Dragon Mage - Softcover

Jean Rabe is the author of the Finest trilogy and numerous books for TSR/WOTC. She lives in Kenosha, WI.

Chapter 1

“I’m in Hades,” Shilo said, staring out her bedroom window, gaze locked on Big Mick’s Pub across the street. Mick, a scrawny, elderly man with a bulbous nose, struggled to put out a large sign advertising tonight’s fish boil.

A wheezing fan teased Shilo’s short red hair, but it did little to cool her. Her bedroom was on the second floor of an antique store. The store was not air-conditioned, nor were any of the rooms on the floor above it—not a single window unit hummed in the entire building. (Initially, she hadn’t expected that to be a problem, as she’d envisioned Wisconsin a cold place . . . but in the heart of July it felt every degree as oppressive as her native Marietta, Georgia.)

No air-conditioning, no ceiling fan, and no swimming pool for . . . well . . . probably a light-year distant. She figured that by noon the heat would be enough to melt the rubber soles off her favorite pair of tennis shoes.

Still, it wasn’t the heat that made her say she was in Hades.

It was her big room with its creaking wooden floor and high tin ceiling painted eggshell white.

It was the antique store.

It was Slade’s Corners.

Maybe it was Wisconsin itself.

Her dad had died one month ago, of a heart attack the death certificate-in-triplicate read—two days after his forty-ninth birthday and two days before her fifteenth. She hadn’t seen her mother in eight years, not since the Tuesday afternoon that the divorce papers were served.

Her mother lived in Portland now, in the company of a bass clarinetist she’d taken up with three Christmases past. She hadn’t bothered to come to the funeral, or to call with a word or two of sympathy. Shilo’s older brother lived in Atlanta and had a job in the Braves’ marketing department, which he’d landed after graduating from college last year. He said he’d love to have Shilo move in with him and his new wife, but there just wasn’t room in the condo, especially with a baby on the way.

After the funeral and all the paperwork from the hospital, funeral home, and attorney was finished, Shilo’s grandparents drove her and her three suitcases and four smallish boxes of belongings from Marietta to Slade’s Corners. She would have rather lived in a closet at her brother’s place than to have this big room atop a sprawling antique store in muggy, boring, don’t-blink-or-you’ll-surely-miss-it, No-wheres-ville, Wisconsin.

The antique store was the largest building in Slade’s Corners. Three stories tall, it stretched a hundred feet across and half again that deep on a patchy grass-dotted lot, and would have been considered good-sized in most any city.

The town, if it could be called such, was four blocks long and a few blocks off a state highway that stretched from the shores of Lake Michigan to Beloit. In addition to the antique store, it consisted of a dozen or so aging houses; a small and relatively new tire store that rarely had customers; a white clapboard church with peeling paint; and an Irish tavern aptly named Big Mick’s Pub.

The antique store was covered with shingles, like someone had bought far too many for the roof and didn’t have anything else to do with them. The shingles were speckled gray and worn on the edges, much like the couple who owned the store—Shilo’s grandparents.

Shilo had been living with them for three endless, unbearable weeks.

For excitement, she’d discovered she could hop on a rusty bike she’d found in the garage. She’d ride it a mile to the east to visit the dog kennel on the hill where a pleasant woman raised little white dogs that yapped incessantly. Or she could ride a few miles farther, past an orchard being plowed under to make way for new homes, and on to the bustling community of New Munster. (On a good day New Munster looked twice the size of Slade’s Corners. It had a tiny post office with a soda machine out front; a gas station with a soda machine out front that only sold Pepsi, when someone bothered to stock it; a small grocery store with irregular hours; a beautiful Catholic church with an adjacent cemetery; and way too many taverns.)

Riding her bike to the west wasn’t an option. Slade’s Corners dead-ended in a cornfield.

At night Shilo either listened to music on her iPod or read. Her grandparents didn’t have cable—cable didn’t exist in Slade’s Corners—and they didn’t want to spend their money on a satellite dish. They had recently bought a rabbit-ear antenna—for five dollars Grandfather was proud to say—which they’d set atop their too-small color TV (recently being ten years ago). Grandfather had wrapped aluminum foil around one ear, supposedly to improve the reception.

“I’m in Hades,” she repeated.

Shilo hated this place more than she’d hated anything, and she hated her mom for not caring and her dad for dying and relegating her to this second-floor room where it was so hot it was difficult to breathe.

Tears spilled down her freckled face and she buried her head in her hands.

She hadn’t cried at her dad’s funeral; she was too numb. Now it seemed like she cried every day, so hard that her shoulders shook and the bed jiggled from the force of her sobs.

“Three years,” she whispered when she finally came up for air. “Only three.”

In three years her “sentence” here would be served and she would be released. She would be eighteen and could go where she wanted and do what she wanted.

She had money in a trust—it was all clearly spelled out in the will. She’d get it on her eighteenth birthday, and then she’d pack her three suitcases and be on her way.

She’d pick a university somewhere out East, maybe North Carolina, and get a degree in history. Her father had been a history buff, passing his erudite obsession to her. She loved to peruse all of his books, which were at her brother’s now, dog-earring the pages of the ones on ancient Egypt and George Washington and the American Revolution, disparate topics that fiercely held her interest.

“Shy . . .”

Shilo groaned.

“Shy . . . we’re opening!”

She slipped into the bathroom and splashed water on her face, deftly avoiding the mirror. She hoped her eyes weren’t red and wouldn’t give her away, but she didn’t want to look at her reflection to see for certain.

“Coming, Meemaw.”

She put on four silver earrings, two for each ear, and followed that with a simple gold bracelet, a pewter cross on a thin chain, and three rings on her right hand—all given to her by her grandmother, and all antiques. Her favorite was a silver one set with a smooth piece of turquoise. Her dad had called her a magpie on more than one occasion because she wore so much jewelry.

She put four rings on her left hand, one a piece of clear red plastic that wrapped around her index finger like a snake. She’d won it at a carnival in the spring, while on her first date. Two were 14-karat gold bands from her grandmother on her mom’s side, one with two small sapphires. The last was a high school ring she wore on her thumb, the back of it wrapped with yarn to make the opening small enough so it wouldn’t fall off.

The ring belonged to the boy who took her on that first...