Three weeks later, I left for England.
Mom and Mrs. Casnoff walked down to the ferry with the four of us late in the afternoon. Mom’s eyes were red, so I knew she’d been crying, but she tried to seem cheerful as she helped Jenna and me load our luggage. “Make sure you take lots of pictures,” she told me. “And if you come back using words like ‘queue’ or ‘lorry,’ I’ll be very upset.”
We stood on the deck, the sea breeze ruffling our hair. Jenna had already claimed a bench in the shade, and Cal was talking in a low voice to Mrs. Casnoff. I saw her look over his shoulder at me, and wondered how she felt about me leaving for the summer. She was probably pumped, or as pumped as Mrs. Casnoff got. God knows, I’d brought nothing but trouble to Hecate Hall.
I also wondered if I should have told her about Elodie’s ghost. Actually, I knew I should have. If I’d told her about Alice when she first appeared to me, maybe Elodie wouldn’t be a ghost. It was a thought that had burned at the back of my brain for months, and here I was making the same mistake all over again.
Before I could think about that any more, Mom wrapped her arms around me. We were about the same height, and I could feel her tears at my temple when she said, “I’m going to miss your birthday next month. I’ve never missed your birthday.”
My throat was so tight that I couldn’t speak, so I just hugged her closer.
“Sophie,” Dad said, appearing at my elbow. “It’s time to go.”
I nodded and gave Mom one last squeeze. “I’ll call lots, I promise,” I told her as we pulled apart. “And I’ll be back before you know it.”
Mom wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and gave me one of her dazzling smiles. Dad drew in a sharp breath next to me, but when I glanced over at him, he had turned away.
“Good-bye, James,” Mom called after him.
Cal, Jenna, and I stood at the railing as the ferry pulled away from the dock. Mrs. Casnoff stood on the shore, watching us go, but Mom was already walking back into the woods that surrounded the beach. I was glad. It was a miracle I hadn’t started sobbing already.
The ferry chugged out into the brown water. Over the trees, we could make out the very top of Hecate Hall.
“I haven’t been away from this place since I was thirteen years old,” Cal said softly. “Six years.”
I’d never asked Cal what he’d done that had landed him at Hecate Hall. He just didn’t seem like the type of guy to do the dangerous spells that usually got warlocks sent to the school. He’d decided to stay on after his eighteenth birthday, although I’d never been clear on whether that had been by choice. But the farther we got from the school, the more troubled he looked.
Even Jenna, who usually acted like she was composing a thesis on all the ways Hecate sucked, looked wistful.
I stared at the bit of roof I could see against the blue sky, and a strong sense of foreboding came over me, as though the sun had gone behind a cloud.
The three of us will never come back here.
The thought was so startling that I shivered. I tried to shake it off. That was ridiculous. We were going to England for three months, and we’d be back at Hecate by August. Premonition isn’t one of my powers, so I was just being paranoid.
Still, the feeling stayed with me long after Graymalkin Island had faded in the distance.
* * *
“Being a demon should make you immune to jet lag,” I mumbled hours and hours later as a sleek black car carried us through the English countryside.
The long flight from Georgia to England had been pretty uneventful. Except that Cal had sat next to me.
Which was fine. Really.
It wasn’t like I’d been hyperaware of his presence and jumped the three times his knee bumped mine. And after that third time, he definitely hadn’t shot me a kind of disgusted look and said, “Chill out, will you?”
And when Jenna gave us both a quizzical look, we hadn’t snapped, in unison, “Nothing!” Because all of that would have been weird, and Cal and I weren’t weird. We were cool.
“You’ll feel better soon,” Dad said. For the first time since I’d met him, his eyes were bright and he actually looked relaxed. I guess being back in the motherland will do that to a guy.
Jenna was practically bouncing with excitement, but Cal looked as tired as I felt. I hadn’t been able to fall asleep on the plane, and I was paying for it now. My eyes felt gritty and hot, and all I could think about was collapsing into a bed. After all, my poor body thought it was six a.m., but in England it was nearly lunchtime. Plus, we’d been driving for what felt like hours.
When the plane had landed in London, I’d assumed the car would take us to a house in the city, or maybe to Council Headquarters so Dad could do business stuff. But the car had driven out of the crowded streets and past small houses all clustered together that reminded me of a Dickens story. Gradually, the brick buildings had given way to trees and rolling green hills. I saw more sheep than I thought existed.
“So we came all the way to England just to hang out in the middle of nowhere?” I asked, leaning my aching head on Jenna’s shoulder.
“We did,” Dad replied.
Cal smiled. Well, of course he’d be thrilled to be stuck on some British farm all summer long, I thought grumpily, my visions of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge crumbling. Probably all sorts of English plants to heal—
Then I caught sight of a house.
Although, calling it a house was like calling the Mona Lisa a painting, or Hecate Hall a school. The term was technically correct, but it didn’t even begin to sum up the reality of the object.
This house was one of the biggest buildings I’d ever seen, and made of a light, golden-colored stone that looked warm to the touch. It sat nestled in a lush valley, an emerald green lawn stretching in front of it, while a forested hill rose in the back. A thin, shining ribbon of water curved gracefully along one side of the property. Literally hundreds of windows glittered in the sunlight.
“Wow,” Cal said, leaning over to look out the window.
“This is where we’re staying?” I asked.
Dad just smiled, looking way too satisfied with himself. “I told you there would be room for all of us,” he said, and I caught myself smiling back. We held each other’s eyes for a second, but I broke away first, nodding toward the house. “Don’t houses like that always have a name?”
“More often than not,” he answered. “This is Thorne Abbey.”
Something about that name was familiar, but I couldn’t think why. “It used to be a church?”
“Not that actual house. It wasn’t built until the late sixteenth century. But there was an abbey on the land.”
He went into lecture mode, talking about how the abbey had been razed under Henry VIII, and the land given to the Thorne family.
But to be honest, I wasn’t really listening. I was watching several people walk out the front door of the house. Then I spotted a pair of wings and wondered who exactly Dad’s friends were.
The car rumbled over a stone bridge and pulled into a circular drive. Dad got out of the car first, and as he opened my door, I suddenly wished I’d worn something nicer than a faded pair of jeans and a plain green T-shirt.
Impossibly wide steps led up to a terrace made of the same golden-colored stone as the rest of the house. There were six people standing there, two dark-haired kids who looked about my age, and four adults. I guessed they were all Prodigium. Well, the faerie was obvious, but I could sense magic hovering around the rest of them, too.
The day was warmer than I’d expected, and I felt a few beads of sweat pop out on my brow. The gravel crunched under my feet, and in the distance I heard birds singing. Jenna appeared at my elbow, her earlier excitement gone, her fingers moving over her bloodstone.
Dad placed a hand on the small of my back and steered me up the steps. “Everyone, this is Sophie. My daughter.”
Suddenly I felt something surge in my blood. Something like magic, but darker, more powerful. It was coming from the two teenagers near the back of the crowd. They were the only ones not smiling, and the boy—who looked weirdly familiar—was glaring at me.
Realization slammed into my chest, and it was all I could do not to gasp.
They were demons.