“No,” Delaney said, affronted by her astonishment. “My mom was a pretty unconventional teacher, but even her weirdest lesson plans never covered the occult.”
“Ah.” Mackenzie kicked her slippered feet onto Delaney’s desk. “Scholarship kid?”
“Yeah.” The admission made Delaney feel curiously small. Sinking deeper into her bed, she drew the sleeves of her sweater over her fingertips. “I’m starting to regret agreeing to go wherever they sent me. Today has made me realize just how out of the loop I am.”
“You’ll catch up.” Adya set the mirror onto her bed. “Think of the ley lines this way—have you ever seen a longitudinal map of the earth?”
“Sure,” Delaney said.
“It’s like that. Only, where the latitude and longitudinal lines are used as travel markers, the ley lines are supernatural rivers of energy. The air only grows thin enough to cross through in places where the concentration of energy is the strongest.”
“Unless you’re Colton Price,” Mackenzie said, inspecting the beds of her nails.
“Allegedly,” Adya amended. “It’s just a campus rumor. I doubt anyone’s actually seen him do it. I’m Adya, by the way.”
“Mackenzie. I’m just across the hall.”
“I think I met your roommate earlier,” Adya said. “She was doing pointe in the lobby.”
“The one in the animal onesie? Yeah, that’s Haley. She and I got paired together in the roommate lottery. She’s a sophomore but couldn’t find a single other person to live with. I can’t imagine why.” Mackenzie bent down and poked at the nearest night-light—a pale cluster of LED mushrooms. “What are the two of you doing in here with all the lights off, anyway? It’s barely ten o’clock.”
“I have a headache,” Adya said, which was almost true.
Delaney, for her part, said nothing. She didn’t want to tell them that she’d been desperate for company. She didn’t want to admit that she’d crept out to the student social earlier in the night only to find the common room inundated with sounds. The room’s muffled acoustics turned the conversations to echoes that ballooned, effervescent, against the ribbed ceilings. It left her head buzzing, her responses trundling along just a beat too late. Flustered, she’d fled as soon as she was able.
Not that it mattered. The longer she spent in the company of her new classmates, the more she felt as though she was the only one who’d gone her whole life without any true awareness of the preternatural. She didn’t understand things like scrying and ley lines. She couldn’t see beyond the veil. She couldn’t tear apart the sky. She couldn’t even sleep with the lights off.
Chances were, when it came time to step through the sky, she wouldn’t be able to do that, either. Across the room, Adya had fallen back to staring into the mirror, her mouth puckered in a frown. Mackenzie scrutinized Delaney, her elbow propped on a pile of books, the painted stiletto of her nails trilling along her cheek.
“You’ll make it through,” she said when the silence began to grow uncomfortable.
Delaney stilled. “Excuse me?”
“That’s what you were thinking about, right? Whether or not you’ll be able to cross between worlds?”
“Yes,” Delaney admitted. “But—”
“You’ll make it,” Mackenzie said again. “I grew up in Salem. My mom and aunt are members of a local coven there. They do readings out of the back room in the family shop, which they bought purely because of its proximity to a ley line. I did my first reading for a customer when I was six. The second Godbole opened its doors, I knew I was going to enroll.”
Delaney frowned. “Is this supposed to be a pep talk?”
“No.” Mackenzie rolled her eyes. “My point is, I applied for early admission. I interviewed. I wrote a killer essay. But there’s no guarantee I have what it takes to step between worlds. Plenty of hopefuls drop out after the first semester. But you? You could have ended up literally anywhere, and the scholarship committee placed you at Howe. That means something inside of you says you belong here. Maybe more so than the rest of us.”
The sound of shattered glass drew both of their eyes. Adya stood in the center of the room, the carpet around her feet fragmented in reflective shards. The mirror lay facedown, silver rosettes alloyed in the light.
“Sorry,” Adya said, blinking too fast. “It’s just that there was something in the mirror.”
“Something,” Delaney echoed.
“A face.”
“Yeah,” Mackenzie said, unimpressed. “Yours. You’ve been staring in that thing since I got in here.”
“Not mine.” Adya toed the mirror farther from her. “It was a boy.”
The way she said it, her voice tight, made Delaney’s blood run cold. She thought again of the twilit wood, the boy’s face in the dark. The way he’d broken apart beneath the wind, there and then gone in the blink of an eye. She dragged her palms against her arm in an effort to rub heat back into her skin.
“The thing is,” Adya said, still eyeballing the hand mirror as though she expected it to sprout fangs and lunge, “I think he was dying.”
