Crescent Marked: StarHaven Sanctuary Book One

  StarHaven Sanctuary: Book One

  Tera Lyn Cortez

  Copyright © 2021 Tera Lyn Cortez

  All rights reserved.

  www.teralyncortez.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form on by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Original cover by Melony Paradise

  Paradise Cover Design

  DEDICATION

  For the dreamers, the readers,

  and those who let the magic of words

  take them to amazing and mystical new worlds.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The empty highway flashed outside my window as I sped by, doing ten miles over the posted speed limit. My tires flew over dry pavement in spite of the rainstorm earlier in the night, although the dark clouds overhead threatened to open up again. The green glow from the radio clock told me it was almost three in the morning.

  It took me about an hour to get home during the day, but I was on track to get there in just under forty-five minutes tonight, thanks to the lack of traffic and my increased rate of travel. Had I not agreed to trade for the night shift tonight, I would have been at home for whatever emergency had cropped up, instead of my mother needing to leave a message on my cell when I didn't answer. Nine words that made my stomach drop.

  The tension in my shoulders traveled up my neck and collected into a throbbing headache at the base of my skull as I navigated the road, while her message replayed itself over and over in my mind. It instantly turned my blood to ice. In a monotone voice, my mother asked me to come home as soon as I heard it. Nothing more. Her phone went straight to the answering machine when I tried to get more clarification. Why?

  Signaling for the exit, I glanced at the clock again. I'd made good time and only had about ten minutes before I would be able to see what had made her leave such a cryptic sentence. I'd prayed the whole way that she hadn't had a medical emergency.

  At the bottom of the ramp rainwater had pooled just before the stoplight, which remained green as I careened down the pavement. Hitting the brakes too late, I felt the tires begin to slide out from under me, shuddering as they tried to get a grip on the asphalt beneath them. The back end of the car slipped out of my control and I clenched the steering wheel as I spun in circles through the intersection. The Mountain Dew in my cup holder escaped its lid and splashed over my denim-clad legs and the front of my stereo. As my sedan came to a stop, I closed my eyes briefly, tasting the blood on my tongue, which I'd bitten in my panic, then opened them to see that the light had changed to red during my ordeal. With a shaky hand, I reached up to wipe away the sticky rivulets of soda that ran down my cheek.

  Looking around for oncoming traffic, I pulled off to the side of the road and put it in park, my entire body trembling from the adrenaline. Pushing the button to put my flashers on, I leaned my forehead down to rest on the steering wheel as I attempted to regain control of my body. Every muscle attached to my five-foot-tall skeleton was pulled taut and quivering from the exertion of trying to wrangle over a ton of out-of-control steel back into submission. The smell of my burnt tires wafted in through the air vents.

  Worry for my mother shortened the amount of time I was willing to sit on the shoulder, and I pushed the button to turn off my emergency lights less than five minutes after the spin out had begun. The rest of the journey would be made far more carefully than I originally set out. I didn't need to add a second trauma to what she already needed to deal with.

  Making a right onto James Street, I passed through the sleeping neighborhood. Our house sat dark as I pulled into the driveway, not even the porch light on to guide me to the front door. Singling out the house key, I felt for the doorknob on the shadowed front porch. It took some scraping and maneuvering, but I managed to get the key into the keyhole and let myself in.

  “Mom? Hello?”

  My purse thudded down onto the wooden entry table. Keys dropped next to it, missing the vintage ceramic bowl sitting there for the purpose of catching them.

  “Mom?” I called her name again, saying silent prayers it was nowhere near as serious as my overactive imagination made it out to be.

  Entering the dining room, I saw her seated at the table, room dark and her phone in front of her on the woven place mat. She sat hunched over, resting her forearms against the table. Her head dropped forward, chin almost resting on her chest. I could smell the burnt coffee that had been left on the warmer too long and walked past her to turn it off.

  “Thank goodness you're alright! I worried the whole way here when you didn't answer your phone. What is going on?”

  She didn't lift her eyes from the tabletop. Until she spoke, I had no idea if she'd even heard me. “Leah, your Aunt Aimee has died.”

  “What? No. She's too young to die. There must be some mistake. What happened?” Tears welled up immediately and spilled down my cheeks.

  Guilt swamped me; it had been far too long since I made it out to see her. Too long since we had been together for a real visit. I thought of the email sitting in my inbox, waiting for me to reply. It had been my last chance to communicate with her and I'd brushed it off, relegating it to the pile of things to do “later.”

  My aunt happened to be my mother's only sister, and my favorite person on the entire planet, in spite of the two of them not getting along very well. Growing up, I spent weeks on end with her at her property on the peninsula. My aunt was the caretaker of a huge private sanctuary for wolves, and I'd always felt at home there.

  “I'll tell you what I know as we drive. The police have requested we come right away. Go pack a small bag if you want.”

  “Do you want me to pack a bag for you real quick?”

  She shook her head. “I won't be staying. I just want to deal with whatever business they have for me and get back home.”

  Taking the stairs two at a time, I ran to my room and tossed a couple changes of clothes and some necessities into an overnight bag. Then I changed from my wet work jeans to clean, casual jeans and my favorite hooded sweatshirt before heading back downstairs, tennis shoes in hand.

  “I'm ready.” I stuffed my feet into my shoes as I looked around the room to be certain everything was off that needed to be.

  Mom stood up, moving stiffly as if she'd been in that chair for a very long time. Her purse was the only item she grabbed as she headed to the front door. I grabbed her phone for her as I passed the table.

  “What about a coat, or a sweatshirt at least?”

  Wrinkling her forehead, she looked around as if she didn't quite understand my question before turning to the hall closet. She reached in without even looking and pulled out the first item she touched. One of my zippered jackets. I didn't attempt to suggest anything different.

  “Mom, I'm so sorry. I can't imagine how hard this is for you.”

  She held up her hand to stop me from speaking anymore. “Thank you, but we both know Aimee and I weren't close.” She paused. “I am sorry that it's too late to change that now.”

  The two of us piled into her car. As I buckled, I took a sideways glance at my mother. I never knew for sure what had driven the two of them apart, although I suspected the last straw had to do with the time I spent at the sanctuary. My last visit there seemed to slam the door
shut between them for good.

  Even at seventeen, I had loved going to visit. Something about the place called to me even when I wasn't there. On that last visit, I'd been out walking in the woods when my mother came to pick me up. The wolves tended to stay much further out in the forest, but I had always been instructed to stay close to the house just in case.

  This particular walk I had gone farther than normal, and just before I reached the clearing where the house was situated, a low growl came from off to my left. The bushes snapped as the branches shivered and a pair of glowing amber eyes appeared. I'd never seen any of the animals so close to the clearing before. I gasped and stumbled backwards, losing my footing thanks to a root in the pathway.

  Despite attempting to catch myself and flailing my arms to try and catch my balance, my backside landed on the dirt with a thud. My left hand hit the ground first, onto a sharp rock that tore the meaty part of my palm wide open, right over my crescent shaped birthmark. Blood poured from the wound and onto the ground. To my shock, the earth immediately absorbed it. I watched in awe as the crimson liquid ran down my hand and off my fingertips in droplets, just to disappear as they hit the dirt.

  I'd all but forgotten about the wolf until movement caught my eye and I realized it had crept forward. I got to my feet, moving slowly while backing towards the clearing. My aunt's yells reached my ears as she called my name, and my mother screamed. The wolf did not advance any further, but watched me every step of the way until I reached the tree line. Then it disappeared as if it had never been there in the first place.

  Walking backward to keep an eye out, just in case, I crossed the clearing with rapid footsteps. My mom herded me directly into the car to take me for stitches, yelling at my aunt the entire way. “This is your fault. I told you this would happen. You stay away from her from now on.”

  “It was an accident. It's not like I bled her on purpose!” my aunt answered my mother's accusations from the cover of the back porch, not trying to get close to me.

  I tried to interject, and explain that it had been my own fault, but my mother wouldn't hear it. She slammed the car door closed and peeled down the gravel road leading to the highway. She never allowed me to go back for a visit again.

  I shook my head, somewhat in awe of how clearly the memory had come to me, playing like a movie in my mind. In the ten years since it happened, I hadn't thought about it much. My aunt and I emailed and spoke on the phone regularly, and she had come to visit a few times, but I hadn't set foot on sanctuary property since. It had just been easier to appease my mother, and my aunt understood.

  Only once did I make an effort to ask my mother what about that day made her so angry. She cut off my query with a stern reminder that her relationship with her sister was none of my concern, and I would be best served by minding my own business. The argument that it became my business when she prevented from seeing the only living member of family I had fell on deaf ears.

  The sun rose as we drove, bringing daylight to the scenery around us. I tore my gaze from the landscape outside the window to glance toward my mom. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel, her face grim. If my memory served me correctly, we should have been close to the exit we needed to take. I'd hoped to get her to open up some on the drive, but I'd gotten lost in the past and she hadn't seemed to be in the mood for conversation.

  “Are you okay, Mom? Do you want me to drive the rest of the way?”

  “I'm fine and no thank you,” she responded without taking her eyes off the road.

  Once we pulled off the freeway, my mother took a turn onto a two-lane highway. The rain that had been beating against the roof of the car finally waned. Few other vehicles traveled the road this early in the morning, and the fog made it seem as if we were the only people around. The next turn took us off the paved road and onto a gravel lane that seemed to stretch on forever.

  The tires of the jeep splashed through potholes that would have swallowed a smaller car whole. Thick grayish water splashed up the sides, prompting me to shut the windows to avoid being soaked, in spite of the balmy morning air. We'd long since left the asphalt and I would have suspected my mother made a wrong turn, except this particular path had no wrong turns to make.

  The turn off the main highway led onto a fairly well-maintained, though rocky, road, wide enough for two vehicles to squeak past one another if each hugged their respective side, not that I'd seen a single other car. But, as we made our way further into the forest, the road narrowed by almost imperceptible increments, until the brush lining the path began scratching along the side panels, sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard. If not for the windows being closed, the vegetation would have been reaching in and plucking at my hair and clothes with their skeletal branches.

  She turned the windshield wipers up, squinting through the wave dislodged by her drive through another tiny lake in the middle of the "road." In spite of the rising sun, she'd had to turn the headlights back on long before in order to see through the gloom of the crowded trees. As we rounded a bend in the path, they illuminated the heavy wooden sign I'd been watching for, the one announcing we had reached sanctuary land and trespassers were expressly forbidden. StarHaven Sanctuary.

  The scar on my hand began to ache, and a sigh escaped me before I realized it was waiting to escape. My attempt to swallow it back proved unsuccessful.

  “What are you sighing about?” My mother's tone had a sharp edge to it, as if she expected me to say something unpleasant.

  “Nothing, Mom. Don't worry about it.”

  She didn't bother to respond, and we drove the rest of the way up the winding drive in silence. As we pulled into the clearing, the house loomed above us, dark and lonely aside from the porch light. It looked abandoned already, even though Aimee had been alive and well yesterday morning when she sent me that email.

  The officer stationed on the porch came down to the car and my mother explained to him who we were and why we were there. He instructed her to park the car and go around back.

  “An officer will lead you to where you need to go.” He tipped his hat as my mother nodded wordlessly.

  As she shut off the car and rolled the window back up, she turned to me. “Why don't you wait in the house for me? You don't need to see this.”

  “Actually, I do, and I absolutely will not. You weren't even close to her. If anyone should go, it should be me. You're welcome to wait here if you want.”

  Her lips pursed, and she clenched the keys in her hand. Instant remorse for my harsh words flooded me. She opened her mouth as she began to argue with me, but she closed it again without making a sound and opened the car door. Exiting the vehicle, I stood for a moment and listened to the wind blow through the trees. The distinctive smell of wet earth greeted my nostrils.

  Pushing the car door closed, I paused to take in my surroundings before moving to walk around the house as the officer had instructed. The giant evergreen trees towered above us, surrounding the clearing like immobile sentinels. No other structures stood on the property aside from my aunt's house. For some reason even the humans seemed out of place here.

  A howl rose with the wind, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The skin on my arms puckered up into goosebumps in spite of my sweater and the scar on my hand throbbed. I rubbed it absentmindedly with my thumb, stopping short when I caught my mother staring at my hands with a frown on her lips.

  I wondered if she knew more about the birthmark/scar than she had ever let on.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Temporary lights had been set up to illuminate the path around the house to the back, where, as promised, another officer was waiting for us. The sunrise had come and gone, but the towering trees kept the area dim for much of the day.

  “I apologize for the long walk, but we don't have any ATVs here that can fit the trail. Everybody is going in and out on foot.”

  My mother just nodded, her expression unchanging. I gave him a small smile. “Don't worry about it. We are fam
iliar with the property and its quirks.”

  Mom's head jerked up. “You've been to the ruins before?”

  My head shook from side to side. “No, but I have walked some of the other trails. The forest is thick and the trails are uneven, even in the best of spots.”

  She exhaled as her shoulders returned to their normal position, some of the tension gone. I caught the officer watching us out of the side of my eye and turned toward him, holding my hand out in indication that we were ready to follow his lead.

  In spite of his powerful flashlight, the darkness pressed in from the trees around us. Except for the occasional gust of wind, the forest seemed to be silent. There were no birds calling out and no small animals rustling through the underbrush. Even the insects made no noise. As we walked, I kept my eyes out for any of the wolves, but they seemed to be far from the trail, well out of the vicinity where all the activity took place.

  The only creatures I saw were a pair of chipmunks, perched on the lowest branch of a large pine tree right near the edge of the clearing. They watched us pass by, unmoving, yet aware of our presence. At any other time, I would have stopped to watch them, and perhaps gone to the house in search of a snack to offer in an attempt to make friends. Turning back once, I noted that they still watched us, silently making sure we continued on our way.

  The only sound aside from our own breathing was our footsteps on the pine needle covered path, which were muffled by the layer of forest detritus. My awareness seemed to heighten as we approached the ruins of the old temple. The air here felt different from the rest of the woods, heavier somehow.

  The decaying buildings sprang up out of the trees between one step and the next. In one moment I had nothing but trees in front of me, then I blinked and the trees disappeared, crumbling stone in their place. Aunt Aimee had told me of the site, making me aware of its existence, but had requested I stay far from it. She never explained its purpose or why I shouldn't go near it, stating only that its unsteady structure was dangerous.