Shade (8 page)

“Okay.” He waited a few seconds. “What’s the name of the professor we’re supposed to meet with?”

“Why?”

“I’ll look up the number and ring them for you, to cancel.”

My aunt opened the door a crack without knocking. “Who’s on the phone, hon?”

“Someone from school.” When she didn’t retreat, I sent her a blank look. “This conversation is of an academic nature.”

“No need to get snippy. I’m leaving.” Except she didn’t. “You sure I can’t get you some soup? I made escarole. You love escarole.”

I turned my head away from her scrunched-up Sympathy Face. “Yeah, I’ll be down in a minute.”

When Gina disappeared—leaving my door open, of course—I put the phone back to my ear. “What did you ask me?”

“The professor’s name. Or number, if you have it. But I don’t mind looking it up.”

The thought of spending another day lying in bed crying, or taking phone calls, or reading rumors on the Internet (assuming my laptop hadn’t suffered Death by Ginger Ale), made me shrivel up inside.

“Give me your address.”

*   *   *

I picked Zachary up in front of his apartment building, on the other side of the Johns Hopkins University campus from my Charles Village neighborhood.

He set his book bag on the passenger’s seat floor and slid inside. “Brilliant, right on time.”

“I’m always on time.”

“Me too. I hate when—” He stopped when he saw my face. “Bloody hell. You all right to drive?”

“Yep.” I adjusted my glasses, the frames crooked from the time I’d sat on them. “The Valium’s worn off.” I pulled out into traffic, probably a little faster than I should have. “If we have to get together to work on this project, we could meet on campus halfway.”

The car beside me honked, and Zachary grabbed the armrest as I swerved back to the center of my lane. Then he quickly let go and scratched his chin, as if to prove my driving didn’t scare him.

“We’re in a temporary let,” he said, “while my dad gets settled at Hopkins. It’s just one room, plus a wee kitchen.”

“He’s a guest lecturer?”

“Something like that.”

“Which department?”

“Political science,” Zachary said quickly, as if he’d been waiting for me to ask. “We’re here for two semesters.”

“Is that what you want to do too? Political science?”

He pressed his foot to the floor as we approached the stoplight, apparently too fast for his taste. “No, I could never do what he does.”

“So three of you in a studio apartment? Or do you have siblings,
too?” I didn’t know why I cared. Trying to avoid silence, I guess.

“It’s just me and him.”

I stopped the car at the light and adjusted my passenger side mirror (I always forget that one). “Your mom’s back in Scotland?”

“Er, maybe.”

“Is it a secret? She’s a spy or something?”

Zachary folded his arms and gave me a bitter look. “If it’s a secret, I’m no’ privy to it.”

“Sorry.” I probably should have revealed my own parental lack, so we could bond over the voids in our respective lives. But my nerves were too raw from losing Logan for me to talk about my mom and dad.

We both fell quiet until we got to the freeway and the sun came out.

“Don’t laugh.” I put on a pair of sunglasses in front of my regular glasses, officially becoming a gold-medal dork.

Zachary didn’t laugh. “How do you see like that?”

“Better than squinting and getting a headache.”

“Why not get prescription sunglasses?”

“They’re expensive, and I never wear my glasses out of the house.”

“Did you lose a contact lens, then?”

“No, they wouldn’t fit.” Maybe because my eyes were almost swollen shut from crying.

“Ah.” Zachary shrugged out of his dark brown leather jacket, tugging it from under the seat belt’s shoulder harness. I checked out his clothing in my peripheral vision. Just a few days ago, I would’ve envied his black shirt. Pre-Shifters had no idea what it was like to have to choose between wearing red or suffering major ghost harassment.

But I wasn’t envious anymore. I twisted the hem of my raspberry-colored
sweater and thought about its burgundy twin (or triplet, if you count the scarlet one too). Maybe some new clothes would bring Logan back.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel.
Get real, Aura. He’s not coming back, not for clothes, not for anything.

As we passed the Inner Harbor, Zachary craned his neck at the USS
Constellation
out the back window. “That ship’s huge. Was it used for battles?”

“It’s got cannons, so I guess so.” Apparently, the testosterone-y obsession with weapons wasn’t just for American guys.

“Have you been inside?”

“Ugh, not since I was a kid.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, already sore from the weight of two pairs of glasses. “It’s terminally haunted.”

“Oh, right. I guess they can’t BlackBox it without tearing it apart.”

I shrugged. “That, and it helps sell tickets.”

On the interstate I changed the subject to our project. Zachary took notes on the research I’d done so far, which wasn’t much. But I had set out the scope and direction, and I wasn’t about to let him drag me off course.

I didn’t tell Zachary how I’d found our adviser, Dr. Harris. That summer I’d discovered a locked box at the back of my aunt’s closet. The key was in her bottom drawer with a bunch of other family keepsakes. When I unlocked the box, I found a journal and a pile of old photos from the Newgrange megalith in Ireland, including one of a girl my age—Eowyn Harris. All dated a year before my birth. All written in my mother’s handwriting.

By this point, I had memorized Mom’s journal entries.

Thursday, December 20

It’s true what they say about Ireland—this place is magic. I never believed in any of that mystical crap before, not even Gina’s supposed “ghost sight,” but now I wonder. It feels like I was meant to come here, like my soul is home.

Nah, I’m probably just jet-lagged. Getting up early for the solstice sunrise tomorrow—woo-hoo!

Friday, December 21

There are no words to describe what happened this morning in Newgrange. But so, so, SO many questions.

Someone had torn out December 22’s entry, but who? My mom? Aunt Gina?

Rather than making me feel gloomier, thinking about my mother and the stuff she left behind calmed the cyclone in my head. I was on my way to finish her quest.

Zachary and I arrived at the University of Maryland fifteen minutes early—good thing, because it took ten minutes of driving around the humongous College Park campus to find the right building.

I reached between the seats to get my book bag, then caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. Mistake.

“Gross, I’m so zombiefied.” I pulled my matted hair forward to cover my puffy eyes. “Dr. Harris’ll think I’m strung out or hungover. Great first impression.”

“Amazing, though.”

“What?”

Zachary started to answer, then brushed his lips with the side of his finger. “No, it’s stupid.”

I’d never seen someone use so much of their mouth for that word. “What’s stupid, besides your mind games?”

“Okay, but if I start, you let me finish.” He spoke to the radio instead of meeting my gaze. “The pieces of you are complete shite today, the bloated eyelids and splotchy skin and your hair all”—he waved his hand—“you know, and all together you should look pure hackit, but somehow you’re more bonnie than ever.”

I rewound his sentence in my head. Zachary’s eyes flicked up to meet mine, and I must’ve seemed pissed, because he said, “Sorry,” and reached for the car door handle.

“Wait. What’s ‘hackit’? What’s that mean?”

“Ugly. But ‘bonnie’ means—”

“I know what ‘bonnie’ means.”

Zachary held up a hand. “I’m no’ flirting with you, not with your boyfriend just passing. I’m only making an observation.”

I took off my sunglasses to see him better. He didn’t look like he was trying to come on to me. He looked kind of pathetic, actually, for someone who was himself so, uh, bonnie.

“Thanks,” I said, partly because I knew it would shock him if I didn’t get offended. But mostly because his words made me feel better, seeing as I was, objectively speaking, pure hackit.

We stood in the doorway of Dr. Harris’s vacant office. A midnight blue silk tapestry covered the ceiling, speckled with golden spots representing stars in their constellations. An MP3 docking station on
the windowsill behind the desk played a hypnotic synthesizer tune.

Posters and paintings of ancient megaliths were stapled or nailed to the bookshelves, covering all but a few spaces, which held miniature replicas of standing-stone formations. The famous Stonehenge sat next to the grassy dome of Newgrange, which gave me a shiver of recognition.

Dozens of books were stacked on the floor next to the shelves. On the desk facing the door, more volumes stood in foot-high piles along the perimeter. It looked like someone had started to build a fort.

I clutched my book bag strap with sweaty palms.
I might actually get some answers today,
I thought.
I wish I still cared about the same questions.

Zachary checked his watch. “We’re on time,” he whispered. “Where is she?”

“If by ‘she,’ you mean me”—a head popped up from behind the book fort—“I’m right here.”

I almost jumped at the sight of the … professor? She looked only a little older than her teenage picture, and if she weren’t slightly shorter than my five-foot-two, I would’ve believed she was a model. Her blond hair fell in waves to her waist. I’d never seen curly hair so long, and I wondered if it was a weave. But it moved like real hair, and she wore hardly any makeup—not that she needed it—so she seemed like a genuinely, obscenely, nature-is-so-unfair-ly gorgeous woman.

Beside me, Zachary stood with his mouth half-open. “Er … ah … ,” he said, like he was having his tonsils checked.

I stepped forward. “I’m Aura. We talked on the phone? And this is
my new partner, Zachary Moore. Mrs. Richards assigned him to help me.”

“Lovely.” Like her hair, Dr. Harris’s voice reminded me of liquid gold, warm and soft and heavy. “Call me Eowyn.” She held out her hands, one to each of us. I shook the right one, since it was closer to me.

Zachary awkwardly shook her left hand with his left. “Eowyn? Like the character from
Lord of the Rings
?”

Her head pitched back as she laughed. “My parents were huge Tolkien fans.” She did look kind of like the lady from the movies. “It could’ve been worse,” Eowyn said to me. “If I’d been a boy, they would’ve named me Gandalf.”

I tried to return her smile, but apparently wasn’t successful.

“Is something wrong?” she asked me, the corners of her deep blue eyes crinkling with concern.

I shook my head, then nodded. “Nothing to do with the project.”

“But you
are
the project.” Her smile widened. “By that I mean, you and your partner will pour yourselves into the work, and what comes out will reflect your personalities.” She glanced between us, almost slyly. “Which I sense are very similar. Your stars may be closely aligned.”

Please don’t let her talk about astrology.
This whole setup was weird enough without Zachary knowing we were born only a minute apart. And if he knew already, I didn’t want him to know I knew he knew.

“How do we start, then?” Zachary asked.

“The way every fortunate endeavor begins.” She unfurled her hand to gesture behind us. “With tea.”

A small, low table was set up in the corner of her office. Two white mugs sat next to a teapot the blue of a twilit sky.

“Sit,” she said. “I’ll grab an extra mug from the cabinet here.”

Zachary and I maneuvered around another stack of books, then stopped next to the two oblong cushions, placed on either side of the table.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll take the floor.”

“No, you won’t.” Eowyn glided over with the third mug. “You two will be putting your heads together a lot this year. It won’t kill you to put your butts together now.”

If I weren’t so numb, I might’ve laughed, or at least blushed. But I just wanted to start this meeting so I could get some answers, then end it so I could be alone again. Faking okay-ness was exhausting me.

Zachary and I sat with a few inches between our bodies, on a sagging cushion that wanted to tumble us together. Eowyn lowered herself onto the cushion across from us, using a graceful, no-handed move that screamed of daily yoga practice. She placed the plain white mugs in a row on the table. “Choose one.”

They all looked the same, but clearly this was some kind of test, judging by the gleam in her eye.

I chose the one on the left, in front of Zachary, and he chose the one that had been in the middle. For some reason it occurred to me that Logan would’ve reached for the one on the right, because it was the farthest away. I rubbed the achy spot on my chest.

Eowyn poured the tea, and I noticed she was wearing an obsidian ring in an oval setting. “Now watch.”

Zachary returned my skeptical glance. Was she going to read our tea leaves? What did this have to do with ancient astronomy?

Slowly a picture began to appear on the side of each mug, broad red strokes on the white background.

“These are ogham letters, Irish runes. The designs are activated by the hot liquid,” she said. “Ooh, I got
ur
, or heather, which signifies healing. Zachary, you have
duir
, the oak. That usually means strength. And Aura has
quert
.”

I picked up my mug and examined the rune. It consisted of a straight vertical line and four short horizontal ones. It sort of looked like a toothbrush. “What’s
quert
?”

“
Quert
is apple.” Her eyes softened. “For love.”

I froze. My hands tightened on the mug, though I wanted to hurl it against the wall and watch it shatter into a thousand pieces of deceitful white ceramic.

Zachary held up a finger. “Could I trouble you for some sugar?”

“Of course.” Eowyn sprang to her feet. “Be right back.” She slipped out of the office.