The Phoenix Girls, Book 3

Chapter 2-7

They sat around the fire pit, Penny’s lingering irritation with her best friend for not staying in touch fading as Zoe caught them up on what she’d been through in the past few months.

“We were in Nevada, Mom and Dad were at a little casino in a truck stop in Laughlin, and I was in the sleeper cabin trying to catch you before you went to bed.” Zoe held up her mirror, a leftover from the Birdman’s kidnapping spree the year before, which the girls had held onto and learned how to use. She looked at Penny. “I called your name, like always, and I saw your hand reaching for your mirror, then it went dark, and I was looking at myself.”

Penny thought she remembered that night, just drifting off when she heard Zoe whispering in the darkness of her room. She’d picked up her mirror, but no one was there, and when she’d called Zoe, nothing had happened.

“Your mirror stopped working?” Katie asked.

“Not just my mirror. I couldn’t use my wand either. I thought I’d lost all of my magic, until we went to Lava Lake.”

“Where?” Ellen and Katie asked.

“The Lava Lake Inn in Oregon. It’s an old asylum that became a hotel. It’s next to Lava Lake; it’s this little lake with hot springs around it, always bubbling and blowing fog everywhere. The place is supposed to be severely haunted by the ghosts of people who died in the asylum or drowned in the lake.”

“Haunted?” Katie raised a skeptical eyebrow and folded her arms over her chest. Given all that she’d seen and done in the past year, Penny was amazed at her ability to remain skeptical of the supernatural. She didn’t believe anything unless she could see it.

“Yeah, Kat, I know. Mom and Dad thought it would be cool, but they don’t believe in that kind of stuff.”

There was a moment of silence, as if Zoe was considering her next words very carefully.

“So, what happened?” Penny was eager to hear the rest. Unlike Katie, she enjoyed spooky stories.

Zoe grinned and walked back to the door. She tapped it with her wand—one that Katie had made for her last spring to replace the black wand they’d confiscated from the Birdman before sending him tumbling back into his own world—and her grin widened almost to her ears when she opened the door to reveal a mist-covered lake instead of the woods beyond Aurora Hollow.

“I saw something that no one else could.”

They crowded around the open door, not quite daring to go through it, and followed Zoe’s pointing finger toward the shallow, steaming pools pouring mist over the cool, still surface of the small lake. Ellen saw them first and let out a little yeep of shock.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Katie said.

“I don’t think she is,” Penny said, and backed off a step as several isolated masses peeled themselves off from the mist covering the lake and moved toward the girls. Like the mist continually pouring from the hot springs surrounding the lake, they moved slowly. Unlike the mist on the lake, these smaller blemishes of the lake’s dark surface had faces. A few even had arms, and seemed to be reaching for the girls as they glided slowly toward the open doorway.

“Don’t worry,” Zoe said. “They can’t hurt us. They just stare at you a lot and try to climb up your legs.”

As the girls pressed forward again to watch the drifting creepshow, a new one floated past the door, only inches away, then stopped and swirled in place to look at them. Its mouth hung unhinged and dragged in the dirt. Its body was nothing but trailing vapor, and it dragged itself toward the open door with pale, insubstantial hands.

The girls squealed in unison, tripping over each other to get away, and Zoe swept the door closed.

“I hate you, Zoe,” Katie said, moving toward the nearest of the fire pit boulders and dropping onto it.

“No you don’t,” Zoe said, recovering from the shock and tittering nervous laughter.

“Is there a point to you scaring the crap out of us?” Penny could still feel her heart pounding. It had been at least two months since she’d had a scare like that, and she was getting used to a calmer life. “Or was it just for entertainment?”

“The point is you can see them,” she gestured around the hollow at the others, “and I can see them, but no one else can.”

“Like Ronan,” Ellen said, catching on first.

Zoe was distracted from the point she was making, looking around the hollow more closely now. “Where is the little hairball?”

“Who knows?” Penny had known the mysterious Ronan for more than a year and was used to his frequent and sometimes lengthy absences, but she didn’t like it when he stayed away for so long. Twice his absences had been prompted by attacks that had banished him back to his own world, and in times when the girls could really have used his help, and Penny lived in dread that someday he simply wouldn’t come back at all.

Katie, determined to avoid more digression, steered them roughly back on course. “You were saying?”

“For some reason, I couldn’t do magic anymore, but I could still see things no one else could,” Zoe said. “I wondered why, and thought that maybe it was because I was away from Aurora Hollow for too long. This place is special.”

Zoe’s words sparked something in Penny’s recent memory.

“Ronan told me Aurora Hollow is a thin place. A place where the worlds almost touch.” Now that the thought had occurred to her, Penny was surprised it had taken so long. “If the Birdman and Turoc and the Reds come from another world, then maybe our magic comes from there too. Through Aurora Hollow.”

“So how do we keep you from losing your magic once you go back to Oregon?” Ellen looked from one to the other, but there were no answers forthcoming.

A sudden lively chittering broke the uncomfortable silence, and Rocky rejoined them, splashing through the shallow waters of Clear Creek and stopping before Zoe. He held his cupped hands up to her. They were full of water from the creek. He lowered his cupped hands to his lips and mimed drinking, then raised them up to Zoe again.

They all remembered the making of the circle, drinking the water from Clear Creek, and the surge of power through their bodies as their minds were peeled away from the moment and refocused on a slice of frozen time where they found themselves facing their element spirits; Penny with fire, Zoe with earth, Katie with water, and later, when they had repeated the ceremony with Ellen, she had been greeted by the spirit of air.

Zoe grinned and dipped her face down to drink from Rocky’s cupped hands.