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CHAPTER ONE
CAT
Two Months Earlier
Rain glided down the car windows, teardrops zigzagging in a frantic, senseless pattern I identified with a little too closely. I’d been frantic all morning, my anxiety at a hundred percent, and it had only grown as we’d driven two hundred miles from Harrogate to a Scottish village whose name I’d only learned last week when the acceptance letter dropped through my letterbox.
I felt sick by the time we drove onto the ferry and sailed from Portpatrick to another village so tiny even a google search didn’t bring up results: Ford’s End, home of the prestigious Ford School of Medicine—our end destination. It was an island halfway between Scotland and Ireland and every bit as grey, dismal, and wet as I’d expected. You’d think the university being as prominent—and wealthy—as it was, it’d have constructed a bridge so we didn’t have to travel by ferry. Apparently not.
I sighed, watching the downpour, my stomach winding tighter. Weren’t rainstorms supposed to be bad omens? Every horrific event in every book I’d read seemed to begin with a rainstorm. At least it wasn’t a thunderstorm. In gothic books, thunder and lightning meant a dark stranger would appear at your window, or you’d hear a mysterious tapping at your bedroom door. And then get haunted, turned into a vampire, or murdered. Or all three rolled into one delightful package.
“I’m getting out,” Honey, my eternally optimistic best friend said, her blue eyes wide with excitement and a near-permanent smile curving her cheeks. “I want to explore.”
I gave her a strange look, making sure she saw me look from her, to the rain outside, then to her, and back to the rain.
“Don’t wander too far. We should be close to Ford’s End,” my dad, Orwell Wallison, warned from the driver’s seat. He had one hand on the steering wheel while another adjusted the gaudy feathered hat he insisted on wearing because it added an air of prestige.
“Do take an umbrella if you’re getting out, Honey,” my mum, Clarissa, said, turning in her seat to give my friend a warm look. Mum’s name was one everyone in the medical field would recognise. Hell, she wrote one of the books on our syllabus. She was thrilled I was going to Ford, where she herself studied medicine, but less pleased I was getting a medical degree to become a vet. “And consider doing a little rain dance to keep the gods happy.”
I could have pointed out rain dances were to summon rain but I just tucked a smile between my cheeeks and watched Mum fondly. Both she and Dad had been raised in conservative, rich families, and when they met in their late twenties they entered a delayed rebellious phase where they both adopted a hippie lifestyle. It had lasted just long enough for them to have me and my brothers before Dad cut his long hair and moved on from the bohemian lifestyle. Mum very much had not moved on.
“Sure, Mrs. W,” Honey said with a double thumbs up. Knowing Honey, she might actually dance in the rain just to avoid letting Mum down. We joked we were sisters separated at birth, with the same love of making people happy, the same fear of rejection and failure—but she was the extrovert version to my introvert.
Honey might not have been Mum and Dad’s biological child, but we’d all grown up together—me, Honey, and Byron, my as-yet-silent best friend who stared gloomily out the window beside me—and they were every bit their children as me, Virgil, and Zoltan.1
“I’m getting out, too,” I said impulsively when Honey cracked the door open, rain driving its way across the leather seats onto the dark-wash jeans I’d worn with a soft cream jumper. Comfort clothes, because today was going to be a nightmare of anxious proportions. I needed fresh air, needed to walk, to do something to burn off my nerves. Mum opened her mouth, but I smiled knowingly and said, “I’ve got an umbrella in my bag.”
I also had pepper spray and a rape alarm, because I’d read far too many horror stories that took place at college or university, and just because Ford was full of medical students whose workload could only be described as insanity, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find time for hobbies. Some people took up cardmaking, some people hit the gym, others were serial rapists in their spare time.
Mum called me disillusioned, her cynical sunshine. I couldn’t fathom why.
“We’re gonna be fine, Cat,” Honey said brightly, slinging her arm around my shoulders when I stepped onto the unsteady ground of the ferry and shut the door behind me. Byron wasn’t budging; he rested his chin on his fist and stared at the frothing sea. He was supposed to be flown into Ford’s End by helicopter, but he’d shown up at our house in the middle of the night with his bags packed and sadness in his eyes. He’d argued with his parents again. Dicks. Honey and I had tried everything to get him to talk for the five hours we’d been in the car, but his reticence was here to stay.
I’d win him around, though. I just had to find some popcorn on this island.2
“Define fine,” I murmured, giving Honey a sideways glance as she wrangled me around the car and towards the railing. There were five other cars making the crossing, full of medical students or Ford staff. A broad-shouldered blonde guy leant against the railing a few paces away, staring into the churning sea. His clothing screamed I have more money than God, but who didn’t? There were no scholarships to Ford, and God forbid anyone’s family be struggling for money behind closed doors. If the students found out, they’d be ripped apart.
Honey squeezed me closer, her cerulean eyes glowing with excitement. “We’re gonna nail school, get the highest grades in all our classes, have a butterfly-worthy social life on the weekends, and graduate in three years as total medical badasses.”
I couldn’t hold back a snort, a smile curving my lips even as rain sluiced down my long brown hair, the frizz it summoned out of control. “Butterfly-worthy?”
“Butterfly-worthy,” Honey confirmed fiercely, her face splitting in a beaming grin when the fog on the sea parted, for just a second, to expose the island we were sailing towards—towering and rocky, with a sprawling village that followed the curve of its roads, a dense woods that hugged the edge of the island and swept up to the top where several bigger buildings clustered, a spire currently attempting to puncture a heavy grey cloud. “We’re in our social pupae stage right now, but by the time we graduate, we’re going to be beautiful social butterflies.”
“I’m going to take pupae as a compliment and not punch you in the tit,” I said sweetly.
“Hey, pupae is a compliment. Have you ever seen them? Wriggly little cuties.”
I wrinkled my nose. Nope. Definitely not. “I feel like we’re about to get shipwrecked on the Island of Dr. Moreau.”
“Ooh, that’s appropriate,” said Honey, who’d never read the book where the mad doctor cut apart animals and humans to make twisted mutants. She threw me a wink. “Maybe this doctor will be one of our professors.”
“Looking at the place,” I drawled as the fog swallowed the view again, “I would not be surprised.”
Now we’d found solid ground, the island was growing on me and the adventure of it all was starting to hit, making my stomach flutter with giddiness. The nerves were still there, but my curiosity took over when we landed on a jetty at the base of Ford’s End and drove onto a beach road ringed with heavy, dark green trees. I peered out the window at the woodland we passed, Dad’s car taking a small, winding road through the village to the top of the island, where Ford School of Medicine hulked at the top.
Byron hovered by my side as I climbed out and surveyed the school grounds.
It still gave me haunted island where we’re going to be vivisected energy, but there was something a little Indiana Jonesy about it with the trees around us, like we’d travel into the woods and find a secret cavern with a priceless golden statue.
