Read Echoes of Power free: the opening chapter

The Static Between Worlds

The chipped ceramic frog was definitely cursed. I just knew it. Not voodoo-doll cursed. More like permanently-attracts-bad-luck cursed. Old Man Hemlock, who’d tried to sell it to my grandma for five bucks, definitely knew. He’d given me a look, a weird knowing look, and mumbled something about “holding onto things better left forgotten.”

Grandma just laughed and handed him a ten.

She collects stuff. Antiques, mostly. Though “stuff” is the more accurate word. Her shop, Park and Daughter, Antiques and Curiosities, is crammed floor to ceiling. It smells like dust and old paper and something faintly floral, like potpourri that died of old age. It’s a good place to get lost, which I do, a lot.

I was supposed to be dusting. Supposed to. But the frog was begging for attention. Plus, the dust bunnies were winning. They’d formed a small fluffy rebellion under the Victorian fainting couch, and honestly, they had a point.

“Leo!” Grandma’s voice floated from behind a mountain of sheet music, warm and scratchy, like a favorite old record. “Less staring at frogs, more fighting grime!”

I sighed and jammed my headphones on. Music usually drowned out the general chaos of the shop, and, more importantly, my own thoughts. My brain is basically a room full of puppies, and a good song is the one treat that makes them all lie down at once.

Today, though, something was off. Static crackled under the thumping bass of my favorite track. Not normal static. It was musical. Like a broken melody trying to climb out of the speakers.

And it got louder when I touched the frog.

---

I yanked my hand back like I’d grabbed a hornet. The static spiked, then settled into a clear, tinny tune. It sounded ancient, like something played on a lute made of bone. A weird, haunting tune.

“What is that?” I muttered, staring at my headphones. They were good headphones, too. Big, cushioned, the color of a midnight sky. I’d saved up for them myself, eleven weeks of allowance plus one extremely questionable lemonade stand. They did not just glitch.

I touched the frog again. The song swelled. It wasn’t coming from the headphones, exactly. It was around me. Filling the air.

“Leo, are you conducting a one-man orchestra in there?” Grandma called, amused.

“No! I mean, yes? Sort of? The headphones are glitching.” My voice came out high and squeaky.

I stepped away from the frog. The song faded. I touched it again. Back it came, the same repeating phrase, sad and silvery, like a lullaby hummed through a wall.

“Maybe put that down,” a voice said behind me.

I whirled around. Finn O’Connell was leaning against a shelf of chipped teacups, looking like a friendly bear who’d wandered into a china shop. Which, to be fair, he basically had. Finn is big. Seriously big. And surprisingly quiet for someone his size. He helps Grandma after school, mostly carrying heavy things and preventing the shop from collapsing.

“You hear that?” I asked.

Finn tilted his head. “Hear what? Just the usual. Creaky floorboards. Grandma humming. The ghosts of grumpy Victorian ladies.”

“No, the music! The static song!”

He listened, then shook his head. “Nope. Just you, I think.”

I glared at him. He always did this. Filed everything I said under “Leo’s overactive imagination.” He wasn’t usually wrong. But this wasn’t imagination.

I touched the frog one last time, just to prove it. The song blared so loud my teeth ached. And then the air around the frog shimmered, like heat rising off asphalt. For a split second I saw something behind it. A flash of green. Trees. And a feeling hit me, a huge wave of sadness that wasn’t mine.

Then it was gone. The shop was just the shop again. Dusty, cluttered, normal.

Finn was watching me with his eyebrows doing the worried thing. “You okay? You went kind of white.”

“Fine,” I said, which was a lie so big it deserved its own zip code.

“Leo!” Grandma called. “If I find one more layer of dust on that Queen Anne chair, you’re polishing the doll collection!”

Nothing on Earth, not even a cursed frog broadcasting ghost radio, was scarier than four hours alone with Grandma’s dolls.

“Just cleaning!” I yelled, putting the frog back with the respect you’d give a loaded weapon. “I’m grabbing a soda from Murphy’s!”

“Be back before dark,” Finn called after me. “And try not to cause an international incident.”

That was Finn’s standard goodbye. He thinks I attract trouble. He’s not entirely wrong.

---

Murphy’s is a corner store a couple of blocks from the shop. Lifeline for anyone needing sugary drinks, questionable snacks, and local gossip. Mr. Murphy is a grumpy but secretly kind old man who pretends to be annoyed every time I order a cherry slushie.

I was halfway there when it happened again.

I passed the old clock shop on Calder Street, a tiny place that’s been closed forever, windows so dusty you can’t see in. And my headphones erupted. The song. Louder this time. Insistent. Practically vibrating inside my skull.

I stopped dead on the sidewalk.

Then the street shimmered.

Not a little shimmer, like with the frog. A full-on distortion. The brick buildings blurred. The cars flickered. For one terrifying second, the sky turned a sickly green. People walked right past, chatting on phones, pushing strollers. Didn’t anyone else see this?

I ripped off my headphones, expecting silence. The song was still there, filling the air, now with a low hum underneath that vibrated in my bones.

And the clock shop wasn’t the clock shop anymore. The windows were wider. The front was dark weathered stone, carved and ornate. Above the door hung a sign written in a script I didn’t recognize. A script that felt old. Powerful.

I stood there, frozen. This wasn’t possible. Trick of the light. Sugar crash. Except the air felt thick and charged, and the song was pulling me closer like a rope.

A woman came out of the shop.

She was dressed like she’d walked out of a painting. A long flowing gown of deep indigo, stitched with silver thread. Her hair was braided with ribbons and beads. And she was looking straight at me.

Her eyes were the color of storm clouds. They held the same sadness as the song.

“You hear it, don’t you?” she said, her voice low and clear. “The fading song.”

I couldn’t speak. My mouth had forgotten its job.

She smiled, quick and sad. “It’s been a long time since anyone has.”

Then a hand grabbed my arm. A strong, familiar hand.

“Leo! What are you doing? You’re blocking the sidewalk!”

Maya. She looked annoyed, juggling a stack of textbooks and a half-eaten bag of chips. She didn’t seem to notice the stone shop, the woman, the shimmering air. Any of it.

“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “You’re pale as a ghost.”

The woman in indigo glanced at Maya, her face unreadable. Then back to me.

“They can’t see us,” she said, barely audible over the street noise. “Not yet. But they will. If the silence spreads.”

Before I could ask what that meant, a black car screeched to the curb. Two figures in dark suits got out, faces hidden behind sunglasses. They moved with a cold, efficient purpose, like machines wearing people costumes.

The woman’s eyes went wide. “They’re here. You need to go. Now!”

She pushed me toward Maya, turned, and vanished back into the shop. The second she was inside, the shimmering stopped. The clock shop snapped back to its dusty, closed-up self. The woman was gone.

The black car sat at the curb for a moment. Then it pulled away, slow, like it had all the time in the world.

Maya was still staring at me, brow furrowed. “Leo, seriously. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I looked at the shop. Ordinary. Boring. But the song was still there, faint and stubborn, echoing in my ears. And I knew, with a chilly certainty, that my life had just changed. Forever.

“Leo. Earth to Leo.” Maya waved a hand in front of my face. “You’re doing the staring thing. The thing that makes people cross the street.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re fine like Mr. Henderson’s sandwich was fine,” Maya said, “right up until the pigeon flew off with it and you laughed so hard you fell off the bench and got detention.”

“That detention was unjust and I will die on that hill.”

Maya snorted. “Come on. Your grandma’s expecting you, and if you’re late she’ll make you polish the creepy dolls.”

That got me moving.

---

We walked the last two blocks in Maya silence, which means she narrated everything. “That pigeon again. It’s following you, I swear. Oh look, Mrs. Chen’s cat is on the fence. Don’t make eye contact, you know what happened last time.”

“I made eye contact with a cat one time.”

“And it followed you home and lived in your garage for two weeks.”

“She chose me, Maya. There’s a difference.”

See, the thing about me, Leo Park, age ten and three quarters, is that I have a reputation. Not the cool kind. Not the “jumped his bike over three trash cans” kind. Mine is more the “how did he manage that, he wasn’t even trying” kind. Trouble finds me the way pigeons find crumbs. Automatically. With unsettling enthusiasm.

There was the Great Aquarium Incident of second grade, which the school newsletter called “an unfortunate misunderstanding regarding the octopus feeding schedule.” There was the time I set off the fire alarm during the world’s shortest game of indoor baseball. There was the museum field trip where I sneezed so hard I knocked over a display of “priceless” pottery, which turned out to be replicas, which nobody told me until after I’d cried.

My mom calls it “being spirited.” My teacher, Ms. Alvarez, calls it “a cry for structure.” My grandmother calls it Tuesday.

And then there were the headphones.

The weirdness started about a month ago. I was helping Grandma unpack a box at the shop, and the headphones started playing a song I’d never heard. Except I hadn’t turned them on. I checked. Battery dead. No phone connected. But the song kept coming, thin and silvery and sad.

The weirdest part? It only happened near old things. Really old things. The heavier the dust, the stronger the song.

A Victorian music box in the window made the headphones hum like a beehive. A chipped Roman coin in a glass case made them play something like rain on a battlefield. And the brass compass I wasn’t supposed to touch, the one Grandma keeps in a locked drawer, the one I have definitely never touched because I am a respectful and obedient child, made them shriek like the end of the world.

I hadn’t told anyone. Not even Maya. Especially not Maya, who would have built a spreadsheet of explanations and gone straight to “haunted headphones” without stopping at any reasonable stations along the way.

---

Grandma’s shop sat on the corner of Wexley Street like it had grown there, a tall narrow building squeezed between a laundromat and a dog grooming salon. The sign read PARK AND DAUGHTER, ANTIQUES AND CURIOSITIES, even though the “daughter” part was a mystery. Grandma’s only child is my mom, an accountant who treats dust like a personal enemy.

The bell above the door jingled, a sound that probably dated back to when dinosaurs were still leaving customer reviews.

Inside, the shop smelled like every old thing in the world had been put in a blender. Old paper, old wood, old perfume, old secrets. Towers of books leaned against cabinets of tarnished silver. A suit of armor stood by the register holding a sign that said ASK ME ABOUT OUR LAYAWAY PLAN, which Grandma thought was hilarious.

Finn was already there, stacking crates by the door, each one probably heavier than me. He gave me a look that said, well, did you cause an international incident? I gave him a look that said, define international.

“Is that you, Leo?” Grandma’s voice floated from the back room.

“Yes, Grandma.”

“Did you bring Maya?”

“She’s here.”

“Good. There’s soup.”

There was always soup. Nobody knew where it came from. Nobody ever saw her make it. It simply existed, the way gravity exists.

Maya dumped her textbooks on the counter and flopped onto the ancient velvet stool that creaked like it remembered the Renaissance. “Your shop is my favorite place in the universe,” she announced.

Grandma emerged from the back, wiping her hands on her apron. She was small and round and silver-haired, with spectacles on a chain and pockets full of butterscotch candies. To look at her, you’d think she was the most ordinary grandmother in the city. You’d be wrong, but I didn’t know that yet.

“Hello, my darling chaos gremlin,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “You look pale.”

“He saw something on the street,” Maya reported through a mouthful of chips. “He went full ghost face.”

Grandma’s hands paused. Just for a second. Just long enough that I noticed.

“Something?” she said lightly. “What kind of something?”

“A woman,” I said, before my brain could file the paperwork on whether this was a good idea. “Outside the clock shop on Calder Street. She was dressed like she was from a long time ago. And the shop looked different. Bigger. Older. Then these men in suits showed up and she told me to run.”

The shop went very quiet. Even the suit of armor seemed to be listening. Finn set down his crate.

Grandma took off her spectacles and polished them slowly. “The clock shop,” she repeated. “On Calder Street.”

“The one that’s been closed for like a hundred years,” Maya added. “There was nobody there when I looked. Just dusty windows and a CLOSED sign older than my dad.”

“Maya,” Grandma said gently, “there’s soup in the back, and a crossword I simply cannot finish. Four letters, ‘a feeling of dread.’ I’d be so grateful.”

Maya, who could no more resist soup and a crossword than I could resist a button labeled DO NOT PRESS, vanished into the back room.

Grandma turned to me. Her face was different. Still warm, still her, but underneath was something I’d never seen before. Not fear, exactly. Recognition.

“Leo,” she said, “did the woman say anything else?”

“She asked if I could hear it. The fading song.” I swallowed. “Grandma, my headphones. They’ve been playing music I never put on them. It happens near old things. It’s been happening for weeks.”

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, there was a shine that might have been tears or might have been lamplight.

“Then it’s starting again,” she murmured. “Sooner than I hoped. Later than I feared.”

“What’s starting? Grandma, you’re doing the cryptic thing. I hate the cryptic thing.”

She reached across the counter and took my hand. Her fingers were small and strong and covered in rings. And the rings hummed, very faintly, through my headphones, which I noticed for the first time were sitting around my neck, singing with no power at all.

“Some songs,” she said, “are older than the world. Some people are born able to hear them. Your grandfather could. And now, it seems, so can you.”

“My grandfather sold insurance.”

“Did he?” She smiled, and it was the strangest smile, equal parts sad and proud. “Leo, listen carefully. The men in the suits. If you see them again, you do not talk to them. You do not let them take anything from you. And you come straight here. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I understand approximately negative four percent of what’s happening.”

From the back room, Maya shouted, “DREAD! Four letters! F-E-A-R! Fear! I did it! Soup’s amazing!”

Grandma squeezed my hand. “Good. Confusion is the correct response. We’ll talk more tonight, after closing. There are things in the basement you should see.”

“There’s a basement?”

“There are several basements,” she said, and picked up her polishing cloth like the conversation was over.

It was not over. It was very, very not over.

I sat down by the register, head spinning, headphones humming their thin silver song. Finn drifted over and parked himself next to me, quiet as furniture, which is his way of asking if you’re okay without actually asking.

“You really heard something,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“You believe me?”

He shrugged one enormous shoulder. “You went white. You never go white. Not even during the octopus thing.”

Coming from Finn, that was basically a sworn testimony.

Through the dusty front window, the afternoon sun was sinking over Wexley Street. Reflected in the glass, across the road, I could just make out the shape of a black car parked at the corner.

It hadn’t been there when we walked up.

The song changed key, sliding low and warning, and for one wild second the whole shop seemed to stretch, shelves rising taller, shadows deepening, the air filling with the smell of a storm that hadn’t started yet.

Then Maya came back out with a bowl of soup and a crossword pencil stuck behind her ear, and everything snapped back to normal.

“Your grandma has a basement,” I said.

“Cool,” Maya said. “Race you to finish this soup and investigate.”

And that, right there, is why Maya is my best friend. Normal kids hear “mysterious basement” and feel fear. Maya hears “mysterious basement” and schedules it between soup and homework.

“Basement?” Finn said, perking up. “I’m in. If there’s anything heavy down there, you’ll need me.”

“Or if there’s anything to hide behind,” Maya said.

“Same thing,” said Finn, entirely unbothered.

I looked back at the street. The black car was gone.

But the song kept playing, soft and sad and patient, like it had been waiting a very long time for someone to finally listen.

I was ten years old. I had detention on my record, soup in my future, and a basement to explore.

I had no idea the world was about to end.

Lucky for the world, I also had no intention of letting it.

The sample ends here.