Creepy Hollow 7

  “Hospital cafeteria food? No thanks.”

  “This isn’t your world, remember? The vast selection of hot drinks available in this world is mind-blowing.”

  “Mind-blowing? Really?” I place my hands on the arms of the chair and push myself up. “One would think I’ve had enough mind-blowing experiences in the past few days, but I guess not. Let’s go find a hot drink.”

  “Great. It’s a date.”

  “It is most definitely not a date.”

  “You know what I mean,” he says as we walk out of the waiting area.

  “No, I know what I mean, and I’m making sure that you also know what I mean.”

  “Miss Clarke?” Just outside the waiting room, a healer stops in front of us. “Can I speak with you?”

  I can’t help the dread that begins to form in the pit of my stomach. “Yes. Definitely. Is my mom okay?”

  “Shall we sit?” She gestures to the chairs behind us.

  “Why?” Panic rises rapidly into my throat. “Do you have something bad to tell me?”

  She smiles. “Not at all. It’s just more comfortable.”

  “Oh. Right. Of course.”

  We return to the waiting area, and as the three of us sit, she asks, “Are you happy for us to talk in front of the gentleman, or would you prefer to speak alone with me?”

  My brain stumbles over the word ‘gentleman’—Dash? A gentleman? Ha!—before getting to the actual question. “Um …”

  “That’s okay. I’ll wait outside while you guys talk,” Dash says, saving me from having to answer.

  “Is she awake?” I ask the healer once Dash is gone. “Can I talk to her?”

  “She isn’t awake, unfortunately. She became very upset and confused after we brought her in, and we ended up having to sedate her again. We ran a few tests then, which revealed that even though we can’t sense any magic in her, she is in fact a faerie. She also tested positive for a Griffin Ability.”

  I pull my head back in surprise. But then I tell myself that this makes complete sense. If she is indeed my mother, then obviously she has a Griffin Ability.

  “This is a somewhat baffling case,” the healer continues. “We haven’t encountered anything quite like it before, so if you tell us everything you know about her, including the mental illness you mentioned when we brought her in earlier, then we’ll do everything we can to figure out what’s going on.”

  Twenty-Four

  Switching time zones so often is messing with my mind. I feel like it should be the middle of the night by the time I leave the healing institute with Dash—because it is the middle of the night there—but it’s early evening when we reach the oasis. Violet and Ryn are preparing dinner while Jack sits at the kitchen table doing homework.

  “She’s a faerie,” I announce to them as I walk in. “She’s a faerie with a Griffin Ability, but they can’t sense her magic, and she doesn’t look like a faerie, and she’s currently too confused and upset to explain anything to anyone, so … yeah. That’s the situation.”

  “And the plot thickens,” Dash says, rubbing his hands together.

  “Dash!” I punch his arm. “This is my life, not some mystery novel.”

  “Jeez, sorry, I know.” He walks into the kitchen and looks over Jack’s shoulder at whatever he’s working on. “It is a mystery, though. You and your mom both are.”

  “A mystery we’re happy to help you solve,” Ryn says, looking across the kitchen at me, “if you’d like our help.”

  “I’d definitely like to solve it. Where should we start?”

  “With whatever you can remember from before she ended up at Tranquil Hills,” Ryn says.

  Violet leaves a wooden spoon stirring a pot and steps away from the stove. “Dinner will still be a while, so why don’t we sit in the living room and start solving this puzzle?”

  “Awesome,” Dash says. “You guys sit. I’ll get drinks. I know my way around this kitchen.”

  Jack gathers his books and follows Ryn, Vi and me into the next room. He spreads his work out on the floor and carries on. “Have you noticed Dash hanging out here a lot more than usual?” Ryn says to Violet.

  “I have.” She looks at me. “I can think of only one reason for that.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “I hope you’re not suggesting it’s because of me. Because that’s the most absurd answer you could possibly have come up with.”

  “From where I’m sitting, it looks like the only answer.”

  I pull my legs up and cross them beneath me. “In the unlikely event that you happen to be right, I’m sure it’s only because it’s a brand new challenge for him to be around a girl who has zero romantic interest in him.”

  Violet laughs. “You could be right. That would definitely be a new experience for him.”

  “Actually,” Dash says from the doorway, “I’m hanging around more than usual because I’ve been following Em’s case for longer than anyone else, and I’m extremely curious to get to the bottom of all this mystery.”

  “Hey!” Violet flicks her hand. A cushion flies across the room and knocks Dash against the side of his head. “Eavesdropping is rude. I know your parents taught you that.” With a laugh, he disappears back to the kitchen.

  “Hey, look,” Jack says. “Filigree and Bandit are playing.” I follow the direction of his pointing pen and see two animals: a squirrel sitting beneath one of the side tables, and a kitten bouncing back and forth in front of it, swiping at the air with its paws, then leaping away. The squirrel blinks and remains motionless. “Well, Bandit’s playing,” Jack corrects. “Filigree’s being a grumpy squirrel.”

  “Cute,” I say. “Although I hope Bandit doesn’t irritate Filigree too much.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Violet says. “Filigree needs to learn to chill out a bit. He’s getting too uptight in his old age.”

  “Okay, have we begun solving the mystery yet?” Dash asks, coming into the living room with a drink in each hand and another two floating beside him. They’re all blue, and I’m certain I’ve never tasted whatever’s inside them.

  “I don’t know how we’re supposed to solve anything,” I tell them. “I just had this conversation with the healer, and nothing useful came up. She asked me about my childhood and my father, but I don’t know a thing about him except that he’s supposedly been paying for Mom’s hospital bills. And I can’t remember anything strange from my childhood. Unless you count Mom’s delusions, but those didn’t have anything to do with—Well, now I wonder.” I lean back and stare at the opposite wall with a frown. “Maybe they weren’t delusions after all. Maybe she could see things I couldn’t see because my magic was blocked. But she didn’t ever look any different—her hair, I mean—so doesn’t that mean her magic was always blocked too?”

  “I would think so,” Violet says, absently playing with a lock of her purple hair.

  “When she had these delusions,” Ryn asks, “did she seem rational? As if she was speaking normally to someone who just happened to be invisible?”

  I slowly shake my head. “No. She didn’t seem rational to me at all. She usually ended up in a highly panicked state.”

  “Hmm, okay.”

  “Do you remember any friends of hers that we could possibly try to track down?” Dash asks. “If any of them turn out to be magical, we can question them. I mean, in case your mom is still confused for a while and can’t explain things herself.”

  I shake my head. “Not really. There was just … well, I wouldn’t classify her as a friend because she and Mom always fought whenever she came over, but I guess they must have been friends at some point.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Um … I just remember …” I push my hand through my hair. “Line.”

  “Line? That’s not a name.”

  “I know, but that’s all I remember. It was a long time ago, okay. I would hear them shouting at each other through the wall, and I remember Mom saying “line” a lot.”

  “That
’s weird,” Dash says.

  “What did this friend look like?” Violet asks.

  “I don’t know. I never saw her. Mom would always say, ‘My friend’s coming over now. You need to go to your room.’ And then she’d close me in my bedroom, and soon after that I’d hear them arguing.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a friend,” Dash says.

  “What did they argue about?” Ryn asks.

  I sigh. “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear much. I tried to just ignore them and play with my dolls.” I twist my hair around my finger, feeling awkward beneath all these questions. “See? I told you I can’t remember anything useful.”

  “When your mother was taken to hospital and you were sent to live with your aunt,” Ryn says, “what happened to all the things in your house?”

  “Uh … I don’t know, actually. I think my dad must have cleared stuff out, and then a few weeks after I got to Chelsea’s, some boxes arrived. Chelsea opened one or two, then closed them back up and put them away somewhere. Probably my bedroom, since that’s where she likes to store stuff.”

  “Then that’s where we start looking,” Ryn says. “Do you want to go take a look tomorrow morning before you go back to White Cedars?”

  “I can go with you,” Dash volunteers immediately.

  “Of course you can,” I say, “because apparently you never have to do any work for the Guild anymore.”

  He shrugs. “Work is flexible. Plenty of time in the field. They’ll think I’m working on one of the many other ongoing cases we have.”

  “Just don’t blame me when you get yourself fired, okay?”

  He places a hand over his heart. “Your concern is so touching, Em.”

  I turn to Violet. “Can you teach me that cushion throwing thing?”

  “Ooh, I’ll do it!” Jack sweeps his hand wildly through the air, and four different cushions soar off their seats and pummel Dash’s head.

  “Hey, stop, I surrender!”

  “More cushions!” I cry, urging Jack on. And soon Dash is buried beneath almost every cushion in the living room. Bandit leaps on top of the pile, and even Filigree comes over to check things out. By the time we move to the kitchen for dinner, my stomach and cheeks are aching, and I realize I’ve laughed more in the past few hours than I have in ages.

  Twenty-Five

  “It feels a lot longer than five or six days since I was here,” I say to Dash as we stand in the back parking lot of Stanmeade Elementary School. “And I don’t know if I’m doing this glamour thing correctly.” Violet gave me a lesson last night, and another one this morning, but I’m still not really sure what I’m doing.

  “Unfortunately we’ll only know if it isn’t working if a human looks over and sees you,” Dash says, “and by then it’ll be too late.”

  “It would have helped if you’d brought us out of the faerie paths a little closer to Chelsea’s house. Like in her backyard, perhaps.”

  “Okay, so here’s something you may not know yet, Em,” he says, leaning against a car and facing me. “It takes a lot of focus to land in exactly the right spot when using the faerie paths, and the further away the destination is, the more focus in requires, so—”

  “So we do this step by step. Got it. We first come to the edge of Stanmeade, then we go to Chelsea’s house.”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, careful. Don’t let Mrs. Pringleton see you.” I pull him down between two cars as Mrs. Pringleton steps out of the back door. She raises a cigarette to her lips and lights it.

  “I have a functioning glamour, remember,” Dash says. “You don’t need to worry about anyone seeing me.” He peers around the edge of the car. “Ah, the splotchy faced teacher. I’ve always been afraid of her, and I never even went to school here.”

  “Don’t be rude. It’s a birthmark or something.”

  “Right, sorry. Can’t be rude about things like that.”

  “Exactly.” I rub my left shoulder through my T-shirt. At the sound of a faint ping, Dash reaches for his amber. “What’s up?” I ask as his eyes scan the surface.

  “Just another Guild-wide memo updating us on the spell that’s supposed to fix the veil. Finished testing … everything looks good … still setting a date and organizing a ceremony for the actual closing of the tear.” He sighs. “I don’t know why they want to waste time with a ceremony. They should just send a few people out there and fix the darn thing. That hole’s been in the sky almost as long as I’ve been alive.”

  “Then I suppose another few days or weeks won’t make much difference.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a waste of resources.” Dash puts his amber away. “Guardians have to be there at all times, making sure people from our side don’t interfere with the monument that keeps the hole from getting bigger. And on the other side, they have to make sure it’s glamoured and humans don’t accidentally walk into it. Anyway, is the scary teacher finished her cigarette yet?”

  I peek around the car. “Nope. I don’t know how many cigarettes she’s planning to smoke, and I don’t trust my glamour, so can we open a doorway here on the ground?” I gesture to the space between the two cars.

  “Yeah, okay.” Dash presses his stylus to the ground.

  “Wait, can I try again?” I ask before he writes anything.

  “Oh. Yeah, sure. Just don’t get frustrated if it still doesn’t work.” He hands me his stylus while I remove a folded up note from my back pocket. “This stuff takes time to get right.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Everyone keeps saying that.” I hold the paper in one hand and copy the letters onto the ground, speaking the other few words I’ve now memorized, and trying to imagine magic streaming out of my core, down my arm, and into the stylus. A thrill races through me as the words I’ve written begin to glow, but when they fade away, nothing happens. “Fine. You do it.” I hand the stylus back to Dash.

  “You almost got it,” he says. “Maybe you just didn’t release enough magic through the stylus. That part will become automatic soon, and then this spell will be easy.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Just open the doorway.”

  Dash writes the words, and this time, a dark gap into the faerie paths spreads across the ground. “Are you taking us inside the house now?” Dash asks before we climb into the paths. “Remember to focus on exactly the right room if you don’t want to land up in front of Chelsea.”

  “Bedroom. Right. Chelsea will be in her salon all day, so if we stay in my room with the door locked, we should be fine. She always has music playing, so I doubt she’ll hear anything.”

  “With the door locked, huh?” He waggles his eyebrows. “That must be against the rules.”

  “Idiot,” I mutter with a shake of my head. “Chelsea never bothered with rules like that. I doubt she would have cared if I ever had a guy in my bedroom.”

  “Oh, so you’ve never—”

  “Just get into the faerie paths.”

  With a snicker, he slips into the darkness, pulling me in after him. I direct all my focus on picturing the inside of my bedroom. The single bed, the desk that used to be a part of Chelsea’s salon, the boxes piled up against the wall. When light touches my eyelids, I open them and see the scene I pictured. The darkness melts away as I take a step forward into the room. “Hmm,” Dash says, looking around. “It’s—”

  “Don’t.”

  “I was going to say cozy.”

  “No you weren’t. Okay, these are all the boxes.” I gesture to the left side of the room. “It’s mostly Chelsea’s stuff, but Mom’s boxes must be under there somewhere. I don’t remember Chelsea ever getting rid of them.”

  Dash walks to the desk and picks up a photo frame with a picture of Val and me sticking our tongues out at the camera. Val’s metal tongue ring is visible, and I’ve got a heart-shaped candy sitting on my tongue—because my fear of needles meant piercings were one thing we would never do together.

  “I really miss her,” I say quietly. “And I think she’s probably seriously mad at m
e for leaving. Hopefully I’ll be able to come back soon and explain things to her. Not the magical things, obviously, but something else. Something I still need to come up with.”

  “Whatever you eventually tell her,” Dash says, returning the frame to the desk, “I’m sure she’ll forgive you. She’s your best friend.”

  “Yeah. She’s pretty awesome.” I start lifting Chelsea’s boxes off the top of the collection. “Although she told me she finds you attractive, so her judgement is questionable.”

  “Interesting.” Dash’s lips spread into a crooked smile. “You know, she’s pretty cute too.”

  I roll my eyes. “What about Jewel?”

  He stands beside me and begins moving boxes with magic from one side of the room onto my bed. “What about her?”

  “Don’t you have … you know, a thing?”

  A box pauses in mid-air. “What thing?”

  “Like, you guys are together or something. Or you will be soon.”

  “What? No, I told you before. We’re just friends.” The boxes continue their journey across the room. I glance at each one that passes, making sure we’re still moving Chelsea’s stuff. “She likes this other guy,” Dash adds. “Um, Sean something-or-other. He graduated a year ahead of us. I’m sure she used to pine after him.”

  “She was probably doing that thing girls do where they pretend to like someone else to try and make the guy they’re actually interested in jealous.”

  “Oh. Are you sure? Because normally girls just come out and tell me they like me.”

  “Of course.” I sigh and fold my arms. “I forgot who I was talking to. Oh, wait, stop. I think that’s one of Mom’s boxes.” The box that was about to add itself to my bed, the box with an orange star-shaped sticker on the side, changes direction and lands at our feet instead. “Look for other boxes that have stickers like this,” I tell Dash as I move to the desk and grab a pair of scissors from a drawer. I crouch down, slice through the tape, and bend the cardboard flaps back. CDs and DVDs look up at me. Useless entertainment from the past. “Okay, this one looks boring. You can start with that.” I move to the second box that just arrived at my side.