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I felt his hand on my arm, and froze. Despite his treachery, a tiny part of me willed his touch to warm me once more.
“Annelise,” he said, and his husky accent was gentle. I felt that familiar warmth spread from his fingertips, and the tight coil squeezing my chest loosened. “Your gift isn’t simply a high IQ. You are more than that. ”
“Right. ” I leaned back against the headrest and shut my eyes. More than that? Really? More than a weirdo? More than a hopeless social case?
I thought of the girls in the seats behind me. I had to swallow the sourness in my throat. If I’m more than that, what are they?
CHAPTER SIX
“Mimi? And Lilac von what?” I kept my voice down, but I couldn’t do anything about my disdain. After withstanding five hours of my incessant prying, Ronan finally told me the other girls’ names, though surely I must’ve misheard. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Lilac von Straubing,” he said under his breath. He avoided my eyes, and I wondered if I spied amusement on that stony face of his.
“Lilac von Straubing,” I repeated to myself, marveling. What fresh he
ll was this? as my girl Dorothy Parker might’ve said. The only von anybody I’d ever heard of was that superrich Claus von Bülow, and he’d been suspected of murdering his wife. Was this Lilac of the idle superrich, too? She sure looked capable of murdering loved ones.
A bell dinged, and the cabin lights went up. It was a gentle tone, in stark contrast to the alarms ringing in the back of my head.
Ronan unclicked his seat belt and stood. His gaze locked with mine and lingered for an unsettling moment. I looked away, but regretted I did. I was furious with him but impulsively longed to feel that connection we’d had in his car. It made me even surlier.
He went to the front and whispered something to the attendant. I watched avidly as she unlocked a closet at the front of the plane.
He retrieved three large satchels, handing one to each of us. They were canvas kit bags in a drab olive color, like we were off to boot camp instead of this whatever-they-called-it school. Getting issued new stuff gave an air of finality to the whole thing. I rubbed my arms, suddenly chilled.
I was in deep now.
“What’s the name of this place, anyway?” I settled the bag between my legs. Private jets offered more than a little legroom, and I was determined to rifle through my satchel as soon as I could. I was desperately curious about what might be inside.
“I told you already,” he said as he sat back down. “Eyja nœturinnar. ”
“That’s it? But I thought you said that was the name of the island. ”
“There’s naught much else on the isle but the school. ”
Hopefully they didn’t go for any lame Go, fight, WIN, Eyja Tigers! nonsense. I bit my cheek to avoid succumbing to nervous tittering. “Either way, Nœtur . . . Eyjan doesn’t sound like any university I’d ever heard of. ”
“Eyja nœturinnar. ” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “But you were close. ”
I shrugged. It was pretty simple once you parsed the roots into recognizable bits. “I’ve got a thing for Germanic languages. ”
“Aye. ” Looking distracted, he stared past me out the window, even though the only view was a flat wall of black and two flickering red lights on the wing. “We knew that. ”
“We, we—who’s this we you keep mentioning?”
He stayed as he was, looking into the blackness, a grave expression on his face. “You’ll find out soon enough. ”
I was determined to drag some sort of information out of him before we landed. I tried a different tack. “But your accent sounds Scottish. If Icelandic is the old tongue, well, your old folks must be pretty old. ” It was an attempt at a joke, but he merely frowned.
Finally, he looked back at me. “Many of our . . . old ones . . . speak the language of the Vikings. We value their culture. And so our island still holds their traditions close. ”
Focusing on my questions was keeping me from freaking out, and so I kept probing, despite the intensity on his face that was gravitating from serious to scowling. “So are you from—”
“This?” A squeal from behind interrupted us. The shrill tone identified it as Lilac, aka Bunny von Slutling. “You’re replacing my Murakami bag with this?”
“Whatever with your origami bag,” I muttered.
“Clearly they don’t carry Louis Vuitton at the local Goodwill, do they, Charity?”
