They passed a number of other people moving in as they headed down the stairs and out the door. Corrie, Edie, and Dawn waved and said hi to Shannon, the girl who had shown them her dorm last year in a bid to get them to move into Sayer. Roe greeted an Asian girl Corrie vaguely recognized as Lin, who’d been in Intro to Magic with them. And they walked past Chris, who had been one of the friends of Leila, Edie’s faerie ex-girlfriend. They didn’t speak to her. Corrie wasn’t sure how she and Edie felt about each other now, but it probably wasn’t good, considering their complicated history.
The rest of campus wasn’t very crowded, and they walked quickly across to Gilkey, sticking to the paved paths as they always had. Corrie wondered whether it even mattered now, since it seemed that the problem with walking on the grass was that it drew the faeries’ attention, and now that humans and faeries all knew about each other, it might not make any difference. But she decided it was better to be safe than sorry.
Corrie swiped her ID card, which let her into Gilkey, and opened the familiar, heavy front door. She didn’t see anyone in the hallway, and a few people were sitting in the common room, but none of them were Belinda. Just as she was wondering whether to start climbing the stairs or just call Belinda’s phone and see if she answered, a familiar face appeared in the hallway to the left.
“Lorelei!” Corrie cried. “Are you still the RA here?”
“One of the two, like last year!” Lorelei said, coming out into the hall and giving them all hugs. “What brings you all here? I know you don’t live here. It’s all freshmen again—which is why I applied to be RA again.”
“We’re looking for Belinda,” Corrie said. “She’s a family friend. Actually, my dad and Charlie both know her.” She had no idea whether Lorelei knew about the werewolves. It seemed like it would make sense, since she’d known about the faeries before most people and she and Charlie had worked together, but at the moment, Corrie couldn’t remember whether it had ever come up between them.
“I can go tell her you’re looking for her,” Lorelei said. “I trust you, but I shouldn’t really be giving out my students’ locations.”
“Oh, of course.” Corrie waved a hand, dismissing Lorelei’s apologetic look. “We just want to say hi. If she’s busy, no worries.”
“Okay. I’ll let you know.” Lorelei looked around at the group of them, grinning. “It’s great to see all of you back this year. So many people have left—and I can’t blame them. Okay, I’ll be right back.”
She headed up the stairs. Corrie turned to her friends. “I guess a lot of people we know are gone, too. What about Naomi?” She directed the question to Dawn—Naomi had been her roommate the previous year.
Dawn shook her head. “She transferred to another school.”
“I’m surprised to hear that,” Edie said. “She’s known about the faeries for a long time. She helped us make some protections.”
“Yeah.” Dawn shrugged. “I guess the actual deaths freaked her out.”
“We can hardly blame her for that,” Roe said. “None of us expected anything like that.” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “I admit, I had a few thoughts about not coming back myself. But of course, it’s really the only college that can help me—even if I’m not taking specific lessons for my visions anymore, I still do a lot better being in a place where people can understand that I have strange magical things happening.”
“Not to mention that your boyfriend works here,” said Annie with a smile.
“Yeah, but it’s not like I would stop seeing Link even if I went to a different college.” Roe smiled back.
“I suppose you haven’t had any freaky visions,” Corrie said.
Roe shook her head. “Nothing that made me second-guess coming here, anyway. Nothing haunting me like the teeth vision, and nothing worrying. Though now that I’m back on campus, I wonder if I’ll have more visions about things actually happening here again. I had almost none all summer.”
“What did you have visions about?” Edie asked. “Anything worth mentioning?”
“Well, I worked at a summer camp, so it was mostly about that,” Roe said, grinning now. “I was able to figure out the culprits for a really big prank because of my vision—though, of course, I didn’t tell anyone how I knew. And I helped a girl who got really homesick, and I knew I’d be able to help her because I’d had a vision of her at the end of camp.”
“Ooh, did your camp have any ghost stories or anything? Did you have any visions about those?” Corrie grinned.
“Well,” Roe began, but before she could tell them about any spooky stories, Lorelei came down the stairs with Belinda in tow.
Clare K. R. Miller 