Silverwood Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  Silverwood Book 2

  The Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2014, by Betsy Streeter

  Silverwood

  Betsy Streeter

  lightmessages.com/betsystreeter

  [email protected]

  Cover and interior illustrations by Betsy Streeter

  Published 2015, by Light Messages

  www.lightmessages.com

  Durham, NC 27713

  Printed in the United States of America

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61153-119-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61153-120-6

  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, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 International Copyright Act, without the prior written permission except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Dedication

  for Rob, Jen and Sean

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my son Sean, for inventing the word “Tromindox” and my daughter Jennifer, whose face appears in my mind whenever I write about Helen.

  To early readers Marianne and Isaac, Kristi and Kristen. Your eyes on the page gave this project life when it needed it.

  To my first and pickiest reader, my husband Rob, who never doubts my abilities even when he might wonder what the heck I’m doing.

  To my parents, who have never ever questioned anything I ever said I wanted to do, not once.

  To Elizabeth Turnbull, whose edits and feedback have made the book a hundred times better.

  To the editors and publishers who have supported me all along the way, especially The Funny Times, who have put my work out there since forever.

  To you, the reader. You are the best.

  And to the artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers whose work I love and who I want to be when I grow up.

  PART ONE

  Helen Silverwood, fourteen, sits dangling her legs from the roof of a twenty-story brick apartment building. Her boot heels bounce off the wall in rhythm as she swings her feet.

  The noise of the city echoes from below. Helen’s straight black hair flies across her face in the wind. She peels it off and pulls it back behind her ear with one hand.

  With her other hand, Helen carves a symbol into the brick with a folding knife. It’s a circle, with a square in the middle, and a spiral that goes from one corner of the square out to the edge of the circle. Once it’s done, Helen admires her work.

  She folds the knife’s blade into its handle. The knife was a gift from Helen’s father, Gabriel. It’s really much more than a knife; the handle sports a variety of buttons and a tiny screen. One of the buttons, when pressed, lights up red and blinks on and off. This is the button that Helen uses to record her journal.

  Helen recorded her latest journal entry a few minutes ago on this roof:

  RECORDING

  Hi Dad, it’s Helen.

  Sorry it’s been a while, we were moving. Again. And I didn’t have a roof to get some privacy so we could talk.

  Currently, I’m sitting on top of our lovely apartment building in this, our latest, greatest home. It’s grimy and wet up here, and you have to avoid the puddles. I’m going to do the customary carving of my little symbol up here somewhere, like I do everyplace we stay. I like the way it says: Helen was here. Helen was somewhere. Since I’m sure I’ll be gone again soon. I’m not from anywhere.

  When I woke up this morning, I thought the bio-reader in the handle of my knife was lit up and I almost fell out of bed. You know, the reader that’s supposed to go on when you come near. Well, the light from the window hit it, I think, and for a split second it looked lit up. But it wasn’t. It’s never lit up.

  Mom has been gone every night this week, every night since we moved here. She seems really edgy. The kid brother Henry says so too.

  I wish I knew what mom was doing at night. All she ever says is, she has to go to work. And that her job is to keep us safe, and that’s why she does what she does. When she comes home in the morning she looks pretty rough, like she’s been fighting. I’m sure you know all about it, but since this is strictly a one-way conversation, I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me much. Mom is going to have to tell us herself. That is, if we don’t figure it out first.

  I have my theories. Theory one: She’s a bodyguard for some mob boss or musician and they tour around and we have to follow. Theory two, which is better: She’s a repo-woman. You know, a person who goes out and takes people’s cars back when they haven’t paid for them and if they fight she kicks their butts and takes the car anyway. Whatever she does, it involves combat skills I’m pretty sure.

  Henry has theories too, but his approach is to interrogate mom, which doesn’t get very far. He’s only nine, so you have to excuse him, but he’s as smart as any grown-up. I think that bothers the grown-ups.

  I’ve got to talk to mom about Henry. He’s having a really hard time. I mean, he’s always had a tough time with all this moving around, and he cries every time we pack up and leave. It makes my stomach hurt when I hear him cry.

  At his last school Henry got in a lot of fights. And now he’s really quiet. I don’t know, something gives me the feeling he might try and run away. I’m worried about him. And he’s making more drawings of stuff that looks… bad. That’s all I can think of to say.

  I say to Henry, someday we’re going to stop moving around, and we’ll have a real home, and dad will come live with us. And we’ll have friends. And a real bed, not just some stuff on the floor. Someday, we will be from somewhere.

  I don’t want to be too dreary, so I’ll end on a positive note. Mom always tells me, “Say something positive.” She says she got that from you.

  So here it is: At least when we move, I get a break from the dream I always have about the big ugly Tromindox creatures. You know, the ones with the black scales and the tentacles. They look like if I could smell in my dreams, they would smell really bad.

  The Tromindox dreams don’t show up for a few days after we move to a new place. Not that it’s all that bad. The dream is the same every time—this slimy thing shows up, and I turn it into a person, and they say thank you about a thousand times and then they leave. That’s it. It’s not a terrible dream, it just happens over and over. I get tired of it, even though the people are different. It’s nice to have a break when we move.

  That’s my positive thought for today. No dreams. Maybe instead I can dream about flying for once. Until the Tromindox catch up with me again.

  That’s it from the roof, and Dad, if you ever get this, I hope I see you soon. We miss you.

  END RECORDING

  The bounty hunter is late for work.

  A train clatters out of the subway station below as humanity pushes its way up the stairs and into the city streets. The hunter, her white-blond shoulder-length hair shimmering like a bright dot in a sea of grey and black coats, struggles downward against the current of the crowd. Eventually, and without spilling too much of her coffee, she reaches the bottom.

  The platform is pretty empty. The hunter takes a quick look around, drops her crumpled coffee cup into a trashcan, and waits for the next train.

  Here it comes, rattling and screeching, and pushing a blast of smelly air into everyone’s face. Good: she hasn’t missed it. This train carries the thing she is loo
king for, if her information is correct. The station’s destination signs light up and blink with information that is only helpful if you already know where you are going.

  The train bursts out of the tunnel, wind whipping the hunter’s hair and knee-length black coat. Her head remains perfectly still, but her light blue eyes flip back and forth as she takes stock of the contents of each car flying by: nope, nope, nope, nope… maybe. The doors slide open; she steps on.

  She stands near the entrance, to get a view of the whole car. The doors slam shut and the train lurches forward. She brushes pieces of hair out of her face and turns her head slowly to each side, peering down the aisles over the rows of heads.

  Nothing yet. People pack in and hunch over their books and games and messages and celebrity gossip. The rules of personal space have been suspended, replaced by a boundary of anonymity. Everybody wobbles around together like a carton of eggs as the train bumps around a turn and speeds up.

  That’s when she sees it. The bend in the train gives the hunter a good look into the next car, and there sits her quarry directly in front of her. Tall, sickly looking, right where she knew she would find it. She works her way over to the doors between the cars, wedges them open, and steps forward just in time to be seen. Not that it matters.

  The Tromindox snaps its head up. Crap. This is supposed to be a clean route, with no hunters on it. But there she is, right there, and with no warning at all. Now I’ve got no choice but to run for it. Why was there no warning?

  The creature stands up slowly and deliberately, never taking its eyes off its adversary. Its grey skin and ragged black robes give it the look of an unhealthy (and sloppy) vampire, although no one ever really looks that wonderful under the train’s fluorescent lighting anyway. At over seven feet tall, it must stoop to avoid bumping its head on the ceiling. It pulls a pair of sunglasses from its pocket and shoves them onto its face, obscuring its bloodshot eyes and creating in their place a reflection of the tunnel lights flipping by.

  The only thing to do now is to try and lose this lady.

  The hunter has a small, coin-like object, called a portal, in her pocket. A few minutes ago, it activated and began heating up to let her know she was getting close. She already knew she was close. She’s been doing this a long time—thirteen or fourteen years now. Yes, fourteen because that’s how old her daughter is. Having children changes the whole way you measure time.

  The subway train slows and the passengers lean forward together as they bump to a stop at the next station. The hunter stands just off the shoulder of her quarry, both of them facing the door. A moment to admire each other’s reflections in the window glass—one smallish female human with white hair, one seven-foot-tall Tromindox attempting to look like a human. Two runners just before the starting gun goes off. The door opens, the reflections slide away and everyone shuffles out. The portal in the hunter’s pocket is white-hot now, she pulls out her hand to avoid burning her fingers.

  The Tromindox exits with the flow, but abruptly turns right and walks along the platform toward the rear of the train. The hunter does the same, dodging around passengers, crossing her path from right to left. She takes a couple of briefcases to the knees and gets tangled with a lady rolling a suitcase, but her eyes remain glued on the hulking figure moving away from her. What is it doing? Looking for an exit?

  The hunter’s attention is caught by two teenagers, about the age of her own kids. Did my kids do their homework? I’ll have to check up on that later. Dig through their backpacks and make sure there aren’t any papers to sign or teacher conferences coming up.

  The train gobbles up its next batch of passengers, and the doors slide shut. The Tromindox has nearly reached the rear of the station now as the train pulls away. And then, in a single movement far more graceful than you would expect from a disheveled seven foot tall, semi-human beast, it reaches out, grabs onto a railing along the side of the train and allows itself to be pulled right off the ground. It deforms in the air, parts of its coat stretching into tentacle-like shapes that reach forward and up and attach to the roof of the train to pull the rest of it along. The train has almost reached full speed.

  Caught off-balance, the bounty hunter nearly falls backward as she spins around on the platform and turns to run alongside the departing train. The cars whip past her, and she must grab a handhold somewhere or lose the Tromindox entirely. Losing the Tromindox means not getting paid. So she leaps forward and digs the ends of her fingers into the molding along one of the windows, running furiously. She kicks her left leg up into the air, reaches out with her left hand to grab the railing at the very back of the train, and gets hauled right off the platform. She wedges her right foot into the railing itself and uses it to launch her body onto the train’s roof, winding up in a crouching position. This must immediately become a lying-down position as the train screeches into the tunnel between stations.

  The tunnel plunges them into total darkness, so the bounty hunter cannot tell how far away the Tromindox is—it can’t be too distant. She crawls forward on her stomach. The train screeches around a curve, throwing her momentarily off-balance. The light of a spark from the tracks illuminates the tunnel like a camera flash, and reveals that the Tromindox is about two cars away, having flattened itself onto the roof like a black octopus.

  The train bursts into the next station and into the light again. Both adversaries lie down on the train roof so as to remain invisible to the passengers below. The doors open, ukulele music and singing can be heard, loudly, and then muffled once the doors have closed again. Now the coast is clear and the bounty hunter jumps up and runs forward, bent over at the waist, before the train can reach the next tunnel. She makes it the length of one car before she must lie down again. The train makes a deafening sound in the tunnels, and she has to dig with her fingers into the ruts on the roof to keep from rolling off the side.

  Another spark from the tracks, and no sign of the Tromindox. Did it get off at the last station? The bounty hunter reaches back and shoves her hand into her coat pocket to find the portal. It remains activated, indicating that her quarry is still nearby. But where?

  She crawls forward on her stomach another car length, and reaches roughly the position where she last saw her target. She pulls herself forward to peer down between the cars, but the train switches tracks and lurches to the side, almost throwing her off the roof again. This time she digs in with the thick rubber soles of her boots to stay in place. She peers down over the edge.

  The Tromindox explodes upward into her face, knocking her back. It grabs her by the neck, but she pulls up her knees and gives it a powerful kick with both of her feet. They roll apart, nearly off either side of the roof as the train clatters toward the bright lights of another station.

  Just before the train enters the station, the Tromindox reformulates itself into a thick liquid and oozes down again between the cars. The bounty hunter sits up and waits, and waits… the train has nearly stopped, she sits perfectly still… and then, just as the train stops moving, the Tromindox bursts out onto the train platform in its previously ugly human shape. She rolls to the side and drops down on her feet, running after it.

  The hunter and the hunted near the end of the platform, a relatively deserted area compared to the crush of people behind them. The hunter makes up some ground on the creature and gets within arms’ length, and the Tromindox must realize this because it lunges to the side and around a corner where no one can see them. She leaps forward and grabs two fistfuls of the back of its coat. The Tromindox lets out an annoyed growl and swirls around to throw her off. She holds on. The Tromindox jerks to one side and then the other, and the force of its movement pulls her feet off the floor. It throws back an elbow and thumps her in the side of the head. She stumbles backward and crashes into the wall behind her. The Tromindox pins her by the neck with its forearm, lifting her off the ground.

  “Bounty hunter,” it hisses, “bounty hunter scum. Find something else to do. You make me sick.
You and all the other scum like you.”

  “Ughgllghhh,” the hunter says, kicking her feet around.

  An old lady pushing a wire cart packed solid with plastic bags and whatnot rounds the corner, her wheels emitting a squeak-squeak-squeak sound. The Tromindox drops the hunter to the ground. Able to breathe again, the hunter clutches her throat and tries to regain her breath.

  The Tromindox sticks a bony finger into her face. “So long, bounty hunter scum,” it says, and turns back toward the next train. It slips through the doors at the last second before they click shut, leaving the bounty hunter alone on the platform.

  She looks into the train window, the Tromindox glaring back at her. As the train pulls out she throws up her fist for her quarry to see. From it hangs a long chain, with a coin-like object dangling at the end. The Tromindox freezes, and the train moves off, grimy reflections of fluorescent bulbs sliding across the windows—one second, two, the portal swings back and forth on the chain—and the Tromindox, along with the tiny syringe that she has jabbed into its neck, dissolves into a fine black powder that falls softly to the floor. Nobody on the train looks up. They have texts to send and games to play.

  I may be scum, but you’re the one that’s gonna end up on the bottoms of people’s shoes, the hunter thinks as she turns away. The portal in her pocket turns off and begins to cool down.

  She takes out a small square device and jams her newly-won portal into a slot on the side. A tiny screen lights up, flips a few times, and displays some characters and information regarding her new (late) friend. Three-hundred years old, traveled here a month ago, responsible for the disappearances of about ten people. The bounty hunter doesn’t dwell on these facts; she knows the habits of Tromindox. She pokes the screen with her finger. Job done, payment due. The device lets her know that her money—enough to cover rent, plus a little more—is on the way. Satisfied, she drops the device and portal into her pocket.