Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (3 page)

“That’s great!” I said, since that was the expected response. Privately, I thought her enthusiasm for seeing ghosts was certifiably insane. I’d have traded with her in a heartbeat and skipped on my merry way back home.

“Couldn’t you just have removed it yourself?” Hannah asked.

“Not by myself,” Karen said. “You need four Durupinen to complete the ceremony. It is very complicated. I’ll go see the Council when we get there, to take care of some loose ends, and they’ll do it then.”

“That’s wonderful, Karen,” Hannah said before turning and pressing her nose to the glass. Milo rested his chin on her shoulder to share the view. I tried to do the same, but had to lean back against my seat and close my eyes after only a few minutes because it was so disorienting to barrel down the left side of road. Our driver seemed to have little regard for silly restrictions like traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and I spent much more time fearing for our lives than trying to sight-see through the darkened windows. Shit, and I thought New York cab drivers had a collective death wish.

After what felt like one long near-death experience, the twisting and turning gave way to a smooth, straight ride, and I risked opening my eyes. The last of the suburban houses were falling away and fading into the distance behind us as we continued to wend our way out into the open country.

I’d seen some beautiful places in my drives across America with my mother, our hair whipping out the Green Monster’s open windows; the red geometric rock formations of Arizona, the golden wheat fields of the Midwest. But the English countryside had a beauty unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before. The fields rolled gently past us, undulating waves of truest green, speckled with sheep and crisscrossed with fences and tumble-down stone walls. Here and there, a quaint farmhouse or cottage perched like a sparrow upon a hilltop. It was as though I had stepped back into a simpler time, and suddenly even the car I was driving in felt like an anachronism —an intrusion. Even though I had never been here before, I was struck, not by a sense of otherness, but of familiarity. There was a tiny but insistent part of myself that was singing with joy because it knew that I belonged here. I tried to hush the song, to ignore it, mostly because it scared me, but it continued to sing, a whisper of a tune, in the recesses of my mind. Hannah turned from the window and her eyes, saucer-wide, were aglow with that same knowledge, and I knew she felt it, too.

The ride could have been a few minutes or a few days, but I was too entranced by the scenery to know for sure, or indeed care. But long before I expected to hear it, Karen’s voice broke into my thoughts.

“Fairhaven Hall is just over the crest of that hill. You should be able to see it coming up on the left-hand side in a moment.” I craned my neck and gasped. The gasp was echoed by both Hannah and Milo. Karen heaved a sigh of contentment.

Fairhaven Hall was nestled between two embracing curves of a valley, a stately and ancient castle. Four tall, turreted towers seemed to anchor it to the ground, a weathered stone collection of windows and balconies, bastions and crenellated ramparts. It was bordered on the east by a vast forest, on the west by a rushing, diamond-bright river, and to the north by the most expansive set of gardens and orchards I had ever seen.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “We go to Hogwarts.”

KAREN WAS PRACTICALLY BOUNCING IN HER SEAT, as though she were five years old and we’d just arrived at Disney World, instead of in view of a decidedly different castle.

“Isn’t it wonderful?”

Nobody answered her. I was so awestruck that I had no room left for any of the other emotions that had been wreaking havoc on my psyche for the past few weeks; they simply shriveled up and vanished. My one and only coherent thought was a silent curse that my sketchbook was packed away in my suitcase, because no place I’d ever been had begged more desperately to be drawn. My fingers twitched with it.

We gawked, open-mouthed, as Fairhaven Hall loomed nearer. Massive wrought-iron front gates, their bars twisted and curled into delicate, vine-like tendrils, opened smoothly as the car approached them. At first, I thought they had done so of their own volition, and opened my mouth to ask about it, but then I spotted the heavy chains, concealed in stone niches, that were pulling the gates apart and vanishing, link by link, into small openings in the thatched gatehouses on either side of the cobblestone drive.

The moment we reached the gates, a strange feeling swept over me, as though I had stepped through a heat haze or a blast of atmospheric disturbance. Hannah closed her eyes and swallowed hard, as though the sensation had made her feel nauseous. Milo flickered momentarily out of view and then back again, his expression wary.

“Um…what was that we just passed though?” I asked. My head was swimming slightly.

“Sorry, I should have warned you about that. We’re just crossing the wards. There are protective charms all around the grounds, sort of like barriers. They are designed to protect the Durupinen as well as the spirits they harbor here. Is Milo still here?”

“Yes,” Hannah answered for Milo, since Karen couldn’t hear him.

“Well, I mean obviously I assumed he would be. The wards are only meant to keep out hostile spirits, and we know he’s not hostile —”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. Milo batted his eyelashes and blew me a kiss. “Oh, you know what I mean,” Karen said. “It’s good to know that the wards won’t affect him negatively or keep him out. He would have been stopped right at the boundary to the grounds.”

“Are hordes of hostile spirits something we’re going to need to worry about?” I asked.

“No, not exactly,” Karen said. “Spirits are drawn to this place in huge numbers, just as they are drawn to you both. They can feel the pull you exert on them, the connection you have to the Gateways. Obviously that would be exponentially stronger with so many Gateways gathered together in a single place. The wards keep us safe from any ghost with less than good intentions.”

“I could have used one of these ward-thingies back at St. Matt’s,” I said.

Hannah nodded fervently. “Will we be taught how to do that? Create wards?”

Karen smiled a little sadly at her, and I knew what she was thinking at once. Hannah’s life had been defined by unexplained Visitations that left her terrified, marginalized, and eventually institutionalized. She probably would have done anything to be left alone. As happened so often when I looked at my twin, a terrible anger rose in me at the thought of what her life had been. I wished I had been there to protect her, or at the very least, stand by her through that nightmare of a childhood.

Karen answered her, “Yes, although it is very difficult, and it will probably take a few years before you can cast one powerful enough to be effective. The wards around Fairhaven Hall have been in place for centuries and are nearly impenetrable. Ah, here we go,” she added, as the gates finally opened wide enough for our car to pass through.

The car bumped along the cobblestone drive, wound through impeccably manicured lawns and flowerbeds, and finally came to rest at the front doors. They were constructed of prehistoric wooden planks studded with nails and held together with ancient metal crossbars. In the middle of the left door, which was closed, an intricately carved door knocker stared at us, a woman’s face with wild hair, whose mouth was open in a silent, terrified scream. The right door stood open, as though the castle had been expecting us.

If this had been an old horror movie, a hunchbacked butler with a genetically anomalous face would have hobbled out to greet us, and everyone watching would have shouted to the heroine, “Don’t go in! Don’t do it! What the hell is wrong with you?”

But this wasn’t a horror movie. This was my life, and like every other epically stupid heroine in every scary movie I’d ever seen, I didn’t turn around and leave, but squared my shoulders and walked right in the front door toward certain doom. Or, at least, that’s how it felt as I crossed the threshold, my heart curled up and cowering in the region of my throat.

Hannah, Milo, and I stopped dead just inside the vast echoing entrance hall. A great marble staircase stood before us, flanked with curving stone bannisters. Tapestries and paintings that looked like they should have hung, heavily guarded, in the National Gallery, adorned the walls. The second floor comprised a balcony which ran the perimeter of the chamber. Behind its heavy wooden railings, I could see a number of arched doorways interspersed with stained glass windows. The stone ceiling was latticed with cathedral-like wooden beams and right above our heads hung a magnificent chandelier worthy of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Any single feature of this room could have captivated us, but it was not the architecture that stopped the breath in my lungs. The entire place pulsed and buzzed with a palpable energy, as though the very stones themselves were alive; the irony of which was not lost on me, considering that what made it feel this way was the constant and powerful presence of death. Even as my eyes made the initial scan of the room, I spotted several ghosts; one walking up the staircase, another peering curiously over the gallery railings, a third crouched defensively in the shadows of a sculpture. I was definitely getting better at distinguishing between the living and the dead, though whether that was a good thing or not, I still hadn’t decided.

“Wow,” Milo murmured. “There are a lot of us here.” He turned to Hannah, looking excited. “Mind if I leave you ladies to it and have a strut around the place —y’know, meet the rest of the floaters?”

“No, of course not,” Hannah said, barely able to tear her eyes from her new surroundings. “Have fun.”

Milo winked and dissolved on the spot.

“Ah, the Clan Sassanaigh has arrived at last!” a voice echoed down to us. I almost looked behind us to see who she was talking about, when I realized that she was referring to our ancient family name.
That
was going to take some getting used to.

The voice belonged to a slender woman with long, curling hair and prominent cheekbones who was descending the stairs toward us, her arms open in a gesture of welcome. Karen’s face broke into a smile of true pleasure when she saw her.

“Celeste!” She walked forward to meet the woman at the base of the stairs, and the two embraced with mutual cries of delight.

“Karen!” the woman named Celeste said. “Welcome home!”

“Thank you, Celeste! I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be back,” Karen replied, squeezing Celeste’s hand affectionately. Then she turned to us. “Girls, come here! I want to introduce you!”

I crossed the entrance hall, my footsteps echoing resoundingly. Hannah followed half a pace behind me, like a shadow, her feet somehow much quieter than mine. Okay, so combat boots were clearly a poor footwear choice in a place like this. I grumbled inwardly about how gleeful Milo would be if I stopped wearing them. I’m sure he’d be convinced that it was his own fashion advice that had penetrated my resistance at last.

“Celeste Morgan, these are Elizabeth’s girls, Jess and Hannah,” Karen said, pointing each of us out in turn.

“A pleasure to meet you both,” Celeste said, shaking my hand. She then held her hand out to Hannah, but seemed to sense Hannah’s hesitancy almost at once, and turned the motion into a wave instead.

“Nice to meet you, too,” I answered for the two of us. Hannah nodded diffidently.

Up close, Celeste seemed to be about Karen’s age, with some gentle lines around her full-lipped mouth and wide, blue eyes. Here and there, a strand of silver glimmered in her hair, which fell in shining auburn tendrils past her shoulder blades.

“Celeste and I were Apprentices together. She serves on the Durupinen High Council and teaches here as well. Do you still teach History and Lore?” Karen asked her.

“Yes,” Celeste said with an apologetic expression. “I’m afraid I will be boring you both to tears three days a week.”

“I like history,” Hannah said quietly, speaking for the first time.

“I’m glad to hear it!” Celeste said. “At least I’ll have one pupil listening, and that’s something, isn’t it? Well, what do you think of the place?” She gestured grandly around us.

“It’s…unbelievable,” I managed.

Celeste gave a knowing smile. “It is overwhelming at first, but you’ll get used to it. We all do. Pretty soon you’ll be knocking around the old place just like you would at home.” She turned back to Karen. “And how was your journey? Uneventful, I hope?”

“It was fine, thanks,” Karen said. “And how’s everything here?”

There was something loaded about the question, about the hesitant way that Karen asked it. Celeste understood whatever it was, and her smile faltered a bit as she answered.

“Pretty calm. The Council met last night. I’ll tell you all about it once we get these ladies settled in their room. Also, I told Finvarra that I’d take you to see her when you arrived,” she said.

“I figured as much,” Karen said, with an expression rather like a kid caught sneaking in after curfew. “Where are they going to be sleeping?” she added, gesturing to us.

“The East Wing, first door after the tower, of course. Your old stomping grounds! Where did you suspect?”

Karen grimaced. “I thought perhaps, given recent events, we might have been…reassigned.”