School Spirits - By Rachel Hawkins Page 0,3

I wondered what felt worse, the vampire bite or the guilt.

With a sigh, Mom dropped her head and rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Iz. I know you did the best you could.”

But your best wasn’t good enough.

Mom didn’t have to say the words. I felt them hanging between us in the kitchen. There were a lot of words filling up the space between me and Mom these days. My sister’s name was probably the biggest. Nearly a year ago, Finley disappeared on a case in New Orleans. It had been a totally routine job—just a coven of Dark Witches selling some particularly nasty spells to humans. We’d gone together, but at the last minute, Finley had told me to wait in the car while she dealt with the witches herself.

I could still see her standing under the streetlight, red hair so bright it almost hurt to look at. “I got this one, Iz,” she’d told me before nodding at the book in my lap. “Finish your chapter.” A dimple had appeared in her cheek when she grinned. “I know you’re dying to.”

I had been. The heroine had just been kidnapped by pirates, so things were clearly about to get awesome. And it had seemed like such an easy job, and Finley had swaggered off toward the coven’s house with such confidence that I hadn’t worried, not really. Not until I’d sat in the car for over an hour and Finley still hadn’t come out. Not until I’d walked into the house and found it completely empty, the smell of smoke and sulfur heavy in the air, Finley’s weapon belt on the floor in front of a sagging sofa.

Mom and I looked for her for six months. Six months of tracking down leads and sleeping in motel rooms and researching other cases like Finley’s, and it all led nowhere. My sister was just…gone.

And then one day, Mom had just packed up our things and announced we were going home. “We have a job to do,” she’d said. “Brannicks hunt monsters. It’s what we do, and what we need to get back to. Finley would want that.”

That had been the last time Mom had said Finley’s name.

Now Mom sat across the table from me, and her coffee mug turned, turned, turned.

“Maybe we should take it easy for a while,” she said at last. “Let you go on a few more missions with me, get your legs back under you.”

Finley had been doing solo missions since she was fourteen. I was almost sixteen now, and this had been the first time Mom had let me out in the field by myself. I really didn’t want it to be the last time, too.

I shoved my own mug. “Mom, I can do this. I just… Look, the vamp, he could read my mind, and I wasn’t ready for that. But now I know! And I can be better on my guard next time.”

Mom lifted her gaze from the table. “What did he see?”

I knew what she meant. Picking at the Formica tabletop, I shrugged. “I thought about Finn for a sec. He…saw that, I guess. It just distracted me.”

I didn’t add the bit about how Pascal had mentioned the boy in the mirror. Bringing up Finn was going to bother Mom enough.

Just like I’d thought, her eyes suddenly seemed a million miles away. “Okay,” she said gruffly, her chair shrieking on the linoleum as she shoved it back and stood. “Well, just…just go to bed. We’ll think about our next move tomorrow.”

Deep parentheses bracketed Mom’s mouth, and her shoulders seemed more slumped than they had been just a few moments ago. As she passed my chair, for just a moment, Mom laid a hand on my head. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she murmured. And then, with a ruffle of my hair, she was gone.

Sighing, I picked up my cup and swirled the dregs of tea still left in it. Every bone in my body ached to go upstairs, take a shower, and crawl into my bunk.

But there was something I had to do first.

Our house wasn’t much. A few bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom that hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. Once upon a time, it had been the Brannick family compound. Back when there had been more Brannicks. Now it was just a house surrounded by thick woods. But there was one room that really set it apart from your normal home.

We had a War Room.

It sounded cooler than it actually was.