CHAPTER 1

Hauntings take more than mist and mountains. More than dark corridors and twisting paths, more than shuttered windows and creaking floors. Hauntings take greed. Pride. And brokenness. Crouched at the top of its mountain, its gate guarded on either side by a snarling hound crushing a thistle beneath its crooked paw, Huntsworth Preparatory Academy would never admit to any flaws—but it is, most certainly, haunted.

In the narrow paved drive before this gate, a transfer student named Jamie Vane steps out of a black taxi and scrapes dark-dyed, freshly cut curls back from her face. Her ripped white jeans are new, and so is her phone. A leather bag heavy with curling irons, makeup, high heels, and books hangs from her fist. She looks up at the gates, then back at the cab she’d called in Sevierville. A sixty-minute ride spent staring out the window, studying the line of her jaw and trying to clench it to make it look disdainful and proud.

My jaw.

I am Jamie.

Over and over again, I’ve repeated that to myself, like if I just say it enough I’ll get used to her fake name, her clothes, her past of blind privilege and pride even though all of it fits me as well as this ridiculous top. I pull up on the low, scalloped neck, making sure my mom’s braided wedding ring is still there, more secure on the silver chain around my neck than in the dresser drawer I stole it from. Not that anyone will miss it.

I pass the driver a five-dollar bill, but his hand stays open. He expects more from someone whose parents can carry the weight of the school behind me, but I’m not actually a Huntsworth student. I’m a runaway looking for justice, and this is my last chance to come to my senses, get back in the cab, and tell him to take me home down the mountain.

“You need somethin’, sugar?” he asks as I hesitate.

I need to get out of here. Not just this entrance, not just this school, but the town below it, its suffocating smallness and expectations. I need to run—far from their measured stares, trying to figure out if I’m more my daddy’s good girl or my mother’s repeated mistake—like I was supposed to run with Sam. But my cousin is dead.

I need three days ago to have never happened.

I need to rip the threads of time and tell him Yes, I’ll come to the party. I need to have been there when he left; when they followed; when his head was held beneath the water. I need him to come home.

I need them to pay.

But you can’t say any of that to a stranger, not this close to Amberdeen, where everyone is someone’s second cousin once removed. So I say what I should, and leave everything else to fester.

“Don’t we all?” I sling the bag that costs more than my dad spends on groceries in a month over my shoulder and hand the driver my last ten-dollar bill. It takes him a second, but then the driver’s grin matches mine and his hand closes around the cash. He gives me a quick wink and then he’s gone.

I’m alone. Huntsworth behind me; my past in front of me. I can still run. Shed these heels and hike down the gravel road on foot, cutting around town on hillsides until I get far enough that people don’t know my dad’s name or my mom’s past. Pawn this stolen ring, catch as many cabs as it takes to get me to Nashville, and finally, finally be free. But that would mean passing right by the place where they loaded Sam’s body into an ambulance, white sheet already covering red hair and brown freckles, and telling his memory that they’re right, he didn’t matter, no one cares that he was murdered.

No one but me.

… Jamie.

Armed with a fake ID and a half-baked plan born of three A.M. logic and suffocating grief, I pivot and press the button marked INTERCOM. A voice comes out, as crisp and clear as if she were standing next to me. “Huntsworth Academy, please state your business.”

I lick my lips, but the lies don’t come. I thought it would be easier, this sinking into a made-up person’s skin. All it’s taken me before was the crack of a book’s spine, my imagination eagerly shaped beneath an author’s touch. I’ve been caged goddesses, immortal thieves, grieving mothers, and wayward sons with magic buried beneath their skin. I’ve lived a thousand lives, all of them more interesting than mine. I can do this. I can be her.

I clear my throat and palm the tiny book I’d slid into Jamie’s back pocket. Medea, the same play I’d been reading the night they stole my cousin from me. My one homage to the life I’m leaving behind. A woman bent on murder.

If the glove fits, and all that.

“I’m Jamie Vane. The new transfer student. You should be expecting me.” My voice sounds strange. Me, and yet not. I can’t tell if it’s just the fake name or how hard I’m pretending to not be afraid.

The comm is still silent. I imagine the disembodied voice turning to someone sitting at the desk behind her, asking if anyone knows about an incoming transfer. I wait, refusing to even adjust the strap of my bag, worried that they’re watching me, looking for any nervous tic that will give me away as a scam. I’m playing a character, and she can never, ever break while they’re looking.

Seconds pass. On campus, a bell rings. Not the electric ones we have at my public high school—a real bell, high in a slender tower on the building halfway up the sloping lawn. A heartbeat later, doors all across the campus start to open, spewing students. Logically, I know there aren’t many of them. Far fewer than in even a single grade at East County High. But standing on the other side of the locked iron gates, it feels like an army.

I close my eyes and remember Sam’s grin. One of those slow, tired ones that he had to work for. You’re sure somethin’, Mar, he’d say and I’d scowl at him, pretending to be annoyed, even though I heard the way he curved that somethin’, turning it from just a placeholder into a place at the table. He didn’t always understand me, but that’s what he loved about me. And that’s what I loved about him—I didn’t need to be who he expected. I didn’t need to be anybody. I just needed to be there.

Having a cousin for a best friend was so easy. And nothing in my life has ever been easy. The hate that brought me here is softening far too fast into a hotter, tighter ball of loss at the base of my throat. It’s safer to be angry than sad. Anger is a weapon. Sadness is a tomb.

I pull out the burner phone I’d stuffed in my back pocket. No minutes, no SIM card, just a full charge and a way to connect to the internet. It doesn’t take any thought—tap tap tap—and the last photo Sam posted before he died fills the screen. It’s a picture of him and three other people sitting on a roof, smaller brick buildings and trees dotting the background. The caption reads no moon only moonshine. empty0graves commented a single middle finger emoji.

Sam sits on the ground at their feet, the phone stretched out in his hand to take the photo. Somewhere between two and four hours later, he was lying face down in a shallow stream, drowning. And one of the three people on the low roof wall behind him is responsible.

Their names come easily to me, memorized from weeks of listening to Sam sing their praises. Henry sits in the center. A fair-skinned boy with jet-black hair falling across his face, hiding his features. Long, elegant fingers hold a bottle to his lips. He ignores the photo to look out over the mountain instead. On his right side is Baz: a slight girl with tight, amber curls and uncertain eyes. On the left, sitting sideways with one foot propped up against Henry’s hip and eyes looking straight at the camera, is the only one of the three I’ve ever met. Adrian.

Pale blue eyes, tan skin, and hair shaved close to his scalp, leaving nothing to soften the disgust curling his lips. He’s stunning. And despicable.

I hated him the first moment we met, when he’d slid into the back seat of Sam’s new-and-also-very-used car months ago. I’ve never had much in this life. A cousin for a best friend, a small wad of cash saved up for a down payment on a condo in Nashville, and a car we could drive as far as the gas money could get us. I tried to be okay with little dreams, little hopes, because at least they took me elsewhere. And I was, I think, until perfection came and curled his lip at me. That was all it took—a prep school boy, with his crisp white button-up rolled at the sleeves, his finger slid into one of the holes puncturing the fabric of the car’s ceiling—and all I could see was its defects.

Sam had said, Adrian’s throwing a party. Come with us.

Those eyes had met mine in the rearview mirror, and I’d said, I’d rather die.

A message from Faye pings across the top of my screen, like she was waiting to see my status go online. We all grew up together, Sam on one side and Faye on the other and me in the middle because that was how our houses stood. We were an us that never got chosen, just was. And now, wasn’t.

Still … if she’s already figured out that I’m gone, she might know whether Dad is looking for me yet. It would help to know how much time I have. I tap on her message.

> you better come home for his funeral

I will not. I cannot. For so, so many reasons.

ping

> you can’t bring him back by avoiding that he’s gone, marey

The phone shakes in my hand. I grip it tighter, trying to resist the urge to smash it into a hundred pieces on the path in front of me. My eyes are dry; my jaw tight. I delete Faye’s messages without a reply and smother the girl Adrian glimpsed in the rearview mirror deep enough beneath my anger so he won’t see her until it’s too late.

Bring him back.

I don’t want to bring him back.

I want to burn them down.

The comm speaks so suddenly and clearly that I jump. “We apologize for the delay, Miss Vane. Please come in. Ms. Hobbins will meet you and guide you to the office.”

The heavy gate clicks. The hound-and-thistle badge splits down the center. I have the strangest feeling that I’m about to be swallowed. If I follow this brick path into the school’s heart, I’m not going to come back out. The gate doesn’t care; it continues to drift open, revealing a woman walking toward me from the closest building. Her blond hair is combed back into a bun as tight and as smooth as the front of her pencil skirt. A red hound pin gleams from the collar of her turtleneck. The quickness of her gait must be unusual, because it draws eyes one after the other, and by the time she meets me it feels like half the school is watching.

I am Jamie Vane. Stare all you want. I scrape my hand through my hair again, unused to how my curls keep trying to sneak across my forehead when they’re this short.

The woman’s high heels come to a clacking halt not two feet away from me. She offers her hand. “Miss Vane,” she says, and I think: Me, that’s me. Her hand extends to grab mine from my side. I look down at it, waiting a beat before I take it. Long enough to make it clear I have a choice. “I’m Ms. Hobbins. I apologize again, on behalf of the admissions team. At Huntsworth, we have a strict policy of meeting new students at the gates and welcoming them in. It seems we have everything for you on file except your arrival date.”

“My mother called,” I say. My mother is gone; my mother has been gone since I was seven and she’s never, ever called. Not me, and not this school, but it’s my life that’s fake and Jamie’s that has to be real. Jamie’s mother would rain acid on anyone who slights her only daughter.

Hobbins smiles, less certain. I can see it in her eyes—the fear that this slipup will find its way back to her. Acid rain would cause issues for her porcelain complexion.

“Do you not keep records of phone calls, either?” I let cruelty creep into my tone, carving a knife edge along my smile. After all, it isn’t me who’s getting ready to walk through Huntsworth’s hallowed gates. It’s Jamie Vane. And this world has no clue about the demon that’s about to slip her way inside. I am playing a character, being this girl, and it’s unfortunate for everyone who meets her that the book I read while crafting her was Medea. Both of them loom large in my mind—Jamie and Medea—beasts that lie down on the hounds’ bodies and broken spears.

I step forward, following Hobbins up the winding path. Boys touch shoulders as they jerk chins toward our slow walk uphill. Girls silently rate every aspect of my gait while they delicately fix one another’s copy-and-paste hairstyles.

Late-afternoon fog creeps between the buildings, swirling around their ankles and reaching for their fingertips, reminding me of every story I’ve ever heard bantered around a bonfire back home about this place being haunted. And beneath, beyond, around all of us, the stone walls and creeping ivy, the brick paths and wooden doors and iron-barred windows of the school, demanding that I prove myself worthy of every step I take toward its hallowed heart.

I’m not. I never will be, not as myself, a small-town girl with a second-rate education and a dad who thinks the greatest thing she can ever be is good.

We stop in front of the largest building on campus, a three-story monstrosity of concrete and glass that sits like a bullet wound on these grounds. I can see myself, Marin James, in the reflection of the double glass doors. Skin that doesn’t tan; it freckles in blotches across the top of my chest and the curves of my cheeks. Dark green eyes and wavy black hair that used to be blond. Not a remarkable beauty, not feminine, not with all that tension screwing tight the hard edges of my jaw. Ms. Hobbins jerks open the door in front of me, stripping away my image. She beckons me to enter before her. “Welcome to Huntsworth, Miss Vane,” she says.

I am not good. I am not worthy. And I am not me.

I am Jamie Vane. At least until I find the three students who murdered my cousin—and make them pay.


Text copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Howell. All rights reserved.

Title page illustration copyright © 2025 by Frances Wren