Hey all, Idris here (IdrisGrey). Welcome to the latest #WattpadBlockParty! Thank you to Kelly for hosting it yet again and for inviting me back. I'm excited to be here among all these talented authors to share my work. Today, I have the first two chapters of an f/f teen fantasy I have been working on. Some of you may recognize it. It's called A DANGEROUS BEAT.
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SUMMARY: New in town, recently emancipated Evie Featherton discovers that the curse that's haunted her family for a century just might be haunting her. Phoebe Park, queen bee of the local high school and feared daughter of Whale's Town's long dead witch, fears that the tragic fate that befell her mother will befall her next. The moment they meet, thunder rolls and lightning strikes the ground. Drums beat in their heads like a warning, like a promise. Are they bound by a curse or something much more dangerous--like love?
Only magic knows.
Chapter 1: A Whale of a Tale
Whale's Town is nobody's idea of a paradise and everyone's idea of a hiding place.
--Unknown
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Evie's cousin Aldous warned her that Whale's Town was off-the-wall strange. They like their whale bones, he'd said, jangling a necklace of plastic tibiae like he was summoning a ghost. Her cousin was dumb like that. He was the 'off-the-wall strange' one.
She wasn't worried about some creepy fishing town on the coast of Maine, anyway. When you've lived with the voices of the dead singing you lullabies for a year, you give up on it. Creepy isn't weird, it's your life. It's the only place that feels like home anymore.
That didn't stop her from getting chills down her spine as she pulled up to her house on Ivory Court. This was where she'd be living from now on, a slouching three-story Victorian her late great-grandmother had built and that the entire Featherton clan had fled the hour the woman had gone into the ground. Bedelia Farragut Featherton had been terrifying, but no more so than Whale's Town itself had been to every one of her progeny.
Curses? Who believes in curses anymore? Her parents, that's who. Her grandparents. All of her aunts and uncles, living and dead. The cousins played at immunity, but none of them had been keen to let her sleep on their couch after...after everything.
Evie stepped out of her pre-owned Honda to take stock of where she'd be living for the next two years. It was a veritable sweet shop of horrors, she could see that from the outside. Every window was an eye on her, flinty as her great-grandmother's, finding her wanting, or worse, perfect. This was the house that had killed two Farraguts and six Feathertons.
But it won't kill me.
Evie was out places to go but here. She didn't have anybody save herself. Fuck fear.
Evie dug her house key out of her book bag, crossing the scraggly grass covering the sloping front yard to reach the front steps. They were disconcertingly sturdy for a house nobody had lived in for forty years. The house was as wide around as a quarter of a ranch house, but it seems to reach up for miles toward the grey sky. Now that she was close enough, she felt under its protection instead of under its gaze. Like she had infiltrated enemy territory and tricked its radar on the landing. This was the closest she'd felt to safe since the meds kicked in and her mother's voice went quiet in her head. For just a second, she wished she could hear it again.
Extending easily ten yards in each direction, the covered porch terminated where the house's face met its sharp corners. It was as big as some dance studios she'd attended as a little girl and just as empty. There wasn't so much as a lounge chair to be seen. The floorboards were bare, scrubbed, not even varnished.
No walking around here barefoot. She made a note of it. Evie didn't do much barefoot wandering anyway. Part of her was always ready to run, had to be. She was never sure when she'd be chased or how long she'd have to prepare for it. Whether her demons were her relatives' wary expressions or the dreams that kept her up nights was immaterial. Better to expect the worst at all times and never be surprised.
Brick red paint was peeling from the walls in curls.
The screen door barring her from the security door and the heavy painted glass entry creaked on its hinges, rocking ominously like it make take a swing at her when she pulled it. Not even the door wants me here. She shoved her reservations aside, along with a tinge of sadness she couldn't deny, and tried to stick her key in the brass lock.
In it went, but then it wouldn't click.
Awesome. The universe was playing with her. Twisting her arm. She had bruises from the months of being bullied by what the world had in store for her. Maybe I'm the cursed one. Her ancestors before her had only died, she didn't remember them being tortured first.
Evie grit her teeth and tried again, blinking against the inexplicable tears filling her eyes as the tumblers in the deadbolt refused once more to turn over. A rusty lock wasn't even the worst thing to happen to her today. She wasn't falling apart that easily.
Evie stomped back to her car and ducked into the passenger seat to get to her glove compartment. There she found her mom's old lock pick set and a can of WD-40. When all reasonable means fail, get unreasonable. She could just about hear her mom saying that.
Miss you, momma.
She'd been saying that every day for over a year. She might be saying it forever.
Once she'd propped the screen door open with her bookbag and sprayed an embarrassment of WD-40 in the keyhole, she stood for five minutes to wait for it to set, checking for texts from her only un-estranged cousin. She had a few Snapchat pics from kids at her old school. There were some who didn't look at her like the sob story she was. She was still Evangeline, smart enough, funny enough, worth knowing and not forgetting the instant she walked out of sight.
Evie snapped a pic of herself looking disgruntled in front of the jammed door.
She got back a garble of texts from two of her friends.
From Gemima: Whoos wit u?
From Ali: V WTF?
She frowned. Yeah, the stained glass door looked like Queen Victoria vommed on it and it could do with a scrub-down but it wasn't even kind of face-shaped. Ali got weird about stuff like that.
It's just my new house. What's wrong?
The messages came back so quick they both must have stopped everything else they were doing because neither were that quick.
From Gemima: Not funy V. Tht's hella creepn sis.
From Ali: Vv smebody's inside. Don't go in.
Evie didn't need to be told twice. She grabbed her bag and her keys and booked it down the steps and back to her car, locking the doors immediately once she was inside. She scrolled back to her selfie to see what they saw.
She was smiling in her usual fatalistic way, holding a hand up to flaunt her creepy new front door. The dull wood looked even duller under the flash of light, the all but flawless surface splintered like someone weak-limbed had taken an axe to it. But it was the rose window that caused Evie stomach to knot up. There was something she hadn't seen standing beside it. A figure pressed against the frosted glass, a distinguishable, unidentifiable face peering down at her. Two hollow, gleaming eyes, a pointed nose, and pursed lips.
The very person with that very face was standing at the nose of her car, smiling.
Her phone fell from her suddenly frozen hands. Shit, shit, god help me. Not again. Not again. She couldn't. Not again.
Evie did what a person does in that scenario: she shoved her keys in the ignition and shot backward in reverse down the sloped driveway, bruising her fender on the asphalt, and screeched out of dodge till she couldn't even see the highest tower of the manor in her rear view.
She was a brave, brave girl, but there was something about ghosts that was harder to deny than a trick of light. She'd seen enough to know.
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Chapter 2: Where Everybody Knows Your Name
"You can be forgotten in a city, but it's small towns are where people tend to forget themselves."
--Unknown
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"How do you keep your nails so perfect?" Jin asked, exasperated at the smear marring her fingertips. Jin was forever mucking her paint job before it dried. Today was apricot yellow, close enough to gold and sweet.
"Magic," Phoebe quipped as she applied a second coat of parsley and four-leaf clover potion polish to her manicure. The color went perfectly with the outfit she was planning to wear tomorrow and the sigils she'd inscribed in the basecoat would alert her to any danger by heating up when a threat came near. Fashion and function. She loved magic, so versatile, not that anybody in this salt-cured town cared about multi-tasking. It was all whales this and burn the witches that. Boring stuff that Phoebe wanted as little as possible to do with.
"You're so weird, Be."
"Every little thing is weird in this fish town. So boring. Here, I'll mix you up a better polish. It'll bring good luck." She winked at her friend and hopped up from her bed to go to her walk-in closet. That was where she kept her work table. She took down a flask of bay leaf water and barberry root and gathered two rocks of dried apricot from her supply of dried fruits. The apricot she mashed in a mortar and pestle till it was a fine crystalline dust. Then, she poured it into an empty phial and joined it with her Intention Elixir. It would judge the intention of all those in two-arms-lengths and warm when it found those intentions to be impure. Good luck, prosperity, safety. They were more or less the same in her view. Fortune is important to the living, pointless to the dead.
Myung "Phoebe" Park was the oldest of two daughters, the second oldest among Leon Park and Chaviva Shafir's three children. She was used to caring for others, save her elder brother, Seon. She got her obsessive caretaking habit from the town's lone radio therapist, abba Leon, and her impeccable sense of style from her dad, Chaviva the globe-trotting tailor. As her dad said, "Love can always be accomplished in style," and so that's exactly what Phoebe did.
She had been mixing elixirs and draughts for her friends since she was old enough to pry her late mother's practical magic books from their boxes in the attic. Her memories of the woman were faint until the day she flipped back a calfskin cover and every agonizing remembrance caught flame inside her, from the moment of her birth to the night Kyong Nah died defending the town that would go on the brand her a witch and an enemy--and her surviving daughters along with her.
Phoebe shook the phial where the Intentia mixed with the waxy fixative and bound to the apricot. If Jin licked her fingers, they'd be sweet as the fruit, and her tongue would be coated in the stuff. Phoebe snorted to herself and shook the phial a little harder. Jin's tongue would become a good luck charm. If it got rid of her best friend's annoying off-again ex, she'd pour the entire phial down Jin's throat. Edgar was a headache Phoebe was all too happy to cure. She said a word of silent thanks to the heavens above for the fact she had no use for love.
Not yet.
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I hope you've enjoyed this peek into A DANGEROUS BEAT. I love this story and these characters so much. I've got such an adventure in store for them, and quite a bit of romance, too. Thank you for reading!
To celebrate #WattpadBlockParty, as well as all those who've patiently wondered if I'm ever going to continue my first work, I'm giving away a pdf of GIRLS CHASE GIRLS to one (1) lucky winner! This pdf will include the complete text of the original novelette plus the mini-sequel "Who's That Girl?" and a deleted scene from GIRLS LIKE GIRLS, as well as other top secret goodies! If you love that story, make sure to enter! The giveaway link is included below and will be posted on my profile as well. Don't miss out!
Until next time...
Stay dangerous!
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