The Heart of the Phoenix (24 page)

“Am I boring you, Penny?” She seemed unoffended by Penny’s show, even smiled at her. “I’ll get to the point then. The Traveling Reds have rejoined the fair circuit for the first time in fourteen years, and will arrive in Dogwood for the Harvest Days fair. He has left me here, my sudden arrival in Dogwood would raise too many questions.”

Penny glared at her.

“Would you like something to drink? I’ll free your mouth if you promise not to misuse it.” She touched a carafe on her cluttered desk with the point of her wand, and steam issued from the spout. It smelled like coffee.

Penny thought for a moment, then nodded. She could swallow her anger for long enough to drink a cup.

Tracy removed two pottery cups from a drawer of her desk and filled them. Penny managed a sullen
thanks
as she accepted hers. It was coffee. Penny restrained herself from gulping it down. She didn’t know when, or if, she’d ever get another cup, so she wanted to take enough time to enjoy it.

“I left something behind in Dogwood. I had counted on you to discover and use it, but you didn’t.” Her tone edged toward exasperation. She sighed, sipped at her cup, and continued. “It was very important to my plans that you do it, so now we have a problem.”

“Why is it my problem?” Penny knew she was edging close to insolence, but couldn’t help herself.

“Because it is,” Tracy said. “Trust me.”

“My mother trusted you. My aunt trusted you.” Penny was satisfied to see Tracy wince at the mention of Nancy Sinclair. “They all trusted you.”

“Yes, they did,” Tracy said. She regained her composure, showing not a hint of a guilty conscience. “I know Torin and Ronan are helping you to contact Flanna. Tynan doesn’t think you’re powerful enough to do it, but I have faith in you. When you contact her, tell her to take my crystal from the memory tree and smash it.”

Penny stood dumbfounded.

“Finish your drink, Penny. I need to escort you back to your cell. We both have work to do.”

Penny didn’t know how to respond, so didn’t try. She drank, and when the cup was empty Tracy resealed the mouth of her mask.

The guards stopped them on their way back, searched Penny, and flanked Tracy as she escorted Penny back to her cell.

“We’ll speak again, child,” Tracy said before unsealing her mask’s mouth and departing.

Then she was alone with her father and Ronan.

“What was that about?” Torin took her by the shoulders and looked her over, as if to confirm she was unharmed.

Penny told them, and from the looks they shot each other, they were just as bewildered by the request as Penny was.

Her meditations that day were as fruitless as the previous, but she did dream of Flanna that night.

* * *

Flanna stood in the bathroom, brushing out her hair in front of the mirror and worrying about the coming day. Her first clue that she was still asleep and dreaming was when Zoe drifted in behind her and began fussing with her own long black hair. Zoe had always stood much taller than her, but that morning she was so tall that her head bumped the ceiling, and she had to bend down to look into the mirror. Her second clue was when her brush grew fingers and began to pull painfully at her tangles.

“Ouch!” Flanna yanked the brush free and threw it into the sink, where it wiggled and curled the fingers that had grown to replace the bristles. When she looked back up at the mirror, Zoe was no longer behind her, and the face staring back at her was not her own.

“You did this to me!” the thing in the mirror shouted, then pounded the glass with its fists. The glass wavered and bent beneath the blows, but didn’t shatter. “Look at me!”

Flanna looked, could not stop looking.

The girl in the mirror was dressed in rags and wearing a leather mask that hugged the contours of her face. There were holes for her nostrils, her mouth, and her eyes. Green eyes, the color of Flanna’s.

“You have to smash it,” the girl screamed, and pounded the glass of the mirror again. Cracks appeared beneath her fists, and when she struck again the cracks spread. “
I gotta get out of here
!”

Smash
!

Flanna screamed and threw her hands in front of her face as shards of broken glass rained down around her, then screamed again when a pair of hands took her by the shoulders.

Flanna snapped awake and upright in her bed, a final scream still stuck in her throat.

Flanna’s first day at school did not go as smoothly as she’d hoped it would.

She argued with Zoe, who wouldn’t stop asking what she’d done to deserve the silent treatment Flanna was giving her. By the time they left, Zoe was returning the silence, and as soon as they were clear of the driveway, Zoe piloted her bike off the ground, into the air, and out of sight on the other side of the trees that pressed close to the road. A stupid chance to take in the daylight, Flanna thought, when you were a magic user trying to hide in a world of people who didn’t believe in magic. She couldn’t follow Zoe, of course. The bike she rode was tuned in to Penny, and would no more fly for Flanna than put on a red wig and go to school in her place.

When she arrived, Zoe’s bike was already parked and locked, and Zoe stood talking with Katie and Ellen. When she saw Flanna coming she turned and walked away without another word, leaving her friends in confusion.

“What did you do to piss her off?” Katie regarded Flanna with undisguised irritation, and Flanna was sure Zoe had already told them. Katie at least seemed to be taking Zoe’s side of the argument. Flanna parked her bike beside theirs without comment, locked it, and walked away from them. She knew she should be using Penny’s friendship with these girls, especially on a day when she was expected to find her way around the zoo that was Dogwood School, things would be much easier for her if she could just follow their leads all day, but she hated them, and pretending otherwise was becoming too difficult.

She was running late, trying to locate the first class on her schedule, when someone called out from behind.

“Hey, Little Red!”

She turned and saw a fat boy with stained clothing and long greasy hair approaching her at a near run. It took her a moment to recognize Rooster from Penny’s memories, because he looked different than he had in Penny’s memories, taller, wider, more unkempt than usual, and without the typical cadre of friends.

She recognized his intent and reached for a wand that wasn’t there. A moment later he hit her, leaning into his charge and crashing into her with his shoulder. She flew feet into the air and heard the screams of a group of girls still walking the halls. She landed and her head slammed the floor. For a moment she existed in pain and darkness. She realized she was fainting, and shook herself back to full awareness to find him leaning over her, reaching down to grab or hit.

She responded without thinking, sweeping his legs out from under him with a hard kick, then rolled away as he fell. He landed where she had been a moment before, and without pausing to consider the move, rolled again and dragged herself atop him. She punched down at him, hitting him in the face, then again and again. He reached for her, and she swept his grasping hand aside with an arm. He brought his knee up into her stomach and she rolled forward off him. She landed in a crouch and turned to find him struggling to his feet.

“Get back down there,” she shouted, and then helped him back to the floor with a kick to the back of one knee.

This is from Penny
, she realized, and felt a new admiration for her sister. Memories of Aikido practice flashed in her mind, fights she’d been in during her time at the orphanage, before she came to Dogwood.

Rooster went down to his knees with a grunt of pain, and Flanna launched herself at him again, but strong arms grabbed her from behind and restrained her.

“Penny, stop it!” The voice was familiar but out of context. A boy’s voice, and one she at first associated with weak knees and the heat of a blush in her cheeks. “He’s finished, let him go.”

Flanna forced herself to calm, to relax, and saw that Rooster
was
finished. He crawled away from her whimpering, and clutched the leg of an approaching teacher who’d come to the sound of fighting.

“And what is all this about?” The woman looked down at Rooster and pulled her leg out of his grasp. She looked at Flanna next.

Flanna felt like someone poured ice down the back of her shirt.

The woman standing in front of her featured in Penny’s earliest memory of Dogwood. It was Susan’s sister, Miss June Riggs. She looked at Flanna with an undisguised contempt that Penny would have recognized.

“What did you do to this boy, Sinclair?”

“She defended herself,” Trey Miller said. “That...”

“Consider your next words very carefully, Miller,” Miss Riggs said.

“Rooster attacked her,” Trey said.

“It’s true,” one of the screaming girls shouted. They were all very young, bug-eyed and traumatized. The others nodded in agreement with their bolder friend. “He hit her and knocked her down.”

“She didn’t kick his butt until he tried to hit her again,” another of them said, and then decided she’d rather look at the floor than Miss Riggs’s face.

“I can speak for myself,” Flanna muttered, and heard the sound of scampering feet as the girls scattered for their homerooms.

Trey either didn’t hear her, or chose to ignore her. He continued to hold her, though more gently now. Any boy who had dared to touch her this way in her home city would have finished their day in a Crow Cage, hanging in the public square for the amusement of the people.

She liked it. She liked
him
. She wondered if this unwelcome feeling was hers or the part of Penny that lived in her head now.

“They’re lying,” Rooster said, finally managing to pick himself up off the floor. He limped slightly and his lips and nose were bloodied, but Flanna thought he would survive.

“Go to the Principal’s office, Price. You too, Sinclair. I will join you shortly.” Miss Riggs looked at Trey. “Let go of her and get to class. You don’t want to be late.”

The final bell rang out, as if to say
too late
.

“I’m going with them,” Trey said. “I saw what happened.”

Miss Riggs aimed her small, bright eyes at him for a few seconds, then shrugged and motioned for them to go before stepping back into her room.

Rooster was already halfway down the hall. Flanna shrugged out of Trey’s arms and followed. She could hear Trey following.

“Are you okay, Penny?” Trey’s longer strides brought him up beside her in a matter of seconds.

“I’m fine,” she said, almost shouted, and winced at the volume of her own voice. She sighed, and forced a gentler tone. “My head hurts.”

More silence, Rooster long gone. They turned the corner from the side corridor into the main hallway. Up ahead, she could see the office.

“Listen, about this summer,” Trey said.

Now she knew who the boy was, and understood her response to his touch.

Please shut up... please shut up... please shut up
!

“I don’t like Zoe that way anymore,” he said, despite Flanna’s mental barrage. “And she never liked me.”

You have no idea
, Flanna thought, recalling Penny’s conversation with Zoe the day she came back.

“I’m sorry that I scared you away. I missed you this summer.” He fumbled for her hand, and she let him take it. “But I’m not sorry I kissed you.”

Flanna knew that Penny had avoided him all summer following the kiss, even staying away from town most days. She’d ignored his calls to her house, racked with guilt at first because she had liked the kiss, had even kissed back for a second. After most of a summer avoiding Trey, Penny had decided to ask Zoe’s permission, but had not gotten the chance. Zoe had been disappointed when Trey didn’t arrive to welcome her back, so Penny had determined then to pretend none of it had ever happened, and never mention it to Zoe,
ever
.

Flanna’s uncomfortable reminiscences of Penny’s crush on this boy were swept away by the sound of running footsteps behind them. She turned, bracing for another attack, and saw Zoe pounding toward them at the other end of the long hallway.

Trey, perhaps taking her turned head for an invitation to kiss her again, smiled and leaned toward her.

Flanna did not shy away from him. Instead she reached up and cupped the back of his neck, standing on her tiptoes to meet him halfway. She closed her eyes, ignoring the last fleeting image of Zoe, the shock on her face, ignored the unexpected guilt she felt, even ignored her own racing heart, the terror and excitement she felt.

Flanna had been searching for a wedge to drive between herself and Zoe, a way to rid herself of this complication to her and her father’s plans, and by pure chance, she had found one.

When Flanna finally broke the kiss, Zoe was standing only feet away. Her expression of shock had given way to a cold, almost vacant look. Her gaze seemed to be aimed somewhere over Trey’s left shoulder, and strayed nowhere near Flanna.