“This isn’t too hard,” Jai says, eyeing the pages as he lowers his violin. The blue light flickers, and we don’t have much time before it fades altogether.
“I’ll take the melody,” Darby says. “Jai, you pick up here, and Amelia can come in here.” She points at different sections on the sheet, the notes all precisely drawn in her neat hand.
“Ready?” I say, looking at each of their faces. Their features seem to jump in the flickering blue light, looking eerie with the paint striped across them, red for Darby and blue for Jai.
They both nod.
“Wait a sec, Jones,” says Darby. “We need to settle something. If this works, I get to talk to her first.”
“Fine. But remember, you agreed to ask her to leave me alone.”
She shrugs, looking aside.
“Darby. That was the deal!”
“Yeah, whatever,” she says, scowling. “I remember.”
“Hurry up,” Jai urges. “This place is giving my goose bumps goose bumps.”
Darby rolls her eyes and puts her oboe to her lips.
“Ready?” she says around the reed.
Jai and I both nod.
The spell is called Dies Irae. I’ve never heard of it before, and neither have the other two, which makes sense since it’s a black spell. All we have to go on that it’ll work is Rosa’s word. But just as I put my flute to my lips, a voice in the back of my head wonders if she can be trusted.
But it’s too late to chicken out now.
The melody is stately and grand, a solemn procession of notes. It reminds me of the old cathedrals I saw in London, when we picked up Jai on the zeppelin—somber and ancient and regal. We play at an even tempo, thankfully, since I don’t think my cold fingers could manage anything faster. It’s a fairly simple tune, though I notice Darby gave me the easiest arrangement, while she and Jai thread in more complicated bits.
The sound of our three instruments blends together, and soon, streamers of light flow from each of us to twine in the air, a slowly revolving knot of light. We all stare, and I see the other two are as confused as I am.
“Yellow?” Jai says.
Since Darby and I can’t talk and play at the same time, we just shrug.
Maybe that’s how black spells are. It’s not like we’ve ever seen one before.
But Darby’s face is hard, her eyes suspicious. I wonder if she thinks this was all a dupe.
Still, I’ve never seen a spell work like this. The streamers whirl overhead and grow, until we stand beneath a spinning ring of golden light. It bounces off the trees around us, a bright-yellow lasso tethered to our three instruments. I can’t look long, because I’m struggling to follow the notes on the spell sheet lying between us.
A minute later, we finish the spell. The last notes fade into the trees, and the yellow magic dissipates.
“Did it work?” whispers Jai.
We stand very still, listening.
The trees sway slightly. Crickets chirp from the leaves. Overhead, the sky rumbles in the distance, warning of a storm on its way. My breath fogs the air and then fades.
I peer into the dark forest, turning a full circle to check every direction. Jai and Darby do the same.
Then we all look at each other.
“Maybe I arranged it wrong,” Darby says. “And the more you rearrange a melody, the weaker it gets.”
Jai rolls his eyes. “Or . . . maybe there’s just no such thing as gho—”
He cuts off in a scream as a shadow grabs his ankle and he slams into the ground.
“Jai!” I shout. “What—”
Something grabs me by the waist.
Then it drags me backwards, like an arm around my middle, and I yelp and drop my flute onto the leaves. The thing holding me tightens until I can barely breathe. Loud creaks and rustles sound all around. It’s like the whole forest has come alive. I scream until I can’t breathe.
In front of me, Darby yells as something seizes her too. In the pale glow of Jai’s spell light, I see what grabbed us.
It’s the trees.
With a gasp, I find myself pinned against the trunk of a tall aspen that’s holding me in place with two strong branches. Jai is locked against a pine, and Darby is in the clutches of another. Its needles block her face until she reaches up and rips them away.
“What happened?” she groans.
We look around at each other, bewildered. There’s no sign of the ghost of Other Amelia. Our instruments are scattered on the ground. My heart misses a beat, hoping my flute’s okay.
“Rosa,” I croak out. “She tricked us!”
“It was a trapping spell, all right,” says Jai. “But not for a ghost. For us.”
“Why? Why would she do that?”
Darby growls. “She was just using us to get the musicat!”
“We are so dead,” moans Jai.
“Let’s just use our heads,” I say, trying to keep calm. “It’s not like we’ll be stuck here forever. Someone will come looking.”
I try furiously to think of a way out of this, but even if I could reach my flute, I can’t think of any spell that will free us from the trees, not without possibly hurting ourselves in the process.
I hear a sniffle and realize Darby is crying. She came here thinking she’d talk to her dead friend, but instead, it was all a trick. I know how much she wanted this, how badly she needed to see the other Amelia. What if I’d been given the chance to see my mom again, only to have it ripped away?
“We’ll get out of this,” I say. “And then we’ll find Rosa and get the real spell.”
“Don’t talk to me about what’s real,” she snarls.
I stare at her. “Darby, no. Don’t—”
“She’s a fake, Jai,” she spits out. “She’s not even supposed to be here.”
I just stare at her, my heart sinking.
“She’s only here by accident,” Darby says. “She’s not good enough for Mystwick, and never will be. She failed her audition, so she stole my Amelia’s place. While the rest of us worked our butts off, practicing for years and years to get here, sacrificing everything to come, she tricked and lied her way in!”
“I didn’t!” I shout. “It was an accident! A mix-up!”
“You’re not good enough for Mystwick. You don’t belong here. You never did. You’re just a big, awful joke.”
Jai looks at me, his eyes round, and my heart sinks. He stares like he’s seeing me for the first time, and I just know he’s going to be mad at me for never telling him the truth. Maybe even mad enough that he’ll never talk to me again. After all, why would he want to be known as the kid who hangs out with the school joke?
But then he turns back to Darby. “So? Who cares? She’s here now, and she’s one of us. I don’t care if she turns out to be a googly-eyed, tentacle-waving slime alien from Neptune, she’s still my friend!”
My heart lifts. I give him a small, grateful smile, and wonder how I could ever have doubted him. I was so ashamed of admitting the truth, I couldn’t see what a good friend he really is.
“Just for the record,” I say, “I am from planet Earth.”
Darby glares at me in the fading light of Jai’s spell. “The real Amelia was a great musician, and my friend. She was a hundred times better than you’ll ever be!”
I want to shout back, to tell her it’s not true, but I realize she’s right. I’ve seen the videos of Other Amelia. And she is a hundred times better than me. I am just an accident. Even the one thing that could make me special—my Composing—only happens when I’m not trying to make it happen. Another accident.
Overhead, the sky rumbles with thunder, and lightning flashes in the distance, veins of white behind a bank of dark clouds. I shiver as the wind picks up. The trees sway around, sounding like bones clacking together.
Please, please don’t let it rain, I think, staring mournfully at my flute, exposed on the ground.
The temperature drops until my teeth start to chatter. I buck and twi
st, but nothing will free me from the tree’s grasp.
Giving up, I slump forward. It’s hard to breathe with the tree squeezing my lungs. I sag over the branch, hopeless. At least it’s still dry.
Then Jai screams.
I look up at once and spot her: in the trees, barely visible in the gloom.
A ghostly blue girl, half-transparent in the darkness.
The three of us gape as she watches us, as if she’s curious why we’re stuck out here in the middle of a storm.
“Amelia!” Darby shouts. “Amelia, it’s me!”
The girl looks at her, but it’s hard to read her expression when I can barely even make out her face.
Did the spell work after all?
But then the ghost turns and glides away, and soon vanishes.
Then Jai’s light winks out, and we’re plunged into darkness.
Jai and Darby say nothing. When lightning flashes again, I catch a glimpse of my roommate crying, and Jai looking totally spooked. He’s actually speechless for once. His eyes meet mine, and I realize this might be the first time he’s really believed the ghost existed.
Other Amelia doesn’t appear again.
“That was a ghost!” Jai gasps. “A GHOST!”
“Yes,” I sigh. “We know.”
His eyes are practically falling out of his head. “But did you see it? She was there, then she wasn’t. There, not there. There . . . not there. WHY ARE YOU GUYS NOT FREAKING OUT RIGHT NOW?”
“Shut up, Jai!” Darby says.
“This is not normal! This is not how the world works! Ghosts are supposed to be like zombies and the Necromuse and an A in History of Musicraft. Not. REAL.”
Darby scowls. “Keep blabbering and I’ll get that hippo spell from Rosa and make sure you both spend the rest of the year flopping around in the lake!”
Jai moans and pulls his head down like a turtle trying to hide in its shell.
As I shiver against the tree, partly from the cold, partly from my own raw nerves, I wonder if musical zombies got canceled because of the lightning. If so, will they realize three kids are still missing? Will they even bother looking in this weather?
The lightning storm seems to last for hours. My body aches from being pinned so long. And Darby’s words keep pounding in my head.
You’re only here by accident.
I’m not good enough.
I’ll never be good enough.
My name is Amelia Jones, I think. I work hard and I don’t give up easily. My mom was a Maestro and if I just try hard enough, if I just want it badly enough, I can be one too.
This is where I’m supposed to be.
This is what I was born to do.
But deep inside, I realize I’m not sure I believe that anymore.
Deep inside, I can feel myself starting to give up.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Time to Face the Music
MRS. LE ROUX’S MAUVE NAILS glint as she slides the ghost trap spell across her desk.
“I am . . . dismayed,” she says in a low voice. “And deeply disappointed in you three.”
It’s early morning. The sky is still strawberry pink, and through the windows of the headmaestro’s office I can see the peak where Mr. Pinwhistle teleported my Aero class, what feels like ages ago. Clouds lump behind the mountains, dark and threatening, bringing yet more storms. I’m still shivering from last night’s adventure.
Me, Darby, and Jai all slump in our chairs. I can feel Mr. Pinwhistle and Miss Noorani looming behind us, and on the floor beneath the desk, Wynk is asleep, humming to herself.
It took the Maestros until dawn to find us. Apparently we’d hiked farther than we’d thought. And spending an entire night pinned against a tree during a storm makes every minute feel like an hour, even without Jai yelping at every flash of lightning and Darby glaring at me like she was trying to melt my bones.
I was sure we would all die out there.
The Maestros were furious when they found us, partly because we’d sneaked away to perform a dangerous spell, and partly because they’d had to search for us in such terrible weather. They hadn’t realized we were still in the woods until almost midnight, after all the kids had been sorted and sent to bed in the aftermath of musical zombies. They’d cut the game short at half past ten, when the storm had begun.
At least they gave us hot cocoa to warm us up. I clutch my half-empty mug like it’ll be snatched away from me at any moment. My flute is safely in its case by my feet.
Only one good thing came out of the whole disaster: we’re in a fraction of the trouble we could have been in, because the spell we played turned out to be no black spell at all—just an ordinary yellow one. Mr. Pinwhistle had recognized it and known a counterspell that would free us.
So Rosa had duped us. Though in this case, it was for the best. If it had been a black spell we’d been caught with, I know we’d all three be on our way home right now. We might even be getting metal rods stapled to our ears, barring us from all music for good, the ultimate punishment.
“We were only trying to win the game,” Jai says with a cheery smile.
I don’t know how he manages to look so perky after the night we just had, but I’m glad the three of us agreed to make him the spokesperson. Well, Darby and I agreed to make him the spokesperson—the only thing we were able to agree on after the spell turned on us. Jai wasn’t so enthused, but I guess he realized he had the best shot at getting us out of this in as little trouble as possible. Darby’s too blunt and I’m already on the thinnest of ice with the Maestros. But Jai has the sort of charm that makes him every teacher’s pet, and now he turns it on full blast.
“We thought we could trap the older students,” adds Jai. “Then we could free the zombie-fied kids and surprise everyone—seventh graders winning musical zombies! Who’d have seen it coming? In retrospect, of course, I can see how that might have been bending the rules too far. We’re very sorry, and we promise to never do anything like it ever, ever again.”
He gives a sheepish grin, then sucks down his hot chocolate. I hide a smirk, impressed with how convincing he’s made the whole thing sound.
“I knew we should have discontinued that ridiculous game years ago,” Mr. Pinwhistle grumbles.
“You went outside the game boundaries,” says Miss Noorani. “You were supposed to stay within hearing of the band.”
“We got lost,” Jai says, looking for all the world like a scolded puppy. “There was this crazy Percusso after us, so we ran. It was so dark, and there were fireballs everywhere . . . I guess we just sort of freaked out.”
At least the Maestros seem to buy our story.
But now the headmaestro is eyeing me. “You three wouldn’t happen to know anything about the humfrog incident last week, would you?”
“Humfrogs?” Jai echoes. “Humfrogs . . . oh! You mean the Great Humfrog Float? Haha! Nope. Don’t know anything about that.”
He grins again, scratching the back of his head, but there’s sweat on his forehead.
Okay, so maybe he’s not as great of a liar as I’d thought.
But I guess since the Maestros can’t prove we were behind the humfrog incident, they let it drop. Actually, they all seem sort of distracted. Miss Noorani and Miss Becker are whispering heatedly in the back corner of the room, talking about last night’s storm like we’re not even there.
I wonder why the weather’s got them so on edge. Maybe they’re worried some buildings will flood.
In the end, we get sentenced to two weeks of detention. We lose all computer, snack, and break room privileges, and earn extra transposing homework, which is of course the most tedious kind there is. I can’t even email Gran to tell her my usual pack of lies about how awesome my classes are and how happy and totally unhaunted I am. I almost call her on the phone in the library, where Darby calls her parents from, but I know I couldn’t possibly talk to Gran without her hearing the truth in my voice. And if she found out how bad things really were, she’d drag
me home in a minute, saying “told you so” all the way.
Days later, trapped in a small classroom with Jai and Darby, hearing only the tick of the clock and the scratching of their pencils as they complete the work twice as quickly as I can, I find myself zoning out altogether and thinking about other things.
Like how everyone seems to whisper when I walk by them now, and how Claudia even called me “the fake Amelia” in Ensemble, when Miss Noorani wasn’t listening. Darby must have told the whole school about how I actually got into Mystwick. My classmates had been annoyed with me before because of my constantly messing up spells. But now it’s like I’m a ghost, because no one will even talk to me anymore. All I get is weird looks and whispers behind my back. Only Jai will sit with me at meals. In homeroom, Claudia asks Darby if she can move into my bed after I’m expelled, knowing very well that I can hear them talking. Not even Darby ignoring her remark made me feel better.
But I have an even bigger problem to worry about now: my test is in three weeks, and I’m nowhere near ready.
Everyone at school is in a bad mood thanks to musical zombies getting cut short, and also thanks to the rain and storms, which seem endless. It may have stayed dry the night we were stuck in the woods, but that ended the next day, when a downpour started . . . and didn’t stop.
Two weeks go by without a single day of sunshine.
One of the boys’ dorms floods, and they have to move all the sixth- and seventh-grade boys into the high school building. Jai complains about having to sleep on the floor by a senior who farts all night long. The ceiling of the Shell springs a leak during one of the junior’s recitals, and the stage has to be shut down during repairs. Being trapped inside for days on end has us all cagey and mean. At least, I think spitefully, they’re all stuck inside too while I’m in detention. I’m not missing out on much.
One day, when I’m headed back to my dorm after a late night practicing in Harmony Hall, I hear the Maestros talking in the next room, which is some kind of teachers’ lounge.
“I contacted the weather service,” Miss Noorani is saying. “And they confirmed it: these storms are concentrated over Mystwick. No one else is experiencing this kind of weather.”
The Mystwick School of Musicraft Page 19