*Isla*
I am staring at the telephone, missing my youngest brother, wondering how he is doing, wishing I could see him, hug him, see his smile… when the phone rings, and I jump back into my chair at the dining table, almost knocking it over.
The situation seems a little creepy. Lately, Mystica has been filling my mind with all kinds of thoughts about what could be going on with my mental state–the dreams, the memories, all of that stuff–that when I am looking at the phone and hear it break the noiseless space of my room with its high-pitched chirp, I can’t help but wonder for a moment if I did that with my mind.
Shaking my head at my ridiculousness, I get up and rush over to answer the phone before the caller hangs up. I have no idea who would be calling when I haven’t given my number to anyone.
My initial thought is that perhaps someone is calling the number wanting to reach whoever had this phone number before, but I won’t know until I lift the receiver.
“Hello?” I say, my heart racing. I don’t have a whole lot of experience talking on the phone, and the last time I spoke to anyone, well, it hadn’t gone well.
“Uhm… is this… Isla?”
My heart leaps into my throat, and my head starts to swim. I lower myself down to the edge of my bed and try to keep my racing thoughts from making me pass out.
Perhaps it’s the mix of the injuries I’ve had recently with all of the emotional turbulence, but that voice in my ear after my last thoughts is making my head feel fuzzy.
“Yeah, it’s me. B-Ben?”
“Hey!” he says with a warm laugh, and I can tell the anxiety he was feeling about phoning me has also melted away. It’s not like my kid brother has a lot of experience using the phone either. “I’m so glad I was able to reach you. The operator at the castle switchboard said that this was your number, but that confused me. I figured you’d be working.”
“Not right now,” I say quickly. My initial thought is, “Not this time of day,” but I’m not going to say that to my brother who has no idea what my real job is. I’m sure, like Mom, he just assumes I’m some sort of a fancy maid. “I was literally just thinking about you when you called.”
“Really?” he says with another rich chuckle that makes me smile.
And miss him even worse.
“Yeah, I really was.” I don’t tell him I was staring at the phone wishing I could call him because that might freak him out. “Where are you calling me from?”
“Home,” he says. “We got a phone. It’s really cool. And Mom and Dad are looking for a nicer house, too.”
I am so happy to hear that, my smile widens. “Wow. That’s great. You must be excited.”
“We are all excited, and it wouldn’t be possible without you. Mom said that King Maddox gave her a bunch of money that you earned. I never knew maids in the castle made so much money!”
My cheeks flush red. He’s fifteen, so he’s not a baby, but he’s still my brother, and I don’t want to tell him how his big sister, his best friend, made all of that money. It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong. I love Maddox, and I think he cares deeply about me. But… no one wants to think of their family member doing… that.
“I have a pretty particular servant job,” I tell him, thinking it wouldn’t be fair for me to leave him believing that working at the castle typically pays as much as what Maddox has handed over to my parents.
And that’s not even including the debt he forgave to Alpha Ernest.
“When I get older, maybe you can help me get a job at the castle!” he says, already going where I didn’t want him to go.
“Uhm, maybe.” I see no reason in discussing it now when he won’t be eligible to work at the castle for another three years anyway. “You should think about going to college, though. You can do that now. Mom and Dad can afford it.”
“Nah, none of us really want to go to college. We just want to be warriors. I was thinking I could start out as a guard at the castle, and then, I could join the castle defense or the king’s guard. You could help me with that, right? You know the king pretty well, don’t you?”
I choke on air as I process what he’s asked. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“So you can help me get a job at the castle then, right? Pull a few strings?”
He sounds so enthusiastic and excited, I want to tell him yes, but there’s no way he can come to the castle and not know what my job is. “Probably. Let’s just see how things are when you graduate from high school.” I look at the clock. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“It’s a holiday,” he says, his tone implying I should know that he wouldn’t just skip school. Even when he was super sick and was in and out of the hospital, he never missed school unless he literally couldn’t get out of bed.
“Where’s everyone else?” My mind jumps to the conversation I had with my mom the other day and the one that I had with my sister. I want to ask him what he thinks about where we came from, but the last thing I need is for my mom to know I haven’t let it go. She thinks I should just accept that we aren’t from Maatua.
“Mom and Dad are at work, and the other guys are out playing basketball with some friends,” he says.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” I already know the answer to that question, but I want to encourage him. I hope I’m not doing the opposite with my question.
I hear him sigh loudly. “You know, sports aren’t my thing.”
Ben has been so sick his whole life, he never really got into any sports. He’s twig thin and tall, but his weak lungs make it so that he can’t run very fast. My other brothers tease him quite a bit about it, and I used to be the one to tell them to stop, but now that I’m not there, I’m wondering who is doing that for him now. Probably no one.
I decide not to bring up our history right now. I don’t see the point. Ben wasn’t even born until we were in Willow Pack. He won’t remember anything. “So… have you started packing yet?” I ask, changing the subject completely.
“No, not yet. We haven’t found a place to live. Mom says she’d like to live in a two-story house. She said something about never finding a house like their old one, but it would be nice if they could at least have a house with a dining room. I don’t know what their old one was like, but it sounded like it might’ve been nice from what she was saying.”
I don’t know if she meant the first house we had in Willow pack, which was pretty nice compared to our current one, or if she’s talking about the house we used to live in before.
If they really were the king and queen of Maatua, I’m guessing they lived in a pretty nice house.
Would their home have been anything like the castle I lived in now?
Ben continues, “Oh, but I did hear mom say something to Dad about it the other day. She said we needed to make sure we brought everything. I thought that was so weird. What would she be talking about, I?”
Sometimes Ben calls me I, and it's confusing to people because they think he means himself, which often doesn’t make sense in the sentence.
I think about his question, and it took me a second, but an idea came to mind. “Ben, you’re sure no one else is home?” I ask him.
“I’m pretty sure I’d know if they were here. This house is the size of a shoebox.”
I almost laugh. His feet are huge, though, so that might be true. “Could you do something for me?”
“I don’t know. What’s in it for me?” he teases.
I laugh. “Uhm… a new house?”
“Sure, sis. What do you need?”
A knot forms in my stomach as I think about what I’m asking him to do. Ben is a good kid. I’m supposed to be a good girl. What I want him to do is not something obedient children should be doing.
“Can you go into Mom and Dad’s room and see if you can get that board that’s loose up out of the windowsill?” I have no idea if Mom still hides stuff in the window like I hid the cufflinks, but I am wondering if Ben can find any proof of where we’re from. I’ve gone from not wanting to tell him anything to using him as a spy. I’m an awful sister.
“Hold on,” he says, and I hear him walking into the other room. I am guessing the phone is cordless. He makes a few grunting noises and says, “I think they might’ve fixed it. It’s not working.”
Irritated, I ask, “Are you sure? Maybe you should set the phone down.”
He mutters something under his breath and I hear him set the phone down. The struggle continues before I hear a crash, and I have to assume the phone fell from wherever he sat it. Ben curses in the distance, but then I hear a squeaking sound–and he curses again. This time, he doesn’t sound angry.
He sounds astonished.
“Hey, sis, it’s not the window, but the floor just opened when I dropped the phone. There’s a space down here.”
My heart begins to pound in my chest. “Is there anything in there?”
“Yeah… hold on.”
I do my best to stay calm as I wait for him. I wish he’d hurry up.
“There’s… a file of old papers, a box with a necklace in it, a few cards, oh, and another jewelry box with… those are weird earrings.”
I really want to know what’s on those papers, but something else catches my attention first. “Earrings?”
“Yeah, it looks like it would be painful to put these in your ears, and the backs are on super tight.”
“What do they look like?” I ask, envisioning some giant hoops or something.
“They’re wolves,” he says. “Golden wolves.”
My heart leaps into my chest. “What?” I ask him. “Is that it?”
“No… they’ve got jewels on them, Like their eyes. But they don’t match. One has emeralds–”
With my heart hammering, I finish for him.
“And the other has rubies.”