The Phoenix Girls, Book 3

Chapter 2-6

Near midnight, Aurora Hollow, the secluded clearing at the edge of Penny and Susan’s property on Clover Hill, was dark and peaceful. One of its two usual denizens, the talking fox Ronan, had been away almost as long as Zoe, but Rocky, a small humanoid with a large head and hands and narrow torso and limbs, stood still as a statue near the fire pit. His gray skin resembled stone, and the blue bib overalls the girls made him wear were dirty. He didn’t breathe, didn’t even twitch, only waited. Rocky’s usual perch was the stone outcropping on the other side of the creek at the hollow’s edge, blending into the rising stone cliff that formed the natural boundary between Penny’s property and the adjoining wild land owned by the State of Washington, but he knew there was going to be company that night and waited for them.

Rocky was a homunculus, a magical creature of stone, and had bonded with Penny at the moment of his birth. He had her eyes, and the uncanny ability to know when she was coming.

There was wildlife about too. The local critters were drawn to the hollow, but they scattered when the old door, which stood improbably wedged between two willow trunks, began to creak open. It spilled light over Rocky, the fire pit, the duff-covered ground, and the quick moving waters of Clear Creek. A second later, Penny stepped through.

Rocky opened his eyes and chattered a greeting.

“Hi, Rocky,” Penny whispered. Behind her, through the open door, was her dark bedroom. She closed the door as softly as possible, then breathed a little easier when the portal to her house, where Susan still slept, was closed.

Penny pointed her wand at the fire pit, and flames shot from the stone circle, bathing Aurora Hollow in bright, dancing light.

Rocky summersaulted past Penny and landed on one of the fire ring boulders. The key for the chest where they kept their most secret things, including the old and maybe a little alive book, The Secrets of The Phoenix Girls, bounced from the leather string around his neck. He chattered at her in his strange, monkeyish language.

Penny, as usual, didn’t understand a word of it, but the meaning was clear in her mind anyway. The connection with her new little pet seemed to work both ways.

“Yeah, I know it’s late. They’re coming …”

The door creaked open, spilling Katie and Ellen into the hollow.

Katie paused two steps from the door and gave Rocky a narrowed sideways glance, what Ellen called her “Patented Death Glare,” and Rocky returned it. The animosity between them had grown over the summer, beginning with Katie’s continuing distrust of the little gray man after their all-out war with his vicious siblings. Rocky had picked up on her dislike, hard to miss when she kept threatening to blast him if he got too close to her, and was now returning it.

“You two behave,” Ellen said, swinging the door closed behind her and cutting off the portal to Katie’s bedroom.

Katie folded her arms over her chest, her wand clutched tightly, looked determinately away from the little gray man, and Rocky followed suit, staring at nothing in particular, tapping one of his overlarge feet in irritation.

Penny had really thought Rocky would have grown on her by now, or that she would have at least gotten used to him, but Katie knew how to hold a grudge, and she showed no signs of letting this one go.

Stand guard, Rocky, Penny thought.

He responded with a quick glance at her, his large green eyes blinking, then launched himself across Clear Creek to the stone outcropping. He climbed the sheer stone face of the cliff like a monkey climbing a tree and blended into it so well not even Penny could spot him.

“We better hurry,” Penny said. “She’s probably waiting.”

Katie gave the world in general a last lingering, hateful look, then nodded. “Yeah, Zoe has some explaining to do. She’s been gone all summer, and we haven’t heard from her in forever.”

“I’m sure she has a good excuse,” Penny said, but couldn’t imagine what it might be. In the past several hours, she’d gone from just missing Zoe like crazy to a growing irritation with her best friend.

“I’ll do it,” Ellen said, apparently unable to take the suspense. She drew her wand as she approached the door, closed her eyes for a moment while she called up a memory of the laundry room door on Katie’s phone, and gave the weathered old wood a single tap with her wand tip.

When she opened it, bright fluorescent light fell over them, and they found Zoe waiting for them in the deserted laundry room next to a row of silent washing machines.

Zoe smiled, then dashed through the open door into the hollow and gathered them all to her in a tight hug.

“Damn, girl, don’t you ever stop growing?” Ellen asked, struggling to break free from the enforced mass embrace.

Indeed, Zoe had grown a few inches taller since they last saw her, as if determined to keep Penny at shoulder level. She was almost cartoonishly thin now, like she had been stretched instead of growing. Zoe ignored Ellen’s question and removed her wand from her back pocket and pointed it up at the canopy of braided willow limbs above them. They rustled for a moment, then unraveled at the center and opened up to show a deep blue sky speckled with stars and showing a thin crescent moon.

Zoe closed her eyes and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Penny stepped back from Zoe and regarded her with growing concern. She was acting strangely.

Ellen and Katie were staring up through the opening in the willow canopy, as if concerned that something big, slobbering, and hungry for young humans was about to drop down through it.

“Nothing,” Zoe said without opening her eyes. She was smiling now, as if some great worry had slipped from her shoulders. “I’m fine.”