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Beltane
Beltane
Beltane
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Beltane

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My name’s Thea Hartsong and this is my story. If you recognize my name from the newspapers or TV please don’t stop reading...I didn’t do what they say I did, I promise....

Following what she believes is a nervous breakdown, complete with a prescription for ‘Headzapper’ pills, sixteen year old Thea Hartsong finds herself at the centre of a battle between the forces of light and darkness when she discovers that her daytime hallucinations are actually the emergence of 'second sight', and that she is the only person who can stop a coven of witches from fulfilling a dark and ancient prophecy which threatens the entire world.

But will anybody believe a girl who is officially crazy?

LanguageEnglish
PublisherThea Hartsong
Release dateApr 25, 2013
ISBN9781301294152
Beltane
Author

Thea Hartsong

I am on the run from the police and am being pursued by members of a coven of witches called the Sisterhood of Cybele. My current location is a secret. For the sake of life as we know it on this planet I need you to read my story and make sure that it is shared as widely as possible. Help me please!

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    Book preview

    Beltane - Thea Hartsong

    THE THEA HARTSONG CHRONICLES - BOOK ONE

    BELTANE

    Thea Hartsong

    © Copyright Thea Hartsong 2013.

    Smashwords edition

    For B, D, M, & T with love always.

    Smashwords License Statement

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. 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.

    Chapter 1 A beginning.

    One thing was obvious. Something had gone horribly wrong.

    The acrid smell of burned-out electrical circuitry hung in the air as the man struggled to sit up. His ears were ringing, his head spinning, and he felt sure that he was going to be sick. Trying to force his eyes to open was a big mistake; it only made the feeling of nausea worse, and scared him half to death because instead of the moonlit forest glade all he could see was a patch of flickering white light.

    After a few terrible moments when he felt certain he’d never being able to see again, he slowly began to be able to make out some blurred shapes, and eventually to see what had happened to the camp site. It was a complete disaster area.

    The tent looked as though it had been torn to bits by some sort of tropical hurricane, though that was hardly likely on a gentle English spring evening without even a breath of wind. Pieces of canvas were strewn across the clearing, and one of the tent poles was impaled in the trunk of a tree. Two guy ropes hung loosely from it, and a single tent peg dangled almost comically swinging to and fro about six feet above the ground.

    Shifting slowly onto his knees, he found himself struggling to remember what he was supposed to be doing here in the middle of the forest so late at night. Wasn’t he meant to be filming something? If so, where was the camera?

    When he eventually found it, at the edge of the still, dark, pool of water in the center of the glade, it looked as though it had melted. Its tripod was twisted sideways about forty- five degrees, and the video tape lay strewn across the ground in tangled knots like the entrails of some great beast.

    Whatever had happened, whatever he’d been trying to film, there would be no record of it now. He stood for a moment staring out into the night uncertain what to do next. Then something caught his eye, something that changed everything. A tiny red recording light was blinking at him from the other side of the pool.

    He was just about to set off towards it when a bubbling sound from the water in front of him made him stop in his tracks. He looked down; a broad ripple was moving swiftly outwards from the center of the pool towards the shore.

    There was something there…in the water… a soft golden colored glow, deep down beneath the surface began spreading rapidly until it filled the pool completely making it glisten, and gleam, as if the whole thing were filled with liquid gold.

    He only put his hands in front of his eyes for a moment to protect them against the sudden glare, but when he opened them again he could barely believe what he was seeing.

    The forest glade had been deserted before, but now the figure of a tall man, whose face seemed strangely familiar, stood solidly in the middle of the clearing. His sandy-colored shoulder- length hair was soaking wet and lay plastered to his skull in strands, and his drenched clothes dripped water onto the dry earth in a steady trickle. But it was what he carried nestled in his arms so tenderly that was so strange, so surprising… and so out of place.

    Wrapped in what looked like a tangle of pond-weed, its hands clenched in tight fists, was a tiny newborn baby.

    Chapter 2. The threads are woven

    My name is Thea Hartsong. If you recognize my name from the newspapers or TV please don’t stop reading…I didn’t do what they say I did, I promise.

    Everything you are going to read here is the truth. What I didn’t experience for myself at first hand I figured out later from what other people said to me, or from surfing the web. I can’t tell you exactly where I am right now for obvious reasons, though not only because I’m wanted by the police. There are other reasons too, ones you’ll understand if you finish reading my whole story.

    The only problem, of course, is that I’m crazy. Officially. It’s a matter of public record. Look it up if you want to, if you haven’t already that is. I’m willing to bet every little intimate detail of my private life, not to mention my full medical history, has been smeared across the pages of the newspapers and the Internet for months. So, you see, there’s a strong possibility that everything I’m going to tell you has been conjured up out of nothing by my sick mind.

    To be perfectly honest I can’t really say for sure that it hasn’t, I just don’t think it has. I remember this T shirt I saw someone wearing once in Greenwich Village which said, ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!’ I think that’s basically my philosophy right now.

    Well, there it is, take it or leave it. Read this post or delete it, believe it or don’t believe it. I’ll leave it up to you to decide. At least if you’ve got this far then there’s a sliver of a chance that you might carry on and read the whole story, figure out I’m not completely out to lunch, and act on the warning my words contain.

    It’s important, really important that somebody does. Not just for me, but for everyone, everywhere. For the future of our entire planet.

    So, I expect you’re wondering how it all began. I used to think for a while that if I hadn’t slapped Sadie Adams face during recess none of this would have happened to me, that I could have had a regular life with nice, safe, ordinary everyday problems like everybody else. Of course I know now what a joke that is.

    It’s strange how once a step has been taken it becomes part of the past; fixed, inevitable. A simple movement of the arm and wrist, or failing to press your foot down on a brake pedal in time, and everything can change. I don’t know if I believe in fate completely, but whenever something happens to me which I didn’t see coming I can’t help thinking of the ancient Norse legend about the women who sit around the roots of the world tree spinning our destinies. The Norns.

    We don’t know where the threads lead and we can’t break them. The most we can do is try to stretch them, or to try to persuade the spinners to extend them a little further. Wyrd bið ful aræd as they say in Anglo Saxon, fate is inexorable.

    You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a bit of a languages geek. I love words. I’ve been hooked on myths and legends since my dad gave me a children's version of the Icelandic Sagas, the ancient tales of Gods, Giants, and Heroes, which mix up magic and mythology with the true history of the Vikings, for my tenth birthday.

    I was planning to study medieval literature at university one day, though I guess that’s never going to happen now. Life has taken me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me down a different path, a path that has blown everything I thought I knew about the world to smithereens, and one which is a long way from over yet.

    Up until recently I’d always thought I was a pretty ordinary sort of girl, average height, average looks, except for a pair of startlingly green eyes which everybody tells me are my best feature. I’d always flattered myself that I was smarter than the majority of people though as it turns out it seems I’m nowhere near as smart as I’d imagined. Cap the whole thing off with a mop of curly red hair that just won’t obey any instructions whatsoever, and a figure that goes straight up and down a bit like a boy’s and you’ve pretty much got me.

    Personality-wise I’ve always been a bit of a loner. I’m the girl who spends most of her time in the library. It’s not because I can’t make friends, I’m just happier with books I guess. If I wanted to analyze what it comes down to I think I’d say that I’ve just always felt a bit out of place. Square peg in round hole so to speak.

    Even so, my life was like anybody else’s right up to the point at which my dad died, just days before my sixteenth birthday. That was the real turning point, what the Greeks call ‘peripeteia’, a reversal of fortune, when all the bad stuff began.

    I really loved my dad. Most daughters do I know that, but our relationship was especially close. He drove me crazy on occasion, and there were plenty of things about him which were far from perfect, leaving his toenail clippings in the bath for example; gross! It’s just that for most of my life there was just me and him.

    Mom died giving birth to me, and dad was the one who got to read me bedtime stories and hold my hand until I went to sleep, listen to me sawing away at a violin, take me to riding lessons and swimming, collect me from sleepovers, bandage my bruised knees, and eventually my bruised heart when I started to get interested in boys.

    It’s going to sound strange, but I knew it was going to happen, the car crash I mean. I had a really vivid dream about it the night before. He drove off a bridge into a river in upstate New York; the weather was pretty bad apparently. They said they thought that he got disoriented, lost control, which is pretty much what happened to me afterwards. I blamed myself, of course, for not telling him, not stopping him from getting into the car. Bouts of anger and depression made me want to lash out at everybody one minute, then the next I’d want to sit in my room in pitch darkness and blank out the world completely.

    I started suffering from insomnia, which was all very well until the daytime hallucinations kicked in. I was seeing all sorts of weird stuff. You name it, from winged horses to two-headed ogres. I even had little people talking to me for a while until they finally put me on the anti-psychotic pills I call my head zappers. I have to take them every morning to keep me on the level.

    It probably seems like I’m making light of the whole thing, though I can promise you it was horrible. Imagine what it would be like not to know what’s real anymore.

    Even with the pills I started going off the rails, behaving like a complete brat at school and at home too. I became hard to handle, and what a girlfriend of mine described rather colorfully as ‘discombobulated’.

    Before the Sadie Adams incident I’d been seeing a shrink off and on for about two months, to help sort out what we pretty much all agreed were ‘grief issues’. He was a creep who I refused to speak to again after he tried to get me to tell him if I’d had any erotic dreams recently.

    He was eventually canned by my stepmom Rebekah when I explained to her why I hadn’t been to my last two sessions. She’s a shrink herself, and following what she called, in her cut-glass English accent, a ‘difference of opinion’ during which they hurled terms like existential angst, repetition convulsion, and transference at each other she sent him packing.

    Although I didn’t call Rebekah mom or anything, she’d only got married to dad a couple of years before he died, she was pretty much the only person I had left in the world once he’d gone. That is except for Grampi.

    Grampi was dad’s father, but I’d hardly ever spent any time with him. He was what you might call ‘eccentric’ which is the word that people seem to use for someone who’s nutty as a fruitcake but has enough money for folk not to care. Perhaps that’s where I get it from. He figures the world’s coming to an end, so he lives in this cabin full of canned foods and piles of ammunition up in Canada someplace.

    In a way I was responsible for Rebekah and dad hooking up. She was a visiting tutor at dad’s university; they got talking after a she’d attended one of his lectures and she asked him out. She was obviously interested in him but Dad wasn’t even going to go until I forced him to call her.

    I knew he’d been lonely looking after me on his own, and I secretly wanted him to find someone nice to date. I have to admit I was slightly thrown when they decided to get married, but what the heck. Dad was in seventh heaven and Rebekah gave me my space, she knew better than to try to throw any mother-type moves on me too soon.

    The shock of dad dying brought us much closer together than we’d ever been before. I hadn’t really realized how much she loved him until we both lost him. She was inconsolable for days afterwards and barely left her room. What really impressed me was how she’d stuck by me when all the practicalities were dealt with and we’d seen him buried. She didn’t have to carry on taking care of me; we weren’t related by blood and I was practically old enough to do that for myself, headzappers aside.

    The day I hit Sadie Adams Principal Dalziel forced Rebekah to come all the way from the hospital uptown where she was on call, to the school in Brooklyn to tell her that he was suspending me.

    It hadn’t even been a particularly hard slap, though from Sadie’s reaction you’d have thought I half killed her. She threw herself onto the ground, thrashed her feet and started screaming like a banshee. Within minutes I’d found myself in the Principal’s office again.

    If you knew Sadie Adams you’d understand why I did it. She’s one of those prom queen types, mean as a rattlesnake, with a nauseatingly convincing ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’ expression which she employs in the presence of any adult she happens to encounter. Unfortunately Sadie’s parents got straight on the phone the minute they heard about it, and her father, a corporate lawyer, threatened to sue the school if I wasn’t excluded for good.

    My hands are tied Mrs Hartsong, Principal Dalziel intoned as Rebekah listened glumly,I’m sorry, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate what a difficult position we’re in.

    He stood, his bald head gleaming like a bowling ball, and gestured vaguely towards the paneled door of his office as if slightly uncertain that it would still be there.

    The slap actually had nothing to do with what people tended to refer to in whispers as ‘my condition’. Sadie was a bully, and she had just tripped a ninth grader in the corridor so that she fell against the lockers. I didn’t even mean to slap her really I was trying to grab hold of her by the hair, and mistimed it.

    Whatever the reason, whatever the excuse I had to face up to the

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