The Ravens

by Danielle Paige

  “Those are Kappas,” the redhead said, reading the question in Vivi’s interested gaze. “One of the sororities on campus. Everyone calls them the Ravens. I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re so mysterious and secretive.”

  “Sorry,” Vivi said, blushing, embarrassed to be caught staring.

  “It’s okay. They have that effect on everyone. If you want to see them in action, go to their recruitment party tonight. They’ll be in rare form, scouting for potential new members.” She shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant even though her eyes shone with obvious desire. “You should check it out, if only to see their sorority house. It’s the only time all year they let non-Kappas inside, and that place is pretty spectacular.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Vivi said, secretly thrilled that someone thought she was the type of girl who could “check out” a party. No one at any of her three high schools had ever invited her to a party. She wasn’t sure the Kappas’ rush event was the right way to get her feet wet, but who knew? Maybe college-Vivi would be up to the challenge.

  “All right, then. Welcome to Westerly!”

  Vivi took a deep breath, calling on her last reserve of strength to haul her suitcases up three stone steps and through the wooden door that had been propped open. She started up the narrow stairs, dragging her suitcases awkwardly behind her. She hoped to make it to the second floor before taking a break, but after a few steps, her arms gave out.

  “Shit,” she said under her breath as her bags slid back down the stairs and landed with two heavy thuds.

  “Need a hand?”

  Vivi turned to see a white boy with dark curly hair standing at the base of the stairs, looking up at her with an amused grin.

  She wanted to tell him she had it under control, but then she realized how ridiculous that would sound, given that he was currently looking at the suitcases she had just dropped. “Thanks, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. And even if I did, I’d do it anyway.” He had a faint Southern accent that elongated his syllables. He lifted both suitcases at the same time and bounded up the stairs, brushing past Vivi.

  “I guess the Southern-manners thing is real,” Vivi said, then cringed, immediately regretting her cheesy, awkward words.

  “Oh, this isn’t about manners,” the boy replied, slightly breathless. “It’s a public-safety issue. You could’ve killed someone back there.”

  Vivi felt her cheeks turn red. “Here, let me take one of those,” she said as she ran to catch up.

  They reached the second floor, but the boy didn’t set the suitcases down. “No can do,” he said cheerfully. “My love of chivalry and public safety makes it physically impossible for me to set these bags down until they’re out of the danger zone. What’s your room number?”

  “Three-oh-five. But you really don’t have to do this. I’ll be fine the rest of the way.”

  “Don’t give it a second thought,” the boy called back. Vivi followed him as her stomach fluttered with a mixture of guilt and excitement. No boy had ever carried her stuff for her before.

  When they reached the third floor, the boy turned right and, with a groan, set her suitcases down in front of a door. “Here you go. Room three-oh-five.”

  “Thank you,” Vivi said, feeling even more awkward. Was she supposed to ask him his name? His major? How did normal people make friends?

  “My pleasure.” He grinned, and for a moment, Vivi couldn’t focus on anything except the dimple that had just appeared in his left cheek. But before she could think of anything else to say, he turned and started back down the hall. “Try not to kill anyone!” he said over his shoulder, and then disappeared down the stairs.

  “I make no guarantees.” She tried to sound playful and sexy, but there was no point. He was already gone.

  Vivi opened the door to the room, steeling herself to meet her roommate, but the room was empty. Just two extra-long twin beds, two nicked-up wooden desks, and a full-length mirror on the back of a closet. As far as dorm rooms went, it was nice—spacious, light, and airy. The exact opposite of the cramped, stifling apartment in Reno.

  She dragged one of her suitcases to a bed and unzipped it, wondering when her roommate would arrive and what the protocol was for claiming a side of the room. Before she had the chance to take anything out of her bag, a window blew open and a gust of warm, fragrant air filled the space, sending the papers in her orientation folder flying. The window had been latched closed when she walked into the room.

  Vivi gathered up the papers with a sigh, reminding herself that a significant temperature difference between the air in the room and the air outside could create enough pressure to push the window open. That phenomenon was just one of many Vivi had memorized over the years to explain the strange things that always seemed to happen around her.

  That was when she noticed the single tarot card positioned neatly at the head of her bare mattress, as if placed there by a careful hand.

  It was the Death card her mother had given her.

  The skeleton leered up at her with a gruesome smile, and for a moment, it almost looked like its eyes glowed red. Vivi shivered, despite knowing that it was a trick of the light. I told you. Westerly isn’t a safe place, not for people like you, Daphne’s voice whispered in Vivi’s ear.

  A door slammed down the hall and the sound of laughter from the quad floated up through the window. Vivi shook her head, coming back to herself. Here she was, free of her mother for one day, and she was already looking for signs from the universe. Daphne would have almost been proud.

  With a dismissive snort, she shoved the Death card into her desk drawer and shut it tight. Vivi didn’t need signs. She didn’t need magic. She didn’t need her mother’s voice in her ear. She just needed to make a normal life here.

  Starting with that rush party.

  Chapter Four

  Scarlett

  Kappa House had transformed. The modern metallic gray wallpaper had faded into the pale pink that had once graced the walls, and the low-slung velvet couch had become a gilded chaise. The room was almost unrecognizable. Only the music blaring from a Bluetooth speaker revealed that they were still in the twenty-first century. The recruitment party was in two hours, and every sister was hard at work—the sophomores were in charge of décor, the juniors were dealing with food and drinks, and the seniors were scurrying around making sure any trace of magic was safely out of sight.

  After they finished giving instructions to the catering team, Scarlett and Tiffany went upstairs to change into their dresses. Tiffany’s room was two doors past Scarlett’s and she peeked inside as she passed.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe you still have this,” Tiffany said, coming in and grabbing a decrepit three-legged elephant from Scarlett’s dresser.

  Scarlett laughed. “I should probably put that away before the rush party.”

  “First impressions are everything,” Tiffany agreed.

  The first time Scarlett met Tiffany, it was at their own recruitment soiree two years ago. Even though she’d been born and bred for Kappa, Scarlett had been fearful all the same—afraid she’d be found lacking, afraid she’d disappoint her family. But then Tiffany stood next to her and gestured at Dahlia’s perfect slope of a nose and whispered, “I’d bet you my whole trust fund that nose is a glamour.” Scarlett didn’t laugh, but she’d wanted to. Suddenly their membership chairwoman didn’t seem so imposing and Scarlett’s nerves melted away. It turned out Tiffany didn’t have a trust fund, far from it, but she was rich in magic, spontaneity, and irreverence. Scarlett hadn’t known just how much she’d needed those last two until she met Tiffany.

  That year, the theme had been a black-and-white ball, and they’d danced the night away in their floor-length gowns, barely caring that, come dawn, the white hems were smudged with dirt. Later that morning, Scarlett had taken Tiffany to her favorite antiques store downtown, the one that the tourists and other witches hadn’t discovered yet. They walked through rows and rows of dusty fur
niture and lamps, tiny figurines, and old coffee-table books, and Tiffany stopped at the kids’ aisle with the excitement of a preschooler. “Stuffed animals and dolls are the best—so much pure energy. So much pure love,” she gushed.

  Scarlett picked up an elephant whose leg was missing. “So much pure something,” she said with a laugh, and Tiffany joined in. But Scarlett knew what she meant.

  “Thanks for sharing your spot with me,” Tiffany said softly, pulling a well-loved Elmo to her chest for a hug.

  They’d gone home with dozens of objects perfect for spells—and they had been inseparable ever since. Tiffany was the kind of sister Scarlett had always wished she had. They balanced each other well. Scarlett was bound to the norms of magic, while Tiffany liked having fun with her gift. The Kappa motto translated to “Sisterhood. Leadership. Fidelity. Philanthropy,” which Scarlett always took to mean that they were supposed to rule and save the world. But Tiffany didn’t think of witches as superheroes only. “What’s the fun of being a witch if you can’t use magic to make the Starbucks line move faster?” she always said. Scarlett saw her point; what good was helping the world if you couldn’t help yourself, too?

  Tiffany’s blue eyes glittered whenever she had one of  her brilliant ideas or used the lightest touches of magic to even the scales of small, daily injustices, like magically spilling the drink of a frat boy who stared a little too long and hard at a sister or giving a truth serum to a sexist professor who gave only boys As. She was smart and funny and just the right amount of mischievous. Tiffany was the one person who got Scarlett out of her own head and reminded her of the joy, not just the duty, of being a witch. And usually when they were together, Scarlett felt at once at ease and excited for whatever they would do next.

  The tarot might have explained their connection—Cups and Swords were always fast friends—but Scarlett liked to think that she and Tiffany would have been connected with or without magic. Right that moment, though, she felt suddenly apart from her.

  Scarlett took a deep breath, remembering what Dahlia had said earlier. “Tiff, do you ever think about Harper?”

  Tiffany stiffened. “We agreed to never talk about that.”

  “I know, but what if it ever got out—”

  “How could it ever get out? We’re the only people who know,” Tiffany said.

  That wasn’t entirely true, though. Gwen, another girl from their pledge class, also knew the truth about what really happened. But Gwen was long gone, and they’d made sure she could never, ever tell.

  “Everything is fine, Scarlett. Trust me, we’re golden,” Tiffany said firmly, shoving the elephant into Scarlett’s closet and smoothing down her dress.

  “Knock-knock,” a deep voice said.

  Scarlett whirled around. “Oh my God, Mason! I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow.”

  “I got home early,” he said with a smile.

  If he hadn’t been her boyfriend, he would have been irritatingly good-looking. His mouth quirked up on one side, as if he were always on the brink of laughter. His skin was a deep, golden tan. His hair was longer than it usually was, twisting in curls at his temples, and his T-shirt couldn’t hide his well-defined muscles.

  Tiffany cleared her throat. “I will leave you two to it . . . See you downstairs, Scar,” she said, waggling her brows.

  As soon as Tiffany left, Mason closed the distance between them, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her into a deep, long kiss. The moment their lips met, her eyes fluttered shut, and she sank into him. Even after two months, he still tasted the same, like warm summer days.

  Scarlett’s mother had said once that there was no such thing as love at first sight, but there was such a thing as love at first joke. Her father had swept her mother off her feet with his dry sense of humor, and even now, thirty years into the marriage, Marjorie Winter could look at her husband and remember in an instant why she loved him—even if she hated him at the moment.

  For his part, Mason Gregory had hit Scarlett double: it had been love at first sight and first joke.

  They had met at a Kappa/Pi Kappa Rho mixer, the Pikiki, where every Kappa girl wore a hula skirt over her bikini, and PiKas wore just the hula skirts. PiKas lei’ed any Kappa they fancied as they circulated through PiKa House, which was decorated like an island, complete with live palm trees and an inflatable water slide that extended from the roof to the pool. With a silly but charming joke about not getting laid that easily, Mason had refused to give Scarlett his lei; instead, he gave her a single plumeria from it. She’d lightly demanded the rest, but he told her about an island tradition. “A girl places a flower behind her right ear if she’s available and interested, behind her left if there’s no chance in hell.” She laughed and put the flower behind her right ear. They had been together ever since.

  Scarlett had her own theory about love; to her, there was something more than humor, something more than looks. There was a rhythm to love, like there was a rhythm to a spell. And Mason and Scarlett had had that from the first second they met. There was nothing Scarlett felt more sure of in life than her place by Mason’s side. Or, rather, his place by hers.

  He broke the kiss and stepped back to sweep his eyes over her, lingering where the buttons met the white lace of her bra and where her skirt grazed her thighs. “You look incredible, as always. How do you do it? Seriously, I’ve never seen you have so much as a bad hair day.”

  “Magic, of course.” She winked.

  He didn’t know she wasn’t joking. Ravens were sworn to secrecy. Only members and alumnae like Scarlett’s mother and sister knew they were really a sorority full of witches. Mason had a fondness for history, and in another life he would have relished the rich witch lore that surrounded her people. His room at the frat was filled with biographies, most of which weren’t listed on any syllabus. He would have loved knowing how magic had shaped the world and who in history had been a witch, subtly guiding civilization forward. But the rules were clear; he could never, ever know. There were times when the secret sat between them like a steel wedge, but as much as Scarlett loved Mason, as much as she wished he could know all of her, she would never betray her sisters.

  “You don’t look half bad yourself. You’re so tan. Let me guess, you got stuck on Jotham’s yacht again?” she said. Jotham was a fellow PiKa and Mason’s best friend. And he was the reason that Mason had gotten stuck across the pond. Jotham had taken Mason along to his brother’s wedding and the rest was summer-vacation history. She reminded herself to cast a spell on Jotham later as punishment.

  Mason shook his head. “No, I skipped the yacht. It turns out Portugal has a killer surf scene.”

  “I didn’t realize you were an aspiring beach bum.” Scarlett kept her voice light, but she was irked. She hadn’t known Mason was interested in surfing. Why hadn’t he texted her about it? The past few weeks had been so chaotic that they’d barely had a chance to talk. But Scarlett being swamped at her internship was different from him being busy surfing.

  Mason grinned. “Jotham took the yacht on to Ibiza with some girl he met at the wedding. I didn’t want to third-wheel it. I don’t know what came over me, but I hopped on the Eurail. I even stayed in a hostel a few nights.”

  Her eyebrows shot skyward. “You stayed in a hostel? Over a yacht?” Jotham’s family’s yacht was practically a cruise ship.

  “It really wasn’t that bad.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t bring home bedbugs?” She eyed him suspiciously, which made him burst into laughter.

  “I wish you’d been there. You would have liked it.”

  Scarlett wrinkled her nose. “A hostel? Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  “Honestly, Scar, it felt like being in one of those subtitled movies that you like,” Mason said.

  “You hate those movies,” she protested lightly. He always said that if he wanted to read, he’d pick up a book.

  His voice turned serious. “It was different from all those family vacations or friend vacations
we have to go on. There were no walking tours, no galas, no yachts, no expectations . . . none of it. I made my own map. I set my own schedule. I decided who I wanted to see, where I wanted to go. I felt . . . free.” He was speaking faster, like he always did when he got excited about something. Only usually he was really excited about Kant, or The Iliad, or the Dow. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was spelled.

  “You almost sound like you wish you’d stayed out there,” she blurted.

  Mason’s expression was thoughtful. “A part of me wishes I could have. But only if you were with me, of course,” he added hurriedly. “Everything here just feels so . . . predetermined. Do you know what I mean?”

  Scarlett raised an eyebrow. “No. What are you talking about?”

  Mason groaned. “All the internships and clerkships and extra degrees. My dad takes for granted that I want to follow in his footsteps and be a lawyer.”

  “I thought you wanted those things.” I thought we wanted those things. Part of what she loved about Mason was his ambition. It almost rivaled hers. They’d had it all planned out since their one-month anniversary: they’d go to the same law school, preferably Harvard, then come back for their internships at their parents’ firms, and when they had enough experience, they’d break away and start their own firm.

  “I know . . . I thought I did too. But maybe . . .” He paused and sighed, as if searching for the right words. “I don’t know. There are, like, a million other careers and startups out there that only require you to have a computer and Wi-Fi connection. Have you ever thought of just saying ‘fuck it’ to our parents and Westerly and leaving this all behind?”

  Scarlett narrowed her eyes. A startup? Was he Mark Zuckerberg now? “Everything I’ve ever wanted is right here. Kappa. You. Our families. Bumming around the world is for people who don’t know where they’re going in life. That’s not us.”

  Mason shrugged and fiddled with a frayed rope bracelet around his wrist that Scarlett had never seen before.