Twisted Heart
Authors: Eden Maguire
Also by Eden Maguire:
Dark Angel
Coming soon
Broken Dream
B
EAUTIFUL
D
EAD
1.
Jonas
2.
Arizona
3.
Summer
4.
Phoenix
Also by Hodder Children’s Books
Dark Heart Forever
Dark Heart Rising
Lee Monroe
Sisters Red
Sweetly
Jackson Pearce
Copyright © 2011 Eden Maguire
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Hodder Children’s Books
This ebook edition published in 2011
The right of Eden Maguire to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 90531 1
Hodder Children’s Books
A Division of Hachette Children’s Books
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
An Hachette UK company
For Anne McNeil, who was in at the birth
It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood. Stones have been known to move and trees to speak …
William Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
I
sleep with a dreamcatcher above my bed. I use it to filter out bad dreams – I had enough of those earlier this summer. Flames eating up the forests, leaping across canyons, shooting firebrands through the night sky. Plus the visions and psychic connections and the dark angel voice slithering through my brain with a warning – ‘We will all rise. There will be other times, other places – a million other willing souls!’
I travelled halfway across the world to get a break from all that flesh-creeping stuff and if my good angel isn’t around any more to protect me, which she doesn’t seem to be, I’m not too proud to rely on old superstitions, ancient beliefs, whatever.
My dreamcatcher is a circle of slender willow branches about thirty centimetres wide, wound with a narrow leather strip and with cotton threads woven across the centre in a geometric petal pattern. A pendulum of turquoise beads and white and black feathers hangs from the bottom of the hoop. Good dreams find their way through the net but bad ones can’t get past. It works some of the time, I guess.
Since the last big burnout on Black Rock, I also avoid going up on to the flame-seared slopes whenever possible. And it’s not just me – my best friend, Grace, and all the traumatized kids in Bitterroot, if I’m honest.
I prefer valleys and water – cool streams, white-water rapids, Prayer River and Turner Lake.
I mean, I love the lake, totally adore the light sparkling on its surface and the way your feet and ankles turn pale and distort when you wade in from the pebble shore, the icy feel of the water between your toes. It’s where Orlando and I first fell in love.
It was midnight, and just remembering it makes my soul soar. The night sky was huge, the Milky Way streaming across it – a glittering banner made out of a million stars. We were tiny and unique. We took off our clothes and swam in the lake.
‘You’re my midnight swimmer,’ he tells me even now.
Or he would do if he was here.
It’s Saturday and he promised he would be home Friday. What the hell happened to his afternoon flight out of Dallas, I wanted to know. I had to fly across the whole freaking Atlantic and I still made it on time – Friday, 8.00 p.m., my parents’ house on Becker Hill. They were in Denver so we would have the place to ourselves. A chance to celebrate after two whole months of love famine.
‘They oversold tickets,’ he explained. ‘The airline gave me a three-hundred-dollar credit for transferring to a later flight.’
I almost tossed my phone out of the window. ‘Jeez, Orlando.’ Words failed me, as you can see. In my opinion, our romantic reunion was worth more than three hundred lousy dollars any day. Evidently not to him.
‘I’m out of here first thing tomorrow,’ he promised.
‘I won’t be here,’ I snapped back.
‘Why? Where will you be?’
‘At the lake.’
‘What for?’
‘The New Dawn thing – the triathlon.’
Silence while he computed this. ‘You’re not – I didn’t know …’
‘I’m not
competing
!’ Insert the word ‘Stupid!’, tag it on the end of the sentence, hear it in my tone of voice. With me, disappointment turns to anger in a flash. I drew breath then spoke more calmly. ‘Yeah – maybe the swimming. I’m OK with that. And cycling. But can you see me running 10k?’
‘Gotcha,’ he mumbled. A pre-recorded warning to keep your bags with you at all times sounded in the background, so at least he’d made it to the airport and that bit of his story was true.
Two grey doves flew across my view and landed in the red-gold aspens behind the house.
My old buddy Paranoia (worse since my bruising encounter with the whole dark angel thing) lay in wait on the back porch, ready to pounce – I figured that Orlando had spent two months in Dallas and found someone new to love. A girl on his fashion design course; a catwalk model; a fabric designer. He was finding an excuse not to leave, to stay with her for one more night. I was absolutely certain. Then, get a hold of yourself, I thought.
The doves took off in opposite directions as I tried again to take the edge of fear and anger out of my voice. ‘No, I’ll be at the lake rooting for Holly.’
‘Oh yeah, Wonder Woman,’ he joked. And then to break the tension; ‘To be honest, she scares the shit out of me.’
‘Me too.’ When I last spoke to Holly on the phone from Paris, she’d been in the gym for weeks performing single-leg dead lifts to strengthen her glutes.
Plus, her dad had bought her the best Boardman performance bike on the market and she’d borrowed a seven-hundred-dollar Speedo Tri-Elite wetsuit from a girl who competed at trials for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. So I knew she was serious about this New Dawn triathlon.
‘So you’re OK if I join you lakeside?’ Orlando checked. ‘I’ll drive straight from the airport.’
What could I do? What could I say? ‘I missed you so much.’ My anger dissolved and my voice broke. A sigh escaped.
‘Me too.’
‘I love you.’
‘See you tomorrow.’ Click. End of.
And now tomorrow was today and my night-time dreamcatcher had let me down, had allowed through a glimpse of hell: a water snake emerging from the dark depths of a lake, bearing a snarling, hissing head at each end of its body, surging to the surface, bringing black rain, floods and disaster. These visions of mine shook me to the core. They chewed me up and spat me out. I wonder all this time – is it worth having these psychic powers if they leave you feeling this wasted and weak?
‘Hey, Tania.’ Holly’s boyfriend, Aaron, found me standing by Lake Turner, my back turned to the knot of early arrivals in the car park at the entrance to the New Dawn Community. ‘Orlando didn’t make it, huh?’
‘Later,’ I muttered.
‘Good to see you after all this time,’ he said shyly, as if a two-month trip to Europe had turned me into a total stranger. And he quickly ducked out of any more conversation. ‘Come and talk to Holly; wish her luck.’
Aaron led the way across the pebbles, his boots crunching, the back of his black sweatshirt reading ‘Never trust anyone below 14,000 feet’ in white letters. He was a climber, a mountaineer trained since the age of ten by his dad who worked for the National Park Service. The training had given him broad shoulders and strong thighs, plus nerves of steel, which you had to have to handle a relationship with my next-door neighbour, Holly Randle.
‘Tania!’ She stood next to Aaron’s grey truck, raised her arm and yelled at me above the rumble of other vehicles pulling into the parking lot. Then she ran at me and held me in her Brunhilda hug. Brunny, by the way, is a legendary princess of the Visigoths who offered to marry any man who could defeat her in a trial of strength and courage. It’s amazing what random information sticks when you’re in Paris, Rome, Berlin.
