House of Phoenyx: House of Phoenyx book 1

by T. John Greene

  Chapter 5

  Lucas

  They left Truthaven the same way which they had come in. Josephine and Landon had stayed behind to ask Don questions. Lucas guessed that it was a rare moment in a witch’s life that she was able to ask one of the founding fathers about the craft. Don had told Percaline that he expected to see her in class in a couple of hours and then they were on their way.

  By now, the sun was in the sky and the birds were chirping. Lucas could tell that Percaline was dying to get back to the house to see if Mischelle was there so that she could beat the Siren out of her, but he was praying that Mischelle had left. He didn’t want to see her again. He felt stupid and embarrassed and drained. He didn’t want to deal with it. He didn’t even know if he believed “it.” Right now what he needed was a hot shower and a cool bed. He needed to think. He needed to figure out how badly he had messed things up between Percaline and him.

  Percaline was the love of his life and she had said she was in love with him. But Lucas knew Percaline and he knew she would see what he had done to her over the last couple of days as a betrayal. Percaline wouldn’t forgive betrayal.

  They walked back to the house in silence. Percaline and Savannah both had school, so that would leave Lucas alone in the house to think.

  Lucas steeled himself as Percaline threw open the gate, raced up the stairs, and barged through the door. Percaline always locked the door behind her so since it was unlocked there was a pretty good chance that Mischelle had left. Normally Lucas would have gone into the battle first, but today was different. He was different. Despite what Don had said about the Siren’s spell he didn’t trust himself to see Mischelle again and not become whipped. It was definitely better to let Percaline and Savannah handle this.

  Percaline headed up the stairs while Savannah searched the first floor. “Clear,” Savannah yelled from the kitchen. A minute later Percaline yelled, “Clear,” from the second floor. Lucas’s phone rang. It was Mischelle.

  “Hey, lover,” she said when he answered. Lucas didn’t say anything, just waited to see if his brain would turn to mush again.

  He found Savannah and conveyed to her that Mischelle was on the phone. Savannah watched him as Mischelle spoke on the other end of the phone. “So you found out my dirty little secret, did you?”

  “Mischelle, what do you want from me?” Lucas asked.

  “I already got what I wanted from you,” she replied.

  “And what was that?” Lucas was feeling more comfortable now that his brain would stay mush-free.

  “It’s been a while. Maybe you should check on your girlfriend.” Mischelle hung up.

  Lucas took the stairs three at a time. Savannah was behind right him. The door to his room was open and he could see that Percaline wasn’t in there. The door to the bathroom was also open. No Percaline. Percaline’s door was shut. Without hesitating, Lucas burst through it, yelling her name.

  Percaline was in her room and she appeared to be fine. She also appeared to be completely naked. He had interrupted her changing for class. “Lucas, what are you doing?” she screamed as she grabbed a pillow to cover herself. Lucas’s phone rang again.

  “Is that Mischelle?” Percaline asked.

  Lucas nodded his head.

  “I want to talk to her.”

  Lucas handed the phone to Percaline, trying carefully not to look at her. “Mischelle?” she said.

  But Percaline didn’t get to speak. Mischelle spoke. Lucas watched Percaline’s face go ashen as she gaped at him in disbelief. After about a minute she silently handed the phone back to Lucas. Lucas put the phone to his ear.

  “Bye lover. It was fun.” Mischelle disconnected.

  Lucas looked at Percaline for a response. She didn’t say anything, just pushed him out of the doorway and closed the broken door in his face. This was not a good sign. Percaline only stopped talking when was furious. If she yelled at him or punched him it would be better than the silent treatment. The silent treatment was what Percaline did when she turned her feelings off. Shit!

  Savannah was still behind Lucas. She said “Shit!” out loud, having been the recipient of the silent treatment before.

  The girls left for school. Lucas debated about whether he should let them go by themselves after the scare that Mischelle gave him earlier, but Percaline had made the decision for him. The only words she said to him were, “She didn’t want to hurt me physically. She wanted to hurt me emotionally.”

  Lucas lay in bed for a while sifting through the haze of the last three weeks. When he had arrived in Tokyo, it had been to undergo a debriefing. Debriefings usually took a couple of weeks. There was always a physical. The Government wanted to make sure that its most valuable soldiers didn’t spill their guts about a top secret mission because they were suffering from PTSD. Lucas had passed both the debriefing and the physical. It was easy for him. He had Percaline and Savannah to come home to and he had the key around his neck to remind him.

  He had met Mischelle at a bar in Tokyo. It had been lust at first sight. He knew that it was lust now. It wasn’t that he had ever thought of it as more than lust, it was that he hadn’t thought of it at all. Being under a Siren’s spell was easy. One minute you had conflicting feelings and the next minute your whole world was based on one person. Her pleasure was the only feeling left.

  Savannah hadn’t been far off with her Karaoke comment. It had been Karaoke night at the bar. Lucas hadn’t noticed Mischelle until she started singing. The moment before her singing began was the last time he remembered thinking like a rational person. They had spent every night together since then, and when he had to leave her to take tests or talk to a panel Mischelle would make sure to call him at least once an hour. That’s how she kept him under her spell. By the end of the first week Lucas was engaged, and in his mind Percaline was no more than just a friend.

  Lucas knew better than that now. Percaline could never be just a friend to him. The only reason they weren’t together was because she kept telling him no. Time and time again, he put his heart out there for her to take but she had left it. He would continue to leave his heart out for her, hoping that one day she would take it.

  That day wouldn’t be anytime soon, though. He betrayed Percaline and whatever Mischelle had told her on the phone had put the final nail in the coffin. Now he could only hope to earn back her trust and her friendship. He wanted more but he didn’t deserve it. She was better than he was, another thing that Savannah had been correct about.

  After a while, Lucas got out of bed. Just lying there was useless and it wasn’t like he was going to sleep. His legs were restless and his mind was racing. He had fixed Percaline’s door and taken a shower right after the girls had left and now he was alone in an empty house. It was the first time in his life that he was in a house that didn’t need anything hung, or glued, or hammered. He decided he needed to center himself and he needed to move.

  Growing up, Lucas always felt scrawny compared to the other boys. In high school, after growing nearly a foot, he took charge of his life. He started to eat more protein and vegetables and he went to the gym every day. By the time he graduated he not only towered over the other boys but dominated them in almost every fighting technique known to man. MMA was probably the thing that made him so good at defensive tactics in the military.

  Lucas went out to the garage where Percaline and Savannah had made themselves a nice little makeshift workout room with weights and benches. In New Haven there was next to zero crime and the weather was never too bad compared to Colorado’s.

  Savannah had been utilizing one side of the garage because her car was new and she was paranoid about damaging it. The Xterra was parked in the driveway because it was sturdy and it had four-wheel drive, so weather generally wasn’t an issue for it. He added weight to each side of one of the bars and laid down for a couple of bench presses.

  The last time he’d come to New Haven, last October, he’d met Percaline after one of her classes as usual
. She was standing at Starbucks waiting for a decaffeinated pumpkin latte. He knew she would be there because it was the first snow of the year and on the first snow, her tradition was to spend money on a pumpkin latte. It reminded her of the holidays and the Colorado slopes.

  He had surprised her in line. She knew he was coming into town, but he and Savannah had secretly plotted his early arrival to surprise her. When Percaline saw him she nearly doused herself in latte running up to hug him. Lucas loved that they were always so excited to see each other. When she finally calmed down, Lucas bought his own latte and whisked her away from school and class, leaving behind some guy she’d been studying with. That was another thing he loved. When he came into town, whatever else was going on in Percaline and Savannah’s lives was put on hold and they spent all their time with him.

  Percaline had been dating the study partner she left at Starbucks. Her date hadn’t been thrilled that her best friend was a guy and was even less thrilled once he had seen said best friend and learned that she was spending the day with him. For Lucas and Percaline this was not the first time this particular situation had come up and it wouldn’t be the last, but they both agreed that their relationship was more important, so whoever they dated with would have to be okay with that.

  They drove upstate, where it hadn’t yet started to snow yet, so Lucas was able to see the autumn leaves of the trees that lined the east coast. They ate seafood, sang songs, and discussed the big things happening in their lives.

  On their way back to town they stopped at Lighthouse Point Park so Percaline could show him the lighthouse that reminded her of Selena. Lucas could imagine the two of them being there, brain-storming Percaline’s entrance into Yale and imagining her future. Sometimes he wondered if back then Selena knew she was going to die and maybe that’s why she’d taken Percaline to tour Yale so early.

  He reseated the bar bell and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Bench presses were good for reminiscing but leg lunges were good for figuring things out. He stood up, grabbed a couple of hand weights, and went down on his right leg.

  “Oh shit!” Lucas said out loud as he realized what Mischelle had told Percaline over the phone, almost dropping a weight on his toe in the process.

  Percaline

  Percaline assumed that Josephine met up with her before class because she wanted to discuss the events of last night and Percaline being a phoenix, whatever that meant, but as the time sped up and then slowed down, Percaline realized that Josephine’s only intention was to comfort her friend. But Percaline didn’t feel like talking about it. She just wanted to be left alone.

  She had told Lucas that she was in love with him and in turn he had said nothing. There were no amount of laps in the pool that would untangle the confusion she had in her head and the sadness she felt in her heart. She was truly heartbroken, most of it not because of Lucas’s omission of love but from what Mischelle had told her on the phone. Her best friend in the world had betrayed their friendship. It was one thing to not love her back but it was something completely different to disrespect her on a basic friendship level, which is what Mischelle said he’d done.

  Percaline remained silent during class even when Don asked her a direct question. It wasn’t that she was blatantly undermining his authority. It was that if she spoke she would start to cry and she didn’t want to start. Instead she would sit and not say anything until it was time to go and then she would work up the nerve to walk into her house, past Lucas, and into her room where she would lock herself in (or barricade herself if Lucas hadn’t fixed her door yet). And that’s exactly what she did.

  While she was sitting in her room, her mood changed from sad to mad and anxious and back to sad again. She knew this because her music taste changed from Taylor Swift and Florence + The Machine to My Chemical Romance and Demi Lovato, then back to Taylor Swift and Florence + The Machine. Anger was the easiest of all of the emotions to change into and it hurt a lot less than heartbreak, but Percaline didn’t want to leave heartbreak. It sucked and it hurt like hell but it was still a feeling, and for a long time after her mom and uncle died she had stopped feeling, like living was an emotion she could shut off. Anger was numbing and it was her go-to emotion for traumatic life events. But this wasn’t a traumatic life event so she would continue to feel the pain. She would live through it because it reminded her that she was living.

  She paced back and forth in her room like a caged animal. She hated that she wasn’t able to just walk around her house, so on more than one occasion just out of sheer stubbornness she almost left her room, but then she realized that crying in front of Lucas was way worse than being stuck in her comfortable room for a couple of hours. She could venture out into the rest of the house after midnight because by then everyone would be sleeping. Lucas would leave her alone if he heard her stumbling around in the early hours of the morning, knowing that was her time.

  Percaline opened her dresser drawer and pulled out a sweatshirt with the Navy logo on it. It had originally belonged to Lucas, but the last time he was in New Haven she’d borrowed it from him during a road trip along the coast. She’d been wearing a jacket because it was the first snow day in New Haven but she’d taken it off when she got in the car because there was nothing more confining than wearing an overstuffed item with a seat belt. Then she had turned up the heat in the car and Lucas nearly ran a light taking off his sweatshirt to give to her, complaining that it was too hot. He had made fun of her cold blood and she’d laughed, snuggling farther into the sweatshirt. It smelled like him then and it still smelled like him even though she’d washed it several times.

  Now she held the sweatshirt up, trying to decide if she threw it into the pile of Lucas stuff she’d compiled along with the CD he’d made for her in the fourth grade and the heart necklace he’d given to her for Christmas one year, or if she kept it. This was a crossroads moment. Did she give the sweatshirt, perhaps her most prized material possession, back to him or did she keep it?

  Lucas was the one that had been there for her when her mother died and he was the one who had cleaned up after they’d discovered Jon’s body. He was her best friend in the world and sometimes the only person she thought understood her completely. Without him she might cease to exist. She put the sweatshirt back in her drawer, turned the music up louder, and curled up on the bed. This too would pass.

 

  Savannah

  Sadly, school had gone by like any other day. Maybe it was the anticipation Savannah was experiencing at the possibility of growing new boobs and a butt, but even seeing Thomas and Elena together in class didn’t faze her. Then again, maybe it was the information download she had received last night that made the problem of Thomas and Elena seem inconsequential. Nah, it was because she knew that she would get her revenge on them. She would make Thomas her bitch and she would make Elena question her own attractiveness, just like they had done to her.

  After school Savannah and Mason went to the mall for coffee and shopping. Savannah filled him in on the morning’s events and Mason, being a devoted friend and shopaholic, helped her pick out one bra of every size so that she would have something to wear to school the following day. He was also nice enough to help her find an outfit that would accentuate her new attributes no matter what they were. He was completely on board with the whole Siren thing and Savannah appreciated that.

  The rest of the night was uneventful. Savannah lay down on the couch for a nap and ended up sleeping through dinner and prime-time television. She would have slept through her own transformation had the sound of pots and pans banging around in the kitchen not woken her up. For a second, in her sleep coma haze, she thought she was having a mom memory, but she wasn’t sleeping and she wasn’t recalling. Percaline was in the kitchen making pancakes.

  When she walked into the kitchen Percaline greeted her. “Morning, sunshine. Thought you might want some pancakes.”

  “It’s one a.m. I could have waited until four. Unless you do in fact bel
ieve that all this supernatural stuff is real?” Savannah said hopefully. It would make everything so much easier if the people in her life would just believe her as easily as Mason did. It would make things less stressful.

  “No, but if you sprout horns and a tail I want to see,” Percaline said, trying to keep the mood light but failing miserably. After all, she couldn’t know that that was Savannah’s worst fear.

  Percaline sat a cup of coffee and the creamer down in front of Savannah. “Are you scared?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Are you?” Savannah poured half and half into her coffee.

  “You’re my person and I don’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to you,” Percaline said as she put the half and half back into the refrigerator. Percaline was never good at mushy, so in the off-chance she had something genuine to say, it always came across as more of a fact than a feeling.

  “Don’t think of it that way, Percaline. Think of it as me becoming a new and improved version of myself.” Talking about this was definitely not helping her stress level. Time for a conversation change. “Percaline, what did Mischelle say to you on the phone? You haven’t ever frozen Lucas out for this long before.” Savannah knew as much as Percaline did that Lucas was awake upstairs. Because of his Navy SEAL training, any noise within a hundred foot radius would wake him up. He was purposefully giving Savannah and Percaline their alone time. Or, more realistically, he was avoiding Percaline.

  “She explained to me with great detail one of the naked times they had together. It involved the lighthouse,” Percaline told Savannah.

  Savannah nearly dropped her coffee cup. “What?” she yelled. If Lucas hadn’t already been awake, he was now. “Oh God,” Savannah said and stopped. “Oh God.” She stopped again. “I like legit threw up in my mouth a little.”

  Savannah thought Lucas deserved Percaline’s silence. He also deserved a kick to the balls. The fact that Percaline wasn’t in an alcohol-induced coma spoke volumes for her character. Savannah would have been drunk in a jail cell somewhere and probably looking at a life sentence.

  “May I just take this opportunity to toast your efforts in not killing Lucas?” Savannah raised her coffee cup in celebration and smacked against Percaline’s cup of tea. “Well done, sis!”

  Percaline smiled, finished mixing the pancake batter and poured it onto the griddle. Savannah guessed that Percaline was so calm because she’d had hours to mull this over. Savannah, on the other hand, had just found out this information and if there was one thing that was going to take her mind off the transformation this was it. She had half a mind to walk up to Lucas’s room right now and roundhouse kick him in the groin. “But when did they find the time to go there?” she asked instead.

  “Apparently on the day they arrived.” Savannah could see Percaline’s eyes well up with tears. “Lucas was getting naked with Mischelle when he was supposed to be picking me up.” And that was the sentence that broke the dam and opened the flood gates.

  Savannah could remember three times in her life that she had seen Percaline cry: on the day Sarah died, the night their mom died, and the day she and Lucas found Uncle Jon’s body. Now in the last two days she’d seen her cry twice. Savannah cried all the time. She cried during songs. She cried at weddings. She cried when watching really sad commercials, so she knew the power of a good cry. She also knew that this was a pain Percaline had yet to experience; the pain of your heart breaking over genuine love.

  “I feel like there’s not enough oxygen in the world left for me to breathe,” Percaline sobbed. Savannah hugged her sister. That was all she could do. Well, that, and curse Lucas silently.

  The pancakes started to smell like they were burning, so Savannah moved to the stove to flip them while Percaline went to the bathroom to get herself together and to blow her nose. Percaline was not an attractive crier. None of the Golden women were. Savannah wondered if that was one of the things that would become more attractive about her after her transition. It would probably remain the same but guys would now find it endearing. Speaking of which, it was one-fifteen. When was this stupid transformation supposed to happen?

  Savannah flipped the last pancake and turned around just in time to see Percaline return from the bathroom. Percaline was putting her hair in a ponytail when she stopped to stare at Savannah. This kind of stare could only mean one thing. Savannah pushed Percaline out of the way as she ran to the bathroom. She needed a mirror.

  Savannah didn’t have the money to go to one of those fancy prep schools but that didn’t stop her from dressing like a prep school girl today—the naughty kind, with thigh high stockings, a plaid miniskirt, and a low cut top. As Savannah walked down the hallway, a sea of people separated to let her through. The girls gave her dirty looks and the guys gawked. She had indeed received bigger boobs (she was now wearing a 32 C bra), and a perkier, more toned butt. Her hair was long and true blonde with a wave that Mason called the mermaid wave. In a different outfit she would look like a 1950’s Hollywood starlet.

  She had picked Mason up for school earlier that morning so that he would be the first to see her new body. He loved it, was happy for her and jealous all at the same time. Mason didn’t want to be a girl, he just really liked girlie things and Savannah was a really girlie thing.

  “Holy boobs, batman!” was the first thing to come out of Mason’s mouth. He followed it up with, “I guess the girls are coming with us to school today?” and “Can you bounce a quarter off that thing?” Savannah’s reply to all he said was, “Yes.”

  Literature class was good again. Like every other boy in class, Thomas couldn’t keep his eyes off of Savannah. At some point Elena faked cramps and went to the school nurse. This left Thomas with his copy of The Odyssey all to himself. Savannah could have “mistakenly” left her copy in the car but she didn’t want to share Thomas’s book. The only thing she wanted from Thomas was the satisfaction of watching him come to the conclusion that he had made the wrong choice.

  Savannah liked competition as much as anybody did, but she didn’t like coming in second. What girl does? If in any guy’s mind she was runner up to Elena, then he clearly wasn’t the guy for her. Until recent events she would never have been able to picture Lucas looking at another girl as long as Percaline was in the room. Savannah wanted that. She wanted to be someone’s first choice. But she was only sixteen, so in the meantime she was going to have fun, and probably at the expense of Thomas and Elena. A woman scorned and all that.

  Class consisted of reading another couple of chapters of The Odyssey. Savannah liked this book and she was pretty sure it wasn’t only because she personally knew a couple of the characters. She read it like a Greek Mythology manual. If Don had been correct about the names that he had gone by in his life and if Josephine was truly the ancestor of Enoch, then somewhere, all religions mixed. She liked that idea. She liked knowing that Athena in Greek Mythology was also Minerva in Roman Mythology and Sophia in Orthodox Christianity. She liked the idea that little Gods were born of one big God—or at least that’s how she interpreted it.

  She added that question to a list she had in her head to ask Don. At the top of that list was to ask if all Sirens were female and if not, how she could make Mason one? Savannah and Mason had discovered that gay guys didn’t fall for the Siren spell when Mason had first met Mischelle and they reaffirmed it this morning when he first saw Savannah. She wondered if lesbians would be susceptible and she imagined they probably were. At any rate, this was a wild ride and she wanted Mason to be on it with her.

  By the end of class Thomas had worked up the courage to talk to Savannah. This meant that he stole her backpack from the ground so that he could carry it for her. Savannah walked down the hallway with him. What else was a girl to do when a guy held her backpack ransom? As they walked Thomas asked her about the big Odyssey paper and she replied in a nonchalant manner that she had already written hers. She wasn’t lying about that. She had liked the book, so she read it all and wrote the p
aper while it was still fresh in her mind.

  Thomas escorted Savannah to her locker, where Mason was trying his hardest to camouflage himself into the silver of it. Thomas teased Savannah with the backpack by holding it out for her to grab and then snapping it back. “So I was wondering if I could come over sometime after school this week?” he asked with a flirting grin. He finally gave up the backpack. Savannah put a couple of her books into her bag and closed her locker.

  “No,” was all she said.

  She and Mason exited the school, passing Elena on the way out. Savannah looked at Elena closely. Elena was a high school girl and just like the rest of them she was trying to navigate her way through life. Savannah could relate to that. Every kid in high school could. Maybe Savannah would cut Elena some slack. Elena mouthed, “Whore” as Savannah walked by. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t. Savannah and Mason laughed.