Aura

Prologue

  You begin to see things, when you feel the way Rowan did the day his grandpa died. When you feel energy, the pure life source, slip from your grasp to the mysterious unknowns, to wherever life goes when someone dies. When you see the light drain from someone's eyes, and the steady pulse in the wrist dry out like spilled lemonade on a summer day...

  A foggy mist, silver like polished skeletons... the breeze like Death itself, whispering upon the dying morning as Rowan would step outside the hospital, his breath clouding in front of his eyes. He shivered with cold and drew his jacket around his body, struggling to keep warm. Rowan walked home in perfect silence, not crying, not sniffling, and not laughing, for only when the world is quiet, you know that it has been silenced. He had his head down, and he was wondering what would happen to him next.

  Rowan was an orphan, living only with his grandfather. He was never lonely, because to him his grandfather was worth more than any number of caretakers people could give him. Rowan's grandfather was wise and laughing, just like all grandfathers should be, but he was also kind and knew everything that Rowan liked and did his best to fulfill him, such as spending Sundays on the lake, fishing for minnows, and reading books and sipping hot cocoa on a rainy day.

  For a year Rowan had sensed it coming, his grandpa getting weaker and weaker, spending less Sundays on the lake, the absence of hot cocoa growing bigger by the day. And for this reason Rowan became independent, spending some time just sitting with his grandfather, and the remainder by himself, cooking food to eat and doing homework.

  But still, he couldn't bear the loneliness when Rowan knew he had been taken away. Perhaps his grandfather knew... The gift he had given...

  Rowan reached into his jacket pocket, fingering the rusty iron key, engraved with swirls of mysterious runes, the last gift from his grandfather. What was he to do? He could only hide for so long; surely the police would come home and put him in an orphanage, or even worse.

  What was it Grandpa had said? Something about an escape to another world?

  That was what Rowan needed. An escape. A doorway out of his ruined universe, where pieces of his heart lay in shattered grey shards. But it was that key, the rust and the complicated calligraphy, that had been his grandfather's last gift, and what could it do besides deepen Rowan's wound, carved by the mere shadow of his memory?

  And so it lived in a dusty drawer in Grandpa's old desk, until the life-changing day when Rowan returned home from school to find the cops were after him, and he had better make a run for it if he wanted to stay out of an orphanage. He had read enough about them in books and magazines and heard plenty from classmates and teachers to know that Rowan did want to stay out of an orphanage indeed. So, while the police sirens wailed only a quarter of a mile away from the front door, then an eighth, and maybe a sixteenth, Rowan desperately yanked the drawer out of the desk.

  Coughing from the dust, Rowan picked up the key and looked around. His eyes fell on another one of the many drawers of the desk, locked tight with metal as rusty as the key's with similar writing. He shoved the key into the hole and yanked the drawer open.

  To his surprise, he found swirling light, yellows and pinks and greens dancing in a whirlpool of color.

  It was too late for surprise. Rowan could hear the boots stomping up the front steps, and he thought quickly. He was gone in a second.

  When the police came into the room, all they found was a cloud of dust, and the subtle clatter of the drawer as it closed. The boy they were meant to look for was nowhere to be seen.

  And that was just the beginning of the story.