Suddenly, she collapsed back onto her chair. A single sob erupted from her lips as she shook and shook, so that the metal chair rattled across the floor.
All I could say was, “I’m sorry, Aunt Zoey. I never thought it would come to this.”
After a long, horrible minute, Zoey plucked a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed at her cheeks. “Is that in, then? Is this the end? Will I come here every day for the rest of my life to sit with my daughter, speak to her, as though she knows I’m here? Have we become some sort of bullshit Lifetime movie, with an added paranormal flair?”
Her anger swept over me. I channeled it and turned toward the boys, who looked stoic yet unsure. I knew it was up to me to come up with some way to fight this.
I couldn’t leave my best friend in this other, impossible, hazy and never-ending universe.
We’d never left one another behind before.
“I have to try one more thing,” I whispered.
“Do whatever you want,” Zoey blurted. “Nothing will help. She’s gone. I know it. I can feel it.”
When I hadn’t been able to save Raphael after the Gulf had bubbled, it had been because I was too emotional.
I had been thinking about how much I loved him—about all I needed to do to ensure he was all right.
Now, I had to shove away fear that I would never speak with Celeste again.
I had to stop considering our past and the uncertain nature of our future.
I had to consider the here and now and find her, wherever she was.
This was the same sort of calm-headed nature that I knew I would need when it came to centering the supernatural world. It couldn’t be emotional. It had to be meditative, peaceful. It had to come from within.
Finally, I clutched Celeste’s hands again and focused, closing my eyes. It felt as though I plunged into some sort of impenetrable darkness. Even the air around me no longer felt like the air at the hospital. I sensed that I moved elsewhere, perhaps to another plane. And as I grew more focused, more sure, I heard her voice for the first time.
“Ivy? Ivy? Is that you?”
I opened my mind’s eye to find Celeste standing before me. She wore only a glorious white gown, which flowed around her, and she seemed to flat a tiny bit off whatever the floor of this universe was. Her eyes were large, confused, but she seemed okay—almost exactly like the Celeste I’d been with all day. The day of my eighteenth birthday.
“Celeste!” I whispered. I moved toward her. It wasn’t stepping, exactly—but a different motion, something that swept me toward her. We hugged in this impossible darkness, then separated and gazed at one another. I realized that most of me had been sure that I would never speak to her again in my life.
“How did you find me?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“I’m so glad you did,” she returned. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It’s felt both like five minutes and many days. Time doesn’t operate the same way here, I don’t think. Wherever this is.”
I squeezed her hands, just as I was in the dimension in which our bodies existed. A slight smile crinkled up across my cheeks. “I think I’m starting to understand, Celeste,” I whispered.
“What are you understanding?” she asked.
“I think I know what I’m meant to do. I think I know how to tap into it now. I think I have more power than ever before.”
She matched my smile, although her eyes remained far away. “That’s good, Ivy. I always knew you could do it.”
Her voice echoed through whatever realm this was.
“I think we should go back. Don’t you?” I told her. “Everyone is waiting for us.”
“Do you think they’ll recognize me?” Celeste asked. She touched her hair delicately. “I feel as though I haven’t seen what I looked like in a very long time.”
“They’ll know,” I whispered. “Don’t worry.”
Slowly, purposefully, I opened my eyes in the real world. The moment I did, Celeste did, as well. We blinked at one another for a long time. Slowly, a grin formed over my face. Celeste still seemed as though she was in the process of journeying back.
Her mother gripped her hand and whispered, “Celeste? Can you hear me?” Zoey flashed her face back toward me and said, “Is she here? Is that really her?”
Celeste coughed once and said, “Of course it is, Mom. I’m here. Stop pestering Ivy.”
Zoey flung forward and wrapped her arms around Celeste. Celeste closed her eyes for a moment, clenched them, and whispered something I couldn’t hear into her mother’s ear. When Zoey lifted herself from Celeste, she turned her big eyes to me and whispered, “Ivy Whitestone. I’ve known you your entire life. I’ve always known you to be an extraordinary girl. But I couldn’t have envisioned this.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The dock incident was something that would go down in history.
Despite our supernatural nature, word of the “mass student deaths” after a dock collapsing on the Gulf of Mexico actually made country-wide news. There were even a few websites that wrote about it around the world, especially since Margot was richer than God himself and something of a celebrity in Paris. The humans didn’t know about her supernatural abilities, of course, although you had to wonder how much of her powers had affected their opinion of her.
But I digress.
In total, thirteen students had been killed at the Halloween party. These students had been close friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, up-and-coming witches and warlocks and lycans and fae. They’d loved and they’d lost and they’d ached for a future that they would never be allowed to have.
Another memorial was set-up next to Margorie’s. Someone gathered up a ton of photos of the victims and placed them over something one of the artistically-inclined mermaids created out of rock she brought up from the bottom of the Gulf. They painted the rock in various bright colors and then wrote, “WE’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER” on it in black. I wanted to help create it. Actually, I asked about the committee. I was refused. Nobody would look me in the eye.
“I wasn’t even there,” I told the girl who operated the committee, as though this would change anyone’s minds. “I was in my room. I was watching a movie.”
She coughed and turned away. It was clear that whatever excuses I could muster, they weren’t wanted. Not now.
“Just don’t bother,” Raphael told me later that night at dinner. “I think you need to focus on what’s going to keep you safe throughout all of this, so you can continue to grow in your powers.”
I stared at my mashed potatoes, moving them around across my plate. “I just can’t understand why so many people had to die. Was it some kind of test? Was it just to push me over the edge?” I dropped my fork and watched as it clattered across the table.
Over the next weeks, it became obvious that I wasn’t necessarily a welcome part of Origins Supernatural Academy. Margot muttered stuff about me wherever I went, to a degree that made me feel like, why even bother provoking her? She was just going to keep it up.
Beside. I knew she was right. If I hadn’t been at Origins, none of those people would have died.
I was meant to be fighting the monsters, but I was losing the war.
I did hear it whispered from others as we crept closer and closer to Thanksgiving, though.
“Things were never like this before she got here.”
“We had such a lovely school.”
“I want to go back to the way it was. I want to feel safe when I go to sleep at night.”
“I don’t know why the headmaster won’t do something about it. He’s putting us at such an insane risk.”
Wherever I went, at least one of the boys was with me. They wanted to ensure nobody attacked me, whether they were from one of the factions or in Margot’s strange clan. Although I liked the company, it felt strange to be deemed such a “delicate” force that I needed this help.
Celeste was slow to recover from what had happene
d to her. She took several weeks off, staying in first the hospital and then her parents’ apartment, so that they could nurse her back to health.
Over Christmas, many of the students left. I was grateful that the abuse ended with their abandonment. It left me time with Raphael, Quintin, and Ezra—time to focus on my powers with Professor Binion—and time to regroup with Celeste, who had finally admitted she could speak a bit about what had happened to her, if not with much articulation.
On Christmas Eve, I sat with Celeste in the makeshift room her parents had made up for her in the apartment they shared. In the kitchen, her parents had begun to cook a turkey feast, complete with stuffing and cranberries and several pies. The boys planned to stop by later to eat with us, as did Professor Binion. For now, though, it was just Celeste and I. I wanted to cherish it.
“How are you feeling lately?” I asked her, my voice low. We were careful not to discuss what had happened in front of her parents, as it riled them up.
Celeste nodded. “Genuinely good. I feel stronger than I did even a week ago. I think I’m fully ready to return to classes in January. I can’t get any more behind. I told you. That spell of changing water to wine will only get me so far when I’m looking for jobs.”
I chuckled, grateful that she was back to at least a portion of her old self—able to crack jokes.
“What did happen that night? Do you remember anything else?” I asked her.
Why was I so curious? I guess I wanted to know what I was up against.
“All I can remember is that I was searching for survivors with you and the boys,” Celeste said. “And as I was near the dock, something grabbed me underwater. Something, like a hand or a shackle. It grabbed me and it yanked me down.”
I furrowed my brow.
“That probably sounds crazy to you, doesn’t it?” Celeste sighed.
“Why would it? Enough insane things have happened over the past year. I think I can handle a little underwater hand,” I told her. I then swallowed the lump in my throat and asked, “Do you remember anything about when you were in that other place? When I came to find you?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I remember bright lights and then sudden, horrible feelings of longing and loneliness. . The next thing I remember, I was in that hospital room and you were holding my hand.”
I pondered this for a moment. “I wish there was a way to see through what you saw, to understand where it was they put you exactly. I wonder if that would reveal who they were.”
Celeste pushed her lips to the side contemplatively. As much as I knew she wanted me to figure whatever this was out, I knew she also was just grateful that her enormous part in it was largely over. At least, for now.
Zoey called is in for Christmas Eve dinner. Together with Raphael, Quintin, and Ezra, we sat around the table and fell into an easy rhythm, a conversation that had nothing to do with all the horrible things we’d seen and done. As Raphael told everyone about a story about his father, I marveled at the ease with which he told it. He leaned back and spoke with his hands, and his laugh enveloped around all of us, until we joined in. As he spoke, I remembered how, because of me, the boys had had to kill those bounty hunters; they were now murderers. And there was no telling what they would have to do next to protect me.
As the night drifted toward midnight, the boys and I returned to the dorms. The campus was a bit gloomy, since it was December, but the fact that all the students were gone thrilled us and reminded us of last summer, when we’d been allowed a cozy ecosystem of our own creation—a world without bullies, without deaths, without anything but ourselves and the Gulf and the sun.
We crashed hard that night. When we awoke, the boys showered me with Christmas gifts, including a stunning gold bracelet, a new diary, several books about previous Oracles, which I’d begun to study up on, and a gorgeous pen with my name engraved on it. Before heading back to Celeste’s place, we feasted on cinnamon rolls and kissed and talked and eventually made love on the rug in front of the fireplace, right smack-dab in the center of the girls’ dormitory living area. Even though times were rocky, and there was no telling what would happen next, I was so grateful in these infinitely small moments that I had them beside me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The week after New Years, students began to return to Origins Supernatural Academy. As they flickered in, I noticed that there were even fewer cars than there had been at the start of the previous semester. When students and parents noticed me as they crept inside, they seemed to keep a wide berth. Obviously, my reputation stuck to me like glue. Fear was the name of the game, and it was clear that they were frightened for their children’s lives. Hell, I was frightened for their lives. If I’d been their parents, I might not have allowed them to return, either.
Still, it was one thing to be labeled the high school “target,” and another thing entirely to be labeled the ticking time bomb, the murderer, the reason to stay far, far away.
I pondered this for several days. I felt I couldn’t shake it—the feeling that I was such a detriment to the state of Origins Supernatural. When I went to the dining hall, people did their best to keep at least ten feet between themselves and I. A girl I’d gotten along with throughout other months literally dropped her tray and chucked herself across the dining hall. When I gaped at her, she gave me a half shrug and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
Of course, not everyone understood that the way things now were was such a detriment to my mental health. It wasn’t like I expected them to care.
Professor Binion noticed a shift in my mood. I could sense it in the way he asked questions, in the way he said hello when I reached his office. He tried to make his smile wider; he attempted to ask me silly, friendly things, like, what I was going to do for fun that night, or what I liked to eat most for lunch. Still, it was always obvious that the words were strained, just something to cover up what he truly wanted to know. He wanted to make sure I still had the mental strength to keep going, to keep training.
Finally, in the middle of a lesson one day, I let my shoulders slump and turned my face toward the window. It had begun to rain, a sad January drizzle, and I felt unending desolation. I almost asked, right there on the spot, if I could return to my bedroom, to return to sleep. I wanted to be unconscious, to not remember. At least for a little while.
“Come on, Ivy. Tell me,” Professor Binion finally uttered. “What’s on your mind?”
“I just don’t know why I’m still here,” I whispered. “So many students haven’t returned this semester because of me and the danger I represent.”
Professor Binion nodded. “To be honest, it’s true that many parents have threatened the school, declaring war on it if they don’t create a safer environment.”
“Then that settles it,” I told him. “I have to leave. As soon as possible. I know it’s the only place in the world that I’m in any way protected, but I cannot be the reason that Origins Supernatural goes under. There’s no telling how long any of this will go on.”
“But you must sense it, Ivy,” Professor Binion said.
“Sense what?”
“Sense that the time is drawing nearer and nearer,” he replied. “There’s been a shift in the air. There’s a change in the energy. I can almost see it physically in the space around you. We’re coming toward it. It’s on the horizon now. Tell me you know this to be true.”
My eyes closed. In my heart, in my mind, I knew that I’d carried this fact with me for several weeks. Perhaps I’d been too frightened to engage with the idea, for fear that it wouldn’t come to any kind of fruition.
“Yes. I can,” I murmured, marveling at how the feeling now seemed to explode near my heart. I placed my hand over my chest and heaved a sigh. “I know it’s coming.”
“Focus on that energy, Ivy,” Professor Binion continued. “It’s the only thing you can really do. That energy creates a shell of happiness and light around you. From this happiness and light comes your power. Don’t allow yoursel
f to dip into the gloominess. Do not dwell on . “Ae past, on what has come before. Remember that you were born for a future that you’re bound to create.”
I carried professor Binion’s words around with me throughout the rest of the day. That night, I sat in Ezra’s bedroom, my feet slung over the side of his bed. The boys joked about something that had happened in calculus that morning, while I studied the ceiling. A smile flickered across my face.
“Look at you,” Ezra said suddenly. He dropped onto the bed and dotted a kiss on my cheek. “You look so happy.”
“Is that not allowed?” I asked playfully.
“You’ve just been... not yourself lately,” Quintin offered.
“We’ve been worried,” Raphael continued. “But we didn’t want to pry about it. We know that it’s been a difficult time.”
“I just sense that something is going to happen soon,” I said. “And regardless of whether that thing is good or bad, I think it will be better than the here and now. It’ll be better than this stagnation. Right now, the only thing that’s changed is the clothes people wear while they keep as big a distance between themselves and me in the dining hall.”
Ezra strung a strand of hair around my ear. “You’re going to be ready, Ivy.”
“There’s no way you could say that and know it to be true,” I told him.
“I know your heart, Ivy. We all do. We’ve seen you do extraordinary things. And whoever is out there, trying to challenge you, you’ve proven your worth at every turn in the road,” he continued.
I fell against him, my head against his shoulder. He rubbed my back, my upper shoulders, then curved his hand around my breast. I turned my lips up to meet his and kissed him with my eyes closed and my heart on my sleeve. My fingers busied themselves over the buttons on his shirt, then I thrust the black garment over his broad shoulders. In seconds, he’d removed my black dress and lifted his hands beneath my breasts, cupping them and pushing them together. He kissed me again and then unhooked the bra and stripped my panties off my feet. His lips turned over my nipples, his tongue curling around and around. He sucked softly, then harder, and my body reacted to the mix of pain and pleasure. His hand slid down the slit between my legs and then opened my glistening pink pussy. The tips of his fingers found my clit and he moved them in circles gingerly, as his face remained at my breasts and his eyes studied my face.
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