Chapter 2 #2
A sound reaches me from somewhere above the tree line, higher on the mountain.
A howl, long and climbing, and then something in the middle register that doesn't sound like an animal testing its voice in the dark.
It sounds like something being split open from the inside, unwilling.
It rises, holds, and cuts off. The silence after it presses down.
My pulse has gone faster than I'd like. My hands are steady, which is what I'm going to focus on.
I walk toward the front doors. I don't look at the gargoyles. I don't look at the man with the bucket. I keep my eyes on the entrance and keep walking until my hand is on the cold iron handle. I pull it open and go inside.
The cobblestones of the main courtyard are wet.
I notice it because the rest of the grounds are dry, the late October air cold enough to have chased off any moisture hours ago, the path behind me bone-dry under my feet.
But the cobblestones in the open courtyard in front of the main entrance are dark with dampness, a roughly circular patch maybe six feet across, just to the left of the front steps.
And there is a man crouched over it, gray coveralls, a bucket beside him, working at the stones with a long-handled brush in quick, systematic strokes.
He hears my footsteps on the cobblestones and glances up.
Our eyes meet for a moment. His face is closed, nothing moving in it, and then his eyes drop to mine watching the bucket and his jaw tightens.
I look at what's in the bucket. The water is dark.
Not the gray of soapy water, not the brown of mud.
A darker color than either of those, with a density to it, the color of something diluted but not diluted enough.
He looks back down at his work. The brush keeps moving across the stones, back and forth, systematic and unhurried, the rhythm of a task that has a method behind it.
I look at the courtyard around us. The rest of the cobblestones are dry and clean. Just this patch. Just this circle, six feet across, directly in front of the main steps, in the most visible possible location, being scrubbed away before the evening properly arrives.
I walk past him. Past the dark patch and the brush moving back and forth across the stones. I don't stop until my hand is on the cold iron handle of the front door and I am through it.
The entrance hall is vaulted stone, the ceiling disappearing into shadow high above, a chandelier of wrought iron hanging from it, candles burning in the early gloom.
The floor is polished dark stone and my footsteps ring off it, bouncing back from the walls, announcing me to the empty space.
Portraits line the walls all the way up the staircase, oil paintings in heavy frames, generations of faces staring out at nothing.
The staircase sweeps up from the far end, wide, the banister dark wood worn smooth.
The smell hits me properly for the first time.
Stone and candle wax and underneath that, something warm and alive and layered, something that fills my lungs differently than the mountain air outside did and settles there like a hand pressing down on my sternum.
My pulse shifts. Something in me goes quiet and alert at the same time, like a sound just outside the range of hearing that I'm straining toward.
This is a place made for what I am. Or what I'm supposed to be. What my parents were.
I don't know what that means yet. I just know the smell of it is doing something to me that I don't have words for.
A girl comes quickly out of a side corridor, folders under her arm, and she pulls up when she sees me, eyes moving over me fast.
"New arrival?" she asks.
"Nova Bardot."
Something moves across her face. Not recognition, exactly.
More like a filing, a fact being placed somewhere.
"Registration is through there." She nods at a door beside the staircase.
"Headmaster Owen is expecting you. Don't be late.
" She starts moving again, then stops, half-turning.
"Don't be anything they notice, actually. If you can help it."
She's around the corner before I can ask who they are.
The door closes behind me.
I'm standing in the entry of Everpine Academy.
The portraits on the walls stare down. The candles burn.
The smell of old stone and something living and layered fills every breath and does things to my pulse that I don't have a framework for yet.
The man outside is still working at the cobblestones.
The girl with the folders is already gone.
I look up at the portraits. Rows and rows of them, all the way up the staircase wall, generations of bloodlines arranged to tell a story about power and permanence.
Power that has friends in the right places.
Permanence that can make three girls disappear and have it come up empty in an investigation.
All those faces looking down, none of them surprised, none of them afraid. Why would they be. This is their place.
Somewhere in this building are people who may have known my parents. Somewhere in this building are people who answer to the same organization that killed them, or people who are both those things at once. The letter didn't say which.
Somewhere up the mountain, whatever howled is still out there in the dark.
I think about the bus driver. Bodies never found. I think about the taxi driver, how quietly he said pretty girls don't last here, not looking at me when he said it, careful not to make it personal. I think about the man with the bucket, the dark water, his jaw going tight when he saw me notice.
I also have eighteen years of fast healing and unusual strength and dreams of running on four legs through forests I've never visited.
Whatever this smell is doing to my chest right now, this alive and animal warmth in the air of this building.
I don't know what any of it means yet. I don't know what I am yet.
But I am here. The people who killed my parents operate here.
The anonymous letter writer sent me here anyway because there was no better option.
I adjust the strap of my bag.
I cross the entrance hall.
I open the registration door.
The heavy oak of the entrance swings shut behind me with a sound like a lock engaging, solid and final, the sound of a door that has closed on many people before me.
I don't look back to check whether it actually locked.