Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

“I have no idea who it was, it just came on me. It isn’t necessarily the way they died, no,” Fiona said, coming to stand behind me and stare down at the drawing. “Sometimes it takes several encounters or drawings for the meaning to become clear. Sometimes the meaning never becomes clear.”

It was as though she flicked a switch in my head. “Is it possible this ghost is trying to communicate with more than one person?” I asked.

“Of course,” Fiona said vaguely, still poring over the image on the floor. “Why?”

“Because I’ve got something to show you,” I said, and I rose to retrieve my bag that I’d dropped unceremoniously in the doorway. I fished out my sketchbook, found the image I wanted, and thrust it under her nose.

It was the drawing I’d done of the little girl who’d been following me, the one with the wall of flames leaping around her. Fiona’s sharp, dark eyes darted over the page. It took her a moment to absorb what she was seeing, then she snatched it from my hands.

“When did you do this?” she asked.

“A little over two weeks ago.”

Fiona rounded on me ferociously. “You had a psychic drawing experience two weeks ago, and you never told me? Why the hell are we even bothering with this mentor bollocks if it takes you two weeks to show me something like this?”

“I didn’t think it was a psychic drawing, not at the time, anyway. I was drawing the little girl from a clear visual —she was standing at the edge of the forest bordering the north garden. But then I realized that the forest I thought I’d been drawing was actually…” I gestured to the sketch again.

“The ninth circle of hell?” Fiona suggested.

“Something like that, yeah,” I said.

“Hmm, fascinating,” Fiona said, wandering across the room, face still buried in the picture. “Have you got any idea who she is?”

My heart sank. “No. I was hoping you might. She follows me all over the school.”

“Hang on,” Fiona said slowly, and placed the sketch pad down on her desk, from which she produce a magnifying glass with surprising ease. “That’s the Silent Child, isn’t it?” My pulse quickened with excitement. “Who’s the Silent Child?”

“She’s one of the resident ghosts,” Fiona said, still gazing at her through the magnifying glass. “Been here for centuries.”

“Why is she called the Silent Child?” I asked.

“She’s never spoken a word to anyone. Never even tried to, as far as I know. That’s where the nickname comes from, I expect.”

“But do you know anything about who she was in life?”

“No one really does,” Fiona said. “She’s always kept to the shadows.

She hides from anyone who tries to get near her. You say she’s been following you around?”

“Yes! And trying to communicate with me, but she doesn’t seem able to.”

“Probably lost the ability to communicate,” Fiona said. “That can happen, you know. Their energy can weaken over time, and she’s been here quite a spell.”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem weak to me,” I said, remembering how she barreled me over with the sheer force of her being.

“I wonder what’s suddenly drawn her to you, after so many years of silence?” Fiona asked, looking at me with a budding interest, as though she’d only just noticed I was there.

“I’m sure she would tell me, if she could,” I said.

“And you say the flames were unintentional?”

“Yes,” I said. “I thought I’d drawn the forest behind her. I didn’t even recognize that I’d drawn the flames until Hannah looked over and pointed it out to me. I was so intent on her face that I didn’t concentrate on anything else very much.”

“Fascinating,” Fiona said again, tracing a finger along the tips of the leaping flames. “Quite fascinating. Well, what you describe is common to the psychic drawing experience, so I suppose first I ought to say congratulations. I think we can safely say that you are indeed a Muse.”

This lifted me out of my brooding contemplation. “Really?”

“Oh yes, I think so,” Fiona said. “Which means that we are definitely stuck with each other for the rest of your time here.”

I don’t know what my expression betrayed of my thoughts about this, but Fiona seemed amused by it. She certainly smiled for the first time since I’d arrived. “We will have to spend our time exploring this aspect of your artistic penchants for now, and get back to the basics later, however badly you may need them.”

“You mean no more fruit?” I asked.

“No more fruit.”

“Hallelujah.”

§

“I don’t know what the problem is,” Hannah said, as we climbed into bed that night. “Lucida was really nice to me.”

“As long as she keeps being nice to you, then I guess there isn’t a problem,” I said.

“But why do you hate her so much?” Hannah persisted. “She was the one who tracked me down and told you where I was.”

“I know that,” I said. “And for that reason, I guess I’ll always owe her. But you don’t understand what she was like when I met her. Karen and I were both so upset and she just seemed to…enjoy it a little too much.”

“Why would she do that?

“I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything?” I said, my voice rising. “She just rubs me the wrong way, okay? I know that she’s your mentor now, but that doesn’t mean I have to like her, does it?”

“I guess not,” Hannah said, and her voice sounded tiny, hurt.

I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to…I want you to be happy that she’s your mentor. If she’s being nice to you now, that’s all I really care about. As long as she’s helping you, the rest doesn’t matter.”

We lay for several minutes in the dark. I thought she must have fallen asleep.

“How was your mentor session?”

“It was…fine,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Fiona didn’t throw anything at me, so I guess that’s progress. And she didn’t crumple up my drawing this week.”

“That’s great,” Hannah said. “See? Maybe both of our mentors will turn out better than you expected.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell Hannah about the psychic drawing and Fiona’s trance. Maybe I didn’t want to scare her. Maybe I needed a little more time to process it myself before I was ready to share it with anyone else. Whatever it was, I promised myself that I would only give it until the next day to work its way out of my system. Not telling her felt like lying, and the last thing I wanted to do was widen the space between us, even by the width of a lie.

I rolled over and dozed off within minutes. When I awoke abruptly, several hours later, I was sure that my tangled web of thoughts had spawned a terrible nightmare.

But it wasn’t that at all.

The hands that grabbed my arms and forced them behind my back were real. So was the fabric stuffed roughly into my mouth. And before I could make out more than a mass of dark, moving shapes, a bag descended over my head and everything was darkness.

FOR A MOMENT, I WAS A FLAILING MESS OF SHEER ANIMAL PANIC. Then, my brain seemed to switch into a detached state, and started trying to identify details that would help me figure out what the hell was going on.

The hands that were binding my wrists together were small and soft. Long hair was brushing against my leg. Several voices were hissing sharply to each other; they were definitely female voices. Young female voices.

“You’re tying it too tight!” one of them muttered.

“No, I’m not!” snapped another, and I felt a sharp tug on the fabric now twisted around my wrists. “We don’t want her to get out of them, do we?”

The one nearest my face was laughing and breathing cheap wine on me. I would know that smell anywhere; I associated it with a twisted sort of childhood nostalgia that normal people attached to campfire smoke or Christmas cookies. I inhaled it like a calming substance, and I composed myself enough to realize what was happening. We weren’t being kidnapped or murdered by random lunatics. These were some of the other Apprentices and we were being hazed —hazed like pledges in the most disturbing sorority of all time, and worst of all, we didn’t even want to join it. Even as hatred for all of them coursed through my veins, I had to admit they had flair; I had no idea what twisted traditions Fairhaven had for this kind of thing, but I could pretty much guarantee that the night was not going to include a keg stand or streaking across the sprawling lawns.

I could hear Hannah struggling and whimpering beside me. I tried to make some sort of reassuring sound for her, but it was all I could do not to gag on the wad of fabric in my mouth, which was very rough and tasted like cardboard.

Then hands were all over me, grasping me under the armpits, and around the legs. I tried to kick out, but one of them lay across my legs while another tied my ankles together. My feet immediately started to tingle from the restricted blood flow. I twisted back and forth at the waist, trying to throw them off, but there were too many of them.

“Just stop struggling,” one of them breathed in my ear. “We’re going to do it anyway, and you’ll just hurt yourself.”

If she was trying to reassure me, whoever she was, she was doing a terrible job. I was filled with a renewed flutter of panic as I contemplated all the horrors that “we’re going to do it anyway” might possibly refer to.

Someone pulled me right off the edge of the bed and I landed hard on the floor.

“Shit, ouch! I thought you said you had her?”

“I do have her! You’re the one that dropped her. Get her arm!”

Our captors lifted me clean off the rug and began, with difficulty, to half-carry, half drag me out of the room and down the hallway. I kept struggling in earnest until we reached the stairs, and then stopped, afraid that one wrong move would throw us off balance and send us all toppling down to the stone floor below. Our pack of kidnappers continued out the front doors and across the lawns. The night air carried no residual warmth from the damp, clammy day; it had drained from the world with the sunlight, and I shivered violently in my thin t-shirt and shorts as we made our awkward, painful way across the lawns. I had little sense of direction in the best of circumstances, but trussed up and hauled around like this, I had no idea which way we were going until the footsteps took on a muffled, shuffling quality, and I knew we must be trudging through the fallen leaf mulch that covered the forest floor.

Finally, amidst a flurry of whispering, we came to a halt. I heard a crackling, and the almost sweet smell of smoke found its way to my nose. I was lowered to the ground, and came down hard on a rock. Ignoring my cry of pain, the captors pulled me up off my back into a kneeling position. Then all hands fell away, and all around me I heard retreating footsteps and then, nothing. For one long moment there was no sound but my own ragged breathing and Hannah’s whimpering beside me. Then the bag was whipped off of my head and the fabric pulled from my mouth. I stared around me.

We were in the woods on the grounds, but in a sunken sort of clearing. All around us were a number of stone structures, a ruin of what might once have been a walled enclosure, or maybe even a small building. Around the outskirts of the clearing stood a dozen figures, clad in long, dark hooded robes and carrying torches. Each face was hidden behind an identical mask; pale and doll-like, with wide staring eyes, rosy cheeks, and the perfect pouting lips of a porcelain figurine.

If I hadn’t already suspected who was behind those masks, I might have died of fright right then and there. Hannah was so pale and still in her terror, she might already have died.

I swallowed hard and spoke, hoping my voice would sound steadier than my nerves felt. “What the hell is this, Valley of the Dolls? Congratulations, you scared the crap out of us, and you are officially the creepiest fucking things I’ve ever seen. Now enough already, okay? Joke’s over.”

All around us, the ghostly white faces shook back and forth in silence. I could actually feel a lifelong phobia of dolls formulating in my psyche.

For what felt like an eternity, the figures just stared down at us, firelight playing on their fixed, waxen features. Then a voice rang out from a masked figure to our right.

“You find yourselves, sisters of the gift, within the walls of the ancient Fairhaven príosún. You have been brought to this place because it has been determined that you must answer for the transgressions of your clan.”

“We don’t need to answer for anything! Untie us now!” I said.

“You have not been granted permission to speak,” the same voice said.

“We don’t need permission to speak!” I shouted. “Let us out of here now. This isn’t funny!”

The figures did not move, but from somewhere to our left, two of them were sniggering. The same one spoke again.

“Your clan has shirked its duties. You have shamed the Durupinen and abandoned the spirit world. As your peers, we invoke the ancient right to call judgment down upon you and sentence you to retribution on behalf of the many souls that suffered at the hands of your negligence.”

“We haven’t done anything!” Hannah called out in a cracked voice. “It wasn’t our decision; our mother was the one who —”