Baffled by her own taste, Ellory rolled her eyes. “I hope it’s a better place to hide a body, because I plan to leave yours there.”
“It’s always nice to have goals,” Hudson said archly. “Follow me.”
He led her down a quiet running trail, occasionally peppered by a dog walker or a sweatband-wearing athlete, and through a thicket of trees reduced to nothing but knotted branches. He moved with the confidence of someone who had been to this area many times before, the same confidence that had flooded her that rainy night she’d been lost in these woods. She stifled a ridiculous urge to ask him if they’d come here together before. Hiking with her once nemesis wasn’t something she’d just forget.
“Here we are,” Hudson said. “Better, right?”
They were in a clearing, the yellow grass feathered with multicolored leaves. The Connecticut River was louder here, like they were near a small waterfall, and there was a pond near the right side that had a single duck cutting across its rippling surface. Its black wings were tucked tight to its brown body, its green-and-black head turned away. The sky was framed by golden-red trees, thin clouds ambling across a cerulean blanket.
Ellory didn’t realize how much stress she’d been carrying until her shoulders dipped, free from the weight of it all. “All right. I’ll let you have this one.”
She spread the blanket she had brought a few feet from the lake, then sat cross-legged atop it. As good as the sun felt on her skin, it wasn’t enough to settle her stomach or her mind. Hudson gingerlysat down next to her, gaze expectant, and trying to seem competent was taking more energy out of Ellory than any spell had.
“I want to try divination,” she said, tugging her almost-full notebook out of her bag. After twice leaving her phone behind, she had made it her new go-to for portable notes. “After the party, I realized I’ve done two of the three. I can restore Bancroft Field, and I can summon the Graves Ghost, but I haven’t tried reading the future or anything.”
“Divination isn’t just about the future. You tried to summon the Graves Ghost, but instead you divined what really happened the night he died.” Hudson took her notebook, flipping through the pages until he found her badly drawn replica of the summoning circle and her hastily scrawled description of all that had happened afterward. “He didn’t appear to you until he was already dead…again. So I’m not sure that counts as evocation.”
Ellory frowned at her own notes, feeling like she was missing something. Malcolm Mayhew wasn’t the first ghost to appear to her without answering her questions. Death had followed her all her life—from Miss Claudette to the Lost Eight—and she felt, instinctively, that she had a unique talent for drawing the deceased to her. If there were only three forms of magic, then what she had done and seen defied categorization. Her frown deepened. Even in this, she didn’t belong.
“Let’s try it anyway,” she decided, retrieving the book and spreading it out in front of her. “I’m not changing my plans based on your guesses.”
“I’ll go first. I want—can I go first?”
Even before he glanced hesitantly her way, his tone made her answer easy: “Of course.”
Hudson closed his eyes and took a breath. “Who’s hunting Morgan? Tell us where to look, where to start.”
Ellory was glad he couldn’t see her so she could manage her surprise that this was the first of his questions. She would have thought he would want confirmation that Boone was innocent of what they suspected or more information about what else his family was hiding from him. Hudson using his magic to protect her—again—made her stomach flutter.
Wind whistled through the clearing, lifting her braids off her shoulders. The clouds moved no quicker, but leaves shot across the ground in swirls of color. A frog leaped into the water, its protruding eyes the only visible sign that it was there. Ellory could no longer see the duck at all, even though she didn’t think she’d seen it fly off.
Hudson’s lids flickered like he was having a bad dream. His lips parted, but no sound came out. His hands had curled where they rested on the blanket, his fingers like claws against some imaginary attacker.
“Hey,” said Ellory, “are you all right?”
She touched his shoulder and gasped.
Night fell. Lightning flashed across the violet sky, surrounded by spidery branches torn free of leaves. The woods were pitch-black in between lightning strikes, and there—in the flare of illumination—figures stood as still as the trees around them. Everywhere Ellory looked were unfamiliar faces, their eyes gleaming in the unnatural light. Every time she caught one, their heads decayed like corpses. Skin bloated and then sagged. Nostrils leaked purge fluid that, even from here, smelled like death. Maggots crawled from blackening eye sockets. She could barely pick out any defining features before they were gone.
The few remaining faces were ones she didn’t recognize.
Except one.
Except Preston Colt.
The professor stood between two trees that leaned against each other like lovers, his hands in the pockets of his tweed suit. She recognized his salt-and-pepper beard, his jaunty pocket square, but she didn’t recognize the expression on his face. With every flash of lightning, his skin turned translucent, revealing a hollow-eyed skull with bared teeth on the left side of his face. His right side remained opaque, wearing a half smile that felt drawn with cruelty.
Ellory eased onto her knees. “Professor?”
Someone screamed so loudly, her word was drowned out. More people had appeared in the clearing, these ones visible even without the glow of the lightning. Four men and four women—none older than their midtwenties, all of them noticeably people of color—circled a blanket, holding hands.
Eight strangers.
Eight young adults.
The Lost Eight.
The sound had come from one of the men, perhaps Manuel Sharp, whose throat widened in a river of red that soaked into his denim jacket and gray turtleneck. To his right, a woman who might have been Olivia Holloway screamed as her skin burned, from brown to pink to white to black and flaking. Then the next person and the next person and the next person, dying in some horrific way before her, shrieking at the top of their lungs as they did, until all she could hear, all she could see, were these people who could have been her classmates suffering in ways she could never have imagined.
