Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (13 page)

Fiona gave a grim nod, as though we’d both just agreed to something mutually unpleasant. “If we’re going to do this —I mean, actually do this, I need to lay a few things out for you. First, you need to understand that I’m not promising I can actually do anything with you. You’re raw. And I have no idea if you’ll improve with training, so it all may be for nothing. I can already see there’s a good deal I’ll have to unteach you, but you’ve got a good eye, I’ll give you that. And if I see you aren’t improving, I’m not going to keep wasting my time.”

“Okay.”

“Now as far as the psychic drawing, I can’t say for sure if you’re a Muse or not. One isolated incident doesn’t mean you’ve been gifted like that, so we’ll have to experiment and go from there. It’s not unusual for an Apprentice to have very varied forms of spirit communication before the gift settles into its regular patterns, and we may find that a spirit never uses you in such a capacity again. You have to be prepared for that, and if that’s the case, I’ll be shipping you off to another mentor, because I don’t have time to hold your hand and bond with you and talk about your feelings, or whatever other rubbish a mentor is supposed to do.”

“Okay,” I said again. What else could I say? She wasn’t really giving me a choice. “Alright then,” Fiona said. “Dogs, I’ve got my work cut out for me. We begin then.”

I spent the next hour in an interrogation scene from a detective film noir, minus the cloud of smoke and saxophone-heavy soundtrack. Fiona wanted to know every detail about every bit of art I’d ever done, but grew increasingly snappish with each question she asked. She grew impatient if I had to consider my answer, and bored if I gave what she considered to be an irrelevant piece of information. She yelled at me no less than ten times about things I had no control over, like which great paintings I’d seen or when I’d first started sketching. She actually threw a chair when I said I didn’t know how to mix paints, and rounded off the whole bizarre encounter by slumping into her chair, banging her forehead repeatedly on the desktop, and pointing wordlessly at the exit, by which I could only assume she was dismissing me. As I high-tailed it for the door, she shouted after me, “Next Monday, same time. Bring your sketchbook.”

As I closed the door behind me, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or sigh with relief. Clearly, my mentor was a complete lunatic. On the other hand, she was also a brilliant artist. If I could avoid being concussed by her penchant for throwing furniture, I might just learn something remarkable.

And then there was this Muse thing. Was it possible that it was true? Did I have some sort of additional ability? I didn’t like the idea of ghosts being able to use me like that; it seemed invasive, like being possessed or something. My drawing had always been my own private escape, something I had done purely for the joy of it. Was it possible that spirits were going to invade that last, secret corner of my life? Couldn’t I have this one, tiny portion of normalcy?

A cold, creeping sensation crawled its way up my spine and broke into my inner monologue. I stopped in my tracks and scanned the corridor around me. It seemed to be completely deserted.

“Hello?”

No one answered. The chill deepened, and I shivered violently.

“I know you’re there,” I said, turning on the spot and squinting into the shadows.

A dark place under a nearby tapestry suddenly rippled, as though the shadow itself was breathing.

I took a tentative step toward it. “Hello?”

A tiny, grubby hand materialized from the darkness. It was pointing at me.

I took a deep steadying breath and crouched down, trying to come to eye level with whatever it was that was looking at me. “Do you want to talk to me?”

The hand vanished, and for a moment I thought I’d scared it away. Then, with no warning, the very same spirit who had attacked me the day before shot out of the gloom and was hovering not an inch from my face.

I would have leapt back in fear if that same fear had not immobilized me where I stood. I swallowed hard and tried to keep the shaking out of my voice. “What do you want?”

She started yelling, her face screwed up with the effort of it, but not a syllable of it reached my ears.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I can’t hear you.”

Her mouth opened wide in a silent scream, and then, in frustration, she began to beat her fists upon the air, which remained solid and impenetrable between us.

I just stood there, helpless, watching her efforts to communicate drain her energy, so that she started blinking in and out of focus. Finally, with one last furious swipe, she gave up, exhausted, her thin shoulders heaving.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered again.

The little girl stared up into my face. As I watched her eyes fill up with spectral tears, I found that my own vision became clouded; that I was, in fact, sobbing. Before I could really even process this information, or do anything to control myself, she was flickering and fading into nothing but a strange, negative imprint behind my closed eyes. As she disappeared, so did whatever alien emotion that had seeped into me, and after a moment, the tears on my cheeks felt as out of place as though someone else had cried them. I brushed them away quickly with the back of my hand and tried to calm my ragged breathing.

“Hey!”

I looked up to find Finn Carey hurrying toward me. I swiped again at the tear tracks on my face. He came to a sudden halt a few feet from me, as though he’d met the boundary of another Sanctity Line hidden beneath the carpet.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” I tried to get up, but my knees couldn’t quite remember how to straighten.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me!” I snapped, struggling to find my bearings.

Finn hovered indecisively on the spot, staring at me as I tried awkwardly to get to my feet. He made a sound that might have been a sigh of frustration, and when he spoke his voice came out in a growl. “Do you need me to go get someone?”

I glared at him. “No. There was just this ghost and she… “

“A ghost? What ghost?” he asked. He shook his hair back out of his face and peered around, his expression skeptical.

“Forget it. I said I’m fine.”

He didn’t move. He just kept staring at me. I finally straightened up, though my knees were shaking.

“What is this, a spectator sport? The show’s over! Nothing to see here,” I said, swinging my bag over my shoulder.

He just scowled at me. Then he turned on his heel and stalked away, his hands shoved deeply into his pockets.

Awesome. I’d met this guy twice. The first time I tripped and fell right into him, and the second time I’d fallen to my knees, sobbing in the middle of the hallway. Nothing pissed me off more than coming across as the damsel in distress, especially to someone who clearly had not the slightest inclination to help me. Not to mention the fact that I’d barely been here two days and already I seemed to have a spectral stalker. I set off down the hallway, glancing this way and that for any sign of her. There were dozens of us in the same building; why was this little girl harassing me and, more importantly, what did she want?

“Well, look who it is,” said a sultry, smoky voice that I recognized, despite hearing it on only one other occasion.

I spun on the spot at the top of the stairs to see Lucida and Catriona on the landing below me. They were both as uncannily flawless and beautiful as I’d remembered them on the night they’d invaded my bedroom. I’d thought perhaps I’d exaggerated it in my mind, or that the moonlight and strangeness of that encounter may have created a false impression, but no. Here, with the afternoon sun streaming in through the stained-glass windows, their glamour was even more apparent.

“Well, you made it then, I see,” Catriona said. “I thought I saw you at the Welcoming Ceremony.”

“Yeah, we made it,” I said, stiffly. “I saw you there, too. Nice playing.”

Catriona rolled her eyes. “Thanks. They always make me do that.”

“Oh, come off it, Cat, you know you love to show off with that bloody fiddle,” Lucida said. “How would you know?” Catriona shot back. “You barely made it to the ceremony.”

Lucida grinned. “You got me there.” She turned back to me. “I’d have thought Marion and her mates would have driven you out by now. Going to make a go of it?”

“I don’t see that we have much of choice,” I said.

“Suppose not. And what about your sister? What kind of state did you find her in?” Lucida asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning at her.

“I mean after all the docs and shrinks had finished with her. Has she completely lost her marbles?”

Her avid gleeful expression sent fury pulsing through my body. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“Lay off, Lucida,” Catriona said, but she was pulling a hair absently from her sleeve as she said it, and it was obvious she didn’t really care.

“No need to get sore with me, Jessica. I’m the one that tracked her down in the first place,” Lucida said. “Haven’t I earned a few details? Come on now, just spill a bit. Was she drugged up? Restrained? Electro-shock?”

“Do me a favor,” I spat at her, “And don’t talk to me again. Ever.”

I stalked past them down the stairs.

“Ah, come on, don’t be like that, love!” Lucida called after me, and I could hear the barely-repressed laugh in her voice. “Can’t we be mates?”

“No,” I muttered under my breath. Behind me, as I turned the corner and caught a snatch of Catriona’s voice, saying something that sounded like “…such a bloody troublemaker.” I seethed about it all the way down to the dining room, where I found Hannah already seated at our corner table, knees up under her chin, buried in our Ceremonial Basics textbook. I took a moment to compose myself, then grabbed a plate, loaded it up, and joined her. I’d been too nervous to eat much at breakfast, and it was only as I bit into a sandwich that I realized how hungry I was.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

She looked up and smiled. “It was fine. Siobhán is very nice.”

“Great! What did you talk about?”

Hannah placed a scrap of paper into the book to mark her place and carefully closed it again. “She asked me a lot about how I was feeling, and I told her. That part was a bit like seeing one of my therapists, but better, because I didn’t feel like she was trying to find something wrong with me.”

I nodded in sympathy. After my one and only foray into therapy, I’d gladly have watched all psychiatrists jump off a cliff — while holding hands and talking all about their feelings, obviously.

“She asked me questions about when I first started seeing ghosts, and what that has all been like for me. She’s not at all like that other woman, Marion. She knew Elizabeth when she was here.”

I was pulled up short. “Elizabeth?”

“Yeah. You know…our mother,” Hannah said, squirming uncomfortably at the label.

“I know who you meant. It was just weird to hear you call her that.”

“I don’t usually call her anything,” Hannah said, in barely more than a whisper. Then she shrugged and went on. “Anyway, Siobhán wants to help me adjust to being here, and wants me to talk to her if I need help or advice.”

“I’m really glad, Hannah,” I said, just as Mackie slid into the seat beside me.

“How’s it going, alright?” she asked us.

“Hannah’s meeting was fine. Mine was bizarre.”

“Why? What happened?” Hannah asked.

I rounded on Mackie. “I think you left out a minor detail about Fiona.”

Mackie tried to look innocent, but couldn’t quite manage it. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about the fact that she’s completely —”

“Off her nut? Mad as a hatter?” Mackie suggested.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“I was kind of surprised they assigned you to her. They don’t send many Apprentices her way.”

“I can see why,” I said, and told them all about the meeting.

“So that’s the end of that then, eh? She chucked you out?”

“Actually, I go back again on Monday,” I said.

“You’re actually going to go back?” Hannah asked. “But she … she threw a chair at you!”

“Well, not exactly
at
me,” I hedged. “It was more in my general direction.”

Mackie looked impressed. “Wow, I’ve never known anyone who’s been back for seconds with Fiona. Good on ya.”

“Thanks,” I said, starting to rethink my whole decision-making process and wondering if I’d do better to just ask for a new mentor.

We finished our lunch and walked over to History and Lore of the Durupinen, which was held in Celeste’s bright and airy first-floor classroom. It was the only other class we shared with the Caomhnóir, who were already seated silently on their side of the Sanctity Line when we came in. Celeste was a passionate lecturer, and although all we received on the first day was an introductory speech, I had to grudgingly admit that the class would be fascinating. As reluctantly as I’d come here, I couldn’t deny that I was interested to know what I could about my family’s culture, even if that culture was creepier and more clandestine than most.

By this point in the day, Peyton and her crew had apparently decided to pretend we didn’t exist, which suited me just fine. The same was true for Finn Carey and the rest of the Caomhnóir, who tended to ignore us in general anyway. The most exciting thing to happen the entire class was Savannah strolling in ten minutes late, reeking of cigarettes and claiming that she’d gotten lost, though the classroom was only a few yards from the entrance hall. Celeste restrained from shouting at her with extreme difficulty.