The Phoenix Girls, Book 3

Chapter 2-4

After a quick goodbye to Susan and a promise to return that afternoon to help her with deliveries, Penny climbed up the folding staircase to her attic room to fetch a beaded bag. The bag, a little too large to be a purse, was a present from Zoe that summer, sent from the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho where she’d lived before coming to Dogwood. It held an assortment of the usual teenage girl survival gear, and a few unusual items.

As far as Penny knew, she was the only girl in Dogwood who didn’t own a cell phone—there was no service at Clover Hill so Susan didn’t see the point—but she did have a small oval mirror she could use to call up a few of her closest friends. For some reason, she’d been unable to reach Zoe on it since she’d left town, but she tried not to take it personally since Katie and Ellen had also been unable to reach Zoe on theirs. The mirrors were left behind with other relics after Penny and Zoe had driven the Birdman from Dogwood and seemed to be connected to the Conjuring Glass hanging on Penny’s wardrobe door.

Another of the unusual items in her bag was a wand, an old and dry twist of root with a tiny clear crystal and scorch marks at its tip. This wand was not as pretty as Zoe’s, Katie’s, or Ellen’s, or even the old black wand that now lay untouched in the locked trunk at Aurora Hollow, but it had never let her down, so she had no desire to replace it.

Penny paused with the bag in her hand and briefly considered taking out her wand and using it on her wardrobe door, a simple tap and she could connect it directly to Katie’s walk-in closet door, the quickest and easiest way to travel. But the ever present risk of stepping through into Katie’s room to discover one or both of Katie’s very confused parents gaping at her and asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about why she’d been hiding in their daughter’s closet stayed her wand hand. Katie’s brother, Michael, already knew about them, an unavoidable consequence of their adventures near the end of the last school year. Letting Katie’s mom and dad in on the secret would probably not make keeping it any easier.

So, bicycle it was.

Her bike was parked near the steps to the front porch. Penny slid the bag from her shoulder, dropped it into the bike’s basket, and climbed on. She sped down the driveway to the road into town, and when she found it deserted, let the bike raise a few inches above the ground. She would have preferred to go a bit higher, but being spotted soaring through the air on an otherwise ordinary looking bike would have been harder to explain away than her sudden materialization inside Katie’s closet. A few inches above the ground, and at a speed most would have considered suicidal, Penny flew toward town.