If all goes according to plan, WISHING CROSS STATION is going to be released in June. I don't have an exact date for you yet, as it is still in the final stages of production; but in the mean time I decided to share with you all a behind-the-scenes, first look at the first chapter of this novel.
This book is different from the ones I've written before. You may recognize my writing style, to be sure, but the content and the tone are darker. If asked why this is so, the only answer I can give is that this is the story that was in my heart; so there it is on the pages.
I truly wrote my heart out on this one.
I have not felt such an attachment to a story, or a cast of characters, since GODSPEED.
I hope that it will surprise you, make you think, and perhaps even make you feel something deep in your own heart, too.
Without further ado, please allow me to introduce you to our protagonist: a young Mr. Keigan Wainwright...
~*~
A dark fantasy romance from the author of GODSPEED and OF STARDUST…
Don’t stay a moment longer than you have to. Don’t say too much. Don’t pollute the timeline.
When nineteen-year-old college library page Keigan Wainwright is sent to pick up a private donation of books for the school’s collection, he has no idea where one of those books will take him, or what it will take from him.
Retracing a
powerful man’s footsteps through the past, Keigan finds himself caught in the
same dangerous trap: falling in love with a woman he was never meant to know,
and uncertain he will ever find his way home.
WISHING CROSS STATION
by February Grace *
Chapter One
January 1, 2016
The wail and cry of the
whistle. The puff of the engine. The clang of the bell and grinding screech of
the brakes… all combined with the roar of a biting winter wind.
No matter how old I live
to be, I will never forget that particular cacophony, an orchestra tuning up in
preparation for a command performance. When I heard her approach, I knew the
journey I was about to take would change me— no matter where I ended up when it
was over.
She was beautiful, dark,
and strong, with powerful legs beneath her as she rode the rails into the
station. Plumes of white and grey rose around her as she moved, fluttering like
angel’s wings. The smell of the smoke was a singular aroma. Coal, fire, and
heat all combined to intoxicate a man, to loosen the ideas in his head from
solid form into threads meant to be spun into the foolishness of dreams.
She was a vixen, a siren,
a savior, and damnation all in one. All things that beckon men to follow her
anywhere, do anything to finally reach ecstasy before demise.
She was one of a kind, this engine, and her name was Aurelia Belle.
She’s silent; the echoes
of her glory only replay in my head. How clear, how deafening, how devastating,
still.
She is restored now,
sleeping in the roundhouse because the Historical Park is closed for the
season. What happened to the version of the engine that took me on the voyage of
a lifetime, I may never know.
I know just this: writing
it down is the only way for me to even begin to come to terms with the fact it
happened.
It did really happen, of this I am certain, because damn it, I was there.
It doesn’t matter now if
anyone else knows, or believes.
I know, I believe, and I
will always remember.
It started as the most significant
things in life do: in the middle of an ordinary weekday afternoon.
***
Sandy, my boss, asked me
to go on an errand to pick up a bunch of books meant as a donation to the
library at J. Howard Fox Community College. Just one of my glamorous duties as
a page there. My official job title should have been Lowest Man on the Totem Pole, and Hauler of Unwieldy Objects.
I sang softly, coming up
behind her as she sat at her desk with a wireless earpiece in her left ear.
“Sannnnndyyyy…”
“Keigan Wainwright,
you’re going to scare five years off my life if you keep sneaking up on me!”
She shooed me back, pretending not to enjoy the teasing, but I knew she did. “What
do you want?”
“Just wanted you to know I’m
taking off. To pick up the book donation.”
“Very good,” she replied
with a nod, her graying blonde bob bouncing as she moved. “Be a dear and run
them straight over to the research department at the museum afterward. They can
tell us what we’ve got, clean them up. If they want, they may display some of
them in the Park itself.”
“We don’t get them
automatically?”
“Nope.”
“Then why send me for
them?”
“Because the research
department is made up of little old ladies who couldn’t lift a spiral notebook
over their heads without breaking an arm.”
“Ah.” At least it got me
out of an afternoon of endless monotony shelving books. “I’m on it.”
“Thanks, Keigan, you’re a
prince.”
“I know.” I waved at her
without looking back as I headed outside.
***
The brakes on my Grandfather’s–no,
my—ancient sedan cried their
complaints as I pulled up in front of the house of the book donor, Mr. Donahue.
I wondered how long it’d
be before I accepted that the few possessions Grandfather had owned in this
world were now mine. A month since the funeral, and I still expected to see him
in his chair when I got home.
I tried to keep my mind
on where I was, what I was doing. I sized up the dwelling before me.
At least the house is only one story, I thought. No stairs that’ll
fight me when I carry the books.
I was wrong about the
stairs. I ended up having to bring them down a ladder from the bloody attic.
“Be careful, they’re
heavy,” Mr. Donahue said, tapping his foot against the floor and staring up at
me. I struggled to rise to my feet from my knees. At six-foot-two, I couldn’t
stand to my full height, so I hunched over, looking for boxes marked books among many tagged in uneven script
with eclectic labels such as fishing lures
and Grandma’s china.
“Would you like some
tea?” the ancient man asked as I came down the ladder halfway, then reached
back up to heft a heavy box of books onto my shoulder.
“No…thank…you…” I replied,
struggling for air.
Granted, I’d never been
athletically inclined, but the work I’d been doing as a page for the past year
and a half since I’d started school should have allowed me to do this without
getting winded so fast. Damned asthma.
I took my inhaler out of my pocket, shook it, and drew a few puffs.
“Scotch?” he countered,
taking a quick swig from a flask in his hand and then holding it out to me with
gnarled fingers.
For a second, I
considered it, even though at nineteen, I was still too young to do it legally.
“No, thanks, not while I’m working and driving and all.”
“Sure, sure, sorry. Don’t
let me get in your way. You just go about your work there.”
“Mr. Donahue,” I asked,
as I wiped sweat from my brow with the sleeve of my jacket and grasped the
rungs of the ladder again, “how many books did you want to donate to the
library?”
I was wondering just how
grueling this level of Hell was going to be, and how long I’d be expected to
remain a resident of it.
“Not my books,” he
clarified, checking the time on an ornate, antique-looking pocket watch. “My
father’s books.”
“I see,” I said, though at
first I didn’t. Then, I supposed he felt about these books the same way I felt
about my Grandfather’s car. Technically they belonged to him, but he felt as though
they were still someone else’s property.
“He left about a dozen
boxes of books when he died, oh, that’d be, I forget how many years now, to be
honest. More than ten but less than twenty. Terrible thing when your mind goes
and there’s no one left to remind you of what used to be.” He sat down in an
easy chair and took another swig from his flask. “Body is going the way of my
brain, I fear. Docs don’t give me much time, so I figure, I better see to it
Dad’s wishes are carried out, and these books go to the College like he
wanted.”
I nodded, trying not to
choke on the clouds of dust swirling around my head, which were now combining
with the aroma of a freshly-lit cigar.
The old man leaned back
in his chair, drew on it long and deep, and exhaled an acrid trail. “He worked
for J. Howard Fox back in the day, you know.”
“Oh?” My voice was
muffled as I wrangled another box down from the attic and set it at my feet
before climbing the ladder yet again.
“Dad was an inventor. Fox
kept a bunch of them on staff, always trying to be at the forefront of
discovery of the next big thing. Of course, it never seemed to work out for
him. His family’s fortune in coal and oil was what kept his empire running.”
I needed to rest a moment
after bringing down the last box I could see marked books. It was heavier than the others, and covered in a layer of
dust.
I turned away so as not
to cough in the man’s direction even though, truth be told, his cigar was just
about as bad for my lungs as the dust was.
When I was finally able
to catch my breath enough to speak, I moved over to him and gestured toward the
fourteen boxes I’d accumulated. “Do you want to look in any of these one last
time? Make sure there’s nothing you might want to keep?”
“Son, they’ve been up
there so long, the only thing in ‘em besides old books is probably a few
petrified spiders.”
“Great.”
“If you are interested,
though, you’re welcome to take a peek inside. You’ll be cataloguing them
anyway, I would imagine.”
I wouldn’t, at least not
at first; the people at the archives would. Still, curiosity got the better of
me, and I carefully opened the folds of cardboard at the tops of the first
couple of boxes. I saw a few pretty volumes, perhaps first editions; others
looked like they belonged in a landfill rather than a college library. I knew
looks could be deceiving when it came to rare and used books, though, so we’d
have experts checking them out. Anything really valuable would go into the J.
Howard Fox Museum collection, maybe even go on display in an exhibit, or in an
appropriate building on the grounds of the adjacent Wishing Cross Historical Park.
The Park,
one of the nation’s premier historical theme parks,
held many such treasures, and I thought it would be cool to go back there to
visit one of these days. I hadn’t actually been inside the place myself since a
field trip in high school. Money was tight, and even student ticket costs were
steep.
“These will make a great
donation. Thank you very much, sir,” I said, anxious now to get going. I was
tired, my skin was itching from my blasted dust allergy, and I needed to take
an antihistamine soon or my eyes would swell shut.
“Be a good boy, close the
hatch to the attic for me? Stick the ladder back up inside before you do. Next
person to go through this place will be the estate liquidators after I’m gone.
They’ll need a way to get back up there.”
“Sure thing,” I sighed,
thinking about my Grandfather again. It just didn’t get any easier, the thought
of people you loved aging and withering away. I wondered for a moment if this
man had anyone left who worried about him. “Before I close up shop, is there
anything else you want from up there?”
I thought maybe there were
family photos, or some other keepsakes he might want to rummage through.
“There is one thing…a box
just marked ‘Stuff’. Do you happen to see it up there?”
Oh, how I hated myself in
this moment for agreeing to look for a needle in that dirty, wretched haystack.
“Let me take a look…” I
poked my head back up and shone my flashlight back and forth. “I don’t see…
wait, hold on. Give me a second.”
I climbed all the way in
and moved an old tackle box and rabbit-eared television out of the way,
revealing the box marked Stuff. I
swore softly as I soundly hit my head on the low ceiling. The blow would leave
a bump.
I withdrew the box from
its hiding place and carried it down carefully, taking note of the fact I was
now breaking out in hives.
I was going to have to do
something about this before it got any worse. Damn me for forgetting to take a pill before I came here, anyway…
“Sir, I’ll be right back,
I just need to grab a water bottle from my car,” I said, and without waiting
for him to answer, I lowered the box of stuff to the ground at his feet and
hurried out the door.
Soon, I was fumbling
through my backpack for antihistamine and eye drops. I found both, and with a
quick swig of water, swallowed two pills. I put the eye drops in, careful not
to lose the cap for the bottle, and then waited for them to start working.
Fortunately, by the time
the drops kicked in, I was feeling well enough to venture back inside of old
man Donahue’s house.
I found him holding a
small model of a train engine in his hands, and a book that I was curious about
simply because it wasn’t in any of the boxes marked books.
“Land sakes, I forgot
about this one…”
He held the book out to
me, and I analyzed it. It was ornate, leather bound with a silvery-gray colored
cover.
“This book is the most
prized of his entire collection. He never would tell me why, and I tried to
read the darned thing half a dozen times. Got a whipping once or twice for it,
I’ll tell you. By the time he was dead and couldn’t catch me trying anymore, my
eyesight had gone to the point I couldn’t make out the text.”
“May I?” I carefully opened the book, fully
aware with its apparent age and condition the cover could crack right off at
the spine if I weren’t careful.
And I wanted to be
careful. I’d always been a book lover; even as a kid, I took good care of my
well-read paperbacks and the occasional hardcover I got for Christmas from my
grandparents. Every year from the time I was ten, they also gave me a
leather-bound blank book to use as a journal. Writing things down became
something of an addiction I’ve never been able to shake.
I was certain from the
moment I set eyes on that particular book that I’d never seen its like before,
not even in the library’s vast collection. The pages appeared to be typewritten
on discolored onion-skin paper, likely a canary shade when it was new. With the
tip of my finger, I could feel slight indentations from the keys striking each
word.
It was like spun glass,
so fragile I was terrified even to breathe while I was holding it.
“It says…” I strained to
read the title on the page, “Wishing
Cross… something. I can’t make out the last word. I can’t make out the
author, either. Did you want to donate it? There will be no way to catalogue it
until we get an author’s name so it can be properly researched.”
He let my question hang,
lost in thought. I waited a moment, then tried again.
“Do you have any other
information about this book? Any idea where your father got it, or who might
have written it?”
“I don’t think so, I’m sorry,”
Mr. Donahue said at last. “There, tuck it into one of your book boxes. I know
you should be getting back to the library, and I’m overdue for my nap.”
I took the hint that he
was ready for me to be on my way, so I loaded the car up with boxes as quickly
as I could before I finally came back to gather up the last one in my arms.
“Wait… here. Take this.” Mr.
Donahue scribbled something, then handed me a small scrap of paper with a name
and location written on it I could barely decipher.
I looked closely. The
note read: Seymour Sanderson, Winter
Forest Retirement Home. I frowned, puzzled.
“My father may never have
explained the silver book to me, but if there is anyone on Earth who might know
what it means, it’s this guy.” Mr. Donahue
coughed deeply before he drew another long drag from his cigar. “He was an
intern at Fox Industries when my father worked there part time, after he’d
retired. You know, my father never stopped working until right before the very
end. He lived to be a hundred, and he did something productive every day of
ninety-five years before it. Rest his soul.”
“He sounds like he was
quite a man.”
Mr. Donahue’s eyes took
on a faraway look. “He really was. I could never be half the man he was.” He
actually welled up, and he dabbed at his nose with a handkerchief. “Just take
care of the special book, and here…” He gestured toward me with the small
locomotive model. “For your trouble.”
“I couldn’t, really, I
mean, the library is already paying me to—”
“I insist,” he added, and from the tremor in his voice, I knew it
would be disrespectful to say no.
“Thank you.” I tucked the
tiny engine, about the size of a Christmas ornament, into the breast pocket of
my jacket. I’d look at it in more detail later.
“Boy, one last thing,”
Mr. Donahue added, as I moved to the door. “Don’t let the College get their
hands on the silver book until you talk to Sanderson first. Understand? I don’t
know exactly what it means or what it is, but I know it was very important to
my father.”
“All right.”
“Give me your word,
please,” the old man asked, extending a withered hand. “This means a lot to me.”
“Sure, I give you my
word.” I shook his hand as gently as I could, but still feared breaking his
fingers with the slightest touch.
He settled back into his
chair, seeming greatly relieved. “Good. Very good. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” I said, then closed the front door
behind me.
I was careful to hold the
box of books away from me as I got into the car. I didn’t want to smash the
small treasure I’d tucked into my pocket.
I placed the last box
into the back seat, then pulled out the special book. I didn’t have anything,
really, to protect it with, so I took a clean sweatshirt from my backpack and
wrapped it around the book before zipping the bundle inside. I took the small locomotive
model out of my jacket and tucked it into the front compartment of the bag,
along with my cell phone.
I knew, of course, I should tell Sandy about this book,
especially if it could be very rare or valuable. But I also knew Mr. Donahue
was making a donation to the College to follow his father’s wishes; the items
were his to do with as he pleased. If it pleased him for me to ask this Mr.
Sanderson for information first, then I would do it.
Tomorrow my shift at the
library would be short. I’d have time in the morning to stop by Winter Forest,
which was not far from my apartment, and see if Mr. Sanderson was lucid enough
to have a meaningful conversation.
~*~
So begins a journey that will change Keigan's life forever... and that I hope will live a long time in your memory.
WISHING CROSS STATION, coming soon from Booktrope. Thank you, Booktrope...and thank you to my amazing team: Majanka Verstraete, Laura Bartha, Jennifer Gracen, and Greg Simanson.
*All rights reserved, February Grace and Booktrope 2015