I dumped my book bag on the table, pulled out my anthropology textbook, and flipped to the section on Samhain.
There were only two pages of information on the holiday, and most of it had to do with the cultural customs of different supernatural species, but one section in particular jumped out.
On the evening of Samhain, spirits cross over from their world into ours using special gateways. These gateways are where the veils between worlds are the thinnest.
The gateways the book mentioned sounded almost identical to the Otherworld entrances I’d been thinking about. If they were one and the same, then that meant that on Samhain, these entrances would be the areas where the worlds overlapped the most.
I sat there blinking. Otherworld entrances were those areas where the veil between worlds disappeared altogether. The serial killer was marking those entrances with bodies.
Now I just needed to know why.
I rubbed my forehead. I knew I was missing something important, and I didn’t know what that something was.
But I happened to live with someone who just might.
***
After school I rushed to my dorm. Leanne had her last class in one of the castle’s towers, so it always took her a little longer to return to the dorms after class. Hopefully that would give me enough of a head start. I only had about five minutes to search through her notes before she arrived home.
As soon as I dropped my bag inside the door of our room, I turned my attention to Leanne’s desk. I had no idea what I was looking for, and the jumble of papers that rested on the desk was going to make this neither quick nor easy.
Most of the papers were copies of essays and misprints of other school assignments. A few of them were Wikipedia articles on different herbs.
Behind me I could hear someone climbing the stairs.
You’ve got to be kidding me. It could’ve been anyone climbing those stairs, but knowing my luck, it had to be my roommate. I did one final look through and a piece of notebook paper caught my eye.
A number of random tasks had been scribbled down to remember. One in particular caught my eye. Look up the properties of ley lines.
I’d remembered her and Oliver talking about ley lines the day before. If that had been the only mention of them, I might not have thought twice about the note. However, something about seeing the term written down reminded me of the cryptic message Cecilia had sent me. She’d misspelled the word lay so that it was written ley. Maybe it was an innocent mistake. Maybe not.
The sound of a key sliding into the door’s lock roused me from my thoughts. I darted to the door and opened it for my roommate.
“Hey Leanne, I just got back from class,” I said, out of breath. Of all the witty, unsuspicious things I could say, I chose that?
“Me too,” she said, her voice exhausted. Her eyes were still bloodshot and her golden hair hung limp and dull. If I sounded suspicious, she was beyond noticing.
I bit back the concerned comment on the tip of my tongue. I knew she would just shrug it off or worse, get annoyed at my concern.
I watched her drop her bags and log onto her computer. When it became clear she didn’t want to chat, I moved over to my own desk and opened my laptop.
Throwing a surreptitious glance over my shoulder, I searched the term ley lines. My eyes moved over an article on them. All I managed to find was that the term was coined by some amateur archaeologist, and ley lines were thought to be straight lines where ceremonial processions took place.
Then a line caught my eye.
In the New Age movement, the term ley line has largely replaced some of its more traditional names such as spirit path, fairy path, corpse road.
Corpse road. That was the term Cecilia used in that cryptic poem. I spent the next hour researching all I could about this idea of an energy line. By the time I was finished, I’d learned that these energy lines, which were in fact roads for certain types of beings, could be found all over the globe, and that time worked a little differently for those walking along a ley line.
I still had no idea what was so significant about ley lines, and I wasn’t positive they had anything at all to do with the investigation I was working on. However, if both Leanne and Cecilia thought they were important enough to write down, then there had to be something significant about them.
I just needed to figure out what that was.
***
That night I fell asleep thinking of Andre. Only, the deeper I sank, the more Andre’s face shifted.
He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear as I looked around. Candlelight flickered off the stone walls. Maybe this was another room in Bishopcourt that I hadn’t yet seen.
Andre—or the man who had once been Andre—wrapped his arms around me, and I sunk into them. I breathed in the smell of ash and smoke, a distinctly non-Andre smell.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, consort,” he whispered.
My sense of peace shattered.