The Faerie Path (Faerie Path Series #1)

The Faerie Path

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Anita Palmer stepped out of the shower and reached for the bath towel. Wrapping it around herself, she padded over to the mirror. She lifted her hand and swept a clear path across the misted glass before leaning forward to look at her reflection.

Her long red hair clung to her head like seaweed to a rock, framing her heart-shaped face with its wide mouth and high cheekbones. She leaned closer, staring into her mirrored eyes. The irises were a smoky green. Nothing particularly remarkable about them.

Or was there?

She leaned even closer.

Gold flecks deep in the green irises--that was what she was looking for.

Evan had said that if he looked into her eyes for long enough, he could see gold dust in them.

Anita grinned.

Gold dust in her eyes.

Sometimes when she was with Evan she could almost believe she had gold dust in her eyes.

She frowned.

It was quite scary--the feelings that Evan Thomas was stirring up in her.

Were they real? They felt real enough. Over the past few weeks thinking about Evan had somehow become the default setting of her brain. And she kept seeing his face--in the swirls of a freshly stirred cup of coffee. In shadows and light. In clouds. In the darkness behind her closed eyelids.

She recalled lines from the play they had been rehearsing for theend-of-term performance. Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.

She could hear Evan's voice in her head.

"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is my sun!"

She'd said to him, "That's not right, Evan. Romeo says, 'and Juliet is the sun' not 'my sun.'"

He'd smiled and said, "No--you're Juliet, and you're definitely my sun."

And the way he had looked into her eyes right then had made her feel like the whole world was turning upside down and inside out all around her.

She laughed into the mirror, shaking her head to dislodge the memory. Still grinning, she threw the towel up over her head and rubbed vigorously at her wet hair. She didn't want to be late meeting Evan today--especially not today.

She winced as the towel scraped against the two itchy points on her back. She lowered the towel and angled her bare back to the mirror, craning to see over her shoulder. Something had bitten her. Twice. There was an angry red point on each shoulder blade. They had been there for a few days now. Very irritating, and in such an awkward place to scratch. She'd have to wear something that covered her back--the last thing she wanted was for Evan to think she was crawling with fleas.

She looked into the mirror again.

Did she really love Evan, or was she just getting tangled up in the fact that she had to act as if she loved him in the play? No, she was sure that it was much more than that. She had felt a strange, thrilling flutter in her stomach when she had been chosen to play Juliet opposite his Romeo, and over the weeks of rehearsals, as she had gotten to know him better, that thrill had just kept getting more and more intense.

She thought back to the auditions. Everyone had been surprised that Evan had shown up at all. He had only been at the school for six months, and he had always seemed so reserved and self-contained, not the type of person who'd want a major part in the school production. He was amiable enough in class, but he hadn't made any close friends and the other students mostly thought of him as something of a loner. No one had ever been invited to his home, and he didn't hang out with them on weekends or go to any parties.

Anita could remember exactly when Evan had first turned up. It had been on the same day as the school trip to Hampton Court.

It had been a weird day. She knew it was called déjà vu when you have vivid memories of a place you've never been to, and that's how she had felt from the moment the bus had driven up to the parking lot and she had first set eyes on the sixteenth-century palace at Hampton Court--the feeling that she'd been there before. The sturdy red-brick Tudor towers and buildings with their cream-colored stone battlements and ornamentations, and the cobbled courtyards and wide, formal gardens--they had all seemed strangely familiar. But when she mentioned this later to her parents, assuming she'd visited the palace when she was much younger, they said they'd never taken her there.

The strangest thing of all had been the world-famous maze. It was a large triangular block of tall hedges, grown close together to create a warren of narrow winding corridors. Pretty much every visitor to the palace wanted to put their sense of direction to the test and find their way to the center. Everyone from the school bus had bundled in there, the boys boasting that they'd get to the middle first. It had been total chaos--most of them got hopelessly lost and had to be guided through by the people shouting from the wooden viewing platforms.

At first Anita had hung back. The green tunnels of the hedges had given her a creepy feeling that she couldn't explain. But then her best friend, Jade, had grabbed her arm and dragged her in--and once she was in the maze, the oddest thing had happened. Somehow she had known the path, and made her way to the little statue in the center without taking a single wrong turn. "How about that?" she'd said to Jade, laughing. "Am I a genius, or what?" But Jade had said it was just luck.

That same afternoon, she had seen him for the first time. The most gorgeous boy she had ever set eyes on in her entire life, standing outside the school gates when the bus pulled up. Evan Thomas--a new student who had just moved into the area.

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Excerpted from The Faerie Path by Frewin Jones Copyright © 2007 by Frewin Jones. Excerpted by permission.
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