Kindle Edition
Download to your Nook (eBook)
Amazon
Category:
Science Fiction
ISBN-10: 1612320074
Type: Fiction
ISBN-13: 9781612320076
Price: $2.69 (eBook)
Zoe Crane puts her hand on a magic crystal ball and is transported to a planet across the galaxy where she realizes she must solve the murder of her mirror image to get home.
Frustrated by her parent's well intentioned attempts to organize her life eighteen year old Zoe Crane climbs out her bedroom window, her world packed into a back pack. She has money in the bank, and a friend that wants her to move in to help with the rent. She has the future all planned out, full time work, part time school. It's a nice well ordered common sense plan.
Except that it isn't where she belongs. Zoe Crane belongs elsewhere and that is where the Keeper of the Crystal Yolanda Wren is going to send her.
After a strange star tossed dream Zoe wakes on a different world. This is a world full of cars with running boards and gangsters wearing pin striped suits. It is a parallel world on the other end of the universe where Zoe realizes she must solve the murder of her mirror image. A girl named Melinda Darby.
Helping and distracting her at once is Joshua Kendal district attorney; handsome, intelligent, self confident and wealthy. He is every romance novel hero ever written. But one thing is missing. He cannot believe Zoe when she says she comes from somewhere else. In the end it is this disbelief that forces Zoe, once she has found the murderer, to return home.
Once home she learns from Yolanda Wren that she is to be the next Keeper of the Crystal. She will have many more adventures each one giving her a little more of the supernatural power needed to control the magic of the crystal.
Excerpt
2
She'd taken a half empty bus part of the way but for the most of the time Zoe had walked. She'd walked past nice houses with big lawns, past stores, past a movie theater where the staff were leaving for their beds. The friendly echoing goodnights floating her way on the evening breeze made the scene itself seem like something out of a film. The sort of scene where the hero is reminded how far removed he is from the every day world.
The later it got the more the shadows seem to draw her eyes. She wasn’t stupid. This was a big city and big cities could be dangerous. Tonight the shadows seemed populated by unseen eyes. They were eyes that waited for her to make the wrong move, eyes that seemed to say the wrong move had already been made.
It was now very late, later than Zoe ever remembered being awake, almost late enough to be early. She was walking down a narrow, poorly lit, city street lined with small houses. Not once since she had left home had anyone spoken to her, or questioned her purpose.
They were impersonal things these small stucco covered boxes she passed. They sat complacently on their minuscule big city lots dark window's watching her pass like empty eyes. They didn't know or care that she was walking among them, thinking, dreaming, trying not to feel so alone. It wasn't easy.
After an eternity in its shadows, the dark side street ended at a brightly lit commercial avenue. Zoe knew this place well, had walked along it with her mother many times. Without conscious choice of direction she simply continued on, grateful for the light.
If the lateness of the hour was intimidating on the dimly lit side street, the effect here was even stronger. The buses had stopped running, and even on this normally busy street the traffic had dwindled down to an intermittent trickle.
A taxi came toward her out of the distance and
rumbled past echoing a silent rebuke.
"Go home. Don't run. Go home."
Message delivered, it left to whatever work it was fated to have that night. Zoe turned and watched it go. As the cab disappeared, a battered blue sports car pulled up beside her, slowing to walking speed. The driver beckoned her closer, smiling.
Revulsion filling her mouth with its acid taste, she gave this drive by shopper the finger. He laughed, returned the favor, and drove on.
Zoe swallowed and tried to shake the empty feeling that had hit her at the recognition of the man's business offer. It wasn't as if this was the first time this kind of misunderstanding had happened. This was a big city and she had been downtown at night before.
It was simply that tonight was different. Everything around her felt strangely new, the good things, and the bad. This time she was alone.
A shiver ran through her that was equal parts emotion and temperature. Zoe pulled the zipper of her spring jacket up as far as it would go. It was cool, cooler than she thought June temperatures usually got. Of course she'd never before been out at three in the morning.
"I am not running away. I am moving out."
The words slipped out without direction, a kind of verbal hick-up. Still, it was nice to hear it out loud, an audible counterpoint to her own inner monologue. Not very convincing, but nice.
"I am not running away!"
Even nicer, even louder, not loud enough for her feet to hear, they kept moving.
Her backpack was slung over one slumped shoulder. The bag and everything inside it had been bought with her own money. That fact was important. It meant that she had to leave behind her treasured guitar, but it also meant they could not force her back by charging her with theft.
The idea that she had to allow for such behavior on her parent’s part left a hollow ache in Zoe's stomach.
This was a new feeling standing on your own; exciting and terrifying all at once. The lateness of the hour and the practical problem of what to do next didn't help matters either.
Suddenly, working during the day, and finishing high school at night didn't seem like such a good idea. Maybe she wasn't street-smart enough to be on her own. Maybe she ought to go back and try again.
"I AM NOT RUNNING AWAY!"
Closing her mouth with her hands, she stopped walking and looked around, hoping no one had heard the nerve-induced outburst. There was no one in sight and after a minute she relaxed.
Just ahead of her was a piece of darkness created by a pair of burned-out street lamps creating an almost tactile blot of darkness. In spite of that one exception this stretch of nighttime world was remarkably well lit. The things in the store windows, the cracks in the sidewalk, even the patterns of the curtains in the apartment windows above the stores stood out in a kind of surreal detail that defied belief.
The street was an old one. A long time ago it had been full of homes for the moneyed few. They had been big Victorian structures, some complete with small carriage houses for guests. Of course parallel to these few had been the army of servants that maintained that old privileged way of life.
It was a completely different world that was long gone. The houses that hadn't been torn down were either partitioned off into apartments or converted into offices. The spaces between these elegant relics were filled by stores with apartments on second and third floors.
The only other pedestrian, if he could be called that, was an old man sitting in a doorway. Zoe glanced across the street at him and immediately got the impression he was staring at some invisible thing that only he could see.
He didn't seem interested in the present, or the future. He had deep drowning eyes that held only the past. Curiously he reminded Zoe of the shadows she had passed to get to this place. He was just as visible and yet just as lacking in substance.
Mildly reassured, Zoe continued walking. This phantom wouldn't say a word if she screamed her fool head off. He was too busy with his own dead dreams. For a moment she wanted to cross the street and ask, "Old man, did your dreams die because you tried and failed, or did they die of simple neglect?"
The thought of asking made Zoe realize how very tired she was. The overpowering compulsive impulse that had kept her moving for almost three hours was swiftly beginning to play itself out. She should have knocked on Karen’s basement apartment door three hours ago. Instead the desperate need to walk had brought her here.
In the distance, a park, no more than three blocks away, held promise. Perhaps it was time to find herself a bench. Just until morning. In the morning she would begin anew. It was too late to knock on anyone's door now.
Blinking her eyes against the sudden change in illumination Zoe stepped into the pool of darkness created by the two burned-out streetlights. In the middle of this dark blot, there was a tall ironwork gate closing off the lane between two buildings swung inward on silent hinges.
The movement slowed, then stilled Zoe's marching feet. It was dark down there, dark enough to hide a hundred reasons to run and a hundred more to be too afraid to move. Zoe stared at the gate shifting gently on its hinges and a new and different feeling was born. It started with a heartbeat, then spread out to touch every inch of her body and mind. There was fear mixed up in this feeling, and awe, and wonder, and something else she thought she knew but could not name.
Zoe took a step toward the opening, so that she stood just outside the threshold. It didn't seem so dark down there now.
At the end of the passage there was a small sheltered moon lit yard with a tree, a bench and a tall wooden fence. A good place to spend the night.
"Oh I eat my beans with honey. I done it all my life."
Zoe spun around. The old man was on his feet near a street lamp, singing and looking at the sky. His clothes, once stylish in some distant past, hung off him as if the old threads were heavy with dirt. The dirt was so thick it blurred the color beneath so it looked as if he were clad in homespun dust.
"It makes the beans taste funny. But it keeps them on my knife."
His eyes turned away from the sky and fixed on her. They were empty. The past that had filled them was gone. Zoe wondered how he could use them to see with at all. They looked dead.
"The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling. For you and not for me."
The man took a step into the road, then another and another. He was standing on the center line now. Zoe could smell the strange sour odor of old wine and something more, something dead and dangerous.
She felt the emptiness of the street, the lateness of the hour. Trembling slightly she began to inch backward away from this frightening vision.
"For me the angels sing-a-ling-a-ling. That's how it ought to be."
This time when he stopped singing he locked eyes with Zoe and smiled. Zoe felt a stab of soul searing terror and took a full step backward. As she did she crossed the threshold of the ironwork gate.
Her hand brushed the free swinging door. Startled by the sudden contact Zoe jumped and the gate began to move. Slowly it put a barred barrier between her and the strangely frightening figure in the center of the road. The noise of the door closing was soft, mundane. At the same time it felt like a defiant scream as if the mettle in the fence had once been armor worn to defend the helpless and the innocent.
At the sound of this clattering clink the dead-eyed man stopped as if splashed with cold water. Sorrow filled his face and his eyes were no longer empty. They were filled with the past.
He turned away from her and returned to his stoop. Sitting he leaned into the shadows, his old-man's mask of a face blending into the darkness like a forgotten dream.
|
