Рейчел Хоукинс - Hex Hall

Kevin was still holding one of Felicia's hands, and by now he was on one knee. I couldn't be sure, thanks to all the screaming, but I think he was singing to her.

Felicia wasn't screeching anymore, but she was fishing in her handbag for something.

"Oh no," I groaned. I started running toward them, but I slipped and fell in the punch.

Felicia whipped out a small red can and sprayed the contents in

Kevin's face.

His song broke off in a garbled cry of pain. He dropped her hand to claw at his eyes, and Felicia ran.

"It's okay, baby!" he shouted after her. "I don't need eyes to see you! I see you with the eyes of my heart, Felicia! My HEART!"

Great. Not only was my spell too strong, it was also lame.

I sat in the pool of punch while the chaos I'd created raged around me.

A lone white balloon bobbed by my elbow, and Mrs. Davison, my algebra teacher, stumbled past, shouting into her cell phone, "I said Green Mountain

High! Um . . . I don't know, an ambulance? A SWAT team? Just send somebody!"

Then I heard a shriek. "It was her! Sophie Mercer!"

Felicia was pointing at me, her whole body shaking.

Even over all the noise, Felicia's words echoed in the cavernous gym.

"She's . . . she's a witch!"

I sighed. "Not again."

"Well?"

I stepped out of the car and into the hot thick heat of August in

Georgia.

"Awesome," I murmured, sliding my sunglasses on top of my head.

Thanks to the humidity, my hair felt like it had tripled in size. I could feel it trying to devour my sunglasses like some sort of carnivorous jungle plant. "I always wondered what it would be like to live in somebody's mouth."

In front of me loomed Hecate Hall, which, according to the brochure clutched in my sweaty hand, was "the premier reformatory institution for

Prodigium adolescents."

Prodigium. Just a fancy Latin word for monsters. And that's what everyone at Hecate was.

That's what I was.

I'd already read the brochure four times on the plane from Vermont to

Georgia, twice on the ferry ride to Graymalkin Island, just off the coast of

Georgia (where, I learned, Hecate had been built in 1854), and once as our rental car had rattled over the shell and gravel driveway that led from the shore to the school's parking lot. So I should have had it memorized, but I kept holding on to it and compulsively reading it, like it was my wubby or something:

The purpose of Hecate Hall is to protect and instruct shapeshifter, witch, and fae children who have risked exposure of their abilities, and therefore imperiled Prodigium society as a whole.

"I still don't see how helping one girl find a date imperiled other witches," I said, squinting at my mom as we reached into the trunk for my stuff. The thought had been bugging me since the first time I'd read the brochure, but I hadn't had a chance to bring it up. Mom had spent most of the flight pretending to be asleep, probably to avoid looking at my sullen expression.

"It wasn't just that one girl, Soph, and you know it. It was that boy with the broken arm in Delaware, and that teacher you tried to make forget about a test in Arizona. . . ."

"He got his memory back eventually," I said. "Well, most of it."

Mom just sighed and pulled out the beat-up trunk we'd bought at The

Salvation Army. "Your father and I both warned you that there were consequences for using your powers. I don't like this any more than you do, but at least here you'll be with . . . with other kids like you."

"You mean total screwups." I pulled my tote bag onto my shoulder.

Mom pushed her own sunglasses up and looked at me. She seemed tired and there were heavy lines around her mouth, lines I'd never seen before. My mom was almost forty, but she could usually pass for ten years younger.

"You're not a screwup, Sophie." We hefted the trunk between us.

"You've just made some mistakes."

Had I ever. Being a witch had definitely not been as awesome as I'd hoped it would be. For one thing, I didn't get to fly around on a broomstick.

(I asked my mom about that when I first came into my powers, and she said no, I had to keep riding the bus like everyone else.) I don't have spell books or a talking cat (I'm allergic), and I wouldn't even know where to get a hold of something like eye of newt.

But I can perform magic. I've been able to ever since I was twelve, which, according to sweaty brochure, is the age all Prodigium come into their powers. Something to do with puberty, I guess.

"Besides, this is a good school," Mom said as we approached the building.

But it didn't look like a school. It looked like a cross between something out of an old horror movie and Disney World's Haunted Mansion.

For starters, it was obviously almost two hundred years old. It was three stories tall, and the third story perched like the top tier of a wedding cake.

The house may have been white once, but now it was just sort of a faded gray, almost the same color as the shell and gravel drive, which made it look less like a house and more like some sort of natural outcrop of the island.

"Huh," Mom said. We dropped the trunk, and she walked around the side of the building. "Would you look at that?"

I followed her and immediately saw what she meant. The brochure said Hecate had made "extensive additions to the original structure" over the years. Turns out, that meant they'd lopped off the back of the house and stuck another one onto it. The grayish wood ended after sixty feet or so and gave way to pink stucco that extended all the way to the woods.

For something that had clearly been done with magic--there were no seams where the two houses met, no line of mortar--you would've thought it would have turned out a little more elegantly. Instead it looked like two houses that had been glued together by a crazy person.

A crazy person with really bad taste.

Huge oak trees in the front yard dripped with Spanish moss, shading the house. In fact, there seemed to be plants everywhere. Two ferns in dusty pots bracketed the front door, looking like big green spiders, and some sort of vine with purple flowers had taken over an entire wall. It was almost like the house was being slowly absorbed by the forest just beyond it.

I tugged at the hem of my brand-new Hecate Hall- issue blue plaid skirt (kilt? Some sort of bizarre skirt/ kilt hybrid? A skilt?) and wondered why a school in the middle of the Deep South would have wool uniforms.

Still, as I stared at the school, I fought off a shiver. I wondered how anyone could ever look at this place and not suspect its students were a bunch of freaks.

"It's pretty," Mom said in her best "Let's be perky and look on the bright side" voice.

I, however, was not feeling so perky.

"Yeah, it's beautiful. For a prison."

My mom shook her head. "Drop the insolent-teenager thing, Soph. It's hardly a prison."

But that's what it felt like.

"This really is the best place for you," she said as we picked up the trunk.

"I guess," I mumbled.

It's for your own good seemed to be the mantra as far as me and

Hecate were concerned. Two days after prom we'd gotten an e-mail from my dad that basically said I'd blown all my chances, and that the Council was sentencing me to Hecate until my eighteenth birthday.

The Council was this group of old people who made all the rules for

Prodigium.

I know, a council that calls themselves "the Council." So original.

Anyway, Dad worked for them, so they let him break the bad news.

"Hopefully," he had said in his e-mail, "this will teach you to use your powers with considerably more discretion."

E-mail and the occasional phone call were pretty much the only contact I had with my dad. He and Mom split up before I was born. Turns out he hadn't told my mom about him being a warlock (that's the preferred term for boy witches) until they'd been together for nearly a year. Mom hadn't taken the news well. She wrote him off as a nut job and ran back to her family. But then she found out she was pregnant with me, and she got a copy of The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft to go along with all her baby books, just in case. By the time I was born, she was practically an expert on things that go bump in the night. It wasn't until I'd come into my powers on my twelfth birthday that she'd reluctantly opened the lines of communication with Dad. But she was still pretty frosty toward him.