QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN ARROW
To my daughter, Emily Ciciotte, the brilliant magic warrior who made this story and all my stories possible. Without her, there would be no me. And vice versa, because … you know … I’m her mom.
Also by Carrie Jones
Time Stoppers
Need
Captivate
Entice
Endure
With Steven E. Wedel
After Obsession
QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN ARROW
CARRIE JONES
Contents
1. Pomegranates Cha-Cha
2. Feelings Schmeelings
3. Bossy Girls for the Win
4. Wanted: Dead or Alive
5. Monsters
6. Trolling for Tutus
7. Mini Magic
8. Grady O’Grady
9. The Headless Horror
10. The Maker of the Town
11. The Boy in the Woods
12. Megan’s Room
13. Grandparents
14. Preflight Jitters
15. Pig Cars
16. Polka-Dotted Giggles
17. Hovering Snatchers
18. Piggy GPS
19. The Boy Who Goes Unnoticed
20. The Arrow
21. Unleashing the Power
22. And So It Continues
23. Helping Hags
24. The Badlands
25. The Awful Place
26. The Meeting
27. A Traitor Revealed
28. Basking in the Glory of Ickiness
29. Powers May Fade
30. Evil Keeps on Eviling
Acknowledgments
1
Pomegranates Cha-Cha
When Annie Nobody, the youngest Time Stopper currently in existence, awoke that frigidly cold winter morning, she was already happy. It didn’t matter that her always-messy hair stood up in tufts that resembled hay bales. It didn’t matter that a good amount of sleep residue resided by her overly large eyes. She just wiped it away without a second thought. And it certainly didn’t matter that her room seemed abnormally cold as a ghost floated in front of her face, dramatically blowing air out her transparent nose. Annie just squared her shoulders and smiled at the ghost’s worried face.
What mattered was that she, Annie Nobody, the same girl who earlier this week had been an orphan, abandoned (unwanted and very unloved) at a foster home where the family only cared about money, was now in a magical town that she and her new friends had just saved from a crow monster and trolls the night before.
What mattered was that she had friends now.
And a job. That is, if one could call being a Time Stopper a job. Miss Cornelia had promised to teach her all about being a Time Stopper. Miss Cornelia was the matriarch of Aurora, fond of rainbow skirts, and full of wrinkles. She was a Time Stopper, too.
In all her years, Annie had never felt more at home than she was at Miss Cornelia’s Aquarius House. And last night, Annie actually had the best night’s sleep she’d probably ever had in her life. She even had her own bed, which was pretty awesome. She rubbed at her eyes again as the ghost huffed at her.
“Wake up!”
Annie sat up straight. “Sorry! Why? Did I sleep too late?”
“No questions!” The ghost twirled around in a frantic circle, wringing her transparent hands together. “NO questions. Not allowed. No, they aren’t.”
Annie bit her lip. She’d forgotten that questions always sent the ghost, the Woman in White, into a small tornado of tizziness.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“Apologies are lovely, but they get you nowhere,” the ghost whispered into Annie’s ear.
Her breath tickled.
The ghost retreated up toward the roof. “Things are happening!”
“What sort—” Annie broke off her question, but it was too late.
“QUESTIONS!” The ghost began to whirl into the ceiling, frantic. Her head and left shoulder disappeared completely while the rest of her dangled there, spinning. Her long white dress and petticoats fluttered as she rotated, out of control, for several moments.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Annie called after her, because she honestly wasn’t quite sure what else to say. Sorry, obviously, wasn’t good enough.
Suddenly, a man’s voice boomed into the room. “Stopper! Do you have any idea how much our heads hurt when you stop time? It’s like railroad cars are driving through them.”
“Ah, the pain … the pain …,” sang a wispy woman.
A barrage of voices echoed “the pain … the pain …” just as dozens of ghosts crammed into Annie’s bedroom.
Like the Woman in White, these ghosts were translucent and very dead. They stood half on the bookcases, dangled from the ceiling lights, and floated arm to arm along her bed. Some overlapped onto each other, body parts taking up bits of the same space. A young girl, with a teddy bear pinned to her dress, slid along the edge of the bookshelf. Some stern men in Revolutionary War outfits, missing limbs and with big black holes in their chests, craned toward her as she stared. A man who wore a doctor’s stethoscope paced back and forth through several ghosts dressed as nuns. Some friars knelt on the floor, hands clasped in prayer, rocking back and forth. The doctor kept checking his watch and looking at a thermometer.
Annie had never seen them before. She wondered where they had all come from. Annie was still a little confused about what was happening. She’d never seen so many ghosts and so early in the morning. She was almost half-convinced she was still dreaming.
“Hello, and how do you do?” Annie greeted the pack.
“We are here,” one of the stern ghosts said, “to implore you not to stop time unless absolutely necessary. It gives us all a headache.”
The little girl ghost toddled over to Annie’s chair beside the bed, reaching out her arms to be picked up. Annie hesitated and grabbed her, pulling her up with her onto the bed. It was like taking hold of air, but she cradled the transparent form in her arms. The little ghost cuddled in and whispered, “I’m Chloe. Head hurts sometimes.”
It broke Annie’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a soothing tone.
The child turned solid for a moment, and Annie kissed her cheek. The girl smiled.
“We need you to not stop time again,” the doctor ghost demanded.
The ghosts murmured among themselves.
“I can’t promise that,” Annie said, thinking about the Raiff and his dangers. Sure, they’d gotten the Gnome of Protection back, but the Raiff was still out there in the Badlands, hoping to find a way to come back and hurt them, a demon ready to unleash his trolls and the rest of his minions. “I might—I might have to …”
“We could help her if she needs us,” a nun said.
“We are not supposed to interfere in the world of the living,” the man said stiffly, as the group of friar ghosts began murmuring louder prayers.
“Fiddlesticks,” said the Woman in White, reappearing again, perfectly dry, but with a piece of seaweed draped over her shoulder. She plucked it out and put it on the merboy Farkey’s hair. “We do all the time.”
“A vote, then?” The doctor ghost raised his hand. “All in favor raise hands. Those without limbs may say ‘Aye.’ ”
Most hands shot in the air and a few “Ayes” rang out.
The ghost turned back to Annie with an air of ceremony. He smiled at Chloe and her teddy. “We promise to help you if the need arises.”
The old ghost reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a solid gleaming brass bell.
“The bell!”
“He gave her the bell!”
“Oh, goodness me.”
“My head …”
“A promise is a promise.”
Annie took the heavy bell in her free hand.
“It summons us,” the ghost doctor said. His voice was solemn and deep. “Ring the bell and we will help you. Use it instead of stopping time if you can.”
“Thank you,” Annie said in what she hoped was a solemn and respectful voice. “I will only use both if necessary.”
As soon as Annie said the words, the ghosts disappeared. If it wasn’t for the bell in her hand, Annie would have thought she’d imagined it all.
The Woman in White popped her head back into the room. Wet tears drenched her cheeks and leaked onto Annie’s quilt, creating a damp puddle spot as quickly as if there had been a torrential rainstorm. “Learn from your mistakes, Annie, dear little Nobody. Learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others. For he comes … he comes soon … and my poor Cornelia …”
“Miss Cornelia …” Annie tried to make the name less of a question and more of a prodding.
“She goes!” The ghost sobbed once more, unleashing a waterfall onto the end of the bed.
Annie leaped out from under the covers, standing on the bed, reaching up toward the ghost as the rest of her began to spiral into the cloud-painted ceiling. Panic overwhelming her, Annie attempted to grab the ghost’s disappearing left ankle.
“What? What do you mean? Who goes? Where? Where does she go? Do you mean Miss Cornelia?”
But the ghost was gone, leaving behind a wet bed and a confused Annie.
“Please come back!” she called after her.
Tala, the huge white dog who had helped to save Annie from her foster home, woofed his agreement, but the ghost didn’t return.
She jumped off the bed, kneeling next to Tala. Her arms wrapped around the dog’s chest and she buried her face in his fur. Home. She was home. Whatever the Woman in White was carrying on about probably wasn’t that important. It couldn’t be.
With her friends Jamie and Eva and Bloom, she had saved the town last night. Annie had done what she once might have thought was impossible: they had stolen a force field–producing gnome from trolls and battled—and defeated—a terrifying crow monster. They and all of Aurora were safe. Nothing could go wrong now. They’d even had a party and celebrated both the victory and Jamie’s thirteenth birthday.
“Obviously,” Annie said to Tala, stroking his muzzle, “I am being a worrywart.”
He nuzzled her chin.
“Right?” she asked, her voice rising with worry.
Tala gave a tiny woof.
“Good,” she said, staring into his big brown eyes, and for a split second, they reminded her of something familiar, somehow. “You are the best dog ever. Now let’s get some breakfast.”
Down the hall from Annie, James Hephaistion Alexander woke up and dressed quickly; a strange feeling of dread seemed to only be growing, tightening his small chest.
He tried to push the anxiety out. Maybe he was just anxious because he was used to being anxious? He had lived with trolls all his life, and not just trolls, but trolls pretending to be his relatives, trolls that were just waiting for him to turn thirteen so that they could eat him. That was enough to make anyone anxious.
But it felt like more than just a habit.
It felt real.
It felt as if things were about to go terribly bad somehow, if they hadn’t already, which made no sense because everything was all right now.
Hurriedly, he started to put on his shoes. Aquarius House seemed like the sort of home where people wore shoes inside. Old and Victorian, rambling along multiple corridors, the house exuded magic and welcome and mystery all at once.
Someone banged on the door with a fist.
“Are you awake?” Eva challenged in a grumpy, demanding voice.
He sat on the edge of his bed with one shoe dangling from his toes, too shocked to answer.
“Jamie! Have you gone troll or something, or are you awake?” she hollered.
He checked his skin. It was still a dark shade of brown. His wrists were still bony. Jamie had always been skinny. His father and grandmother only let him have a couple of minuscule cans of Vienna sausages a day. It was hard to build up muscles let alone fat on that kind of diet. A pat to his head confirmed he still had hair.
“I am not a troll,” he announced, feeling quite relieved. “I am still human!”
“Are you naked?” she demanded through the closed door.
Jamie hopped up. “What? What? No!”
“Then why don’t you open up the freaking door? Freaking word, Jamie. You are as rude as a freaking arkan sonney, I swear. Are you just going to skulk in your room all day like some Manx fairy hedgehog or something?”
Eva kicked the giant wooden door open and trotted into the room, grabbing Jamie by his ear, tugging him toward the door and the hallway. “I mean, I know we’re friends, but you have got to stop hiding from the world. You’ve got to go out there and announce yourself, you know?”
Jamie’s shoe fell off.
Eva did not notice. “I mean, freaking word, Jamie. You are a hero now, you know? Just like me. Although, obviously not as mighty as me or as brave or whatever. But you are a hero. You’ve got to act like one. Every morning you have to roar hello to the sun like this …”
She proceeded to do a pretty decent lion imitation, releasing Jamie’s ear so she could pound her chest for effect. Jamie scuttled back and grabbed his shoe.
Eva stopped roaring, braced her stocky frame in the doorway, and peered at Jamie, a triumphant smile filling her face before she said, “That was a pretty good roar, huh?”
“Amazing. An amazing roar.” Jamie knew Eva was big on flattery. He and Annie had talked about that a lot.
“I could teach you how to do it?” Eva suggested. “We could have roaring lessons.”
Jamie hopped around and then leaned against the wall, trying to get his shoe on. “Well … I don’t think I’m really a roaring type.”
Eva scrutinized him. Her arms crossed her chest. “No, you’re more of the studying, quiet type. The smart type like SalGoud, only with actual emotions.”
“Maybe,” Jamie admitted, thinking of his young friend the stone giant and his penchant for books, history, and quotations.
“That’s too bad.” Eva coughed behind her hand. “Bor-ing.”
Jamie decided to ignore that statement rather than argue about it, which, he realized, probably just proved Eva’s point.
Once his shoe was on, she grabbed his hand and tugged him down the hallway. “Come on. We have a day to adventure with. No school. A weekend. Life is freaking good!”
She was so enthusiastic about it, pretty much bounding down the velvety wall-papered corridor, that it was hard for Jamie to remember the tight feeling in his chest—the feeling he’d always get right before his grandmother screamed at him and threw cans at his head, the feeling he’d always get right before his father and grandmother would play catch, making him the ball, the feeling he’d had right before he watched his grandmother turn into a real, certified monster.
That feeling was doom.
That feeling was dread.
That feeling was oh-my-gosh-something-is-horribly-wrong.
And even as he followed Eva down the hallway of Aquarius House, that feeling was spreading. The house appeared slightly less fancy and elaborate than the day before. It was as if the magic keeping it all together had started to wilt.
“Good morning, Aquarius House,” he said to the wallpapered hall.
G d mor ing, Jami appeared in shaky script writing along the walls.
He did not like the look of the greeting, which was missing letters and trailed away into swirls before fading away completely. Usually, the walls were a stickler for perfect grammar and liked using upbeat punctuation.
Jamie pushed his concern out of his mind for the moment and quickly caught up with Eva, who wasn’t much of a runner. The thing about Jamie was that he was a
ctually quite fast. He was all knobby knees and close-cropped hair, short straight nose, and thin arms, but he was in actuality stronger than he looked and much faster than people expected. Living with his fake grandmother and pretend father had taught him how to dodge meaty fists, outrun kicks, and sidestep thrown cans. He could bob and weave and evade pretty much all kinds of blows. It came from all the chores the Alexanders had made him do.
He hadn’t had to do one chore at Aquarius House. He blinked hard at the realization. How was that even possible? To not have to clean toilets with toothbrushes or cook meals or pick up random chicken feathers off the floor? It seemed impossible, but it felt sooo good to not have to do work, or be yelled at, or hit in the back of the head, or anything horrible.
Nobody kicked or threw things at him here in Aurora.
“Eva …” He stopped following her down the hallway.
“What?” She put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot.
“Why are we hurrying?”
“Because this is my first full day as an official, glorious hero and I don’t want to miss it!” She glowered at him as if she couldn’t believe he hadn’t figured it out.
Annie and Tala sat at the kitchen counter, which was all shiny and deep-colored, waiting for the bread to pop up from the unicorn-shaped toaster. Nobody else was there and an odd quiet settled over the room.
When Annie opened the refrigerator, none of the food items sang out like they had the night before. The cartons of eggs and blocks of cheese and butter just rested there stock-still like regular cartons of eggs and blocks of cheese and butter. Even the milk stayed in its jug and refrained from yodeling. Everything seemed profoundly un-magical. Annie found it unsettling. She’d been looking forward to a bacon serenade or a pomegranate cha-cha, to the obvious evidence of happy magic.
“Maybe the food is just asleep,” she whispered to Tala as she quietly removed the orange juice and shut the refrigerator.
Tala whined.
“Don’t you think?” Annie whispered.
His tail drooped.
She poured herself some orange juice and got him some water, which he elegantly lapped out of a sparkling bowl decorated with frolicking dwarfs.