Chapter 12
During the next week, Ellory and Liam started texting from sunrise to sunset.
True to Hudson’s word, the phone in the jack-o’-lantern had indeed belonged to Liam (Boone, he’d explained with a roll of his eyes, wiping pulp off his screen.
It’s a long story.), and his initial message had escalated into never-ending conversation.
Divorced from the blinding force of his generic handsomeness, Liam was still every bit as charming, funny, and interesting.
He sent her songs and memes, jokes and photos of restaurants he wanted to try.
In turn, she mostly sent him reminders to study, because her flirting skills had always been poor.
Somehow, he seemed to find that endearing, and their banter rolled onward.
If Hudson Graves knew she’d been communicating with his roommate, it didn’t show as he leaned against the wall, waiting for her.
His gaze was on his phone, ignoring the eyes that roved over him as people passed.
None of the students approached, however.
Ellory and Hudson were, after all, meeting at the campus founders’ museum, a location Ellory hadn’t even known existed before Hudson had texted her and would never have gone to otherwise.
She could barely believe they’d squandered a building on a museum devoted to long-dead white men, but if there was one thing rich people knew how to do, it was waste money.
“Hey, Morgan,” Hudson said, pocketing his phone. “Ready to go digging?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she confirmed. “Do you actually think we’ll find anything in here?”
“Oh, absolutely not. But I’m bored and we’re both free, so why not?”
Ellory snickered, following him inside. A weary student was behind a desk in the small lobby, playing a handheld game.
He didn’t even look up as Ellory and Hudson passed, and she got the feeling that they could have walked back out with half the museum’s items in their arms and he wouldn’t have blinked.
The museum itself was smaller than Ellory had expected from the size of the building; it was one long hallway, with portraits, plaques, and the occasional preserved item against the back wall.
There was another door—a fire exit that led outside—but no obvious way of getting to the rest of the floor.
“Hardly encouraging,” Hudson observed.
“Suck it up, Encyclopedia Brown. You did say there would be digging involved, so dig.” Ellory reached out to clap him on the arm, then thought better of it. “You take left, I’ll take right, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
His eyes burned into her back as she walked away, but she ignored it.
Just like she was ignoring the fact that she had no idea how to interact with him in this provisional space between what they’d been before and what they were now.
Were they partners? Colleagues? Enemy soldiers in a temporary ceasefire?
She’d seen parts of him that she couldn’t forget, yet she didn’t know him any better than she had in August. Not really.
They weren’t friends by any definition of the word, but it was still Hudson here with her instead of Tai or Cody.
It was Hudson who had been the first to take her seriously.
It was Hudson who had offered to help her—no dismissal, no psychoanalysis, minimal snark.
Once, she had been able to rely only on his contempt. Now his faith in her was the one thing keeping her sane as she faced the possibility that ghosts were real, she could see them, and they might be a sign of magic leaking into the natural world.
It was uncanny, and not because of the spirits. Her world had tilted so quickly that she was dizzy with it. At least she had a mission to focus on, something easier to investigate than the mystery of Hudson Graves.
Information was as bare as the hallway walls.
The founders of the school—Howard McElking, J.
Brett Troy, and Richard Lester Odell—had three large gold-framed portraits with the existential quantifier between them.
Their interest in the occult and former membership in the New England Society for Psychic Research wasn’t mentioned, not even in a single line.
They were noted to be an architect, a philanthropist, and a mathematician respectively—which at least confirmed Hudson’s interpretation of the symbol—but that was all.
The most peculiar thing about them were the birds; each man gazed severely from the oil painting that captured their pale cheeks and silver sideburns, each with a bird perched on the shoulder of their suits.
McElking had a crow, its black talons piercing the fabric of his brown jacket.
Troy had a doctor bird—or hummingbird, as she remembered Americans called them—a tiny thing with ruby neck feathers and a straw-like beak.
Odell had an owl with black button eyes gazing from a snow-white face and brown body.
They also sat by arched windows displaying different time periods.
McElking and his crow sat during a bright, sunny day.
Troy and his hummingbird frowned from beside a clear night, the clipped-nail curve of the moon lining the windowsill in silver.
Odell and his owl were seated at night as well, but there was no moon visible; instead, their sky was a gorgeous patchwork of off-white stars.
Ellory frowned, taking a picture on her phone. It was probably nothing, but she was here to follow her instincts, and every nerve was alight with suspicion.
The aseptic cream walls, intermittent bronze and gold frames, pristine glass display cases, and ambient museum lighting lent her entire walk a dreamlike quality that was hard to shake free of.
All she saw around her were white faces, which wasn’t exactly unusual, but something about their serious expressions as they bore down on her from their massive portraits made goose bumps climb her arms. She didn’t know if it was her own insecurities or their stone-faced demeanors that screamed, You don’t belong here!
Get out. But she heard it as easily as she could hear her own breathing.
Inhale.
Get.
Exhale.
Out.
Ellory paused in front of a plaque explaining the existential-quantifier symbol and fought the urge to hug herself.
She recognized this terror. It was the same way she’d felt at Professor Colt’s house, seconds before she had seen the tattoo.
That sense of being Icarus soaring too close to the sun, heat cleaving the beeswax from her feathered wings to drop her to her doom.
But, instead of being intimidated, Ellory dug her nails into the palms of her hands and breathed past the stone in her stomach.
At this point, she was more afraid of not knowing.
Whatever her mind was trying to protect her from couldn’t be worse than this limbo between her reality and the possibility that magic underpinned it.
“Morgan.”
Hudson was beckoning from halfway down his side of the hall.
He’d shed his jacket, and the way he said her name put Ellory on instant alert.
He stood before a glass case that held a framed certificate of accreditation, browning with age.
His skeptical eyes were not on the faded letters and curling edges of the paper but on the wall behind the display.
“There’s a door,” he said, before she could question him. “Look there.”
The wall was the same sterile white as the rest of the hallway, but as she peered through the glass, she noticed an unevenness that had been invisible to her before.
There was a ridge in the flat surface that shouldn’t have been there, so far from the nearest corner.
The glass magnified it until she could see nothing else.
Frowning, she moved from left to right; the door disappeared unless she was looking directly at it, the seam fading into the wall without the display case before it.
“How did you even notice this?” she asked, stepping back. Even that shift in position made it impossible to see the door she now knew was hidden there.
“I’m thorough. And the fact you asked me that makes me think I should check your half of the museum, too,” said Hudson. “Hold this.”
Ellory took his jacket, and he gripped the glass case, rocking it experimentally.
At any other museum, it might have been bolted to the floor to prevent thefts or accidents, but the funds devoted to Warren University apparently hadn’t been spent on this collection.
Hudson was able to shove the case across the floor until he made a space wide enough for them to fit through.
The place it had once occupied was a perfect square of cleanliness in the middle of a dusty floor.
Standing in that square made the outline of the door stand out more, though it had no visible hinges or even a knob.
Her pulse was setting off fireworks beneath her skin.
Her erratic heartbeat made her fingers curl into her denim pants, letting the feel of the fabric ground her in this moment.
What kind of museum stashed an invisible door behind a large glass case?
How many people had gone through it?
And how many of those people had emerged alive?
As if thinking the same, Hudson slid in front of her like a broad-shouldered shield. “I don’t see any sign of an external alarm,” he said, rubbing a muscle in his side. “But I suppose we’ll have to take our chances.”
Under his hands, the door swung inward with a creak.
A cloud of dust escaped into the hall, chased by the stench of stale air and mildew.
Hudson coughed twice before bringing an arm up to cover his nose, and Ellory copied the motion as she followed him into the dim room that was roughly half the size of a lecture hall.
It took her eyes precious seconds to adjust, seconds during which she heard Hudson’s footsteps echo deeper inside, but when she could finally see again, her lips parted in surprise.