Extraordinary (The Extraordinary Saga #4)

Chapter 1

Caeden Caldwell thought he had finally figured out this new town when a cell phone fell on his head. And, in the grand scheme of things, that cell phone changed his life.

He didn't want to move to Lotus Valley. He didn't want to leave Arizona, where he had friends. He was just starting to think of it like home; it hadn't even been two years since the last move. And that was the longest he'd lived anywhere since the moves started up eight years ago.

He blamed his mom's job. She and his dad had worked for a company in the same town they were moving to... what was that company called again? Aether? Aether Entities? He was pretty sure that was it.

But then the accident happened. The first second she could, Caeden's mother had yanked him and Ivy away from that town.

A fresh start, she had called it. But it wasn't a fresh start. The change of scenery didn't change the fact that his dad was gone. And with each move, each time his mom's new job had demanded she work from somewhere else, the idea of a fresh start became even more stale.

Finally, when his mom's company had nearly relocated them to Alaska, Diana Caldwell decided she'd had enough. After eight years of sightseeing the country, all any of the Caldwells wanted was a solid home. So she had quit that awful, transient job.

Supposedly, this was the "last fresh start." The last move. His mom no longer had a job that sent her moving all across the country. They could settle down. And, for that reason, Caeden and his little sister, Ivy, were trying hard to make it a good one.

Ivy was trying in her own way, picking apart every part of the house in an effort to find something magical like in all the movies. Deep down, Caeden figured she knew magic wasn't real. She was eleven, and even though she pretended, she actually had her feet pretty solid on the ground. If her games kept her interest in this place, it didn't matter. The valley was just another town. It didn't matter that they'd lived here before. Things were different then. Now, it was just as new a town as any other.

When Ivy ran off to check out the woods that bordered their new backyard, it wasn't alarming - not until she'd been gone for twenty minutes and their mom found her phone on the table. So she sent Caeden out to find her.

But like his dad used to joke about, fate has a way with things. Everything happens for a reason.

Which is what he was thinking about when the cell phone fell out of the sky.

It hit him on his forehead, right between his eyes. Not hard enough to hurt, really, it was still enough of an out-of-the-blue kind of thing to make him look around.

He grabbed the phone off the ground. Its green case nearly blended in with the grass, but the camera stared at him like an eye. When he picked it up, it was startlingly hot, like it had overheated.

"This yours?" Caeden held it out to the mop of curly red hair dangling from the tree above his head.

The hair shifted, revealing the face of a girl about his age. Her eyes were a startling mismatch behind a thick pair of fake-wooden glasses, one iris bright green and the other sky blue.

"Yeah." She reached out and took her phone from him. "Sorry."

He shrugged it off and was about to continue walking when something made him pause.

"You haven't seen my sister wandering around, have you?" He asked. "Dark hair, short, eleven..."

He trailed off. The girl was shaking her head. "Haven't seen anyone, sorry."

****

Rowan Holley didn't mean to drop the phone; it just kind of happened. Then again, most weird things in Lotus Valley just kind of happened.

Once the boy had returned her phone (which, admittedly, she felt pretty bad about dropping on his head), she returned her attention to its screen. Though, when she looked up a good twenty minutes later, she was happy to see the stranger find a young girl way down at the end of the path. The girl matched his loose description of his sister, so it seemed all was well.

That sweet sight made her realize she should probably go home. She'd taken off early in the morning without even a word. Nothing had happened, really, but she was just processing. She needed some alone time. It had been a crazy week, to say the least.

She swung her feet out of the tree, noting the crunch that followed as she hit the ground. That was odd... it was March. There shouldn't have been any dead foliage that time of year.

Glancing at the ground, she noticed a patch of blackened grass, strangely enough in the rectangular shape of a phone. When she ran her fingers over the patch, she felt that all-too-familiar buzzing in her hands.

Not again, she thought. But it seemed different. It wasn't necessarily stemming from her hands this time; no, more like her hands were picking up on something down below.

Ripping away the dead grass, Rowan began to dig. It was slow work and she wasn't even sure that she'd find anything, but something kept her going. She was beginning to suspect something strange about this town - not just about her, but about the entire town in general.

Eventually her fingers scraped against something distinctively metal. It was a coin, yet even covered in dirt Rowan could tell it wasn't any ordinary coin. Like she had suspected, it seemed to be the source of that strange, energetic buzzing.

After refilling the hole, she took the coin down to the creek, a little limb of running water branching off of the valley's mysterious Lake Lotus. The creek itself was safe, but ever since a few months ago, strange things had been happening at the site of the larger body of water in the center of town. The current began to rise, making it unsafe for people to swim. The boat rental shop closed a few weeks after that discovery, after numerous capsizes had deemed the water unfit for boating as well. The news articles had chalked it up to potential climate change, or maybe erosion, but that wasn't enough of an answer for most of the town. Why so suddenly?

As Rowan washed off the coin, she discovered it was not a quarter like she had originally thought. It had the build of one, yet its two faces were smooth. And even weirder - the entire thing looked like it had been carved out of solid gold.

And there was more. The mystery coin brought back the very thing she was trying to get away from, like it was connected.

The lightning.

She hadn't meant to do it. It was an accident. But that's how those things always went. She didn't see it coming, and by the time she did, it was too late.

She clenched her hands into fists, feeling the simmering dread in her stomach finally boil over. The coin fell from her grasp as her power finally showed itself again, tendrils of little lightning curling around her hands.