According to the locals, we made it to the school around three in the afternoon. It felt like ten in the morning to me, and the weather only made my sense of time displacement worse. The sky was blanketed with a layer of gray-white clouds that blocked out most of the sun. Through the tinted windows of our limousine, it looked even darker.

We stopped at the gate while our driver tried to get someone on the intercom.

My eyes followed the line of the gate to the high stone wall it was set in. I hadn’t noticed the wall as we pulled up. It was easy to miss. Thick trees were planted, two rows deep, on each side of it.

Our driver managed to announce us, and we rolled through the gate onto the school grounds.

The trees became sparser as we drove up the long road. The brush gave way to orderly bushes, which gave way to a manicured yard. The lawn striping made the grass look like a series of green carpets, rolled out to welcome us to the school.

When the main building came into view, I sat on my legs and leaned the side of my head against the window to get a better look.

I remembered the awe I felt when I first saw Big Jacky’s mansion. I remembered it really well, because I was feeling it all over again.

The main building of Setlan on Lee was massive. It sprawled across the grounds, presenting its rose-beige brick walls like a fort. The walls were broken up by towers that could have been stolen from a castle. There were rows and rows of windows. Between the windows were three-story chimneys that led up to the steep, brown-black roofs, and along the roofs was another line of white windows, standing tall, each with their own little peak. There were bay windows, sometimes two stories high, crowned with the same kind of stone teeth you could see on the towers.

I felt like some part of that immense edifice had to be newer than the rest, but I couldn’t pick out which part. The school might as well have been plucked out of history, brushed with fairy-tale dust, and dropped into modern-day Britain.

Darius shifted to the bench beside me.

“Emerra, you’re smudging the window.”

I looked down at my hands. There were streaks where I’d smeared them while they were pressed against the glass.

Oh, geez. I was like a kid at a candy store without the excuse of being a kid. Or having any candy.

I sat in my seat properly. “Are you going to remind me to be professional?”

The vampire straightened his jacket as he settled back in his seat. “Not this time.”

That was suspicious.

“Why not?”

“Setlan on Lee is an all-boys school whose students range from the age of fifteen to eighteen. We’re basically walking into a building of your peers.”

“I’m twenty!”

A closed-lip smirk appeared on the count’s face. “You’re closer to being their age than either Conrad or I.” He glanced, meaningfully, at my hoodie. “I think you’ll fit in fine.”

I huffed and wrapped the sides of my jacket around me tighter.

A tall, slim man was waiting for us outside the doors of the main entrance. He wore baggy khaki pants, a dress shirt that showed his wrists, and a tie. His hair was thick, coarse, blond-brown, and down to his chin. It stood away from his head, making it look like a lion’s mane. His nose would have been thin if it wasn’t for the knob at his bridge and the large nostrils. As the limo pulled up, he stepped forward with a nervous, eager gait, and stood there with his hands clasped together in front of him.

When our driver let us out, Darius emerged first. Then Conrad. Then me.

Slim retreated a step and stared at the wolfman.

“Good afternoon,” Conrad said softly.

Slim cleared his throat and stepped forward again. This time it was a lot more nervous and a lot less eager. “Good afternoon.”

I was impressed. You could hardly hear the quaver in his voice.

His eyes moved between Darius and Conrad. “Mr. Vasil?”

The vampire stepped forward. “I’m Darius Vasil. Are you Alex Miller?”

Miller smiled. “Yes, sir. We spoke on the phone.”

“I know. I recognized your voice. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.” They shook. Darius turned to us. “These are my colleagues, Mr. Conrad Bauer—”

Bless him, Alex Miller actually stepped toward the wolfman to shake his hand.

“—and Miss Emerra Cole.”

Miller had to step around Conrad’s bulk to see me.

I smiled. “Hey.”

He smiled back with palpable relief.

Darius looked so sharp and expensive it tended to intimidate the people who couldn’t match his standards—which was, well, everyone. Conrad looked like something that crawled out of the deep dark woods to read an etiquette book. Compared to them, I was blessedly boring. Another bald punk in sneakers.

Miller stepped back and addressed Darius. “Thank you for coming so far to visit us. Mr. Wuller would have liked to be here to welcome you, but I’m afraid he’s rather busy. We’ll have your bags sent up, and I can take you to meet him.”

“Thank you,” Darius said. “That’ll be fine.”

Miller turned and motioned to the shadows under the arched entry. Two boys stepped out. They looked like they were sixteen. As they came toward us, they stared, unashamed, at Conrad.

He stared back. His ears inched toward his head.

Conrad didn’t like being stared at, but he was doing his best to hide it.

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This was going to be a long day for him.

Our four bags were lined up in front of the driver.

“I can help bring them up,” the driver said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Miller said. “Stewart. Evans.”

The boys picked up two bags each. The taller of the two hoisted Conrad’s duffel. When he reached for my luggage, I thought I saw it drift off the ground until the handle reached his hand. If anyone else saw it, they didn’t say anything.

“This way, please.” Miller motioned for us to follow him.

The inside of the school was as impressive as the outside. High ceilings, stone walls, old paintings—I gawked as we passed through the halls.

Alex Miller gave us a kind of informal tour as we walked, pointing out wings and hallways, trying to give us an understanding of where the different areas of the school were. Both his voice and his arm movements were jerky.

“The three main wings of the building were constructed in eighteen-forty-seven. In nineteen-oh-one, they added the east and back wings, but after the first world war, it got too expensive to keep up as a single-family home.”

The question burst out of me: “This was a single-family home?”

Miller stopped and turned when he heard me. “Well, it was used more as a retreat, so there were often guests, and all the servants, of course, but it was owned and maintained by the Lurendells. They sold it off. It passed through various hands until Mr. Wuller bought it seven years ago and founded Setlan on Lee.” He turned and kept walking.

Guests. And servants. And…how many rooms?

“How many students do you have?” I asked.

“Two-hundred and eighty.”

“The papers I was sent said there were three hundred,” Darius said.

Our guide slowed. “Yes, well…we recently came back from half-term. We lose and gain boys at almost every break.”

“How long have you worked here, Mr. Miller?”

Miller’s pace picked up again. “Five years.”

“What’s your job?” I asked.

“I’m Mr. Wuller’s professional assistant. The school secretaries deal with most of the school’s logistics. I help out more with Mr. Wuller’s personal workload.” The heavy wood door he opened creaked loudly. “But this is still a start-up, so we all have to move into different tasks if the need arises.”

The creak of the door made me realize how quiet the rest of the wing was. The walls swallowed up our footfalls, making the whole building feel empty.

“Do you like working here?” Darius asked.

Miller passed through a diffused block of light cast by the window to our right. One second of shine on his blond hair. A break. Another second of shine, then back into the shadow.

“The work suits me. Mr. Wuller puts a lot of faith in me—which is gratifying—and I like the energy that the boys bring in.”

I looked around at the dead walls and the wide hall.

Then I heard the murmur of voices. It sounded like the stones to our right were humming.

“Speak of the devil,” Miller said with a smile.

The wide room we’d entered fed into three wings, as well as the interior courtyard. The doors to the courtyard crashed open, all at once, to admit a crowd of boys and the noise that came with them.

Miller stood off to the side and raised his voice to say, “These are our alpha classes, coming in after their games.”

Alex Miller was right—the boys carried an energy with them. The air in the room came alive. There were random pockets of laughter and an omnipresent smell created by the scent of grass, sweat, and a crowd of people. On the edges there were a few adults, looking over the group like weary sheepdogs.

It finally felt like a school.

The mass of boys got closer. Some of them stopped when they saw Conrad. They turned to each other or stared. One of them raised a finger to point.

I wanted to stand in front of Conrad, to block him from their view—which was hilarious given our relative height difference. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one worried about how the school was going to welcome our wolfman.

Darius put his hand on Millar’s shoulder. “Perhaps we should keep going.”

“Huh? Oh…yes. Certainly.”

We waded through the crowd.

Since Conrad stood head and shoulders above everyone in the room, this made him even more visible.

You’d think that would make the problem worse, but it didn’t. Everyone could gape all at once and get it over with, and the pressure of the group would keep any one boy from shouting out something that I’d make him regret.

Miller and Darius led the way. I trailed behind Conrad’s empty wake, feeling almost invisible.

We had reached the stairs at the far end of the room and started climbing when a voice behind us sailed over the noise of the crowd.

“Avatar, the Last Airbender was brilliant! And Iroh is my hero!”

It took one second: my breath stopped, I looked down at my shirt, half hidden by my hoodie—yes, it was my Airbender shirt!—I whirled around on the step to look over the crowd below.

“Where are my people at?” I yelled.

At the other end of the room, a hand shot out from the crowd. Its finger was pointing right at me. I could see the teeth of the kid’s smile. I grinned and pointed back.

One of the adults drawled, “Keep moving, Osborn. You’re blocking the flow, and you need a shower.”

There were a couple of sniggering laughs.

Osborn and I both turned away. He was swallowed up by the mass of teens. I stood alone, three stairs below Conrad, Darius, and Alex Miller.

All of them were watching me. The insufferable vampire was smiling in a smug manner.

I put my nose in the air and climbed until I was level with Darius. “If you’d seen the show, you’d understand.”

We continued to Wuller’s office.

In the outer room, there was a desk near the windows, covered with paperwork, stray pens, and an old computer. On the other side of the room were bookshelves and file cabinets. Miller led us through it all toward the door in the side wall.

Darius motioned to the file cabinets. “Is this where you keep the student information?”

“Well…um, yes,” Miller said. “But not the normal student information.”

“I see.” Darius rested his hand on one of the cabinets. “This is about their psychic powers.”

Miller’s body twitched. “Yes…I’m—yes. It is.”

He turned and walked over to the door. When he knocked, a bluff voice answered.

“Enter!”

The headmaster of Setlan on Lee was all I imagined him to be from the one word he shouted. He was an inch taller than average, with a rotundness that couldn’t be disguised by his tweed suit. His hair was a graying brown, but his bushy mustache was reddish brown. His eyebrows were almost as bushy as his mustache. He had a set of spectacles on a chain. They had to be spectacles. No one would attach a mere set of glasses to their button hole. As he stood up to greet us, the spectacles dropped from his nose.

“Good afternoon! Good afternoon!” He paused for a fraction of a second while his brain force fed him the image of a wolfman standing in his office. “How do you do?” he said to Conrad. When he saw me, he smiled. “Ah! A young one. I wonder what you’ll make of my school. Wayne Wuller, at your service.”

I shook his hand. He had the kind of brassy, friendly aura that always made me feel welcome. With someone like him around, I knew I wouldn’t be the loudest person in the room.

“Emerra Cole,” I said.

“Excuse me, you’re a lady!”

I smiled. “It’s the hair. It throws people off.”

He turned to the wolfman and put out his hand.

“Conrad Bauer,” Conrad said as they shook.

“North American lycanthrope?”

“Yes, sir.”

“May I ask which group?”

“Unnuk. North West region.”

“Fascinating.” Wuller looked down and realized he was still holding Conrad’s hand. “Oh! Pardon me. There’s no one more rude than an old scholar.” He let go and waved his finger. “Don’t let me corner you. I’ll bore you to death with all my questions.” He turned. “And that means you must be Mr. Darius Vasil?”

Darius held out his hand. “Yes, Mr. Wuller. Thank you for allowing us to stay here during our review of your school.”

“Of course! I couldn’t think of a better place to have you stay. You’ll get all the time you need to look around, and we can arrange for you to meet our psychics without breaking into their school work too much. Err.” He brushed his mustache down with two fingers. It sprang right back up. “That being said, I should warn you, I only have one guest room available. We usually keep three open, in case parents want to visit, but we’ve had to set two of them aside for the extra teachers we brought on.”

His eyes drifted in the direction of the unexpected female.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Wuller,” I assured him. “We’ll work it out.”

“Yes. Thank you. You’ll let young Miller know if you need anything like cots or blankets, won’t you?”

“No problem.”

“Now, I can’t walk away from all this paperwork at the moment, but I’ve set aside a few hours after dinner to meet with you. Until then, Miller can show you to your rooms, and you can rest until it’s time to eat. Will that do?”

“That’ll do fine, Mr. Wuller,” Darius said.

Wuller raised his hands like a ringmaster presenting his circus. “Then let me formally welcome you to Setlan on Lee, our little psychic academy!” He lowered his hands. “I hope you find our work here as stimulating as I do.”