AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I stretched out my arms on either side of me and tilted my face to the sky. “I wish I could fly right into it.”
The Gray Man pointed to the clouds with his specter of a hand. His strange, whispered words coiled into my ear like smoke, and I heard them like a snatch of song on the wind.
“Then fly, Little Bird. Fly into the storm.”
I closed my eyes, bent my knees, and flung myself off the edge into nothingness.
* * *
I hit my bed with a thump and woke with a gasp of terror. The room was dark, and Freya blinked sleepily at me, annoyed at having been woken up.
“Sorry,” I told her. “Just a dream.”
Just a dream,I repeated to myself, though the sweat still glistening on my body had the salty tang of the sea, and the shadows in the unfamiliar room were gathered in strange places. I rubbed my eyes and let them adjust, my heart pounding, until the dark shapes resolved into furniture and a suitcase splayed open on a chair. The battered gold alarm clock on the bedside table told me it was just after midnight. Strange. I could have sworn I’d only just fallen asleep a few minutes ago.
The fear that had flooded me upon waking receded now, leaving my limbs feeling like water and my mouth parched. I slipped out of bed to get a drink of water from the bathroom but stopped before I reached the bathroom door. Raised voices from downstairs caught my attention, and I strained to listen.
“…to please keep it down. I don’t want to wake up Wren.”
It was my mother’s voice. I crept forward down the hallway, holding my breath at every tiny creak of a floorboard, until I reached the top of the staircase and squatted down, holding onto the banisters for support while I eavesdropped.
No,listened,I corrected myself. This conversation concerned me as much as it did them, and if they weren’t going to include me in it, then I had every right to insert myself into it. Besides, how would I ever find out the truth if they clammed up every time I was with them?
“I knew she was sick, Rhi, but I didn’t know she’d lost her damned mind!” my mother cried.
“Well, at least we’re in agreement on one thing,” Persi replied.
“Don’t say that! It’s not true!” Rhi’s voice rose an octave in her distress, making it even higher and squeakier than usual.
“Look, I know how much you loved her—how much we all loved her—” Persi snorted loudly at this, but my mother plowed on, ignoring her, “but this isn’t the kind of decision a sane person makes,” my mother went on. “You can’t just leave a house to a child.”
“A child, moreover, whom you could pass in the street and not look at twice because you haven’t seen her for the better part of a decade,” Persi added.
“It wasn’t mother’s fault she couldn’t see Wren! That was Kerri’s decision,” Rhi interjected.
“Oh good, I thought we might wait until later to heap all the blame on me,” Mom said. “Go on, then, let’s have it. This is all my fault, right?”
Rhi sighed. “I didn’t say that, I—”
“You didn’t have to!”
“I’ll say it, if we’re taking volunteers,” Persi offered.
“I swore to her face that I would never come back to this house, and now she has actually saddled me with it!”
“She didn’t—”
“Wren is only sixteen! She’s not even legally allowed to own this house, which means it’s my responsibility! If she wanted me to have the house, why didn’t she just leave it to me?”
“Because she knew you’d sell it out from under us at the first opportunity?” Persi suggested. “Either that or burn it to the ground and dance around the flames.”
“I wouldn’t do either of those things and you know it,” Mom snapped. “I would have signed it over to the two of you and that would have been the end of it! But of course I can’t do that now, can I? Because it’s not mine, it’s Wren’s, and I can’t just make that decision for her! This is just an underhanded way to keep me here and tie me to this place the way she couldn’t thirteen years ago.”
I frowned. Thirteen years ago? But Mom and I had left this place when I was only a few months old. So what had happened thirteen years ago?
But Auntie Rhi had finally found her voice.
“Mom knew exactly what she was doing, I know she did, and it certainly wasn’t to spite you, Kerri!” Rhi said. “You want to call it madness, fine, but there was a method to it, I know it. We just have to figure out—”
