As the sun climbed higher into the morning sky, the headmaster ducked his head back inside the Jaguar and stretched his arm over the driver's seat to the center console for his coffee cup, the dark brew simmering at the same temperature as his patience. A movement in the corner of his eye jerked his balding head toward the windshield. Behind the entrance gate, a figure darted across the grassy quad that was cushioned between the paved driveway and the main administration building.
“Hello!” the headmaster cried at the top of his lungs, but the elusive figure did not stop and did not look back. Man? Woman? He could not decipher a single detail.
Behind the headmaster, a siren blared as his trembling hands spilled his liquid breakfast down his chest.
“Now what?” he growled, his thick belly burning under his coffee-soaked shirt.
A police cruiser eased to a stop behind his Jaguar. Blue lights flashed over Dr. Sullivan's angry face. “Just in time,” he muttered under his breath as the figure disappeared.
Officer Marion Scott had a headacheâa throbbing, skull- splitting headache. He had absolutely no memory of how he had let himself fall asleep, in his patrol car, behind a gas station overnight. He shook cobwebs from his skull and felt stupid. Furthermore, he noticed, his uniform smelled like wet dog. He wisely approached Dr. Sullivan slowly, because the blood of the headmaster was boiling inside his skin as he paced helplessly back and forth in front of the crippled Jaguar.
With a radio call for back-up and the assistance of a fire truck, Officer Scott took control of the scene. The fire department came and removed Miss Daisy, clearing the driveway to the campus. He escorted the agitated headmaster through the gate and then went around assessing the damage.
Thus, by the morning of only the fourth day of the fall semester at Collinsworth Academy, Dr. Humphrey Sullivan already knew it was going to be a long school year. He stood dejected just outside the administration building. Staring up at the now cloudless sky, his eyes trailed the white, puffy exhaust of a jet plane circling for a landing at nearby Atlanta airport. He pondered whether or not he should have been a pilot, as his mother had advised. He considered if it was too late to embezzle the school's endowment and flee to some island, somewhere without the word “extradition” in their language. The solemn, portly headmaster felt the sweat soaking the armpits of his blue-and-white pinstripe shirt.
A crow had a perch above Sullivan's balding head. The bird sat on the window ledge outside Sullivan's second-story office in the Academy's administration building. The jokester cackled down at Sullivan before escaping into the clear morning sky.
Sullivan loosened his red tie as Officer Scott approached with news about the storm damage.
“Looks like all's clear,” the officer told Sullivan. “But you've got trees down everywhere. The power is probably going to be out for a while, too.”
Sullivan peered at the baby-faced officer's name tag:
M. Scott.
The officer brushed the sweat from his brow. “And that gate is toast,” he said, pointing to the iron entrance gate, bent and swaying in the morning's warm breeze.
Headmaster Sullivan shook his head in disgust. “What about the person I told you I saw? Someone was trespassing in here when I pulled up to the gate this morning.”
“We found some muddy footprints on the sidewalk over there,” the officer explained. He pointed at the cement walkway leading through a grassy, open quad toward the campus assembly building, Drake Hall.
“And?” Sullivan asked impatiently.
Officer Scott shrugged his shoulders. “And
nothing
, sir. The footprints just stop where whoever left them took off from the sidewalk and went around the side of building.”
“To the cemetery?” the headmaster asked.
“I guess,” the officer answered.
“So you did not check?” the headmaster bellowed.
Gritting his teeth, the officer stared at the round man in front of him. A deep line creased his forehead. “My officers aren't Ghostbusters, sir. We are the Atlanta City Police, and there appears to be no disturbance to this property by anyone or anything except a vicious thunderstorm. Unless you can prove otherwise, we're leaving.”
The officer raised his palm to the handful of uniformed men milling around the entrance gate. “Let's go,” he shouted into the air.
Headmaster Sullivan hung his head in worry. He had cancelled a full day of classes only twice in his ten years at the school. The first incident had occurred only the previous spring semester. Cancellation was the only sane option the day after a batch of tainted frozen pizza served in the cafeteria at lunch gave the entire school a case of hideous food poisoning. This crushing storm would be the second incident.
Bands of Hurricane Emily had struck a path inland from the southern shores of the South Carolina coast and wreaked havoc upon the city. His campus would take months to repair. Last night, while he was ensconced in the basement of his Tudor mansion north of the city, the storm had not seemed
this
dangerous to him. Now the harsh light of the morning revealed Emily's destructive path across Atlanta.
“I should have called in sick,” he muttered to himself as the milling police followed Officer Scott's lead, back to their patrol cars.
“Sarah,” the headmaster squawked into his cell phone to his assistant. “Call all the instructors. No classes today. You're asking what about the parents? Just tell everyone I'm unavailable.” Headmaster Sullivan felt a throbbing pain building in his chest.
Miss Sarah Jane Adams, a fifty-year-old spinster of infinite patience, arrived as the police officers were departing. She had a fresh grande cappuccino and a box of glazed donuts for her boss. After hearing him on the phone, she considered that he might have a heart attack. Wisps of gray ringlets framed her soft face as she watched Dr. Sullivan panting in agitation. He was, for some reason, scurrying across the green quad in front of the campus administration building.
“Sarah,” he shouted, seeing her approach. She walked to him. A trio of cannons sat like sentinels watching over the main entrance to the campus. A flagpole with the stars and stripes towered above the monuments, older than the school itself and with an origin steeped in rumor. She remembered the unofficial story passed down by generations of students, which was that the original property owner, Charles Collinsworth, had bought the cannons from a Spaniard before the outbreak of the Civil War to protect his land. The Spaniard swore they had been cannons on a pirate ship finally sunk by the British Navy in the Caribbean Sea. When Charles Collinsworth died, he had been buried where the cannons now stoodâalong with a treasure of gold and jewels. But no one ever admitted to really believing the old story.
Sarah wiped the lenses of her glasses with the end of her navy-blue cardigan as the fat headmaster plopped himself on the ground in front of the center cannon. It had been nicknamed Bloody Mary, and it was the largest of the three.
“Sarah!” her boss shouted again at the top of his lungs, his arms flailing in the air. “Come here!”
Peering over Sullivan's beefy shoulder, she gasped, “Oh my!” A lightheaded wooziness washed over her.
Kneeling in the rain-soaked grass, Sullivan scraped at the mud around what appeared to be rocks. “Bones,” he cried over his shoulder. “These are bones, Sarah! The stories are true. Get me a shovel!”
But she didn't do as he had asked because she fainted to the ground.
Kraven concentrated on navigating the cavernous parking garage. Adjacent to Park View Tower, the five-story behemoth of concrete and asphalt echoed with squealing tires. He glanced at his passenger and knew that she trusted him, at least for now. He felt in his heart that he was still aliveâ
for her.
In the seat beside him, Alexandra chewed on a thumbnail until blood lined the cuticle. “Anywhere on this level is fine,” she advised and pointed to a row of vacant spots.
No school
, she thought to herself.
What am I going to do all day?
“What will you do now?” Kraven asked. The concern in his voice annoyed her and Alexandra tossed a sharp look at her driver as he parked her Jeep and lowered his boots to the slick asphalt floor.
“What won't I do now?” Alexandra grabbed her book bag and ran her hands like a comb through her windblown locks. “No school. No mom. A new friend with wings. And did I mention I discovered I can read people's minds?” She tossed Kraven a sly smile as he helped her down from the Jeep's high step.
“You should stay home,” Kraven said solemnly.
He followed Alexandra to her apartment, always a single step behind her heels.
Me and my shadow
. . . Alexandra hummed to herself as the elevator bell rang and opened to the tenth floor. “Home,” she sighed heavily and skipped into the hallway.
Her dog was sagging against the door inside the last apartment at the end of the hallway. The brown-and-white bulldog pricked his ears and listened:
Footsteps, coming quickly!
A growl echoed through the door as Alexandra held her hand out to Kraven for her set of keys. At the foot of the door, a wet nose sniffed.
“I'm here, Little Man,” she called at the door as her dog scratched at his mistress's familiar scent.
“Alexandra,” Kraven said as he rested his hand on her shoulder. “Look.”
A trail of fresh, muddy footprints marked the length of the navy-blue carpeted hallway from the elevator to her door. Nodding her head, she nudged the unlocked door. As her fingers searched for the light switch, she felt a whack of bulldog flesh against her knees and dropped to the hardwood floor.
Jack licked her face again and again, a happy whine in his throat. “I missed you, too,” Alexandra cooed as she lay on the floor, pinned by his paws.
In the hallway, Kraven knelt to the carpet and lay flat against the ground. A sniff raised his suspicions.
Sitting up on the floor, Alexandra stroked the brown spots on Jack's forehead as he crawled into her lap. “Shh, Boy,” she told him, as a deep growl grew in his chest. “He's a friend.”
“I know this smell,” Kraven said, dabbing his finger into the muddy tracks. “Collinsworth.”
“Get in here,” Alexandra hissed. She stood and pulled him inside her apartment. Slamming the door, she checked the peephole before bolting the lock.
A hand brushed her backside.
“Hey,” she shouted, swatting behind her with both arms.
“This was stuck to your back.” Kraven held up a wrinkled page.
Alexandra ripped the paper from his steady hand and turned her back to his chest. Her lip quivered as her eyes absorbed the black and white photograph. Kraven peered over her shoulder.
“It is you,” he whispered into her ear. She swatted him away as Jack growled at his black boots. The bulldog sniffed the stranger's legs and barked fiercely. “Please,” Kraven said, pointing to the dog.
“Come here, Boy,” Alexandra said, struggling to pick up the hefty chunk of canine. She cradled him clumsily in her arms and peered at the paper in her hand.
Looking into Kraven's eyes, she gulped and held the photo up to his face. “This is from a Collinsworth yearbook,” she explained.
“It's you,” Kraven said, tearing the page from her fingers. His brow furrowed as he stared at the picture of Alexandra waving a flag with her best friend, Taylor Woodward.
Alexandra remembered the snapshot from homecoming week during her junior year at Collinsworth. She and Taylor had stood on top of Bloody Mary, largest of the trio of three-hundred-year-old cannons that stood in the middle of campus, in front of the administration building, and they had waved a pirate flag. The caption under the picture proclaimed, “Alex P. and Taylor W. hoist the Jolly Roger and show their Raider pride.”
“There's something on the back,” Alexandra said, as Kraven drew the page to his eyes.
“Why are you dressed like a pirate?” he asked, peering closer.
“Look at the back,” Alexandra insisted, ripping the wrinkled paper from his hand.
Flipping over the yearbook page, she read the words hand-printed in capital letters in bold red ink. “What once was lost now is found.”
“Who did this?” she hissed. She did not recognize the handwriting, the letters indistinguishable and blurred.
“The paper was wet,” Kraven reasoned, “but dried under the door waiting for you to return.”
“I don't care,” Alexandra cried, a quiet rage building in her chest.
Crumbling to the floor, she held Jack tightly to her stomach. As sobs racked her body, the bulldog licked her wet cheeks.
Kraven knelt to the floor and rubbed her clenched arms. “This is not over,” he said, a throbbing pain rising in his back. A hot ball of air rose from his throat and he coughed, turning his handsome, anguished face from the girl.
Smoke
. Alexandra closed her eyes and clung to her dog as he whimpered.
“Do you hurt?” she asked.
“Because you do,” Kraven answered calmly.
“Then let's fly away,” she said, “to somewhere we can't hurt anymore.”
Kraven let the question soak into his mind next to a puddle of suspicion that he and this girl had only fought the first battle in a war of evil. He knew that the shapeshifter was alive and so was the witch who'd made him.
Alexandra laid her head against Kraven's chest, the warm tingle of his fiery skin soothing her aching skull.
“We have to return my uncle's journal to my Granny June,” Alexandra said. Kraven stroked her long hair. He nodded his chin up and down as the slam of a door in the hallway roused Jack from Alexandra's lap. Growling, the dog scratched at the bottom of the door, his paws trampling the yearbook page that had fallen to the floor.
Retrieving the picture, Alexandra ran her fingers over the red letters. “Who would've left this here? Do you think it's some kind of sick joke?” She became thoughtful and said, “I wish I could have shown this picture to my dad. He always used to tell me he wished he could have been a pirate, but that he was born a few hundred years too late.” Her green eyes bored into the hard mask of the creature towering over her.