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“Mason wants you to be his girlfriend so bad,” Thais said, looking amused.

“No. He doesn’t.” Dru had taken out her stele and was using the tip of the instrument to apply runes—True North, Awareness, Clarity, Knowledge. “I made out with him at the end-of-term party last year and the next time I saw him, the first thing he said was that it hadn’t meant anything.”

“I know,” Thais said, because of course she did. “But just because he said that doesn’t mean—”

“Yes, it does.” Dru snorted. “Guys like that—they want to make out with a girl who looks like me, but they’d never admit to their friends they actually liked her. So he just lurks around, hoping he can drag me off into a closet somewhere for a furtive groping session. Lurk, lurk, lurk. He’s like a…a sex crocodile.”

“A what?” Thais laughed.

Dru couldn’t keep her mouth from twitching into a smile. “Crocodiles lurk underwater, waiting until their prey gets close enough for them to strike. Haven’t you seen Rogue Crocodile?”

“No one but you has seen Rogue Crocodile.” Thais did draw the line at some horror movies, especially the bloodier ones. As far as Dru was concerned, there were no lines to draw. Nothing scared her. Nothing in a movie, anyway.

That had all been hours ago, before sunset. Now the moon was a sliver in the sky, and the spring fields that spread out around them were so dark that even Dru’s Night Vision rune wasn’t totally dispelling the shadows.

The trees whispered eerily in the breeze, making Dru shiver. Not that she was scared, she reminded herself. She was—worried. Where was everyone else? Why couldn’t she hear them? Surely the other students were also blundering around the countryside, searching for signs of the Fair Folk? Cairns of stones, circular rings of mushrooms, moss growing in unusual patterns, the odd behavior of animals, especially birds…

Luke had said there would be evidence for them to find, but so far they hadn’t seen even a single mushroom growing in a suspect way, or a blown dandelion clock. In fact, they’d found sweet fuck-all, as Dru’s friend Kit liked to say. He’d been living in England for the past four years and had developed a whole new set of idioms, which Dru enjoyed teasing him about.

She glanced down. The True North rune stood out stark on her wrist. She turned her body, rotating until the rune emitted a tiny spark that hovered in the air for a moment before vanishing. “That way.” Dru pointed. “That’s north.”

“All right.” Thais squinted at her map. “I think that’s this. Powell’s Field. After that, we leave Luke’s property.” She sighed. “I say we check this area out, and if we find nothing, we head back. If we fail this assignment, we fail it.”

“All right.” Dru glanced up at the sky. “I’ll take the west half of the field. You take the east. We can meet in the middle.”

Thais looked dubious. “Is it a good idea to separate?”

“There’s no danger. We’re on Academy grounds,” Dru said. “I’ll see you in five.”

She tugged gently at a dangling lock of her friend’s hair, and headed off into the shadows.

She hadn’t gone far before she started to regret leaving Thais behind. The field wasn’t cleared—it was rocky and pitted, and the low heels of her boots caught on the uneven ground. She paused to apply a Surefooted rune, but that didn’t help with the brambles that scraped at her as she reached the field’s edge, where overgrown hedges ran wild under gnarled oak trees.

Dru moved farther into the shadows, keeping an eye out for clusters of four-leaf clovers or signs of faerie circles. The wind had risen, and rattled the leaves overhead in a way that sounded uncomfortably like bones clacking together. She was about to throw up her hands and trek back to find Thais when she glimpsed a strange shadow—a wide opening in the trunk of an oak tree.

She moved closer. It was an arch-shaped hollow at the tree’s base, surely too symmetrical to be natural. Dru dropped to her knees and peered at it. She could see nothing but darkness, but it was an odd sort of darkness—a darkness that shifted, almost wriggled a bit…

Julian would definitely tell me not to do this, she thought, and stuck her head into the hole in the tree.

It turned out the darkness was peculiarly shallow. Perhaps an inch of blackness, which gave way to an illuminated tunnel inside. A tunnel that sloped gently downward, its walls veined with tree roots, a soft light pulsing from a torch set into the wall. The torchlight had a pale, darting quality, like a will-o’-the-wisp dancing through branches.

Faerie light, Dru thought. Her heart was beating rapidly. All she had to do was crawl into the tunnel and retrieve the torch—it was incontrovertible proof of faerie presence. With her hand on the seraph blade at her waist, she inched forward, the dry crunch of meadow grass giving way to packed earth.

The hole in the tree was narrow, but with a wiggle, she was through, and standing up inside the tunnel. A leaf had caught in her hair; she shook her head impatiently and made her way over to the torch.

It was clearly of faerie workmanship, delicately carved of pale gray stone, burning with a smokeless flame. As she reached for it, the lick of fire flared up, illuminating the tunnel with a momentary daylight glare.

The light only lasted for a moment—the flame sputtered low to a dull red glow. Dru found herself standing in near darkness, though her Night Vision rune allowed her to see—not as well as if there were light, but enough to make out that the tunnel was suddenly full of movement. Then she heard a sound. An eerie, high-pitched repetitive sound, like mirthless giggling.

The hair rose on the back of her neck. She wrenched the torch free of the wall and began to retreat toward the tunnel entrance.

But there didn’t seem to be a tunnel entrance anymore. The underground corridor stretched away behind her, the walls bulging with roots and vines. There was no sign of an archway leading out into the night. She was trapped.

She wondered if this was what had happened to her friend (and sometimes crush) Jaime Rosales. He’d been sent on a mission to Faerie two years ago and had never come back. Dru suspected that he was still alive—she knew Faerie had many ways of tricking and trapping a person.

You know better than to do this. Dru couldn’t help but hear Julian’s voice in her head, a little scolding. The problem, Dru, isn’t that you don’t recognize when something you want to do is a bad idea. The problem is that you go ahead and do it anyway.

She cursed silently, imagining every bad word she could think of and some she was pretty sure she’d just made up. Then she sighed, pressed her back against the wall, and began to make her way slowly down the tunnel. It had to go somewhere, though she knew it might simply lead her deeper into Faerie.