Jane of Air

  Jessica Penot

  www.jessicapenot.com

  Published Internationally by Jessica Penot

  Copyright © 2018 Jessica Penot

  Exclusive cover © 2018 Fiona Jayde Media Designs

  Interior design by Tamara Cribley www.deliberatepage.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the author, Jessica Penot, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  PRINT ISBN

  978-1-7326928-1-7

  EBOOK ISBN

  978-1-7326928-0-0

  Editor - Joanna D’Angelo

  Copy Editor - Brenda Heald

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

  I dedicate this book to all my clients and all the people that feel alone. It is a terrible thing to feel like you don’t belong and I believe there is always a special magic for those who feel unloved.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Also Available

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Joanna D’Angelo for pushing me to finish this book and keeping me writing even when I wanted to give up. She is a wonderful editor and a wonderful coach.

  Also Available

  The Accidental Witch Series:

  Book 1 The Accidental Witch

  Book 2 The Darkest Art

  Single Titles:

  Circe

  Death’s Dream Kingdom

  Twilight Saint Series:

  The Twilight Saint

  Haunting Series:

  Haunted Chattanooga

  Haunted North Alabama

  Chapter 1

  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

  ~ H. P. Lovecraft

  I WAS ALWAYS COLD IN the morning. Even in the spring, I felt like my skin turned to ice while I slept. I crawled out of bed and hopped into the shower. I stayed under the warm curtain of water as long as I could and then I forced my wet body back out into the cold.

  I could always see my past when I was naked. It was etched on me in long scars and ink. I didn’t remember much of my early childhood, but I didn’t need to. When I stepped out of the shower, I glanced over my shoulder at my image in the mirror and shuddered. My entire back was covered in an enormous tattoo that had been there for as long as I could remember. It was a reminder of what I was: an abandoned girl with parents who had used her as a template for their madness. I had to twist my neck to see it in the mirror. I never let anyone else look at it, but it seemed to me that it had changed and grown with time. When I was a little girl, it had just been a door. Now, it was intricate. It was a door into a hillside, and it was wrapped in ivy and flowers. A brook flowed beside the door. It was in color. I loathed the thing, so I looked away. I tried to pretend it wasn’t real.

  I didn’t just pretend the tattoo wasn’t real. I pretended most of my life was different. I pretended I hadn’t bounced from one foster home to another. I pretended that, at sixteen, I wasn’t essentially living on my own. I closed my eyes and envisioned that somewhere out there I had a loving mother and father and that I was an average teenager. All my life, I had worked twice as hard as everyone else to maintain this façade. I always got straight As in school. I had been advanced two grades. I wore boring clothes and tried to blend in so no one would know that, underneath it all, I was an aberration.

  I had been through three foster homes since I was abandoned in an emergency room at the age of four. I tried not to think about my first foster homes, but I did remember the emergency room. I remembered waking up and everyone staring at me like I was from outer space. I was naked. My name had been written across my forehead in Sharpie: Jane. Across my chest were the words: Love is the gateway that will set the old ones free. And, of course, on my back was that massive tattoo. My parents might as well have written, “Circus Freak. Handle with Care.” on my arms.

  It was May and it should have been much warmer, but winter had lingered. It clung to the air like an old ghost. I covered my tattoo in heavy sweaters and tried to keep it covered. I never wore bathing suits or tank tops. I hid under big clothes. I was lucky it was still cold because I would have been miserable if it had been hot.

  I took the bus to school. I sat in the back and tried to avoid notice. This was easy enough. Most of the other kids were well practiced at ignoring me. I was a shadow to them. I wasn’t even important enough to bully or mock anymore. When I was young, I hadn’t been as good at hiding and the kids had been ruthless, but I had become an expert at making myself completely forgettable. I was nothing. I knew this should have made me sad. It should have filled me with woe, but I had my books. The laughing girls around me seemed far away compared to the characters in my stories.

  I had one friend. Helen Yee. Helen was my opposite. Her features were a mixture of Asian and white. She had short black hair and eyes the color of the sky at twilight. The color lived somewhere between the blue of day and the black of night. She was small and curvy, with a shape I imagined would make boys look at her with lust. Her fair skin and blue eyes were disarming when mixed with her Asian features so that she had an otherworldly quality that could be described as haunting. She dressed however she pleased and, most of the time, whatever she was wearing was a little bit shocking. She would wear striped witch stockings from a Halloween costume with pleated shorts, and a man’s shirt with a bow tie or combat boots with what looked like a bridesmaid’s dress from 1972 that she’d dug out of the trash. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She was quick-witted and fierce, and I loved everything about her that was different from me. She was three years older than me, but she didn’t treat me like a kid. She started kindergarten a year late, she said, because she’d moved around so much when she was a little kid. She was nineteen and I was sixteen and she always seemed to have all the wisdom I wished I had. When Helen was around, she made all the girls that ignored me seem like pale shadows.

  “Are you ready?” Helen asked after school. We sat together on my bed, plotting. Helen had drawn a large picture of an eyeball on the back of her arm. It was so bright and vibrant that I would have thought it was a real tattoo if I hadn’t known Helen’s penchant for self-illustration. Helen was the only one who knew about my back tattoo. She thought it was a gift and told me to show it off, but I wasn’t brave like Helen.

  “Just another house,” I muttered. “It isn’t like staying with Mrs. Blankenship has been a joy. Getting out will be good.”

  “You have to be a little excited. You’re graduating two years early. You’re going to college. You have a full scholarship. You�
��ll be free.”

  I shrugged. I tried not to think about the future. It was a dark tunnel to nowhere. The only reason I was able to graduate early and go to college was because my foster mother, Mrs. Blankenship, went along with it. She collected her government check and deposited it, and said she’d keep her mouth shut about me going away to college at the ripe young age of sixteen. Even though she treated me with polite indifference, she had given me a home for almost ten years and kept me from being tossed back into the foster care system. She lied to my caseworker and I helped her lie because I didn’t want to go to another foster home. Mrs. Blankenship’s lies kept me safe. I lived in constant terror that my caseworker would figure out how unsupervised I was and shuffle me into yet another nightmare. I wouldn’t go to college. I would be stuck repeating high school because I wasn’t a teen or even a person; I was a number in a system that didn’t account for individual differences.

  “We are going to college. And we’ll be living in a castle. You are done with foster care. Aren’t you a little bit excited?” Helen asked me.

  I rolled my eyes. “We’re going to be killed and eaten by some crazy serial killer.”

  “You read too many books.”

  “You don’t read enough books.”

  “Don’t worry so much. It’s a good job with room and board included. In a castle. Can you believe it? We’re going to live in a castle and go to college together. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

  “That’s what makes it so creepy,” I said. “It’s too good to be true. Getting paid to stay someplace at night? Who pays someone to stay in a house at night? No one does that. Oh wait, I know who does that. Serial killers. We’re going to be killed and turned into a floral arrangement in some psycho killer’s basement or even worse… CPS is going to find me and put me back into foster care.”

  Helen sighed. “Mrs. Blankenship will cover for you. She wants her money, so she won’t tell anyone you’ve left. You’ll be fine. And I promise you that Edward is not a serial killer. He’s a nice guy who needs someone to keep an eye on his grandmother at night. It’s the perfect job.”

  Chapter 2

  Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

  ~ H.P. Lovecraft

  HELEN AND I LEFT THE day after graduation. We weren’t starting college until fall, but we had jobs and I had no desire to stay at home a moment longer than I had to. Neither of us was leaving anything behind that we’d miss, so we were both eager to get on the road. We drove both to escape everything that had happened before and to move on to a more hopeful future. Mrs. Blankenship was sitting by the window as I dragged my two heavy bags toward the door. She stared blankly out into the backyard. There was a cigarette in her hand. It had gone out, but she didn’t notice.

  I was sixteen. I felt entirely on my own. And I was terrified. In truth, I had been on my own since Mr. Blankenship died. Since then, it was like Mrs. Blankenship had died, too. She rarely left her room and spent more time crying than working. She hadn’t done any of the things that a mom was supposed to do for her child. I’d been working part-time and buying my own clothes for as long as I could remember. I even cooked our meals and cleaned the house. I didn’t know what she would do after I left. I hoped she would be okay.

  I threw my bags in the back of my rusty old Jeep. I rarely drove the thing because I couldn’t afford the gas, but I had just enough in the tank to get Helen and me to campus. I waved goodbye to Mrs. Blankenship and wondered if I’d ever see her again. I knew that the thought was somewhat irrational, but I felt sad at the idea and the feeling lingered. Mrs. Blankenship had never been loving or affectionate, but she’d never been abusive either. She was never present, but at least she’d always been there. She was my almost-mother. Leaving her felt like I was severing all ties to my childhood. What little childhood I’d had. And yet, I was only sixteen. I felt both too young and too old at the same time.

  I looked over at Helen. She was all smiles. She put on some music. I never fully understood Helen’s music. It was loud and incoherent, but I was sure it was cool in a way I could never comprehend. I never really knew why Helen wanted to hang out with me. Helen was cool. I was sure of that. She was pretty and well-shaped, and she wore clothes that whispered of something dangerous and bold. Yet, she was always around me for some unknown reason. I never saw her with anyone else. It was like I was the only person that existed to her. She had a boyfriend, but I had never met him. I never saw her with anyone else. Everyone else in her life seemed distant, like a memory or an old photograph.

  This is what bothered me the most about Helen. I never met her boyfriend Jake. He was an enigma that took her away from me for long stretches of time. She would disappear for weeks to be with him. It made me wonder. We were best friends, so why didn’t she introduce me to her boyfriend? Why didn’t she introduce me to anyone?

  I sat down and I put my foot on the gas in a way that made the Jeep take off at something that resembled warp speed. I drove so rarely; it was nice to feel the wind in my hair when I did.

  “Woo hoo!” Helen yelled as I drove. “I thought we would never get away from this hell hole.”

  My smile didn’t quite mirror her exuberant grin, but a feeling was beginning to unfurl inside me. I didn’t know what it was yet, but it sure felt good.

  “So long Craphole!” Helen’s bracelets clanged together as she made an obscene gesture out the window toward our tiny town. Her thin arm was disturbingly graceful while it moved.

  Sometimes I found myself wishing I possessed half the beauty and grace my friend did. I was chronically jealous of her straight black hair and her striking blue eyes. I wanted to look like Helen so badly. I had curly, brown hair and dark eyes. My skin was too dark to make me white and too light for me to be black. Or so the kids at school had told me. I’d been teased for my strange appearance as a child. Especially because of the freckles on my face. The kids called me “freak girl” because I didn’t know who my parents were. So, therefore, I had no idea what my ethnicity was, but I had to assume it was mixed. I always wanted to be Asian like Helen because she was the most beautiful girl I had ever known. When I was in public, I tried my hardest to not stand out because people always asked me what I was. And I could never tell them because I didn’t know.

  I hid beneath baggy clothes. Not just because of my tattoo, but also because I was tall and too thin, and my hair was long and big and curly. I generally kept my hair in one thick braid down my back. My clothes came from the Goodwill, but they lacked the style and creativity of Helen’s outfits. Besides, I was more concerned with making sure my tattoo was covered at all times to worry about style. Mostly, I wore jeans and long-sleeved shirts and tried to forget I had a freak stamp on my back.

  The sun was setting as we sped along the highway. The pink and purple of the vanishing sun painted the sky with an uncommon beauty. I basked in that light. Maybe everything would be good from now on. I was hopeful.

  Chapter 3

  Terror made me cruel.

  ~ Emily Brontë

  HELEN WAS QUIET FOR MUCH of the drive. I knew that this was definitely a sign that she had something important to say. Helen could talk for hours about nothing, but when she had something significant to talk about, she became mute. I didn’t press for conversation. I was content just having her beside me as I drove.

  Huntington College was a small school in a small town. The road from our hometown of Gateshead, Massachusetts, to Huntington, Virginia, wove through the Appalachian Mountains. It was lined with large, old-growth trees that had watched, in silent majesty, the birth of our nation and the unfolding history of the South.

  Suddenly, Helen blurted out what she’d been holding in. “My boyfriend says I can stay with him in his apartment.” The guilt washed over her face in a deep crimson wave.

  “Oh.” It was all I could say. I felt numb. I knew I should feel something, b
ut it was like all my emotional responses vanished. Helen did things like this all the time. I would be the center of her world and then I would ask her to come to a movie with me and she would stand me up. She would spend hours with me in my room talking and then disappear for a week. I had the flu once and she sat by my bed for the entire week and when I woke up, I couldn’t find her. Helen was capricious and I should have seen this coming.

  “I know I should stay with you at Thornfield and I don’t want to leave you with some crazy serial killer, but you know Jake is really important to me and he really wants me to live with him. He’s in love with me and wants us to be together forever. Isn’t that romantic?” Helen said in a rush.

  I put my hand on Helen’s arm. “That’s wonderful. Truly.” I meant it. I wanted Helen to be happy. I would be fine. I was used to being on my own, in any case. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure the owner isn’t a serial killer. I’ll be fine. I’m glad I have a job and a place to live.”

  “Why are you always so nice?” Helen seemed even more frustrated. “It just makes things worse. Here I am dumping you at the last second before you we even get there.”