“Pro tip?” Kelly laughs, linking her arm in mine and leading us away from the storage room. “Don’t. No, but seriously. Don’t.”
“Um… are you sure this old portal is safe?”
“It is—it’s just a bit of a hassle if you’re not careful. If you lose the card, you have to call someone from campus to come get you—they’ll travel through with their own card and bring you back that way. It’s inefficient and not all that secure, which is why they made the upgrades to the rest of the portal system. But I like having my own personal unit. Besides, I mainly use it for popping into town and back—nothing too taxing.”
“But that storage room—what if someone had been inside it when we portaled through?”
“Then the magick would’ve put us in a holding pattern until it was clear. After five minutes, if it still wasn’t clear, the portal would’ve kicked us back to my store.”
“Wow. That’s… wow.”
“Magick,” she says. “Come on. This way.”
I follow her down the alley and onto the sidewalk, then down another block to a little hole-in-the-wall bar called La Naranja Vieja.
“The Old Orange?” I ask.
Saying nothing, Kelly simply offers another mysterious grin, then opens the door, waving me through.
Viejais right—there are only a handful of other patrons inside, but none of them look under the age of seventy. The space itself is old too, its once-vibrant salmon and orange-painted walls cracked and peeling, the wooden floor planks stripped bare from years of spills and footfalls.
We find a secluded booth in the back corner and slide in, reaching for the menus sticking out from behind the napkin dispenser.
“Order anything you’d like,” she says. “It's my treat. And don’t let the ambiance fool you. The burgers here are to die for.”
My stomach is growling, but I can't seem to focus on the menu. I’m still a little out of sorts from the trip, and no closer to understanding why Kelly was so desperate to meet tonight.
“Professor Maddox,” I say, setting the menu back in its place. “I’m—”
“Kelly.”
“Okay. Kelly.” I smile, hoping it softens my next question. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what exactly are we doing here? You said you wanted to meet about my issues in class, but I saw my essay on your desk today. You gave me an A+. Now we’re out here in this random bar in the middle of nowhere, and—”
“What’ll it be, girls?” The bartender—a stout woman of eighty at least—shouts at us from behind the oak bar in the center of the space.
“Strawberry margarita and a bacon cheeseburger for me,” Kelly calls back.
“Same,” I say, because my brain is too full to think for myself right now.
“You’re right, Stevie,” Kelly says when we turn to face each other again. “We’re not here about school. We’re here about your mother.”
Thirteen
STEVIE
It’s nothing less than what I suspected, but still. The word crashes into me like it always does, no matter who’s speaking it.
Mother.
“But you already knew that,” she says softly. “Didn’t you?”
“I… I had a feeling,” I admit. “A hope, maybe. The first day of class, there was something about your energy, the way you looked at me… I wondered if you knew her. Then, when you mentioned Starlight earlier… That’s what she used to call me.”
“She always told me her daughter would be her starlight.”
“How well did you know her?”
Kelly reaches into her purse, fishing out a photo and passing it over. There are two girls in the picture, and I recognize Mom immediately—she’s wearing that formal silver dress, the same one she’s wearing in one of the pictures Trello gave me.
