Chapter 20
Sunday mornings at Beecher are usually pretty laid back. A handful of khaki-clad guys and women in dressy coats making their way to the gray stone chapel at the center of campus or huddling under its gothic archway at the front with cups of hot chocolate.
A few obsessively driven music majors hauling oversized instrument cases at a fast clip to the Meredith Center for the Arts to get their desired rehearsal room before anyone else arrives.
Grumbling and still half-asleep grad students grabbing a coffee and a bagel with cream cheese from the student union cafeteria before making their way to their offices to grade papers and labs, while squeezing in their own work.
That never happens, except at the beginning of the year on freshman move-in day.
“What is going on?” I ask, sitting forward, the seat belt tugging at my neck.
“You want me to go around, try another way?” Devon asks, hand over the turn signal.
I pause. “No, I want to see what’s going on.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. The phrase is thrumming through me, over and over again, like a second heartbeat.
We inch forward, and the source of the traffic congestion becomes obvious when we reach the front of the line.
A silver Mercedes blocks part of the turn lane, angled sharply.
Directly in front of it is an SUV with its side caved in and an entire dorm room’s worth of stuff scattered on the asphalt—shampoo bottles oozing white glossy puddles, a laptop lying dented in a sea of safety glass, clothing still on white plastic hangers in twisted heaps, and a random assortment of shoes, including mismatched Birkenstocks and one proud pink Croc.
Devon edges around the damaged vehicles—the hood of the Mercedes is crumpled in folds, like a cartoon car—until we can join the stream of cars heading deeper into campus.
Hazard lights flash everywhere, and flatbed moving carts are abandoned in clumps of icy snow while students drag wheelie-suitcases and boxes out of the dorms.
This is worse than freshman move-in day.
Most of the drivers have given up trying to get closer to the dorms and are now parked on the edge of Beecher Drive, waiting.
As we edge forward slowly, I spot a familiar face, long dark hair in a braided ponytail swinging between her shoulders.
One of Chessa’s intramural soccer teammates is walking in the grass along the line of cars, an overloaded backpack over one shoulder while she carries an oversized fluffy reading pillow in front of her.
“Hang on, slow down,” I tell Devon.
I fumble for the button to put the window down.
“Kenzie,” I shout.
But she doesn’t hear me thanks to the blast of a horn, directly behind us.
When I lean around to look, a balding guy in the car following throws his hands up in aggravation, his mouth moving rapidly in words I can’t hear.
I give him the universal signal for “one minute!”—or maybe that’s a different finger—and try again. “Kenzie!”
This time, her head jerks up and she looks around until she spots me. She pauses, uncertainty written on her face. Then she approaches, cutting between bumpers of parked but running cars. “What do you want?” she calls.
“What is going on?” I ask.
“Where have you been, Trelane? People are dying all over campus,” she says, adjusting her load, trying to keep her backrest from slipping to the ground, its neon pink fur clenched between her fingers. “Thought you would have known about that.”
I try to ignore the emphasis that implies I’m somehow involved or connected. Clearly that rumor is still spreading. “Besides the Foreign Language House?” I ask. “And the Deltas?”
Kenzie arches her eyebrows. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Yes, obviously.” I glare at her. I’ve never liked her smugness. “I just didn’t know if there was anything new.”
She hikes her backpack higher on her shoulder with a sigh. “They’re saying that that explosion last night was actually an earthquake, maybe part of a sinkhole by Greek Row. A bunch of kids are missing, I guess. People are freaking out, parents are pissed.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I ask, skeptical. Beecher is like the worst small town; there’s always a mysterious “they” who knows and shares everything except their identity and their sources.
“I don’t know.” Kenzie shrugs impatiently.
“Everyone. Dr. No made Old Campus evacuate to Wibberley, but he won’t commit to going remote.
So a bunch of us decided to leave anyway.
Can’t have classes if there’s no one to go to them.
” She gives me a grim look. “I’m not risking my life because of that asshole. ”
Dr. Nokomis, known not affectionately as Dr. No both for the villain status and his predisposition for that response, is the university president. I’m betting he’s more worried about bad press and the parents. Can’t charge insane amounts of tuition when parents are afraid to send their kids here.
But if he’s willing to move students out of their housing, then there must be something to the sinkhole/earthquake rumors. I need to see for myself.
“I gotta go. My mom and my sister are waiting.” Kenzie turns and cuts her way through the cars back to the sodden and icy grass.
“Any of that sound right to you?” I ask Devon once the window is back up and we’re rolling forward again.
“None of this sounds right,” he says. “I don’t understand any of this.” He sounds bewildered. “The strategy, the motives…” He shakes his head.
“Exactly!” I throw my hands up. “What spawn would do this? Waste time and energy this way?” Rather than, you know, just killing me.
“But it definitely sounds like it’s getting worse,” he adds. “What do you want to do?”
For lack of any other idea, my original plan was to start from the very beginning, at Branwick. I wasn’t paying any attention when I left my room yesterday morning, focused only on getting to Lennie.
Maybe there was something I missed. No idea what, but checking was at least more effective than curling up in a corner in defeat. Which was my next best option.
Plus, it would give me the benefit of changing into clothes I actually owned and seeing what, if anything, the police had left behind. I was hoping for my phone, or at the very least my laptop. I wanted to see my missed-call log for myself.
But now, it seems like a better idea to go where the action is … or was, most recently. Something about that earthquake or sinkhole idea … it bothers me. Like a cold, unfamiliar fingertip tracing down my spine.
The ground. It came from the ground. I shiver reflexively.
“When you pulled me away from that girl, Izzy…” I begin, then I shake my head. “Never mind.”
“What?” Devon asks, looking over at me. The lack of judgment in his expression pushes me to continue.
Still, I hesitate because it sounds utterly bizarre. “Did you feel the power? Did you feel…” I try to think how best to describe the sensation. “The pull. It wasn’t like being fed on from a distance. It felt more like being devoured from below. Like it was pulling me under, toward the ground.”
Devon shakes his head. “I didn’t, but I was focused on breaking the connection as fast as possible.
” He executes a quick move to cut around a double-parked car before an oncoming car blocks our path.
“I told you, though, this whole place has an odd feel to it. I thought maybe it was your claim, but—”
“I haven’t, I didn’t,” I say quickly. A part of the ritual and rites of the Old Ones that I saw no need to participate in.
Not to mention, I didn’t want to draw that kind of attention to myself from anyone who happened to be keeping tabs on that kind of thing.
My goal was to be just Jocasta Trelane. Normal human, nothing else.
“Right,” he says. “So then, what is it? Something to do with the campus itself?”
“It can’t be Beecher. It can’t. I’ve been here for three years, and nothing like this has happened before,” I say, more to myself than to Devon. “If there was something inherently … magic-related about this location, I would have seen it or felt it before now.” Wouldn’t I?
Plus, magic doesn’t really work like that. Some places are dead zones, where all the life or energy has been drawn out or where echoes of powerful magic remain, but that’s because someone did that.
People—or whatever you want to call the Old Ones and those of us who are spawn—wield magic, not places. As far as I know, anyway.
I’d blame my carefully cultivated ignorance of the Old Ones for this, but Devon doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on, either, and he was raised in the community.
Devon reaches the four-way stop at the intersection near the chapel, and he glances over at me for direction.
“Let’s just get as close as we can to Old Campus,” I say. “See what we can see.”
Even cutting through parking lots and taking odd turns down indirect side streets, it takes us a full fifteen minutes to make it from one side of campus to the other.
When we finally reach Old Campus, just past Branwick Hall, we can’t get very far.
Right at the start of Greek Row, a barricade of orange and white sawhorses with flashing lights block the road, with several construction signs indicating “ROAD CLOSED” and “DANGER AHEAD.” A dozen or so students are still scrambling to get out of nearby houses, lugging suitcases and backpacks awkwardly down steps and into waiting vehicles or up the sidewalk toward the athletic center.
Behind the barricade, several police officers pace back and forth, talking to each other and into their radios.
A fire truck is parked on the opposite end of the street, at some distance from the disruption.
Sirens aren’t running but the lights are still flashing and a team of firefighters in full protective gear are inspecting something around the edges of the broken asphalt.
The road is raised in jagged uneven chunks around the perimeter of a large hole, like something has tunneled beneath, leaving space for the whole thing to collapse in on itself.
“Whoa,” Devon says.