I stumbled into the hall and started to shut the heavy wooden door behind me.
“And Miss Harris?” Bartlef said. “Please don’t speak to anyone about what happened today.”
The door swung shut. I leaned against the wall and drew in several long, cleansing breaths. The hallway smelled faintly of industrial-strength cleaner, but it was fresh air compared to Bartlef’s office.
I stared down at my hands, imagining them still coated in sticky blood, and felt my stomach heave again. I shook my head and moved toward the stairs to go to my locker. Nothing about this made any sense at all.
The rest of the day was as okay as I could have expected, given the circumstances. Natalie, Scott, and Sarah were all in my afternoon history class. The students stared at me silently as I walked in. Sarah indicated an empty seat next to her and I slid into it. The teacher resumed her lecture.
Sarah leaned over to me. “It was Cody, wasn’t it?” she whispered
“That’s what Spencer said.”
She shuddered. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “We never do.”
“Sarah?” the teacher said, looking at her pointedly.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sarah said, bending down to copy homework instructions into her notebook.
I followed her example, hoping I could get more out of her after class, but as soon as the bell rang she scuttled off without making eye contact.
Andrew was in first-year Spanish with me. I’d been taking French in Atlanta, but Fairy High didn’t have French as a language option, so I was having to start all over. Like Sarah, Andrew refused to talk about Cody, but his eyes were red-rimmed, and I suspected he’d been crying. He kept his head down on the desk; the teacher didn’t call on him.
The longer the day went on, the more frustrated I felt. I had found a dead body, and no one would discuss it with me. In fact, no one much seemed to want to talk to me at all. The whole school seemed subdued. The other students stood in small clumps and whispered to one another, but the whispers hushed as I walked by. I felt tears well up in my own eyes. I wondered if anyone would notice if I just went home—then remembered that Kayla was my ride. And anyway, I didn’t really have a home anymore. Just a room with a borrowed desk and a bunch of boxes waiting to be unpacked.
I missed Atlanta more than ever.
* * *
My last class of the day was listed as Journalism, which I quickly discovered had little in common with the school newspaper I’d been involved with back home. In Fairy, the journalism class produced the yearbook. I saw Kayla in a seat in the back whisper something to the girl next to her. The teacher, Mr. Carlson, glanced up at me as I slid into an empty chair.
“Hi, Laney,” he said. “Welcome to Fairy. Mr. Bartlef told me you’re a photographer?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
He smiled. “You ever worked in a darkroom?”
“No,” I said slowly. “Mostly we used digital cameras.”
Mr. Carlson laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We use digital cameras here, too. I just think it’s important for my students to know their way around a darkroom. That's the foundation of art-photography, and you never know when it might come in handy.”
Like maybe never? I thought, but again, I kept the thought to myself. I was getting pretty good at that here.
“Anyway,” he said, “that’ll come later.” He raised his voice to the rest of the class—there were maybe fifteen or sixteen students in all, and about six of them clustered around Kayla. “Good afternoon, everyone! We’re going to jump right in here. As you all know, the yearbook gets no funding from the school district, so we’re going to spend the first six-week grading period on our annual fundraiser. Everyone will be assigned a partner, and you’ll spend this last class period out selling ads to local businesses. Your grade will be determined by the number of ads you sell.”
He pointed to a chart on the chalkboard and everyone groaned. “I’ve already arranged for you to be released early every day, so you’ll be spending this hour out in town. Don’t waste it goofing off and hanging out at Sonic trying to be cool. It won’t work, anyway.” He looked pointedly at the guy sitting in front of me and the rest of the class laughed. “And here are your assigned partners.”
He read off a list in his hand. When he called my name, I discovered I was partnered with Mason Collier—the infamous football-playing, cute, but possibly black-magicky friend-of-Bartlef I’d heard about at lunch. I looked around and saw a guy waving at me from across the room. He was looking at me kind of like he was hungry and maybe I was breakfast. It worried me.
Still, at least I hadn’t been paired up with Kayla. It could have been much worse.
“Okay,” Carlson said. “Go ahead and meet with your partners and plan your strategy.”
Mason and I stood up at the same time and walked toward each other. I was so busy making sure I didn’t trip over any desks that I didn’t see Kayla headed toward me until she was right in front of me. And then she leaned in close to my face and hissed at me. “Don’t get too cozy. He’s way out of your league.”
I rolled my eyes and moved around her without responding. Three days. Three days I’d been in Fairy, and already I had an enemy. And I lived in her house. My life kept getting better and better.
Mason and I met in the middle of the room. Kayla and her friends huddled nearby, watching us.
“Hey,” Mason said.
“Hey.” Nice, neutral word, hey. Can mean almost anything. Or nothing.
“So,” he said, “where do you want to start?”
He was asking me? Where I wanted to start was away from here, where there weren’t any dead boys to trip over.
So much for that option.
“Well,” I said, drawing the word out. “I’m new here. It’s your town. Where do you think we should start?”
“Hm.” He looked at me appraisingly. “I bet you’d do real well selling ads to the old guys at the auto-body shops.”
One of the guys standing with Kayla actually hooted out loud. I could feel my face turn red. I counted to ten in my head without breaking eye contact with my new sales partner. When he finally started to shift in his seat just a bit, I leaned back, crossed my arms, and gave him a look that was every bit as assessing as the one he’d given me.
“Hm,” I said. “Well, you’re not too bad-looking. We might be able to hit up the old ladies at the hair salons. As long as you don’t open your mouth and say anything stupid—and on second thought, just to be safe, I think maybe you shouldn’t talk at all.”
I heard a snort from the front of the room, but when I glanced over, Mr. Carlson’s head was down over some papers on his desk and he was studiously ignoring us.
Mason Collier threw his head back and laughed out loud. “You’re all right, Harris,” he said. “Let’s go show these losers how to sell some ads. We taking your car or mine?”
Round one to me, then. “I don’t actually have a car,” I said.
“No problem.” He stood up and towered over me. “I can drop you off back at your house when we’re done, if you want.”
“Fine by me.” I smiled up at him.
“We’re out of here, Mr. C,” Mason said as we walked past his desk.
“Be careful,” Carlson said. “See you tomorrow.”
Kayla watched us leave the room with narrowed eyes. I didn’t hear what she said to the tiny brunette standing next to her, but I had some guesses.
Yep. Better and better.
* * *
“Let’s stop by Sonic and get a Coke,” Mason said as soon as we were in his dark blue pickup truck.
“Didn’t Mr. Carlson say that was against the rules?”
Mason laughed. “He doesn’t really care, just as long as we sell enough ads to pay for the yearbook.” He pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the tiny downtown.
I studied his profile out of the corner of my eye. I could se
e why Ally thought he was cute. He had dark blond hair, blue eyes, and a blinding smile.
“So you’re on the football team?” I asked, mostly to break the silence that was building.
“All-State in our division last year,” he said proudly. I swear his chest actually puffed out a little bit.
“And you’re on the yearbook staff?”
“Yep.”
“And that’s not . . .” I paused for a moment, “…strange?”
He frowned. “No. Why would it be?”
“Well, it’s just that in my old school, back in Atlanta, football players usually didn’t do very many other sorts of things—I mean, other than sports. Certainly not things like yearbook. They were too. . . .” My voice petered out.
“Too cool?” Mason asked, grinning that huge smile of his.
“Something like that.”
He shook his head. “Some of the guys on the team ragged me about it a little at first. But I do what I want to. And I wanted to do yearbook.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh. Well. That.” His cheeks turned a little pink. “At first it was because of . . . well, because of a girl.”
I smiled at his embarrassment. “Oh yeah? Which one?”
He turned into the Sonic and pulled into a parking space next to an order station.
“Kayla,” he said shortly, without looking at me.
I closed my eyes. Yep. That was it. I was doomed to a life of misery in my own house.
“What happened with that?” I asked without opening my eyes, hoping he couldn’t hear the dread in my voice.
“Didn’t work out.” His voice was curt. “What do you want to order?”
I opened my eyes and turned to face him. “Cherry limeade. And if we’re going to spend the next six weeks selling ads together, you’re going to have to give me more than that. I have to live with Kayla. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not exactly her favorite person in the universe.”
Mason leaned out the window to place our order through the intercom, then turned to face me. “What’s there to tell?” he said, shrugging. “We went out a couple of times. It didn’t work out. End of story.”
I stared at him, silently willing him to tell me more. His face flushed more deeply, but he didn’t say anything else. Finally the waitress showed up with our drinks and broke the stalemate.
I insisted on paying for my own drink. No way was I going to do anything that even hinted to Mason that this might be date-ish.
We spent the next hour going around to local businesses and asking them to support the high school yearbook by buying an ad. I was surprised at how easy it was—I’d been dreading the thought of trying to actually sell something.
“It’s a small town.” Mason shrugged when I mentioned it. “These people buy an ad every year. No big.”
There was one odd moment, though. Despite our exchange earlier, we hadn’t gone to any auto body shops or hair salons. Instead, we’d gone up and down the main street and stopped in at several different kinds of businesses: a real-estate agent’s office, a pharmacy, a couple of restaurants. After the second restaurant, Mason started the truck and said, “I need to make one more stop before we’re done today.”
I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except that his tone changed when he said it—he somehow sounded more tense, like maybe he didn’t really want to make this stop. And besides, he’d been deciding where we were going all along. Like I’d said, it was his town; I didn’t know where anything was.
“No problem,” I said.
We left the downtown area and drove for about ten minutes down a two-lane highway. I watched the scenery flow by—scrubby brush and barbed-wire fences running along small rises and dips in the land. When Mom had told me we were moving to Texas, she had assured me that we would be only a few hours southwest of Dallas. But it could have been a million miles, for all the difference it made here. This was a Texas no-man’s land: too far east for desert, too far west for pine trees, too far north for real hills, too far south for plains. And far too far away from any real city, in my opinion.
We pulled into a driveway covered with off-white gravel. A fine white dust blew up behind the truck as we bumped over a group of metal bars set into the ground—a cattleguard. I knew what it was because there was one leading into John’s ranch, and he’d explained it to me. Apparently it kept cows from getting out into the road, even though it was surrounded by a gate that could be closed. A sign across the top of this gate-and-cattleguard said “Rockin’ J Ranch.” A man in his thirties or so, wearing heavy work gloves, tugged at a fence post. He looked up and waved, and Mason stopped long enough to roll down his window.
“Rama habra,” the man said. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like. I assumed it must be Spanish or something. Mason repeated the words to him with a nod and we continued up the driveway. After a few minutes, we pulled up to an old, sprawling white house.
Mason parked the truck and sat still for a moment.
“You want to come in?” he finally asked, almost reluctantly.
“Sure!” Like I was going to say no when it was so clear he was uncomfortable. If he didn’t want me to see, then he shouldn’t have brought me along.
Mason walked into the dim, cool interior of the house without knocking.
“Oma Raina?” he called.
“In here, boy.” The voice that replied was cracked and dry. I followed Mason into some sort of living room, where an ancient woman sat in a Lazy Boy recliner. I had half-expected to find her in a rocking chair, knitting. Instead, she held a television remote in her hand.
Mason leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Hi, Oma Raina,” he said.
The old woman looked as dry and brittle as her voice sounded. “Sit down, sit down.” She peered up at me. “Who’s your friend?”
“We don’t have time to visit right now,” Mason said. “Dad just wanted me to stop by and give you this.” He pulled a packet out of the back pocket of his jeans. It looked like a brown paper lunch bag, folded flat.
The old woman cackled. “Oh, good,” she said. “I’ve been needing that.”
“Okay, then. I’ve got to go,” Mason said. “I need to take Laney here back home. I just wanted to get that to you while we were out.”
“Laney,” the old woman said in a musing tone. “Laney, Laney.…Ah!” She looked up at me. “Your mother married John Hamilton.”
Good Lord. Was there anyone in this town who didn’t know that?
“Come down closer, girl, and let me take a look at you.”
I knelt down by her chair and she took my hand, peering into my face.
“Oh, yes,” she cackled. “You’ll do. You’ll do.”
And for the second time that day, I nearly gagged. She had the same hot corpse breath as Bartlef. What was it with the old people in this town? Was it something in the water? I pulled my hand out of her grasp and stood up quickly.
“Um. It’s nice to meet you,” I finally managed.
She just cackled again.
“Bye, Oma Raina,” Mason said, and leaned in to give her another kiss. I shuddered. How could he stand to be that close to someone that stinky?
I was reminded of the discussion at lunch today—about the rumors surrounding Bartlef and the students. Suddenly it seemed a lot more likely to me that Mason might hang around with Bartlef. The thought made me shiver again.
Mason was silent when we got back into the truck. I wanted to ask what had been in the packet he’d given the old woman, but he didn’t start talking, and his expression didn’t particularly invite questions.
When we pulled up in front of my—John’s, Kayla’s, now Mom’s and my—house, Mason turned to face me. “I actually had a good time today,” he said. “I’m glad Carlson assigned us to work together.” He smiled that blinding white smile at me.
I jumped out of the truck before he could say anything else. I did not need another guy with The Look following me around. As flattering as it mi
ght be, I knew that the guys of Fairy High were only responding to me that way because I was the new girl in a town that didn’t get much in the way of new.
“Okay!” I said brightly, in a voice that sounded eerily like my mother’s when she was trying too hard. “I’ll see you tomorrow!” I shut the door and waved.
Mason grinned again and waved, and then gunned the engine a bit as he backed his truck out of John Hamilton’s driveway.
Chapter 3
Of course Kayla was waiting to pounce on me as soon as I got inside.
“What took you so long to get home?” she demanded. “School was over almost two hours ago.”
I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of orange juice. “We were selling ads for the yearbook, just like you were supposed to be doing.”
“Doing what?” Mom asked as she came into the kitchen carrying a cardboard box.
“Selling ads for the yearbook. It’s our first assignment for Journalism class.”
“Oh, good,” Mom said absently. “I’m glad you’re getting involved already.” She opened the box and began sliding glasses into a cabinet.
“That’s not where the glasses go,” Kayla said peevishly.
Mom paused long enough to glance over at her new stepdaughter, then said calmly, “Actually, I’ve rearranged the kitchen just a bit so everything will fit. I’m sure you’ll get used to it soon.”
Kayla sniffed and stomped out of the kitchen.
Mom sighed. “I hate it that this is so hard on her,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I just took one of the glasses from her and poured juice into it.
“And I know it’s hard on you, too, honey,” she said, sliding an arm around my waist.
I sighed and leaned my head on her shoulder. “I’ll be okay,” I said.
“I know you will. You’re strong and smart. You’ll be just fine.” She went back to unpacking dishes. “I just hope Kayla will be okay, too.”
I held back the snort that threatened to erupt, busying myself with taking a long drink.
Mom reached up into the cabinet to put away a glass as she said, “The school called me about you finding that poor boy.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I think she was trying to be casual, but it didn’t really work out. “The counselor talked to you, right? How are you feeling?”
Paranormal Magic (Shades of Prey Book 1) Page 25
