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New YA fantasy book by Ella Arrow! Finally!

My second book, Indigo Calico Raspberry Night, is available now wherever books are sold. This young adult low fantasy book is a stand-alone story (so far), and unrelated to my other book, The Flight of the Starling. (In case you missed it, you can read my intro blog post here.)

I’m tempted to insert the back cover blurb, but why give you a bite when you can have the whole pie? So the first chapter is below, gratis. If this hooks you, please find it on Amazon or ask your favorite indie bookshop to get you a copy.

Prologue

I remember believing in another world. I remember it felt like being the most awake I’ve ever been, like I’d just run down a hill as fast as I could. Scared my feet would trip me up, scared they couldn’t keep me on the ground, I ran like those dreams of flying that are really bounding, touching down with only toes bouncing off the skin of the earth’s drum. Breathless and flushed at the bottom of the hill, my skin would be buzzing and twitching, my lips apart, and though I was tired, at that age I could never really be exhausted, only ready for one more go.

The other world felt like that. Brio and zing.

I used to visit this neighbor’s house to play sometimes. Up in the attic was an old bedroom they never used, with grandmotherly wallpaper of tiny violets and crawling vines. In the closet was a mirror, perfectly circular, laying on the floor. The closet had no light, just whatever spilled in from the room. That’s why the circle of glass was all murky, and the girls who peered up from under dangling hair were not us, not me, not with skin like ghostly shadow and deep tea, and eyes you couldn’t see at all except for a sly glint if you were lucky.

I was convinced that was a portal to the other world. It seemed so perfect, set into the floor like a pond, shimmering in the half-light. Couldn’t you just dive in, feet first? Closing your eyes first, of course. And hoping those Other Girls from the Other Side would get out of the way. Or maybe they would decide to jump at the exact same moment and take your place here on This Earth, so you wouldn’t have to do your social studies homework or eat your Brussels sprouts, or whatever kind of problems an 8-year-old imagines it’s important to get away from.

I’m not supposed to talk about it. They think I forgot, about the Fox and the fairy, the quest, red ink and all the rest. When I think about that portal, that mirror, I have these memories I can’t be sure are real. Maybe I’m remembering a dream. Maybe the doctor’s right and my brain made the whole thing up to cover the trauma. I don’t know. It’s just as murky as that stupid mirror, just as confusing. But you asked me if I believed in magic, in things beyond the Veil, so that’s my answer. Take it or leave it.

Chapter One – Haunted

“Lyra. Lyra! Hello!”

I looked from the boxes in my hands to my boyfriend. His raised eyebrows made dark corners on his forehead, under that adorable spike of black fringe half down over his face. “Where are you today?” he asked.

I shook my head to clear it. My motley blonde hair swayed behind its swammie wrap of purple linen scarf, sunshine and honey and ivory locks swinging into view. “Sorry, what was the question?”

He slumped his shoulders under his red T-shirt and sighed. “Which one do you think we should get?”

The contenders were brownies versus blueberry muffins. “Can’t we just get them both and decide at home?” I tilted my hips in my doodled-on jeans, and scratched my side. The white hourglass on my black t-shirt bounced above the words, “Time’s Up!”.

My boyfriend — his name was Ralph Sevenskelli, so everybody called him Seven — smiled with the left half of his mouth. He took me by the shoulders. “Lyra, you are as beautiful as a storm cloud, but you’re just as unpredictable.”

I smirked at the weirdness of the compliment, trying to think of some joke involving Doppler radar but failing. He dropped his hands and said, “Whatever you want. Your place or mine?”

Would my mother be in a good mood today? That meant she would be tensely focused on a mound of papers and her sarcastic bites were funny. A bad mood meant I had to steer clear if I wanted to avoid the splashes of vitriol that happened every time she overflowed with stress.

“We can go to mine, sneak down to the basement lounge after we bake our Betty Crocker,” I finally said. “Unless your place will be quiet.” Seven had four brothers, and no second living room. The privacy we craved was harder to come by at his place than mine. Perks of being an only child. He bobbed his eyebrows once, knowing exactly what I meant, and nodded.

We walked out with our purchases to his car in the September sunshine. His phone pinged, and his round nose scrunched as he read a text.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly, punching buttons. “Just a number I didn’t recognize. New one I have to block.”

When I asked him what the text was, all he said was he’d deleted it. Whatever, I didn’t want to pick at him. I wasn’t about to demand to know my guy’s every thought when I certainly did not tell him mine. So instead I said casually, “Hey, I know what we should do.”

Seven started chuckling, deep and vibrant. “Oh no, here it comes.”

“What?” I smiled, half nervous. I didn’t know whether to expect teasing or flattery so braced for both.

“You’re about to offer some wild scheme for our afternoon, instead of making either of the snacks we just paid money for, and you’ll end up cackling your head off while I try to explain to a security guard why we shouldn’t be arrested. Last week it was bowling in Wal-Mart. Or reverse garage saling. Or there was that time we tried to give vegan wheatgrass smoothies to the people working the McDonald’s drive-thru.”

I rolled my dark brown eyes. How could Seven pick on me for something so awesome and original? I grabbed his shirt, leaned back against the passenger door of his car, and pulled him up against me, so we were touching from chest to thighs.

“Shut up. You know you loved reverse garage saling. Hiding my old bikini bottom in the picnic basket was pure genius on your part.”

He pressed his body into mine without raising his arms. His smirk bubbled just below the surface, making him even cuter than normal. He liked to tease me, but not torture me, and heck, I usually liked his teasing. After letting me squirm, he admitted, “It must’ve made for some funny story when they found it. What kind of picnic were these people having? And why aren’t my picnics more like that?”

“So, we agree, my ideas are brilliant. Harebrained, poorly planned sparks of genius. So when I say I know what we should do today, you should get excited.”

“Well, I don’t dare disagree with you now. Not with that magnificent sneer of yours.” He pecked me on my very straight nose and we got in his sedan whose better days were behind it. “What wacky scheme should we perpetrate on the unassuming public?”

“I was thinking we should come up with names that are colors. Like secret names, code names for each other. Only they would be color names, too.”

Seven shrugged as he pulled into traffic on Maclean Boulevard. “Sheesh, after all that build up, this sounds almost reasonable.”

“I know, my vanilla barely speaks French. So what’s your color name?”

“Why does it have to be a color?”

I squirmed in my bucket seat. “It’s… hard to explain. You ever had words follow you?”

“No.” Seven repressed a chuckle. “I can honestly say I’ve never had words follow me.”

“No, but … that sounds weird and made up. I just mean have you ever had words stuck in your head but you don’t know why, like a piece of a song or an old nursery rhyme you half-remember.”

“Oh, sure. Is a color name following you around?”

It’s practically haunting me, I thought. “Nevermind about that. I just want to do it. It would be an awesome way to make a nickname.”

“I already have a nickname,” the boy named Ralph pointed out. “You could pick a number name. How about Eight? Or Double O?”

“Double O? I don’t want to be ‘ooo’ — oh, I get it. Ha. I don’t want a pair name with you. Too cutesy by half.”

“But both of us having color names isn’t?” He twitched his wrist so his leather bracelet spun and the beads clacked against the steering wheel. I was becoming familiar with his fidgets. Funny, the things I hadn’t noticed when we were just friends hanging out at the music store, meeting accidentally on purpose.

“It would just be between us. Like a private joke.” I liked the idea of sharing a private joke with someone, maybe because I never did. Seven was starting to come in handy for this, the better I got to know him. I took a pen out of my backpack and started doodling on the left thigh of my jeans. After some prevaricating swirls, I wrote, “Hello, my name is Alloisious Oswald Letsgo.”

“But you can call me A.O.,” I mumbled.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.” I’d show him the doodle when he wasn’t driving, or just wait and see if he noticed. Sometimes I needed to invite him into my world; the door was not always open.

“Well, what’s your favorite color?” Seven asked.

“Same as my favorite fruit.” At this reminder, I pulled one from my backpack. “But ‘Orange’ is hardly a good nickname.”

“Okay, a word that means orange but sounds pretty, like… amber.”

“You mean like Amber Perkins, Amber Simpson, or Amber Tranoria? I wouldn’t be caught dead being associated with those maggots, who haven’t had an original thought since they hit Macy’s for a half-priced sale on lobotomies.”

“Alright, just put the can of whoop-ass down and step away. What’s another word for orange?”

“I dunno but nothing rhymes with it.” My peel began to perfume the car.

“Sunset, pumpkin, cheddar,” Seven rambled.

“Velveeta,” I chuckled. “What puts the ‘ape’ in apricot? I mean a color name that sounds cool, like Violet. What was that one from Rocky Horror? You could be a nice masculine blue like Cerulean. Or Vermilion.”

“Not a chance. Too Goth. I might go by Indigo.”

I scoffed as I popped a section of orange in my mouth. “Indigo’s a girl’s name,” I said with a ringing confidence. “Besides, I already know an Indigo.”

“How’s that possible?” We were at a stoplight, so he had the chance to shoot me an incredulous look. “Who do you know named Indigo?”

I blinked, surprised. “No – nobody.”

“But you just said — Are you just screwing with me?”

Strange things come out of my mouth sometimes, which is often a hoot, but people can’t always tell whether I’m serious.

“No, I don’t know why I said that. It’s those freaking words again, they’re freaking following me.”

“The song lyric?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me what it is, maybe I know it,” said Seven.

“I don’t think so. It’s like a kid’s rhyme or something.”

“So? I still might know it.”

I fidgeted with the edge of my red leather fingerless glove, rearranging the safety pins there. “You’re gonna think it’s stupid.”

“When have I ever.”

I shook my head and looked out at the tree-lined street and all those houses with all those front porch swings, as we headed up the last hill to my street. “You didn’t like Wal-Mart bowling until I made you do it.”

“I liked it fine until we had to talk our way out of going to jail for wrecking the bicycle display.”

Last couple of weeks, the words were always there, floating in my ears, aching to be spoken. Some days I woke up with them in my head, as if I’d been dreaming of Indigo. Other days, they’d sneak up on me, leaving me alone for a while, then wham! The rhyme would hit me again like a Frisbee to the side of the head. I was beginning to think if I didn’t say the words out loud soon, they might leap off my tongue the next time I was called on in class or the dinner table. Seven might mock me, but at least he’d be the only one to hear them.

Seven parked his car in front of my house, a two-story Victorian made of red brick. I always felt a little more relaxed just seeing it. The white steps needed a new coat of paint, and the front bushes were wilder than usual. Probably already on Mom and Dad’s long to do list.

“So are you gonna tell me this lyric, Lyric?”

I growled deep in my throat, then turned to him with a vicious finger stab. “Alright, but I warn you, these words are haunting me for some reason. I haven’t figured out why yet, but I will. This I vow and my words are my power. So you are not allowed to further taunt me with them, if I tell you.”

“Haunting, no taunting, got it.”

He did get it. I could tell by the clear look in his eyes and his often mocking demeanor which was held in check. Good old Seven, finally my boyfriend.

I closed my eyes, and at long last spoke the words that clouded my dreams and whispered through my days.

Indigo Calico Raspberry Night

dwelled in the mystical Kingdom of Starlight.

A white-yellow spark fired in the center of my forehead, at my third eye. The heat and glow spread with a flash over my face, flushing it, tingling down my shoulders and my arms. My insides started spinning and the bottoms of my feet grew hot. I opened my eyes and reached a flaming palm at Seven, tasting ash, gasping for breath because the car seemed like a vacuum, the oxygen consumed in the fire I had become.

He caught my hand and laced his fingers through mine. “Sorry, I don’t recognize it.”

The skin on my hand was pale, ordinary, unburned. Seven’s palm even felt a little warmer than mine. The glow, which I could still feel like a shell over my body, was invisible. I smelled smoke. The sensations of heat were mellowing into an all-over warmth, almost as quickly as the fire had leapt up, threatening to scorch me into a pillar of ash.

I coughed out a catch in my throat. I would never admit to Seven I’d gone momentarily insane. As soon as I could get it together, I said, “It’s hot in this car. Let’s go inside.”

We went around the house to the side door off the driveway. As we passed the pine tree in the neighbor’s yard, a blue butterfly rose off the trunk, enormous palm-sized wings silently fluttering.

“Wow, look at the size of that thing,” Seven said. “I’ve never seen one that big.”

“Me neither,” I mumbled, momentarily walking slower. For the second time in as many minutes, something happened that seemed so crazy I couldn’t imagine describing it to anyone but my journal or my imaginary best friend. The butterfly seemed to flap in slow motion, blue wings outlined in black, a few inches from my face, but without even the ghost of a breeze from its ethereal wings. An iridescent shine washed like a wave over its wings. The moment it floated noiselessly in front of my face, it turned its head, turned its face with perfect, tiny human features no bigger than a thumbprint, and looked straight into my dark, unblinking, disbelieving eyes.

Some lessons I’ve had to learn over and over. When a door opens and shows you something impossible, you can always shut it.

I’ll post it on my Etsy store for signed copies soon.

All the best,