“Did you see that?” Marie-Rose pointed toward the window.
“See what?”
“I saw a flash of black out in the snow.”
“Probably Madame LaCroix patrolling.” I scratched away at my paper.
“I don’t think it was Madame.” Marie-Rose glanced toward the library doorway, where Mrs. Lemmon, who’d been assigned to supervise our punishment, nodded off in her overstuffed armchair.
“Well, what is it then?”
“I will see.” Gracefully, Marie-Rose floated her way to the window. She’d told me she’d been a pretty good dancer before everything turned to merde at the ballet school, and with her chin tilted to see out the glass and her torso holding perfect posture, Marie-Rose did look the part of a ballerina. All she needed to do was sweep her long red hair into a bun and take her place at the barre.
“So?” I asked, putting a period on the end of my dictionary definition. “What is it?”
“Ah, well, it’s a little dark out there, but I can definitely see something moving near the stone wall.”
I got up from the table, my wooden chair scraping loudly against the stone floor. Oops. Mrs. Lemmon grunted and rolled her large head to the other shoulder. I let out the breath I’d been holding and tiptoed over to the window.
Marie-Rose frowned out at the snow. “It’s gone now,” she said. “Maybe it was nothing.” She stepped back over to her chair.
I was dying for something, anything, to relieve the boredom, so I stood at the window, searching the darkening landscape for movement. The funny thing was, though I didn’t see anything, I thought I heard something. Low, behind the moan of the wind, someone speaking to me…
“Shelby,” the voice said.
“Huh?” My skin prickled with goose bumps.
“Shelby,” it said. “Hear me, Shelby.”
I jumped back from the window, crashing into the library table and sending Marie-Rose’s dictionary flying. The thump of the anvil-like book against the floor seemed to echo across the library.
“What? What’s all this foolishness then?” Mrs. Lemmon sat upright in her chair, glaring at us.
Marie-Rose recovered the dictionary from its landing spot. “Excusez-moi, Mrs. Lemmon. I am so clumsy.” She sank back into her chair, looking down at the table demurely.
I took my seat too, my face warming with embarrassment. I hoped Marie-Rose wasn’t going to get busted for my bumble.
“Clumsy, my foot.” The old woman lumbered over to us, patting at her loose gray bun. “You two were messing about instead of working.”
“We were working,” I said, holding up my paper. “All this time while you were…” I trailed off, realizing too late that it was probably better not to mention Mrs. Lemmon’s nap.
“While I was what?” She lifted her chin, daring me to continue.
“Nothing,” Marie-Rose said.
Mrs. Lemmon’s beady eyes seemed to light up. “That’s right,” she cooed. “Doing nothing but watching you unfortunates serve out your punishment. Let’s pack it in then and I’ll escort you to dinner.”
“We should change first,” I said.
“Dressing for dinner, are we? How fancy.” She waited for us to collect our books and notebooks. “Spoiled brats,” she said under her breath.
I paused, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up. If there was anything I was not, it was a spoiled brat. “Actually, I meant that maybe you should change.”
Marie-Rose tugged on my sleeve. “Don’t,” she whispered.
Mrs. Lemmon stepped in front of me so that we were chest to chest. She straightened her posture, rising a good inch taller than me. “Oh, do I need nicer clothes to dine with the likes of you? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
I met her gaze. “No. It’s the drool, ma’am. The drool on your dress.”
Mrs. Lemmon glanced down with horror at her shoulder, where a dark stain spread.
“Go to dinner,” she said between clenched teeth. “Now.”
Marie-Rose and I hurried out of the room. Once we were safely down the corridor, I couldn’t help but smile.
“That was tres stupide!” Marie-Rose scolded. “Now she’ll have it in for you! Are you trying to get us both into trouble?”
“No, but I hate people like that. I can’t help it, okay?”
“You must try.” Marie-Rose’s blue eyes darkened. “The last thing I need is to be expelled from another school. Maman will cut me off completely if that happens.”
“Look, I wasn’t trying to get you in trouble. I’m really sorry,” I said, my smile fading. Marie-Rose’s situation wasn’t hard to believe, or unique. Steinfelder was the last stop for many of us before getting cut off or disowned. Honeybun hadn’t threatened me with anything like that so far, but I’m sure she wanted nothing more than to see that happen. Then she’d have my dad, and his fortune, all to herself.
“Is it so hard for you to endure these idiots for a short time longer? We are only a few weeks away from holiday break. That is the easiest time to try to convince your parents that you’ve changed, that you’d rather be with them,” Marie-Rose said. “Don’t you want to go home for good?”
My heart caught in my throat. “I don’t think they want me there.”
“But there is better than here, no?” Marie-Rose slipped a thin arm around my shoulders.
“Anywhere is better than here,” I said. “Well, most places anyway.”
“Just think, the sooner you go home, the sooner you can call Austin,” Marie-Rose said. “I know he is somewhere, waiting for you.”
“You know, I heard something at the window,” I said. “It startled me.”
“What does that have to do with Austin?”
“Maybe it’s him calling to me. You know, telepathically or something.”
Marie-Rose wrinkled her nose. “What?”
I remembered, although I talked about Austin quite a bit, Marie-Rose didn’t know Austin’s secret—that he wasn’t human. I was alone in wondering how far his powers extended. Could he really speak to me telepathically? He’d never done that before.
“It’s nothing. Just forget it, Marie-Rose,” I said.
“Uh-oh. I see some mischief in your eyes,” she said. “Please, whatever it is, you must forget it.”
“Yeah,” I heard myself say, but I didn’t mean it. Austin could be out there in the woods, calling out to me. We’d always met in the woods before, back at camp. It had been the safest place to meet up. Maybe I would take a look that night, when everyone was asleep. I just wouldn’t let myself get caught.
***
Moonlight filtered into our room that night, and since I had gone to sleep in my clothes, I only had to fumble around a little for my down jacket, boots, and flashlight. After what Marie-Rose had said about leaving her out of it, I didn’t want to wake her. I couldn’t take the chance that Madame would think that she had anything to do with my quest. I, on the other hand, had no choice but to go. A voice I suspected belonged to my long-lost werewolf boyfriend had called to me, and I had to find out if it was really him. I was pretty sure that was in the furry creature’s girlfriend handbook.
The door creaked a little as I inched it open, and with a sigh, Marie-Rose rolled to the other side of her bed. Quietly, I pulled the door closed behind me. The hall seemed longer than I thought. Paintings from Duke Steinfelder’s collection hung on the odd blank space of wall between each door, the faces of his weird relatives watching over all of us as we slept. I tiptoed down the corridor as best I could in my clunky boots.
At the end of the hall, a slice of light cut the darkness. My stomach fell a little as I noticed Mrs. Lemmon’s door was slightly ajar.
“Oh, no,” I heard her voice say. “I’m always up at this hour, Massimo.”
A man laughed.
Oh, gross. Did the old bat sneak a dude into her room? I stood quietly outside her room, waiting to see if it was safe to pass the open doorway.
“My dear Harriet,” th
e man said in a heavily accented voice. “Mi manchi, bellissima.”
Mrs. Lemmon let out a high-pitched giggle. “Me too, amore.”
I shuddered and peered around the corner of the door, forcing myself to take in the scene. Mrs. Lemmon, wearing a negligee and silky bathrobe, her gray hair loose from its usual bun, gazed longingly into a webcam. I could just see the edge of Massimo’s picture on her monitor, his bushy mustache quivering as he blew her a kiss.
Shaking off the mental image of Lemmon and her Internet boyfriend, I moved down the hallway. I could only hope that lovesick Lemmon was wrapped up enough to ignore my clomping and swishing. Snow clothes weren’t exactly made for prowling.
At the bottom of the stairwell, I paused in front of the picture of the Duke, Johanas Steinfelder, listening to the sounds of the chateau in general and for Mrs. Lemmon’s footsteps, in particular. Johanas stared down at me, an almost disappointed look on his regal face.
“What?” I whispered up at him. “You don’t approve?”
I left his portrait and moved into the hallway. Then I heard something. It was quiet at first, but it grew louder. Footsteps. Crunchy footsteps that sounded like boots on snow.
I swished and clomped as lightly as possible into the lobby, where there was a window looking out onto the front lawn. There was no movement, but the sounds had to have come from outside…
I paused at the front door, my curiosity and longing for Austin fighting against my good judgment. I mean, I didn’t actually know that Austin had sent me the note, or that his had been the voice I’d heard. It was highly likely I was just cracking under the pressure of Steinfelder. But if there was a chance it was him, then I wanted to find out. Still, I wondered why, if he had entered the school to leave the note, he wanted me trudging out in the snow to meet him? Then again, who knew why werewolves, or boyfriends, or werewolf boyfriends did anything they did.
At any rate, it was surprisingly easy to get outside. The massive door was unlocked. I figured that was to make us feel like we weren’t prisoners when we all knew otherwise.
When I stepped outside, the cold felt like a slap. I quickly zipped my jacket and pulled the hood up. I couldn’t hear the footsteps in the snow anymore, so I decided to head toward old stone wall where Marie-Rose had seen movement that afternoon. I kept to the edges of the school, though, away from the security lights. At the corner of the main building I stopped, huffing in the night air and listening. Maybe the voice would come again.
With my eyes closed, I tried to take in all the sounds. The heavy wind and snow had eased, and now I could hear the night birds talking to each other in the forest beyond our fence, which buzzed ever so slightly with its electric charge. I listened to the night, hearing things I’d never paid attention to before.
Clumps of snow fell from one of the building’s overhangs, hitting bushes below. I could hear the Dobermans scratching and whining in their kennel at the guardhouse. And then, there was a sudden screech and a thrashing of wings. Ducking, since it sounded so close, I opened my eyes in time to see an owl near the fence swoop to take a small rat in her talons and fly off into the poplars, her silhouette ghostly in the moonlight.
Filled with a new appreciation for the night, I hurried toward the old stone wall, losing the cover of the building for a moment. I didn’t feel any fear, just the heat of frustration building in my bones. I was risking a lot to come out here in the dark to chase nothing.
Just when I was ready to turn back, though, I noticed a light on in the old well house, about a hundred yards ahead, out of the sight line of the main entrance of the school and the guard station. In its window, a faint light flickered, reminding me of the glow of the small candles Austin used to draw by at brat camp.
I ran as fast as I could in my boots, the moon lighting my way in blue and silver on the snow. I slowed my roll near the door of the well house, breathing in puffs of air. Nervousness chewed at my insides. What would I say to Austin? I would have to confront him about the tabloid photo, of course, and then there was the whole matter of him not writing me all these months. I was going to need to be diplomatic.
Shakily, I reached out for the metal latch of the well house door and pushed it open. In the dim light, I saw the sad little room was nearly bare except for some old sandbags stacked near a makeshift table made from a barrelhead. But the sight of an open sketchbook and pens made me smile. Austin had been there. And I figured if he’d left the candles burning, then he couldn’t be far.
I shut the well house door and sat down on the sandbags to wait. Austin’s sketchbook was open to a portrait of me, done in his signature pen and ink style. I’d never seen this picture before. When I’d met Austin the summer before, his drawings had been of animals, mostly birds. A picture of a person was something new. I smiled, thinking that maybe he’d missed me enough to want to draw my portrait. That was something, at least.
I studied the picture closely, noting how the moon rose behind me in the background, its beams looking almost alive and casting long shadows on my face. He’d made me more beautiful than I knew myself to be. My normally crazy hair flowed out in perfect waves. He’d made my nose a little more delicate than it was.
Looking at the portrait, though, I started to get angry. If he’d thought enough of me to draw a picture, then why had he waited so long to come to see me at Steinfelder? I mean, I risked everything to break him out of Camp Crescent. And he couldn’t even drop me a postcard?
I was out in the snow a minute later, stomping my way back to the main building. But halfway there, I stopped and turned around. I really did need to wait for Austin. It was one thing to complain about him not showing up, but quite another to ditch him before he had a chance to explain. And I wanted to see him. That was the main reason.
I neared the end of the old stone wall and leaned a hand on it to steady myself. I needed to chill. The situation called for me to be rational and as normal as possible when we were together again. I forced myself to take some deep breaths of the clean, night air, and then I squatted down behind a too-small bush to watch for Austin.
As before, the sounds of the night echoed all around me. Scratching continued in the guardhouse kennels. The night birds, on watch for prey in the snow, rustled on branches. I thought of all those nights I’d spent looking out the window at the moon, never realizing the forest beyond Steinfelder was alive. Never realizing that if you just listened, you could hear everything. I let the symphony of the darkness wash over me. It was as comforting as lying in a bathtub, listening to the meditative drip of a faucet. I felt myself start to relax.
After a while, my patience was rewarded. I heard the crunch of footsteps as a figure moved across the snow toward the door of the well house. He was back! I rose up from my hiding place and started moving. Ahead of me, the figure ducked into the doorway. I ran across the snow, fueled by my eagerness for the reunion with Austin.
I threw open the door, opening my arms wide to capture him in a hug. “You’re here!”
“EEEEAEE!” the hooded figure in my arms squealed and squirmed out of my grasp.
I stepped back from a visibly angry Marie-Rose. “Sorry. I thought you were—”
“Mrs. Lemmon is up and about the dorm, peeking in rooms. Any minute she’s going to reach our room and we’ll be dead!” She shook a finger at me.
“How did you know I was in here?”
Marie-Rose’s cheeks colored. “Your boots were gone. And, the light was on in here, obviously.” She frowned down at the sketchbook on the barrelhead. “What is this?”
“Austin’s drawings. He must have been here earlier.”
Marie-Rose blew out the candles. “We’ve got to get back up to our room.”
“I want to take the book,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Do you want Lemmon to find it when she turns beds? She will ask questions.”
Marie-Rose had a point. I didn’t need Lemmon on my case any more than she was already. “Okay, fine,” I said, giving the
sketchbook a last, longing glance.
“Well, then? What are you waiting for?” My roommate led me out of the well house, closing the door behind us. “We need to get back up there now.”
“But what about Austin?”
Sometimes By Moonlight Page 2
