AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My mother was talking. She was crying.
I couldn’t hear her.
Gasping for breath,I startled awake and bolted upright. I patted myself down. There were no stab wounds on my chest. My neck was straight and unbroken, exactly as necks were meant to be.
Every muscle ached. A sheen of sweat covered my body, along with a layer of dirt and grit. Those things didn’t matter, becauseI was alive.
My death had been a dream, a memory of pain long past. I was breathing, unbroken, and perfectly fine, and…in a garden. Right, I was in Roldaria, on a mission for the library. I’d gone down the stairs after Cornelius Kurnbottom, and completely botched everything.Again.
I needed to get my emotions under control. Reliving the worst day of my life every time I sensed any danger was not going to fly. I couldn’t do my job like this. I could have been caught. Oh, no,was I caught?
No one else seemed to be around, but I also had lost my chance to figure out what Cornelius was up to.
It was no longer night. The sun was high in the sky, which meant many hours had passed. If Cornelius hadn’t noticed me snooping, my best chance of getting information out of him was to get to asking my questions as soon as possible.
Except there was clearly something wrong with the guy, if it was him who I had followed into the garden last night. Also, my self-preservation skills were on the fritz.
It would be safest to calm myself first, and then return with backup.
I rose to my feet and dusted myself off as best as I could. My dress was singed, though, and there was no wiping the burned holes away. I caught a glimpse of my hand…and the feather stuck to it.
I grabbed onto the feather and tried to pluck it off, but it was stuck. Really stuck.
I shivered, told myself it was fine, and started walking briskly away from the garden and from the castle. How was I going to stop myself from going into a full-blown panic attack every time I was in a tiny bit of danger? I needed help, the kind my bodysnatching companion could not provide.
I pulled my cellular telephone from my bag and called the only person I knew who would understand what I was going through—my uncle Ambrose.
It was Ambrose who had come to Marshmallow for me when I’d awoken seventy years after my death, covered in fire, broken. Unbeknownst to my mother and me, my father had been a carrier of the phoenix gene, passing the ability on to me before he’d died. Permanently. His brother, Ambrose, was like me, a phoenix, cursed to endlessly revive and remain the age of his first death for all of eternity.
Or that was the gist of it. The logistics were all still blurry to me.
I’d only died once so far, and clearly I was not eager to try it again.
Ambrose answered on the first ring. “Lily, hi.”
“Hi,” I said, unsure what exactly I wanted from him, or rather, unsure of how to articulate that need into the correct words.
We were still more or less strangers, no matter our blood relation, or the fact that he and my mother were now in a relationship. We both wanted to know each other better, but my work, and the time distortion of library travel, made it difficult.
“I need your help,” I said.
“What can I do for you?”
“Do you ever…partially transform? During times unrelated to rebirth?”
“I used to,” he said. “My first death was by locomotive. After my rebirth, I couldn’t hear a steam engine, or even see a toy train circling under a Christmas tree, without my body catching on fire.”
“Not a merry Christmas if you burn the tree down,” I said.
He chuckled. “Exactly.”
“How about feathers?”
“Those, too. They sprout with intense emotion, generally fear.”
“Great. Just great.” I blew out a long breath. “How do you make them stop?”
“When you relax, they fall out.”
