The Crimson Brand (20 page)

*   *   *

Back in bed now, just starting to drift off, Penny heard someone whisper her name from her bedside table.  She yawned, stretched to turn on her lamp, and found Ellen’s face looking at her from the mirror.

“Sorry … I couldn’t sleep.”

“It’s okay,” Penny said, hiding another jaw-stretching yawn behind a hand before picking the mirror up and lying down with it.  “Have you decided?”

“No,” Ellen said, and Penny thought it pained her to say the word.  Penny thought she understood Ellen a little better now than she had earlier that day.  Ellen was popular without being a joiner, unconditionally friendly and outgoing to almost everyone.  She strived for harmony, even within the chaos of emotion and uncertainty of a teenage girl’s life.  She didn’t like conflict, and she sensed the coming conflict as well as they did.

“No, you’re not joining us, or no, you haven’t decided?”  Penny forced a smile to show that whatever her answer, Penny was okay with it.

Ellen hesitated.

“It’s okay to say no to something you don’t want, Ellen.  If you can’t get comfortable with the word
No
, then you’ll spend your life always trying to please everyone else and you’ll never be happy.”

Ellen seemed on the verge of saying something, then closed her mouth.

“It’s also okay to say
Yes
to something you want, even if it opens you up to risk.” 
Listen to me
, Penny thought. 
I sound like Yoda
.  “Every day you get out of bed is a risk, and sometimes trouble finds you whether you want it or not.  That’s when you need friends … good friends.”

Ellen was silent, seeming to consider Penny’s words.

“Whether you say yes or no, we are your friends.”

“When you first came here … you and Zoe, no one accepted you.  Even Kat was mean to you, but it seemed like it didn’t matter to you.”

Penny could have corrected her.  Of course it had mattered.  Those first few months at Dogwood School had been horrible.

“You two had each other even before all that magic stuff.”

Penny waited.  She sensed the point of Ellen’s late-night call was close.

“I’ve always had a lot of friends, but no one has ever been that important to me.”  She turned her face away from Penny’s.  “I’ve never been that important to anyone.”

“Is that why you’ve been coming around?”  Penny asked the question without thinking and instantly wished she hadn’t.

Ellen blushed a little, then shrugged.

Penny opened her mouth to say something, anything to ease her embarrassment, and another yawn took control of it.

“I should let you go to bed,” Ellen said, and Penny felt her retreating from the subject.  She was relieved.  The ability to make intelligent, or even intelligible, conversation was quickly deserting her.

“Come by anytime you want.”

“Okay,” Ellen said, finally looking Penny in the face again.  She smiled, then faded from the mirror.

Penny fumbled the mirror back on her nightstand, and sleep took her.

*   *   *

Late night or not, Penny awoke at just after six the next morning.  A quarter-hour of fruitless flopping in bed later, she kicked her sheets aside and rose, grumpily admitting defeat.  She knew what was keeping her awake; she’d dreamt about it for the few hours of sleep she’d managed that early morning and could think of nothing else now that she was awake.  She briefly considered taking a quick shower and changing into real clothes, but decided she didn’t have the patience.  It wouldn’t matter to the people in the mirror anyway.  They were all from a distant past when she didn’t yet exist.  She could see them just as easily in her pajamas and with her hair in a tangle.

She leaned over the edge of her bed and slid the mirror out from under it.  Sitting cross-legged on her unmade bed, she pulled the old photo album from under her pillow and rifled through it.  There were so many to choose from that she had trouble picking one to start.  She settled at last on the picture of her pregnant mother with her stern, serious aunt. 

Penny pulled the photo from its sleeve.  “Hi, Mom.  Hi, Aunt Nancy.”

She placed the photo in the center of the Conjuring Glass, and waited.

Nothing happened.

Penny picked it up, turned it over to see if there was something stuck to the back, something coming between the photo and the mirror, then placed it carefully in the center again.

Again, nothing.

“Why won’t you work?”  She closed her eyes and focused on her first encounter with the strange mirror’s previously unknown ability.  “What am I doing wrong?”

She tried to recall as clearly as she could her actions and emotions the last time, if she had spoken to the photographs or the mirror, and the sense of her previous sadness came flooding back into her.  Wanting to see herself, her face, in the same frame as her mother and father.  Wanting to see what they might look like together if things hadn’t gone so badly wrong the night she was born.

Blinking back tears even though no one else had been there to see them.

She felt a blush of embarrassment.  She hated to cry, and she had been crying a lot lately.

Penny recalled blinking back tears and wishing she could have known them.

She had wished.

Penny wished again, and the past came alive for her.

Penny watched as small moments in her mother’s and aunt’s lives played out in front of her.  There were no great revelations that morning, but the smaller revelations, the proofs that her family had once lived, were just as important to her. 

When the larger revelations came she would share them, and the newly discovered ability of the Conjuring Glass, with the others, but these moments were just for her.

*   *   *

Penny didn’t realize how much time had passed until she heard a knock on the inside of her wardrobe door and snapped her head toward it.  Out of the corner of her eyes she saw the numbers on her nightstand clock.  It was almost ten o’clock.

The knock came again, and when Penny didn’t hasten to answer, the door began to inch open.

Penny slid to the edge of her bed and threw the top sheet over the moving images in the mirror—she was on her fifth photograph now, having watched the previous four several times each before moving to the next.

Her feet hit the floor as Zoe’s face appeared through the partially open door, and she manufactured a yawn, as if she’d only just awakened. 

Penny didn’t understand why she wanted to keep the photographs’ stories secret, if even just for now, but the desire was strong and she couldn’t deny it.

“Zoe,” she scolded, though she was obviously not convincing.  Zoe only grinned at her, unabashed.  “Call first, okay.”

“I have been,” Zoe protested.  “You weren’t answering.”

Penny did a quick about-face to the nightstand, where her mirror lay only inches from the glowing digits of her alarm clock. 

The time had flown by fast while she’d been lost in her mother’s past.  Apparently her awareness had flown with it.

“You did?”

“Course I did.  I don’t just barge in like some people I could name.”  Zoe’s grin wilted slowly as she regarded Penny more closely.  “Have you been crying?”

“No,” Penny protested lamely, wiping at the corner of her eyes for any telltale signs.  They were there, of course.  “I have allergies.”

Zoe looked unconvinced but let it drop.

“Must have been sleeping hard,” Zoe said, throwing the door wide open and stepping through.

In the background, Penny saw Katie on her knees at the creek’s edge, bent low over the flowing water, her arm immersed to the elbow and searching for her makeshift net with their ash sticks.

“I thought Kat was still grounded,” Penny said, surreptitiously shoving the old photo album back beneath her pillows when Zoe turned to regard Katie.

“Oh, yeah ... she’s still grounded.”  Zoe put a hand over her mouth to stifle laughter.  “Her dad’s out of town today and Michael talked her mom into letting her out.”

“I’d like to have a big brother like that,” Penny said, a little enviously.

Zoe went slightly redder in the cheeks and turned away. 

“And what about you,” Penny said, rising at last.  “Aren’t you supposed to be a full-time nurse now?”

Zoe was not amused by this.  The tone of her reply was crisper than usual.  “Grandma’s at church.  Then lunch with
The Elders
.”  Zoe had adopted Susan’s pet name for the troupe of old town women with obvious delight.  “Then Bingo at the Senior Center.”

“So you’re free for most of the day.”  Penny somehow thought Zoe getting almost a full day away from her grandma would be a cause for celebration, but Zoe wasn’t showing it.

“Yep,” she said, then in an obvious effort to change the subject, continued:  “Come on, let’s go already!  We have stuff to do today!”

“Stuff?”  Penny stood confused for a moment.  She didn’t remember any specific
stuff
planned for the day. 
She
had planned on spending time in her basement, searching for more treasures like the photo album.

“You know …,” Zoe glared meaningfully at her, her eyes flicking for a second to the trapdoor in her floor and the folding ladder that led to the second floor, where Susan might even now be getting ready for the day.  She whispered, though with such force it didn’t make much difference.  “We’re making new wands today, and you’re going to teach us how to fly.”

“Oh … that!”

Zoe shook her head.  “You’re such a scatterbrain sometimes.”

She stepped back into the wardrobe and turned around when she was standing in the hollow again.  “Hurry up.”

“Okay … okay!”

Zoe pulled the door most of the way closed again to give Penny some privacy, stopping just short of latching it.  Penny took quick advantage of it to change into something a little more rugged than her pajamas. 

No time for a shower that morning.  Apparently they were having a busy day.

*   *   *

Penny changed and swept a brush through her tangle of hair, then crept downstairs to leave a note for Susan next to the coffee pot, which she regarded longingly before creeping back upstairs.  She stepped through the door into Aurora Hollow five minutes later.

Katie had laid the half-dozen ash sticks on a large rock near the fire pit, next to the assortment of crystals they’d selected.  A small toolbox was open in her lap.

She met Penny’s questioning look with a wide, wicked grin. 

“My dad’s,” she said.  “If he knew I had it, he’d be so pissed.”

She paused for a second, perhaps to take some undiluted joy in the knowledge, then opened the box and pulled out an assortment of drill bits.

“She’s crazed,” Zoe said matter-of-factly.  “I’m just going to stand back and watch.”

“Oh no, you aren’t!”  Katie fixed Zoe with a look that reminded Penny of Aunt Nancy.  “You get to match which crystal will fit which wand best.”

Then she turned to Penny, “And you get to sand them smooth so we don’t get slivers.”

She pulled out a package of sandpaper and flung it at Penny like a Frisbee. 

Penny impressed herself by catching it as it spun toward her head, then tore the cellophane off and selected a sheet of the finest grain she could find.

Zoe’s seemed by far the easiest task of the three, but Penny wasn’t going to complain.  Compared to Katie’s slow, tedious chore, sanding the already smooth ash sticks to a velvety texture was quick work.  Penny and Zoe had finished completely before Katie finished her first.

“Done!”  Katie sounded manic with triumph as she fit a light blue crystal, which Zoe had identified as tourmaline, into the hole she’d painstakingly hand-drilled.  The fit was nearly perfect; she’d chosen the size of the drill bit to match the crystal, and, when she’d pushed it in all the way, no more than a centimeter of the crystal’s tip was visible.

Penny and Zoe waited in growing anticipation. 

“What now?”  Penny found the expectation a much-needed distraction from her private concerns of the past few weeks.

“The First Magic seals the crystal to the wand.”  Katie held the wand close to her face, scrutinizing Penny’s work, testing the smoothness with her hands, flexing the wood slightly to feel its strength.

“Does it matter what the first magic is?”  Zoe was almost trembling with anticipation.

Katie tore her loving gaze from her new wand and regarded them.  “It’s called The First Magic.  It’s when a wand takes its first breath.”

“She’s speaking in metaphors now,” Zoe whispered to Penny, then hushed when Katie’s eyes narrowed in her direction.

“Go on,” Penny said.

Katie nodded, and now her excitement seemed to be turning to nerves.

Penny could tell that Katie had no more idea what to expect than she did.

Katie pointed her new wand skyward, and something began to happen almost at once.  Light spilled from between the fingers clenched around the wand’s handle, coursing up toward the tip; and the crystal began to glow bright blue.  Then the light faded, the glow around the wood dimmed, but the crystal glowed more brightly still, until it was almost too bright to look at.  Then, with a bang like gunfire, the blue light expanded in a bubble that filled the hollow, engulfing them all, and just as quickly vanished. 

But for several seconds, everything in Aurora Hollow glowed: the trees, the rocks, the flowing water, the girls.

They regarded each other with varying expressions, Penny with near panic, Zoe with wide-eyed and grinning wonder, Katie with clear pride.

“I think it worked.”

Katie finished a second wand with a deep-orange topaz while Penny searched the old book for the spell that had gotten her and her bicycle airborne the day before.  She finally located it, a single page filled with writing, surrounded by dozens of blank pages.  Most of the pages in the old book were still blank.  Still a lot to learn.