The Hunt for Merlin: The Hunt, #1

The Hunt for Merlin

K. L. Anderson

The Hunt for Merlin

Written by: K. L. Anderson

Copyright © 2024 Kelly Anderson

All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by: Kelly Anderson

Dedication

I’d like to dedicate this book to the chaos of my life which taught me that even though I may not always have the answers, and even though I may stumble (a lot), getting through life is always about just figuring out the next step.

Chapter 1

A Cat Named Duck

Montreal was a boring , life-draining, snooze-fest in the winter.  It was so dull that it felt like time dragged out impossibly long so that you found yourself looking at the clock more than anything else.  Not that it was an extremely interesting place to be during the rest of the year, but I bet it was the way most people felt it about their home towns.  When nothing ever seemed to change, people just got used to it and started to appreciate it a little less and less until they came to the point when they didn’t notice it at all.

But on a day like this one, when the snow laid as thick as a down-filled comforter on the windowsill, making it impossible to open in an attempt to feel even a hint of the dingey winter air, it felt particularly suffocating.  And beyond that, the snow partially obscured the lackluster view beyond.  The scenery outside my window was painted in a million shades of grey, highlighted by the snow mounds which were now deep enough to lose a child in, and shadowed by icy sheets of street water which hovered somewhere between frozen and melted so that if some poor, unsuspecting pedestrian stepped in one, they were never really sure if their foot would go through the ice or if they would go flying into a mailbox (which, by the way, were the only bright spots of colour hidden under the layers of blah all over the city).

The frosty minefield was enough of a reason for me to stay sitting in my cramped condo, staring out the window at my humdrum neighbourhood.  But my other reason was that I didn’t really have anywhere else that I needed to be.

You know, so many stories start with a girl, all alone, coming from a poor background and finding a way to her happy ending.  And a lot of times, her happy ending involves overcoming some kind of impossible obstacle, or just finding a way to believe in herself.  Or in so many fairy tales, finding a man who makes her whole world feel complete (like that was all a girl needed to feel whole – newsflash: it’s the twenty-first century).

But that wasn’t my story.  At least, not entirely.

As it turns out, I struggled more in the beginning of my life than I did later on.  Not that I wouldn’t have different kinds of challenges later on...that’s life.  But let’s start from the beginning.

I was perfectly average in every way.  I wasn’t waif thin or overly obese.  I was somewhere in between.  My long hair, hanging down past my waist (which I usually tied in a braid because it annoyed me otherwise) was neither red nor brown, but somewhere in between, like an old penny.  I didn’t have glamourous or even distinguishing features, other than my slightly larger eyes, which gave me a look of pure innocence which I’ve been told could be disarming.  My eyes were a soft olive green, which coloured nicely with my creamy skin, and were shadowed by a thin smattering of freckles across my nose and cheeks.  If I was honest, my eyes were my favourite feature.  But none of that gave me a demanding or even noticeable presence.  Most of the time, I was just...sort of...there.

Even my name isn’t terribly creative.

My name is Aurora Ward, though people call me Rory.  Apparently, my parents must have really been into Sleeping Beauty or something, at least to name me Aurora.  Ward was a name given to me by someone else, though I don’t know exactly who.  I was abandoned as a baby, which made me a ward of the...well, not a ward of the state, since I live in Canada, but a ward of the system, nonetheless.  I did go through that brief, cliché phase which every orphan seems to go through and tried to find out who my birth parents were, but I had no luck with that search.  And honestly, I didn’t feel damaged enough to make it my life goal to find out who had abandoned me.  I just didn’t see the point in chasing after people who hadn’t wanted me around, no matter what their reasons were.  The most that I could find was a black hole of a void, not even knowing if I was born in Canada or not.  As far as anyone else was concerned, I had dropped out of the sky when I was a baby, and was a burden on the system from that moment on.  I mean, it would have been nice to know something about where I came from, but what was the point of chasing ghosts?

But even with that rocky start, my life hadn’t been too terrible.  I may have moved around a lot, never settling in one place for too long, but it was usually with nice people who, even if they didn’t love me enough to adopt me, didn’t hate me enough to scar me for life.  For the most part, I just felt like a nomad, never finding anything to get attached to.  Basically, if I was living my life in a movie, I was one of those people who you saw wandering around in the background...just there as a backdrop for the people who really mattered.

And then I turned eighteen, and I wasn’t a problem for the system anymore.  I was on my own, and I had to figure out what my life was going to be.  I had already finished high school, but I had decided not to continue going to school because I had no idea how I would be able to afford it once it was time for me to be on my own.  And if I was being completely honest, I didn’t really have a dream of what I wanted to do with my life.  It wasn’t like I harboured a secret desire to be a brain surgeon or something.  There wasn’t some guiding light inside of me, telling me that I was meant for greater things.  Really, at the time, my goal was survival, because that was the only goal which had gotten me through being a foster kid.  So, I worked from the time I turned sixteen.  And after two years, I had more than enough money to get my own apartment and a junker of a car that managed to get me where I needed to go, but didn’t accomplish much else.

I had done everything that I needed to do to prepare myself for a life, which might not have been glamourous, but at least it wasn’t the worst kind of life that I could imagine.  But then the weirdest thing happened.  The kind of thing that never happens to someone like me.  It was the kind of thing that normal people only dreamed about.

I won the lottery.

Literally.

To celebrate my eighteenth birthday, I didn’t want to go to a bar because I didn’t want to spend a lot of my hard-earned savings on something so pointless.  So instead, I stopped at a gas station and spent three dollars on a lottery ticket.  Twelve hours later, I woke up sixty-five million dollars richer than I had been when I fell asleep.

When did something like that happen?  When, in real life, did something like that happen to someone who came from nothing?

And just like that, my whole life changed.  All of my life, I had prepared myself for a life of hard work and not many expectations.  In the blink of an eye, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and I didn’t have to work meaningless, dead-end jobs, just struggling to stay alive.  In a strange way, suddenly having all of that money terrified me because it meant that I could do anything I wanted to do.  The problem was that I had no idea what I wanted from life.

No one had ever asked me what I wanted to do before, and like I said, I had never thought much about it.  I had never daydreamed of living some sort of fantasy life.  I had always just accepted that my life would have limitations.

The first thing I did was to buy my pokey little condo.  I might have been richer than Croesus now, but I just couldn’t convince myself to spend tons of money on a place for myself.  I needed a place to eat and sleep, and that was what I got.  I didn’t even care enough to upgrade to the fancier materials that they offered when I bought the place under construction.  I just didn’t care what the place looked like, and that wasn’t something that I would change my mind about.  I had never grown up with the luxury of caring what the roof over my head looked like, and so many of those roofs had only been temporary.  Just having somewhere permanent meant more to me than the colour of my kitchen cabinets ever would.

I just wished that there was something which would grab my attention...something to keep my days busy so that I felt like less of a lump.  I wasn’t good at doing nothing.  I wasn’t the kind of person to train for a marathon or start a million charities, but I didn’t like sitting around either.  But nothing really appealed, and I’d really tried to find something.

The thing was, after having won the lottery, if I didn’t want to work, I didn’t need to.  And looking out at the dull grey day, which held all of the appeal of an old sock you find under a couch, I wasn’t motivated to leave the condo in search of something with which to occupy my time.

So I was sitting in my window seat, staring out at the unsaturated scenery, wondering what to do with myself.  Not for the first time, I wished that I could find some kind of hobby.  Something to keep my hands busy and my mind from wandering.  I wasn’t good at being idle, but I wasn’t much better at doing anything else.  I had done some cooking courses online, and even more baking courses, and I liked them.  But I would end up weighing three hundred pounds if I spent all of my days baking cakes and pies with no one else to eat them but myself.

There was even a brief time when I was so bored that I thought I would try doing something with my appearance.  I know that was something all teenage girls seem to master...like learning how to curl your hair, or how to do your make-up just right.  But I’d never been interested in that when I was young.  I was a plain Jane, and I had never taken much interest in changing that.

I was just me, and I was comfortable (I’ll note, not overly confident) in my own skin.

So I didn’t do much to change it.  But it didn’t mean that I didn’t think about changing it from time to time.

Duck, the fluffy grey-brown Scottish fold cat (whom I’d adopted only because he wouldn’t stop sitting outside my window and yowling at me through the glass) hopped up onto my lap and curled up there.  I know Duck is a weird name, bordering on stupid for a cat, but anybody who heard him yowl wouldn’t think that it was an odd name.  His meow was a weird mix between a yowl and a honk, and if you heard it, you wouldn’t know whether or not to laugh or look at him like he was an alien species.  That was how I looked at him when I first heard it, but I just couldn’t leave him out in the cold.

Most days, I was relieved that I had him in the house.  If he wasn’t around, I would just be pottering around the condo, feeling completely useless and alone.  Duck at least gave me someone to pamper, and he made me feel a little less crazy when I was wandering around, talking to no one but him, which was really no one but myself (but I’d rather be talking to my cat instead of being one of those disturbing people on the street who talked to the voices in their heads).  Duck at least made me appear sane; that was what I told myself, anyway.  In truth, I was more than a little worried that I was turning into a crazy cat lady, but there were worse things to be.

What do you think, Duck? I muttered.  Duck, as always, looked up at me with his large, dandelion-yellow eyes.  It was why I didn’t mind talking to him.  In a weird way, I always felt like he was listening to me, which was more than most people had ever done in my life.  But that might have been because I was probably a little too attached to my cat; most pet owners would probably say the same thing.

Are you as bored as I am?

He yowled, that goose-honking yowl that never came out of a cat before, but was Duck’s way of communicating.

There’s nothing to do around here.

Yowl.

Maybe we need a change of scenery.  There’s nothing to do here.  And if I’m going to sit around and do nothing, I’d rather do it surrounded by some new scenery.  Someplace new, but quiet.

He pressed his squished face against my thigh, rubbing an itch away, but I was going to take that as a kitty vote of ‘yes’.

I’d been thinking about getting away for a while now.  I wasn’t sure that there was going to be much more to do if I went somewhere else.  But at least I could take some walks surrounded by new scenery, see some new shops, maybe meet a few new people.  It wasn’t a permanent solution to my boredom, but it would be good to get away and play the tourist.  It would give me something to do...a break in the monotony.  And it wasn’t like I had a whole lot going on around here to keep me stuck in the city.

Less than twenty-four hours later, I was standing in front of Woolverton Place, completely unaware of what I was getting myself into...not knowing that my life was going to change completely.

Woolverton Place was a house with history.  It used to be one of the more prominent houses in the small town of St. Andrews, Newfoundland, back when it was a popular seaside town often visited by the wealthy out-of-towners.  That was before the grand hotel was built at the top of the hill, and before the train line which led into the town had been shut down.  The tracks for the train were still there, but the access to the town had been limited to a few hours’ drive from the airport.

St. Andrews was a beautiful little seaside town, not offering much more than beautifully scenic views, wonderful people, and the experience of smalltown life.  But sometimes that was all a place needed to be, to be the best place to be.

There was only one main street filled with brightly coloured shops all squeezed together close to the shore and the docks, which stretched far out over the sparkling waters.  Hand-painted murals collaged the main street depicting seaside life and ads for brands that I had never heard of, seeming larger than life, peeking around the corners.

Where the ocean peeked between the buildings, I could see that the water was shrouded in mist, obscuring the view of Maine across the water.  It was the kind of view that was clouded in mystery and intrigue, and I was already anticipating sitting on a pier and absorbing the view, letting my mind wander away until I felt nothing but bliss.  It wasn’t like Montreal didn’t have docks and water, and all the same stuff...but there was a different heartbeat in the town of St. Andrews...slower, less chaotic.  And since I hadn’t lived here all my life, there were possibilities.

During my drive, I had seen some of the other houses which heavily freckled the town.  It was an odd combination of historic homes, and the old kind of bungalows that were common in a seaside town.  They were quaint, and some of them leaned a little too far to the left, but they spoke of time, and family, and lives spent living together, under the same roof, working hard and getting by while growing old together.  As domestic and quaint as it might have sounded, it was the kind of thing I knew a lot of foster kids dreamed of...and I wasn’t excluded from that group.

The entire town was built on a small hill, surrounded by water on three sides.  All of the older homes, and more expensive homes, were higher on the hill, while the newer homes (which weren’t really that new, they just weren’t historic or overly fancy) were lower and closer to the main street, which was at the very bottom.  Woolverton Place wasn’t at the top of the hill, but it was higher up.  All the time I was driving, I hoped that I would be able to see the water from my room.  Even in the middle of winter, there was something very appealing about the ocean.  I knew upon arrival that there was no way that I was going to be able to see it from the main floor, though.  There was a very high, dense hedge wall which surrounded the property.  Even though it was winter, the branches were so tightly woven together that I couldn’t see the house until I opened the tall, heavy wooden gate under the hedge arch at the front of the property.

The house was like something out of a fairy tale.  It was historic, with high-pitched, pointed roofs, Victorian windows, blue wood siding trimmed with white, and an actual stone turret at the front corner of the house.  Every nook and cranny was filled with the white trim, carvings, and scrollwork which decorated old Victorian homes, and wouldn’t look out of place on a gingerbread house.

It was downright picturesque.

The rest of the property was covered in a thick swathe of snow, but I could imagine a wildly growing garden with colour bursting from every nook and cranny.  What I could see, even with the snow covering everything, was the expansive array of mature trees, all very old and gnarled, twisting up towards the heavy grey sky.

I half expected there to be a river running around the side of the house and a deer standing under one of the trees.  It was just so quant and idyllic that I felt like I was in another world.  It was exactly what I needed: something so completely different from the city.  It felt like a breath of fresh air; a very picturesque breath of fresh air.

When I booked the rental, I received an email telling me that the key would be left in the mailbox.  Having lived in the city for my entire life, I knew that it wasn’t the safest place to keep a key, but that was just how peaceful the town really was.  It was the kind of place where a key could be left in the mailbox and people didn’t need to worry about anyone breaking in and robbing them blind.  That was one of the drastic differences from the metropolitan areas...that and the view.

Dipping my hand in the mailbox, my fingers closed around the heavy, cool metal of the key at the bottom.  The key matched the house perfectly.  It was one of those old-fashioned brass keys, with an intricately curling design at the end.  The arched wooden door had the same curling design around the keyhole on the iron plate of the handle.  The design felt old, and oddly structured, like a Celtic knot.  It was probably indicative of the history of the house.

I had found it odd that there wasn’t more about the place online, and I hoped that there would be a book about it somewhere in the house.  Places like this always had a history of people who founded towns, or women who married rich and inherited everything, becoming these impressive matriarchs of a town.  Sometimes there was even a ghost story, or two.

I closed and locked the front door before I turned back to take in the rest of the house.  Just because the owner of the house felt safe leaving the key lying around, it wasn’t going to undo my lifetime habit of locking doors behind me.

There was an old, carved coatrack by the door, and I stopped to hang up my coat and hat before I unlaced my boots and tucked them beside the bench that looked like an old pew from a church.  The hallway that I was standing in was a large square.  There were four carved archways styled like gothic arches, one on the left, one in front of me, and two on the right.

I wasn’t in the mood to wander and discover, after such a long drive from the airport.  I felt weary, and was hoping to find my room, unpack, and perhaps take a nap.  But even though I hadn’t seen much of the house, I already felt a little rejuvenated.  The house felt comfortable, and I knew that I had made the right decision in choosing a place to relax for the next couple of weeks.

Duck yowled from his crate, making it clear that he was grumpy and had run out of patience.  He hated being in the cramped travelling case, but I hadn’t been brave enough to let him wander the car while I was driving through the snow.  Because honestly, even having grown up in Montreal, where winter was pretty severe, and it wasn’t uncommon to walk through knee-deep snow...the Maritimes were even worse.  The snow here was so insane that it filled in entire embankments and ditches, making it impossible to know whether you were on solid ground or suspended over a ditch which could give way at any instant.  And don’t even get me started on the ice.

But now that we were inside, I bent down and let him out to wander around our new home for the next couple of weeks.  Duck always had the ability to make himself at home no matter where he was, and the moment that he was released from his kitty prison, he wandered off, slinking around one of the doorways and disappearing from sight.  I was pretty sure that by the time I unpacked, he would already have found his favourite napping place.

While he was discovering the house, I picked up my luggage and hauled it up the stairs to find my room.  There was another square hallway at the top of the stairs, this one with five doors leading off from it.  In my exhaustion, I didn’t take the time to look in all of the rooms and be choosy about where I wanted to sleep.  I really just wanted to crash.  So, at random, I pushed my way through a door and found one of the most elaborately coloured, if not decorated, rooms I had ever seen.

I was standing in a sitting room with puffed up vintage furniture, upholstered in different vibrant fabrics, all looking like they belonged in a genie bottle.  Every surface was covered with books, flowers, decorative odds and ends, and different fabrics and textiles.  It was the kind of organized chaos that all mixed together in an oddly perfect balance, making the room feel homey and loved, like someone had collected everything they loved and piled it in one place.  With everything going on, it was difficult to focus on any specific item, but I liked what I saw as a whole.

To my right, I could see the bedroom peeking out through the opening of an elaborately carved doorway.  On the other side, was one of the most welcoming bedrooms I had ever seen.  For the first time ever, I thought that it might be worth it to care about the look of a room.

The suite was really beautiful, and felt a little more luxurious than I had been expecting it to be.  There was a magnificent four-poster canopy bed made of honey-coloured oak and draped with deep teal gauzy curtains.  Tiny stars and sequins were embroidered with golden thread so that it looked like the night sky shrouded the bed.  It was flanked on either side by bronze and glass end tables, holding table lamps which appeared to be made of twisted stone, sparkling in the light.  There were bunches of fresh flowers clumped in the multitude of vases made of glass and stone clustered on the tables, making the room smell like gardenias.  An over-stuffed, tufted bench at the end of the bed was upholstered in rosy pink velvet.  The tall windows looked out over the town with the ocean scene smeared across the background.

I rolled my luggage over to the tall, carved wardrobe and unpacked.  I didn’t want to feel like I was just visiting while I was here.  And since I packed light, it didn’t take me very long to get settled in.  I was just rolling the case under the bed when Duck slinked into the room, staring up at me with his wide yellow eyes.

So, what do you think, Duck?  Think you’ll be comfortable here for a couple of weeks? I asked as I scooped him up and fell back against the mattress.  The gauzy canopy up above me swayed from the movement of the bed, making the golden thread shimmer like it was under water.  It was hypnotizing, and it definitely caught Duck’s attention because he stared up at it like it was a bird taunting him just a foot above his head.

Hhroow, he yowled, rubbing his little folded ears against my chest affectionately.

Well, I think it’s nice, and it’s all ours for a few weeks.  I’m going to stock up on groceries tomorrow, so I’m thinking pizza for tonight.

Mreow.

Don’t worry, I brought you a little treat for dinner.  How does salmon sound?

He purred and rubbed his face against my chest again.  It was times like these when I loved him just a little more.  I scratched him affectionately behind his ears and smiled when his purring got louder.

That’s what I thought.

I spent the rest of the day looking around.

With a name like Woolverton Place, I had almost expected the house to be some kind of grand manor.  But the house wasn’t massive.  It was petite and quaint, but it had a lot of character.  The sitting room was a rich emerald green, filled with overstuffed furniture covered in bright, floral patterns and lush, crushed velvets, with a buttery orange onyx fireplace which was big enough for a full-grown man to stand in.  A massive, gilt mirror hung over the fireplace, reflecting back the light from the turquoise glass chandelier which glittered over the room and illuminated all of the watercolour paintings of leaves and flowers that I had never heard of before (but I never claimed to have much of a green thumb).

The study was darker.  All of the shelves reaching the ceiling around three sides of the room were a dark, navy blue, framing the aged leather tomes they held.  A caramel-coloured chesterfield was stacked heavily with dark, soft pillows, and there were two majestic, striped wingback chairs which sat in front of the red marble fireplace with glimmering golden veining.  And in the corner, there was a carved burlwood desk, facing the rest of the room, looking like the kind of desk that Mr. Darcy would sit at to do business.  It almost made me want to pick up a pen myself, even though I had absolutely nothing interesting to write about.

But the kitchen was where I planned on spending the bulk of my time, even if I didn’t end up doing a lot of baking.  The stove was an eight-burner stove with brass edging.  It was pristine and had multiple ovens, perfect for making dinner and dessert at the same time.  The rangehood above it was like a giant fireplace mantle painted black to match the stove.  The backsplash all around was old, crimson tile that looked like glazed brick.  All of the white wooden cabinets were filled with baking sheets, serving dishes, and mixing bowls that I was itching to use.  Glass cabinets on the walls were filled with heavy, glazed dishes which felt like they were from another era, with little lace-painted detailing around the edges.  But the area that I might have loved the most about the kitchen was the scrubbed wooden table.  It was surrounded on two sides by an L-shaped banquette with two black wooden rail-back chairs on the other two sides.

The table was surrounded on three sides by big, multi-paned windows that looked out into the yard at the back of the property.  It was the kind of place where I wanted to sit and read a book with a cup of hot chocolate, and Duck curled up beside me.

I ate my dinner there and put the leftovers in the fridge, all under the watchful, unblinking eye of Duck, who hadn’t been satisfied with the piece of pepperoni that I had tossed to him when I’d settled in to eat.  But one of something was never enough for Duck.  I had learned early on, for his health, that I had to stop giving in when he stared up at me unblinkingly.  I didn’t give in (completely) anymore, and he knew it.  But that didn’t stop him from staring at me whenever I ate, like I was robbing him of something.

Flakes had started to fall outside, adding to the three feet of snow that had already blanketed the world outside the window.  It seemed to soften everything, making the world quieter and darker, like being wrapped in a fluffy sherpa cocoon.  It made it nearly impossible to see anything outside of the big bay window in the sitting room, but I settled into the sofa with a random book that I had pulled off one of the shelves in the library.  I wished that I could have built a fire, but I had no idea how to do that, and it would be such