Toward a Secret Sky

by Heather Maclean

  It began to rain. She looked up, hoping the rain would soothe her throbbing wound, make the shadows disappear. A drop of liquid fell into her eye, causing her to blink. It burned, and she rubbed it furiously, trying to stop the pain. When she opened it, everything was blurry, but she could see the dark splotches on her arms and legs.

  It was raining blood.

  I slept like the dead for eleven hours straight. When I finally did emerge from sleep, it was sudden, as if I had been thrown from the back of a moving car. My eyes flew open, and I instantly remembered my nightmare had been about Hunter. She hadn’t died—yet—but I couldn’t bear it if anything bad happened to her. I reached for my phone.

  “Hi,” she answered on the first ring.

  “Are you okay?” I blurted.

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I had a nightmare about you.”

  “Was I hot?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “In your dream. Did I look hot? No point dying if I didn’t look good.” She cackled at her own vanity. She was a sick puppy. I kind of loved that about her.

  “It’s not funny,” I chided. “And what makes you think you were dying in my dream?”

  “Why else would you call me?” she answered. Good point.

  “Well, you didn’t die, but every time I’ve dreamed like this, the person did,” I explained.

  She was unmoved. “So what happened to me?”

  “You fell and skinned your knee.”

  “Ouch. I can see why you’d be concerned.”

  “I’m serious, Hunter! My dreams are serious.”

  “I’m sure they are.” I heard a distinct exhale.

  “Are you smoking?” I challenged.

  She cleared her throat. “No . . . no, of course not.” I could tell she was lying. “Why, was I smoking in your dream too?”

  “Yeah, smoking hot,” I assured her. It was useless. I wasn’t going to scare her out of . . . what? Not running down an alley? I was glad I’d called, and she was fine. I decided to change the subject. “Guess who visited me last night?”

  “Your angel boyfriend?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I protested.

  “So it was him. What’s his name, Gavin? You should be worried about yourself.” She blew into the phone again. “I checked into it. Messing around with an angel is no joke.”

  “You checked with who?”

  “Just watch yourself,” she repeated.

  “Maren!” my grandmother called up the stairs. “Can’t sleep the entire day away.”

  “I have to go,” I said. “Call you later.”

  We said good-bye, and I tried Jo’s number. I wanted to make sure everything was okay with her gran. Straight to voice mail. I hung up and fired off a quick text instead.

  As soon as I hit send, the events of the previous night at Campbell Hall rushed my still-foggy brain. I tried not to give in to them. Happy thought. Surely, I could find a happy thought. Gavin. A warm peace flooded over me. I held my hand up and remembered him holding it again. I could almost feel the pressure of his strong fingers. I had zero desire to move.

  I rolled over and blinked at the clock. It was almost noon, definitely time to drag myself out of bed. And, thankfully, it was Saturday; two days before I had to worry about seeing anyone at school. How was I ever going to face Anders . . . or Graham? Maybe I could just take classes on the Internet, or convince my grandparents to homeschool me.

  As soon as I sat up, I regretted it. My head felt like it was full of rocks, and my stomach was sour. I didn’t know if it was from stress or poison. Probably both.

  I shuffled to the bathroom and surveyed the damage. I looked tired and pale, but that was pretty much my standard appearance. My hair still had a few shiny curls molded into it, and there was a trace of sparkle on my neck. I dabbed concealer under my eyes, and over the bruise on my elbow, brushed some blush on my cheeks to at least pretend I wasn’t a zombie, and headed downstairs.

  While I fixed myself some tea and toast, I listened dutifully to my grandfather’s new joke. It had something to do with Irish men on a plane. I willed the toaster to work faster while I waited for what I knew would be a terrible punchline about poop. British jokes were always about poop.

  “That’s nothing, you should see the mess in the back of mine!” my grandfather exploded. My grandmother just rolled her eyes. “Do you get it, Maren?” he asked me.

  I got it. But it wasn’t remotely funny. I smiled and nodded, stuck a triangle of toast in my mouth so I couldn’t possibly talk to them, and took my breakfast back upstairs.

  Once back in my room, I lugged the giant armchair around so that I could sit in it with my feet up on the window seat, and snuggled down under the rose blanket with my mom’s journal. Now that I knew one of the buildings was Campbell Hall, I wanted to look more closely at those pages to see if I could learn anything else.

  I flipped to the first page that showed the sprawling country mansion. Definitely Campbell Hall. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized it right away. It was exactly the same in the drawing as in person—from the balconies under the front windows to the huge columns by the entrance. I traced the outline of the sketch with my fingertip. How crazy that my mom had drawn the very building I’d just been inside.

  After a while, my legs started falling asleep, so I decided to tuck them under me. As I shifted my weight, the leather-bound book fell to the floor. When I reached down and scooped it up, a thin, pink ribbon about ten inches long, with a silvery pattern printed on it, fluttered free. When I picked it up, I saw that the decoration was actually a vertical row of tiny letters. Probably a bookmark with a lame inspirational quote.

  GAITRMNITQMLJCSUKDMANAENDEO-

  AIC•SLERWSVOYOXTPTTOFMGFA•

  I tried to read it, but it made no sense. It didn’t spell out a single legible word except END, which didn’t inspire any confidence in me. Why would my mother have a ribbon in her journal with a random string of letters on it?

  Once I looked closer, I realized the letters weren’t printed, but handwritten in her dainty, swooshy script; all capital letters, with two dots—one about two-thirds of the way down, and one at the end. If my mother took the time to write it, it wasn’t random. It had to mean something.

  I found a pen and paper in the desk, and copied the letters. I looked at what I wrote upside down, sideways, and then held up to a mirror. I tried rearranging the letters, grouping them into words, using every third one . . . nothing.

  It was possible that there was a key somewhere else, where the letters were randomly assigned to others, such as all Ws equaling As, but my mother wasn’t a fan of such simple cryptograms. They were either too easy to work out, hence their popularity in newspaper puzzle sections, or they were too hard because they required spiriting two different messages to the same person separately but quickly.

  I tried again. I wrote the letters in boxes, in crosses, and even circles. I tried reading the letters backward, and then backward in twos and threes. Still nothing.

  I was shocked my scribbling didn’t amount to anything. I was great at puzzles. Why couldn’t I solve this one? Frustrated, I tossed the pen aside. It skipped off the desk and landed in a nearby tin trashcan with a satisfying thunk. Exactly, I thought. Garbage. The pen is precisely where it belongs.

  Being free of the pen suddenly freed my mind. Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be using a pen at all.

  Most of the historical secret messages my mother studied came from ancient wars. When scrambled communications were received on the battlefield, they were read immediately. Soldiers didn’t get to sit down and ponder the possibilities with a piece of paper. They usually had a custom contraption or tool to arrange the letters automatically for them.

  I fell back into the squishy armchair, twisting the slippery ribbon nervously, sliding it between my fingers. Was my mother in a war? Considering what I knew about the Abbey and my recent encounter with demons, it seemed
likely.

  I glanced down at the ribbon, now looped across my fingers three times. Three of the letters lined up to make a word: MET. Nothing else around it could be read, and “met” wasn’t enough to go on, but it reminded me of how strips of letters were decoded: they were wrapped around something.

  What was I supposed to wrap it around? I moved the ribbon around my fingers a couple different ways until I was satisfied that was not the answer. I tried my wrist. Nope. I had a flash of a soldier with a gold helmet holding a thick bar. That was it! On one of the many rainy Sunday evenings we spent snuggled up with popcorn and the History Channel, my mom and I had watched a documentary about how the Greek army used codes printed on long strips of leather. The recipients had a dowel—sometimes wooden, sometimes metal-covered—crafted with the specific diameter needed to make the letters line up correctly. What was it called? Something like “scale” or “style.” The word popped into my head: scytale.

  My heart started racing like it always did right before I solved a puzzle. Now, I just had to actually solve it.

  I needed a cylinder. I was fairly certain modern spies—like my mom?—didn’t walk around with decoder cylinders. No, they would use something easily found wherever they were. Cylinder. Cylinder. What kind of cylinder would anyone have access to? I thought about a drinking glass, but it would have to have the exact same diameter for the writer as for the receiver, and glasses, even those in hotels, came in all shapes and sizes. Whoever sent the message had to have the same cylinder at their disposal.

  Disposal. My grandfather’s poop joke barged into my mind. Disgusting. I closed my eyes. Thinking about crap was not going to help me . . . or was it? I jumped up and ran into the bathroom.

  I found it perched on top of the small, tin trashcan: the cylinder that every house in Scotland—every house in the Western world—had dozens of at all times. It had the same dimensions in every country, and had been the same for the last fifty years or more.

  An empty toilet paper tube.

  I went back to my room and shut the door behind me. I held the ribbon against the tube and wound. It only circled three times, but the letters lined up next to each other perfectly. The letters spelled out:

  GET

  ANT

  IDO

  TEF

  ROM

  MAG

  NIF

  ICA

  T••

  I didn’t even have to write them down. Reading them in order and stopping where each word ended, the message was revealed:

  GET ANTIDOTE FROM MAGNIFICAT

  I took a minute to let it all sink in. A secret message from my mom stared at me from a slip of ribbon. And I had decoded it! I was proud of myself, for a second, until I realized I had no idea what it meant. Antidote for what? And from where? A place called Magnificat? Yet another Latin word I couldn’t begin to translate.

  The window next to me rattled. I saw a large man on the roof, inches away. I was so startled, I threw the toilet paper tube over my shoulder.

  When I realized who it was, my heart lifted like a kite in the wind. But I didn’t want to let him know how thrilled I was to see him again so soon. I opened the window latch.

  “Gavin! You scared me to death!”

  He beamed. “You look alive.”

  “Barely.” I self-consciously smoothed my hair behind my ear. Thank goodness I had put on a little makeup, but I was sure I still looked terrible. “You’re going to have to start using the front door,” I said, nervously glancing over my shoulder to make sure my bedroom door was still closed. “At least in the daytime.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s an emergency.” He searched my face with his beautiful blue eyes.

  “What?”

  “Have you talked to Jo?” he asked.

  “No. I texted her, but she hasn’t answered back yet.

  She must still be at the hospital with her grandmother.”

  “She’s at the hospital,” he confirmed, “but not with her grandmother. She’s been admitted.”

  “What? Why? What’s wrong with her?”

  “The same thing that’s wrong with about thirty of the kids from the party at Campbell Hall last night,” he answered. “They’re all sick.”

  “Sick? How sick? Like food poisoning?”

  “Really sick. And I think it’s more like outright poisoning.”

  “But Jo left the party right away,” I said. It made no sense. I’d been poisoned, and I was fine. She wasn’t even at Campbell Hall for an hour.

  “I’m headed over there now to find out more. I thought you might like to come,” he answered.

  “Yeah, of course. Um, meet me downstairs,” I said. “I’ll see if I can borrow my grandparents’ car.”

  “No need,” he said. “I’ve got one.”

  “What?” I was surprised. I’d never seen him drive. I kind of assumed he couldn’t. “Angels have cars?”

  “We can get one when it’s needed.”

  “And you know how to drive?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “Yes,” he answered, smirking at my question. “Have to be able to get around same as you, and I can’t fly in front of people—well, most people.”

  “So you drove over to my grandparents’ house?” I continued. He nodded, and his eyes sparkled. “Then why did you fly up to my window?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Too dangerous. Couldn’t have anyone see my wings, could I? I climbed up the drainpipe.”

  He was definitely showing off, I concluded. A good sign that he really liked me. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how strong and romantic I thought he was, though.

  “Well, you’d better climb back down quickly”—I shrugged—“because I’m leaving to go see Jo, with or without you.” I slammed the window on his surprised look, and turned my back so he couldn’t see me smile.

  CHAPTER 20

  There was nothing to smile about once we got to the hospital.

  The Kingussie Sanatorium was a two-story building made entirely of brown stones, and looked like it might crumble at any moment. Inside, the hallways were long and dark, and surprisingly dirty. And not with the kind of dirt you could just clean up, but with grime that looked like it had become part of the walls centuries earlier. Cracked florescent lights, which had probably been added to the ancient structure with the advent of electricity, flickered ominously. Even though it was daylight outside, inside, it might as well have been midnight.

  I was relieved to get out of the creepy hallway and into Jo’s room, but only until I saw her. She was lying still, her skin sallow and her cheeks sunken in like she hadn’t eaten in weeks. Long, bloody scabs bisected her face. I wasn’t prepared for her to look so bad so quickly. And I definitely wasn’t prepared to see that she was tied down to the bed with wide restraints.

  “She kept trying to scratch out her eyes,” her mother explained to us tearfully from the corner. “They finally had to sedate her. She was going wild. All the kids are.”

  “How did it happen?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me, Maren,” Mrs. Dougall said through sniffs. “Weren’t you with her? Why aren’t you sick?”

  I wondered if I had gotten more than the date rape drug at Anders’ party. Maybe Graham’s antidote had saved me from two horrible fates.

  “I was, but she left pretty early to go see her grandmother,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Dougall’s face twisted with confusion. I wondered if lack of sleep and worrying about Jo had made her a little loopy.

  “She got a text that her grandmother had a stroke,” I reminded her. “She came to the hospital to see her?”

  “Her gran is fine,” Mrs. Dougall said slowly. “We didn’t text her. We found her this morning, lying on the front lawn. When we woke her up, she attacked us. The ambulance workers had to chase her out of a tree.”

  I didn’t know what to say; I couldn’t explain it. Had I imagined Jo getting the text? Was that part of
my drug hallucination?

  “Where’s her phone?” I asked, wanting to prove myself not crazy as much as I wanted to help any investigation find out who had set up Jo.

  “We don’t know,” Mrs. Dougall replied. “It’s missing.”

  And not by coincidence, I thought grimly.

  Twenty-eight other partygoers were in the hospital with the same symptoms. There were originally twenty-nine, but one boy struggled against the staff so fiercely, he bit his tongue in half and drowned in his own blood. Since then, all the patients had been strapped down and sedated.

  Gavin excused himself and left me with Mrs. Dougall.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, my eyes suddenly swimming in tears. “I didn’t mean to abandon her. I thought . . .”

  “Of course you didn’t, dear,” she said, crossing the room and wrapping me in her arms. “It’s not your fault. The police will find out what happened, don’t worry.”

  But it was hard not to worry, and even harder not to blame myself. If only I hadn’t let her go. If only I had insisted on going with her . . .

  I sat down next to Jo’s bed. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. Her face was a mess. I reached down to squeeze her hand, to let her know I was there. Her skin was ice cold.

  I kept Mrs. Dougall company, tried to keep the mood light and my outlook optimistic, but it was hard with Jo lying next to us, looking like she was knocking at death’s door. And my good-friend guilt didn’t make it any easier. I didn’t know if I felt worse that Jo was hospitalized or that I wasn’t.

  Stuart arrived to visit Jo, looking healthy but worried. I was glad he was unharmed, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder why. How was he spared? And what happened to him after I left for the bathroom? I never came back, but he never seemed to go looking for me, either. What did he think happened to me? Where had he been?

  He wasn’t my guardian, of course. I shouldn’t have expected him to be, or think less of him because he wasn’t. Why couldn’t he have saved Jo, though, like Graham had saved me?