Free Silent Doll by Sonnet O'Dell

Now, don’t bite my head off if this is a stupid question, but why on earth would you want to find those people?”
    I’d thought about that many times myself, but as I told her then, I only had the one answer: “I can’t stand not knowing where I come from.”
    “I understand that–I do–but when I was searching for my father, I was looking for a man who merely couldn’t hold his liquor and had commitment issues. You could be looking for people who were so horrible that your mother didn’t want to raise her child around them.”
    “I know, but I have questions…about why I can…” I raised my hand and the flame that came to it was small, very small. On this side I was weak. I had little power at all. Incarra watched the flame flicker; it was no bigger than that on a candle. I closed my fist around it.
    “Where’s your Hagrid when you need one?” she asked with a queer smile on her face as she patted me on the head. “You’re a wizard ‘arry.”
    I smacked her hand away and pushed my chest out at her. “Harry Potter never had these.”
    Incarra giggled, and I smiled at her. It was nice to see that we could still be comfortable with one another.

Chapter Nine
    Incarra left a couple of hours later, after I made some breakfast to see her on her way. I soon had my hands buried in hot soapy water, doing the dishes, listening to music on the radio, and letting my thoughts drift as I sang along.
    I found myself thinking about the tickets. Aram had thought I sent two to him and I, of course, thought he had sent mine. So, if we hadn’t sent them to each other, who had sent them to both of us, and why? I mean, the show had been enjoyable, but there was no reason I could think of that made it a must-see.
    I looked back over my shoulder at roses on my coffee table: another mysterious gift. I’d never had a secret admirer before. Men who sent me flowers usually took credit for them.
    I put the last of the dishes in the rack to drain and dried my hands on a towel, then went to examine the box. I dug around through the tissue paper and found the cream-colored card, rereading the strange, one line messages.
    “Roses are red, huh? Well, whoever he is, at least he can observe the obvious.”
    I flipped the card over in my hand; nothing on it, not even an embossing of the company name. I checked every side of the box for a clue. Had these people not heard of a return address? I threw the box down, a little cross. I was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but getting flowers from someone who didn’t have the balls to tell you who they were, how much of a compliment was that, really?
    I got dressed—nothing fancy, just a pair of black jeans and a red blouse, then headed into the spare room and pulled out some pages I’d printed from Wikipedia to continue my research on the phoenix.
    In ancient Egyptian mythology and in myths derived from it, the phoenix is a sacred firebird. Originally, the phoenix was identified by the Egyptians as a stork or heron-like bird called a benu, known from the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian texts as one of the sacred symbols of worship at Heliopolis. Said to live for 500 or 1461 years—depending on the source), the phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises.
    I was so glad that wasn’t true. Imagine having to go through puberty again.
    The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible — a symbol of fire and divinity. Tears from a phoenix can heal wounds.
    That I knew was true. I’d experienced the healing process and I was sure my tears had actually helped heal an injury on another person. This deserved further research.
    I turned to my laptop and clicked on the internet provider link, then waited patiently as it