Chapter One: The Bracelets of Anna Brynn

"Watch out!" a woman in a worn flannel shirt shrieked, frantically pursuing a toddler in a miniature Jeep. Abandoned sidewalk chalk, likely a consequence of the maniacal child behind the wheel, crunched beneath the battery-powered vehicle's chunky tires. A squirrel dropped an acorn and clambered up a tree trunk, narrowly avoiding destruction.

Ahead of the toddler, Anna Prentiss walked down the sidewalk, immersed in the music blaring from her iPod. At the mother's agitated warning, she turned, finally noticing the Jeep as it was dangerously close to slamming into her heels.

She did the first thing that came to mind. She hollered a dismembered cry of surprise:

"Whagermygawd!"

and jumped off the sidewalk, tumbling into a pile of damp leaves on a lawn adjacent to the concrete. The plastic Jeep hurtled past, the woman closing distance quickly. From her place in the leaf-pile, Anna pulled a leaf out of her bangs and watched as the woman caught up with her daughter.

"It's all right, I'm fine," Anna muttered, but the woman was too busy inspecting her child for injuries to offer up anything resembling an apology. She waited for the woman to turn and apologize; the woman did not oblige. Frustrated, Anna pointed her arm at the oak tree above the woman and clenched her fingers.

"Fall," she muttered.

An acorn tumbled out of the tree and clattered on to the woman's skull. The woman's hand flew to her forehead. When the woman understood what had happened, she scowled and kicked the tree.

Anna pulled herself up, brushing leaves from her clothing and frowning at the dirt stains on her knees. She took to the sidewalk again, but not before she stowed her headphones away in her backpack. Apparently, the sidewalks of Melrose Lane weren't as safe as she'd supposed.

But Anna's street was just as safe as it had always been. Anna was the only young person on the block; the residents of the other houses were mostly elderly retirees or wealthy middle-aged people. Anna's parents were the youngest people on the block (other than Anna, of course),and in their late thirties, they could barely be referred to as being young. As Anna strode over the crosswalk, she felt herself settling into the comfortable sleepiness of Walter Street.

She walked up the steps slowly, one at a time, digging in her jacket pocket for her key to the house. A shiny brass plate engraved "The Prentiss Residence, 172 Walter St," glimmered next to the door. But when Anna's hand touched the doorknob, expecting it to be locked, the door opened smoothly, and warm scented air wafted out onto Anna's face.

"That you, Birdie?" a delicate voice lilted from the kitchen. Katerina Prentiss's tiny head bobbed around the corner.

"Yeah, Mom," Anna said, slightly surprised. "What are you doing home so early?"

"I finished editing tomorrow's edition faster than I'd expected," Anna's mother piped, gesturing with an oven glove that dwarfed her slender arm. Katerina was referred to as "Kat" by most of her coworkers at the newspaper, the Daily Herald, where she worked as editor. This was not only a nickname derived from her name; she looked and moved like a cat. Enormous green eyes peered out from her intricately built face; a tiny nose that turned up at the end jabbed out from her face. She moved with an innate gracefulness that suited her slender build perfectly. "How was school?"

Anna removed her shoes and placed them in the closet next to the door. "Not bad."

"Was something wrong?" Katerina's luminous eyes glowed from beneath her arched eyebrows. "Anything you want to talk about?"

Secretly, Anna hated it when her mother's voice adopted that tone. That overly-concerned tone. That voice that jabbed tiny spikes into Anna's skin and made her slightly angry though she wasn't entirely sure why. It was the voice Kat took on when she was worried that Anna was going to far in directions that she shouldn't be going. It was the voice that Anna sometimes wanted desperately to remove from her mother's mouth and toss off of a cliff somewhere, tie it to a balloon and send it floating up into the sky.

"Nothing was wrong," Anna said hastily, stumbling over her words. "It just wasn't exceptional. Not good, not bad. You know, that kind of day?" She stared at her mother's eyes filled with a suspicion her mother probably didn't know was visible and added, "Nothing to worry about, okay?"

It might be better if Anna's voice didn't break. It would be much better if she could speak confidently, assure her mother that everything really was all right. But there was always the roughness. Always the breathless rasp that bled into her voice when she was trying to make a point.

Her stretched answer satisfied Kat, but only barely. "Oh. Well, good! I'm making chop suey for dinner. Remember Auntie Charlie's recipe? The spicy one? It's going to be ready in an hour or so, when your father gets home from work. He hasn't called to say that the hospital's going to keep him on late, so I'm assuming that he'll be home at regular time."

"Sounds awesome," Anna said, moving toward the stairs.

Anna looked forward to returning to her bedroom every day after school. Since the incident, she'd made some changes to her formerly formal room, stripping it of it's matchiness and showering it with things she gneuinely liked instead of things that went well with each other. An enormous globe presided over a chipped bookshelf of encyclopedias in the corner. Long rows of shelves lined one side of the room, filled partially with paperbacks and hardcovers and partially with knick-knacks that she'd acquired at various places. Paintings, Anna's own work, were scattered over the walls. A worn plush quilt was draped over a bed littered with multicolored pillows. The room gave the impression that a tornado had swept through various garage sales, furniture stores and flea markets, collected a vast amount of merchandise in one swoop, and distributed around a square room with sloped ceilings and wide windows on either end.

It was Anna's sanctuary. She placed her backpack neatly next to her desk and rolled onto her bed, sprawling across her quilt and resting her head on her wrists. The leather bracelets covering them were cool and slightly damp from the ordeal with the leaf pile. Anna flipped over on to her back and inspected the bracelets, holding them above her and looking at the intricate leatherwork.

Anna's father had bought the bracelets home for her shortly fter the incident. Once she'd returned home from the hospital and a few days had passed, Anna's father had came home late from work. Anna had heard his footsteps, heavier than her mother's, coming up the stairs. There had been a knock on her door.

"Come in," Anna had mumbled from her perch on her bed, swathed in blankets. When Anna's father opened the door, he'd seen her in her bed, light green eyes peering out from beneath a blanket hood, taking on the hollow glow so like her mother's.

Thomas Prentiss, affectionately called Tom by Kat, had hesitantly opened the door and sat down on the bed. "How you doing, sweetie?"

"Okay, Daddy," Anna's thin voice had murmured.

"I brought you a present."

"That's nice, Daddy."

"It's important, honey. Now come out from beneath those blankets."

And Anna, sixteen-year-old Anna, had reluctantly crawled out from beneath her blankets like an unhappy four-year-old who's been told that it's time to stop playing games and go to bed. Her lantern eyes peered at the box in her father's arms.

"What is it, Daddy?"

"Well, what do you think it is?" Tom's voice was gentle and pained. He hated the rawness he saw in his daughter's eyes, hated how she flinched back from him like a wounded animal, hated the bite marks on her lips and the way her pale forehead looked clammy.

It was easy to heal the people at the hospital. Administer antibiotics. Take this one's blood pressure. Change that one's sheets. But this, what had happened to his daughter, was a different creature entirely. A hypodermic needle dripping fluids intrevenuously would do little to tame what was eating his daughter from the inside. But what he had brought her might close a gash slightly, might jumpstart the healing process.

"I don't know." She didn't want to guess. She was quickly losing her curiousity.

"Then let's open it up, okay?"

"Okay."

And nestled inside crumpled paper had been the bracelets. Smooth leather and looking for all the world like something created by elves or wizards. Simple beauty laced with magic. Even through the murk, something warm trickled through Anna's throat, something swelled behind her eyes.

"What are they?" She traced a jagged fingernail across the leather surface.

Tom watched her intently. "I had them made for you. They're sort of bracelets, but they're meant to be more than decoration. Do you know what gauntlets are?"

"They protect the knights' arms," Anna answered, her eyes still rooted to the bracelets.

Tom smiled. "That's right! They protected the knights when they were going into battle. Of course, knight gauntlets were made of different, heavier materials, but they were meant to protect knights from swords and arrows. These are meant to protect you from different things."

"Like what?"

Tom was silent for a moment. He chose his words carefully. "Like painful thoughts, or bad dreams. I bought these from a very old man who has a shop downtown. He had the longest moustache I've ever seen!" Tom motioned towards his other lips and pretended to twiddle long, braided facial hair. Anna didn't notice. Tom went on. "He works mostly with leather, but the word on the street is that he's a master of magic, too. When I bought these, he told me that whoever wore them would never have bad dreams again."

"Did he really?" Anna was not making small talk. Genuine interest filtered through her words.

"Yes," Tom answered softly. "He said they were charmed."

She's buying into it,

he thought. She's buying into it because she has her mother's blood. She just can't resist an interesting story, even if the better part of her knows it's untrue. He watched his daughter's fingers trickling over the newly-worked leather, caught the glimmer in the lantern eyes she'd inherited from her mother along with her love for fairy tales.

For a fraction of a second, he felt something resembling regret towards his decision of buying the gauntlets for his daughter. They might not be good for her. It might have been best to let her work through her feelings all on her own. It might've been more difficult and taken a longer time, but would it have been healthier, too? His eyes glanced at the rumpled bandages looped around Anna's wrists, and he thought of the overly-pink gashes slowly healing beneath. His regret vanished. Even if the bracelets are really just from the leatherworker downtown and they don't have an ounce of magic in them, she believes. That's all that matters. She needs to smile more than she needs to know the truth.

"Thank you, Daddy," she'd breathed.

"You're welcome, sweetheart," he'd answered. She'd slipped her hand over his, which was, by her standards, the equivalent of throwing herself at him and spouting loving thank-yous. When she turned her attention back to the gauntlets, he'd left the bedroom, dark hair standing on end where he'd nervously rifled his hands through it. By the time he'd reached the bottom of the stairs, he was sniffling.

Thomas Prentiss, searching for a novelty to make his daughter smile, had unknowingly sparked something within his daughter's mind. By giving her the gauntlets, beautified descendants of objects designed to protect warriors in battle, he had created a warrior. A scatterbrained ink-blot of a warrior, but a fighter nonetheless.