by E. E. Holmes
As I closed the door behind me, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or sigh with relief. Clearly, my mentor was a complete lunatic. On the other hand, she was also a brilliant artist. If I could avoid being concussed by her penchant for throwing furniture, I might just learn something remarkable.
And then there was this Muse thing. Was it possible that it was true? Did I have some sort of additional ability? I didn’t like the idea of ghosts being able to use me like that; it seemed invasive, like being possessed or something. My drawing had always been my own private escape, something I had done purely for the joy of it. Was it possible that spirits were going to invade that last, secret corner of my life? Couldn’t I have this one, tiny portion of normalcy?
A cold, creeping sensation crawled its way up my spine and broke into my inner monologue. I stopped in my tracks and scanned the corridor around me. It seemed to be completely deserted.
“Hello?”
No one answered. The chill deepened, and I shivered violently.
“I know you’re there,” I said, turning on the spot and squinting into the shadows.
A dark place under a nearby tapestry suddenly rippled, as though the shadow itself was breathing.
I took a tentative step toward it. “Hello?”
A tiny, grubby hand materialized from the darkness. It was pointing at me.
I took a deep steadying breath and crouched down, trying to come to eye level with whatever it was that was looking at me. “Do you want to talk to me?”
The hand vanished, and for a moment I thought I’d scared it away. Then, with no warning, the very same spirit who had attacked me the day before shot out of the gloom and was hovering not an inch from my face.
I would have leapt back in fear if that same fear had not immobilized me where I stood. I swallowed hard and tried to keep the shaking out of my voice. “What do you want?”
She started yelling, her face screwed up with the effort of it, but not a syllable of it reached my ears.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I can’t hear you.”
Her mouth opened wide in a silent scream, and then, in frustration, she began to beat her fists upon the air, which remained solid and impenetrable between us.
I just stood there, helpless, watching her efforts to communicate drain her energy, so that she started blinking in and out of focus. Finally, with one last furious swipe, she gave up, exhausted, her thin shoulders heaving.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered again.
The little girl stared up into my face. As I watched her eyes fill up with spectral tears, I found that my own vision became clouded; that I was, in fact, sobbing. Before I could really even process this information, or do anything to control myself, she was flickering and fading into nothing but a strange, negative imprint behind my closed eyes. As she disappeared, so did whatever alien emotion that had seeped into me, and after a moment, the tears on my cheeks felt as out of place as though someone else had cried them. I brushed them away quickly with the back of my hand and tried to calm my ragged breathing.
“Hey!”
I looked up to find Finn Carey hurrying toward me. I swiped again at the tear tracks on my face. He came to a sudden halt a few feet from me, as though he’d met the boundary of another Sanctity Line hidden beneath the carpet.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” I tried to get up, but my knees couldn’t quite remember how to straighten.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me!” I snapped, struggling to find my bearings.
Finn hovered indecisively on the spot, staring at me as I tried awkwardly to get to my feet. He made a sound that might have been a sigh of frustration, and when he spoke his voice came out in a growl. “Do you need me to go get someone?”
I glared at him. “No. There was just this ghost and she… “
“A ghost? What ghost?” he asked. He shook his hair back out of his face and peered around, his expression skeptical.
“Forget it. I said I’m fine.”
He didn’t move. He just kept staring at me. I finally straightened up, though my knees were shaking.
“What is this, a spectator sport? The show’s over! Nothing to see here,” I said, swinging my bag over my shoulder.
He just scowled at me. Then he turned on his heel and stalked away, his hands shoved deeply into his pockets.
Awesome. I’d met this guy twice. The first time I tripped and fell right into him, and the second time I’d fallen to my knees, sobbing in the middle of the hallway. Nothing pissed me off more than coming across as the damsel in distress, especially to someone who clearly had not the slightest inclination to help me. Not to mention the fact that I’d barely been here two days and already I seemed to have a spectral stalker. I set off down the hallway, glancing this way and that for any sign of her. There were dozens of us in the same building; why was this little girl harassing me and, more importantly, what did she want?
“Well, look who it is,” said a sultry, smoky voice that I recognized, despite hearing it on only one other occasion.
I spun on the spot at the top of the stairs to see Lucida and Catriona on the landing below me. They were both as uncannily flawless and beautiful as I’d remembered them on the night they’d invaded my bedroom. I’d thought perhaps I’d exaggerated it in my mind, or that the moonlight and strangeness of that encounter may have created a false impression, but no. Here, with the afternoon sun streaming in through the stained-glass windows, their glamour was even more apparent.
“Well, you made it then, I see,” Catriona said. “I thought I saw you at the Welcoming Ceremony.”
“Yeah, we made it,” I said, stiffly. “I saw you there, too. Nice playing.”
Catriona rolled her eyes. “Thanks. They always make me do that.”
“Oh, come off it, Cat, you know you love to show off with that bloody fiddle,” Lucida said. “How would you know?” Catriona shot back. “You barely made it to the ceremony.”
Lucida grinned. “You got me there.” She turned back to me. “I’d have thought Marion and her mates would have driven you out by now. Going to make a go of it?”
“I don’t see that we have much of choice,” I said.
“Suppose not. And what about your sister? What kind of state did you find her in?” Lucida asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning at her.
“I mean after all the docs and shrinks had finished with her. Has she completely lost her marbles?”
Her avid gleeful expression sent fury pulsing through my body. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“Lay off, Lucida,” Catriona said, but she was pulling a hair absently from her sleeve as she said it, and it was obvious she didn’t really care.
“No need to get sore with me, Jessica. I’m the one that tracked her down in the first place,” Lucida said. “Haven’t I earned a few details? Come on now, just spill a bit. Was she drugged up? Restrained? Electro-shock?”
“Do me a favor,” I spat at her, “And don’t talk to me again. Ever.”
I stalked past them down the stairs.
“Ah, come on, don’t be like that, love!” Lucida called after me, and I could hear the barely-repressed laugh in her voice. “Can’t we be mates?”
“No,” I muttered under my breath. Behind me, as I turned the corner and caught a snatch of Catriona’s voice, saying something that sounded like “…such a bloody troublemaker.” I seethed about it all the way down to the dining room, where I found Hannah already seated at our corner table, knees up under her chin, buried in our Ceremonial Basics textbook. I took a moment to compose myself, then grabbed a plate, loaded it up, and joined her. I’d been too nervous to eat much at breakfast, and it was only as I bit into a sandwich that I realized how hungry I was.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
She looked up and smiled. “It was fine. Siobhán is very nice.”
“Great!
What did you talk about?”
Hannah placed a scrap of paper into the book to mark her place and carefully closed it again. “She asked me a lot about how I was feeling, and I told her. That part was a bit like seeing one of my therapists, but better, because I didn’t feel like she was trying to find something wrong with me.”
I nodded in sympathy. After my one and only foray into therapy, I’d gladly have watched all psychiatrists jump off a cliff — while holding hands and talking all about their feelings, obviously.
“She asked me questions about when I first started seeing ghosts, and what that has all been like for me. She’s not at all like that other woman, Marion. She knew Elizabeth when she was here.”
I was pulled up short. “Elizabeth?”
“Yeah. You know…our mother,” Hannah said, squirming uncomfortably at the label.
“I know who you meant. It was just weird to hear you call her that.”
“I don’t usually call her anything,” Hannah said, in barely more than a whisper. Then she shrugged and went on. “Anyway, Siobhán wants to help me adjust to being here, and wants me to talk to her if I need help or advice.”
“I’m really glad, Hannah,” I said, just as Mackie slid into the seat beside me.
“How’s it going, alright?” she asked us.
“Hannah’s meeting was fine. Mine was bizarre.”
“Why? What happened?” Hannah asked.
I rounded on Mackie. “I think you left out a minor detail about Fiona.”
Mackie tried to look innocent, but couldn’t quite manage it. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know, how about the fact that she’s completely —”
“Off her nut? Mad as a hatter?” Mackie suggested.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“I was kind of surprised they assigned you to her. They don’t send many Apprentices her way.”
“I can see why,” I said, and told them all about the meeting.
“So that’s the end of that then, eh? She chucked you out?”
“Actually, I go back again on Monday,” I said.
“You’re actually going to go back?” Hannah asked. “But she … she threw a chair at you!”
“Well, not exactly at me,” I hedged. “It was more in my general direction.”
Mackie looked impressed. “Wow, I’ve never known anyone who’s been back for seconds with Fiona. Good on ya.”
“Thanks,” I said, starting to rethink my whole decision-making process and wondering if I’d do better to just ask for a new mentor.
We finished our lunch and walked over to History and Lore of the Durupinen, which was held in Celeste’s bright and airy first-floor classroom. It was the only other class we shared with the Caomhnóir, who were already seated silently on their side of the Sanctity Line when we came in. Celeste was a passionate lecturer, and although all we received on the first day was an introductory speech, I had to grudgingly admit that the class would be fascinating. As reluctantly as I’d come here, I couldn’t deny that I was interested to know what I could about my family’s culture, even if that culture was creepier and more clandestine than most.
By this point in the day, Peyton and her crew had apparently decided to pretend we didn’t exist, which suited me just fine. The same was true for Finn Carey and the rest of the Caomhnóir, who tended to ignore us in general anyway. The most exciting thing to happen the entire class was Savannah strolling in ten minutes late, reeking of cigarettes and claiming that she’d gotten lost, though the classroom was only a few yards from the entrance hall. Celeste restrained from shouting at her with extreme difficulty.
By the time we arrived back in our room that night after dinner, I was exhausted. Hannah dragged her bag over to one of the armchairs by the fireplace, pulled out our Ceremonial Basics textbook, and started reading the chapters Siobhán had assigned us for homework. The thought of trying to absorb anything else about the Durupinen culture made my head throb, but I was still too wired to go to sleep. I decided what I needed was a friendly face and a nice dose of normalcy; I needed Tia. So I took my laptop out of its case and began unraveling the various cords. As I worked, Milo drifted in.
“What up, biatches?” he trilled. “How was the first day of classes? Do tell all!”
Hannah smiled, closed her book, and launched into a full description of the day’s events. Hearing her talk to Milo was very strange; she never spoke that much to anyone living. I felt a petulant little stab of jealousy that took me by surprise. I tried to ignore it as I struggled to connect to the outside world.
“Do you two mind if I Skype with Tia? If she doesn’t hear from me by tonight she’ll probably have a panic attack.”
“Be our guest,” Milo said, not even looking away from Hannah.
“Thanks,” I said, and signed into my Skype account. It seemed to take forever to connect to Tia, so while I waited, I tried to decide what exactly I was going to tell her. I couldn’t just unload all my woes on her in miserable detail, as I would have liked, and I resented that.
My instructions from Karen and the rest of the Durupinen had been very clear; I had to stick to the official cover story for my time here: I had been accepted into a prestigious study abroad program in England at Fairhaven University. When I finished my Apprentice training, I would be provided with a transcript, all the credits of which would be fully transferable back to St. Matt’s the following fall, so that I could still graduate on time. Tia was a little bit of a special case, since she knew all about the ghost stuff, and so, although I couldn’t tell her any of the specifics, she knew that part of my “educational experience” would be to get the spirit activity under control. Even this tiny concession came at the expense of a lot of begging and pleading on my part; I had to convince Karen, and then Karen had to convince Finvarra and the Council, that Tia was simply too smart to accept the bullshit scenario that I had suddenly decided to study abroad on a whim, and that, if I didn’t give her some idea of what was happening, she would look into it herself. And, as Tia was exceptionally good at getting the answers she wanted, it was better to put her off the attack. This way, I could at least control what she knew, and the Council could avoid having to do the kind of damage control that had left poor Pierce with a huge box full of blank tapes and empty memory cards. In the end, they agreed. And Tia, as I had promised she would, accepted that I couldn’t tell her everything, and settled for the knowledge that I was getting help.
“Hello? Jess? Is that you?” Tia’s voice, stilted and tinny, rang from my speakers. I could barely make out the shape of her head in the stilted, pixelated image.
“Yeah, Tia, it’s me. Hang on, I can’t see you. Come on, come ON,” I grumbled, fiddling with the power cord, the screen angle, and the resolution setting in turn before resorting to whacking the computer with my fist out of sheer technological incompetence. Oddly enough, this last method worked suspiciously well, and Tia’s heart-shaped face framed with sleek curtains of glossy black hair resolved itself from the pixels and broke into a smile.
“Jess!”
Just the sight of her had me swallowing back a threatening onslaught of tears. “Hey, Ti! How are you?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine, don’t worry about me, for goodness sake!” she said with a wave of her hand. “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said, hardly daring to hint at my misery in case I dissolved into a useless puddle.
“Well, you obviously got there okay. What’s it like? Oh, sorry. Can I ask that? I probably shouldn’t have asked that.”
I laughed. “That’s okay. It’s beautiful here, you would love it. It’s like going to school in a Jane Austen novel, without the dress code. See?” And I picked the laptop right up off of the desk and panned the room with it so that she could see my digs.
“Oh, wow!” Tia sighed. “Is that a fireplace in your room?”
“Yup! Kind of drafty, but it beats the hell out of our old room in Donnelly, I can tell you that.”
“No kidding! What about your classes? I probably shouldn’t ask you about that either.”
“I think the classes will be challenging, but in a good way.”
“And I suppose you can’t tell me what any of those subjects are, huh?”
“Well … I’m taking a study in old Celtic languages. And a private tutorial in art and art history,” I said.
“Yeah, and I’m sure those are the most interesting and unusual things you’re learning,” Tia said with a laugh.
“Oh, yeah, everything else is really boring and predictable.”
“Alright, I’ll be good. Enough about all the stuff you can’t tell me.
How’s Hannah?”
I glanced over my shoulder. Hannah was deep in conversation with Milo. “She’s…adjusting.”
Tia smiled a little too knowingly. “It’ll get better. For both of you. It may just take some time.”
“Normally I’d say you’re right as usual, but this time, I really don’t think so,” I said. My vision began to cloud as the tears started to win their fight for domination.
“Oh, I knew it, I knew you were upset! Your voice sounded all quivery. I wish I could help,” Tia said, picking at her fingers fretfully. “Can’t you tell me about any of it?”
“No, not really. It’s just that…well, we don’t feel very welcome here. And I never thought I’d say this ever in my life, because I never really stayed anywhere long enough to think of it as home, but I think I’m homesick.” I brushed the tears away with the back of my hand and took a deep breath. “I miss St. Matt’s, and you, and Sam, and… ”
“And Gabby?” Tia suggested.
I burst out laughing. “Especially Gabby.”
Tia bent over to pick up her mug of tea and I focused on her surroundings for the first time. I’d recognize that institutional cinder block wall anywhere. “Wait, are you at St. Matt’s right now?” Tia nodded, her mouth full of tea. She swallowed and said, “Yeah. I’m in MacCleary Hall.”