The First One's Free (The Summoner Sisters Book 0) Read online

  The First One’s Free

  The Summoner Sisters - Novella I

  By Allison Hurd

  Copyright Allison Hurd 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by David Berg

  Shrikedesign.com

  All rights reserved.

  T ABLE OF CONTENTS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  AFTERWORD

  OTHER WORKS

  EXCERPT FROM FEEDING FRENZY

  A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This story is a little more personal. This is for all of the people in my world, including anyone joining it just by reading along here, who live with invisible illness. You’re not alone. We’re here, too. A special thanks to my intrepid editors and friends, especially the “fresh eyes” of CA, YK, ZSM and KO. You are more generous than I can believe. And of course, thank you to my family, near and far.

  C HAPTER 1

  Lia and I pull up to the gas station right off the highway near a small town in Mississippi. I grab cash from our diminishing supply in the center console and try to guess how much it’s gonna cost to fill up our Lexus LX. Pretending it’s part of a game makes it less painful to see how much poorer we are after refueling.

  “Just gonna grab a water and some snacks while we’re here,” my kid sister Ophelia says, putting her dirty blonde hair up into a messy bun and opening the car door.

  “Just gonna grab a water and peanuts,” I reply, handing her a small stack of quarters.

  “How did you know more peanuts were exactly what I wanted? It’s been that and ‘blueberry’ protein bars for a week now. I just can’t seem to get enough,” she grumbles sarcastically, slouching towards the station with her combat boots untied.

  “I told you you could have one of the chocolate toothpaste ones anytime you wanted,” I say back.

  “No chance, Summer. You lost that ‘nose goes’ fair and square. No backsies.”

  I chuckle as I stretch in the late afternoon sun, wondering quietly why it is that she always manages to yell “not it” before me. The pump clicks. Score—I overestimated how much it would cost. Summer: one; gas pump: way too many.

  We get back in the car, and I take the wheel this time.

  “Right, so, Florida, like seven hours out?” I ask Lia as I begin rolling out of the lot.

  “Yeah! I’m excited to finally just relax at the—oh my God!”

  A woman runs into our car and I slam on the brakes to keep from mowing her down.

  “Jesus Christ!” I yell, throwing the car into park.

  The woman pushes herself off our hood and bows. “Thanks, Charles. It’s good to feel you so close.” And, with a wave, she stumbles across the two lane highway and into another little shop. We sit in stunned silence and watch her go.

  “Huh!” Lia exclaims, staring along with me. “Summer, since when are you Charles?”

  “Charles is not now, nor has it ever been, one of my aliases,” I say, my heart slowing down from its adrenaline high. The woman comes back out of the shop and stops to converse either with the air, or something invisible to us. As monster banishers, we can’t rule out the “invisible fiend” theory too quickly. That’s bit me more than once, and I’m losing my fondness for stitches.

  “Are you sure? ‘Cause she seemed pretty confident,” she asks cheekily.

  “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “Well, Charlie, we should go check on her, then,” Lia says, still watching the woman. “What if we gave her a concussion?”

  I raise my eyebrows and brush my red-tinted bangs out of my eyes. “I think then we’d have a dent in our car.” I squint at the woman who is in animated conversation with nothing. “I’ve had several concussions and I never did whatever she’s doing now. What is she doing?” I ask. It looks like she’s making out with the invisible thing.

  “Yeah, we definitely need to go check on her,” Lia replies, frowning worriedly at the erratic lady. She’s out of the car before I can say anything else. Cursing under my breath, I move the car to a parking space and trot after her.

  “Excuse me, are you okay?” Ophelia asks from a safe distance.

  The woman ignores her, mesmerized by some wind-chimes, her eyes wide and bloodshot.

  “Hey, lady, you okay?” I ask in a more forceful voice.

  “Dude, I don’t think she’s concussed, I think she’s stoned out of her gourd,” my sister whispers to me.

  “She’s chasing the dragon, all right. Metaphorically, I mean,” I agree in low tones, although I can’t help but glance up to the sky—all clear. I look at the time on my phone and sigh, wondering how long this will set us back from our first vacation in months. Ah, life. Yesterday we were warding a town against ogre attacks. Today we’re chaperoning a tweaker. “Okay. Well, let’s get her home or to the police station, whichever we find first.”

  Lia nods and approaches the woman carefully while I cross back for the car. Banishers like us generally handle more supernatural threats, but when you spend this much time protecting humanity against destruction, you tend to get a little protective of it in all its forms.

  I pull up next to my sister and Lady Lit.

  “Okay, up we go, easy now,” Lia says in soothing tones, helping the woman into the back seat. She slides in next to her. “You got a phone, lady? An address?” Lia gently feels for a cell phone and removes it. “Awesome. Got an I.C.E. and everything,” she says, dialing the number. “Hi, yes, thanks for picking up. My name’s Lia, and we found…Holly you said? Yeah, she seems to be a little out of it. Is there somewhere we can escort her? Oh, great, thanks! Be there in a minute.” She hangs up. “Okay, let’s go drop off the wayward babe,” Lia says, plugging the address into her phone.

  “Abby,” Holly murmurs. “I should have said that to you the first time we met, and I’m sorry.”

  “Quickly,” I suggest, glancing pointedly at our passenger.

  “What, you don’t find this soothing?” my sister teases.

  “It’s not that, it’s just that the role of ‘strange lady who rambles’ in my life has already been filled by a wonderful though eccentric woman by the name of Ophelia,” I say.

  “Aw, you can have a collection of us! We can sit on shelves and take turns talking to your throw pillows.”

  “See? Why would I need a stoned stranger when sober you come up with things like that?” She pushes my arm as I follow directions from the robot-voice. It’s gonna take us twenty minutes minimum to get to Holly’s house. “Mmph. I’m’a need a muffin,” I say under my breath as we roll out.

  “I’m sorry, we’re all out. How about some peanuts?” Lia offers smoothly.

  I sigh in exasperation and settle in. It’s a scenic drive. The directions bring us down smaller and smaller streets, until our “scenic drive” turns into an off-roading adventure, following dirt roads that are just barely cut through the wild natural growth.

  “Man, every dirt road makes me feel like we’re driving to our doom,” I say. “If there’s a suggestion box for public works projects ‘paving all roads to be less doomy’ would be my suggestion.”

  “This wouldn’t be a thing we had to worry about if you’d let us go to cities more often,” Ophelia says archly.

  “The world is on fire,” Holly adds.

  “Holly, it better
not be. And it’s not me, Lia, it’s this country. There’s a lot more not-city than there are cities,” I reply.

  “I don’t care, I’m blaming you,” Lia says with a searching look at the woman next to her.

  “Good, excellent,” I say, bouncing over a hard rut.

  “The lightning dances over the beach and kisses the waves which sizzle, like our dreams,” Holly sighs.

  “That one was actually kinda pretty,” Lia says, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  “One for five, she’s on a hot streak,” I drawl.

  The trees give way to a rambling building covered in vines, like we just left Mississippi and ended up at a French villa. I pull up next to a door that says “Visitors” and go to help my sister get our passenger out of the car.

  “Not…what I expected,” Lia says, opening her door.

  “Right? You think a place like this would’ve had a sign at the street or something to say this wasn’t a murder den.”

  “Ah yes, the ‘No Murdering Here’ sign,” she chuckles, one hand on Holly’s arm.

  Crunching up the gravel to the door, I take in our surroundings. It’s an idyllic spot: light filters through flowering trees which add a slight fragrance to the air. Trellises are lined with different varietals of the same cone-shaped flower in an array of colors that sigh in the light breeze. Inside, there’s a security window for signing in guests.

  “Hello?” I call out to the empty room beyond. No one comes to meet us in the corridor, and no other doors open. In fact, there are no sounds at all. Maybe it’s naptime here?

  “Your spidy senses tingling?” Lia asks, referring to my strong sense of paranoia as she looks around uncomfortably.

  “They’re not not tingling. Where is everyone?” I say.

  “Hello, welcome to Bentonia Trauma Resort,” says a woman in scrubs who is suddenly at the window. I jump a little. Where the hell did she come from? I must have blinked or something—my situational awareness is usually pretty keyed up. “How can I help you gals today?”

  “Yeah, hi. Sorry...trauma…resort, did you say?” Lia asks skeptically.

  “Yes ma’am. We’re a clinic for those who need a little help getting past something in their lives. I see you’re with Holly. How ya doin’ today, Holly? Have a nice visit with your folks?”

  “The lights always lead away from our truth,” our passenger says to the floor.

  “We found her wandering in town,” I say. “Gave her a lift back. I…think we spoke on the phone?”

  “Oh, yes! I remember now. I apologize. It’s been a busy day.” I look down the silent corridor and out to the serene courtyard.

  “Ah, yeah. It uh…seems that way,” I stumble over myself.

  “Well, thank you for bringing her back, we’ll take it from here,” the woman says.

  “Right. Um, we think she may be high, so you might want to run some toxicology tests?” Lia chimes in.

  “We will take care of her. We can’t discuss our guests without the right forms,” the woman replies.

  “Of course. Well, uh, glad we could help,” I say with a slight wave. “‘Bye, Holly, it was nice, err…meeting you.”

  “Don’t leave me here,” she whispers, grabbing my arm. Her eyes are clearer than we’ve seen them yet and her grip is firm.

  “What?” I ask, wincing from a sudden, sharp pain on my ear.

  “They’re gonna…wait, darling, I’ll be right there,” Holly’s expression shifts mid-sentence, and she’s back in la-la land.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” the woman behind the counter says aggressively, excusing us.

  “Well, hang on, she just asked us not to leave. Maybe we should at least tell her folks she’s okay?” I say.

  “Please leave,” the woman says with more heat, reaching for a phone.

  “Okay, Jeez. Take it easy,” Lia mutters.

  We head back out to my car.

  “Wow, that was creeptastic,” Lia says out in the sunshine.

  “Yeah. Hey Lia, is the earring glowing?”

  Ophelia looks at a piercing in my right ear. It’s a charm I have that heats up and glows when danger is near. “A little, I think. Why, is it hot?”

  “I’m shocked my earlobe isn’t melting,” I say, touching it gingerly.

  “When was the last time it lit up?”

  “The sigbin.”

  My sister whistles. Sigbins walk backwards with their heads between their legs, which may sound funny, but is terrifying face-to-back. Oh, and also, they suck blood through your shadow. My theory is that the gods in its pantheon each took a turn adding something horrific. I can’t help but wonder what else was on the inspiration board but it’s probably best I don’t know.

  “Yeah, that merited every alarm we had. And something here is doing that again?”

  “Appears so.”

  “Well…balls.”

  “Well said,” I say with a small laugh. We both shift slightly to scan our immediate environment, trying to uncover what it might be.

  “What do we do with that?”

  Monster banishers generally work to send the things that make it top side back to their own homes. The pay is crap, the hours are worse, and it’s totally worth all of the hassle. Unless it’s trying to suck the blood out of your shadow. That one was especially messed up.

  I shrug. “It is a ‘trauma resort.’ Maybe my earring is afraid that someone here will mistake me for an inmate and lock me up.”

  “Enough to burn you?” Lia asks skeptically.

  “No, probably not. Welp. Feel up to some snooping, then?”

  Lia sighs dramatically, and then smiles at me. “Aw, who am I kidding, I love snooping around when there’s a chance that my shadow will be sucked of my vital fluids.”

  This warrants a head tilt. I examine my sister briefly, wondering if this is something I should be concerned about. “You worry me, Lia.”

  “Yes, but everything worries you, Summer. If I tried not to worry you, I think you’d have a stroke.”

  I snort at her. “Solid logic, as always.”

  My sister grins at me. “I’ll move the car down the way, you start working your way around back?” she says, preparing to catch the keys.

  “Yeah, that works. Park at the edge of the lane, in that little blind turn off? Rendezvous there if either of us get made?”

  “Deal. Get in, in case they’re watching. Make it easier to pick your poisons, too.”

  I do as she suggests and hop in, worming my way to the back of our enormous vehicle. I load up on weapons, my armored jacket, a distraction spell, and most importantly, various bracelets made of different materials known to upset monsters from various pantheons. It’s really helpful if we can at least narrow down the problem to a specific belief system, which is hard to do without a little reconnaissance. And since this job is so short notice, “reconnaissance” here means “picking fights with unknown monsters.” You say tomato, I say ketchup.

  Once the “resort” building isn’t in view, I jump back out of the car and move through the trees rather than up the front walk in an attempt to remain unnoticed. I skirt past the maze of cone-shaped flowers and come in from the side. It, too, is leafy and sweet-smelling from the wealth of blooms.

  I round a corner and stop short, like a deer in headlights. Despite my stealth, at least four sets of eyes follow me. One woman approaches me with arms open, while I try to decide whether this counts as getting “made” enough to disappear back to the car.

  “Jenny, how are you, honey child?” She asks, trying to grab my face and making up my mind for me. I catch her hands in mine.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?” I ask her.

  “Of course, baby,” she says with a slow, sweet smile. Her eyes are unfocused and bloodshot, like Holly’s.

  “And who am I?”

  “Quit playin’. You’re my niece, Jenny. You’ve been in Afghanistan for three years now.”

  I furrow my brow. I look past the obviously stoned woman at the othe
r people. None of them are looking at me anymore, all of them lost again in their hallucinations. What the hell medication are these people on? I scan around more carefully, looking for some sign of medical personnel. Nobody seems to be watching these space cadets. If I was looking to adopt some new parents, I could have my pick—we already know they willingly get into cars.

  I turn back to the woman smiling at me.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask her.

  The smile vanishes from her face. “H-here?” A shadow crosses her eyes. At first I think she’s just performed a dramatic mood swing, but then her forehead lightens again, and I realize that while the woman may also have just lost her sweet smile, there was an actual shadow that crossed in front of her. Which is strange, since I didn’t see or hear anything move, and no shadow seemed to cross my own vision.

  “This isn’t a place, it’s a punishment,” the kind woman says sadly. And then she faints. I catch her before her head hits the ground, but only just. Who just faints like that outside of movies?

  “That was extremely discomforting,” I mutter to the air. Talking to myself relaxes us. I lay the woman down as comfortably as I can, checking her vitals before leaving to finish circling the building. At least a dozen people in various states of stupor wander around the garden. No orderlies, no nurses, no doctors…curiouser and curiouser. I feel my earring. It’s hot, but not like it was. That’s still not a great sign. The heat means that I’m in danger, and I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but usually when something’s a problem for me it means the Avengers may already be assembling.

  —How is it going? I text my sister, rounding the eastern wall heading back to the gravel courtyard. I squint at my phone a minute later. It’s unusual for her not to have texted me back instantly. I’ve trained her well. I only had to ruin one or two of her dates in order for her to get the message: pick up your phone. I crouch close to the building, staying beneath the front windows. As I approach the front door again, the white hot pain returns to my earring. I grab for it distractedly even as I try to make sense of a small shape I see on the ground. I squeeze the earring a little so that the heat in my fingertips forces me to concentrate again, to regulate my breathing.