song of the moment : gun and horses/ Elli Goulding
Ch.4
Severin Boarding School
I woke up just as we pulled into a long gravel road, for about five minutes we drove on it then we reached the school. Mom had text me about an hour ago while I was still asleep, telling me the school was near East Jordan, close to what Keena and I called the peak, the narrow strip of land that was between two of the Great lakes.
The school rose up out of the woods that flanked it on either side and in the back, all the evergreens reached out with hungry fingers as if to pull the structure back into the forest where it belonged. But that wasn’t where it belonged; I belonged out in the woods, even before the shift I had always belonged out there.
I stared up at the imposing building, two eagles soared up around the top, then landed on the stone gargoyles that sat on each corner of the building. This place was an old fashioned nut house, and it kept getting creepier as we drove through the iron fence that closed with a clang behind our car without us or anybody else near it.
With my black duffel bag over my shoulder and my personal bag under my arm I walked up the 10 steps to the huge front doors where my dad stepped out from behind me and used the giant eagle faced knockers that left my ears ringing.
Soon I heard footsteps on the other side, also another perk from the shift, heightened scenes, but as I waited for the door to open I held my breath, expecting soon creepy old guy with a candle to answer the door, instead a kind looking old lady did. Go figure.
“Hello, you must be the Charretier’s, it’s very nice to meet you, if you’ll just come this way,” she gestured inward, and we walked in.
The moment we walked in I was struck by how many eagles there where. Statues of them everywhere, along with bears, mountain lions and bobcats, foxes, and one wolf, “What the-,” I whisper and would have finished the sentence except the women looked back at me and smiled at me as if she knew what I had been thinking, which that the owner of this place had a weird since of home décor.
“Yes, Dr. Thornton’s a little bit of a actives, he enjoys the outdoors, like I hear you do,” she says like she’s known me forever. I looked at her skeptical, these people where already weird in my mind.
“What did you say your name was?” I ask adjusting the strap on my bag.
“Mrs. Forter, and you are Alianna, no?” she says looking at me strangely again.
“Yes, but it’s pronounced Ali-n-a,” I say looking her over, a neat navy blue skirt, a white blouse tucked into the skirt, gray brown hair pulled back into a messy bun with a few pieces hanging lose, blue eyes sparking with kindness, wrinkles around her eyes, wrinkles everywhere, and her lean body did not look her age. Then I noticed something weird about her eyes as she looked at me, her pupils became thin and long like a cat’s.
I must have been looking at her weirdly because she asked me, “Are you okay, dear?” My dad cleared his throat, I looked back at him, he inclined his head towards her, when I looked back her eyes were normal.
Mrs. Forter turned around and kept walking so me and my dad where forced to keep up with her. She walked to another set of door and opened them, “This is the cafeteria,” she turned her back to the door and let us see the room. No one was in it, only the cooks who were preparing the food.
