“Hiya.”
“Haven’t seen you much this summer,” Leslie continued, and Bel fought the urge to snap, “More like haven’t spoken to me much,” and instead just gave a little shrug.
“Busy at the shop.”
She wished Leslie would just go away now, and she could feel Nolie’s eyes on her, asking a million questions.
But then Alice stepped forward. She was taller than Leslie, with the same dark, straight hair, although her eyes were blue, not brown like Leslie’s. They were also kind of mean as she glanced down beside Nolie’s plate and saw her book.
“Monsters of the Minch,” she read out loud, and behind her, Cara gave a muffled giggle.
Leslie just shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
Alice looked over at Al then, and his hat. “Aaaaand a Nessie cap,” she drawled. “The two of you planning to go hunting for fairies after your tea?”
Bel’s face was burning now, and there were two spots of red high on Al’s cheekbones.
Nolie turned her face up to Alice and smiled. “Why? Are there fairies around here?”
Alice scowled, then flicked her gaze over at Bel. “I thought you weren’t supposed to make friends with tourists,” she said, her voice almost sneering. “Isn’t that what you told Leslie?”
Bel’s eyes flew to Leslie, and she watched her former friend squirm slightly, not meeting Bel’s gaze. Was that it, then? Sure, when Leslie had first started hanging out around Alice, Bel had mentioned her mum’s advice, about how people not from Journey’s End never stayed long, but she’d only said it because she didn’t want Leslie to get her feelings hurt.
And yeah, maybe she’d been a bit jealous, but she hadn’t meant that Leslie couldn’t be friends with Alice.
But none of that seemed to matter now, because it was clear Alice had already made up her mind about Bel.
“Anyway,” Alice said, backing away from the table. “Have fun monster hunting or whatever. Come on, I’m not hungry after all.”
The three girls drifted back toward the door, Leslie shooting Bel one last, unreadable look before they were gone.
Al, Bel, and Nolie sat in silence.
“They seem fun,” Nolie said at last. “And by fun, I mean ‘the worst.’”
“Leslie wasn’t all that bad,” Bel muttered, looking into her tea. It had gone cold now, the sugar at the bottom a kind of brownish sludge, and she frowned at her cup before standing up to toss it in the bin.
“We need to get Al into the Institute attic while your dad’s still in Wythe,” she told Nolie. “Then I have to get back to the shop.”
Nolie and Al were both still watching her, but neither of them argued as they cleaned up the table, then set off into the misty afternoon.
Bel and Nolie both had rain jackets, but Al just hunched his shoulders against the drizzle, eyes narrowing a bit.
“At least this beastie should be happy in weather like this,” he said, flicking Nessie’s head with his finger, and Bel glanced around. The city center was nearly deserted, and there were a ton of cheap plastic (and plaid) ponchos at the shop. “Go stand under that awning,” she told Nolie and Al, pointing to the covering above the tiny Journey’s End museum.
They did as she’d asked, and Bel quickly jogged across the street to Gifts from the End of the World, digging her key out of her pocket.
But as she glanced up, something taped to the window on the door caught her eye. It was a plain white sheet of paper, which she snatched down and unfolded.
It was a note, and it was only a few lines, scrawled in a scratchy handwriting that made Bel think of spiderwebs.
If you want answers, I have them. Meet me at the manor house. Sunset.
And under that was a name.
M. McLeod.
M.
Maggie.
CHAPTER 16
“SCOTLAND IS INVOLVING A LOT LESS PLAID THAN I thought,” Nolie said as she stood by the ice cream truck with Albert, waiting for him to make his choice. The fact that there were over a dozen different kinds of ice cream was blowing his mind a little bit, and Nolie didn’t want to rush him.
“And no one has offered me haggis,” she went on. “Which I guess is a good thing.”
“Haggis is lovely,” Albert replied, and then finally said to the ice cream man, “One vanilla cone, please.”
He carefully handed over the money Bel had given him, and Nolie smiled at the look of wonder on his face as he took a bite of the soft-serve cone.
They were meant to meet Maggie at sunset, but in Scotland in the summer, that was a lot later than Nolie had reckoned. She’d been surprised when Bel had said they’d meet on the path to Maggie’s at a little after nine, but getting out had been easier than she’d hoped—her dad was pretty focused on Institute Stuff right now—and there were actually a few kids her age milling around the village. Heck, even the ice cream truck stayed open late.
Once Albert had his cone, they made their way up the hill that led away from Journey’s End, off toward the gentle green slopes overlooking the ocean. “This is brilliant, this is!” Albert enthused, waving his ice cream cone at Nolie. “And right off a lorry! Frozen and everything.”
“Yeah, the twenty-first century is super rad,” Nolie muttered, her eyes off to the side, looking at that tall cliff. At the thick bank of fog hanging over the steel-gray water.
“Super rad,” Albert repeated slowly, and Nolie smiled. His accent, like Bel’s, did all sorts of funny things to words. The S twisted behind his teeth, the R rolled like a wave on the shore.
The wind had ruffled his hair, and in his Midlothian Hearts jersey and sweatpants, he should have looked like any regular boy. But even in sneakers, there was something different about Albert. Nolie wondered if she was the only one who could feel it.
“Is it easier today?” she asked, turning up the collar of her jacket as the wind blew harder. “The whole ‘being in the future now’ thing?”
Albert crunched into his cone, mulling that over. “A bit,” he finally said, swallowing. “The village seems the same in a lot of ways. There are still shops and places to get tea. Although I haven’t seen anyone walking a cow down the high street yet,” he added, and Nolie laughed.
“I’ll see if I can’t make that happen at some point,” she told him, turning to walk backward. “Make you feel at home.”
Al smiled back. “It is loud, though. In the village. Mostly the automobiles.” Shaking his head, he ate the last bit of cone before saying, “I dinna know how you all stand it, that constant clatter. But you two were right—I do like the clothes.”
Grinning, he looked down at himself, tugging his jersey out a bit so that he could read the front of it. “Much more comfortable. And the shoes are—what’s that word?”
“Ace,” Nolie supplied, and Albert nodded, lifting one foot and admiring his sneakers. She had no idea where Bel had unearthed them, and they did look a little big, but they were better than nothing.
“Ace,” Al echoed. “Super rad. Super ace rad.”
Nolie laughed and shook her head. “Super ace rad,” she repeated, and Al turned his smile on her.
“And you too are Super Ace Rad, Nolie Stanhope.”
Nolie wasn’t sure why, but that made her face suddenly feel hot in spite of the wind. Now that Albert was dressed like a regular boy, she couldn’t help noticing that he was . . . well, he was cute. He had nice dark eyes, and all that thick black hair, and when he smiled, his nose kind of crinkled at the bridge in a way she liked.
She turned her head, pretending to look at something off in the distance, and hoped Al wouldn’t notice her blush.
Maybe Al felt weird, too, because he cleared his throat and fidgeted with the sleeves of his jersey.
“What would you have said instead of ‘ace’ or ‘rad’ back in your time?” she asked, tugging at
the hem of her jacket.
Albert ruffled his hair, thinking. “S’pose it’s the same as top-hole?” he said. “That’s what I would’ve called that ice cream or those shoes. Top-hole.”
Nolie giggled, shaking her head. “That’s awful,” she said, and Albert gave an easy shrug.
“I’d agree ‘ace’ is better,” he said. “Or sometimes, if something was really grand, we’d call it ‘wizard.’”
“Okay, that I like,” Nolie said with a decisive nod. “Wizard. That’s good. Very Harry Potter.”
“Who’s he?” Albert asked, his face scrunched up, and Nolie just laughed.
“What do you think she wants with us?” Nolie asked, changing the subject. “Maggie.”
“Dunno,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, “Hoping it’s some kind of answer about why I’m here instead of home, and why that light is so ruddy important.”
“I’d guess because it keeps man-eating fog away?” Nolie suggested. “That sounds ‘ruddy important’ to me.”
Albert threw her a smile over his shoulder. “You and Bel are very different, you know that?”
Nolie rolled her eyes, tugging her jacket tighter around her. The wind up here seemed to find ways of slithering in despite her jeans and long-sleeved shirt. “Well, yeah,” she said. “We’re different people. Were all girls the same when you were . . . here?”
Now Albert blushed a little, or maybe that was just the wind. “Didna really talk to girls,” he said, his shoulders creeping up near his ears. “It wasn’t the done thing, talking with a girl once you were older than ten or so.”
Nolie stopped in her tracks, staring at Albert. “What, so you couldn’t be friends with a girl without your families wanting you to marry them? Even when you were just twelve?”
Albert stopped, too, turning around to scowl at her. “No, that isna what I meant. It’s just that girls do other things. They were learning to keep a house, while we were leaning to fish or farm. We wouldna had anything to talk about had we been friends.”
Folding her arms, Nolie stared him down. “So girls were boring?”
The tips of Albert’s ears were bright pink now. “I didna say that!” he insisted, and luckily, at that moment, Bel came jogging up the hill, her sandy hair bright against the gray sky, still waving a green scarf over her head, like they wouldn’t know it was her without it or something.
It made Nolie laugh, and for the moment, she decided to let Albert slide on his whole “didn’t hang out with girls” thing. Seriously, had boys always been like this? Just last year, one of her friends from school, Ethan, had decided they had to stop playing video games online together because “it looks weird.” And since Ethan had cut his own bangs back in second grade, Nolie wasn’t so sure he was one to talk about what looked weird.
“There you are!” she said to Bel now.
“Sorry!” Bel called, a little breathless as she joined them on the path. “For once, Jaime and Jack were both behaving themselves, so Mum wanted to hang out with me for a bit. Took me ages to get away.”
Nolie waved, then turned to the manor house, which was standing on a slight rise. It couldn’t have looked more like a place where people got horribly murdered—maybe because people had been horribly murdered there. Weren’t people always fighting over big houses? It seemed likely that at least once, someone here must have taken an arrow to the eyeball or something.
“So . . . we’re doing this?” she asked Bel and Albert. “Just knocking on the door and being like, ‘Hi, we got your note, here we are’?”
Albert had his hands in his pockets and was already walking up to the house.
“Seems the only way,” he said, and Bel followed. Nolie looked up at the ruined castle, its jagged stones tearing up toward the cloudy sky.
“Super ace rad,” she muttered as she started walking, and Bel looked back at her, eyebrows raised.
“What did you just say?”
Shaking her head, Nolie thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket, mimicking Al’s pose. “Nothing,” she said, and then she nearly tripped over a loose stone.
When she’d first seen the house through the telescope at the Institute, it had looked spooky, definitely. Bel’s story about the old castle being struck by lightning had been even spookier, and Nolie fought the urge to grin as they made their way past the rubble. There were still a few piles of stones that gave the suggestion of towers, but for the most part, it was all a ruin, and Nolie reached for her notebook. She knew Bel and Albert were taking this pretty seriously, which meant that now probably wasn’t the time for her to give in to ghosty nerdery, so she tried to make her face look as expressionless as possible.
There was definitely a weird feeling in the air, and she wrote that down, along with the fact that all the hairs on her arms were standing up. That might just have been due to the wind and the setting sun, but still, couldn’t be sure it wasn’t proof of an electromagnetic field.
Writing down a quick description of the castle helped, too, since it meant Nolie was focused on that, and not on how much closer the house was getting.
It was just a plain stone building, some moss growing in the cracks between the stones, but the rows of windows were all dark, like sightless eyes.
Next to her, Bel was pulling out the note, and Nolie wondered if she meant to hold it up to Maggie as proof of why they were here. Although, looking at that dark house, Nolie wasn’t sure Maggie was even home, and a little part of her hoped she wasn’t. It would be nice to go back to civilization, maybe go back to Bel’s warm, chaotic house and have a cup of tea.
But no. That’s not what Gary and Bess from Spirit Chasers would do.
That in mind, Nolie pushed her shoulders back and walked up the shallow stone steps to the house. It seemed to loom over her, and everything was in soft purple shadows now. The wind whipped through her hair, and she tucked it back behind her ears with one hand while, with the other, she lifted the massive iron ring on the door and knocked.
CHAPTER 17
BEL STOOD AT THE BASE OF THE STEPS, STARING UP AT Maggie McLeod’s house. She’d never been all that spooked by scary houses before—you couldn’t throw a rock in the Highlands without hitting a ruined castle, it seemed—but there was something about this house up close that gave her a case of the shivers.
Maybe it was all those windows reflecting the setting sun, or how lonely the house seemed, perched on top of its hill. Maybe it was the way the wind sounded blowing through the leaves of the one stubby tree off to just one side.
Or maybe it was knowing that if Mum found out she’d gone banging on Mrs. McLeod’s door at ten o’clock at night, Bel would be in the worst trouble of her life.
There were no sounds coming from inside the house; all she could hear was the hollow sound of the wind blowing. And then Bel thought she heard something like a laugh. A giggle, really, from somewhere behind them.
She turned, looking over her shoulder, but there was nothing there except for the piles of stone from the old castle, now just black lumps in the gloom.
Nolie knocked again, and the sound seemed to echo around them. Next to Bel, Al was standing straight, looking more like the boy in his photograph than he had earlier.
Probably because he’d ditched the Loch Ness monster cap.
“It seems like she isn’t home?” he suggested to Nolie now, but Nolie just screwed up her face, still holding the note Bel had found.
“She’s really old,” she told Al. “It probably takes her a while to get to the door.”
And just as she’d finished saying that, the door creaked open, Maggie McLeod standing there in her jeans and a bright blue jumper. “Not so old that my hearing has gone, lassie,” she said to Nolie, who flushed as red as her hair.
This close, Maggie did look old. Really old. Her skin was papery thin and her white hair bright in the light of a lamp behi
nd her.
“Now what are you doing on my doorstep at this hour, Bel McKissick?”
Bel was so surprised that Maggie knew her name that for a moment, she didn’t say anything.
Luckily, Nolie was there to take the lead. Snatching the note from Bel, she thrust it at Maggie, her hand wavering just a little bit.
“We’re here because of this,” she said, and Maggie took the paper with thin fingers, holding it up close to her face to read the writing.
“What on earth,” she said softly, then lowered the note with a snap. “I didn’t write this.”
Her pale blue eyes narrowed. “What are you on about, girls?” she asked, her lips pursing slightly. “Think it’s funny to play jokes on old ladies?”
“We weren’t,” Bel said, stepping back a bit. The night was getting darker, and she suddenly wished they’d never come up here. If Mrs. McLeod knew who she was, she might tell her mum. “We just found the note, and we—we had some questions, so we thought you might know something.”
“About what?” Maggie asked, still glaring at them, and Bel was about to spill the whole story of the fog and the lighthouse, and maybe even Al himself, crazy as it would sound, when suddenly, Mrs. McLeod leaned forward a little. “Who are you?” she demanded.
Bel looked around. She hadn’t realized that Al had backed up into the shadows a little, but now he moved forward, his shoulders straight.
Maggie was staring at him, one hand clutching the doorframe. “I know you,” she said slowly. “I’m sure of it. I—”
Then there was a burst of giggles from behind them, followed by a bunch of frantic shushing, and Maggie drew back, her lips clamping shut again.
“Play your pranks on other people, all of you,” she said, and with that, the door slammed shut in their faces.
Bel could only stand there for a moment, frozen, but Nolie had no such problems, apparently. She stomped down the front steps and close to the nearest ruined tower, where the giggles had come from.
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