Chapter 6
SIX
GWENNA
We ride in silence.
It’s a massive black SUV; Callahan’s at the wheel with Kai and Lanz in the middle row, me and Morgan all the way in back.
Kingston rides shotgun.
No one’s saying anything. Occasional murmurs between the guys, some low-voiced discussions I can’t really hear or make out, but no conversations. No words.
I didn’t have anything to pack, didn’t have any goodbyes to say besides the brief hug that Jessie gave me outside the director’s office. Just got my coat and boots and followed Morgan down the long and slushy driveway to the edge of the Renfrew campus where the car was idling, waiting for us.
Them. There. Of course. I half-wondered, half-suspected, really, that Morgan and the four of them must have traveled together, but seeing them again still hit like a cattle prod.
Then two hours through New Jersey, another hour to pass Manhattan, and as the sun starts to set pink and gray over the pine trees we’re now somewhere between upstate New York and New England.
And reality has set in.
I press my hand to my mouth, my throat thick, my stomach turning and mind spinning.
Mom will find out. Of course she’ll find out. She’ll find out as soon as she stops getting invoices or starts seeing her payments bounce back. And then she’ll..
Then I’ll…
Could she tell them I’m crazy, truly? Call the cops, tell them I’m a hazard to myself, some kind of manic firebug on the loose—
Except no, Gwenna. She couldn’t; there’s no record. No crime. From the church. No proof I ever did anything. She made sure of that. She made sure of that.
You think I wanted a lunatic for a daughter?
No, I think, staring at the dusky roads whipping past. I think you didn’t want me for a daughter.
Headlights flash; someone’s merging from a side road and nearly clips us. Callahan leans on the horn and jolts me out of my stupor.
“Sorry,” I hear him murmur from the front. No one answers.
Reality hits me. This is insane. This, more than anything I’ve ever done, is actually insane. Going back to Caliburn, a place where the student body hates me, where the tuition is probably astronomical, where for all I know I’m still liable for destroying God knows how many priceless manuscripts.
And that’s before even touching the whole quest for the Holy Grail thing.
“What am I doing?” I murmur. “What am I doing? What am I doing?”
I don’t mean for anyone to hear me, but Morgan does, of course. “Hey.” She shuffles a little closer to me across the black leather bench seat, wraps an arm around my shoulders. “Take it easy. You’ve had a long day.”
A choked sound comes out of my throat that’s maybe a sob, maybe a muffled shriek.
“I can’t,” I say. I shake my head back and forth, panicked energy starting to spring up from my chest. “I can’t, I can’t…”
“Shh, shh, shh” Morgan says, stroking my hair. “You didn’t actually want to stay there, did you?”
“I…no,” I admit. But the choice was never binary. It wasn’t simply mental hospital or back to Caliburn. I could have left and gone anywhere. I could have left and gone—
Out the window: Sarrasford Exit. I close my eyes. Feel as the car starts to climb—we’re going uphill—towards campus—
I open my eyes.
God. The gates. The walls. The familiar black silhouettes of the buildings, of the chapel steeple, of the trees…
It’s too much. I have to close my eyes again.
I hear only the dull clicking of the turn signal, feel the slow lurch of speed bumps and stops and the sweep of forward motion until we stop, a long stop, and I realize we’ve arrived.
I open my eyes. In front of us Lanz is unclicking his seatbelt, scooting along the middle seat to open the right-side door, and next to me, Morgan does the same and gestures for me to follow.
“Come on,” she says.
No one else moves, and that’s when I realize Lanz was just opening the door for us.
Sheepish, self-conscious, meeting no one’s eyes, I slip across to the side door and out, my breath billowing out in the snap of cold air that greets me.
I look around—at the stark black trees, the drifting snowflakes, the white plush of ground cut through with brick footpaths—and then back to the car, at just the wrong time.
Blue eyes. Caught on mine.
“Gwenna,” Lanz breathes. “I—”
“Let’s go,” clips out a voice from inside the car—I don’t know whose—and Lanz blinks, obeys, disappears inside the door.
Then they’re gone.
“My suite’s in Cornubia Hall,” Morgan says, threading her arm through mine and nodding down the path. “Right there.”
I nod, only half-listening, and look around at exactly where we are. It’s a part of campus I never really spent time in, a pocket of space between Grove Quad and the field house I only remember crossing the one time Callahan gave me a ride back in from Sarrasford.
Morgan takes a step onto the footpath, pulling me gently with her, then pauses.
“You okay?”
I nod again. “I’ll live,” I joke. Maybe the first joke I’ve made all night.
“There she is.” Morgan beams. “Welcome back.”
Lamps draped with scarves, curlicued antique furniture, random potted plants and candles and rocks and trinkety shit absolutely everywhere.
Morgan’s suite is unmistakably hers.
“You’re in the smaller bedroom,” she says, kicking off her fluffy white boots into a heap of shoes by the door.
There’s a respectably sized living space slash kitchen, a far-off door ajar to what seems to be Morgan’s room, and two more doors besides.
“By the bathroom.” She nods. “Hope that’s okay.
But I did have dibs. And you know what they say about beggars being choosers, so…
” She pauses in unwinding her scarf and winces. “Sorry. Too soon?”
“No,” I say softly. I don’t even care. Suddenly, the weight of everything that’s happened in just twenty-four hours is pressing on me, and I sink onto her plum-colored couch, bracing my head up with my hands.
Was it really just this morning that I woke up in the Renfrew dorms? Ate my tasteless breakfast, ate my tasteless lunch, did my EMDR session, read the next stupid chapter in The Michelangelo Matrix, saw…
…saw Alexei Moroslav in the reception room?
My temples pulse under my fingertips.
What am I doing?
What is going on?
“Here.”
I look up to see Morgan setting something on the coffee table in front of me: a steaming mug the size of a cereal bowl that smells like cardamom and maple sugar. She’s somehow already changed, into a loose set of dusky pink loungewear and thick white socks.
“Drink some,” she says, settling into a criss-cross applesauce position next to the coffee table. “You’ll feel better.”
I take a sip. It’s good.
“How did you…” The question feels almost too fragile to piece together. I set down the mug. “Why?”
Morgan takes a deep inhale. Then lets out a long sigh. Closes her eyes.
“Because you need to be safe, Gwenna.”
She opens them again. “The whole thing with them is…it’s complicated.
Not for me to say. And I promise I’m not just saying that to cover for them.
I am incandescently angry at them on your behalf.
Still. It’s more that I just…don’t really know it all.
From their perspective.” She drums her fingers on the coffee table, pensive. “You know?”
“Not really,” I say, and pick my tea back up. “That’s kind of the whole problem.”
“Right.” Morgan gives the coffee table a light tap with her palm.
“Well, look. I really only know the broad strokes of whatever God-loving, swordfighting, do-gooding thing they’re up to, okay?
Hand to goddess.” She holds up her hand for emphasis.
“But when it comes to you, Gwenna…” She swallows.
“You’re my friend. And you do need to be safe.
For that reason, at the very least. So that’s why I… inserted myself into the process.”
“Okay.”
“Like, I’m not on their side, but I’m also not not.” Morgan shakes a thin gold watch down to the end of her wrist and glances at it, frowning. Then resumes. “It’s just, I can’t give you too many details on their…motivations. At present.”
This either isn’t making much sense or I’m too tired to process language. Possibly both. “Okay,” I say again. I look around the living room again. “So, am I just…”
“Staying here,” Morgan says. “With me. For the foreseeable future. As long as you want, anyway. But I figure…”
“I don’t have anything,” I blurt out.
Morgan presses her lips together.
“I…did take the liberty of having all your stuff brought over,” she says. “From Camlann House. I hope that’s okay.”
Oh. I hadn’t even thought of that. But…yes, I decide. It is okay. Definitely beats the alternative.
Except that’s not what I meant.
“I mean…” I chew my lip, hard. “I don’t have money. My mom—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Morgan interjects.
“I have to worry about it!”
My words ring out in the living room. Morgan freezes. My fingers are trembling on the mug.
“I have to,” I whisper. “I don’t…” I chew my lip even harder, bite it ’til it stings. “My mom...”
You think I wanted a lunatic for a daughter?
“She’s not going to like this,” I finish. It’s pathetic, little-girl feeble. I sniff, like I’m really about to cry. I swallow it down, swallow it all down, press my fingers into the warm ceramic surface to ground myself. “That I’m here again.”
Morgan stares at me. “Do you want to be here again?”
“I don’t exactly have anywhere else, do I?” I speak the words into the jittering surface of my tea, and immediately regret them.
This is Morgan. Who’s only ever been my friend. Well, excepting those first few days in the dorm together. But still. She doesn’t deserve my vitriol.
I look up, and Morgan reaches over to squeeze my knee.
“Gwenna, please,” she says. “Please, just…try not to worry. Luther will take care of it, okay? Now that he knows how crucial you are to this whole thing, and…”
“This whole thing?” I repeat. The ringing in my ears starts to come back. “Crucial?”
Why was Alexei Moroslav there today?