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Authors: Brian Knight

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BOOK: The Heart of the Phoenix
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The circle of trust around the Phoenix Girls continued to expand, and both Katie and Ellen seemed pleased to not have to hide who and what they were from their parents any longer.

Erasmus arrived a few minutes later in the passenger seat of Susan’s old blue Falcon, now cleaned up and restored to near new condition. Behind the wheel, Michael West stuck an arm out and waved at his parents and sister as he glided to a stop beside their car. The new sheriff was out of uniform, the first time in a long time Penny had seen him in civilian clothes.

The guests demolished Fabia’s huge breakfast spread and began departing for town, Flanna tagging along with the Traveling Reds to keep Jaiden company. The fair was set up, and the festivities were scheduled to begin that morning. The Reds who were not a part of that year’s troupe began to drift back to Aurora Hollow and the Worldgate, and before long only the Phoenix Girls, old and new, Erasmus, Michael, and Ronan remained.

“We should get going,” Erasmus said, patting Susan’s arm while staring somewhere into the distance over her left shoulder, his blind act as immaculate as ever. “We need to open up.”

Taylor and Pi had been an instant hit, its lounge always full, an oasis for the coffee loving people of Dogwood, the book department doing a respectable business, the town happy to have a local place to buy books again, and the stationery sales rebounded.

Erasmus Pi had remained on Old Earth, visiting Gallia only infrequently, to indulge in his love of gadgets and science, and help run the store he founded.

“Is it that time?” Susan checked her watch, then cast panicked eyes over the mess left behind by her guests.

“Past that time,” Erasmus said.

“I’ll clean up,” Fabia said. “The girls can help.”

“Actually, I need to borrow Penny,” Torin said. “I won’t keep her long.”

Fabia waved them off with a smile, and began directing Zoe, Katie, and Ellen in the cleanup.

“Why do we have to clean up?” Katie grumbled, but began gathering paper plates and plastic cutlery for the trash.

Ellen glanced surreptitiously around, then pulled her wand out and levitated the garbage out of Katie’s hands and toward the trash.

“Show off,” Katie said and began to gather chairs.

Zoe snatched the last scraps of bacon before gathering the serving dishes.

Penny walked to the hollow with her father, almost asked what he needed her for, but didn’t. He seemed deep in thought as he walked.

Ronan, not his cute fox avatar, but the full grown and ferocious looking manimal, greeted them. The trail at his back was now blocked by what appeared to be a wall of solid stone, but when Ronan brushed it with a hand it began to move, and then disassemble itself into a couple dozen black-eyed homunculi. They yawned, stretched, and stood aside for Ronan, Torin, and Penny to pass.

Penny patted the nearest gray man on the head as she passed, feeling a pang of grief she’d thought long past. She’d lost Rocky a year ago, and she still missed him.

Memories of Rocky led to memories of Bowen, and a wish that she’d gotten to know him better before he’d died.

She followed her father down into Aurora Hollow, waited for a long moment, then finally asked, “What?”

“There’s something I want to show you.” He pointed to the ever-present heat-haze shimmer in the center of the hollow, the Worldgate.

Penny gave a shrug of resignation and walked through.

 

* * *

 

The sepulcher of the Reds was gone. In its place was a grove, larger than the sepulcher had been, but still confined by walls inside the citadel of the Reds. Open to the sky, bright sunlight shone down on a landscape that might have existed untouched since the dawn of this Earth. Trees great and small lined the walls, and the only door stood free, like the door in the hollow, at the end of a stone path.

A creek ran through it, meandering, bisecting the grove, coming from nowhere at one end, disappearing into nowhere at the other.

“We’ve moved the artifacts and relics,” Torin explained. “I decided it was time for a change.”

Penny took a tentative step away from the Worldgate, deeper into the grove. A bird, something large and only vaguely familiar, dropped down from the sky and roosted on a boulder next to the running water.

“That’s Clear Creek, from Aurora Hollow.” He pointed out the stream. “When we moved the walls and tore up the floor to plant, it was there.”

The bird, a condor of some kind, Penny thought, dipped its beak into the creek, then leapt into the air again and circled the clearing before taking to the wide open sky.

“We call it the Conservatory.”

“That door,” Penny pointed.

“Is the only way in or out, unless you can fly,” Torin said. He took Penny by the arm and led her away, toward a cluster of willows near the inlet of this improbable branch of Clear Creek. “Zoe helped with the trees, they’d still be saplings without her help. Look in there.”

Penny looked, and for a while saw nothing.

“Dad, I…”

Then she saw, gasped, backed up a step until Torin caught her and held her steady.

A glow started from the darkness inside the clustered willows, and emerged as the shape of a woman. A woman with flowing, curly hair, gowned in flowing light. She turned, and Penny saw her face.

Her mother.

“Tracy helped me,” Torin said, and Penny saw the moisture of tears on his cheeks. He held up the final crystal sphere from Susan’s memory tree, the one with the likeness of her mother, Diana Sinclair Fuilrix. “This was your mother’s final memory, a memory Tracy saved for us, in this. Now it’s free.”

“Has Flanna seen?”

“Yes, this morning while you were still sleeping.”

Two more figures emerged behind this glowing apparition of her mother, twin girls with their mother’s flowing hair. Diana turned back to them and smiled, then crossed to the water, waded through it, and vanished into the trees on the other side. The twin girls chased after, and vanished.

“That never happened,” Penny said. She felt her legs unlock at the knees, would have fallen if her father hadn’t caught her. “How can this be her memory?”

“It was real to her,” Torin said, and left it at that. Penny smiled.

 

 

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

 

BOOK: The Heart of the Phoenix
11.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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