by Blair Drake
He pinched himself, wondering if he was once again in a dream. “Ouch.” He should have learned from the last time.
He hesitated before grabbing the handle of the academy door. He didn’t want to visit other realms any time soon. He sucked in a deep breath and pulled the door open wide.
The halls were full of students, rushing to their next class, or maybe to lunch. He wondered how long he was gone and if anyone missed him. Had the headmaster called his parents?
Speaking of the headmaster, should he go back to his office? Should he let Hettie know he was back? Had she even noticed he was missing? She had to know he was thrown from the roof. She was there...but so was Headmaster Auster. He decided they could come looking for him. He didn’t feel like explaining himself or what just happened to him. He joined the other students, but instead of heading to a classroom, he made a beeline to his dorm.
He was tired, and a bit freaked out. He didn’t have a chance to talk to Henry, Woli, or even Strix about what happened, or to find out how the royal family was doing. He heard they were defeating the darkness, and they must have won the battle, or Henry and Strix wouldn’t have been at the café. But he wanted to know more about why he was dropped in Craydusk. He was dropped there, right? No way was all of that craziness a dream. His body and mind were exhausted, so he knew what he experienced was real. Right?
He’d been through so much, and he wasn’t even sure what was real and what wasn’t. Did the underground even exist? Or was it all in his head?
He pulled his lanyard from under his shirt and used the key hanging from it to unlock his dorm room door.
When he opened the door, he saw the room was dark, but by the light of the hallway, he could see Rex still curled up in bed. He didn’t even stir.
Dylan closed the door slowly so it didn’t wake Rex. He wasn’t in the mood to talk. He needed to get his head straight first. Apparently, Rex hadn’t missed him, and he’d slept well, having the room to himself.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and placed it on his desk. When he looked at the time and date on the lock screen, he saw only a matter of minutes passed since he looked at it on the way to the headmaster’s office days ago. He rubbed his eyes then looked again. Another minute passed, so the phone was working.
Then he remembered his talisman and grimoire. He reached into his right pocket and felt the talisman’s warmth. It vibrated when he touched it. So, Hettie gave him the pin when they were all on the roof. That much was real.
With his left hand, he felt for the book. He couldn’t feel it. Reaching deep in his pants pocket, he felt a small square tucked at the bottom. He pinched it with his thumb and forefinger and slowly pulled it out. As soon as the small square was in his hand, it expanded and opened. The letters floated onto the page. “Welcome home.”
Dylan closed the book, and it shrunk again. He walked over to his bed and put the book under his pillow. Then he climbed on top of the covers, fully clothed, and with one hand under his pillow touching the grimoire, he fell asleep.
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The Finding Magic Series
Melissa's Quest: http://littl.ink/+YBlO
Reese's Quest: http://littl.ink/+A3Mr
Jaspers's Quest: http://littl.ink/+oBl7
Elijah's Quest: http://littl.ink/+n7Ee
Dylan's Quest: http://littl.ink/+DxN6
Natasha's Quest: http://littl.ink/+vxo0
Piper's Quest: http://littl.ink/+9KM8
Rebecca’s Quest: http://littl.ink/+5AMR
Alex's Quest: http://littl.ink/+eK9l
Annalise's Quest: http://littl.ink/+PzvB
Sneak Peek at Natasha’s Quest…
Owww.
Tash lifted her head and gazed around. She was propped up on her hands and knees like a baby learning to crawl, planted in the middle of a dirt road. She had landed hard. Her knee throbbed.
Where was she?
More dirt road stretched ahead of her, rutted gray and brown. On one side of the road was a field filled with weeds and wildflowers, bordered by dense forest. On the other side was more forest—thick, towering pines, streaks of white birch, a crazy tangle of undergrowth lining the road. She recognized ferns, ragged daisies, and poison ivy sprouting through a carpet of rust-colored pine needles. She might have the wind knocked out of her, but she knew enough not to mess with poison ivy. A painful rash would spoil the soccer season, plus she wouldn’t be able to get close to Kyle. Poison ivy was contagious, wasn’t it?
Why was she wasting time worrying about poison ivy when she had no idea where she was or how she got here? One minute she was standing in her dorm room, her backpack slung over one shoulder and her phone in her other hand while she texted Kyle about their plan to study for the calculus final together. The next minute Headmistress Lalane was ordering Tash to put her phone away and herding her, along with a bunch of other kids, first to Headmaster Auster’s office, where they’d stood around, confused, while the office got darker and colder, and then they’d been taken up to the roof. And the minute after that…
The minute after that, Tash opened her eyes to find herself crawling down a dirt road, with pebbles embedded in the palms of her hands and her right knee bruised and bleeding.
This was really weird.
She shifted to sit, swinging her leg around carefully because it hurt. After plucking the grit out of her hands, she flexed her fingers to make sure they still worked, then checked her knee. The skirt of her uniform was dirty. The flesh around her kneecap—her patella; she’d knocked herself memorizing the proper names of the bones in the human skeleton in honors biology last year—looked like a puffy pink sponge. The skin was scraped raw. Trickles of blood skittered down her shin.
She groped for her backpack and discovered it missing. Great. No tissues. More important, no phone. No wallet. No money. No anything.
Where the hell was she?
What the hell happened?
She was in major trouble. Leaving campus without permission was a serious breach. She’d probably be dragged before the disciplinary board, and they’d contact her parents, and God knew what would happen next. Loss of senior privileges? Expulsion just weeks before graduation? Serious shit from Mom and Dad?
Would they go light on the punishment if she explained she hadn’t done anything wrong? She was minding her own business, texting back and forth with Kyle about studying for the calc final, when Lalane poked her head through the open door to Tash’s dorm room and ordered her to come. Tash obeyed. Surely the school would cut her a little slack.
Especially since she had no idea how she’d even gotten here—wherever here was.
Her dorm. Auster’s office. The roof. She recalled the other kids—nine of them—murmuring among themselves as Lalane hustled them up the stairs to the roof. She recalled Lalane dropping something into the pocket of her blazer. She recalled the roof. The air was chilly, the sky surprisingly dark, clouds as dark as soot obliterating the morning s
unlight.
She reached into the pocket of her blazer and pulled out a pin. Round, sort of gold, it didn’t look like much. Why had the headmistress stuck it in Tash’s pocket? Was Tash supposed to pin it to her blazer?
She did now, fastening it to a lapel. Who knew why Lalane gave her the pin? Some of the students were kind of pals with the headmistress, but Tash always maintained her distance from the administrators. She was a scholarship student. She didn’t want to run the risk of antagonizing the folks in charge—or to seem like she was kissing up to them.
She returned her attention to her knee, using her thumb to wipe the rivulets of blood leaking out of her torn skin. Now her thumb was bloody, too. Wonderful. She supposed she could use the tail of her shirt to mop up the mess, but then her shirt would be stained, and she’d get in trouble for that.
Above her, the sky was a crisp, vivid blue marbled with rippling white clouds. One minute she was breathing the aroma of the travel-mug of coffee she filled in the dining hall during breakfast and brought back to her room, and the next she was breathing a dry, piney fragrance. No hint of the musty scent hanging in the corridors of the old school buildings, or the stale smell of the locker room adjacent to the soccer field, or the cool, lightly scented breezes drifting across campus. Was she even still on the campus? She’d never seen this field before, or these woods.
She forced herself to stand. Her knee ached, but her leg didn’t buckle. No broken bones, she decided. Correction: no broken patella, femur, tibia, or fibula. If she was going to do pre-med next year, a notion she was considering at the moment, she ought to practice using the correct terminology.
She bent over and tried to rub the blood from her sticky thumb on a patch of grass. That didn’t work too well, but a little saliva helped, and she got most of the blood off. Then she straightened up and started down the road. Maybe her backpack dropped somewhere along the way. She’d be royally screwed if she couldn’t find it. It contained not only her phone and wallet but a few textbooks. If she lost them, she’d have to pay to replace them, and she wasn’t exactly rolling in money.
Replacing her textbooks would be cheap compared to replacing her phone. When her parents gave it to her last Christmas, they went on and on about how much it cost, which kind of spoiled the whole Christmas thing. You weren’t supposed to mention the price of presents at Christmas. You weren’t supposed to make a person feel guilty about the gift you were giving them. You were just supposed to give it and say, “Merry Christmas.”
She hobbled along, scanning left and right in search of her backpack. If it slid off her shoulder somewhere in the field, she would spot it easily, but it could have landed in the woods. She hoped she wouldn’t have to traipse through poison ivy to retrieve it.
Like that was going to happen. How could she think logically when this was so illogical? She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here. She didn’t know why she was here.
She ought to be scared—except she didn’t do scared. Scared was for wusses. Tash was the girl who killed the spiders venturing into the third-floor bathroom in her dorm. She was the girl who argued with Mr. Pritchard, the meanest history teacher in the school, when he insisted on popping surprise quizzes or grading essays on a curve. She was the girl who stood up to that bitch Susie Martland two years ago, when she was picking on Mary Ann Leominster, who obviously had Asperger’s, even if she wasn’t officially diagnosed. Mary Ann was hard-wired and weird, everyone knew it, but that was no reason for Susie to give her a hard time.
Tash noticed a movement in the woods. Not her backpack, which didn’t move, at least not on its own. A shadow weaving through the trees, meandering toward the clearing. An animal? A dangerous beast? Not that Tash was afraid, but were there wolves on the island?
The shadow drew closer, and Tash noticed a flutter of pale gray, and then a crescent of white. She halted, which actually made her knee hurt a little more, and watched as the figure moved through the forest toward the clearing.
It was a girl, dressed in a shapeless gray dress with long sleeves and a full skirt falling to her feet, which were shod in dusty black flat-heeled shoes. A sagging drawstring bag hung from a belt around her waist, and a strange white cap fit snugly over her head. Her hair was tucked up under it, but a few pale strands leaked out and drizzled down around her round, open face. Freckles dappled her tiny nose. Her mouth shaped a perfect O as she gaped at Tash.
Tash gaped back. If this girl was a student at Gray Cliffs Academy, Tash had never seen her before. It wasn’t as if she knew all the younger students, but the school wasn’t that big. And if she ever heard about some eccentric freshman who dressed like a stowaway on the Mayflower, she would remember.
To her surprise, the girl broke into a smile as she stepped into the clearing. “Greetings, wayfarer!” she called to Tash.
Wayfarer? The girl’s speech was as bizarre as her outfit. But Tash was raised not to be rude. Besides, this girl might know where Tash’s backpack was. Maybe that drawstring bag was her own backpack, although its contents seemed lumpy. No textbooks or cell phone in there, as far as Tash could tell.
“Hello,” she said.
“We see so very few strangers here,” the girl said. “And rarely in such unusual costume. Are you not wearing stockings?”
“Um…no.” If Tash was wearing stockings, they would have been shredded when she landed on her knees on the road.
Anyway, Tash wasn’t the one wearing the unusual costume. She scrutinized the girl’s dowdy gray dress. Apparently, there were outfits even more unflattering than the school uniform—A-line skirt, tailored white blouse and blazer—she herself had on. For a moment, she wondered if this was some sort of hazing ritual some upperclassmen imposed on the first-years, forcing a newbie to dress in ridiculous old-fashioned clothing and wander through the woods. Hazing was against the rules at Gray Cliffs Academy, but rules were made to be broken.
“Pray tell, where do you come from?” the girl asked.
Something fresh and innocent in her face convinced Tash the girl wasn’t here under duress. Crazy though it seemed, she looked as if she actually belonged on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
And she’d said, “Pray tell.” Who said “Pray tell”?
“I came from Gray Cliffs Academy,” Tash said.
The girl frowned. “A school? But you are a girl.”
As if girls didn’t go to school. “Okay, look,” Tash said, planting her hands on her hips and drawing herself up to her full height, a few inches taller than the girl. “I have to get back to campus, and I don’t know where my backpack is. Have you seen it?”
“Your backpack? What is this backpack of which you speak?”
If this was, in fact, a hazing gag, the girl was overdoing it. “Come on. My backpack. It has my phone in it, and if I lose my phone, I’ll be in deep shit.”
The girl blinked, her face radiating confusion. “What is this thing you call a phone?”
Maybe they were being watched. Maybe the girl had to play her part to the hilt or her classmates would give her a hard time. If so, the best thing Tash could do was go along with it, pretend she was in on the joke, and bail the kid out so she wouldn’t get trashed by her friends. “Phone,” she said. “Comes from the Greek word for ‘voice.’”
“Greek,” the girl said, her face brightening. “I know about Greeks. They told glorious myths. A man sailed around the sea, trying to get home to his wife after a great war.”
“You’ve read The Odyssey?” Progress, Tash thought. As much as the girl was into cosplay, at least she demonstrated a basic knowledge of Gray Cliffs Academy’s curriculum.
“I have not,” the girl said, “although I should like to someday. Goody Cooke taught me the rudiments of reading, but I am not yet able to read so fine a book. She has read it to me, though.”
“Goody Cooke?” Tash tried to recall if any of the cooks in the dining hall were nicknamed “Goody.”
“Come,” the girl
said. “I shall take you to her. Perhaps she will read it to you, too, although it is a very long book.”
Tash didn’t need anyone, let alone a kitchen staffer, to read The Odyssey to her. She read it in lit class two years ago, and wrote an essay about it her teacher declared “well done,” as if it were a sirloin steak.
However, if this Goody person was indeed on the staff, she might be able to help Tash get back to school. If only Tash could locate her backpack first…but that didn’t seem to be happening right now.
She fell into step next to the girl, trying to keep up. She was one of the fastest runners on the soccer team, but her knee was stiffening, her scrapes clotting into painful purple scabs. The girl was so light on her feet, Tash felt like an elephant lumbering along beside her.
They covered just a few yards when the girl noticed Tash was limping. She halted, peered down at Tash’s damaged knee, and gasped. “You are injured!”
“It’s just a scrape.”
“Goody Cooke will tend your wound. She is most masterful at the healing arts. Pray tell me about your garb. I have never seen its like before.”
The girl’s language was silly, and actually kind of annoying. How long would they have to play this game before she snapped out of it and started talking like a normal person? “It’s the school uniform,” Tash said.
“You wear a uniform at this school?” The girl trilled a laugh, as light as bubbles floating in the air. “I thought only soldiers wore uniforms. I should like to wear a uniform too, if it would allow me to go to this school you have spoken of.”
Why the girl wasn’t in school, Tash couldn’t begin to guess. Still, she saw no better option than to continue playing along. “Athletes wear uniforms, too,” she said, thinking of her dirty soccer uniform sitting on the floor of her closet in her dorm room. She planned to run a load of laundry later that day, but if she didn’t get back to school soon, she wouldn’t be able to. Thinking about how gross the sweaty uniform would be by the time she got back to campus made her shudder.
