Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (15 page)

“Tia, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything, Jess, you know that,” Tia said.

“I need you to help me find out where Pierce is. I know that you don’t really know him, but I just…I have a bad feeling about this. I need to know why he’s suddenly dropped off the grid. It might be nothing, but I’m going to worry about it until I know. I’d do it myself, but I’m stuck here, so my options are limited.”

Tia bit her lip, but nodded. “Okay. I’ll look into it. I’m sure Sam will help me, if I ask him.”

I grinned. “Aww, sleuthing dates. How romantic!”

Tia rolled her eyes. “Yes, nothing says romance like stalking a missing person.” She caught the look on my face and backtracked at once. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure he’s not missing, Jess. There’s bound to be a perfectly logical explanation for him being gone. We’ll figure it out.”

“Thanks, Tia, you’re the best,” I said, that nervous flutter in my stomach calming slightly. “I’m lucky to have my own personal Sherlock Holmes for a best friend.”

“Elementary, my dear Ballard,” Tia said, in a pathetic impersonation of a British accent.

We chatted a little while longer, mostly about what was going on with Tia, since my life was now classified information, and said goodbye, Tia promising to get in touch again as soon as she had some information on Pierce. I knew she would find out what was going on, and in some ways that made me feel better. In other ways, it made me terrified about what she might uncover. In the meantime, determined to do what I could, I drafted a casual email to Pierce, asking him how he was and what he was up to. I kept the tone light and joking, just in case I was overreacting. Then I hit send and tried not to spend every waking minute of the rest of the night checking to see if he’d responded yet.

NO RESPONSE FROM PIERCE WAS WAITING FOR ME the next morning when I rushed to my computer, my heart leaping at each unread message only to discover it was spam. I tried to tell myself that I was being paranoid—if he was really on sabbatical, he could be anywhere in the world, probably holed up in some ancient haunted ruin in the middle of the Peruvian jungle somewhere. Twelve hours without a reply was hardly a reason to call out the National Guard —or, in this case, Scotland Yard. I resisted the urge to lug the computer around with me all day and forced my brain to concentrate on everything Fairhaven Hall still had to throw at me. It was pretty easy to get distracted.

Our first class Tuesday morning was Introduction to Ancient Celtic Languages, which Mackie explained was necessary for understanding and pronouncing all of the different instructions and “castings” we had to perform as a part of our duties. Indeed, every page of the Book of Téigh Anonn was crammed with words I could neither comprehend nor pronounce.

“You are here at Fairhaven Hall because each of your clans hails from somewhere in the British Isles,” our instructor Agnes explained. “The castings and incantations you must learn have been passed down to you in the ancient languages of your ancestors. We will be dealing primarily in Gaelic for the purposes of pronunciation, but you will find an antiquated mixture of old Celtic languages have survived in the words you must learn in order to perform your duties. This includes elements of Irish and Scottish Gaelic as well as the various branches of Common Brittonic, both living and dead languages.”

“You know, they’re real fond of saying that none of this is magic, but they use a fair few magic words, don’t they?” Savvy muttered to me across the aisle. “I mean, ‘castings?’ ‘Incantations?’ Sounds like some bloody hocus pocus to me.”

“You’ve got a valid point,” I told her.

I didn’t understand another word Agnes said for the rest of the class. In the interest of total immersion, she began speaking in an ancient form of Irish Gaelic, pointing to items in the room and encouraging us to repeat after her. I couldn’t force my mouth to make the right sounds; I’d never heard a language like it, full of odd clusters of consonants and strange cadences, so that the language felt as foreign as though it were from a different planet rather than a different country. We all struggled through with the exception of Peyton and one or two others who, in their Durupinen upbringing, had obviously been exposed to the language. It was only with extreme difficulty that I restrained myself from rolling my eyes when Peyton made a point of raising her hand several times so that she could show off her pronunciation with long and complicated sentences. By the time the bells began their clanging, my head felt like it was clanging also.

“Our next class isn’t until after lunch,” I said with a sigh of relief as Hannah and I left Agnes’ classroom. “Do you want to want to go take a walk or something?”

“Sure,” she said. “The sun is out for a change.”

Our first few days at Fairhaven had been cloudier and damper than we were used to, although the heat hung low and heavy like a wet, smothering blanket just like the humidity could do back home. But today was blessedly bright, and as we ambled along the cloisters on the north side of the castle, I thought I could gladly have made this weather last forever. The breeze that snatched at our hair and lifted it playfully around our faces was cool and fragrant. We dropped into the shade of a small but gnarled old tree covered in dangling, knobbly green fruit.

“Where’s Milo?” I asked.

“Oh, still exploring. He’s determined to make some dead friends to keep him entertained while we’re in class,” Hannah said. “He hasn’t had much luck so far.”

“What, no wisecracking, Vogue-reading ghosts wandering the halls of Fairhaven?”

“He’ll be lucky if he can track down a ghost that’s even heard of Vogue, let alone read it. Most of the spirits here have been dead for hundreds of years.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the sunshine. I pulled out my sketchbook, flipped it open, and started adding some detail to a recent drawing of the castle. The sun created a whole new world of shadows to play with.

I glanced up at Hannah. She was tracing a finger absentmindedly over the scars on her wrist, little dermal reminders of the ways she used to cope with the overwhelming reality of being herself.

“So, three classes down and one left to go. What do you think so far?” I asked her, lowering my eyes again so that she wouldn’t know I’d seen what she was doing.

“I think we have a lot to learn,” she said slowly, “but I’m really interested in learning it. All of this ghost stuff never felt like it had any rhyme or reason to it. It just sort of happened, and I had to deal with it when it did. It’s nice to know that there are actually guidelines.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It creates the illusion of control, doesn’t it?”

She smiled gently. “Exactly. But honestly, it does seem fascinating—all that clan history over hundreds of years, all recorded and documented. It’s like the most interesting genealogy ever.”

“Definitely more interesting than finding out your ancestors were sheepshearers or something.”

“I used to imagine all kinds of crazy family histories,” she said, pulling up little blades of grass and shredding them with the tips of her fingers, “to explain away what was happening to me. I didn’t know anything about my biological family, so it was easy to convince myself that there was a logical, genetic explanation for things. For about two years, starting when I was five, I told everyone that I came from a long line of serial killers, and the ghosts of all our past victims were haunting me, looking for revenge.” She giggled at the horrified look on my face. “I know, right? What a morbid little kid.”

“Well, you were surrounded by dead people,” I said, trying to keep the tone light to mask the sad little hollow her words had dug into the pit of my stomach, as they so often did. “Being morbid was probably a foregone conclusion.”

“I remember I used to watch their faces when I told them, waiting for the fear to appear. I always felt so satisfied when I saw it. I would think, ‘There. See? Now I’m not the only one who’s scared.’ It was just the macabre little way I invented to make myself feel better. Misery loves company, right? No wonder they institutionalized me.”

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Hannah’s smile faded.

“That wasn’t me trying to spread the misery again. Sorry. You must think I’m so fucked up.”

It was such a shock to hear her swear that I couldn’t keep my own mouth shut. Maybe I just couldn’t stand to see her sitting there all alone under a thundercloud that dark. “When I was ten, we were driving from Houston to Albuquerque,” I said. “Mom pulled off the interstate and left me in the car while she ‘ran in’ to a bar for a quick drink. Three hours later I woke up and had to drag her out of the place. I managed to get her into the passenger seat and then I drove. I drove the car the whole rest of the way to Albuquerque. I don’t even know how I knew how to drive; I must have just absorbed the information because we spent so much damn time driving to the next place we were going to live. Around two in the morning, I hit an animal — I think it was a coyote or something. I saw it dart out into the road and turn to look at me with glowing eyes before that awful thump. I was too scared to stop and see if it was alive, so I just kept going, sobbing my eyes out over the death of some random desert animal. I pulled over to the side of the road just as the sun came up. When Mom woke up, I told her she’d driven the whole way herself. She was too terrified to admit that she didn’t remember it, and even more terrified when she saw the blood on the front of the car. I just watched her staring at it, and I could have told her what had happened, or even just assured her that she hadn’t hit a hitchhiker, but I didn’t. I guess I just wanted her to be scared for a while, too.”

I chanced a glance up from my own hands. Hannah was staring at me, her face hovering somewhere on the border of an incredulous smile.

“Just thought you’d like to know that you haven’t cornered the market on fucked up. Although the two of us together might have.”

She started to laugh. Before I realized what I was doing, I had joined in. Before long we were both in hysterics, tears rolling down our cheeks, clutching our stomachs and begging each other to stop. It was equal parts cathartic and euphoric until we lapsed into silence.

“If you ever do want to know more about her,” I said, “just let me know. I can tell you a lot about her —what she was like, and all of that. Just so you could start to get to know her a little bit.”

Hannah didn’t answer at first. I felt the last warmth left behind by the laughter ebb away. “I don’t think I want to get to know her. Not right now, anyway. I’m still just so…I just don’t think I want to.”

“That’s fine. It’s up to you, I just thought I’d offer.”

“Thanks, Jess,” Hannah said, “but you can’t answer the questions I really want the answers to, so the rest of it just seems…unimportant.”

“Okay. Well, the offer stands.” I tried to shrug it off, but a little voice inside me wanted to tell her that nothing about our mother was unimportant. She was a person worth knowing, as screwed-up and troubled as she was. Between the binges and the evictions and the frantic cross-country moves, there was laughter and spontaneity and music. Then I wondered if knowing those things might only make it worse.

I looked back at my sketch, then at the castle profile. A cloud had swept swiftly in while we talked, and the shadows I’d been hoping to incorporate had faded to nothing. With a sigh, I thumbed through the pages, looking for another sketch to work on.

“Who is that over there?” Hannah asked suddenly, her voice still not quite steady.

I followed her gaze. At first I could not understand who she was talking about, but then a tiny movement, lower to the ground than I’d expected, caught my eye. At the edge of a nearby copse of trees, a small figure peered out from behind a trunk. I recognized her at once.

“Hey, that’s her! It’s that little girl again!” I said.

“What little girl?”

“The one who sort of attacked me on the first day.”

“That’s her?” Hannah asked, squinting into the trees. The bright sunlight, while brightening everything else, seemed to make the girl dimmer, more difficult to see.

“Yeah! I saw her yesterday, too, in the hallway after I met with Fiona.”

“You saw her again? You never told me that.”

“I forgot. Fiona sort of made the rest of my day dull by comparison.” Hannah rose up onto her haunches to get a better look. “She didn’t attack you again, did she?”

“No, no, not like the first time. But she did really want to talk to me,” I said. I waved tentatively at the girl. She did not wave back.

“I wonder why she’s so shy all of a sudden,” Hannah said. “She had no problem asserting herself before.”

“I don’t know.” I gestured for her to come nearer. She shook her head, but continued to stare at me.

Hannah shivered and took out our new textbook. “She gives me the creeps.”

I looked at her in surprise. “Really? I’d have thought you’d seen plenty of creepier things than her.”

“I’d have thought so, too,” Hannah said. “It’s not how she looks, it’s just…something about her.”

I found a fresh page in my sketchpad and began to draw the girl. If she knew what I was doing, she raised no objections. In fact, she stood so motionless that she might have been posing for me.

“There’s definitely something wrong with her,” I said.