The second option was going to be so embarrassing if it was true.
“Hi, there, happy camper!” A small hand pulled the map I’d been studying away from my face to reveal a beaming girl wearing big glasses. She had frizzy brown hair and looked like a little bunny rabbit: all frail and skittish. “You seem lost. Are you heading to your cabin? I can help you find it, if you want,” the girl offered, with a kind smile.
“Oh, thank God. I was getting worried. Do you know if this is the right way to the main house?” I asked, with a sigh of relief.
“The main house? Yeah, you’re heading in the right direction. Just keep following this road. There’s literally no way you can lose the main house in this camp: all trails lead there. Are you here for the Gathering?” she asked, whispering the last word in a spooky voice to make it sound more supernaturally impressive.
“Yes, I am. You’re attending, too? Celeste Harker is actually waiting for me at the main house, or so I was told.”
The girl widened her eyes. The effect of her bugged-out eyes through her thick lenses was quite impressive. “Miss Harker told me to come see if her apprentice Joe Gray had arrived yet. A-are you by any ch-chance . . .?”
“Yep, nice to meet you. I’m Joe Gray. Actually, it’s Halloway now, not Gray.” I beamed, extending a hand towards her.
She looked at my hand as if it were a two-headed snake. “You’re really the Joe Gray?” she whispered. “I thought Joe Gray was a boy!”
“Doesn’t everyone,” I mumbled tiredly. “It’s not a big deal. Sometimes girls have boy’s names and vice versa. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Oh, my God! Are they really true, all those stories about you?” she said, her easy demeanor returning. “Are you really an empathy seer? People are saying you’re the best one there is! Can you really enter people’s heads and mess with their minds? Like, for real? I can’t believe I’m talking to you! No one believes you’re really coming to this Gathering. Everybody thinks you’re the greatest.” She squealed in full-on fan-girl fashion. I would recognize those high-pitched notes anywhere. The sound was embedded in my memory from all the fans screaming at shows we played.
“Where did you hear these things?” I crossed my arms and glared at her.
She caught sight of my guarded expression and rushed to explain, “Oh, no, you don’t need to worry! We all swore to secrecy; only witches are allowed to know these things, if you know what I mean.” She tapped the side of her nose in a Mob-like secret signal. “A witch’s vow is a serious thing. There are grave consequences if someone breaks one. You have my word: I will never say a thing.” She raised a hand and placed it over her heart.
“Okay, I guess,” I muttered, still watching her suspiciously. Her expression seemed to be genuine, though, so I let myself relax. “These rumors have been completely blown out of proportion, by the way. Most of it’s not true at all, so you can understand my worries. If this story leaked to the press, it’d be a nightmare for the band.”
She looked at me with the most puzzled expression. “What band?”
“Hmm, you know . . . my band?”
“You have a band?”
“You don’t know about my band?” Go figure. She knows about my empathy-sight but doesn’t know a thing about me being in a popular rock band. Okay, fine, we weren’t internationally famous yet, but we were fast heading in that direction. How could she not know I was Joe Gray from The Lost Boys? “I’m in a rock band. It’s my main occupation. This witch thing is just a hobby, at the moment.”
“Oh, okay. That’s cool. Rock ’n’ roll! Whoohoo!” Her awkward cheer ended with a weird snort, and she added a feeble fist pump into the air in an attempt to look cool. “I’m Liza, by the way. But my friends call me Lizzie, so call me Lizzie. Not because I’m assuming you’d want to be my friend, no one ever does. I mean, you can, if you want to, but I’m not forcing you, so you don’t need to be, but you can call me Lizzie, or whatever you want . . .” She trailed off, shuffling her feet on the gravel road.
“Nice to meet you, Lizzie. My friends call me Joey, so call me Joey.” I extended a hand once again for her to shake.
This time, she took it and shook it vigorously. “All right!” She was clearly exhilarated that she was officially my friend now. She made the rock ’n’ roll hand signal, trying to impress me, but ended up failing miserably, looking even more awkward than the first time.
“Come on, Lizzie. Show me the way! We have a Harker sister waiting, and time’s a-wastin’!” I chuckled.
The main house turned out to be bigger than I expected. The walls were all made from a dark wood, but inside it had a cozy feel, very welcoming. There were fake bearskin rugs scattered around the floor, and paintings and photographs of the camp adorned every wall. Above the front desk in the lobby was a big map of the camp, the main house at the center, with small cabins dotted across the surrounding area.
Lizzie pointed at the entrance to the cafeteria, telling me that if I ever decided to sample a bit of the camp “cuisine”, this was the room to head for. Then she pointed out the meeting hall, explaining that it was where travelling groups and their tour guides usually congregated; then she showed me a few recreational games rooms where people hung out in their free time, when they were not hiking or exploring.
As we walked back to the main entrance lobby, a frantic girl hurried up to Lizzie, asking for help solving an emergency regarding the room-sharing list for the cabins. She also asked me if I could do her a favor by taking a plate of cookies to the meeting hall for the first introductory lecture, which was due to start.
Lizzie was completely appalled by her friend’s lack of ceremony towards me; the girl clearly had no clue who I was. She tried to apologize on her friend’s behalf, but I waved her off and took the tray of cookies, telling her it was completely fine.
Before I started this trip, I decided that I would face this Gathering with an open mind. Tristan had once taught me, several years ago at school, that the way we perceive a situation can change everything about that moment. If you see it as fun, it ends up being truly fun. And I was choosing to see this Gathering as a great opportunity. Nothing and no one was going to upset me here; I wouldn’t allow it.
“Excuse me, you!” Someone standing at a table within a circle of girls snapped her fingers in an annoying fashion to get my attention as we entered the meeting hall. The girls all looked to be around my age, early twenties. “We’ve been waiting for these damned cookies for ages, here! What have you been doing all this time, making them from scratch? I have a low blood-sugar level; I could have fainted waiting here this long!” The voice came from a fake-blonde girl. She continued to berate me, while her cluster of friends tutted.
I raised my eyebrows in puzzlement. For a moment, I thought I had travelled back in time and this was high school all over again. They were sure behaving like the cast of Mean Girls: bratty, rude and immature.
Okay. So far, not a very good start – at least, not if I were going to manage to maintain my good-natured self. But, like I said, nothing and no one was going to upset me while at this camp.
I bloody wasn’t going to let it.
I forced a smile and placed the cookies calmly on their table. “Here you go, ladies. No need to faint any more.” No one in their group seemed to recognize me from The Lost Boys, which did make me wonder about the skill of our marketing team, to be honest. Maybe it was my comfy road-trip sweats that were distracting them: it didn’t look like an outfit a rock star should be wearing, after all. “Go ahead!” I continued. “Gobble up these fattening cookies. They look like the type that go straight to the hips, if you ladies know what I mean.”
I gave them a cheeky wink. They looked like the sort of girls that went in for crazy diets. The type that thinks a good reflection in the mirror determines their real worth. They should worry less about appearance and more about what was inside, I thought. In other words, they should stop being superficial twats and start treating people w
ho brought them cookies a little bit better.
As I expected, my comment had the desired effect. The low-blood-sugar girl, who was about to snatch up a cookie, faltered. She began to glare at the sugary treats as if they were a long-sworn enemy.
I grinned, seeing her reaction. She looked like she was starving, but the fat-to-the-hips-cookie threat had been a complete turn off. I know, it was mean for me to point it out; I could have let her have her cookie, guilt free. But, hey, she started it!
“What are those things made of, anyway? They look stale to me. I’m not eating that crap,” she muttered, searching for an excuse to reject them.
“They look fine to me,” a younger blonde girl, who resembled the older, teased. “And taste even better!” She munched one cookie in an exaggerated display of enjoyment.
“Ah, Felicia. No wonder you can’t find a boyfriend, dear sister. Boys don’t like fat girls, you know,” the grouchy older girl jibed at the younger one, in clear sibling rivalry.
Felicia stuck her tongue out, and her sister blew her a kiss in provocation, while the rest of the girls giggled.
“Hey, Alicia, speaking of boyfriends,” one of them piped up, “do you really think this Joe dude is coming to the Gathering?”
“Of course! He’s Celeste star student, after all, isn’t he? And she’s organizing the damned thing. He’ll be here, don’t worry,” Alicia stated, before adding smugly, “I’ve come prepared. The boy will be putty in my hands by the time the day is over, you’ll see.”
I was fighting hard not to laugh out loud by this point. So the rude blonde girl named Alicia thought Celeste’s star student was a boy named Joe.
The curse of the name struck again. The joy.
If I had a penny for every time someone has mistaken me for a boy because of my name, I’d have all the pennies in the world.
“Do you think he’s really done everything people say he has, Alicia?” another minion asked. “I mean, it all sounds very far-fetched to me. I know you said you heard your grandma talking about it, but I don’t think all those stories can be true.”
“Well, you know how those old bats are, they do tend to exaggerate. We can’t be completely sure . . .” Alicia murmured, and pulled at her black velvet tank-top so that more cleavage was showing. “But you’ve heard the wild tales about Miss Violet’s protégé. No wonder Celeste Harker rushed to snatch the Gray boy out of the old hag’s wrinkled hands. She’s always been the greediest – and smartest – of the sisters.”
Still hovering nearby, I perked up at this. Wild tales? What was that all about? How much did these people actually know about me? How much had Miss Violet and Celeste let on?
“Do you really think this Joe can conjure up Death?” Felicia asked. “That he has free passage into the Land of Lost Souls, and that he can go there and leave as he pleases?”
Apparently, rumors of my visits to Sky’s home (also known as Death’s domain) had been circulating here.
It was true I had passed through Death’s scorching desert a few times, albeit not on purpose. At the time, I had been trying to save Tristan from the deadline of his New Year’s spell. And then, very recently, I had met Sky again in an encounter that had been particularly gruesome and had ended horribly for me. The purple scar on my stomach was still fresh and constantly reminded me of that terrible night at the warehouse.
A few weeks ago, I also received a special wedding present from Sky herself, which I kept safely hidden in my apartment: a translucent glass coin that gave me free access to her home. So I suppose I did have a free pass into the Land of Lost Souls, come to think of it. But no one except Tristan knew about this gift. We hadn’t told anyone, and I was glad about that now. It turned out that witches were not a very secretive bunch, and I feared what people might do if they knew the truth.
“Oh, I’m sure those are just stories, Felicia. No one even knows where these rumors come from, anyway.” Alicia waved her ringed fingers, which caused around a dozen metal wristbands to clang noisily on her arm. She also had loads of moon-and-star pendants hanging from silver necklaces around her neck, wore dramatic earrings and a multitude of bracelets and rings. The witch image she was trying so hard to project was painfully obvious. She even had a huge pentagram design printed on the front of her velvet tank-top, for God’s sake. All that was missing was an “I wanna be a witch” flashing neon sign on her forehead.
“You know how boys can be, bragging about stuff they can’t really do, puffing out their chests to impress us girls. He’s probably come up with some clever incantation that got the old hags in a hustle, that’s all,” Alicia mused in dismissal.
“Do you think he’s cute, Ally?” one of her minions asked giddily, and I pretended to be clearing used plastic cups from their table as an excuse to keep hovering around while I eavesdropped on their conversation.
“I heard Celeste saying this Joe can charm his way around anyone!” Felicia chirped excitedly.
“He may be a charmer, but he won’t be expecting this little concoction, here!” Alicia waved a small purple flask for her group of minions to admire. “A love potion. I just need to put a little of this in his drink, and he will be the one charmed into submission. He’ll be all over me, you wait and see.”
I grimaced in disgust. Dear Lord, how low can a girl go?
“I don’t know, Alicia,” her sister cautioned. “This Joe fellow doesn’t sound like a fool you can play that easily.”
“Trust me, I’m more cunning than any boy will ever be, little sis.”
“Wouldn’t be so sure, if I were you,” Felicia continued. “People are saying he’s a very powerful empathy reader. He’ll see right through you the second he lays his eyes on you. He’ll know you’re up to something.”
Alicia tucked the flask in her jeans pocket and turned to glare at her sister. “I’ll have you know, I’ve come prepared for everything, Felicia. See this?” She waved a crystal ball, which hung from one of the many silver chains around her neck. “I got this from a very powerful witch. It will deflect his eyesight, blind him so he won’t be able to see any of my intentions. I’ll be a beautiful and intriguing mystery to him. Boys love that!” she said triumphantly.
I looked intently at the crystal. It seemed like a worthless piece of glass, if you asked me. It wasn’t blocking my sight at all.
I had this strange gift called empathy-sight that gave me the ability to read other people’s emotions just by looking into their eyes. Some people were really strong broadcasters, and the insight I got from them was almost close to a mindreading experience. Some people had pretty strong defensive walls, though; it was very hard for me to read anything from them. But most of the time I could see right through people’s intentions without even realizing I was doing it. It was so easy for me that I couldn’t make it stop – at least, I hadn’t been able to at first. It was like trying to stop seeing with your eyes open. It was only after the latest incident – when I switched powers with Vigil – that I’d learned how to control this ability. And I’d also vowed never to use my sight on close friends and family. Especially not Tristan. For the majority of our relationship, my empathy-sight had been a problem. It was hard for Tristan to have his privacy, and keep his feelings to himself, when I kept reading him.
Now I only used this ability on strangers, and only for my protection. At the moment, it was working at full capacity. I could read Alicia as clearly as a cloudless day: she had barely any protective barriers whatsoever, and that “amulet” was as ineffective as plain old glass.
There was a sudden stir amongst the many clusters of people around the room. Alicia and her circle of minions turned to watch as a guy around our age entered through the door.
He was slim and tall, with dark hair tinted blue at the tips, and he was dressed all in black. He was accompanied by two other boys; all three of them were trying hard to put on a brooding and mysterious act, but only the tall one – who was clearly the leader – managed to pull it off.
“It
’s him!” the girls around Alicia exclaimed.
“It’s Joe Gray!”
Chapter Three
Presentations
“IT’S GOTTA BE him!” Alicia squeaked, and rushed to grab a drink she could spike with her potion. Then she sashayed towards the couch where the brooding boy and his friends had sat down, a seductive smile on her pink glossy lips and the cup firmly in her grasp. Her minion troupe followed, all giggling and nudging each other.
Oh, I cannot miss this, I thought to myself, and grabbed the plate of cookies to offer them as an excuse to be close by.
This was going to be epic. I could feel it!
“Hey! How y’all doing? Are you boys here for the Gathering?” Alicia purred, with her friends at her side. Groups around the room started to drift closer, trying to eavesdrop, like I was.
The impostor Gray glanced up at Alicia, his expression a mix of disgust and annoyance. “Yes. Obviously. Everybody in this camp is here for the Gathering. We’ve booked the whole place for the week. Duh.” He had a faint accent that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. It gave his words a sharp enunciation.
Alicia seemed taken aback by his hostility, but recovered astonishingly fast, the creepy smile on her lips never faltering. “Well, yes, obviously I know we have booked the whole place, but—”
“Not the whole place. The cabins up the hill are being used by a rock band,” I interrupted. Alicia turned round, a flash of irritation in her eyes, but I gave her an it’s true shrug.
“So, as I was saying, do you guys need any refreshments while we wait for the Harkers’ presentation? It’s awfully hot in here today, dontcha think?” And Alicia shoved the drink into impostor Gray’s hand without waiting for a reply.
Lost and Found Page 2
