Secrets of Green & Gold: A contemporary fantasy adventure (Green & Gold book 1) Read online

  SECRETS

  of Green & Gold

  ***

  Green & Gold, Book One

  Jo Holloway

  SECRETS of Green & Gold

  Copyright ©2019 by Jo Holloway

  ISBN: 978-1-9991359-1-1

  First edition. September 2019

  Published by Jo Holloway Books

  Edited by Courtney Umphress

  Cover design by MoorBooks Design

  .

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

  .

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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1 | Not Again

  CHAPTER 2 | And butterflies

  CHAPTER 3 | Don’t Scream

  CHAPTER 4 | Pyxsee-Gold

  CHAPTER 5 | Not Another One

  CHAPTER 6 | Ominous Things

  CHAPTER 7 | Breathe

  CHAPTER 8 | Don’t Jinx It

  CHAPTER 9 | Sunshine

  CHAPTER 10 | Of Course

  CHAPTER 11 | It’s Not Fair

  CHAPTER 12 | Eavesdropping

  CHAPTER 13 | Awkward

  CHAPTER 14 | Hoot, Hoot

  CHAPTER 15 | Low Blow

  CHAPTER 16 | Oh Crap

  CHAPTER 17 | Double Crap

  CHAPTER 18 | Pocket Lint

  CHAPTER 19 | Stupid, Stinking Raven

  CHAPTER 20 | Air, Go, Now

  CHAPTER 21 | Calm

  CHAPTER 22 | See?

  CHAPTER 23 | Here We Go

  CHAPTER 24 | Thanks A Lot

  CHAPTER 25 | Light-Headed

  CHAPTER 26 | Busted

  CHAPTER 27 | Just Move

  CHAPTER 28 | Friends

  More

  PREVIEW: Shadows of Green & Gold | CHAPTER 1

  Acknowledgements & Author’s Note

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Not Again

  CROSSING THE LITTLE park was always an exercise in caution. It was her twice daily challenge: eyes down, one foot in front of the other, make it to the other side without doing anything to draw attention. Simple, right?

  Cara had made it to the end of another week of school without incident. One more, and she’d be free from those kids forever and ready to focus on her next school. A light breeze on her skin gave her hope for a weekend of reading outside, and with summer holidays beckoning, she let herself relax, looking forward to her new life. She had plans, ones that included actual friends and a place where she wasn’t the weird girl. Seriously, it could only get better, as long as she stuck to the plan.

  When wings whispered overhead, ruffling her wavy hair, she couldn’t help looking up. It wasn’t her fault. Anyone would have looked. Cara Ransome was no different, at least that’s what she’d tell herself later.

  Her heart jumped into her throat at the sight of the huge owl, with its long talons wrapped around a lump of dark fur. She shrieked as it swooped low, feathers close enough to feel a tickle on the arm she threw over her head.

  Stumbling sideways, her leg went out from under her when something squished and rolled under her right heel. With wild, wide eyes, Cara looked up from where she had fallen unceremoniously into the grass beside the path. The pinecone she had slipped on was still rolling away.

  The owl dropped its prey ten feet away by a large evergreen. Cara blinked. The furry creature it had been carrying, which turned out to be a squirrel, scurried away unharmed and ran off to meet up with two other squirrels who stood waiting under the tree. Waiting? Nope. That couldn’t be right.

  Stop it, Cara.

  She shook her head, blushing. Someone laughed softly, and she looked around the park at the other people, searching for the source.

  This park used to be one of her favorite places as a child. With its groves of densely packed trees on either side of the path, it created its own world in spite of its small size, cut off from the surrounding neighborhoods. Frequently, the animals playing amongst the trees had amused and entertained her with their antics, causing her to point and giggle while her mom glanced around in confusion.

  Now, at fourteen, she felt completely differently about it. She hurried through on her way to and from school each day with her eyes focused only on the path ahead. The strategy worked most of the time. Not today, though.

  Even if they weren’t laughing, people had stopped to stare. A man in a dark suit hurried over and stretched out a hand to help her up.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I'm fine,” she mumbled, her face burning.

  The man completely ignored the dive-bombing owl. In fact, now that she glanced around, the other people walking through the park had all stopped to look at her instead of at the owl. It soared, unnoticed by anyone else, up to the treetops. Her stomach clenched.

  Not again.

  Things like this kept happening to her. She gritted her teeth. She was usually better at hiding it when she saw things no one else saw. Overactive imagination was how her mom described it. Hallucination was the scary word she tried not to think about. Whatever it was, it had been going on her whole life. Her eyes closed while she took a long breath through her nose. She hadn’t let herself slip up so badly in a long time.

  Taking the man's hand to stand up—it felt rude not to, now that he was standing there—she started to brush herself off. She used the opportunity to scan the rest of the park. All she needed to top off the humiliation was for some of her classmates to have witnessed her fall.

  She groaned. Two boys had turned into the park. They were definitely close enough to have heard her scream and to have watched the man help her up off the ground, and they were her age, even if they didn’t go to her school.

  Fantastic. That’s just great, Cara.

  The contrast between the two boys was striking. The tall, athletic one was seriously cute, all blond hair and sunshine. He practically glowed. The grin on his face looked like a permanent fixture. The small guy beside the glowing blond was slight and wiry, with shiny black hair, dark features, and an expression that could have been sculpted in red clay for all it revealed.

  She tried to compose herself and focus again. She knew how to do this. She could ignore the owl and the squirrels like everyone else in the park.

  Well, actually . . .

  The shorter boy tracked the path of the owl across the sky. When vanished into the distance, he leaned in to mutter to his blond friend. Then he looked right at her.

  Her stomach lurched. If this had been an isolated incident, she might not have let it affect her. But that wasn’t her life. Years of teasing over things she couldn’t explain had left a mark, and with no friends to talk to—aside from her dog—Cara did her best to stay under the radar. Her superpower of choice would definitely be invisibility.

  Cheeks burning, she waited for the two boys to start laughing at her like other kids her age when she did something dumb like this. Instead, the serious one pulled the blond guy away, heading toward the tree where the squirrels had now disappeared.

  After quietly thanking the man who had helped her up, she walked with extra care past the t
wo boys, avoiding eye contact. Fortunately, their attention stayed focused on the tree. They must be distracted, maybe by some silly game, searching for things in the park or looking for zombies to kill on their phones. Something like that. Whatever it was, bitter experience had taught her they weren't seeing what she had seen.

  THAT NIGHT, CARA LAY in bed thinking about the squirrels and the two guys in the park playing their dumb game. She couldn’t believe she’d let her guard down and overreacted to the owl so badly. At least she didn’t know them and would probably never see them again.

  She circled back to the squirrels. Had she really seen anything? Maybe the owl had been startled by her scream and dropped its catch before it could kill it—if the owl was even real to begin with. The worries started again. Eventually, she must have fallen asleep, because she awoke with light peeking around the curtain.

  She had been dreaming. It had started with the squirrels, only in the dream, they stared at her with eerie green eyes. Then they started to point, turning into the two boys from the park, who laughed until she fled into a dark cave. She screwed her eyes shut again, trying to dispel the image.

  A big, warm weight moved beside her legs, pinning them tightly under the covers. The weight slowly inched up, pinning down her hip, and then her whole left side, and then her left arm. The corners of her mouth twitched up in a slow smile until a wet tongue slurped up her face beside her ear.

  “EWW! Gross, Jenner.” Cara’s eyes flew open.

  She wiped the side of her face, and found herself staring into the big brown eyes of her best friend—her dog, Jenner. Her only friend, really. Being a dog, he probably didn’t count, but since he was the closest thing she had, she counted him.

  Sitting up, she started the little ritual she’d adopted over the past couple years, taking an inventory of the ordinary things around her. It helped her stamp down any memories of bizarre things she'd seen, either awake or asleep, and to convince herself she was perfectly normal.

  Her room wasn't large, so her mental checklist of nice, normal items was short. She checked off the bed, the pale maple desk with its tidy surface, and the matching chair in quick succession with a tiny nod at each one. The next item was the navy-blue beanbag, next to a small stack of her favorite books. Her reading corner got another small nod as she checked it off the list.

  There wasn't much on the bedroom walls. Her mom had forced her into pale yellow paint instead of the deep purple she wanted, saying she didn’t need to live in a dark cave. A memory of the cave from her dream came flooding back to her. There had been bats in the cave—bats with flashing green eyes. The uncomfortable knot in her stomach squirmed, and she figured her mom might have been right about the dark walls.

  Keep going, Cara, she told herself firmly.

  Her eyes scanned the little collage of pictures of Jenner pinned to a piece of weathered wood above her desk and continued across to the only other picture in the room. It was a silver-framed photo of her as a toddler sitting on her father's shoulders. He was holding her hands out above his head, and they were both grinning like fools, two sets of golden eyes sparkling.

  Looking at photos of her dad was the only time she ever liked her eyes. The rest of the time, they were yet another thing to make her different and she hated the comments they brought. Clearly, she’d inherited the peculiar golden hue from her father, because she’d never seen anyone else with quite the same color.

  “Time to go outside, buddy,” she said to Jenner, finishing her ritual and putting the dream behind her. She threw off the covers and stood up, running her fingers through her wavy brown hair as she stretched. “Mom will be home soon.”

  They didn't talk about her mom's Saturday-morning outings, although Cara knew where she went. Sandra went to the cemetery every week to visit Cara's dad, Jordan Ransome, as she had for over ten years now. She sat at his grave and talked to him about all sorts of things, and then she came home, and she and Cara had breakfast together and talked about anything else.

  Cara reached the back door, unlocked it, and yanked it open. She needed some fresh air this morning. Shoving on a pair of shoes, she stepped into the backyard with Jenner.

  The dog started his morning rounds, sniffing all the way around the yard, peering under every bush like there might be a secret message there for him. Cara stood in one place with her face lifted to the sky. For mid June, it hadn’t been warm, but yesterday’s breeze had made it brighter out today in Portland than it had been recently. The rain had been incessant in Oregon for the last couple weeks.

  Jenner's ears perked up, and he bounded back through the open door into the house. The front door closed with a bang. She followed her dog inside, putting on a smile as she came through the kitchen to the front hall where her mom was hanging up her jacket. At least on Saturdays, Cara tried her best not to be a sullen and moody teenager.

  “No rain,” Sandra said. Her cheerful tone sounded forced. “We should walk Jenner together after breakfast before it starts again.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Even though her mom didn't have much free time thanks to her busy job and long hours at the law office, adopting Jenner had been a great decision. Cara was too grateful to mind being responsible for most of the dog walking. They had found the beautiful brown-and-black dog as a stray almost two years ago, and her mom had agreed to adopt him if no one claimed him.

  He immediately became Cara's dog, following her everywhere in the house and sleeping in her room. Cara was smitten too. Whenever she sat down, he came to sit beside her, and soon her fingers would be slipping over his silky soft, triangle ears that flopped over at the very tips.

  “Walk?” Cara put her breakfast dishes in the sink and turned around. Jenner leapt up and skittered out of the kitchen, returning a few moments later with his leash and collar in his mouth. She smiled at his self-taught trick.

  By the time they returned from the walk, the rain was falling again, and they hustled inside. So much for her plans to read outside.

  “I don’t know why I never realized Uncle Josh went to Scovell Academy too.” Cara shook off her rain jacket and hung it up, reaching back to grab her mom’s coat to hang up as well. “I knew Dad did. That’s why I’m going there. But I never thought about Uncle Josh. I wonder why he didn’t say anything when he was here at Christmas.”

  Her mom shrugged. They had been talking about the boarding school Cara would be attending in the fall when she started high school. The walk and the thought of a fresh start had improved her mood. She climbed the stairs to her room, her spirits rising with each step up. She flopped into her beanbag chair and closed her eyes, listening to the rain patter against the window. A contented sigh escaped her lips as she picked up the top book from the stack and found her page. She tucked her legs up beside her, and dove headlong into a magical universe where embarrassing memories couldn’t follow her. The park incident from the previous day was forgotten.

  Her dreams were not about to let her forget so easily, though.

  Again the next morning, she awoke from a dream about the squirrels who had turned into the boys, pointing and laughing at her. This time, when she wanted desperately to flee, her legs had turned to lead and refused to obey her brain, so she was forced to stand and endure their mocking for an eternity.

  Finally, the dream had changed, and Jenner was there beside her, and then she was back in her bedroom, sitting on the floor across from him. He had looked at her with his big brown eyes and told her everything was fine. He had spoken to her and told her she was okay and she understood now.

  Well, that was weird.

  Awake, she blinked away the last images of the dream, Jenner's face fading from her mind's eye. She rolled to the side and scanned her room. Normal bed, normal desk, normal beanbag—check, check, check. She finished her morning ritual but didn’t see Jenner anywhere. She finally poked a leg out from under the covers, and he poked his head around the door.

  He came in and sat down in the middle of her room
. As she swung her other leg over the side of the bed, she reeled with a sense of déjà vu. She was sitting across from Jenner, who was sitting on the floor, looking at her with those big brown eyes. The only difference was, in her dream, she'd been sitting on the floor too. Instead of standing, she slid down beside her bed to sit cross-legged in front of her dog. She looked into his eyes. He looked back. He didn't talk.

  Cara shook her head. “Pfft, I know, buddy. I'm ridiculous. You don't talk, do you, silly boy?”

  Jenner tilted his head to the side, looking amused. She leaned forward to ruffle the fur around his neck.

  “You’re a good listener, though. I’ve lost count of all the crazy things I’ve told you about.” She lifted her hand to rub the top of his head, the feel of silk passing under her fingers. Jenner settled down onto his elbows and rested his chin on her legs. She smiled. “You don’t try to explain what I must really have seen, like adults always do. Like when Mom tried to tell me there was only a beetle that day outside the zoo. I know what I saw. Or that hawk that used to visit me. She never managed to come in time to see it. I don’t think she ever believed that either.”

  Her stomach churned thinking of all the times grown-ups had dismissed her stories as the imagination of a child. Jenner lifted his head enough to stretch his legs out and flop onto his side. His back leg stuck straight up in the air, a clear invitation for belly rubs. She laughed and obliged him.

  “Exactly. No judgement from you, right? You don’t tease me or tell me I’m making it up for attention like other kids do. You didn’t say a word when I told you about the Antons’ old dog hanging out with that wild rabbit. Why would I make that up?” She shook her head at too many memories exactly like that one.

  The scariest of the experiences had happened two years ago. She had gone on a hike with her mom and uncle to Kings Mountain Trail in the nearby Tillamook State Forest. Josh and her mom had started to talk about her dad, and she had dropped back. Soon, she had fallen way behind, and was about to run to catch up, when she spotted the cougar.