The Amulet Read Free Page A

had become their daily ritual since Faedra had
started driving and gotten herself a job. She’d taken a year off
before she started college so she could get a job and save some
money. College didn’t come cheap these days. Her father had offered
to pay, but she didn’t want him to shoulder all of the cost on his
own.
    “Hey, boy. Yes, I love you, too,” she
responded to another sloppy kiss.
    She leaned over to the back door and pushed
it open from the inside.
    “In you get,” she told him.
    Faen wagged his tail voraciously and did as
Faedra asked. She pulled the door closed and carried on down the
driveway towards the cottage while Faen panted his hot breath in
her ear. Upon turning a sharp bend in the driveway, the cottage
came into view. She never tired of its beauty, or the warm feeling
it gave her just to look at it. The cottage was many hundreds of
years old and had been handed down through the family for
generations. Her dad had completed many restorative projects on it
since her mother inherited it before Faedra was born. This, in
itself, was a sad thing because that meant she had never known her
grandparents. They both died in a car accident before she was born.
After living with the pain of loosing her own mother, Faedra felt
full sympathy for what her mother must have gone through, losing
both her parents in one fell swoop. Although, her mother had been
much older than Faedra when it happened to her. She was already
married to her father, Henry, and pregnant with Faedra.
    The cottage had cream walls with an array of
black oak beams that were exposed both on the outside and on the
inside. A beautiful climbing rose crept up the wall on a trellis
and was in full bloom, exhibiting an abundance of bright sunny
yellow petals. Her mother had planted it the year Faedra was born.
She had watched her father carefully tend the plant ever since.
    Her father had also added a few more rooms on
the back of the cottage, making it twice the size of the original
dwelling. The living room, dining room, and two of the upstairs
bedrooms were original and they were Faedra’s favorite rooms. You
almost had to duck when you walked into the living room, the
ceilings were so low. People had been much smaller in stature when
the cottage was first built. But the living room was a complete
contrast to the dining room that Faedra had lovingly named ‘The
Great Hall’.
    The dining room was a cavernous room with an
imposing brick fireplace at one end. A ceiling that towered two
stories high was handsomely finished with exposed black oak beams
running parallel to each other for the length of it. A staircase
ran up one side of the room to a door at the top that led to her
bedroom. She made sure she kept the front bedroom for herself, even
after her father had finished a beautiful new room for her towards
the back of the house. She had resisted, and with sensitivity,
declined. There was something about the history in the old section
of the house that she didn’t want to be parted from.
    Faedra pulled her car in beside her father’s.
He worked from home; he had ever since her mother died. For that,
she felt blessed. His job enabled him to stay at home so she did
not have to be shipped off to a childcare provider every day. This
turn of events had also made them very close. She loved her father
with all her heart, and he felt the same about her. She smiled when
she saw the other car parked next to her father’s. It belonged to
her uncle Leo. He’d been an integral part of her upbringing, too,
and she always enjoyed seeing him when he came around to visit.
    She opened the door to let Faen out and
reached in to grab her bag that had been thrown precariously on the
back seat when she left work earlier. Faen waited by her side until
she closed the door. He looked up at her and wagged his tail.
    “Thank God that week is finished with,” she
told him. “I’m not sure I could’ve taken much more of Mr. Thompson.
I honestly don’t know why