The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 1) (21 page)

Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out a short paddle made of shiny greenstone. Intricate spiral designs had been carved up and down its length. Some formed a terrifying face, the eyes of which were inset with a pale blue stone.

“The Moth family…You mean like the nurse and the dean?” Valerie flipped through her notes to a list of names. Zoë nodded.

“One of my aunts married a Moth,” said Joy.

“Wish I’d been sent to live with her.”

“She married a cowboy.”

Zoë nodded. “I’ve got pretty colorful relatives. At least a third of them are cowboys. They live on some huge ranch in Uncanny Valley, Nevada, where everyone is welcome. Only my father never saw fit to send me there. No. He went for the really eccentric ones. The mountain climbing couple in the Swiss Alps who were never home because they competed in yodeling contests. The wacky billionaire who gave all his money to a charity that did pot-bellied pig rescues and went to live in a grass hut in Bangladesh. That was a fun three months. Have you seen the size of the insects in Bangladesh? Imagine finding them inside your unmentionables.

“Then there was the French family where everyone was impeccably dressed. If you committed a fashion faux pas—like, say, wearing sneakers with a skirt, or socks with sandals— you were locked in the attic without dinner. I’d like to see them deal with huge bugs in their unmentionables!

“Then, there was a Russian great aunt who only ate oatmeal and pickles, which would not have been so bad, had she not insisted that I eat only oatmeal and pickles, too. I won’t even tell you what she did the time she caught me eating a ham and black bread sandwich. It was bad enough that my father yanked me out of there. Then came the old Japanese guy in his nineties who made me dress like Alice, from
Alice In Wonderland
, and wear bunny ears…all the time. Otherwise, he wasn’t so bad, really. Oh, and the coupon-cutting fanatic who forced me to climb into dumpsters to retrieve sales flyers. Let me tell you, after them, the Maori barber seemed positively normal.”

“How did you meet Seth Peregrine?” Kitten petted the purring lion. “You knew each other before coming here, right?”

“My dad lives in the same town in Michigan as Seth and Misty Lark—in the U between the thumb and the finger.” Everyone else stared at her blankly. Zoë chuckled and pet her quoll, “Sorry. A little Michigan humor. Two years ago, Dad decided I was old enough that I could live with him during the school year. I met Seth at the dojo. I wanted to win a fight for a change.”

“Seth does martial arts?” Sigfried made a karate gesture with his hands. “You mean, like Ju Kwan Do and Tae Jitsu?”

Kitten asked, “Are those real martial arts? Or did you make them up?”

Valerie rolled her eyes. “He is mispronouncing Tae Kwan Do and Ju Jitsu.”

Zoë shrugged. “Seth’s a hockey player. Hockey players need to know how to fight.”

Rachel rested her chin on her knees, watching Sigfried and Lucky mock jab at each other. She felt terrible for Zoë. Her situation was almost as bad as Sigfried’s. How horrid not to have a proper loving family.

“Misty Lark. Does she have short straw-colored hair?” Nastasia glanced at Zoë, who was chewing on one of her own plaid locks. Zoë nodded. “I saw her with you and Seth in the vision I had when I touched you. You were standing on a silver road surrounded by fog, facing off against what looked like knockers or kobolds—some kind of fey. You each wore a bandolier that held little glass bottles with cork stoppers. Something swirled in the bottles. You had panpipes on lanyards around your necks and carried—I am not sure what it was? A bat? A hockey stick? You stood together, back to back.”

The others listened in astonishment, but Zoë merely shrugged, unimpressed.

“Sounds cool,” she said, “but it means nothing to me. Though I am glad to hear that Seth and Misty were my friends, even before I came to this world.”

The princess’s brows drew together in thought. “I wonder why some students from the same landscape know each other, such as you and Seth, and some do not. When I touched Sakura Suzuki, I saw her with Enoch Smithwyck in what I took to be ancient Japan. But they do not know each other now.”

“Sakura Suzuki?” Valerie asked. “Is she the Japanese girl whose spells go horribly astray?”

Joy nodded. “She is my roommate.” Leaning toward them, she lowered her voice respectably, though a note of excitement crept in. “She’s an orphan. When she was five, her mother and father were killed right in front of her. She watched them die.”

“How tragic.” The princess’s voice broke slightly.

The others were quiet for a time. Siggy seemed particularly dismayed. He frowned, his face a sullen mask. Rachel looked down, tracing a triangle on the thigh of her robe. Not having a family was bad enough. But having one and losing it? The idea was so horrid, she did not even know how to feel about it.

Eager to think about something else, she turned to Valerie. “You had a question earlier that got interrupted?”

“Oh, right!” Valerie spoke up so brightly that Payback’s ears perked up. She spun her pencil around her hand and caught it.

“She makes that look easy, Lucky. It’s not. I’ve been trying,” Siggy muttered to his dragon. “I drop it two out of three times.”

Valerie grinned. “You should see what I can do with a butterfly knife.”

Siggy and Lucky both cocked their heads at the same angle and stared with the same awed expression. Siggy murmured dreamily, “with a butterfly knife!”

In the exact same tone, Lucky murmured, “Look at all that golden hair. It’s like she has her own head-hoard.”

“Butterfly knife?” exclaimed Zoë. “Aren’t they illegal in sixty-two out of fifty states?”

Valerie grinned. “Being a cops daughter does have a few perks.” She turned back to Nastasia, “But about my question, Princess. Is it no longer safe for you to touch people?”

Nastasia shook her head. “No. I have only been warned not to touch two people. I do not seem to be in danger otherwise.”

“
Two
people?” Rachel leaned forward. Valerie leaned forward as well, notebook ready.

Nastasia nodded. “Xandra Black—or the voices that possess her—warned me not to touch Mr. March. Last night, my father came to visit me at the Halls of Healing. He told me that under no circumstance must I touch Vladimir Von Dread.”

“Is that so?” Rachel recalled the prince of Bavaria striding across the lawn, students scurrying out of his way like leaves before a storm. “I wonder why. Do you think he is being tortured, too?”

“More likely, he himself is evil.” Valerie chewed on a stray blond lock as she wrote furiously in her notebook. “I bet Salome is right about him.”

The princess stated, “My father confirmed that the Von Dread family is wicked. The King of Bavaria refuses to uphold the rules of the Parliament of the Wise. He lets people practice forbidden magic without facing prosecution.”

Joy leaned forward eagerly. “Everyone knows that Bavaria is where the last of the Morthbrood are hiding. My sister told me that the King of Bavaria offered money to any Morthbrood member who wanted to come and live in his country—as long as they shared their secrets.”

Valerie’s comment about her friend reminded Rachel of one of the puzzles she was still mulling over. “In the princess’s vision of Salome Iscariot, she had been dead for twenty years. What does that mean?”

“Wait, Salome? My Salome?” Valerie jumped to her feet. “You are talking about my best friend, here. H-how could she be dead?”

“Maybe she’s a ghost,” Joy whispered, spooked. She sat down with her knees pulled up against her chest and hugged her Witch Baby. “I remember when you touched me, you said nothing happened. What about everyone else? Have you touched us all?”

Valerie opened her mouth as if she was going to object to the change of subject and then shut it again. She crossed to the far side of the music room and began pacing. As she walked back and forth, she snapped her lens cap on and off, chewing worriedly on her lip.

Sigfried crossed to where she was pacing and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “There, there.”

Valerie snorted in sardonic amusement, but her cheeks turned slightly pink.

“Is there anyone here you haven’t touched yet, Princess?” Zoë asked.

The princess glanced around. “I believe I have touched everyone but Miss Fabian.”

“Kitten!” Joy bounced up and down. “Now, do Kitten!”

“I bet I know what Nastasia will see,” Rachel said softly.

“Really?” Joy looked skeptical. “How could you know? Are you psychic?”

“We’re all psychic,” Sigfried quipped from where he stood with Valerie. “We’re sorcerers.”

“I bet she’ll see the things Kitten remembers,” Rachel said. “The world with the magic carpet and the old-fashioned garments.”

The princess crossed over to the fireplace and extended her hand to Kitten, who gave her a dimpled smile and reached toward her. The tiny lion growled. Kitten began to pull away, but the princess grasped her outstretched hand anyway. Nastasia stood very still. Then, her eyes rolled back until they were entirely white. Slowly, she began to sink.

Dashing across the room, the newly-knighted Sigfried caught her and laid her on the rug in front of the hearth, patting her face in an attempt to rouse her. The tiny lion leapt onto her lap. Putting its paws on her chest, it breathed on her face.

Her eyes fluttered open.

“Princess! Are you all right? What happened? What happened?” Joy hovered over her, peering into her face with concern. Kitten and Rachel knelt beside her, too.

Nastasia rubbed her temples. “There was light everywhere. It was too bright to see, and I was in horrible pain, as if my very self were on fire. Then, a deep voice spoke. It said,
‘Child, you should not be here. Not yet.’
A moment later, I found myself standing on a beach. It was pleasant, though it was still very bright. I did not see any sign of Miss Fabian.”

A furrow appeared in her forehead. Mainly to herself, the princess murmured, “Maybe
that
was the kind of light the Lightbringer meant.”

At precisely seven forty-five that evening, Ivan Romanov and Agravaine Stormhenge, the male college resident for Dare Hall and the head of the fencing team, came to collect Nastasia and escort her to the meeting of the Young Sorcerers League. With his athletic build and curly blond hair, Agravaine reminded Rachel of a grown-up Sigfried, if Siggy were more calm and collected than currently conceivable. Rachel looked after them hopefully, but they were talking about Nastasia’s time at the Halls of Healing and paid Rachel no heed.

Then, Kitten’s older sister, Panther, came to get her. Panther took Astrid with her, too, though Astrid did not particularly wish to go. The tiny lion accompanied them, as did Astrid’s red-winged blackbird. Rachel, who burned to be invited, stared after Astrid’s retreating back. She wanted to offer to take Astrid’s place but failed to summon up the courage to voice her wish.

From the window, she saw her brother Peter going off with his friends, including John Darling and some of Darling’s red-headed cousins, all in their red and blue YSL cloaks. Their familiars, mainly cats, darted in and out around their feet. Laurel, too, for all her wildness, was a member. Her sister ran down the path with several friends, laughing and tossing their YSL medallions.

Rachel sat down on her bed, waiting for Siggy, but he did not come by—which might have been because boys were not allowed on the girls’ side. She looked for Mistletoe, but he would not come out of the hole in the wall. She read for a bit, but she felt so filled up with sadness—from being left out of the meeting of such a historic organization, from being forgotten by her friend, from not being invited to begin with—that she could not concentrate. She got up and wandered the halls, looking for someone to talk to.

Every room was empty.

Rachel checked the lower floors. She checked the common room. She pulled opened the massive doors at the back of the black and white foyer and peered into the vast, empty theater in the center of Dare Hall. She even gathered her courage and checked the boys’ side. Sigfried was not there. The entire dormitory was empty. Everyone in Dare Hall had been invited to the YSL meeting…except for her.

Rachel went to the library, which took up three stories in the eastern leg of the hollow square that was Roanoke Hall. It was a wondrous place filled with enormous stacks and tiny spiral staircases. The moment she walked in and smelled the familiar musty odor of old tomes, she felt much better. She may not have been invited to the meeting, but the sheer amount of knowledge available to her was enough to lift anyone’s spirits. She could not be unhappy among her old friends, books.

Yet, even with all this knowledge calling to her, the pain of having been overlooked continued to burn in her chest like a smoldering ember she could not douse.

She browsed through the school’s selection of “Daring” Northwest books and found two she had not read before, one on
Kelpie, Each-Uisge, and Nixies
, and one on
Kallikantzaroi and Their Cousins
, which she promptly checked out. The school also had his work on griffins, a copy of which was prominently displayed in the main library at Gryphon Park. There was a whole chapter on the Arimaspians, Rachel’s ancestors.

After that, she looked up ravens. She found a great many references, to Odin’s Hugin and Munin; to the Native American trickster god; and to the places where ravens were considered birds of ill omens or portents of death. Ravens deserting their nests were said to be terribly bad omens, and it was believed that if the ravens ever deserted the Tower of London, the English monarchy would fall. Ravens could even be taught to talk, similar to parrots and magpies.

But nowhere did she find anything about a giant raven with blood red eyes.

She tried to read one of the volumes she had checked out, but she could not concentrate. Her mind kept picturing a future in which she was a great sorceress, and the kids from the YSL were sorry they had not invited her. After that, it wandered to images of Cydney Graves and her friends with their heads on fire and other spiteful pictures of their suffering and humiliation. She wondered what Zoë had in store for them.