The Hollow of Mont Noir

By Jennifer Krey

Seventeen-year-old Allison Spencer thought her life was completely normal - or as normal as it could be for an animal empath known as "Crazy Animal Girl." But when her older brother disappeared and her parents moved the family 400 miles away to try to find some answers, she discovered friendship and love in a supernatural world she never knew existed and learned some shocking truths about herself and her family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Krey
• Release date: Feb 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466185319

Jennifer Krey

Jennifer Krey resides in New York State with her wonderful husband and two adorable little boys. She is a stay-at-home mom who enjoys swimming, cooking and reading, and she also likes to write in her free time.

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THE HOLLOW OF MONT NOIR

Book #1 of the HOWL Series

By Jennifer Krey

Published by Jennifer Krey at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Jennifer Krey

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to

Patrick, Harrison and Franklin

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: Crittervision

Chapter 2: Moving Day

Chapter 3: Resentment

Chapter 4: The Chief

Chapter 5: Discovery

Chapter 6: The Wolf

Chapter 7: School

Chapter 8: Acquaintances

Chapter 9: Connections

Chapter 10: The Vision

Chapter 11: The Assignment

Chapter 12: The Project

Chapter 13: Cookies

Chapter 14: Questions

Chapter 15: Revelation

Chapter 16: Rendezvous

Chapter 17: Royalty

Chapter 18: Magicvision

Chapter 19: The Date

Chapter 20: Legends

Chapter 21: The Scarf

Chapter 22: The Scent

Chapter 23: Too Close

Chapter 24: The Conrí

Chapter 25: New Year’s Eve

Chapter 26: New Year’s Day

Chapter 27: Transformation

Chapter 28: Remembering

Chapter 29: A Commencement

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Prologue

I've heard all the clichés, probably a hundred times each. Keep your chin up. It's always darkest before the dawn. Keep a stiff upper lip. Soon you'll see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or my personal favorite: Never give up hope. Hope... what a cruel joke that is.

I've come to realize that hope is good for nothing, and so I've written my own little cliché about hope: Hope is a vampire, relentless and evil. It slowly sucks the life out of you while it lives on, lurking in the shadows, waiting to feast on your soul.

But perhaps that's more the ramblings of a crazy person than a cliché. I don't really expect it to catch on.

If I sound a bit gloomy, it's with good reason. My older brother has managed to ruin three perfectly good lives, four if you count his own... although we can't really call his life ruined without knowing where he is or what he's up to.

Chapter One: Crittervision

The dreams started before we even moved to Mont Noir. I would dream that I was running through a forest, skillfully dodging trees and other obstacles, as if it were something I did everyday. I would feel twigs snapping under my bare feet, leaves softly brushing me as I passed and the wind rushing down my back. I couldn't enjoy the feeling, though, because I was running away from something that was following just behind me. I couldn't take the time to look behind me to see what it was, but I knew that it was something dark and sinister, and it wanted me dead. I just raced on and on with this thing chasing me, never getting caught, but never increasing the distance between the two of us.

In every one of those dreams, I was an animal. I couldn’t tell what type of animal I was, or perhaps I just couldn't remember. When I woke, all I could recall were the sounds and the feelings of running on four legs and speeding through the trees. I had a slightly uncomfortable feeling about it, like I should have known what I was, but the animal was something that I’d never known, never seen. Something from a fantasy, perhaps, but the only creatures I could think of were unicorns and centaurs, and that didn’t seem quite right.

It was strange, even for me. I often dreamt of animals, but never that I actually was an animal.

My dreams of animals never led to anything good. Whenever a dream of mine included an animal, it became portentous, or something of an omen. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that it was just coincidental, but the connection eventually became too obvious to ignore. When I dreamt of cats, our neighbor's Siamese kitten got hit by a car and died. When I dreamt of whales, several humpbacks beached themselves on the shore close to our home in Ocean City, Maryland and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and biologists from the Baltimore Aquarium. I once dreamt of snakes and found out later that my English teacher, Mrs. Duncan, was bitten by a rattlesnake while hiking in New Mexico and had to have a foot amputated. It all seemed so random and unpredictable, and I never could tell just what would go wrong after I had an animal dream. I only knew that something was coming, and it wouldn't be pleasant.

I kept having these dreams for two weeks before my family moved from Ocean City, Maryland to Mont Noir, New York, and it gave me an uneasy feeling. Why was I suddenly starring in my own animal dreams? I couldn’t help but wonder if I might become the unfortunate victim of a close encounter with an animal.

I wasn’t happy about moving, but I was hoping that if any good was to come from my family moving halfway across the country, maybe it would be that I could finally ditch my reputation as Crazy Animal Girl. I was born an animal empath, with this sixth sense for animals, or Crittervision as I liked to call it. It is just some freaky mind connection that I'd had for as long as I could remember. I would get a strange sensation, like an over-caffeinated jittery feeling in my mind, when an animal was close by. Each type of animal gave me a slightly different sensation, kind of like a signature for the species. I could tell what kind of animal it was and how it was feeling, but it worked only with non-human animals. I couldn’t exactly read their minds; I could just feel if they were hungry or lonely or frightened or whatever, but that’s about it. Oh, and the dream thing.

When I was younger, trips to the zoo or a local farm usually turned traumatic, both for me and for others around me. I loved seeing and sensing all of the different types of animals, but I invariably ended up in tears because the bears felt lonely or the elephants were depressed. When the zoo got a new baby tiger cub that had been rescued from illegal exotic pet breeders, I cried for a week. The poor thing had been abused by the breeders and was sad and confused and scared. Seeing so many different animals in person really helped me learn to recognize the unique feelings I get from each type of animal, but in the process, I earned quite a reputation for myself among my classmates and teachers as a slightly unhinged wannabe animal psychic; hence, the name Crazy Animal Girl.

As I got older, I learned to keep my Crittervision more to myself. My immediate family was aware of it, but my parents preferred to pretend that it didn't exist rather than try to explain it to people or even understand it themselves. My older brother, Logan, was the only person who was completely comfortable with my ability and didn’t make me feel like a freak. Once, when I was six and Logan was eight, we went camping with our parents and I sensed a frightened skunk just as we were putting out our campfire before bed. I told everyone to run, and we all just escaped getting sprayed. Our tent wasn’t so lucky, so we had to drive back home that night, burning the stinky tent and everything that was inside of it before we left. After that day, Logan thought of my Crittervision as a cool superpower and would always try to help me learn more by catching animals in the park and bringing them home for me to identify without seeing them. I eventually figured out that I could also get a slight sense of a species' signature through television or photographs, and, although it was not as strong a feeling as I would get in person, it helped me to greatly expand my animal knowledge.

I often felt like an outsider, even with my own family, since I was the only person I knew that had any kind of strange abilities. I wondered why I had this Crittervision thing when no one else in my family did. I occasionally thought about calling a psychic hotline just to try to speak with someone who might understand my situation, but I couldn't tell which of the psychics that I saw advertised were for real and which were frauds. Besides, my parents would have killed me if I charged the $4.95 per minute to their phone bill. I finally learned how to put my Crittervision in the back of my mind and just focus on being a normal girl.

So when I started having recurring animal dreams that were unusual - even for me - two weeks before my family moved to Mont Noir, New York, I knew that trouble was brewing for me already. I just didn’t know what kind of trouble.

Chapter Two: Moving Day

I leaned my head back against the seat, sweating profusely in the muggy August heat and pondering the fact that it was really my brother's fault that my parents and I and all of our valuable and breakable possessions ended up stuffed into our minivan. Normally, the air inside the minivan wouldn't have been quite so stifling, but the van was so over-packed that the boxes and bags blocked the air conditioning vents from providing much relief from the heat. So there we were, sweat dripping down our faces, our backs stiff from sleeping in sleeping bags on the bare floor last night, our bellies full of greasy diner food and four hundred miles of open road ahead of us. Moving day. Yippee.

We were leaving behind our nice, upper-middle class, suburban neighborhood, my high school with all of my friends and my boyfriend - actually, my ex-boyfriend - and everything I'd ever known for a new life out in East Podunk, or wherever it was that we were headed. Some sleepy little farm town called Mont Noir that lies at the base of the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. The motivation for my family's big move was the fact that the prestigious St. Alexander Academy was located in a town called Culver, close to where we would be living. My brother, Logan, had been attending college there on a baseball scholarship until last May, when he suddenly disappeared.

It had been almost four months since anyone had heard from Logan. Lucky me, I was the last one from the family to speak with him, so I'd been grilled a thousand times over by the parents and the police for any clues there might have been in his words, his tone, the inflections of his voice. Trust me, I had recounted every little detail over and over, and there was no hint of anything to come. Logan had called the house to say hello, as he did every week. We chatted for a minute or two about school, baseball and other mundane aspects of life, then he asked to speak to Mom or Dad. They weren't home, so we said goodbye, and he promised to call back the following day. He never did.

In my darkest moments - and the drive from Maryland to New York was looking like one of those - I didn't believe that we would ever see Logan again. It felt like we were living in an eternal black hole of time, where the days morphed together into one long, unending search for my brother. Sometimes, I thought it would actually be a relief to learn that he was dead so that we could stop the hoping and praying and waiting, and then I immediately hated myself for even thinking that. And then I usually hated Logan for putting us all through such agony. It was really all his fault anyway. If he hadn't gone and disappeared, I would still have been at home in Ocean City, living my regular old life, enjoying my last couple of weeks of summer vacation with my friends and my boyfriend and getting ready for my senior year of high school. Everything a seventeen-year-old girl should be doing. Not sweating my rear end off in the back of a minivan and wallowing in my own miserable thoughts.

Since Logan's disappearance, my family had become a walking example of the seven stages of grief. We’d all gotten past the shock and disbelief of stage one. My parents and I had each then come up with our own desperate theories of what could have kept Logan from contacting us, ranging from a kidnapping (Dad’s) to a sudden mental illness (mine) to amnesia (Mom’s). Dad and I eventually managed to move past the denial stage, but my poor mother still acted like Logan would walk through the door any minute and kept his room ready for his arrival. I was pretty comfortable in stage three with my anger to keep me company. Being mad at Logan kept me from focusing too much on other emotions. Dad, apparently the most evolved of us all, was straddling stages four and five, waffling between bargaining and guilt. Dad thought that if he just put in more effort and gave up more of his own life, he would be able to get his son back. They didn't think I could hear it, but I had overheard Dad telling Mom that he wished he could trade places with Logan, wherever he was, and that he felt like he didn’t protect Logan enough. If only we could all just skip over the depression stage and move on to acceptance… actually that thought was pretty depressing in itself. I was definitely not ready to just accept that my brother was gone and would never return. I don’t think my parents were either.

My dad, Dr. Randall Spencer, was a science professor - a career that helped to prepare him to lead an organized, methodical investigation. After Logan disappeared, Dad became positively robot-like in his search for clues. He was convinced that if he looked in the right place or talked to the right person, the clues would add up and lead us to my brother. I knew that Dad was not going to give up easily, but I was shocked when he quit his job as Chair of the Chemistry Department at The University of Maryland and accepted a position as Associate Chemistry Professor at St. Alexander Academy in Culver, New York, in order to be closer to the police investigation and the scene of the incident, as everyone was calling it since there was no evidence of any crime.

When my parents first told me about Dad's new job, I naively asked, How is Dad going to get back and forth between Ocean City and Culver every week? That seems like it would be a long drive.

I was starting to learn firsthand just how long of a drive it was. Of course Dad wouldn't be commuting; the whole family was moving. Moving!

I continued thinking about my brother, becoming more and more engrossed in my own thoughts. I couldn’t stop picturing him in my mind and remembering how he looked the last time he had been home. Logan was headed back to college after spending Easter break with the family. He was running late as usual, so he ran out the door with his blond hair disheveled and his face unshaven, but with his trademark goofy grin and warm blue eyes. That was the last time my parents and I had seen him.

Logan had been gone since May fifth, Cinco de Mayo, just before his nineteenth birthday, just before his college baseball team was to finish out the season and just before finals. Logan would have completed his freshman year of college and come home to work as a lifeguard at the beach to earn some money before the next semester started. He loved working at the beach because it gave him a chance to work on his tan and gave all of the girls in town a chance to fawn over him. Well, August had arrived, and the next semester at St. Alexander was scheduled to start in just a few days, but Logan wouldn't be there. But the rest of the family would...

At first, there was a terrific hoopla when Logan went missing. The Culver Police Department and St. Alexander Academy's Public Safety officers opened a joint investigation to look for clues, interview witnesses, and scour surveillance tapes from the area. They even set up a team of local volunteers and brought in additional police officers from neighboring towns. The entire county was plastered with signs showing Logan's picture and a phone number to call with information. Mom and Dad took turns driving to the Adirondack Mountains every week so that one of them would always be there while the search was underway. They did countless local television, radio and newspaper interviews, pleading with the public to help them find their missing son. After the first couple of weeks, my parents were flown to New York City to appear on the Today Show to talk about the situation. Luckily, I was spared the humiliation of having to tell my side of the story while sobbing on national television, and my Aunt Annabelle came to stay with me while my parents were out of town.

My parents were hopeful that the national media attention would generate more information and uncover clues that would help them find Logan. Shortly after the Today Show interview, however, there was a terrible storm in the Midwest, and a series of seven tornadoes ripped through a small town of mostly trailer parks. Forty-nine people were confirmed dead and eighteen more were trapped under the rubble. The ensuing rescue and clean-up efforts consumed the news media for the next couple of weeks, and Logan's disappearance was suddenly old news. The Culver police scaled back their search for Logan, believing that he had simply run off with his new girlfriend and did not wish to be found. Before long, the chief received a tip that a freshman student was selling marijuana out of his dorm room at St. Alexander, and the tiny Culver police department's efforts were completely refocused to the new crisis at hand.

Once my dad decided that the local police weren't doing enough to look for Logan - actually, I was pretty sure they were doing nothing, having assumed that Logan, who was technically an adult, just ran away - he took matters into his own hands. My father applied for, and was offered, the Associate Professor job at St. Alexander, which was a step down from his previous position as Chair of the Chemistry Department, but he figured that the lighter workload would give him more time to play detective and the lower cost of living in the rural town would allow for the lower income. Our house went up for sale, and Dad bought us a new house close to St. Alexander Academy. He had seen the place only once, and Mom and I had not seen it at all. Everything was moving so quickly that I barely had a chance to complain before the furniture disappeared and the boxes were packed.

Can you hear me back there, Allison? My dad's voice boomed cheerfully over the air conditioner and radio.

Um, yeah. I mean, what? That was the best response I could muster after being suddenly jarred out of my own dismal thoughts.

Do you want to stop for dinner? It looks like there's a rest stop area ahead. It would be good to stretch our legs, too. My parents were trying to be overly positive about this big move, pretending that it would be a great thing for me as well, and was not, in fact, completely destroying my entire life. Likewise, I was trying to put on a brave face for their sake because they had enough to worry about with their first-born child missing.

Sure, dinner sounds great. Be positive, I reminded myself.

More greasy food. Yay. This trip was doing wonders for my diet. I wasn't usually too strict with my eating habits, but after a summer of eating pizza and ice cream with my friends, I was getting worried that my normally athletic body would require some shaping up before school started. I needed to stay as fit as possible if I hoped to make the field hockey team in my new school. It was a given that I would make the team at my old school, but who knew what kind of competition there would be in a new town? I wasn't taking any chances.

We pulled into a truck stop along the highway just south of the New Jersey-New York state border. As I hauled myself out of the seat, I regretted not wearing more comfortable clothes. My skinny jeans and lace-trimmed white tank top looked super cute at home, but now they clung to my sweaty body in a wet, wrinkled mess, much like my long, dark-blond hair. As I tried to force my stiff legs to walk properly in my new high-heeled boots, I realized that it might have been a good idea for fashion to have taken a backseat, just this once. I looked at my parents in the worn jeans, faded t-shirts and sneakers that had embarrassed me that morning, and for one moment, I longed to trade outfits with them. Then I was thoroughly horrified with myself for wishing I had dressed like my parents. This was going to be a long trip if I didn't get a hold of myself.

I used the truck stop restroom, which ironically smelled of toilet cleaner but looked like it hadn't actually been touched by any type of cleaner in several weeks. When I came out, my parents were in line at the fast food counter, hugging and whispering in each others' ears. I found their public displays of affection mortifying, and I was torn between pretending that I didn't know them and joining them in line so they would pay for my food. Financial considerations won out over social embarrassment, and I sidled up behind them, hoping to not draw any attention to myself.

The fast food menu was not extensive, so I ordered a limp salad with watery dressing on the side and a Diet Coke. It tasted about like you would expect a truck stop salad to taste, plus it was brown around the edges and seemed like it might have been sitting in the refrigerated case for a few days or so. I guess they must not sell a lot of salads at the highway truck stop. My parents had the nerve to get cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

We were back on the road before long. Next stop: home. Their word, not mine. It was going to take a long time for me to start to consider any place besides Ocean City home. In fact, I didn't plan on ever thinking of any other place as my home, but I kept that opinion to myself.

As the evening wore on and we traveled further and further north through my new state of residence, New York, I felt myself becoming more uncomfortable and bored with each passing minute. I finally decided to try to focus on the two positives: as the sun began to set, the temperature finally dropped to a reasonable level, and the scenery was becoming slightly more interesting. As we approached the final hour of our journey, the Adirondack Mountains were visible in the distance, a hulking bluish-gray silhouette against the orange sky. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what my new life would be like. I had been perfectly happy with my old life and prayed that my new life would be very similar, maybe even with my brother in it.

Finally, we reached the town of Culver, and I had to admit that it could have been worse. It was an extremely small, but somewhat hip-looking college town. We drove right by St. Alexander Academy and onto the town's main strip. Since classes were starting in just a few days, the streets were already bustling with students. The town offered eclectic bookstores, vintage clothing shops, artsy cafes and coffee shops, a surprisingly diverse array of ethnic restaurants, and of course, a number of college bars. Not that I would be able to go to any bars for about four more years, but it was nice to see an element of fun in our new town.

In keeping with my vow to be positive about the move in front of my parents, I made some vague comments about how the town looked nice and how I hoped that we would be close enough to walk down to the cafes and bookstores from our house. Boy, was I mistaken.

Oh no, baby, we're not going to live in Culver! My dad sounded horrified, as if I had suggested we might be living on death row at Riker's Island. Culver is a dangerous place! We're going to be living in Mont Noir. I'm sure I told you that.

Um, I thought Mont Noir was like a suburb of Culver. My resolve to remain positive was rapidly waning.

No, no, no. It's called The Hollow of Mont Noir, and it is a nice and safe small town about thirty minutes from here.

Small town? Smaller than Culver? Yep, all resolve was gone, and I slumped back in my seat, feeling defeated and drained of energy.

I watched out the window as the scenery changed and the tiny, hip college town was left behind. Before long, there was nothing to look at but trees and sky, and then, even the paved road disappeared out from underneath us and we were driving along a bumpy dirt road. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about just how small this Hollow of Mont Noir would be. In the back of my mind, I heard my parents arguing over whether we were lost or were taking a shortcut to our new town. I didn’t open my eyes again until I heard my mother scream.

Randy! Randy! Stop the car! she shouted.

Oh, for crying out loud, Helen, we’re not that lost, my father responded in exasperation.

My mom was gasping for breath as she gripped the dashboard and said, Stop! Turn the car around now! I saw Logan!

The car fishtailed a bit and there was a loud squeal as my father slammed on the brakes. I heard him curse under his breath and mumble something about seeing things, but he turned the car around and slowly drove back the way we had come.

Okay, Helen, now where did you see Logan? Dad asked, with just a trace of patronization in his voice.

He was walking just off the road by the trees, over there. Mom pointed to the left. He was with a girl.

I could tell that my father didn’t believe that Logan was really walking down the side of a random dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and I didn’t either. I knew that my mother had been under a lot of stress for the past four months, and I had a sinking feeling that seeing things might be a product of that.

It’s pretty dark here. Are you sure it was Logan? I asked hesitantly, not wanting to upset