Davidson MaryJanice - Jennifer Scales 1 - Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace, ebooks [ENG]
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Page 1 Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace MaryJanice Davidson and Anthony Alongi ACE BOOKS,NEW YORK Page 2 For the daughters: Gabriela Alongi, Christina Alongi and Erika Growette, whose help was invaluable PROLOGUE The Ruin of Eveningstar On the day Jennifer Scales turned five, her family was forced to move. It was the morning their quiet river town of Eveningstar , Minnesota , died a horrible death. Jennifer remembered only dim dawn light against her window, her mother rousing her, and jeans and a sweat-shirt finding their way onto her tired body while her head drooped against her chest. If she thought a little harder, she could remember walking through the crisp, brown woods behind her house until they reached the Mississippi River, stepping onto a flat, slippery boat that sunk a bit with her Page 3 weight, and shivering in her mother's firm arms while her father's voice calmly reassured her. And if she relaxed her mind, which she wouldn't be able to do until she was older, she could remember standing on a bluff beyond the other side of the river, watching from a safe distance as her hometown burned under a crescent moon. She heard the roars of beasts— dinosaurs? — the howls of wolves, and the screeches of unknown things. The morning of September 18, those things laid waste to Eveningstar. No one from beyond its borders ever tried to put out the fires, or bury those who died there, or even report the incident. No one went there. No one remembered there. Eve-ningstar, Minnesota, settled by Scandinavian immigrants and incorporated more than one hundred years past, fell into ashes and out of existence. CHAPTER 1 The Flip The Winoka Falcons were on the verge of their third straight Community Junior League Soccer Champi-onship. In sudden-death overtime, the score was tied at 1-1 with the Northwater Shooting Stars. Jennifer Scales, the Falcons captain, dribbled the ball across midfield. Four of her teammates charged forward with her; only three exhausted defenders were keeping pace. Jennifer, who had turned fourteen the day before, wanted a win for her birthday present. As one of the Northwater defenders approached, she kicked the ball sharply to the left, into what could have been open field. It skimmed the grass and nestled squarely in the instep of her teammate, Susan Elmsmith. Jennifer grinned in delight at her friend's sudden change in pace and direction. There were Page 4 times she was sure me two of them could read each other's mind. Susan advanced on me enemy net with gritted teeth. Jennifer slipped behind the defender who had challenged her and matched pace with the last opposing fullback, be-ing careful not to slip offsides. Unfortunately, it had rained most of yesterday, and though the skies were clear today, the ground was treach-erous. More than twenty yards away from the goal, Susan went skidding into the grass and mud with an angry yell, just managing to push the ball a bit off the ground and over the foot of the fullback. It came spinning by Jen-nifer, and in a tenth of a second she saw her shot. She darted forward and kicked the ball straight up with her toe. Then she somersaulted into the air, twisted, and sent the ball sailing toward the net with a hard kick. For an upside-down instant she saw the goalie dangling in the sky from the earth above. Then she twisted again, completed the midair roll, and landed on her feet as the ball flew past the goalie's reaching fingers. Game over, 2-1, Falcons. She turned back downfield grinning, already anticipat-ing the slaps and congratulations from her teammates. But all the players on the field were staring at her in sur-prise, and a little bit of ... fear? "How did you do that?" Susan's eyes, usually almond-shaped, were wide with shock. "You turned upside down ... It was so fast." "Duh, it had to be," Jennifer shot back. They were gap-ing at her as if she'd pulled a second head out of her butt and kicked that into the net. "Jeez, any of you could have done it. I was just closest to the ball." "No," Terry Fox, another teammate, said. Her voice sounded strange and thin. "We couldn't have." Then the field was crowded with parents from the stands, and their ecstatic coach, who lifted Jennifer by the elbows and shook her like a maraca. She forgot about the odd reactions of her friends and reveled in the win. In all the ruckus, she didn't think to look at her mother's reaction to her stunt. By the time she sought her out in the crowd, the older woman was cheering and clap-ping like everyone else. Winoka was a town where autumn wanted to last longer, but found itself squeezed out by the legendary Minnesotawinters. Like many suburbs, it had new middle-class neighborhoods built on top of old farmland and inside small forests. The Scales's house, at9691 Pine Street East, was in one of those lightly forested neighborhoods, where every house had a three-car garage, ivy-stone walls, and a mobile basketball net on the edge of a neatly manicured lawn. It looked incredibly typical. Jennifer could never figure out why this bothered her. The night of the championship, however, she wasn't thinking about the house. She was thinking about her friends. She wanted her mother to think about them, too. Page 5 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |