Chosen for Song, Volume 1

by Delia Stewart

  "Which are what, exactly?" I asked.

  "You know we don't share that kind of information." This was one of the most annoying things about Schola Celata. We were all supposed to treat each other as if we were just students at any school, taking everyone at face value. The teachers made a show of not revealing what each student was capable of, insisting that unless our lessons were focused on channeling specific gifts, our abilities shouldn't impact our learning. They also cited some kind of privacy issues. Most students learned about the gifts of the others through frank questioning, which we were all used to, or through gossip, which was more common though less accurate.

  "Dad, there's something going on with her, I can feel it."

  Dad rubbed a hand down his face and sat back, looking at me with soft eyes. "Carly, honey. I know this is hard. This is all new to you, and I'm sure it's unsettling, maybe a little scary. Your gift is still developing, and I know you sense things you don't understand sometimes. I think you're probably picking up on her discomfort at being in a new school, being a stranger."

  "She doesn't seem uncomfortable at all. At Tate, she's managed to fit right in with the queen's court with no problem at all." I rolled my eyes, thinking of the table full of mean girls. They insisted on being referred to as "the Royals."

  "The 'queen's court?'" Dad asked, frowning.

  "There's a pecking order at Tate. I'm on the bottom. Dora's already on top."

  "Maybe because she's a junior and you're a freshman?"

  I shook my head. "It was like she just walked in and they recognized her as one of their own. Evil."

  "Okay, Carly, that's probably enough." He sat up and turned back to his keyboard. "If you're learning anything here, I hope it's that every student is different, and each of us has struggles no one else knows about." It was the first time Dad had ever referred to himself as a student.

  "Dad, did you go to school here?"

  He looked at me sideways. Since learning my dad was the director of Schola Celata, I'd learned very little else about how that happened, or what his previous involvement with the school might have been. "I did."

  "But I thought you grew up in Portland." I shook my head, trying to make the pieces in my brain fit together in some way that made sense.

  "There are Celatas all around the world, Carly. There's one in Portland too."

  "But Mom thinks you were homeschooled by your hippie parents!" All the stories about my grandparents were starting to fuzz, and my fond memories of their land in Oregon and our family trips to visit them were starting to seem like lies somehow.

  "Carly, I don't have time to talk about this right now. We will, I promise." He stood up and pulled me into a hug, his calm energy flowing through me, making me feel less worried and confused. He released me. "Do me a favor. Get to know Dora. Give her a chance, okay?"

  I sighed. "Fine." Then I remembered I had other things I wanted to talk to him about. “Hey Dad?”

  He blew out a breath and looked up at me, his I’m-being-patient look in place. “Yes?”

  “Are you going to recruit Ethan? Vance and Alex think he’s like them. A.. magnetic.” I hesitated on the word, which was still new to me.

  Dad’s eyes slid shut and he sighed again. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you worried about him meeting his counter? Someone dark and dangerous or whatever?”

  “I’m worried about a lot of things, Carly. Including you.”

  “And the girls turning up bitten? Armstrong told us.”

  Dad frowned. “I asked him to get some people working on that. We’ve been asked for help.”

  “He told us. By the police.” It was so strange to me that the police knew about Schola Celata, that they would come here for help.

  “Yes. There are alums on the force, you know. We communicate regularly.”

  “So what do you think is happening? Does this have something to do with the prophesy?” I was leaning over his desk now, my weight on my hands as it finally seemed like we were having a real conversation, like he might actually tell me something.

  Dad turned his attention back to his computer. “I’ll see you at dinner."

  I’d been dismissed. “Okay. Bye.”

  I left Dad's office to find Dora leaning against the wall across the hall, staring down at her fingernails as if she could wait forever. "Ready?" she asked in that cheery voice she'd used in Dad's office.

  "Sure," I said, wary of this girl who radiated an energy like nothing I'd felt before. Wrong. Something about her was wrong.

  We didn't talk as we proceeded down the long stone tunnel from Dad's office to the front doors of the school. In the dark abandoned train tunnel out front, I shivered with unease. I hated it in here. But Dora was smiling, seemingly relaxed as we walked through the near-darkness to the obscured door to the west side.

  "Oh, look out," she said, shoving my arm gently to guide me around a dead rat I'd nearly stepped on in the darkness.

  "Thanks," I said. How had she seen that when I'd barely noticed the lump until I was on top of it?

  Dora pulled open the door for me and a few minutes later we were walking through the fading sunlight in Riverside Park. The tension in my body relaxed a bit.

  "So school is hard for you, huh?" She looked at me, her short dark hair swinging around her pretty face.

  "Not especially," I said, unsure whether she meant Tate or Celata.

  "Socially, I mean," she clarified, her eyebrows rising.

  "No," I said, realizing I would probably deny anything she believed about me. "Not really."

  "Well, that's good," she said, smiling in a way that made my blood go cold. "It kind of seems like all you really have there is Alex. And Vance, of course. And that little deformed friend of yours, what's her name?"

  "Deformed friend?" I shook my head. This girl was off her rocker, and I didn't like her talking about my friends.

  "The Asian girl? With the violin?"

  Grace? Was she talking about Grace? A momentary vision popped through my mind, of the strange illusion that had come into my head earlier when I'd watched Grace walk away from me, when I'd thought I'd seen her limping, scarred.

  "Never mind," Dora said, just as I was about to speak. "That doesn't matter." We were approaching Broadway, and the noise of traffic made it harder to hear her, but there was little confusing the menace in her voice as she whispered. "Just know this, Carly." She stopped walking and her hand gripped my forearm like a vice. "What is yours will soon be mine, and we will all serve the master soon enough. One is a lonely number, little mouse. Better to be part of the many than to be the one, don't you think?"

  I stared at her, wondering if I'd misheard some part of what she said. No one had mentioned the prophesy to me since we'd dispelled the Witiku demon. Life, if it was possible given the number of supernatural elements contained in my own, was pretty normal. Until now.

  "I know everything," she went on. "And soon you'll lose everything."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" I managed. What was mine would soon be hers?

  "I think you know. And soon you'll have a choice to make. Join us or be destroyed." This last part came out like a hiss, and Dora's eyes flickered, shifting for a split second to long slit-like irises before she blinked, and the illusion cleared.

  "Us?" I asked. "Who? The royals?"

  "You'll know soon enough," she said, her voice light and false again. "See you at school!" She released me and turned, sauntering off up Broadway and leaving me standing on the sidewalk with cabs and bikes flying by as my mind whirred.

  Something was very wrong here. I needed to find out what it was.

  I walked the rest of the way home with a dark unsettled feeling twisting in my gut. I imagined just heading up my steps, into my room, and settling down to do my homework as usual. But I couldn't fathom concentrating with Dora's words ringing through my mind.

  What is yours will soon be mine.

  Dora wasn't just a mean girl--she was creepy as he
ll. Her weird dark eyes had gone all moony when she'd said Alex's name, and they'd been hard as steel when she mentioned Grace. I shivered as I drew near to my building, and it wasn't because of the way the air was chilling as fall drifted into wintertime in New York. It was Dora. I fiercely wished she would just crawl back into whatever hole she came from.

  As I moved nearer to home, my mind churned with evil ideas, ways I could get Dad to see there was something wrong here. Did kids get expelled from Schola Celata? I wondered if I could frame her, get her kicked out.

  But really, none of that was me. Not something I could do.

  I sighed and lifted my eyes as I paused at the bottom of the stairs to my house.

  "Hey," Vance called up. He was sitting next to Madame Codona in one of her metal patio chairs. She used the sunken area in front of her garden apartment door like a private patio, which I guess it kind of was. She was out there a lot in her shapeless old lady housedresses, smoking and watching. She sat there now, next to Vance, watching me.

  "Carly," she said, and as usual, her withered old voice drifted through me like smoke, giving me the chills. "Come down a minute," she said.

  Vance smiled up at me, and even though I wasn't sure I was in the mood for Codona's particular brand of crazy, I was always drawn to Vance. His easy smile and calm aura drew me in, and right now it was like a cool drink after a long desert hike.

  I rounded the iron railing and descended the steps to Madame Codona's door, where Vance pulled me into his arms and smiled down at me. Vance was tall and sturdily built, muscular and solid. And when his arms wrapped me like this, pulling me against the solid security of his hard chest, I felt my entire body vibrate with a kind of pleasure I'd never known before. Vance was safety, he was security, he was like coming home after a long uncertain journey. I leaned my head against his chest and let my eyes slip closed for a moment, my arms around his waist. I felt him press a kiss to the top of my head and after a minute, I leaned back to look up into his face.

  The smile was there, as always, but his bright green eyes were darker now, his lids slightly closed. As if I affected him too.

  "You okay?" He asked me, frowning down at whatever expression I was making. "You look upset."

  "Dora walked me home," I said, and Vance's head snapped up, scanning the street for Dora.

  "She turned off at Broadway."

  Vance's grip on me tightened and then relaxed as I stepped backward and greeted Madame Codona.

  "This girl troubles you?" she asked, tilting her head like a bird as she watched me.

  I sighed and slid into a chair, dropping my pack to the ground. "I don't know. Maybe I'm being too sensitive." I was used to giving people the benefit of the doubt, and had been taught not to spread gossip. "But, actually," I said, remembering each of Dora's venomous words. "Yeah, she does trouble me. And today she said a bunch of weird shit to me. Like what is mine will soon be hers, and how one is such a lonely number and wouldn't I rather be one of the many."

  Vance's brows pulled together and he gave Madame Codona a questioning look. "She said something about you being the one? Or she just said one was a lonely number?"

  I shrugged. "It felt like she meant that I was the one, but she didn't say that exactly, I don't think." Dora's words were starting to fuzz in my mind, as if they'd had some kind of expiration date, or been written in invisible ink in my memory. "It seemed like she knew more than she was saying. Mostly she just wanted to intimidate me, I guess."

  "There's something off about that girl," Vance said.

  I sat forward. "Yes. That's exactly it. The energy around her is crazy. Like ... bad."

  Madame Codona narrowed her hawklike eyes at me, but still said nothing.

  "I told my dad about that, about the energy thing. I'm supposed to be able to feel it right? Affect it?" Both heads nodded. "But he said I was probably mistaking her nerves over being the new girl for something else."

  "Is that what you think, Carly?" Madame Codona asked.

  "Definitely not. If Dora's nervous then I'm Miley Cyrus."

  "Weird comparison," Vance muttered.

  "Sorry, I don't know why that whole Wrecking Ball thing is randomly in my head." I didn't. Miley riding that ball had just flown into my mind unbidden.

  "Maybe you want to wreck Dora," he suggested.

  "I think 'wreck' is a euphemism of sorts in that song," I said, actually thinking about it. "I'm not interested in Dora that way."

  He chuckled and Madame Codona made a tsking noise, like she was tired of the Miley Cyrus conversation.

  "Come inside," she said, and stood up abruptly.

  I was not a particular fan of Madame Codona's apartment. Walking through her door felt like going into a time warp and being transported back to some gypsy caravan of the past. It was dark and close in her place, the smell of incense hanging thick in the air over tufted furniture draped with scarves, and piles of old newspapers in the corners of the room. I was pretty sure her apartment must have been several rooms, but there were no discernible doorways out of the main room I'd been in before.

  "Sit," Madame Codona commanded, and I took a seat in the center of the room in front of the low table where she read cards. She'd read for me once before and I didn't like it. Without her saying it, I knew that was her intention again today.

  My eyes adjusted as she laid out the cards before me after asking me to hold my hands above them and think about Dora. Vance sat at my side, his closeness radiating warmth and calm in my direction.

  I'd seen Madame Codona lay out the cards before, and it had given me a sense of foreboding then, just as it did now.

  Once the cross was laid, she stared at it for a long moment, her hand hovering over certain cards, then moving slowly to another.

  "The serpent appears," she said quietly. "Here," she indicated a card called The Wheel, where a snake slithered off to one side of a strange yellow wheel that appeared to float in the clouds, carried on the back of some kind of foxlike demon and surrounded by winged creatures on all sides. The snake looked out of place, menacing, as it floated in the heavens near the western side of the wheel. "And here," she said, pointing to another card, this one upside down and next to another card that drew Madame Codona's finger. The Magician and the Lovers both had snake images in them, with the serpent around the magician's waist in one card and coiled around a tree just behind the woman who represented Eve in the other.

  "This is the present situation," Madame Codona indicated the lovers and then looked up at me with a raised eyebrow. She indicated a card crossed by another, and she lifted the top card for me to better see my present. "The seven of cups. A wealth of choices. But there is illusion here. Not all is what it seems." She pointed to something I hadn't noticed at first. Another snake, slithering out of one of the seven cups. She replaced the crossing card and made her tsk-tsk sound again as the dark image of the ten of swords was revealed again.

  I sucked in an involuntary breath. I hated the picture on the card--a body on the ground with ten swords piercing it, sticking up into the air. Behind the swords, it was black, foreboding.

  "Destruction. Death. Danger on all sides. Deception." She looked up at me, and I must have looked like I was about to pass out, because she added. "But look here. A little golden sky behind. Possibilities for things to improve, yes?"

  But off to the side the serpent waited on the wheel and the tower leaned with lightning all around it.

  "Dangerous times," Madame Codona said. "And trickery. This card here?" She jabbed a finger into the magician. "All is not as it would seem. Someone is not as they would have you believe."

  "Dora," I said, my mind jumping easily to the girl I was coming to think of as the enemy.

  "Or someone closer." With that happy little thought, Madame Codona gathered up the cards.

  Vance had been silent during the entire reading, and as we went back outside, gathering our packs from the chairs where we'd left them, he looked down at me and grinned.

&nbs
p; "What?" I asked him, wondering how he could always manage a smile.

  "You're hosed," he said, and then he wrapped his big arm around me and pulled me into his side.

  "Thanks a lot." I glanced up at my house, but I didn't feel ready to go inside, not after Madame Codona's predictions about death and destruction. Oh yeah, and deception.

  "I'll buy you a coffee," Vance said, as if he could read my mind. He took my hand and we walked together to the Starbucks a few blocks away, each of us sipping an iced latte as we found a table in the corner of the shop.

  "Where's Alex?" I asked.

  Vance's open face darkened for a moment and he dropped my gaze, picking at an invisible spot on the table. "He's brooding. Locked himself in his room. He's been weird for days."

  I frowned at him, trying to read those clear eyes of his. "Does that bother you? You guys are always together. And what you said--about him being connected to you somehow ..."

  "Yeah. Something's wrong," Vance said. "But I can't figure out what it is."

  "Has this happened before?"

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair. "I've only been at Celata a couple years longer than you, Carly. I don't know how all this stuff works. I just know that Alex is my magnetic half, that something's off when he pushes me away."

  That made sense. "Are you doing okay? That has to be hard."

  "For now. I just don't want to end up like the legend of Baz Allegash, you know?"

  I shook my head. "Nope. Never heard of him."

  Wrinkles creased Vance's forehead. "It's like a fairy tale," he said. "I forget which ones are the normal ones and which ones I learned at Celata."

  It was my turn to frown.

  "All the fairy tales have roots in truth. They're like allegories for life, things that happened to real people that we should watch for."

  "So there's a chance a witch might lure me to her gingerbread house and try to eat me?"

  "Be careful in the park," Vance said, raising an eyebrow as he made the joke.