Free VoodooMoon by June Stevens Page B

mid-night.
    Groaning, I threw the light blanket off and pushed up to sit on the edge of the bed. I’d actually slept a full eight hours. Of course, now I would be awake the rest of the night and I had to report for duty early in the morning. I’d scryed Sam when I got home and gave a verbal report, but I would have to type up a formal report on today’s activities with Ian as well. I would also have to put my name in queue for another mission.
    I touched the crystal-lamp next to the clock and the room filled with a soft, bluish light. Different lamp crystals gave off a different color cast. I preferred blue. The room was small enough that the few furnishings, a narrow bed, a small bedside table, a small dresser with a mirror and one small wooden chair filled it to capacity.
    A series of hooks on one wall kept my cloak, belts, and other clothing items neat and orderly when they weren’t flung across the chair or bed posts or, more often than not, scattered across the small expanse of floor like the mud caked garments I’d worn the night before. I got up and made my way to the dresser. I shuffled my feet to make a path through the clothes and realized I had been wrong. My dirty clothes were not on the floor at all.
    Oh, Mother Earth bless River! My little sister had come in and gathered up my clothes to be taken to the laundress. I knew it had been River. She was ever mothering me and Anya, and while we both pretended not to like it, I secretly treasured my sister’s mother-hen ways.
    I grabbed a house-dress from a hook on the wall and pulled it over my head. The blend of hemp and cotton and was soft and cool against my skin, flowing to just below my knees. It had once belonged to my mother and the emerald color had long since faded to a soft, pale green from years of wear and washing.
    The moment I opened the bedroom door the mouthwatering scent of cooking vegetables and the soft sounds of female conversation wafted in.
    Before my mother and I came to live here Pinky’s had also been an inn and all three upper floors had been separated into several small rooms with a larger main sitting room. My mother took out two walls to create a larger main area and leave three rooms. Pinky had continued to rent out the rooms in the lower floors. When my mother died he had moved from his small rooms on the second floor into the apartment to take care of me, then River and Anya when they came. Although he had needed the extra money, he’d eventually stopped renting out the rooms on the other floors claiming it wasn’t safe for the three of us. Now that we were all grown up, he still refused, though he’d moved down to the third floor years ago to give us our privacy.
    I quietly moved down the hallway and found my sisters in the main area of our apartment. Anya was sitting at the large wooden table nestled in one side of the room with a bowl of what looked and smelled like River’s tasty vegetable stew and a huge hunk of bread. She was alternately shoveling food in her mouth and chatting with River who was standing at the counter washing dishes in a large metal tub.
    For a moment I stood at the edge of the hallway and watched them. No one who took a look at the three of us side by side would be able to say we were sisters with our drastically different appearances. In a way they would be right, but they would also be dead wrong.
    I was born Fiona Malaina Hernandez, daughter of Fredrick Hernandez and Malaina Murphy Hernandez. A few months after my mother’s death, on my ninth birthday I was fishing, illegally, just outside of the City Walls when I found River. The City Walls surround the entire city and cross the Cumberland River with metal-grid gates. During the day the gates are opened to allow merchants and trade ships in and out of the city. There are regular Guard Patrols, but a small child on a homemade raft who knows the patrols can easily slip in and out of the gates unnoticed. It was my favorite past time as a child, and