Coral & Bone Read online

  Coral & Bone

  Tiffany Daune

  Jester Ink Press

  British Columbia

  Published by Jester Ink Press

  British Columbia

  www.jesterinkpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Coral & Bone ©2014 Tiffany Daune

  All rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without written permission.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Daune, Tiffany, 1973-, author Coral & bone / Tiffany Daune.

  Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-9936537-0-4 (pbk). ISBN 978-0-9936537-1-1 (pdf).ISBN 978-0-9936537-2-8 (epub). ISBN 978-0-9936537-3-5 (mobi).

  I. Title. II. Title: Coral and bone.

  PS8607.A754C67 2014 jC813’.6 C2014-904053-9 C2014-904054-7

  Edited by Alix Reid

  Cover Art by Nathalia Suellen

  Book Design by Tamara Cribley

  For Glenn & Cody

  Acknowledgements

  It takes a village… and boy do I have a warrior team to thank. First, hands up to God for listening to all my prayers and for answering the ones that brought me to this beautiful place. A huge thank you to my husband for believing in the dream. You are the magick in my life. My son for being my soundboard and for your wonderful creative input. You inspire me every day. Donna, I couldn’t get by without your daily shot of positive vibes. You’re my lifeline when I get lost in Edit Land. Nathalia Suellen for the most stunning book cover a girl could ever ask for. I can’t tell you enough how amazing you truly are. Alix Reid, the fairy godmother of editors, your fantastic insight has brought my work to a new level, and I appreciate the time and detail you dedicated to Coral & Bone. Tamara Cribley for making the pages of Coral & Bone look beautiful. You truly go above and beyond and I’m thrilled to have worked with such a talented designer. My wonderful copy editor Elyssa Preston, your sharp eyes made Coral & Bone shine. The lovely Avery Hastings for proofreading the final. You are a true gem. My mother for encouraging me to dream big and for cheering me on. My dear friend and grandmother, for believing I would be a writer before I even knew it. And a big thank you to the readers for picking up this book. If you’re like me you have a huge TBR pile, so it means the world to me that you would chose Coral & Bone. Enjoy the journey!

  One

  Sketching his crooked smile had become a habit for Halen, not easily tamed. Flipping through her notebook, the boy’s gray eyes flashed back from the pages—almost one hundred drawings in three months. She turned to a blank page, not caring if the teacher noticed, and set the tip of her pencil on the paper. Closing her eyes, she knew the boy would be there. He never kept her waiting. His face flashed into view. His forehead was creased in the center, and his usually full lips were pressed with a tight line. Her fingertips sparked, and when she opened her eyes, her hand was already penciling in the edges of his jawline. Halen sketched him quickly; she was familiar with the hallow of his cheeks which dimpled when he smiled, and how one side of his jaw was a little more round than square, and how his nose hooked ever so slightly as if it had been broken at one time and had not been set properly. His imperfections were perfection.

  As she shaded the rims of his eyes with deep charcoal halos, she longed to climb into the page, and asked him what was bothering him. She had a lot of questions for him. Finding a page filled with his broad smile, she smiled inside. As her fingertips brushed his lips, she bit back her own. If only—if only you were real.

  Halen first drew the mystery boy the morning of the move. Coming back to Rockaway Beach was a nightmare, so when she had woken from a dream with the boy’s face etched inside her eyelids, and her fingertips igniting with sparks, she feared the worse. She knew the sparks were a warning; she had fought the flickering flames her whole life. There was more to this boy, more than she cared to admit. There was more to Rockaway Beach than she cared to face.

  The boy smiled knowingly. Like you care. With a sweep of her hand she drew a long handlebar moustache under his nose. Then tearing the page from her book, she crumpled it in her fist. Instantly, her palm warmed as if she were holding a hot stone. Only she knew the heat was coming from inside her. She quickly scanned the classroom. Most of her classmates were still filling in the test answers with penciled circles. A few students were reading. Her fingertips flickered with heat and she dropped the paper, fearful it might combust in her hand. She hadn’t set anything on fire, not in a long time, and she wasn’t about to start. She shook her hands by her side, and as she did, a jolt of pain gripped her wrists.

  Halen. A whispered voice brushed her ear.

  She spun around. Toby Creston shot her an annoyed glare as he shielded his score sheet with his arm. As if she would copy his answers. She sucked at algebra, but she had studied; Toby Creston would be lucky if he figured out how to fill the circles in.

  Haaaalennnn.

  A searing pain spread up her arms, and she inhaled a sharp breath. She whipped around to face the front of the class. Mr. Ajax sat with his long nose wedged between the pages of his book. He peered over the rim of his catlike glasses when she let out a gasp.

  HalenHalenHalenHalenHalenHalenHalenHalenHalenHalenHalen.

  Beating like the thunderous wings of a thousand birds, the whispers swarmed her thoughts. Her fingertips pressed the squishy foam nestled in her ears. No way. She couldn’t take her earplugs out. Her earplugs were her salvation, the only things keeping her from blacking out. Besides the sparks, sound had become her enemy since moving back to Rockaway. Her mom’s diagnosis—stress. “You’re suppressing your grief,” she had said. “You have to let yourself have a good cry.” Her mom overestimated the power of tears. Halen’s father’s bones lay in a bed of sand—tears would never bring him back—tears would never drown the fire raging inside her. Tears would not save her now.

  The chants grew louder, now drilling into every crevice of her mind. She pounded the sides of her head. The blond girl beside her scooted her desk away from her, shooting her an evil glare.

  Stop! Halen begged as the whispers hammered her brain. She didn’t have a choice, she had to…

  She tore the earplugs from her ears. At once the chanting ceased, only now to be replaced with the chaotic clatter of the classroom. The blond girl now tapped her pencil on her desk. The metal eraser band hitting the desktop sounded like a jackhammer. She could hear the click clack of some other student’s gum and the strike of a pointed heal on the linoleum floor. Toby Creston’s heavy breath was a rush of howling wind. The sounds united with the next student, and then the next, until the whole classroom exploded with a deafening cry. Halen fought to hold on as the classroom blackened around her. She caught the word freak, someone calling for Mr. Ajax, and the blond girl shrieking. The last sound Halen heard was the thud of her skull as her forehead slammed against the desktop.

  “That’s twice this week,” a muffled voice said. “I think she should take some time off from school.”

  Halen’s fingertip poked the foam cushioning her ear. As she peeked between slit eyelids even the soft florescent lighting stung. She pinched her eyes shut. She didn’t need to see anyway. The school infirmary was a familiar place. Three months in a new school and already she would qualify for a frequent visitor card.

  “Hey, when can she go?” Halen recognized this voice—Tage.

&n
bsp; Great. She groaned. Tage was the last person she wanted to see right now. She was the only girl she knew at this school, but a complete stranger would be better than Tage. Halen might be able to persuade her not to tell her mom, but she would be the first to rat her out to Daspar. He was already on freak-out mode, since they moved back to Rockaway. Last week Halen had been late for a swim meet. She had been studying and fallen asleep in the library. Tage couldn’t find her and called Daspar. He had the entire school just short of issuing an Amber alert. If Tage had just set foot in the library, they could have avoided the pandemonium. But no, you would think the library was holy ground and Tage the damned. Come to think of it…

  Squinting, Halen caught sight of the row of silver rings lining Tage’s lower lip. Her hair was newly shaven close to her scalp, with just a layer of black fuzz on one side. The other half lay long and silken down past her shoulder and along her arm, which even in the summer was covered with long black sleeves. Yes, sun and the library would probably burst Tage into flames.

  “You’re awake.” Tage sat across from her and propped her boots on the edge of the cot. “What were you thinking—taking your earplugs out?” Despite Tage’s queen of the damned appearance, she looked genuinely concerned. She had definitely called Daspar.

  “Does my mom know?” Halen sat up and the room spun.

  “She’s on her way.” Tage nibbled the edges of her fraying nail polish.

  Halen’s heart sank. Her mom was already worried enough about her as it was. The move had been her mom’s idea. She thought coming back to Rockaway Beach would be good for the both of them. A time to heal, she referred to the transition. More like a time to embrace insanity. The whispers were a whole new kind of crazy, though. Halen would postpone telling her mom about them—indefinitely.

  “Did you really have to call her?”

  Tage leaned forward, her caramel eyes simmering like hot coffee. “Hey, look. You think I like being yanked out of class every time you decide to drool on the floor?”

  “You’re not my babysitter,” Halen snapped. But ever since she’d moved back to Rockaway, that was what Tage pretty much was. She lived with Daspar who was Tage’s godfather and now her legal guardian, although Halen had never even heard of Tage until three months ago. The details about Tage’s parents were sketchy to say the least, but supposedly they had died in some kind of hunting accident. Halen wasn’t sure exactly, and no one was willing to fill in the details, especially Daspar. If Daspar could be complimented on one attribute it would be his ability to avoid answering a direct question. If Halen wanted to know how Tage’s parents died she would have to ask Tage, and that was so not going to happen in this century.

  “Honey, you look horrible.” Halen’s mom brushed past Tage.

  Rolling her heavily black lined eyes, Tage stood up. “I’m outta here.”

  Halen’s mom touched her arm. “Thank you.”

  “Whatever.” Tage shrugged. She gave Halen a last look, and Halen was sure that if flames shot out of people’s eyes, she would be reduced to ash.

  Halen gulped, sliding her eyes toward her mom. She was still in her white doctor’s coat, a stethoscope hung loosely around her neck underneath her dark braid. “You didn’t have to leave work,” Halen said.

  “It’s fine. I assigned my patients to another doctor. I’m going to take the afternoon off.”

  “Mom, you don’t have to come running…”

  Her mom cut her off. “I wanted to get out of there.” Her lips spread with a mischievous grin. “I had some difficult patients this afternoon.”

  “Difficult pregnant women? You love your job.”

  “I love you more.” She wrapped her arm around Halen’s shoulder, and Halen inhaled the scent of gauze and lemon, with a hint of rose, and the metallic scent of blood—the hospital. Halen held her breath to suppress gagging. If a nose plug wasn’t so obvious, she would wear one too. As if hearing everyone’s breath wasn’t enough, her sense of smell and taste were working overtime. Even eating a simple veggie burger had become an assault on her taste buds and her emotions. The flavors messed with her feelings. Like the euphoria psychologists suggest people get from eating chocolate. Only for her, every food now had a different sensation. Veggie burgers, with dill pickles, equalled melancholy—which was why she was trying to avoid them. She was confused enough.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Halen rose to her feet, head swimming.

  “Please sign out,” the nurse called over her shoulder. She was busy applying bandages to a boy’s forehead. Halen choked back the odour of copper and iron; the taste of blood coated her tongue. Clasping her sleeve to her nose, she scrawled her name on the line with her free hand. After headlining as the biggest psycho in algebra—correction, the school—her name would be on everyone’s lips. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She only wished she didn’t have to go back.

  Halen cracked the kitchen window open, and the salt air rushed in. This house had way more room than their apartment in Chicago, but there was nothing homey about it. It was more like the hospital—sterile. The walls were constructed of bleak concrete, broken with panels of tinted glass. The floors were more bare concrete without carpets to warm your toes. This crypt of concrete would be their home for the next year.

  A year seemed like an eternity. Halen had lived in Dallas, Minneapolis, and Manhattan just in the last two years. Rockaway Beach had been a shocker. She had never lived in a place without towers of skyscrapers. Rockaway sat on the outskirts of a bigger city, with Portland still two hours away. There was one school and one grocery store. No bookstore. Her mom had given her a digital book reader to compensate. It was still in the box. She couldn’t quite get past not having real pages between her fingers and corners to turn over to mark her place. She was going through bookstore withdrawals and losing her sanity at the same time. She would have to try and persuade her mom to take her to Portland—soon. If she could just nestle between the isles of books, get lost for few hours, she might be able to harness some of these crazy new feelings she had been experiencing.

  Arranging her chopped fruit in a bowl, Halen plucked a strawberry out and ate it. She stared out to the white-tipped waves breaking along the shore. In the distance, two massive rocks jutted up from the ocean—Twin Rocks. They seemed misplaced against the long stretch of sand, as if God had forgotten to put away his building blocks. Halen followed the hollow of the rock, which formed the tail of a serpent, the other rock its head dipping under the waves. Darla, her dad had named the shape of the water beast the rocks formed. Or maybe it was Daphne, she couldn’t quite remember. Memories of him came and went like the tide, leaving fragments for her to pick up, each moment like a treasured piece of sea glass. Only she never could piece them all together in one solid memory.

  With her earplugs in, Halen didn’t even hear Daspar and Tage enter the kitchen. She jumped when she saw him and aimed the knife in his direction. He held his hands up. Waving the knife, she cut the air. “You know it’s not nice to sneak up on a girl.”

  Tage reached around from behind Daspar and helped herself to a strawberry from Halen’s bowl.

  “What’s this I hear about you blacking out at school today?” Daspar asked.

  “It was nothing.” Halen shot Tage an annoyed glare.

  Tage shrugged and made her way into the living room, leaving Halen to fend for herself.

  “I didn’t eat lunch,” Halen started to explain. This was a lie. She had two helpings of French fries just because they made her feel happy. Now that was normal, nothing connected to the weirdness she had been experiencing. Eating French fries made people happy—all people.

  “My blood sugar must have been too low.”

  “Two times in one week?” Daspar’s golden stare met hers. He was older than her mom by five or six years, but he looked ten years younger than her. His skin was without lines except for a little crescent moon scar by his left eye. His clothes were not for the over forty club but rather a night club. Hi
s jacket was tailor made from a slick material that appeared wet and his pencil thin denim jeans a custom-dyed dark wash. His sandy blond hair was always close shaven to his scalp and behind his ear was a small tattoo with four letters that spelled Tari. Halen had searched the name on the internet finding zero results. She knew better than to ask him.

  “It won’t happen again. I promise to eat my lunch,” Halen said.

  Still dressed for work, Halen’s mom entered the kitchen. She stood beside Daspar, and he spoke close to her ear. Halen cursed her earplugs. Her sensitive hearing allowed her to hear most conversations, but whispers were shielded by the neon green foam. Bowing her head, her mom nodded yes, though her mouth was tight as if she were fighting her response. She placed her hand over Halen’s and rubbed the three new dots that had appeared on her hand the same day she had first been compelled to draw the boy. Halen didn’t mind the dots so much; it was the rest of her birthmark she hated. The dark dots and swirls sprawled across her shoulder trailing her left arm down to her hand. It would be one thing if her mom allowed her to get laser removal, but she had told her they had to wait until the mark stopped spreading. The new dots didn’t help her case.

  “Honey we need to talk,” her mom said.

  Halen’s stomach instantly knotted. These were words no one ever wanted to hear. They usually preceded crappy news. Her mom pulled her hand, and they joined Tage in the living room. Tage got up to leave when Daspar nodded, and she threw herself back down.

  “Let me give the girls their gifts first,” Daspar said, looking to Halen’s mom.

  Something was definitely up. Halen was all too familiar with the side-glances her mom and Daspar shared.

  “Gifts?” Tage slid her black socked feet off the coffee table and sat up.

  “I have gifts for the two of you—for your birthdays,” he said. “I’m sorry yours is late.” He turned toward Tage and then back to Halen. “And yours is a bit early.”