The Phoenix Girls, Book 2

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Relics

When Ronan stalked, he moved with all the stealth and grace of any other, any normal fox. It was something he’d perfected in the past few years, as much practice as instinct, because Ronan was not a normal fox. In fact, Ronan was not normal in any sense of the word.

He got around, wandering far away from Aurora Hollow and learning the countryside. During his solitary years before the girls had come, there had been nothing else to do, so he spent his time pretending to be normal, and he’d gotten quite good at it. Mostly, he moved about with his body dimmed so others couldn’t see him, but even when he crossed paths with one of the very few people who could see him, they hadn’t seen him for what he was. To them, he was just like the other wild foxes that occasionally roamed close to town. He’d been shot at a few times, though never hit. Extraordinary or not, it might take him some time to shake off a bullet wound.

He had also learned to hunt, an unfortunate necessity during his extended stays in the area. He had no objection to the occasional taking of life. It was, after all, how natural foxes survived, but he had always preferred to take his nourishment in more enjoyable and less messy ways.

He was not hunting rabbits or field mice today. The objects of today’s hunt were much more important than simple nourishment, and the longer they remained unfound, the greater the danger they posed. It was only a matter of time before someone found one of them and opened a door best left closed.

* * * *

Dogwood’s landfill was several miles beyond the border of the town in an arid scrap of valley too dry and stony to produce anything but weeds. The man who ran it was youngish, with a long dark mane of thinning hair and a love of shooting anything that moved on four legs. Ronan had seen him at it, sitting on an old patched recliner on the front patio of the little camper where he lived and worked, a .22 rifle with scope pressed to his shoulder, scanning the junkyard for rats and rabbits, stray cats and dogs, and, on two occasions, Ronan himself.

Unfortunate luck, really, this unpleasant guardian of Dogwood’s garbage being one of the very few who could see beyond the purely physical world, could see Ronan even when he didn’t want them to.

He’d missed both times, which Ronan counted as good luck. Ronan had watched the man at work since late that previous fall, and he rarely missed. The place stank of his kills, the carcasses rotting among Dogwood's garbage.

It was not the carcasses or the garbage Ronan had come for, but a half-collapsed structure standing at the far end of a labyrinth of old sofas, refrigerators, and other human castoffs.

Leaning against a ruined and charred trailer was a partially burned false front in the shape of the monster that had terrorized Dogwood’s children last fall during the annual autumn fair. Only his girls (for that was how he thought of Penny, Zoe, and their new friend Katie) remembered the monster as it truly was.

The leaning false front, now damaged by both fire and the elements, was a giant effigy of The Birdman, who had come to town in the guise of a magician, one of The Reds who’d frequented the annual fair in years past. When the monster had abandoned his burning house of horrors, he had left behind some very dangerous toys. Those toys, those potentially dangerous relics, were what Ronan hunted.