that it would only be minutes. In her last couple of weeks she was in and out of consciousness but she would have these profound moments of clarity. Again, I’m not sure if she was psychic or just metaphysically informed, but she knew that those minutes were her last.
Uncle Jon had been on a ladder hanging a light fixture when he received the call. He missed one of the steps on his way down and came down on his right leg hard, pinching his sciatic nerve and causing the use of his right leg to be minimal at best. However, he did make it to the house in time to watch the light in his sister’s eyes fade and eventually burn out.
Percaline, Jon, Lucas, and I stayed with my mother for hours, crying, discussing random memories we had of her, and contemplating the future. Once her body was removed and taken to the crematory, Uncle Jon finally went to the doctor. By now he could barely move and must have been in an amazing amount of pain although he never showed it. He had fractured a vertebra and pinched his sciatic nerve so hard that from then on his right foot would feel as though it was constantly on fire. No amount of pain medication would correct the problem, and although the accident had taken place on the job, because he had waited so long before going to the hospital his employer wouldn’t pay out worker’s comp.
Without the ability to work as a carpenter and feeling as though he was just one more mouth for Percaline to feed, Uncle Jon killed himself six months after his sister died. It was a tough year. Percaline and Lucas were the ones to discover his body and the note. He had shot himself in the head in the outdoor shed so that there would be as little clean-up as possible. I think that his death, because of the surprise of it and the selfishness of it, had been more earth-shattering than Mom’s death. With Mom we had a chance to prepare for it and there was nothing that was going to stop it from happening, but with Uncle Jon we had no indication of what he was thinking or if it could have been prevented. About a week after he died we received a letter from a doctor at John Hopkins who said that she had looked over his MRI and had thought that he would be a great candidate for a new procedure. She was going to operate on him pro bono.
It’s now been a little over three years since his death and the procedure she was talking about has been a success on every patient they’ve treated with it. If only he could have waited just one more week. But I guess a week to someone in pain is like a lifetime to the rest of us, or so I’ve been told. I actually get why he did it and I forgave him long ago, but I wish that I would have paid more attention to the subtle signs he us gave in the days leading up to his death.
For example, before Jon died, Lucas had got us four tickets to go see the Colorado Rockies play the New York Mets. Lucas’s parents, Wayne and Simone, are rich, and he thought it might be nice for us to get out of the house and away from the depression that seemed to hang over us like a cloud. Lucas was also getting ready to leave for Navy Basic Training. He wanted to be a Navy SEAL.
When Lucas and Percaline told Uncle Jon and I that we were going to a Rockies game I literally jumped with joy, a natural response. Uncle Jon, on the other hand, didn’t confirm or deny his attendance. I should have known then.
We never did use those tickets. The game took place on the day of Jon’s funeral. After that there had been talk about Percaline and Lucas getting married for the sole purpose of Percaline and me being stationed with Lucas. It was Lucas who had came up with the plan but Percaline refused. She didn’t want her problems to hold him back and she thought that he would have a better chance of getting into SEAL training if he didn’t have a family. What she didn’t get and still hasn’t gotten is that the three of us have been through so much together that we are family and that it was Lucas’s life and also his decision to make.
Lucas and Percaline have been best friends since the second grade, when Percaline had punched Jimmy Warren in the nose for bullying Lucas. Lucas would never live that down and he didn’t want to because it was in that moment he decided that Percaline was everything in the world to him. Without siblings or parents that gave a crap about him, Lucas was by himself. With one punch everything changed and he and Percaline were inseparable.
But Percaline always gets her way, so for the first time since second grade Lucas went off alone and Percaline and I remained in the house of death for another couple of years. We saw Lucas on holidays and breaks when he was in the country and we talked to him via web cam when he wasn’t. Lucas sent us his military pay every month, which wasn’t much, but made it possible for Percaline to buy me new shoes and school supplies. Percaline and I were there when Lucas graduated from SEAL Qualification Training.
This now brings me to my sister, Percaline. Percaline was nineteen years old when she became a parent and almost a wife. Uncle Jon had willed us the house and my mom had left us her car, a yellow 2001 Nissan Xterra. The Xterra and the house were just about the only things that the health insurance bills didn’t take from us. Because Uncle Jon’s death was ruled a suicide, life insurance wouldn’t pay out on it and Mom’s life insurance policy was enough to mostly pay for her hospital visits and on-call nurse. Having been the estate executor for the untimely deaths of two people, Percaline went to work for a law office as an assistant. She made good money considering she only had high school level education.
Percaline is naturally very good with money. I always thought that she should work on Wall Street or as a Budget Analyst for a well-known corporation, but she didn’t want to do either of those things. Her dream was to get into Yale and study to become a lawyer. She wanted to fight for the little guy against workers comp suits and insurance corporations. Percaline has an IQ of 162 which is borderline genius, so although she missed most of her last year of high school she still graduated with honors. Lucas graduated too but without honors. Lucas is a smart guy but in comparison to Percaline all of us are uneducated buffoons.
It wasn’t until Percaline was twenty years old that she sat down to take the ACT and SAT tests. Naturally she tested very well in each. Yale accepted her but she deferred enrollment until the following August so that I would only have to start a new school once and so that we could figure out how the whole financial aid thing worked.
As it turns out, Percaline didn’t have to use financial aid. Yale gave her a full academic ride and an anonymous Yale alumni, who had heard about our story, sent us a very big check in the mail that would allow us to buy a house, a new car (which Percaline let me buy since she wanted the Xterra and I was about to get my driver’s license), and to live without having to work for the next four years.
Percaline is now a junior at Yale University, I am a junior at a high school in New Haven, and Lucas is a professional badass who moved to Connecticut to be with us and arrived there just in time for me to finally get to the beginning of our story…
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