Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 65042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
He looks scary but he’s nice, whispered that same little voice in my head. The shadow boy—you called him the shadow boy. He saved you.
I shook my head, trying to make sense of it all.
“Er…I’m not sure to be honest,” I said, still trying to answer Harmony’s question. “Since I came here—to Hidden Hollow, I mean—a lot of things I had forgotten have been coming back to me.”
“Actually, that’s not unusual,” she said, surprising me. “Sometimes magical memories can be hidden in the Human World—I work with Madam Healer, who’s basically the doctor for all of Hidden Hollow—and she says it isn’t uncommon at all to forget things and only remember them when you get back to the Magical Realm.”
Well, that certainly seemed to be what was happening to me, but I still didn’t feel comfortable going back into the cottage. When I told Harmony that, she nodded sympathetically.
“I totally understand. Something under the bed waiting for you is scary, whether you’re in the Human World or the Magic World.” Then she brightened. “I know—why don’t we test to see if the thing under your bed has harmful intentions or not.”
“How in the world do we do that?” I asked skeptically. “Just ask it? It might just lie to me. Maybe it’s planning to eat me up later!”
“We don’t have to ask it if you don’t want to—though it can’t hurt. But I have something here that will tell us everything we need to know.”
She reached in the pocket of her blue woolen dress—which was really pretty, by the way—and pulled out what looked like a smooth, flat pebble.
“What’s that?” I asked, looking at it.
“It’s a Harm-or-No-Harm Charm,” she said. “We use it all the time when working with magical ingredients but I think it ought to work in this case too. All you do is put it near the thing you need to test—if it’s harmful, the charm turns red. If it’s neutral and won’t hurt or help, it turns yellow. And if it’s helpful or beneficial, the charm turns green.” She flipped it in the air like a coin and caught it. “What do you think? Want to try it?”
“How come it’s not any color right now?” I asked, looking at the flat stone as it lay in her palm. “I mean, it looks like any pebble you could pick up on the beach.”
“Oh, because I haven’t said the cantrip that activates it,” she explained. “You can’t activate it until it’s tuned to a specific area or ingredient or person. You have to direct it to make it work.”
“Oh…okay.” I shrugged. “I guess it can’t hurt to try. Er…are you sure you want to come back into the possibly haunted cottage with me?”
“Sure—I’m not afraid.” She lifted her chin. “One thing you need to know about Hidden Hollow is that bad magic has a very hard time crossing into the town borders. That’s why you don’t see Ogres or Giants or Trolls wandering around Main Street—the magical bubble around the town wouldn’t let them through. And even if it somehow did, the Town Council would kick them out right away. So I doubt the thing under your bed is truly bad or they would have been alerted.”
Her explanation made me feel somewhat better.
“Well, all right then—let’s go test it out,” I said. “Because if I could live in the cottage, it would be nice. I think I’m about to lose my house back home. Er…in the Human World, I mean.”
“You are?” She gave me a worried look. “Why? What happened?”
I didn’t really want to tell her all my troubles—she was a stranger, after all. A really nice stranger, but still, I didn’t want to dump all my trauma on her. So I just said,
“I don’t have the money to pay the mortgage and I’m not working right now.”
“Well then maybe Hidden Hollow is the place for you,” she remarked.
“Let’s check on the cottage first, before we decide about that,” I said.
“All right.” She nodded. “Let’s go.”
And that was how I decided to go back into my Grandma’s cottage, even though I was pretty sure it was haunted.
9
DANNI
The hair on the back of my neck was standing up before we even reached the front steps.
"You sure about this?" Harmony asked, casting a sideways glance at me as she held the charm stone in one hand, her other hovering near the doorknob.
"No," I admitted. "But I need to find out what’s going on."
The cottage loomed in front of us, deceptively cozy with its pumpkin-lined porch and little hanging wind chime shaped like a crescent moon. If not for the unsettling whisper I’d heard in the bedroom earlier, I might've found the whole thing charming.
But that voice—deep, smooth, masculine—still echoed faintly in my head.
"I can’t wait to hold you again."
A chill ran down my spine.