Carry On (Book 1)

Chapter 1:

" Who is Mr. Mallen? " I had asked my dad since this mystery man had been the key to my acceptance into a school I had no idea existed until now.

" Do you mean Harry Mallen? " He had replied. " He's an old friend of your mother's, used to work with her when she was just starting out with training horses, he moved away some years after that... "

My mother, Sally Whitman. Unlike the twins, I remembered plenty about my mother. I remembered her being beautiful, strong, confident, if not a bit stubborn.

And I remembered that he made miracles happen. 

She was the Kasper horse whisperer, the woman who had the 'gift'. She took the horses nobody wanted, the ones who had been given up on, the one deemed, rouge or dangerous, and she made them champions, not just in competition, but in heart and spirit.

Mom had been our main source of income, charging hefty prices to fix the problems of horses that people didn't want to, or had time to deal with.

I had spent my elementary and middle school life watching the way she worked with each horse, forming bonds with them that remained for a lifetime, even after they were sold or taken back by their owners.

Life had been good through those years, we were a big happy family and even though we didn't have as much money as most, it made us closer as a family.

...Then it had all come down in flames...literally.

During a thunderstorm, a light pole on the street had been knocked down onto the barn, starting a fire. Most of the horses managed to escape by kicking down their stall doors or jumping over them, but a few were still trapped.

" Stay with dad! " mom had told me. " I'll be back, I promise! "

I knew that promise had been broken the minute the rest of the horses dashed out of the flames, but mom didn't...

It had taken all our savings to rebuild the barn, hoping, praying, that people would still want to board their horses with us. 

But without Sally Whitman, Kasper's horse whisperer, nobody came back...

And our family was left without a wife, without a mother and now, without money. It took years to get us from the brink of losing our home to just barely scraping by.

It was one of the main reasons I took the scholarship to Willow Lane...so that the money I made working with their horses could go back to my dad and sisters, while I was as far away from that depressing life as possible.

Dad had never been the same after the accident, and our relationship was rocky. He put on a good facade for the twins, but even though I was only in grade 9, I considered myself more grown-up than most kids my age. I had to be...because when my dad went catatonic and barely got up out of bed, it had been me who had taken care of the twins and kept up the garden for the harvest while also taking care of myself...and Storm.

I smiled when I thought about the fifth passenger on this trip, being towed in the trailer behind the truck. A fierce black gelding who's rags to riches transformation was nothing short of a Cinderella story.

Storm had been dropped off at our farm on a truck bound for slaughter. Apparently, the driver missed the news of my mothers passing and thought she would be able to help the skin and bones mass that barely resembled a horse. 

Dad had been put off at first, especially when the truck driver informed him that Storm was sold to slaughter after a riding accident killed his previous rider, a girl no older than me, during a cross-country run at a competition. He had a constant reminder of that memory by the scar that ran down his neck to his shoulder. It was a reminder that would never go away.