I spent the rest of the day exploring Thorne Abbey with Jenna, and even though we spent hours wandering through its rooms, we didn’t come anywhere close to seeing it all. Every room was filled with bizarre, dusty treasures, including one bedroom that contained five complete suits of armor, and another that held nothing but taxidermied animals. I told Jenna about e-mailing Mrs. Casnoff—and paid up my ten bucks—and that seemed to make her happy.
At lunch, Lara brought us sandwiches in the conservatory—which, it turned out, was a large sunlit room that housed the biggest piano I’d ever seen, as well as about a thousand ferns—and told us that she’d talked to Dad. He would be home later that evening, and we had his permission to go to the village with Nick and Daisy.
“But,” Lara added, “you’re to be home by midnight, and you’re only to go to the village. Anything farther afield is absolutely forbidden.”
Yeah, that sounded like something Dad would say. “How much ‘farther afield’ could we go?” I asked Jenna once Lara had gone. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
I found out that night. We were supposed to meet Nick and Daisy by the back entrance (wherever that was) at eight. At 7:45, I was in the bathroom putting on some mascara when Jenna slipped in wearing an outfit that I can only describe as Hello Kitty Goes Goth.
“Isn’t that a bit much for strolling through the village?” I asked, eyeing her hot pink go-go boots.
She shut the door and hoisted herself up on the counter. “We’re not going to the village,” she replied. “I asked Daisy. They’re taking us to London.”
I nearly poked my eye out with the mascara wand. “London is like three hours away. Are we going to steal a car or something?”
Jenna shook her head. “Sophie, when are you going to start remembering that we have magical powers? We’re not driving, we’re…well, I don’t know how we’re getting there, exactly, but it’ll be, you know.” She waved her hands in the air. “Maaaaaagic.”
“Great,” I muttered, fishing in my makeup bag for some lip gloss. My stomach lurched nervously. If Daisy expected me to perform some sort of awesome demon traveling spell…yeah, that wasn’t happening. “Why exactly are we going to London?”
Jenna grinned. “There’s this club that’s just for Prodigium. Daisy says it’s pretty awesome.”
Ugh. A club for Prodigium? That conjured up images of way more velvet and dry ice and angst than I was up for.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That sounds awfully ‘afield’ to me.”
“Yeah, but if we wanna find out more about Daisy and Nick…”
“I know. It’s so obnoxious when you’re right about stuff. Still, there’s no way Cal is going to be cool with this,” I said, hoping that might put an end to the whole thing.
Jenna looked confused. “Cal’s not coming.”
“What? Why not?”
She shrugged. “He got caught up in dealing with some sort of botanical emergency. Apparently there were a lot more sick plants here than he thought.”
“Huh,” I said, turning back to the mirror.
“Why, Sophia Mercer! Is that disappointment I detect with my super-special vampire powers?”
“No, I just…I just wish he’d come to tell me himself.”
“Uh-huh,” Jenna said with way too much smugness. “And you wore that low-cut shirt and those high-heeled boots for my benefit, right?”
I tossed a compact at her. “No one likes a nosy vampire, Jenna.”
Nick and Daisy were waiting for us by the back door once we finally made it downstairs. Nick shot me a surly glance, but didn’t say anything.
“I take it Jenna filled you in on our plans for this evening?” Daisy asked me in a low voice. Her gray eyes were lined with kohl and practically glittering.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to feign some excitement. “Can’t wait!” There was nothing I wanted less than to hang out with a bunch of Prodigium and two demons, one of whom was obviously unstable.
“You know if you narc on us to your dad, he’ll probably kick us out,” Nick said, opening the door.
“Wow, I sure would hate that after you’ve been so friendly and welcoming to me,” I replied brightly.
“She’s right,” Daisy admonished, pulling on Nick’s sleeve. “Be nice.”
He studied me with those unnerving blue eyes.
“I’ll try,” Nick said finally.
We stepped out into the damp night. Just outside the door, a gravel path led to a long row of shoulder-high hedges. It disappeared into the darkness near the edge of the forest that surrounded the back of Thorne Abbey.
We followed the path as it wound its way toward the woods. Jenna clutched my arm, our shadows stretching out before us in the moonlight.
Up ahead, Daisy lit a cigarette, and I could see its tip glowing bright red. Nick walked next to her, hands in his pockets, and I could hear the two of them talking, his voice low and clipped. I was pretty sure I heard my name.
“They’re not so bad,” Jenna whispered. “And it’s like they don’t even care that I’m a vampire. Apparently they’ve met lots of them at this place where we’re going tonight, Shelley’s.”
“Shelley’s?”
“Yeah, you know. As in Mary. Frankenstein, monsters…”
“Cute.”
We reached the edge of the forest, and I saw that the gravel path continued through the trees, although it was a lot narrower. My heels sank into the damp ground, and soon Daisy, Nick, and Jenna were pretty far ahead of me. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets, wondering if I was ever going to be able to walk through a forest at night without thinking of Alice, and all of the time Elodie and I had spent learning spells.
The path came to an end just in front of a large stone building. Nick was nowhere in sight, but Daisy was standing in the doorway. “Come on,” she said, waving us forward before disappearing inside.
We followed her. Even though the night was warm, the stone structure felt damp and gloomy. The musty scent of age and disuse hung in the air. I heard a flutter of wings and looked up to see a large dark bird fly out of a giant hole in the roof. “What is this place?” I asked.
“It used to be a corn mill for the estate,” Daisy replied. She pointed toward the destroyed roof. “A tree fell on it during a storm about sixty years ago.”
“So why not tear it down?” Jenna asked.
Even in the dim light, I could make out Daisy’s incredulous look. “Because,” she said, “it houses an Itineris.”
“That’s not some kind of hideous Latin monster, is it?” I asked, trying to raise an eyebrow.
Daisy laughed as she picked her way over fallen beams to lead us deeper into the mill. “It is Latin, but it means journey, or road.”
I stumbled over a pile of broken stone. “Well, that sounds equal parts fun and terrifying,” I muttered, but Daisy was already too far ahead to hear me.
Nick stood at the back wall. There was a tall opening, probably about eight feet high. It looked like a doorway. Inside, all I could see was darkness.
“Oh, man, I really hope we’re not crawling all the way to London,” I said, but as I got closer, I could see that it wasn’t the opening of a tunnel like I’d originally thought. The doorway led to a shallow alcove, no more than three feet deep.
Daisy smiled shyly at me. “I take it you’ve never traveled by Itineris.”
“I’m not even sure I could spell it.”
To my surprise, Nick graced me with a tiny smile, one that actually looked genuine and not unhinged. Then he walked into the opening. There was no flash of light or surge of magic. One minute he was there, the next he wasn’t. Somehow, that was so much scarier than if there’d been a big light show, or maybe some smoke. Daisy went next. It was the same way with her, like she just blinked out of existence.
Jenna and I stood there, staring at the passageway. “We could go back,” I suggested weakly. “Tell them their magical road thingie didn’t work for us.”
But Jenna shook her head. “It can’t be that bad,” she muttered.
“We could try to go together,” I said. “I think we’d both fit, and that way, if we end up transported to another dimension or morphed into a wall, at least we’d have company.”
Jenna laughed. “All right, then. Let’s do this.”
Hand in hand, we walked toward the opening.