Hex Hall (2 page)

Kevin was stil holding one of Felicia's hands, and by now he was on one knee. I couldn't be sure, thanks to al the screaming, but I think he was singing to her.

Felicia wasn't screeching anymore, but she was fishing in her handbag for something.

"Oh no," I groaned. I started running toward them, but I slipped and fel in the punch.

Felicia whipped out a smal red can and sprayed the contents in Kevin's face.

His song broke off in a garbled cry of pain. He dropped her hand to claw at his eyes, and Felicia ran.

"It's okay, baby!" he shouted after her. "I don't need eyes to see you! I see you with the eyes of my heart, Felicia! My HEART!"

Great. Not only was my spel too strong, it was also
lame
.

I sat in the pool of punch while the chaos I'd created raged around me. A lone white baloon bobbed by my elbow, and Mrs.

Davison, my algebra teacher, stumbled past, shouting into her cel phone, "I
said
Green Mountain High! Um . . . I don't know, an ambulance? A SWAT team? Just send
somebody
!"

Then I heard a shriek. "It was her! Sophie Mercer!"

Felicia was pointing at me, her whole body shaking.

Even over al the noise, Felicia's words echoed in the cavernous gym. "She's . . . she's a witch!"

I sighed. "Not
again
."

"W
el?"

I stepped out of the car and into the hot thick heat of August in Georgia.

"Awesome," I murmured, sliding my sunglasses on top of my head. Thanks to the humidity, my hair felt like it had tripled in size. I could feel it trying to devour my sunglasses like some sort of carnivorous jungle plant. "I always wondered what it would be like to live in somebody's mouth."

In front of me loomed Hecate Hal, which, according to the brochure clutched in my sweaty hand, was "the premier reformatory institution for Prodigium adolescents."

Prodigium
. Just a fancy Latin word for monsters. And that's what everyone at Hecate was.

That's what I was.

I'd already read the brochure four times on the plane from Vermont to Georgia, twice on the ferry ride to Graymalkin Island, just off the coast of Georgia (where, I learned, Hecate had been built in 1854), and once as our rental car had rattled over the shel and gravel driveway that led from the shore to the school's parking lot.

So I should have had it memorized, but I kept holding on to it and compulsively reading it, like it was my wubby or something:
The purpose of Hecate Hall is to protect and instruct
shapeshifter, witch, and fae children who have risked exposure
of their abilities, and therefore imperiled Prodigium society as a
whole.

"I stil don't see how helping one girl find a date
imperiled
other witches," I said, squinting at my mom as we reached into the trunk for my stuff. The thought had been bugging me since the first time I'd read the brochure, but I hadn't had a chance to bring it up.

Mom had spent most of the flight pretending to be asleep, probably to avoid looking at my sulen expression.

"It wasn't just that one girl, Soph, and you know it. It was that boy with the broken arm in Delaware, and that teacher you tried to make forget about a test in Arizona. . . ."

"He got his memory back eventualy," I said. "Wel, most of it."

Mom just sighed and puled out the beat-up trunk we'd bought at The Salvation Army. "Your father and I both warned you that there were consequences for using your powers. I don't like this any more than you do, but at least here you'l be with . . . with other kids like you."

"You mean total screwups." I puled my tote bag onto my shoulder.

Mom pushed her own sunglasses up and looked at me. She seemed tired and there were heavy lines around her mouth, lines I'd never seen before. My mom was almost forty, but she could usualy pass for ten years younger.

"You're not a screwup, Sophie." We hefted the trunk between us. "You've just made some mistakes."

Had I ever. Being a witch had definitely not been as awesome as I'd hoped it would be. For one thing, I didn't get to fly around on a broomstick. (I asked my mom about that when I first came into my powers, and she said no, I had to keep riding the bus like everyone else.) I don't have spel books or a talking cat (I'm alergic), and I wouldn't even know where to get a hold of something like eye of newt.

But I can perform magic. I've been able to ever since I was twelve, which, according to sweaty brochure, is the age al Prodigium come into their powers. Something to do with puberty, I guess.

"Besides, this is a good school," Mom said as we approached the building.

But it didn't look like a school. It looked like a cross between something out of an old horror movie and Disney World's Haunted Mansion. For starters, it was obviously almost two hundred years old. It was three stories tal, and the third story perched like the top tier of a wedding cake. The house may have been white once, but now it was just sort of a faded gray, almost the same color as the shel and gravel drive, which made it look less like a house and more like some sort of natural outcrop of the island.

"Huh," Mom said. We dropped the trunk, and she walked around the side of the building. "Would you look at that?"

I folowed her and immediately saw what she meant. The brochure said Hecate had made "extensive additions to the original structure" over the years. Turns out, that meant they'd lopped off the back of the house and stuck another one onto it. The grayish wood ended after sixty feet or so and gave way to pink stucco that extended al the way to the woods.

For something that had clearly been done with magic--there were no seams where the two houses met, no line of mortar--you would've thought it would have turned out a little more elegantly.

Instead it looked like two houses that had been glued together by a crazy person.

A crazy person with realy bad taste.

Huge oak trees in the front yard dripped with Spanish moss, shading the house. In fact, there seemed to be plants everywhere.

Two ferns in dusty pots bracketed the front door, looking like big green spiders, and some sort of vine with purple flowers had taken over an entire wal. It was almost like the house was being slowly absorbed by the forest just beyond it.

I tugged at the hem of my brand-new Hecate Hal- issue blue plaid skirt (kilt? Some sort of bizarre skirt/ kilt hybrid? A skilt?) and wondered why a school in the middle of the Deep South would have wool uniforms. Stil, as I stared at the school, I fought off a shiver. I wondered how anyone could ever look at this place and
not
suspect its students were a bunch of freaks.

"It's pretty," Mom said in her best "Let's be perky and look on the bright side" voice.

I, however, was not feeling so perky.

"Yeah, it's beautiful. For a prison."

My mom shook her head. "Drop the insolent-teenager thing, Soph. It's hardly a prison."

But that's what it felt like.

"This realy is the best place for you," she said as we picked up the trunk.

"I guess," I mumbled.

It's for your own good
seemed to be the mantra as far as me and Hecate were concerned. Two days after prom we'd gotten an e-mail from my dad that basicaly said I'd blown al my chances, and that the Council was sentencing me to Hecate until my eighteenth birthday.

The Council was this group of old people who made al the rules for Prodigium.

I know, a council that cals themselves "the Council." So original.

Anyway, Dad worked for them, so they let him break the bad news. "Hopefuly," he had said in his e-mail, "this wil teach you to use your powers with considerably more discretion."

E-mail and the occasional phone cal were pretty much the only contact I had with my dad. He and Mom split up before I was born. Turns out he hadn't told my mom about him being a warlock (that's the preferred term for boy witches) until they'd been together for nearly a year. Mom hadn't taken the news wel. She wrote him off as a nut job and ran back to her family. But then she found out she was pregnant with me, and she got a copy of
The Encyclopedia
of Witchcraft
to go along with al her baby books, just in case. By the time I was born, she was practicaly an expert on things that go bump in the night. It wasn't until I'd come into my powers on my twelfth birthday that she'd reluctantly opened the lines of communication with Dad. But she was stil pretty frosty toward him.

In the month since my dad had told me that I was going to Hecate, I'd tried to come to terms with it. Seriously. I told myself that I'd finaly be around people that were like me, people I didn't have to hide my true self from. And I might learn some pretty sweet spels. Those were al big pros.

But as soon as Mom and I had boarded the ferry to take us out to this isolated island, I'd started to feel sick to my stomach. And trust me, it wasn't seasickness.

According to the brochure, Graymalkin Island had been selected to house Hecate because of its remote location, the better to keep it a secret. The locals just thought it was a super-exclusive boarding school.

By the time the ferry had approached the heavily forested spit of land that would be my home for the next two years, the second thoughts had majorly set in.

It seemed like most of the student body was miling around on the lawn, but only a handful of them looked new, like me. They were al unloading trunks, toting suitcases. Some of them had beat-up luggage like mine, but I saw a couple of Louis Vuitton bags, too.

One girl, dark-haired with a slightly crooked nose, seemed about my age, while al the other new kids looked younger.

I couldn't realy tel what most of them were, whether they were witches and warlocks or shapeshifters. Since we al look like regular people, there was no way to tel.

The faeries, on the other hand, were very easy to spot.

They were al taler than average and very dignified looking, and every one of them had straight shiny hair, in al sorts of different colors, from pale gold to bright violet.

And they had wings.

According to Mom, faeries usualy used glamours to blend in with humans. It was a pretty complex spel since it involved altering the mind of everyone they met, but it meant that humans could only see the faeries as normal people instead of bright, colorful, winged . . . creatures. I wondered if the faeries that got sentenced to Hecate were kind of relieved. It had to be hard, doing that big of a spel al the time.

I paused to readjust my tote bag on my shoulder.

"At least this place is safe," Mom said. "That's something, right? I won't have to be constantly worrying about you for once."

I knew Mom was anxious about my being so far from home, but she was also happy to have me in a place where I wasn't risking getting found out. You spend al your time reading books about the various ways people have kiled witches over the years, it's bound to make you a little paranoid.

As we made our way toward the school, I could feel sweat pooling up in weird places where I was pretty sure I had never sweat before. How can your
ears
sweat? Mom, as usual, appeared unaffected by the humidity. It's like a natural law that my mother can never look anything less than obscenely beautiful. Even though she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, heads turned in her direction.

Or maybe they were staring at me as I tried to discreetly wipe sweat from between my breasts without appearing to get to second base with myself. Hard to say.

Al around me were things I'd only read about in books. To my left, a blue-haired faerie with indigo wings was sobbing as she clung to her winged parents, whose feet hovered an inch or two above the ground. As I watched, crystaline tears fel not from the girl's eyes, but from her wings, leaving her toes dangling over a puddle of royal blue.

We walked into the shade of the huge old trees--meaning the heat diminished by maybe half a degree. Just as we neared the front steps, an unearthly howl echoed in the thick air.

Mom and I whirled around to see this . . .
thing
growling at two rather frustrated-looking adults. They didn't look scared; just vaguely annoyed.

A werewolf.

No matter how many times you read about werewolves, seeing one right in front of you is a whole new experience.

For one thing, it didn't realy look much like a wolf. Or a person. It was more like a realy big wild dog standing on hind legs.

Its fur was short and light brown, and even from a distance I could see the yelow of its eyes. It was also a lot smaler than I'd thought one would be. In fact, it wasn't nearly as tal as the man it was growling at.

"Stop it, Justin," the man spat. The woman, whose hair, I noticed, was the same light brown as the werewolf's, put a hand on his arm.

"Sweetie," she said in a soft voice with a hint of a Southern accent, "listen to your father. This is just sily."

For a second the werewolf, er, Justin, paused, his head cocked to the side, making him look less like a throatripping-out beastie and more like a cocker spaniel.

The thought made me giggle.