Chatoyant College Book 14: Ghost Stories

Chapter 4: Reassurances

"Hey, Corrie," Belinda said, waving and laughing. "You brought a whole escort just for me?"

Corrie laughed and waved back. "These are my closest friends. You know Edie." She gestured at each of her friends as she said their names. "These are Dawn, Roe, Annie, and Rico."

"Hi," Belinda said, waving again at them all. "Do they all know about, uh... how we know each other?"

Corrie nodded. "Yeah, they know about my dad."

"I've done my part," Lorelei said with a smile. "Belinda, feel free to bring them up to your room, or whatever you want to do. I just wasn't going to bring this group crowding up the stairs. See you all later." They said goodbye to her, and she headed back to her own room.

"It's kind of crowded here and it won't be any better in my room," Belinda said. "Should we go outside?"

"Sure," Corrie said. Rico moved quickly to open the door and hold it open for them, and they all went back out into the warm afternoon.

"Now I'm wondering," Corrie said to Belinda once they were a few feet away from the dorm, walking north along the path. "What are the werewolves doing? I mean, now that everyone knows about the faeries. You could be open, at least on campus."

Belinda raised her thick eyebrows. "You didn't talk to your dad about this?"

"It didn't occur to me," she admitted. "And it's not like I talk to him all the time. It's nice to get along with him and chat now, but I've always been really close to my mom, and I've only known him for less than a year."

"Well, we decided to stay secret, at least for the time being." Belinda wrinkled her nose.

Corrie grinned. "I'm guessing that means Sasha decided, and the rest of you have to live with it."

Belinda laughed. "There was a little more discussion than that, but most of the adults were on the side of secrecy. I didn't want to, but I guess everybody has to stay secret off campus anyway, so it's easier if we keep that consistent."

"Maybe when the story gets around that faeries are real," Edie said. "If it gets around."

Corrie nodded. They'd been worried, after the faeries had revealed themselves at the end of the previous semester, that the whole world would find out about faeries and there would be some backlash. But it seemed that the world didn't want to know about faeries. She'd tried to tell a few people, and while her mother and grandmother had believed her, no one else had. She would have thought the news would have had stories about the deaths and the numbers of students leaving or transferring because of the faeries, but she hadn't seen anything of the kind.

Of course, Chatoyant College seemed to have a way of keeping itself out of the public eye. Knowing what she knew now about the magic classes, she would have thought that a school that openly taught magic would have had millions of people trying to take the classes. But most people seemed to not take it very seriously. Even Edie, when they'd all started at Chatoyant College, hadn't believed that they could really learn magic there. Only people who were previously inclined to believe in magic did so before they took classes—like her, with her pagan family, and Dawn, whose aunt had attended Chatoyant College and learned magic thirty years before.

"While we're talking about faeries," Belinda said, "do you have any idea what happened with the faeries I was teaching music to?"

Corrie shook her head, looking around at the others. "We haven't had that much contact with those faeries, thankfully. I don't remember seeing the cage, or Feloc or Siffyd, when Professor Strega marched us across the border..."