A Deadly Deed in Faerywood Falls Read online

2

  I found Bliss in a place that I wasn’t expecting to find her.

  After wandering around for a few minutes, having checked in her room, the kitchen, and the offices where she helped her mother with the finances, I realized she might have left the Lodge.

  But her car was still here, I thought.

  “Hey, Aunt Candace?” I asked, bumping into her on the third floor as she was delivering a fresh stack of clean towels to a guest room. “Is Bliss here?”

  “Yeah, sweetheart, she’s down meeting with her troop.”

  “Her what?” I asked.

  “Oh, I guess the girls haven’t met here yet since you’ve been around, huh? Well, why don’t you go down to the community room and find out.”

  The Lodge was quiet that day, which seemed like the perfect opportunity for a group gathering that I’d never seen before.

  There was a big, open room in the public space of the Lodge on the bottom floor. It overlooked the backyard, and had a full wall of windows. There was another fireplace along the back, and the walls were painted a soft green. For the entertainment of guests, there were stacks of board games in a shelf built into the wall, as well as books, magazines, and travel guides. Aunt Candace had even collected some baskets of kid’s toys at the thrift store in town for the guests’ children to play with while they were staying.

  I’d only been in this room twice before, since there were usually visitors inside.

  I walked in to see Bliss sitting on the floor in a circle with about a dozen girls who were all under the age of ten. There was another circle closer to the fireplace, but those girls were older, probably in their early to mid-teen years.

  Bliss turned around as I entered and beamed at me. Her dark hair was tied in a loose braid that hung all the way down her back. “Hey, cuz,” she said. “Come on in.”

  I noticed the girls were all wearing the same sort of outfit, too; a brown beret and a navy blue vest. Many of the girls had little patches on the front of their vests, all of which had been sewn on and had images of different places and items on them. Bliss was wearing the same vest and hat, as was the other woman who sat with the group of older girls.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked. “Your mom said you were having a troop meeting?”

  “Yeah,” Bliss said. She patted the carpet beside herself, and scooted over to make room for me. “Come and join us.”

  “O…kay,” I said.

  I walked over and sat down beside Bliss. The young girl beside her looked up at me and grinned; her two front teeth were missing.

  “Ladies, say hi to my cousin Marianne,” Bliss said to the other girls in the circle.

  “Hi, Marianne,” they all said in a monotone voice.

  “She’s your cousin?” one little girl with a lisp asked. “She doesn’t look like your cousin.”

  “She’s adopted,” Bliss said flippantly, shrugging. “Who would like to tell her what we’re doing here today?”

  One girl with bleach blonde hair shot her hand up into the air so fast I almost missed it.

  “Yes, Frankie?” Bliss asked.

  “We’re the Forest Friends,” the girl said in a proud voice, her blonde hair bouncing. “We love nature and everything in it!”

  “Very good,” Bliss said in a teacher-ish tone.

  I arched an eyebrow at her, but she ignored me.

  “What else can we tell her?” Bliss asked. “What do we do at our meetings like this?”

  Another girl’s hand appeared, but it was only after a few seconds of no one moving at all. Her brown eyes were wide behind her glasses. “W – We talk about stuff,” she said. She couldn’t have been older than five or six.

  “Yes, we do talk about stuff,” Bliss said. “What sort of things do we talk about, Liza?”

  The girl with the glasses looked around at the other girls in the group for support. When no one jumped to her aid, she knotted her tiny hands together and frowned over at Bliss, shrugging her narrow shoulders.

  Bliss rolled her eyes, though it was so well executed that it was likely imperceptible to the younger ones. She looked over at me. “This group has been around for several generations now, and it’s a way for us to teach the kids about Faerywood Falls and about nature in general.”

  A third hand appeared in the air, this time from a rosy cheeked girl with a button nose. “And magic,” she said, smiling proudly.

  My eyes widened as I looked at Bliss. “So these girls are all – ”

  She nodded. “Gifted, yeah. The group is supposed to be about building an appreciation for nature in the youngsters, a lot like other scout troops outside of Faerywood Falls. And on the outside, that’s what a lot of people in Faerywood Falls think we’re doing. We do all the normal things, like go camping and sell snacks and baked goods out of catalogs, but that’s really just the outward purpose, so the community as a whole won’t get suspicious.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “So what’s the real purpose?”

  “Well, to put it simply, it’s to try and encourage cooperation and trust between the Gifted classes of the younger generation,” Bliss said. “At least, that’s the political way of saying it. Basically, it’s a way for all these kids to get together and know that they aren’t alone, and that even though most of us have different powers and abilities, they can all get along, and that no one is better than anyone else…right, girls?”

  “Right,” the group agreed.

  Bliss nodded. “Good.”

  “So…what about the boys?” I asked. “Do they have something similar?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bliss said. “It’s just easier to keep them in smaller groups for now, especially as they’re learning about their abilities. Girls tend to show their magical abilities earlier than boys do, and so their groups are always formed first.”

  “That’s really interesting,” I said. “Were you in a group like this as a kid?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bliss said. “And it was a good thing, too, since my mom doesn’t have any magical abilities at all. Some kids here are the same way. There was magic in their family some generations ago, and so their powers manifested, and Mom and Dad just didn’t know what to do. This helps them to cultivate their talents, and their time together spent in the forest is meant to not only draw them all together, but also be educational for them.”

  “You sound like an infomercial,” I said with a smirk.

  She elbowed me in the ribs, but since we were sitting so close together, I doubted that any of the kids saw it.

  I looked around at the girls in the group, wondering if I could recognize any of them. “Are there kids from every group here?” I asked.

  Bliss nodded. “Yep. Liza there is from Lucan’s pack – ”

  The girl with the brown eyes nodded.

  “And Frankie is a spell weaver like me,” Bliss said.

  The girl with the lisp grinned.

  “Georgianna and Morgan are both daughters of spell singers,” Bliss said. “They’re trying to figure out if they’ve got the same talent, since it’s around six or seven that those characteristics start to show.”

  The two girls sitting beside me, including the one with the gap between her teeth, smiled up at me.

  “Sarah’s a vampire, Hailey is a beast talker…yeah, I think we’ve pretty much got everyone represented here,” Bliss said.

  “Not faeries,” said the tiniest girl sitting on Bliss’s other side. She barely came up to Bliss’s shoulders, even when she was sitting.

  She turned her bulbous blue eyes up to Bliss.

  “We don’t have any faeries,” she said again.

  My heart skipped, and I hoped the flush in my cheeks didn’t give me away.

  “That’s true,” Bliss said. “But faeries are very, very rare magical creatures, and there hasn’t been a faery in Faerywood Falls in a long, long time.”

  Phew…I thought. Good thing Bliss has a better poker face than I do.

  “Why?” the little girl asked again.

&
nbsp; “We’ve been over this, Bella…” Bliss said. She sighed heavily. “No one really knows much of anything about the faeries. All we know is that when they were around, they kept to themselves most of the time, and – ”

  “My daddy said that faeries were mean,” said the little girl named Sarah…who was a vampire. “He said that he remembers them.”

  Bliss opened her mouth to answer, but seemed frozen. “He…he does?” she asked.

  It was like my whole body was responding, and every nerve was lit up, ready to hear what this child had to say.

  Sarah nodded, apparently unaware of the fact that every eye in the circle, especially my own, was fixed on her. “He said the faeries did mean things to people. Played tricks on them.”

  “Yes, well, some faeries were known for being tricksters, that’s true,” Bliss said. “But there are also a lot of stories about faeries helping the other magical creatures around them.”

  “I heard that the trees are their guardians,” said Georgianna. The other girls turned and looked at her with great respect. “That the trees won’t listen to anyone but them.”

  Something deep within me reacted to that statement. I knew it was true. The trees…they definitely seemed more alive to me here in Faerywood Falls, especially since I had found out I was a faery. It was like…the forest was on my side. I always felt safe inside it.

  “Who told you that?” Bliss asked.

  “My aunt,” Georgianna said. “She said that a faery taught her a spell song once, and she watched her sing it in the middle of the forest.”

  The other girls erupted into chatter, and Bliss held out her hands in front of her. “Okay, okay, enough. There are a lot of things we don’t know about the faeries, and all we know for now is that we don’t know when they’ll come back. Right?”

  “Right,” said the girls in unison.

  “Okay,” Bliss said with a sigh. “Let’s stick to topics about things that we do know, okay?”

  “Okay,” the girls agreed.

  Bliss glanced very briefly over at me, and we shared a knowing look.

  Faeries were not something we wanted to bring up, since we didn’t want anyone to know that I was a faery, and these girls would certainly have a field day if they even suspected it.

  “So what’s she?” asked Sarah, pointing at me. “If she knows about us, then she’s Gifted, too, right?”

  “Um….yes,” Bliss said, turning to look at me. “She is. She’s a sort of novice spell weaver.”

  “What does that mean?” Liza asked, furrowing her small forehead.

  “She lived away from Faerywood Falls for a long time, so she didn’t understand her powers. Or even know that she really had any, until she moved back here. I’ve been helping train her,” Bliss said.

  “But aren’t you an apprentice?” asked Georgianna. “You’re not even a full spell weaver yet yourself – ”

  “Her situation is very special,” Bliss said, talking over the other voices that had sprung up. “Now, who would like to tell Marianne what we were talking about when she walked in?”

  Three or four hands shot into the air, and Bliss was just about to call on one when a sharp voice carried over from the other circle of older girls.

  “What have I told you about bringing that with you?”

  I glanced over at the other group and saw a thin, sallow-skinned girl with dark hair and glasses frowning, while something small was clutched in her bony hands.

  “He’s my pet, though…” the girl said, her bottom lip sticking out.

  “I don’t care,” said the sharp voice again. “It’s disgusting. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”

  I leaned back a little so I could see behind the heads of some of the other girls, and my eyes fell on the other leader.

  I could only see her profile, but she had a square jaw and a small mouth that was pursed together. Her blonde hair that was clearly dyed was pulled back in a low pony tail at the nape of her neck; I could see her mousy brown roots growing in behind her ears. Her eyes, which were deep-set and watery, were narrowed as she glared across her circle at the poor dark-haired girl. The woman couldn’t have been much older than I was, maybe a year or two.

  “But – ” the girl protested.

  “Not another word,” the leader said, glaring darkly at the teenager. “And if you bring that…that thing again next week, I’m going to have a talk with your parents about suspending you from the group.”

  “No!” the girl cried. “You can’t do that, I need to – ”

  “Don’t you try to tell me what I can and can’t do,” the woman said, her eyes narrowing to slits. “I’m the leader here, not you, and you have to do what I say.”

  “Hey, Amanda?” Bliss asked.

  The woman turned and looked over at Bliss, totally unaware that the whole room was watching her scold one of the troopers. “What?” she snapped, her blue-grey eyes flashing.

  “I thought we agreed to use our inside voices,” Bliss said in a tight voice, a smile plastered on her face that was anything but kind.

  Amanda rolled her eyes, adjusting her beret on her head, pulling it down closer to her broad forehead. “Fine. Whatever. You can keep your dumb rat or whatever.”

  Bliss looked over at me, her eyes widening. “Okay, girls. I think it’s just about time for a snack. Who wants some of my mom’s famous chocolate chip cookies?”

  All the young girls jumped to their feet, each squealing with delight. One girl hopped up and down, her hand high in the air, and another clapped her hands excitedly together.

  The older girls got up, too, but I saw more than one blank face, trying to act cool and like they weren’t super excited about cookies.

  Bliss and I got up, and I followed her over to one of the tables beneath the wall of windows, where some plates covered in tinfoil were waiting.

  “Alright, girls, go down the hall to the restroom and take turns washing your hands,” Bliss told them. “Amanda, could you go with them and make sure they don’t make a huge mess?”

  Amanda, who was standing off to the side, her nose buried in her phone, rolled her eyes and followed the chattering girls out of the room.

  Bliss sighed heavily as soon as they disappeared. “What a nightmare…” she said softly, looking up at me. “I tell you what, if I have to sit through one more troop meeting with that Amanda, I think I’m going to go crazy.”

  “Don’t work with her much?” I asked, helping her to take the foil off the top of the plates of cookies.

  “She’s new,” Bliss said. “Just joined the troop about…oh, I don’t know. Three weeks ago? Maybe a month?”

  “She’s…” I said, trying to find some nice way to put it.

  “She’s not working out,” Bliss said with a sigh. “She has absolutely zero patience with the kids. Her first meeting, I put her with the younger ones, and she seemed okay with it. But she spent more time yelling at them than anything, having totally lost control of them…so after that, I gave her the older girls, since they’re all so much better behaved. Well, you can see how that’s going…” Bliss shook her head. “We’ve had several events, including one overnight stay with some camping, and Amanda got so fed up with them that eventually, she told the older girls they couldn’t even speak to one another. She’s just getting harder and harder on them, no matter what I’ve said to her.”

  “I wonder why she even wanted to join,” I said. “If she doesn’t like kids, I mean. Unless she just had no idea what it was about, going into it?”

  “No, she did,” Bliss said. “Apparently, she just moved back to town like a month and a half ago. She’s also staying here at the Lodge until she can find some place to live. Though to be honest, I’m not really sure how hard she’s looking…”

  “Really?” I asked.

  Bliss nodded, her lip curling. “Let me tell you. She’s, like, the worst roommate imaginable. And I don’t even share a room with her, or have to be anywhere near her most of the time. Anyways…she grew u
p here, and I guess she used to be a Forest Friend when she was younger.”

  “Really?” I asked. “And she still treats them all like that?”

  “Yeah, I know. Weird, isn’t it?” Bliss asked. “But do you know what’s even weirder?”

  “What?” I asked.

  She leaned in closer to me, her green eyes glinting. “She’s Mrs. Bickford’s daughter.”

  I gaped at her. “No…” I said.

  Bliss nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

  “But they’re so different,” I said in a quiet voice. “Her mother is a little eccentric, but I’ve never thought she was mean or anything like that.”

  Bliss nodded. “I know. I still don’t understand it.”

  “So Amanda’s…what, exactly? A ghost speaker like her mother?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, exactly,” Bliss said. “That’s a good guess, though, unless she inherited whatever gift her dad had. What kills me is that she actually has good knowledge about things. I guess she traveled overseas to some other magical communities and spent time there. But she’s not willing to share her experiences with the girls. She thinks they won’t appreciate them.”

  Bliss sighed and shook her head.

  “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with her,” she said. “I don’t want to keep hearing from the parents that their girls are absolutely miserable during our meetings and stuff. Amanda’s going to chase them all off, and the whole point of this is to let them all get to know one another. Ugh…” she rubbed her temples. “I think she just needs the boot. She’s obviously not happy, the girls aren’t happy…”

  “How come I never knew you did this?” I asked her. “This Forest Friends thing, I mean.”

  “Oh, it’s something I do in my spare time,” Bliss said. “There are a lot of leaders, so we kind of take shifts. I just recently decided to jump back in. I think having you around has me thinking about it a lot more, and I want to help these kids to really understand their powers…so they don’t turn out to be twisted people like Silvia Griffin or that gardener who worked for Lucan…”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. I smiled at her. “It’s cool, though. You seem totally natural at it, too.”