Chatoyant College Book 13: Chapter 34: Accepted

Corrie only had a little while between her classes, but she and Edie went over what she’d heard about Jo. Edie was surprised to hear that anyone would want to leave campus, but realized it made sense after they discussed it. To them, campus had always been a dangerous place—it had been on their second night there that the entire hall had been awakened by Roe’s scream and everyone had discovered that Annie was missing (though the two things turned out to be unrelated). It had only gotten worse when most of them had forgotten about Annie, and Dawn had needed to rely on her newly-discovered Sight to remind everyone about her. Come to think of it, it had also been on their second day on campus that Corrie had discovered that her stalker ex-boyfriend, Paul, had followed her to college.

They’d accepted the way things were, especially since it had seemed that they had some ability to do something about it. Or at least Dawn did, and after rescuing Annie, the rest of them felt like they knew something about faeries. But to the rest of the students, Chatoyant College had been safe, sheltered place. The vast majority of them probably thought that nothing bad ever happened here, since they immediately forgot about anything that was even strange.

Not the RAs, though. Not any other faerie students. And not anyone else who might know about faeries. But there weren’t too many of those.

Corrie parted ways with Edie and headed into her Grounding, Centering, and Trance classroom a few minutes early. Dawn and Rico were already there, so Corrie sat down next to her. “Hear anything interesting this morning?” Corrie asked. “I don’t suppose either of you has a class with Link or Troy?”

They both shook their heads. “I did hear something interesting,” Dawn said. “At least one person is wondering if the same person killed Christy and Sean.”

Corrie grimaced. “Yeah, that’s a reasonable conclusion to come to. I can’t argue with it myself.”

“We don’t even know if Sean was murdered,” Rico said.

“But the administration won’t tell us how he did die,” Dawn said. “So it probably wasn’t an accident.”

Corrie nodded agreement. “People are scared. One person in my earlier class already left school, she’s so scared. And another person is saying she’s going to transfer after this semester.”

“Do they blame the school?” Rico asked, his eyes widening.

“They think the school is covering something up. And they’re probably right.”

The door opened again, and Corrie turned to see Annie and Roe walking in. Roe looked tired, but not exhausted, scared, or angry, which was a relief. So either she didn’t know anything, or Link had nothing to do with what had happened to Sean.

“How are you?” Corrie asked as Roe sat down next to her. “Feeling any better since last night?”

Roe nodded. “I slept okay, and Link left me a voicemail this morning saying he’s sorry and he wants to explain everything. He wants to meet up tonight, but I haven’t called him back yet. I have to see if Professor Strega would mind rescheduling our appointment.”

“You’re supposed to talk to her about this vision that won’t stop,” Annie said, frowning.

Corrie couldn’t help grinning at Annie. It was nice that Roe had a friend to take care of her. It reminded her of—well, her and Edie. She was sure they’d each nagged each other about something along the same lines. “Maybe you can meet with one of them earlier in the evening, and the other later. Did you have the teeth vision again last night?”

Roe nodded, leaning back so her head hung down, her hair falling almost to the floor. “It almost feels like it’s blocking other visions. I haven’t had a different one in a long time. Not even something about Sean—some kind of warning would have been nice. I bet Troy’s really upset.”

“Link didn’t say anything about him?” Dawn asked. Corrie was sure they were both thinking the same thing—there was no reason to even suggest to Roe that Link could have had anything to do with Sean’s death. If he was willing to explain, then it probably wasn’t true… or he had a really good story planned.

“No, his message was really short,” Roe said. “But, I mean, I know he takes care of Troy, and sometimes the three of us hang out together, but Troy isn’t exactly a hot topic of conversation when it’s just me and Link.”

Corrie laughed. “Fair enough.” The classroom was starting to fill up. “Well, maybe Professor Strega will tell us something.” But she didn’t expect it.

And the professor didn’t have anything to say to them that wasn’t about class. They were finally learning to move around while in trance—which was really hard, and she didn’t seem to expect any of them to do it. She praised them for trying and for giving up and going into trance sitting down. As long as they were working, that seemed to be good enough for her.