And yet here she was.
She didn’t feel so capable anymore.
Lying in the little bed of her dorm, she stared at the blazing wall of night-lights and wondered if Colton Price still slept with a light on.
Somehow, she doubted it.
Rolling onto her side, she peered across the room to where her roommate sat on the floor, legs crossed and arms slack, palms upturned atop her knees. The ocean blue of Adya Dawoud’s hijab draped around her shoulders in a cerulean cowl, the ends tucked into the cream-colored stitch of her sweater. The warm beige of her oval face was gilded in the array of lights, gold carving out the prominent arch of her brows, the straight line of her nose. Her eyes were open and unblinking, her chestnut stare fixated on a point in the middle distance.
On a yoga mat in front of her sat a sterling silver handheld mirror, the handle adorned in pewter rosettes. A crystal pendulum lay against the looking glass, its planes bending the light, caught up in the silver trill of a necklace chain.
“Are you sure you don’t mind all the lights?” Delaney asked, not for the first time. Her voice startled Adya into blinking, and her roommate’s gaze refocused in a way that made Delaney’s hair stand on end.
“Oh, hello,” she said brightly. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” Delaney replied, though the truth of it was that she rarely slept. She couldn’t, with the shadows clustered at her feet, the night nibbling on her toes. “Did I interrupt something?”
“What, this?” Adya gathered up her materials and climbed to her feet. Her socks were mismatched, one pink, one yellow. “Not at all. It was a waste of time anyway.”
Delaney tucked her hands beneath her cheek and watched Adya roll the mat back into a cylindrical bag. “What exactly were you working on?”
“This.” Adya held her necklace up between them and glowered at the spinning pendant. “I’ve spent all afternoon trying to work out how to scry on command. I’ve downloaded apps, I’ve done meditation, I watched yoga tutorials. Did you know there are some classes that do yoga with goats? I can’t imagine it’s easy to access the astral body when there’s something chewing on your sock.”
“Sorry,” Delaney said, ignoring the bit about the goats. “What do you mean by ‘scrying’?”
“You know.” Adya set the necklace down hard enough to plink the pendant against her desk. “Looking beyond the veil? Divination?”
Delaney shook her head.
Frowning, Adya picked up the mirror and angled it until the glow of a nearby night-light swam into its surface. “This is going to sound insane, but there’s been something stuck in my periphery ever since I arrived on campus. It’s like the beginnings of an aural migraine—there’s just this pale, formless mass at the edge of my vision. I can’t see it, not clearly, but I know whatever it is, it wants me to look.”
Delaney sat up in bed. She felt suddenly cold, in spite of the considerable warmth of the cluttered dorm. All around her bed, the shadows chittered like katydids warning off a predator. She ignored them.
“And you think the mirror will help you see it?”
“I don’t know.” Adya dropped down onto her bed. Their bedroom door sat ajar, light from the hall spilling across the floor in a thin bar of yellow, and from the nearby common room there drifted the indecipherable chatter of students. “I need to figure out a way to get out of my head,” she said, “but so far I’ve only been able to do it by accident. Usually, it happens when I’m mid-seizure, but my doctor has strongly advised against discontinuing my lamotrigine.”
Delaney thought of staring into the dark and seeing a boy’s face staring back. Of the scars that still constellated her kneecaps, white starbursts of skin that never properly healed. Softly, she said, “Maybe you shouldn’t look. Maybe it’s better not to know.”
“Maybe.” Adya turned the silver stem of the mirror over and over in her hand. “I spoke to Dr. Whitehall about it after class today. I have a supervision with him tomorrow. I’m hoping he’ll give me some advice.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” came a voice from the open door.
Delaney glanced up to find the redhead from class wedged into the opening, the fiery halo of her curls coppery beneath the hallway lights. Adya scowled and tucked her legs up under her.
“How long have you been standing out there?”
“Long enough.” Mackenzie elbowed her way into the night-lit haze of the room without waiting for an invitation, edging past a leaning tower of storage containers and dropping into the chair at Delaney’s desk. “You know the adage ‘Those who can’t do, teach’? Rumor has it that’s true for Whitehall. He’s never walked through the sky a day in his life. His boy wonder does all the heavy lifting for him.”
Delaney pulled a face. “Boy wonder?”
“Colton Price,” Mackenzie said, as though it should have been obvious. “I’ve heard Whitehall treats him like a god, which explains why he has an ego the size of a planet. Some sophomore down the row told me Price can pry the sky open with his bare hands, whether he’s close to a ley line or not.”
Delaney waited for Adya to chime in with the most obvious next question. When her roommate stayed quiet, she asked, “Does everyone in this room know what a ley line is except for me?”
“Yes,” Adya said, still squinting into the looking glass.
“You don’t?” Mackenzie’s eyes boggled.
