someone yelling, “He’s opening it!” and then everyone rushing away. This had to be the strangest school he’d ever seen.
Tugging at her hair, Daphne sighed and said, “It’s a long story. Come on. Let’s go grab something to eat and we’ll explain.”
“That’s okay,” he said slowly, looking first at the redhead and then at her boyfriend, or whatever he was. “I think I’ll find my own way to the cafeteria.”
Rolling her eyes at him, Daphne scoffed, “What? Afraid of a couple of girls? Oh, and Fin, I guess. You should be afraid of Fin. He could totally kick your butt. But he won’t unless you mess with Aislin. Aside from that, what are we going to do? Suck you into another dimension?” She put her hands on her hips and stared up at him, her dark eyes daring him. “Come on. You know something weird is going on right? Not just the door. People have been avoiding you, acting strange. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the only people who have talked to you all day. Don’t you want to know why?”
They picked a table at the back of the cafeteria, but didn’t need to worry about being overheard. As soon as they sat down, everyone in a twenty foot radius picked up and moved. They didn’t even bother to be casual about it. They just scooped up their trays and hightailed it across the room, as far away from him as possible.
“Okay,” Dylan said as he watched the migration. “Let’s start with why everyone’s treating me like I’ve got the black plague or something.”
“Oh, that’s Kira’s fault,” Daphne said offhandedly.
“Maybe we should wait for her before we try to explain,” Aislin murmured.
“Nah.” Daphne dismissed the suggestion with a wave of her fork, flicking rice across the table. “She won’t be back until Monday.” She turned back to Dylan. “Kira is staying with her dad in Portland this week to meet his new fiancé,” she confided, as if that was supposed to mean something to him.
“So, who is Kira and how it is her fault that everyone’s terrified of me?” he asked, trying to bring them back to the topic at hand.
“Oh…uh…” Daphne began and then paused to take a bite of her lunch. She chewed thoughtfully for a few moments before continuing. “I guess what you have to understand is that this is a small town. Like really small. Hardly anyone ever comes here. Not to pass through, not to visit, and certainly not to live.” She looked around the cafeteria. “We’ve all known each other our whole lives. Until this year, we’d never had a new kid in school. Not really, anyway. Sometimes a family will move away for a few years and then come back or a kid will come to stay with a grandparent or something, but never strangers. Never outsiders.”
Dylan thought about this. “How is that possible?”
She shrugged. “It’s complicated. Just trust me. Seelie High never had a new kid.”
“Until Kira,” Aislin piped up. Beside her, Fin was devouring a slice of pizza and not looking particularly interested in what was being said. What was up with the guy? Dylan still hadn’t heard him talk.
“That’s right. Until Kira,” Daphne agreed.
And then she launched into the craziest story anyone had ever tried to hand him. A prophecy, a lost tinker, and a magic door. It was like a Disney fairytale.
“You know you’re crazy, right?” he asked when Daphne paused for breath.
“You saw through the door,” she said simply.
“Some kind of optical illusion,” he suggested again.
She raised an eyebrow. “Really? Tell me you didn’t feel the breeze, didn’t smell the forest, didn’t hear the leaves rustling? What kind of illusion can trick all your senses at once?”
He didn’t answer. What could he say? It was crazy, but who was he to judge? If he could recognize crazy, it was because he had a fair amount of it himself. Without his music, he heard not just voices in his head, but a whole other world that no amount of therapy or medication could get rid of.
“Anyway,” Daphne said when he didn’t respond, “that’s why everyone’s freaking out about you. Kira showed up and this weird thing happened. It changed…stuff. No one’s quite sure what to think about it. And then there’s you. Another new kid. Everyone’s worried that you’re like her. And then you go and open the door.” She shrugged. “Can you blame them?”
“They’re scared,” Aislin added. She looked around the room sympathetically. “We should take him to Leena.”
Daphne shook her head. “No. I don’t think being introduced to Leena by us is going to help him. We’re not exactly her favorite people. Not since you prophesied that she was going to get all gray and ugly.”
Aislin’s face turned as red as her hair. “That’s not what I said. All I said was that a day was coming when her gold would fade to silver. I don’t even know what it means, but I definitely didn’t say she was going to get ugly.”
“Whatever…She doesn’t like us anymore. Not that she did much before. We’re too close to Kira.”
“Okay, what are you talking about?” Dylan interrupted, waving a hand between the two girls to remind them that he was there. “Who is Leena? And what did you mean when you said that stuff changed when that Kira girl opened the door?”
The girls exchanged a look. There was one of those silent conversations that you only get between people who know each other really well—the kind that don’t need words.
“Okay…This is where it gets strange.” Daphne took a deep breath and continued, “Leena is a junior. She’s…like the queen of the fairies.”
“Oh, don’t! You know she hates it when people call her that!” Aislin said, glancing around as if she were afraid that this Leena girl might pop out from underneath a table or something.
“Well, it’s true. Or something like it. She calls herself the Lady. Anyway, she brought a group of fairies here a long time ago and started this city.”
New Elphame had been founded by fairies. Not just fairies, but elves and banshees and mermaids and every other kind of mythical creature. Daphne claimed that most of the students were descendants of those magical beings and that after Kira had opened the door, some unusual traits of their long dead ancestors had begun to resurface. Aislin, for example, was a seer who could see into the past as well as into future.
“She’s always been able to see stuff, but it didn’t make much sense until Kira showed up. Now she can control it. Sort of. That’s why her eyes changed color when she touched you. She was having a vision,” Daphne said, while Aislin blushed uncomfortably.
“Okay,” Dylan said. “So, what did you see about me? You said that I couldn’t go through the door because someone was looking for me. Who?”
Aislin ducked her head, letting her long red hair hide her face for a moment. “It’s hard…I didn’t see much…It was more of a feeling.” She lifted her head and looked at him straight on. Her eyes were still green, but they shone with something he couldn’t quite describe. Magic, maybe? “When I touched you, I just knew that you had to stay, that you couldn’t go back.”
“Back where?”
“Through the door.”
He frowned at her. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Wherever that door leads, I’ve never been there. I’d remember trees like that.”
Aislin sighed fitfully. “I don’t know. That’s just what I felt. And then I knew that there were people looking for you and that they’d be looking for a long time. They love you.”
He stood up suddenly. “You’re both crazy.” He picked up his tray, dumping it in the first trash can he came to, and stalked out of the cafeteria.
Dylan was angry. This whole school was crazy. Maybe the whole town. There was no such things as fairies and magic doors. He stormed back to the courtyard and stood in front of the door. It was just a trick. If it really was the portal to another world, if it was dangerous, they wouldn’t just leave it in the middle of a school, unlocked and unguarded.
He was going to prove how ridiculous this whole thing was.
He opened the door and stepped through.
The forest was still exc
ept for a soft, summer breeze. That was weird because on the other side of the door it was autumn. Leaves had started to change color and the air had been crisp, pleasant but leaning toward chilly. Here it felt like the middle of July.
He couldn’t hear anything except the leaves rustling in the trees all around him. No bird song, no chirping squirrels…Nothing. He wasn’t much of an expert on nature, but that seemed wrong.
Then the breeze died down and even the leaves fell silent.
Silence.
He reached for his iPod, only to remember that it was in his backpack, which he had left in the cafeteria. His heart pounded.
But he still couldn’t hear anything. No sounds of the other place filled his head. For the first time since he could remember, the silence was truly empty.
He was just starting to calm down and enjoy it when it was broken.
“Hello there,” a voice purred.
Dylan twisted around to find a…person, of a sort, stepping out from behind a tree at his left. It—he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female—was quite a bit taller than him and impossibly thin. Its skin was a dark leathery brown that looked a lot like tree bark and it wore a cap of leaves on top of its head. It was dressed all in black except for a long green jacket that reached clear to the ground. Dylan had never seen anything quite like it. Whoever—or whatever—it was, it clearly had not come from the school.
“Welcome home, brother,” the tree person said. Its voice, low and