Chosen for Song, Volume 1

by Delia Stewart

  "He's a magnetic," Vance said, tugging my arm to get me walking again. "Like me."

  "People are drawn to him," Alex said.

  "He's always been like that. It's not a power, it's just annoying." I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Ethan meeting up with three kids on the end of the block as they turned the corner.

  "It's a power. He just hasn't figured out what to do with it yet. For now he just uses it to get girls." Vance shrugged. "When he meets his counter, he'll know."

  "His counter?" I looked between Vance and Alex, understanding dawning. "Like, his ... Alex?"

  Alex shot me a smile. "There's only one Alex," he said, his voice nearly a purr. "But yes. He'll eventually attract his second half, and they'll either kill each other or learn to work together. They'll need Celata."

  I shook my head. "What?"

  "Don't freak," Vance said. "Alex and I knew right away. Magnetics usually do."

  "So you're both ... magnetic? That's this whole light and dark thing?"

  "Basically," Alex said. "We work better together."

  "When did you guys meet?" I'd never heard how Alex and Vance had become so close, so attached.

  "My parents sent me here to live with my aunt," Vance said. "And I ran into Alex down in the Village, being an ass to a group of tourists."

  I shot a look at Alex, but he just shrugged.

  "It was a few years ago. He was living on the street, and he made money by hustling people who didn't know better."

  "What do you mean?" I looked between them, which was hard because they were both taller than me. Alex took my hand, squeezed it gently.

  "I needed to eat, and people are stupid," he said, as if that was an explanation.

  "So what, you stole from tourists?"

  "I think it's called mugging," Vance said, a note of irritation in his voice.

  "It's not like I was threatening them," Alex said. "I didn't have a weapon." He didn't sound apologetic, which surprised me, but there was a darkness inside Alex that I had always known was there. It popped out sometimes.

  "They didn't know that," Vance pointed out. "Anyway, Carly, I saved him from all that. After he was done trying to beat the shit out of me."

  I stopped walking. "So let me get clear on this. You found him mugging tourists, you tried to stop him, he beat you up, and the rest is history?"

  Vance laughed lightly and threw his arm over my shoulders. "Something like that."

  "I was searching," Alex said, taking my hand again. "I knew it. And when I met Vance, I felt the connection. I didn't understand it, but he'd been at Celata a while, and he could identify it. I just knew I needed to either kill him or keep him by my side."

  "I'm really glad you didn't kill him," I said, leaning my head into Vance's warm security for a moment. "Wait though, are you saying Ethan will have to confront someone dark? Someone dangerous? And that person might kill him?"

  "Maybe not," Vance said. "Maybe your dad won't recruit him."

  I thought about that. Dad hadn't said anything about Ethan to me, but I resolved to speak to him later today. He'd be at Schola Celata, and I had intensive history this afternoon. I'd talk to him after school.

  We climbed the steps at Tate, and the boys each gave me a hug as we went our separate ways. I shoved things in my locker and grabbed my math book, turning to rush to class, and noticed Dora across the hallway, watching me.

  That girl gave me the willies, and I hated that she knew my secrets. How was it possible that she belonged at Schola Celata? So far I had no idea what her special gift might be, but I knew she definitely had the power of bitchcraft.

  That afternoon, Grace and Colton went with me to Schola Celata, walking across the west side and into Riverside Park at my sides after fifth period.

  "At what point will I be trusted to take myself to school?" I asked Colton, who always took me to school if Vance and Alex were otherwise occupied. Like them, there was something about Colton, something I could feel inside myself. A link? A bond, maybe?

  For a girl who'd never had a boyfriend, it was strange to know there were three boys around me now who would certainly do almost anything for me. My relationship with Colton was different than with the other boys, but I could feel his interest and his loyalty tucked close, like having an emergency hundred dollar bill in the side of my wallet. He touched me sometimes--a gentle hand on my back, a reassuring palm on my shoulder--but Colton had never kissed me, never held my hand.

  "After a year you'll have a key."

  Grace held up a small black stone that looked absolutely nothing like a key. "Like this."

  "That appears to be a rock," I said.

  "You of all people should know by now that things are rarely what they appear to be." Colton grinned at me and raised an eyebrow at Grace, who let out a sigh that sounded like irritation. I glanced at her.

  "Everything okay?"

  "Fine," she said. "Just getting some pressure from people about things." She emphasized the words pressure and people, and I had the sense she meant Colton.

  "Oh." Again, I was on the outside of some secret. I was beginning to be annoyed by this. How long would I be the new girl? "So do I have to like, earn my key?"

  "It's just a formality. A year of instruction. Once you're loyal and you've mastered some part of your gift, you'll have a key." Colton said this like it was something I shouldn't worry about, so I decided I wouldn't. But I might ask my dad about that, too.

  Inside the Celata main entrance, we parted ways. I said goodbye to Colton, and then turned to say goodbye to Grace, but she was already disappearing down an alternate hallway toward music. I did a double take, my words faltering as I called out my goodbye to her. For a split second, Grace didn't look like herself as she moved away from me. When I turned to call goodbye, my eyes had played some kind of trick on me, and Grace hadn't been the small, compact and graceful girl I knew, the one with long shiny black hair hanging down her back. Instead, I'd seen a flash of someone else--a girl with some kind of deformity or injury, a figure with one side of her body twisted and scarred, her hair missing on one side, and a pronounced limp that forced her to drag one foot. But as soon as I'd caught my "goodbye" in my throat and had time to blink, Grace was there, turning back to me with a wave and an uncertain smile.

  Weird.

  For a couple weeks after our visit to the past, I hadn't seen Mr. Armstrong. Those of us in the history intensive had been told to use our time to read independently, and we'd been warned that when Armstrong returned, he'd be in a less-than-cheerful mood, and that he would expect reports. With very little direction, I'd managed to select a period to study and had begun putting my findings and theories into a kind of report, a document I was assembling on my laptop. But I was used to a little more guidance.

  That was why I was relieved to find Armstrong sitting in a chair near the fireplace when I stepped into the history room. He was a small man, ferocious-looking, though. He had a fiery red beard and the bright green eyes that hid beneath bushy eyebrows were menacing today.

  Jeffrey sat at one end of the couch, typing on his laptop, his gloves at his side.

  They both looked up at me as I entered, neither saying a word. Annabelle greeted me from the corner, where I hadn't noticed her working.

  A few other students wandered in over the next few minutes. Celata's classes were far less organized than at Tate. It seemed there were always new students, or those I'd seen in the halls but who had never been in my classes before. They came and went, and I'd been made to understand that instruction here was far more fluid than at a traditional school, the instruction based around work the students were doing both inside and outside Schola Celata. Though we were students, we were also something else.

  The singular force of beings standing between the human world and the one that pulses just beneath it. The murkier shadow world where demons and monsters lurk.

  Mr. Clifton's words were never far from the surface of my thoughts. Though coming to Celata ha
d made me feel special in some ways, and had made some things in my life easier, it had also forced me to realize that the things I'd been afraid of as a kid--those things were real. And people like me, like the other students and graduates of Schola Celata, were the force that kept those monsters at bay.

  It was a lot of responsibility for a girl who'd been your run-of-the-mill Los Angeles teen less than a year ago.

  But my new abilities were welcome in some ways. It was like having a song running through your mind and finally being able to identify the tune--I'd known, somewhere deep, that there was something different about me. Something unusual. And when Samuel had spoken to me in my room, had awoken me to the knowledge I could affect and sense energy--it had been like waking up. My old life felt like the dream now.

  "History," Armstrong boomed, causing me to jump, and shaking all the students in the room from whatever self-directed learning they'd been doing. "History is why we're here. And it's where we're going if we aren't careful."

  There was a snort from somewhere in the room, though I couldn't tell which student it had come from. I wasn't eager to hear an overwrought lecture from the easily excitable Armstrong either, but it was preferable to what was probably happening back at Tate right about now. And it got interesting rather quickly.

  "Let's discuss the ways history and mythology interplay, shall we?" Armstrong rose, which meant he was only incrementally taller than when he'd been sitting--the man was maybe four foot two, on a good day. "Someone tell me about snakes in legends and myths." Armstrong looked around the room.

  "Snakes are often linked with sea monster legends," Annabelle said thoughtfully. Armstrong nodded. "In Greek mythology, Perseus rescued Andromeda by slaying a sea serpent that was about to eat her. And in Norse mythology, Thor defeated the Midgard serpent coiled around the Earth. And anyone who's read Harry Potter knows the legend of the basilisk, which was said to have the power to kill victims just by looking at them--that one is medieval in origin, I think."

  "Good, Annabelle, yes." Armstrong raised one furry red eyebrow as he looked around the room. "Is she forgetting anything?"

  "Adam and Eve?" I asked. I rarely spoke up, but it seemed the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a perfect example of snake legends.

  "The downfall of humanity itself," Armstrong said, smiling at me encouragingly.

  "And the Naga," came a voice I recognized. Alecia stood in the far corner of the room, looking angry as ever. "The ancient Indian snake people who are said to inhabit underground cities and rule the human world from their lair below the surface."

  "The Naga," Armstrong repeated appreciatively. "One of my favorite legends. Did you know there are legends of serpents in almost every ancient culture, from Native American to Southeast Asia, the Norse to the Greeks?" He looked around the room, waiting for someone else to volunteer something. When no one did, he went on. "Snakes are both revered and feared by humanity, and the variance in the serpent legends reflects that. Snakes are thought to represent rebirth and even immortality in some cultures--the way they shed their skins and reemerge, bigger, stronger, leads to that ideology. In addition to being attributed with powers of regeneration and rebirth, most serpent legends also attribute snakes with vast intelligence and superiority over the human race. In these myths and legends, we survive at the whim of the snake people who govern us. What do you think about that?"

  "Interesting," Jeffrey said, making notes in his journal.

  "The Naga legend is of particular interest because of its global influence," Armstrong said. "The Naga, which are sometimes described as benevolent and sometimes more like evil masterminds running the world, inhabited vast networks of underground tunnels. Evidence of tunnels attributed to the Naga snake-people has been uncovered all across the Asian continent, through India, and across the entirety of the Americas. Even here, in Manhattan."

  "But here they could just use the subway tunnels," Annabelle said.

  "And perhaps they would, if the legends were true, right?" Armstrong said, nodding in her direction. "But there are deeper tunnels, other clues. And lately, evidence is accumulating that suggests there is a possibility that this legend has some merit."

  "That snake people are potentially ruling humankind from tunnels below the city?" Alecia strode farther into the room, took a seat across from me. "What do you mean, evidence?"

  This was where things at Celata always got a little weird. Like I said before, the things we heard about as kids--vampires, shifters, ghosts--they'd been proven to be real since I'd been studying here. And most legends had some basis in reality. It was a hard truth to accept, but in some ways those of us at Schola Celata were here to keep the rest of humanity from having to deal with realities they didn't want to face.

  Armstrong crossed the room, pulled a stack of newspapers from a drawer in a huge armoire and passed them around the room. I opened the one he handed me and scanned the front page. Down toward the bottom there was a small article about a missing woman who had turned up later dead with peculiar wounds on her arms.

  "Vampires?" Jeffrey said, putting his own paper down. "Are all these articles about evidence of vampires?"

  "Bite wounds in every case," Armstrong said, steepling his hand before his lips as he looked at Jeffrey. "But not on an artery. On the arms. In a few cases, on the ankles, as if the women were struck or bitten as they ran or walked away."

  "And always women," Alecia said.

  "Indeed. And these are the ones they've found. Did you know that the number of missing girls in New York City has spiked by ten percent in the last year? And police reports in other major metropolitan areas are showing a similar trend."

  I stared at Armstrong. What the hell was he saying? Snakes and missing women. I didn't know how any of it related to us, but his discussion of the Naga legends gave me some idea where this might be going and I didn't like it. "Why are we talking about this?" I asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.

  "I want you all to study whatever you can get your hands on about both the serpent legends and historical spikes in missing girls. See if you can find any other periods of history with similar clusters of reports of women turning up bitten. Right now we're just looking for some correlation--and you're not the only ones working this, I assure you. But NYPD has asked for assistance, and I've always been of a mind that the best place to begin solving a current issue is by searching the past for clues."

  Armstrong gathered a few things and then left the room, and for a few minutes, we sat there quietly, each of us jotting notes.

  "Shit," Alecia said, laughing slightly as she stood. She glanced at me and sighed. "How are you doing, Carly?"

  I was shocked that Alecia was addressing me directly. Usually she skulked around the school, running errands for Mr. Clifton and helping keep the tunnels clear of demons and other vermin. Her gifts were far more frightening and violent than mine, as I'd learned when she'd dispatched the Witiku demon in my front room.

  "Uh, good?"

  She chuckled, her eyes flaring with what I guessed was amusement. "Things are about to get interesting around here."

  I was about to ask what exactly she meant, but she gathered her things into a bag and turned on her heel, disappearing out the door before I had a chance to say anything else.

  I needed to go have a talk with my dad.

  Chapter Three

  Dad was behind his desk when I knocked lightly on his open door, but when I stepped into his office, I was dismayed to see that he was not alone.

  Dora sat across from him, in a chair I hadn't been able to see from his open doorway.

  "Come on in, Carly. Have you met Dora, our newest student? You girls go to Tate together too, don't you?"

  Dora turned and shot me a maniacal smile before her voice came out sticky sweet. "Yes, sir. Carly and I both go to Tate. We've met a few times."

  I didn't like her tone or the weird smile on her face, and there was something instinctive flaring inside me. I didn't like her talking to
my dad.

  "I was just helping Dora get acclimated a bit. Since you're both fairly new here, I'd like you to look out for each other a little bit, maybe stick together?" Dad looked so hopeful, all I could do was nod. How could I tell him how awful Dora was to me at school or how just being near her made my insides recoil for whatever reason? I was supposed to be good at sensing energy, and the only energy I felt around her was bad.

  "That would be so nice," Dora gushed, that devious smile still aimed my way. "It'd be great to have a girlfriend to share secrets with." She actually giggled, and I couldn't help glancing at her again. She met my eyes and something inside me vibrated to life, buzzing in my mind like an alarm I couldn't snooze.

  She definitely had some kind of secret. I doubted she had any plans to share it with me, though. "Um, sure," I said, wishing she'd go ahead and leave so I could talk to my father alone.

  "Great, thanks girls," Dad said, looking at something on his computer screen with wrinkled brows. "Oh," he said, and then glanced at us, seeming to remember we were still there. "I'm going to have to deal with this right now. Will you excuse me?"

  "Of course," Dora said, standing. "We can walk home together, Carly."

  I turned to look at her, distrust and that strange worry mingling inside me. "Just a sec," I said. "Dad, can I talk to you a minute?"

  Dad was already furiously typing something into his computer, but at the pleading note in my voice, he paused. "Sure. Of course. Maybe Dora can wait outside for you?"

  "Will do," she said jovially, and she stepped into the hallway.

  I rose and closed the door, and then stepped around Dad's desk to lean into it, next to him. He looked up at me in surprise. "What's going on, Carly?"

  "That girl," I whispered. "I don't like her. There's something wrong there."

  Dad sighed and shook his head. "Students at Celata are all different. You should know that by now. Dora is a lot like you, honey. A little older, maybe, but she's new here, just discovering her gifts..."