Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

Prologue
    L IKE MOST ANY other girl my age, I was afraid of the darkness when I was alone. I was afraid of mysterious sounds, curious shadows, and all the other assorted Halloween creatures that populate our nightmares. More important, perhaps, I was not afraid of admitting to those fears. It was comforting to know that so many others my age shared them with me and so few would deny it. But I did have one fear that I was ashamed to admit or reveal to my friends, or anyone, for that matter, and I did the best I could to hide it, even though, at times, that seemed impossible to do.
    I had always been afraid of my older sister, Cassie. As long as I can remember, Cassie made me tremble inside when she looked hard at me or came toward me quickly as someone angry might. There was nothing grotesque or immediately frightening about Cassie, either. Anyone who heard me say I was afraid of her would surely tilt his or her head and smile with some skepticism. But none of them was her younger sister, and none of them lived with her.
    Mother once told me that she thought Cassie, even though she was only about three at the time,deliberately caused me to fall off the diaper-changing table, which resulted in a fracture in my right leg. To this day, Cassie denies it and insists that Mother was just not watching me properly and had put me too close to the edge. Although Mother blamed her, she excused it with something called sibling rivalry. She even made it sound okay.
    “Until the day you were born, Cassie was the precious princess in the family, especially for your father, and then you came along and nudged her off the throne. It’s only natural that she would have been terribly jealous and disappointed, but smother your worries. Sisters grow out of such things as soon as they are confident about themselves,” Mother told me, and then ran her fingers through my long golden-brown hair, which she said was softer than silk. I could see the pleasure in her face, and I was happy that I could bring that look of pleasure into her speckled green-blue eyes simply by being me.
    Unfortunately, I would immediately wonder if she had felt that way about Cassie’s hair when she was my age. Cassie didn’t take as much pride in her hair as I did, and she certainly wouldn’t let Mother run her fingers through it that way anymore, if she ever had. She always hated Mother touching her and especially hated her hair being brushed or changed from how she wanted it. Still, I was afraid she would be envious of how much attention Mother or Daddy paid me, whether it was because of my hair or my clothes or some clever thing I had said.
    Maybe Mother could see that fear in my face. She leaned down to whisper, her lips tickling my earlobe,and added, “And you and I know, Semantha, that Cassie is the most self-confident girl her age for miles and miles and miles around us. She doesn’t have to be jealous of anyone anymore. There are few her age or even older who are as intelligent and as competent as Cassie. Cassie is a born leader. She’ll make us all very proud someday. I’m sure of it.”
    There was always a lot of whispering going on in our house. Soft words flew through our rooms on butterfly wings. Our parents whispered to each other often, even if we were too far away to hear their exact words. However, Cassie was the champion whisperer. That was because whenever she wanted to impress me with something, she would whisper it. It was a way of stamping it
Secret,
just the way a letter or a package might be stamped
Priority Mail.
    And there was no greater sin in Cassie’s Ten Commandments than her First Commandment: Thou shalt never reveal a secret, especially if it was a Cassie Secret.
    Over time, her other commandments would come raining down upon me as if from the lips of some deity. Eventually, I came to believe that Cassie had her own private religion, her own personal god. I watched her carefully in church and saw how her eyes would blaze with defiance whenever we were asked to speak directly to God. She wouldn’t speak. She wouldn’t sing a hymn or chant a prayer. She wouldn’t even bow her head. Neither Mother nor Daddy ever seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t seem to care, and ours was a very religious community.

    We lived in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, because that was where Daddy’s ancestors had come to live when they left England. Our triple great-grandfather, as Cassie liked to call him, built the Gothic Revival