Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
I wouldn’t want to. The thought of not attending the institute, of not seeing Crane again, or Paul, or wandering the grounds and listening to students laugh and practice magic pains me. But I would accept that pain if it meant my mother would feel better.
I swallow the thickness in my throat. It tastes like guilt. “Do you think that’s why you’re getting worse? Because I’m gone?”
She shakes her head. “No. We don’t know what is wrong with me. The doctor said for me to avoid all physical activity. And eat more, but of course, I have no appetite. I’ll have to save up all my energy to make it to the school on the full moon.”
“That’s in a few days. I can take you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she says. “I can still ride. Chester knows the way. I can practically sleep in the saddle if I wish.”
Now is your chance, I think. Ask her. Ask her.
“Mother,” I begin warily, like I’m approaching a spooked horse. “What do you do when you go to the school? What do you do during the full moon?”
She stops rocking in her chair and looks up at me blankly. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why do you go? Is it for witchcraft? A ritual?”
She stares at me for a moment, and suddenly, the room fills with a buzzing sound that gets louder and louder, like a hundred cicadas trapped in here with us, and I almost put my hands over my ears and—
It suddenly stops.
My mother smiles at me. “I like to see your aunts, and they don’t like to leave the campus. Full moons are the easiest way to keep to a schedule.”
My heart is pounding loudly in my head now, my ears still adjusting to the silence. A cold sweat forms along my forehead.
“You’re looking a little tired, dear. Perhaps you should lie down.” She gestures to the couch. “Have a nap. We’ll wake you in time for supper.”
I try to protest, to tell her I’m okay, but my feet move, and I’m up and staggering over to the couch, where I lie down. I fall asleep immediately.
A week later, Crane asks me to speak with him after class. By now, the students don’t pay us much attention. They see us on our daily walks around the school. They probably think I’m involved with him romantically, and while that’s not true, I don’t mind them thinking that either. It makes me feel special, and not in the “my aunts run the school” kind of way but in that someone as esteemed as Professor Crane might see something in me that no one else does.
I go to his desk, a thrill running up my spine. He looks at me, and I look at him, and it’s this clandestine meaning that passes between us, knowing exactly what we’re about to do.
Although I actually don’t know what we’re about to do. All he said to me was that he needed help contacting the lady of the lake, the teacher he ended up replacing who had gone mad and drowned herself in it. He had wanted a little more time to study spells and find out more about her before we performed the ritual. Tonight is the night, but what I’m actually doing as part of this ritual is beyond me. He just told me my energy would be needed.
And I—because I’m apparently a sucker for following his orders—am going along with it.
“Well,” I say to him, eying the clock in the room. “We have a few hours until it’s dark.”
“Indeed,” he says. “Shall we grab supper?”
I shake my head. “I would rather not eat with you in the dining hall.” He looks so comically aghast that I laugh. “People are already talking about us,” I explain.
“Are they now?” he asks playfully, grabbing his coat. “What are they saying?”
“I imagine they’re saying that you are the dastardly seductive teacher preying on his young students, in particular, the ravishing Katrina Van Tassel.”
He grins at me. “You got everything right except her name. She prefers Kat.”
I laugh, and my stomach tickles like vlinders are taking flight.
This man is giving me butterflies.
“But I do like this business about me being dastardly seductive. Makes me sound like a menace.”
“You are a menace,” I say as we walk out the door, and he shuts the classroom behind him. “A menace to the supernatural. Why do you think so many women are haunting you?”
He rolls his eyes at that but then grows silent, his thoughts trapped somewhere as they often seem to be. After all that, we still head to the dining hall anyway. Luckily, the both of us are able to sit with Paul and a few of his friends. They all seem to admire and fawn over Professor Crane, so they don’t mind him there. I just stay quiet and let Crane answer a plethora of questions over a meal of roast pigeon and turnip.