by Nicola Marsh
“And?”
She shrugged. “It did.”
“Tree branch?”
“A rock. From the riverbed. Twenty feet away.”
“Wow,” I murmured, imagining how scared she must’ve been, fighting off a horny jerk and then discovering she could make things move just by thinking about it.
“I didn’t believe it at first. Thought someone must’ve been spying on us and wanted to do the right thing.” She paused, her strange smirk confusing me. “So I tried again later that night in my room. Draped my skinny jeans over the lampshade after I’d dumped them on the floor. Made books spin on top of my to-be-read pile. Rearranged my wardrobe. All while lying on my bed just thinking about it.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Waited a month, then called my folks, asked them to transfer me to a different boarding school. Here.”
A bitter undertone made me tread with caution. “How did you—”
“I searched ‘moving stuff with your mind’ on the Internet. Came up with loads of links to Brigit and her parapsychology crap. Found this place, so here I am.” She toyed with the edges of her book, folding the corners into little triangles, and from her shuttered expression, I knew it couldn’t have been as easy as she made out. “That Randall thing was a nightmare, but in a way I’m grateful. Maybe if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have discovered the telekinesis.”
“You like it? Being different from everyone?”
“Don’t you?”
“Jury’s still out.”
She squared her shoulders. “I think it’s cool and I love being here. Beats the dropkicks at my old school.”
She had a point.
We didn’t have time to talk further as a teacher breezed into the room. He made straight for the front desk, barely giving us a second glance. “Turn to page twenty-one of your Divination for Beginners text and start assembling the tephramancy experiment,” he snapped.
His deep voice, extreme pallor, scraggly black hair, and head-to-toe ebony clothes—shirt, trousers, overcoat—made him look like a caricature of every fictional baddie I’d ever read.
Raven must’ve thought the same, because she muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “Hogwarts” and I giggled.
“Do you have something to share with the rest of the class, Miss Burton?”
My grin faded. I shook my head. My cheeks burned as I quickly opened my textbook to the appropriate page.
“Don’t let Crane intimidate you. He thinks he’s a badass, but I bet he’s a marshmallow,” Raven whispered, as she ducked down to pick up a pencil she’d deliberately dropped on the floor.
“Okay, thanks.” I smiled. Until I saw the first line of our first lab.
“Tephramancy is the art of foretelling the future by burning tree bark and reading signs in the ashes.”
A memory of Cadifor leaning over a stone altar, lighting a match to an offering that closely resembled a bunch of twigs, flashed across my mind, and I clutched the text to my chest in fear.
“This is so lame,” Raven muttered, pulling a bag of bark from her bag along with a small stone vessel.
“Was I supposed to—”
“Nope, I read ahead.”
She blushed, and her diligence endeared her to me. Nothing wrong with being prepared. Unless you were the only conscientious one in a class of slackers at Wolfebane High. I liked that we had that in common. Interesting how I felt closer to Raven in a short space of time than to any of my classmates at Wolfebane High over the years.
She shook out a small pile of bark into the vessel and handed me the matches. “Here, you do the honors.”
My fingers fumbled with the matches, and I muttered, “klutz,” so Raven would mistake my trembling hands for anything but the fear snaking through my body. Having seen Cadifor doing this experiment in a vision did not make me like it. In fact, I would’ve rather been anywhere else, doing anything else, than striking a match and lighting bark.
Bracing, I touched the match to the bark, the tiny hiss and sizzle masking my sharp indrawn breath.
Crane paced between the desks, grunting his approval here and there, a perpetual frown on his face. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, but with the dorky side-parted hair, long sideburns, and shaving rash, he could’ve passed for twenty.
Raven waved her hands over the twigs and closed her eyes. “I predict if you don’t make this pile of crap catch in the next ten seconds, our sorry asses will be in detention for the next week.”
With a nervous chuckle I blew on the twigs and bark gently, watching them catch and burn and smolder down to the ashes that would supposedly reveal the future.
Raven peered into the gray ash, tilting her head this way and that, her dubious smirk telling me more than the ashes. “Only thing that pile of cinders revealed is that I’m going to flunk divination.”
Reluctant, I pulled the vessel toward me. “Here, let me try.” Brave words, considering the last thing I wanted to do was peer into the ash and see my future. Considering the track my visions were heading down, I was guaranteed to see something horrendous—like my mom and Cadifor doing more than holding hands.
Leaning forward, I peered into the embers, wondering if this was like the tea leaf thing Nan used to do to make me feel good about potentially scary stuff: first day starting school, first time away at camp, first trip to the dentist.
Nothing.
I observed harder. Blew on the ash a little, stirring the wispy fragments into miniature tornadoes. Still nothing.
Holding about as much faith in reading tree bark ash as I did in my visions, I nudged the vessel away. That’s when I saw it. I blinked, squinted, but the image remained: a baby curled in a crib, next to another crib, empty, a faint blurry outline among the ash.
Then the baby in the crib opened its eyes, strange golden eyes, and stared straight at me.
Maybe it was a trick of the light? A shadow created when I moved the stone vessel?
“You see something?” Raven’s curious voice broke the spell and I shook my head, not surprised that when I glanced back the ashes were just that: a pile of burnt bark.
“Thought I did, guess I was trying too hard.” I wanted to mention what I’d seen, but it didn’t make sense, and no way did I want Crane psychoanalyzing me.
Raven jerked a thumb toward the table next to us. “We’re in for a little one on one.”
Crane swooped down on us, looming like a crow, studying our faces more than our pile of ash. His gaze flicked over Raven, dismissive, but when he peered at me, I felt a jolt all the way down to my toes.
He knew.
I held my breath as I focused on my text.
After what seemed like an eternity, he said, “Carry on,” and moved on to the next desk, leaving me more shaken than I cared to admit.
The way he’d scrutinized me … like he could see all the way down to my soul. Probably just a figment of my overactive imagination, but given what people could do in this place, not out of the realm of possibility.
If he could read me, why hadn’t he called me on what I’d seen? Questioned me? Pushed me for answers like the rest of the uptight teachers I’d had before? That made me uneasier than anything. I didn’t like games, and hated teachers playing them more. As he cast a quick glance over his shoulder at me, I sucked in a nervous breath. When a nerd at the front asked a question and distracted Crane, I sighed in relief.
Raven muttered, “He’s spooky,” before slouching in her chair and flicking through the rest of the text. “When do we get to the good stuff? Bet I see heaps in crystallomancy.”
I raised an eyebrow.
She grinned. “And you thought the old crystal ball gazing was a fallacy.”
We didn’t have much more time for chitchat as Crane strode to the front of the class and started expounding on the best methods for divination.
I was glad. I had a lot to think about, starting with making sense of what I’d seen and how it fit into the crazy jigsaw
puzzle my life had become. If tephramancy told the future, what did the baby with golden eyes have in store for me? And worse, how could something so innocent possibly be tied to Cadifor’s evil?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After surviving my first divination lesson, I sat through semantics and parapsychology with Raven and Quinn, who made the lessons bearable. Well, semi-bearable. Whenever a teacher droned on about esoteric traditions or imbuing charms or channeling your inner urban warrior, my brain would fog—not from lack of interest, but this stuff was all so new to me. I didn’t like lagging behind the rest of the class. I’d been a brainiac at Wolfebane High, but C.U.L.T. gave me a severe case of brain overload.
Symbols and planetary alignments and ancient parapsychological experiments spun around my head until I was dizzy. Meeting my spirit guide might be kind of useful in my quest, but sitting in a classroom of sleepy zombies staring at individual candles while barely able to breathe from the dense incense fog didn’t do much for me. I didn’t see a blue light approaching me from a distance, I didn’t see it take on a human form, I didn’t get to invite her to sit with me and discuss what problems I had—and boy, could I have done with that chat.
Maybe I didn’t have a guardian angel or maybe I was spiritless; either way, I sucked at the labs. Ironic; my initial fear of not fitting in at a school for freaks, because I couldn’t control my gift, was superseded by my fear of flunking.
Soon I had to head back to Eiros and act like I was cool with weekend lessons. Assume responsibility for finding Arwen. Be part of a sorority that was fractured at best.
“Concentrate.” Quinn nudged me with his elbow and pointed at the text lying open between us. “If we don’t get this assignment on auras out of the way, we’ll have to spend the whole night doing it.” With a wicked smile, he leaned closer and murmured, “Or maybe that’s your plan, huh? You want to get me alone so you can take advantage of me?”
I gulped at his proximity, at the way his lips curved temptingly in the corners, and at the thought of spending some one-on-one time with him. I liked being around Quinn. He made me feel good, and anyone who could do that amid all the crazy stuff was welcome to flirt with me anytime. “In your dreams.”
His moss-green eyes sparkled. “You have no idea.”
I elbowed him back, hoping I wasn’t blushing like an idiot, and yanked the textbook closer. Not that I didn’t enjoy his flirting; it just made me a little uncomfortable after the buzz I had going on with Joss. Strange thing was, when I was with Joss, I didn’t give Quinn a second thought, and when I was with Quinn, Joss faded to the furthest recesses of my memory.
“How about it? You and me, doing some study tonight?”
Brownie points for persistence, but even if I had wanted to hang out with Quinn, I couldn’t.
“Can’t.”
“Hot date?”
His voice had an edge I didn’t like and I shot him a glare. “Visiting my Nan.”
Sheepish, he shrugged. “Sorry.”
Not wanting to talk about Nan, I flipped to the next page. “Which means we need to get this done now. Ready?”
He nodded and picked up his pen, tapping it against his notebook like a conductor’s baton. “Go.”
I led in with an easy question. “Define aura.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Come on, you can do better than that.”
“This is my pop quiz. I’ll ask the questions.” I tapped his nose and he laughed. “Answer before the buzzer, please.”
We grinned at each other and it struck me how easy being with him was. No hassles, no pressure, just two friends helping each other out. Trading banter with Quinn made me wish life was as easy as this: studying with a cute guy, enjoying the challenge of learning new stuff with my hardest task being absorbing new lessons, and not saving the world. For an all-too-brief time, with him flirting and teasing and making me laugh, I could forget my responsibilities.
“Sometime this century would be good,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.
“The literal translation of aura is breath. Apparently Zeus turned Aura, the companion of the goddess Artemis, into a spring, and she embodies mild breezes, literally a cool breath from water.”
I drew a check mark in the air and he threw up his arms and mouthed “score” complete with fake audience cheering.
Laughing, I glanced at the page for my next question. “Okay, wiseass, what’s the parapsychology definition of aura?”
“Too easy.” He interlocked his fingers and stretched forward. “A collaboration of expressing one’s life force and in response someone skilled perceiving it. Basically, the emanation of a person’s emotional state made visible to certain psychics.”
“You sure you didn’t swallow this text for breakfast?”
“Just smart, I guess.”
“Smartass more like it,” I muttered, earning another heart-stopping grin that had my insides fluttering.
I flipped the pages faster, trying to come up with a question to challenge him and distract me from his all-round appeal.
“Okay, to win the car, answer this question: Can auras be photographed?”
He screwed up his eyes and pretended to think, then snapped them open in a fake light bulb moment that had me wanting to hug him, he was that cute.
“Yep, they can. A Ukrainian dude, Kirlian, accidentally discovered he could photograph auras, known as the corona effect, in nineteen thirty-nine while fixing medical machinery. A person’s body part subjected to a high-voltage electric field against a photographic plate creates an aura image on the plate. Then, according to the color, a diagnosis can be made.” He leaned toward me and tried to sneak a peek at the textbook. “So, how’d I do?”
“You’re a nerd.”
I closed the book and threw it on the desk, secretly pleased he was so smart. Looks were important, as was a sense of humor, but give me a guy with a brain and I was hooked.
He tapped his head. “Up here for thinking,” he said, and wiggled his feet. “Down there for dancing.”
I snorted. “Do those lame lines usually work for you?”
The laugh lines around his mouth crinkled adorably as he crooked a finger at me, beckoning me closer. “You tell me.”
Rolling my eyes, I said, “So not working.”
He shrugged and his smile widened. “Just means I’ll have to keep trying.”
Poking out my tongue, I silently cheered when the teacher, Miss Morris, demanded the class’s attention again.
I didn’t want to encourage Quinn; it felt lousy I couldn’t be completely honest with him.
Not yet.
Visiting Nan broke my heart, and using her as an excuse for my absences from school only served to increase the constant guilt that I’d put her here. The only woman I truly loved in this world was in a coma because of me. She’d devoted her life to raising me, and how had I repaid her? By freaking her out so badly she’d had a stroke. Rubbing the ache centered in my chest at the thought, I headed for the nurse’s station.
“Go on in, Holly. I’m sure Rose would love a visit.”
I gave the nurse a tight smile along with an “are you for real” glare. How could that plump, perky twenty-something possibly know what my comatose Nan would want? Unless she had a gift for reading minds along with a gift for patronizing relatives.
I held my breath as I walked down the long corridor, but some of the nasty odors still managed to seep into my nose: bland mushy food, antiseptic, industrial detergent, and musty old people. And something else I didn’t want to acknowledge: the cloying smell of death.
Outside Nan’s room, the last on the right, I smoothed a hand over my face, hoping to wipe away my horrified expression at being here. Though Nan couldn’t see me, I felt like a traitor walking into her room with doom and gloom written all over my face.
Knocking from years of manners she’d instilled in me, I eased open the door, squared my shoulders, and stepped into the sterile room, only to slump as if an invisible opponent had sucker pu
nched me. Seeing my vibrant, bossy, quirky Nan lying in that bed, hooked up to machines monitoring her every breath, snatched away mine.
I edged closer to the bed, the frail, pale, white-haired old woman not equating with my Nan. My Nan who loved long walks around the lake, tending her herb garden and giving me a hard time about preferring books to real dates. My Nan, whose kooky predictions rarely came true but were close enough to unsettle me, whose adoration of fossils like Frank Sinatra and Sean Connery gave me good teasing fodder, whose love of knitting kept me in enough scarves and gloves to keep the next millennium of freezing Wolfebane winters at bay.
She’d always insisted I wear a new scarf every winter and I did to please her. Even the time she’d unwittingly knitted a bright, glary number in rainbow colors. I’d valiantly worn it out of the cottage as far as the end of the street before yanking it off and stuffing it into my bag. About two seconds too late since the biggest gossip in school had seen it. I’d borne the brunt of tasteless gay jokes that day and the next, but because of the loving twinkle it had put in Nan’s eyes to see me wear it, I wore that thing out of the cottage every morning for the entire winter.
Struggling to hold back tears, I blinked rapidly and tiptoed toward the bed, my fear increasing the closer I got. She’d lost more weight, her gaunt face almost skeletal. I placed my hand over hers on the bedclothes, wishing I could infuse some of my warmth into her.
“Hey Nan, it’s me. How you doing?”
I cringed at my stupidity. Like she could answer. The nurses had said to act completely normal, maintain a normal conversation; sometimes coma patients could hear every word spoken even though they couldn’t respond. I’d tried the few times I’d visited, but my monologues were on par with my teleportation skills: below average at best.
Determined to try harder, I squeezed her hand. “I’ve survived my classes at C.U.L.T. Made some new friends. Loving my dorm.” I carefully avoided any mention of my gift, considering my revelation had resulted in her current state. “You’d like Raven. She pretends to be this goth chick, but she’s funny and smart and nice. And Quinn is cool.”
