Soul Revival

By Rebecca Bloomer

Strange things can happen on Midsummer's Night. A funeral pyre can burn and a girl can slide through time.

After that things just keep getting stranger for Roxy Hart. There are witch trials and ferrymen, corsets that pinch and young girls with dark secrets. Of course Roxy knows someone needs saving, but who, how and from what?

Join Roxy Hart as she denies destiny, reallocates luck and sifts truth from lies to find a reality she never could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebecca Bloomer
• Release date: Nov 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301978977

Rebecca Bloomer

Rebecca Bloomer is a Brisbane-based author with a keen interest in pretty much everything. Rebecca’s favourite writing aids are:•long walks (often in someone else’s shoes)•big dreams (day, night and especially in meetings)•a decent sense of humour (her own or someone else’s, itdoesn’t make too much difference)•curiosity (ever wondered why cats look so smug?)•observation skills (thus the contact lenses)•quiet determination (the loud kind causes headaches)If you'd like to know more, please visit her website!

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Rebecca Bloomer

Copyright 2012 Rebecca Bloomer

Smashwords Edition

Discover other Smashwords titles by Rebecca Bloomer

Also Available In This Series:

Old Soul

Other Books by Rebecca Bloomer:

UnEarthed

UnEarthly

Willow Farrington Bites Back

Foley Russel And That Poor Girl

Mae-Be Roses

Coming Soon:

Soul Revival (Travellers Fate Series)

Acknowledgements

For my daughter Felicity whom I hope continues to lead a charmed life.

For my friend Ashlyn Chase, who entrusted me with Roxy Hart.

For Haley Kerans who offered enthusiasm, advice and support.

For Jodi Moran who never lets me get away with anything.

For Marianne Subra who reminded me I have dancing feet.

For all the people who've told me stories and let me dream, you know who you are…many thanks.

Of Fairies, Witches, Gypsies,

My nourrice sang to me ,

Sua Gypsies, Fairies, Witches,

I alsua synge to thee.

Denham Tract

Chapter One

When I die, I will need two names on my headstone. Roxy Hart will be the first. Underneath it will be Aishe Camomescro, my true name, the one given me by my people, the Rromany. Beneath that, if Shani gets his way, it might also say Lively Lover (because that’s what my name means and he likes to tease me)… or if he really gets his way, it might say Wife. There is still some contention about that. I have commitment issues. He’s doing his best to help me overcome them. Beneath all of those words, there will be numbers. Numbers inside closed brackets. Or maybe not. Perhaps, if I do everything right, my brackets will be left open like the gates to a mansion waiting for its owner to return. This was not the case for my Gran. Her brackets closed.

I had never been to a funeral before. I’d never known anyone long enough to have them die on me. Now that I have, I can honestly say that funerals are inadequate. Not being an idiot, I understand that the routine, the actions performed during the funeral service, are supposed to give mourners something to hold on to, something they can do. But they don’t.

Grief, I have learned, is a small word for something so deep and dark and emptying. Grief. It sounds like that noise a person makes between sobs. The sound a person makes as their body is hollowed out to be left nothing but a fragile shell.

Gran would have expected more from me. She’d have growled at me for being so weak. Aishe, she would say cupping soil in her gnarled hand, without death there is no life. Then she would quirk her eyebrow. You know it is true. Others have told you so.

Those ‘others’, the Rromany—Shani, Laleh and Vadoma in particular—had opened lots of doors for Gran, Ma and me. I got to learn things Ma would normally have forbidden, and Gran had delighted in teaching them to me. This lesson, this particular crappy lesson, I wish she had kept from me.

In the time between my return and her dying, Gran spent hours teaching me Rromanes, her steady hand firmly in the middle of my back as the shudders of memory and longing ran through me. It turns out language evokes memories and feelings more strongly than even smells or images. Memory is a form of true-seeing and both, it turns out, make me sick. So, it was also Gran who stroked my hair and kept it from my face as I hurled up the bile that always followed a true reading of my cards.

This is the price, she told me, for you, Aishe, who fights always with belief, with truth…this is the cost of seeing it. She smiled as she said it, of course, unable to be less than delighted with a child who could see things in the cards. Thrilled that after having spent all my life with her, she finally got to teach me her world.

What she had loved most, though, was walking with me through the woods. Much like the enchanted forests of children’s stories, the woods around our house are magic. Maybe sheer age has gifted them with power. Apparently the same is not true of humans, but when we walked together, I thought it was so. Gran’s old legs moved her almost as silently as Shani’s moved him when he was hunting. She named plants for me, showed me how to use them, and what never to touch.

She was so alive when we did these things. I thought it must have something to do with speaking in her own language, because feeling the rolled r’s on her tongue and the swallowed vowels in the back of her throat certainly seemed to shake loose her stories. She told them tirelessly and I listened. Well, I listened as best I could. A girl would need superhuman focus to concentrate on every word, and Roxy Hart is not that girl.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t know what was happening when she dressed herself in her favourite floral skirt, her starchy white shirt, and a shawl that was hand painted with roses. Her grey hair hung, in its plait, well past her waist, and my favourite earrings, the hoops with drop shaped baubles that dangled, tinkled and shone like new beside a face that was creased with years of smiling, frowning, and travelling. Gran didn’t often wear makeup any more, but that afternoon, she’d smudged on a bit of lipstick and darkened her eyebrows, because she hated the way they always seemed to disappear on her dark olive skin.

You going to church or something? I smiled at her and tugged on the hem of her skirt from where I sat on the porch. It wasn’t unheard of for my Gran to go to church, faith in something great and powerful, after all, is generic across all forms of belief.

Aishe, she chuckled and lowered herself slowly into her wooden rocker. Aishe, she grasped my hand and kept it beneath hers on the arm of her chair. Sit with me daughter of my daughter. Sit with me in this, my church. With her eyes she motioned towards the woods surrounding us.

Gran! I snuffled with laughter. Pastor Pete would have a fit if he heard you. Pastor Pete was unfortunate, I thought, in that he was a genuinely nice, slightly goofy kind of a guy. Sadly, whenever someone said his name, I expected the holy version of instant Mac ‘n’ Cheese. Pastor Pete served with a rich tomato sauce and scrapings of tasty parmesan. If Pastor Pete were more forbidding, if he didn’t go all soggy and fall all over himself any time Gran visited the church, the thought never would have crossed my mind.

We do this, I’m told. We dress ourselves for death so relatives won’t have to touch the body. We die outside, so our spirit can fly free and won’t attach itself to anything we cherish inside our dwelling. Oh yeah, and we don’t talk about death because that would be like tempting fate, not like preparing our children.

It was Pastor Pete who did the funeral thing, of course. Apparently she’d spoken to him, made ‘arrangements‘. Well, of course she knew; there wasn’t much she didn’t know, except how to email without bugging me and how to play a DVD without swearing bilingually at the remote.

So Pastor Pete, spaghetti man, knew all about Gran’s plans, but I wasn’t ready. I thought my Gran was eternal. I thought she would be with me forever. I trusted her to stay.

Nothing can stay forever, Aishe. Nothing and nobody. She’d told me that when I was little and wanted to keep a butterfly as a pet. Now she was gone too and I was left with the truly awful job of entering the date of her death in our Bible. Pastor Pete couldn’t do that job, oh no that was no job for a fast food priest. This was a job for pathetically mortal me.

I wasn’t sure of the rules for our Bible. What do you use to write in a magic Bible? Invisible ink? Magic Marker? Snail slime mixed with grasshopper blood? In the end, I opted for a fountain pen. I didn’t know if it would work when I tried placing her name amongst the other glowing, silver names wavering like leaves on the branches of our family tree. I didn’t know if I wanted it to work, but I was going to bloody try anyway.

Clutching the Bible and pen, I grabbed up the cling filmed crispbreads Mum had put out for my lunch before I’d decided not to go to school yesterday, and made my way to our backyard. I would write in the Bible while sitting in Gran’s church. Of course that meant I had to pass her funeral pyre.

We’d buried her like normal people do, but that’s where we departed from the mainstream. Instead of going home to a house full of mourners and casserole offerings, where later we could quietly pack Gran’s things into boxes for Goodwill, Ma and I followed older traditions.

Our house was empty of people and our mirrors were covered. Most Rromany funerals are huge and hundreds attend, but we had departed from the Rroma and the gadje both. The penalty for a life apart is a lonely death. Nobody offered casserole because Ma doesn’t really make friends and Gran was always suspicious of the gadje. So we began our process of dismantling, with empty stomachs that matched our hollow hearts.

Everything that was Gran’s had to be taken apart and trekked outside, where we dumped it in a pile. Admittedly it was a fairly humble pile, but it was bright with colour and well cherished, until now. Everything but the Bible went onto the heap. Now Ma was out there, black hair untied and pouring down the back of her oversized knit jumper. She looked shrunken, my mum, in her baggy track pants and bare feet, hugging herself as she watched it all burn. That’s what we do, Ma says, we bury them with what they’ll need for an afterlife, then we burn the rest. Hopefully then, her spirit won’t feel bound to anything left behind. Hopefully she’ll be free.

Shame about the rest of us.

* * *

Crows, Shani’s carrion eating mates, swooped through the smoke to land around Ma’s feet. Of course they pretended to be pecking at the grass, but we all knew they were watching, recording things for their master. Who better to attend a funereal burning than the birds who could fly between this world and the next? I hoped a couple had gone with Gran, like heralds or ambassadors or something.

A few of them came with me, jumping from branch to branch, cawing to each other as they followed me to my tree, which was the only place to do this godawful job. The crows and I all knew that, too. I’d come here lots since my last trip back to Shani. When I first got home, I came every day. Every day I hugged this cursed Bible to myself and wished and wished myself back across time. It didn’t happen, obviously, and then I started coming less often. Gran and school kept me busy and, frankly, it just hurt too much to wish for something so hard, only to have crows laugh at you.

Back again, wishing for nothing, I sat cross legged in the bole of my tree. Unwrapping the crispbread package I broke half a one into crumbs and flicked them out for the birds. Feeding them was habit now. I nibbled on the corner of the second half, grimaced, and rewrapped.

When I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I opened Gran’s Bible to where our family tree was sometimes writ. Clenching my fingers around the pen, I glared at the pages and willed the image into existence. And there it was. As if sensing my need, this bloody book had finally got something right.

Nadja Camomescno. Gran’s name shimmered and flickered all silver with a greenish sheen on the page. Taking a deep breath, I concentrated on not snapping my new fountain pen in two. It’s just numbers, I told myself. Just numbers, not Gran. I wasn’t killing her more by writing a date on a page. This was not the same as putting a nail in her coffin. This was...well, it was just awful, is what it was.

Still, I wrote the numbers on the page. 21/6/2012. I stared at the date, why did it look like something I should remember?

Midsummer, Aishe. Gran’s voice whispered in my head. At the time we’d been planting calendulas in our new herb garden. Midsummer: a time for the world to wait. When darkness is only around the corner we plant these little suns. When I was a rawne, the fires would burn on the night before, and the people would feast. Then we would be ready for the cold and need of the winter. Do you see, Aishe? That we plan for what we know will come, but always we plant a little seed of hope? Do you see?

Gran, please! My voice croaked out of my throat as all the stupid tears started again. One of them, before I could catch it, fell on my writing and splodged Gran’s date so it was unreadable.

I watched it soak completely into the page, until there was nothing left. I swallowed all my tears, then, and watched. Had it eaten her? Rejected an unworthy offering? Had the escape of Aishe, my Gran’s mum, meant we could no longer be part of the tribe? Were we struck off the family tree?

But no, right before my eyes, Gran’s death date came back, this time with its own silvery green sheen. It sparkled where it hung and I knew Gran would be smiling over my shoulder if she could.

Tears! It had required tears to make it work. Always a catch with these people. Always a price. Nothing given, nothing gained. Just frikkin’ typical. I cannot tell you how tired I was of all that rubbish.

Leaning back against my tree, I stretched my legs out across the grass, the borage and the heartsease that all clumped together. I smiled a little to myself as I closed my eyes. Heartsease. Gran and I had deliberately transplanted some here from deeper in the woods. Gran had said it might help. I wished it would.

I should have known better than to make such flagrant wishes but I wasn’t thinking. And even if I had known, I might have wished anyway, in fact I’d probably have put some pepper into it!

Chapter Two

A crow stood on my writst and pecked at my fingers.

Ow! Get out! I am not dead and you’re getting way too familiar, you guys are. I flapped at the bird and it did me the courtesy of hopping less than a foot to the left and fixing me with a beady eye.

He does seem to like you.

I gasped and spun my head so fast I’m surprised it didn’t twist right off. Looking back at me was a girl who looked a lot like my friend Laleh, but that couldn’t be right. I closed my eyes and shoved sleep behind me as hard as I could. I rubbed one eyelid at a time and I refocussed on the girl.

She was pretty. Like Laleh she had mocha-toned skin. Through big, thickly lashed milk-chocolate eyes she looked at me and, at the moment, her broad mouth was smiling. I couldn’t tell her hair colour because it was wrapped up under some kind of turban-like headwear, but her eyebrows were black, so I presumed her hair was the same. Slightly different bone structure, I noted, and slightly smaller than Laleh, the two could still have been sisters.

Sar buchos tuke? It seemed polite to ask the girl her name in Rromanes. Besides, I was dying to try it out on someone other than Gran.

But instead of smiling encouragement, the girl gasped, threw her hand up to her chest and reeled backward away from me. Stop! We don’t use those words! We are English, do you understand? English!

Well jeez, don’t have a cow. I’ll use English if it makes you happy.

Cow? The girl’s voice rose again. "I do not have a cow. I milk the cows sometimes but I do not own one, it is forbidden. What is wrong with