The Crimson Brand Read online

  Book II - The Crimson Brand

  By

  Brian Knight

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright ©2014 by Brian Knight

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-37-2 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-38-9 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956491

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: March 14, 2014

  Cover Design: Denis Daniel

  Cover Art: M. Wayne Miller

  Edited By: Dr. Michael R. Collings

  To my muse, as a bribe to come back and visit more often.

  If that’s not enough, then come for the coffee and pizza.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe thanks to a lot of people, too many to fit between the covers of this volume, let alone the very limited space allowed for acknowledgments.

  Here are a few.

  Amanda Richards, Lauren Doll, M. Wayne Miller (Mr. Eye Candy himself), Frank Errington, Karen Bryant Doering, Susan Matute, Lost Lenore, Debra Lobel, Rhonda Cash, Norman Rubenstein (Godfather of The Phoenix Girls), Carol Weekes, Dr. Michael Collings, Christopher Payne, Robert Fleck, Rob Miller, Sharon Fitch, Geoff Guthrie, Scott Tyson, Jamcat Cook, Judi Wutzke, Judi Key, Ellen Knight, Christopher Kennedy, Kecia Serene, Shawna Knight, Judi Snyder, Rocky Snyder, Nshara Key, Dave Lancaster, and really just too many to list.

  Most of all, thank you.

  Contents

  PART 1: The Circle of Friends

  Chapter 1: Relics

  Chapter 2: Birthday Girl

  Chapter 3: Making the Circle

  Chapter 4: The Party Poopers

  Chapter 5: Memories

  Chapter 6: Temptations

  Chapter 7: Unfinished Business

  PART 2: Night School

  Chapter 8: Night School

  Chapter 9: How to Fly

  Chapter 10: The First Magic

  Chapter 11: The Snake in the Grass

  Chapter 12: Fishes and Sharks

  PART 3: The Crimson Brand

  Chapter 13: Cutting Her Roots

  Chapter 14: Into The Fire

  Chapter 15: Just Like Sisters

  Chapter 16: Homunculi

  Chapter 17: Little Gray Man

  Chapter 18: The Rescue

  Chapter 19: Closing the Deal

  Chapter 20: The Crimson Brand

  Chapter 21: The End … For Now

  About Brian Knight

  Book II - The Crimson Brand

  PART 1

  The Circle of Friends

  Chapter 1

  Relics

  When Ronan stalked, he moved with all the stealth and grace of any other, any normal fox. It was something he’d perfected in the past few years, as much practice as instinct, because Ronan was not a normal fox. In fact, Ronan was not normal in any sense of the word.

  He got around, wandering far away from Aurora Hollow and learning the countryside. During his solitary years before the girls had come, there had been nothing else to do, so he spent his time pretending to be normal, and he’d gotten quite good at it. Mostly he moved about with his body dimmed so that others couldn’t see him, but even when he crossed paths with one of the very few people who could see him, they hadn’t seen him for what he was. To them he was just like the other wild foxes that occasionally roamed close to town. He’d been shot at a few times, though never hit. Extraordinary or not, it might take him some time to shake off a bullet wound.

  He had also learned to hunt, an unfortunate necessity during his extended stays in the area. He had no objection to the occasional taking of life. It was, after all, how natural foxes survived, but he had always preferred to take his nourishment in more enjoyable and less messy ways.

  He was not hunting rabbits or field mice today. The objects of today’s hunt were much more important than simple nourishment, and the longer they remained unfound the greater the danger they posed. It was only a matter of time before someone found one of them and opened a door best left closed.

  * * *

  Dogwood’s landfill was several miles beyond the border of the town in an arid scrap of valley too dry and stony to produce anything but weeds. The man who ran it was youngish, with a long dark mane of thinning hair and a love of shooting anything that moved on four legs. Ronan had seen him at it, sitting on an old patched recliner on the front patio of the little camper where he lived and worked, a .22 rifle with scope pressed to his shoulder, scanning the junkyard for rats and rabbits, stray cats and dogs, and, on two occasions, Ronan himself.

  Unfortunate luck, really, this unpleasant guardian of Dogwood’s garbage being one of the very few who could see beyond the purely physical world, could see Ronan even when he didn’t want them to.

  He’d missed both times, which Ronan counted as good luck. Ronan had watched the man at work since late that previous fall, and he rarely missed. The place stank of his kills, the carcasses rotting among Dogwood's garbage.

  It was not the carcasses or the garbage Ronan had come for, but a half-collapsed structure standing at the far end of a labyrinth of old sofas, refrigerators, and other human castoffs.

  Leaning against a ruined and charred trailer was a partially burned false front in the shape of the monster that had terrorized Dogwood’s children last fall during the annual autumn fair. Only his girls (for that was how he thought of Penny, Zoe, and their new friend Katie) remembered the monster as it truly was.

  The leaning false front, now damaged by both fire and the elements, was a giant effigy of The Birdman, who had come to town in the guise of a magician, one of The Reds who’d frequented the annual fair in years past. When the monster had abandoned his burning house of horrors, he had left behind some very dangerous toys. Those toys, those potentially dangerous relics, were what Ronan hunted.

  * * *

  Ronan crouched low in the tall grass across the putrid little valley, waiting for the man to go inside. The sun had fallen low in the sky behind him while he waited, painting the wasteland below him with its surreal, deepening orange until the place was almost beautiful. Ronan was patient. He had to be. He’d found some of them already, along with a few other unexpected surprises, but if the girl’s description of that strange door-lined hallway was accurate, there were still three to account for, and if something happened to him, if he was unable to recover them all, the results could be disastrous.

  The Phoenix Girls always attracted a certain amount of trouble. It was unavoidable, but the new Phoenix Girls came with extra complications. The crow had almost certainly talked when Penny and Zoe had sent him back to his world unarmed and helpless, so chances that their return had gone unnoticed were slim. They were not ready for the trouble that was sure to come their way, and though Ronan had kept a careful ear to the ground and heard nothing telling, he feared that trouble was coming soon.


  Then of course there was Penny herself, perhaps the biggest complication of all simply because of who she was. It was a complication he’d have to reveal to her in detail someday, but not yet. She wasn’t ready.

  If she knew the whole truth, it would break her heart.

  First things first, Ronan reminded himself, and refocused on the job at hand.

  The last thing any of them needed was for some unwitting person to find one of the doorway relics and open the way for new trouble, so when the man finally rose from his seat, slinging his rifle back over his shoulder as he climbed inside his camper, Ronan didn't waste a moment.

  Lesser quadrupeds—the rats, cats, and dogs too clever to be picked off by the garbage man’s bullets—fled before him as he raced down the barren slope toward the junkyard’s bordering fence. They couldn’t see him now. Like most humans they were blind to him when he made himself dim, but they could smell and hear him. He moved slower, stealthier as he approached the rusted barbed wire fence, and then crossed beneath the lowest strand and into the wasteland beyond. He knew his way to the burnt-out husk of the trailer well enough that he could have run there in his sleep. He’d been there many times already, and a minute later, he stood before it again.

  He spent a long moment studying the leaning false front and the fire-blackened siding, then the open front door, mostly blocked by charred rubble and broken glass, looking for any sign of recent exploration other than his own. Vermin and strays had made this place home, their scents and tracks everywhere, but he wasn’t worried about the animals. The rubble piled inside the open door had not been moved or shifted since his last visit, and no human could have entered these ruins without disturbing them. He chuffed with satisfaction and scanned the length of the trailer to where the exit for the House of Mirrors had been. This portion of the structure had remained partially intact during the search following the fire but had collapsed when the authorities had brought the trailer here.

  The collapsed walls and roof changed that end into a claustrophobic maze of broken glass and charred wood. Many of the twisting paths were too dark and narrow even for Ronan. These were the only places he had yet to search for the remaining Relics.

  Tonight he would have to dig.

  Might as well get it over with, he thought, and with a very unfox-like sigh, leapt up onto the threshold of the open doorway.

  The stink of old smoke and decay filled his sensitive snout, and he sneezed several times before crouching low to pass beneath a large shard of smoke-blackened mirror.

  The structure was mostly gutted, only a few warped and half-burned struts remained where walls had once stood, and the sagging ceiling had split in many places. Ronan navigated the dangerous debris by memory and moonlight until he reached what had been the back hall, the short corridor where the troublesome Birdman had kept his handy doorways.

  The thing that troubled Ronan most about the girls’ story, a story he’d confirmed during his explorations of this ruined place, was how a lone avian had accumulated so many rare and dangerous items. It simply wasn’t possible. The Birdman’s operation was small, though effective, and no rogue flier just appears in an ordinary, sleepy little town with such a trove of rare and powerful magic.

  The Birdman’s dangerous tools, his specialized knowledge of this world, and the sheer number of children he’d taken—all of it pointed to something much bigger than a lone, wandering avian snatching children for the open slave market. Much, much bigger.

  That monster had been the tip of some unseen sword, but who or what was holding that sword’s hilt?

  Trouble coming on this side, something big happening on the other.

  Ronan could feel the fragile peace of this once-safe place shivering, about to shatter, like The Birdman’s House of Mirrors.

  He worked well into the night, burrowing through the wreckage until something shiny revealed itself in the ash and rubble. Despite his discomfort, Ronan managed a brief grin before pulling the dirty brass object from the debris with his teeth. He backed carefully from the rubble and emerged into the clean night air a minute later.

  He peeked from around the cover of the false front to the camper on the hill. The chair was still empty.

  Again, Ronan took quick advantage of the garbage man’s absence and sprinted from the wreckage, through the maze of human junk, with the etched brass doorknob between his teeth, slinking low to the ground to pass beneath the barbed wire, and was halfway up the hill and the start of his long trek back to Aurora Hollow when he scented something that stopped him in his tracks.

  Ronan’s sense of smell was superb, much stronger than his hearing or vision, and his memory for unique scents was eidetic. If he smelled a fire from far away, he almost always knew what was burning: the sharp, poisonous preservatives in processed lumber; the heavy tang of pine sap; the rich, pleasant smell of wheat grass.

  His favorite scent was clover in spring, a wild, sweet scent unlike any other.

  He could identify each of his girls, his only companions in this place, by their individual scents, and could tell if they were happy, sad, angry, or scared.

  The scent that stopped him was a familiar one, and unexpected. It raised his hackles and made him want to shrink into the grass. He resisted the urge and stood alert, scanning the countryside for the source. Hoping he was mistaken but fearing he wasn’t.

  The scent, and the thing it belonged to, didn’t belong here.

  Cursing his luck, Ronan dug a shallow pit in the stony earth and dropped the relic into it. He swept the loose dirt back over it, marked the spot in his memory, and moved back in the direction of the landfill.

  Stalking, again.

  He didn’t cross the fence, just skirted it, moving away from the trail back to Aurora Hollow and toward the low hills and the darkness beyond the landfill’s security lights. The scent was strong, and as he passed the boundaries of the landfill and into air undiluted by the sour stench of human rubbish, it grew stronger still.

  He settled into the grass, nose in the air, and waited. After a few minutes something moved toward him, soft footsteps padding in the dirt and rustling the dry grass.

  Footsteps?

  That wasn’t right.

  Nothing to do but wait. He would see for himself soon enough.

  And soon enough, he did.

  A man’s silhouette appeared on the top of the hill: head and shoulders, torso and arms, then legs carrying him forward in an easy stroll through the deserted darkness. The scent was all around him, but he was not the source of it. His weaker human scent, sweat, old onions, and some acerbic cologne that burned Ronan’s sensitive snout diluted the alien scent. He stopped at the top of the hill, hands on hips, and paused for a long moment before continuing toward the landfill.

  Ronan stayed put, moving only his head as he tracked the stranger.

  The man moved at his steady but unhurried pace until he stood at the fence, then shielded his eyes as a security light turned on, spotlighting him against the backdrop of last year’s dead grass and tumbleweeds. Soon the new green would appear, as it had everywhere else, but here it wouldn’t last long.

  The man was tall, stout, bald, with black trousers and a dark overcoat covering a crisp white shirt. He held one hand in front of his face, shielding his squinting eyes, and the other in the pocket of his jacket. He waited almost a full minute before speaking.

  “Joseph, hurry up, boy. I don’t have all night.” The ease of his posture and the calm in his voice belied his words. A moment later the long-haired killer of rats, cats, and dogs hurried into view on the other side of the fence, unarmed, Ronan was relieved to see.

  “Pa.” The garbage man stopped on his side of the fence and nodded toward the dark man. His accent was unfamiliar, thick and slow. He wasn’t from around here. “I waited up, but you didn’t come.”

  Without his gun, Joseph didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. They twisted around each other for a few moments, then he shoved them deep into the pockets of hi
s jeans.

  “I’m here now,” the man said, betraying for the first time a hint of impatience and a trace of his own accent. It was lighter than his son’s, but there. “I’ve got a full plate right now, son. Multiple irons in the fire and only two hands to juggle ‘em, so you’ll just have to excuse my tardiness.”

  “I know, Pa, I know that.”

  The silence that followed made Joseph fidget again.

  “Don’t ask,” Joseph’s pa said. “You know how this is.”

  “Yeah, I know how it is,” Joseph said, his own irritation finally breaking through the brittle civility between them. “I just don’t trust how it is … and I don’t trust them.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “’Course I do, daddy … you know I do ….”

  “Then just relax and do your job. I’m taking care of everything else.”

  The two faced off, glared at each other through the old rusting fence for a moment, then Joseph sighed and nodded.

  “It would be nice to get out of here every once in a while though. Been stuck here for months.” Joseph cast a look over his shoulder and frowned at the landfill. “This place stinks.”

  His father smiled, clearly pleased his son had brought that subject up. “Then I have some good news for you.”

  “We finally done here?”

  “Not even close to done here, but you’ve got some help on the way. You can start keeping normal hours soon.”

  “Who?” Again, there was worry in his voice.

  “No one you know,” his father said. “No one you need to know either. You won’t see them and they won’t mess with you. Just think of them as a silent night shift.”