Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The bus smells like diesel and old fast food. I sit with my bag on my lap, forehead against the cold glass, watching the landscape change.
It takes most of the day. Flat suburban sprawl gives way to highway, then mountains.
Mountains that don't look real from a distance, too large, too sharp against the sky, the snow line creeping lower as we climb.
My ears pop twice. The air through the vents shifts from stale warmth to something cooler, dryer, carrying a faint edge of pine that gets stronger with every mile.
The other passengers thin out at each stop, ordinary people with ordinary destinations, until by early afternoon it's just me and an old man in a flannel shirt who fell asleep before Denver, his head tilted against the window.
I've read the letter four more times since this morning. Not because it tells me anything new. Because reading it gives my hands something to do and my mind something to grip that isn't the free-fall of everything I don't know.
The photograph is at the bottom of my bag, and every hour or so I'm aware of it, that persistent low-level consciousness of something tender. I don't take it out. I just know it's there. The woman with my cheekbones, caught alive in afternoon light, one week before everything.
The driver is a heavyset man with a gray beard, and he hasn't said a word to me since I boarded. Two hours out from the final stop he catches my eye in the rearview mirror.
"You headed to the Academy?"
I don't answer right away. The letter didn't tell me to keep it secret.
It didn't tell me much of anything about how to behave, just handed me a destination and a deadline and wished me luck in the least encouraging way possible.
I look at the back of the driver's head, the gray hair, his shoulders sitting slightly too high.
"Yeah," I say.
He nods, eyes back on the road. A long pause. Long enough that I think he's done, that it was idle conversation, that he's going to spend the next two hours saying nothing while the mountains grow closer through the windshield.
"Three girls went missing from that place last year."
The old man keeps sleeping. The diesel smell keeps turning.
"Bodies never found," the driver says. His voice carries no emotion, flat as stating weather. "Figured you should know."
My hands tighten on the strap of my bag. "Did they investigate?"
"Sure." The word comes flat. "Came up empty. Sheriff's a shifter. Academy's got friends."
I look at the back of his head. "You're not."
"Not what?"
"A shifter."
He's quiet for a moment. Outside the window the highway is giving way to something narrower, the trees pressing in on both sides, the mountain climbing ahead of us.
"My daughter applied to that place when she was seventeen," he says finally.
"They said she wasn't the right bloodline. " He pauses. "Probably lucky."
We don't talk again after that. I sit with his words and the smell of diesel and the mountains coming up through the glass, thinking about luck. What it means in a place where bodies don't get found.
The town at the base of the mountain is called Harrow's Creek, and it is the most aggressively quiet place I have ever been.
It isn't small-town quiet, the comfortable hush of a place where nothing much happens and people are easy with it.
It's the quiet of a place that learned to keep its mouth shut.
The main street has a diner with a flickering neon sign, a gas station, a hardware store with boards over one window, the boards weathered gray, in place long enough to have become part of the building's face.
The sidewalks are clean but no one lingers on them.
Three people in the half-block I can see from the depot, each one moving with purpose, eyes down, not looking at the bus, not looking at each other.
Walking carefully, not drawing attention.
One woman glances up as I step off the bus. Our eyes meet for less than a second before she looks away, speeding up, turning the corner at the end of the block without breaking stride.
The bus depot is a parking lot with a covered bench and a trash can. The bus doesn't idle. The driver pulls away before I've shouldered my bag. The sound of the engine fades up the road. I am standing alone in the cold mountain air with a sign in front of me: EVERPINE ACADEMY, 4 MILES.
The air up here has a weight to it, a mineral cold that settles into my lungs with every breath, clean and sharp and threaded with pine resin. And underneath that, something warm and organic I can't place, prickling at the back of my throat, making something in my chest go quiet and watchful.
I need transportation. There is one taxi, a sedan with a cracked bumper parked in front of the hardware store.
A man leans against the driver's side door, arms crossed, and when he sees me crossing the lot his eyes do a quick assessment, running from my bag to my face and back, his jaw settling into something cautious.
"Academy?" I ask.
He uncrosses his arms. Looks at my bag, then at my face, taking his time about it. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
He looks at the mountain. The peak is visible above the tree line from here, gray rock and early snow, and the Academy is somewhere up there in the trees, invisible from this angle. He stays looking at it for a beat longer than the question requires. Something in his jaw tightens.
Then he opens the back door and gets in without a word.
We don't talk on the way up. The road winds through dense pines, switchbacks carved into the mountain with no guardrails, the drop on one side going down and down through trees until I can't see the bottom.
The forest presses in from both sides, all the same height, all the same dark green, and they don't make any sound even though there is clearly wind up here, moving the canopy overhead.
That's wrong. Trees in wind make noise. These don't.
I keep my eyes on the road.
The driver drops me at a wrought-iron gate set into a stone wall that disappears in both directions into the tree line. The gate is open. He doesn't pull through it.
"They'll collect your bag," he says, engine still running. "Registration is in the main building, straight up the path." A pause. I have the door half open when he speaks again, quiet enough that I have to focus to catch it. "Pretty girls don't last here."
He's pulling away before I've fully stepped out. I watch the taillights disappear around the bend. Just the gate, the path beyond it, the amber lamp light already burning in the late afternoon gloom.
I step through the gate.
The path from the gate to the Academy is about a quarter mile of crushed gravel lined with iron lamp posts, the lamps already burning even though it's only late afternoon, their light a deep amber that pools on the gravel and doesn't quite reach the shadows between them.
The air smells different inside the gate, even after just a few steps.
Still pine, still cold mountain, but richer now, more layered, more alive.
The grounds on either side are manicured to a standard that doesn't feel possible outdoors, in a mountain October, in a place with actual weather.
The grass is so even and close-cut it looks pressed, more like a surface than a living thing.
The hedgerows are shaped to geometric angles, every edge clean, not a twig out of place.
Flower beds in late-season bloom, each plant spaced exactly from the next, the blooms all facing the same direction, the whole of it so relentlessly perfect that it sets something off in the back of my skull.
Not fear exactly. A low, source less hum of wrongness, the feeling of something that looks right but isn't.
No birds. I realize it now, halfway up the path. The mountain had birds, I heard them through the taxi window. Here, inside the wall, nothing. The only sound is my own footsteps on the gravel and the low sigh of wind moving through the perfectly shaped hedgerows without disturbing a single branch.
Beautiful. Wrong. The combination of the two sits in my chest as I keep walking, each step on the gravel too loud in the no-bird silence.
The Academy comes into view around a bend in the path and my step falters for just a moment.
It's Gothic stone, dark with decades of mountain weather, reaching up into the sky in towers and buttresses and arched windows that throw the amber lamp light back at me.
Gargoyles line the roofline, dozens of them, and they are not the generic crouching figures you see on cathedrals in photographs.
Each one is different. Each one is individual, their expressions carved with too much care, too much detail, as though the carver worked from something real rather than imagination.
Some are crouching. Others are stretched upright, arms extended, mouths open.
Each one faces outward. Each one looks down at the path. At me.
The main building is four stories at its lowest point, wings spreading left and right, and the whole thing sits against the mountain as though it belongs there, as though the mountain shaped itself around the building rather than the other way around.
Every window is lit from within, warm light behind old glass, distorted and amber.
There are students behind some of those windows, shadows moving across the panes, the life of the place going on inside it, completely ordinary.
It should be stunning. It is stunning. It is also exactly what the bus driver's silence meant, what the taxi driver's quiet warning meant, what the town at the bottom of the mountain meant with its eyes-down residents and its weathered-over windows.
This place has been here a long time and it has been beautiful the whole time and beautiful has never made it safe.