Hex Hall

"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.

In the month since my dad had told me that I was going to Hecate, I'd tried to come to terms with it. Seriously. I told myself that I'd finally be around people that were like me, people I didn't have to hide my true self from. And I might learn some pretty sweet spells. Those were all big pros.

But as soon as Mom and I had boarded the ferry to take us out to this isolated island, I'd started to feel sick to my stomach. And trust me, it wasn't seasickness.

According to the brochure, Graymalkin Island had been selected to house Hecate because of its remote location, the better to keep it a secret.

The locals just thought it was a super-exclusive boarding school.

By the time the ferry had approached the heavily forested spit of land that would be my home for the next two years, the second thoughts had majorly set in.

It seemed like most of the student body was milling around on the lawn, but only a handful of them looked new, like me. They were all unloading trunks, toting suitcases. Some of them had beat-up luggage like mine, but I saw a couple of Louis Vuitton bags, too. One girl, dark-haired with a slightly crooked nose, seemed about my age, while all the other new kids looked younger.

I couldn't really tell what most of them were, whether they were witches and warlocks or shapeshifters. Since we all look like regular people, there was no way to tell.

The faeries, on the other hand, were very easy to spot. They were all taller than average and very dignified looking, and every one of them had straight shiny hair, in all sorts of different colors, from pale gold to bright violet.

And they had wings.

According to Mom, faeries usually used glamours to blend in with humans. It was a pretty complex spell since it involved altering the mind of everyone they met, but it meant that humans could only see the faeries as normal people instead of bright, colorful, winged . . . creatures. I wondered if the faeries that got sentenced to Hecate were kind of relieved. It had to be hard, doing that big of a spell all the time.

I paused to readjust my tote bag on my shoulder.

"At least this place is safe," Mom said. "That's something, right? I won't have to be constantly worrying about you for once."

I knew Mom was anxious about my being so far from home, but she was also happy to have me in a place where I wasn't risking getting found out. You spend all your time reading books about the various ways people have killed witches over the years, it's bound to make you a little paranoid.

As we made our way toward the school, I could feel sweat pooling up in weird places where I was pretty sure I had never sweat before. How can your ears sweat? Mom, as usual, appeared unaffected by the humidity. It's like a natural law that my mother can never look anything less than obscenely beautiful. Even though she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, heads turned in her direction.

Or maybe they were staring at me as I tried to discreetly wipe sweat from between my breasts without appearing to get to second base with myself. Hard to say.

All around me were things I'd only read about in books. To my left, a blue-haired faerie with indigo wings was sobbing as she clung to her winged parents, whose feet hovered an inch or two above the ground. As I watched, crystalline tears fell not from the girl's eyes, but from her wings, leaving her toes dangling over a puddle of royal blue.

We walked into the shade of the huge old trees--meaning the heat diminished by maybe half a degree. Just as we neared the front steps, an unearthly howl echoed in the thick air.

Mom and I whirled around to see this . . . thing growling at two rather frustrated-looking adults. They didn't look scared; just vaguely annoyed.

A werewolf.

No matter how many times you read about werewolves, seeing one right in front of you is a whole new experience.

For one thing, it didn't really look much like a wolf. Or a person. It was more like a really big wild dog standing on hind legs. Its fur was short and light brown, and even from a distance I could see the yellow of its eyes.

It was also a lot smaller than I'd thought one would be. In fact, it wasn't nearly as tall as the man it was growling at.

"Stop it, Justin," the man spat. The woman, whose hair, I noticed, was the same light brown as the werewolf's, put a hand on his arm.

"Sweetie," she said in a soft voice with a hint of a Southern accent,

"listen to your father. This is just silly."

For a second the werewolf, er, Justin, paused, his head cocked to the side, making him look less like a throatripping-out beastie and more like a cocker spaniel.

The thought made me giggle.

And suddenly those yellow eyes were on me.

It gave another howl, and before I even had time to think, it charged.

CHAPTER 2

I heard the man and woman cry out a warning as I frantically racked my brain for some sort of throatrepairing spell, which I was clearly about to need. Of course the only words I actually managed to yell at the werewolf as he ran at me were, "BAD DOG!"

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of blue light on my left. Suddenly, the werewolf seemed to smack into an invisible wall just inches in front of me. Giving a pitiful bark, he slumped to the ground. His fur and skin began to ripple and flow until he was a normal boy in khakis and a blue blazer, whimpering pitifully. His parents got to him just as Mom ran to me, dragging my trunk behind her.

"Oh my God!" she breathed. "Sweetie, are you okay?"

"Fine," I said, brushing grass off my skilt.

"You know," someone said off to my left, "I usually find a blocking spell to be a lot more effective than yelling 'Bad dog,' but maybe that's just me."

I turned. Leaning against a tree, his collar unbuttoned and tie loose, was a smirking guy. His Hecate blazer was hanging limply in the crook of his elbow.

"You are a witch, aren't you?" he continued. He pushed himself off the tree and ran a hand through his black curly hair. As he walked closer, I noticed that he was slender almost to the point of skinny, and that he was several inches taller than me. "Maybe in the future," he said, "you could endeavor not to suck so badly at it."

And with that, he sauntered off.

Between nearly being attacked by Justin the Dogface Boy, and having some strange guy who was not that hot tell me I sucked at witchcraft, I was now thoroughly pissed.

I checked to see if Mom was watching, but she was asking Justin's parents something that sounded like, "Was he going to bite her?!"

"So I'm a bad witch, huh?" I said under my breath as I focused on the boy's retreating back.