Bounty of Ash

Chapter 3

1

The phone was ringing. I tried to ignore it, but it kept on going and sunlight burned through my eyelids making a return to sleep impossible. I tumbled from my bed and made my way to the living room. I pawed at the phone until it came loose from its cradle and pressed it to my face, somewhere near my mouth.

“Hello,” I croaked.

“Phoenix? Sweetie, are you okay? You sound sick!”

My entire body snapped to attention. It was my mother.

“No mom, I just woke up.”

“It’s 11 AM! You just got up?”

“Mother, don’t start.” She would anyway.

“Don’t speak to me like that, Phoenix.”

“Mom, I’m sorry. I…”

I stopped cold. I could see myself in the mirror above the sofa. I had wings. Big, giant, multicoloured wings. On my sleepy march to the phone, I’d forgotten all about them.

“Whoa,” I whispered.

I reached back to touch them, and there was nothing there. Panicking, I looked over one shoulder and then the other like a slow-witted dog searching for its tail. There was nothing there. Nothing. No wings protruding from my back, no beautiful feathers framing me. They were only visible in my reflection. Crazy. And problematic. Going to the ladies room would raise a few eyebrows.

“Phoenix? Are you listening to me?”

Right, my mother was still talking.

“Yes, mom. Sorry, mom. Could you repeat that?”

She sighed loudly.

“When can we expect you this afternoon?”

“This afternoon?”

I’d Travelled back to the exact moment in time I had left when I went on my wing finding adventure. Today was my brother’s birthday. Crap. And there was a big family dinner. Double crap. I had to get out of this.

“Well, Mom, I’m not really feeling that well.”

“Nonsense. You’re fine.” Her voice was like cold iron. My Mom definitely had some powers of her own. “You want to live a life of big city excess that’s your choice, but I’ll not have you taking that out on your brother.”

She had slipped into her big-city evils routine. Although I highly doubted my brother would miss my appearance at his, quote-un-quote, party, Mom was gearing up for an epic rant, and there was only one way to defuse this ticking time bomb.

“I’ll be there at 6.”

“You’ll be here at 5.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Love you, sweetie.”

She hung up. I dropped the phone back in its cradle and turned to the mirror. I looked at my big winged reflection. They were huge. The multicoloured feathers gleamed in the sunlight that streamed into my apartment.

“Well, this complicates things.”

This was shaping up to be a situation of craptastic proportions. There was no getting out of this party if I didn’t show up my Mother would hunt me down, and I still had to pick up a present, showing up empty-handed was a big no-no in my Mom’s world. But the first thing I needed to do was figure out what was going on with my wings.

I made sure the wings were just in my reflection with nothing periodically protruding from my back. This involved a five minute game of peekaboo between me and the mirror. Oh, if my Traveller friends could see me now. I won the game, the wings were just in my reflection, but the funny thing was that the Phoenix in the glass had rips in her shirt where the wings had broken through, but the Phoenix standing in my living room, me, her shirt was intact. Another level of weird in my already strange life.

“Maybe it’s just mirrors,” I said to myself and then ran to the patio doors to check my reflection there.

I live, well I lived, in a medium sized loft in an ‘up and coming’ part of town. FYI, up and coming just means artsy people have moved in and that eventually, one day, it will be a nice place to live. One day. My building was okay, except for Tuesday nights when the apartment below hosted a drum circle. The bedroom and the bathroom were closed in, but the rest of the place was a wide open space. An island separated the kitchen area from the living room, and I’d tried to create more separation by placing a large, complicated looking, bookshelf thing in the middle of the room to house my TV and mass quantities of books. The sheer size of it made a hallway between the kitchen and living room. But the real reason I fell for this place was the balcony and amazing patio doors towards which I was currently running.

I rushed up to the large stretch of glass and tried to see a ghost of my shape. It was there, or rather, I was there, wings and all, staring back at myself. A pale blue silvery self with gossamer wings.

“Ah, crap.” I was saying that a lot today.

This seriously complicated my life, and seriously didn’t happen last night when I got back. I’d run straight into the bathroom to check, and the mirror was wing free. Why was this happening now? How was I supposed to go to my parents’ house when every time I passed a reflective surface my wings were right there in the glass?

“Ah, double crap,” I said with feeling as I threw open the French doors and stepped out into warm midday sun.

This was my sanctuary in this world, and it went a long way to explaining the massive greenhouse in my Traveller home. The patio ran the length of the apartment and then wrapped around the corner towards my bedroom window and the fire escape. Over the years I had turned this south facing strip of concrete into a verdant jungle. Bright flowers cascaded from boxes along the entire railing, and a trellis, running up the walls of the building, was covered in vines and climbing roses. Gigantic clay pots played home to large trees that broke up the constant sun that streamed down on the balcony. I’d even set up a mini fountain in the corner, a pillar with a sphere of stone that spun gently on a spray of water. The air was filled with the soft sound of water sliding over stone. It was a little piece of paradise.

My chaise was calling to me, and I laid out, the sun touching my face dappled by the trees and shrubbery above me. I closed my eyes and thought happy, calming no-wings-in-my-reflection thoughts.