Chapter 8: Angel 2020-300
This is a game changing chapter. Angel finds Dom mutilating pictures of Mavi, and in her attempts to stop him, finds herself inside him. Possessing him. Exciting!
Chapter 9: Mavi
Angel’s possession of Dom’s body is apparently not a one-off. “Dom” seeks out Mavi and they begin a flirty friendship with multiple secret rendezvous. This can’t end well. Sooner or later, Angel won’t be piloting Dom when Mavi ends up alone with him. Really, this is nothing but trauma waiting to happen. At best, it’s hurt feelings; at worst… well, it’s like Angel is training the deer to approach the hunter.
On the school side, Mavi finally gets the student files from Morency, and it’s a series of tragedies thrown into contrast with the earlier personal essays that barely touched on the realities of their lives. Mavi begins to make inroads with the students—commiserating with Lucinda over her dying mom. And after Michelle has a near-fatal accident when something unseen pushes her on one of the school’s icy, rocky paths, Mavi makes a project of her. Keeping an eye on her, the girl who reminds her of her classmate murdered by her mother’s guerilla fighters.
That’s also not going to end badly.
Chapter 10: Angel 2020-1000
Okay, so first off, I obviously have no idea what those numbers refer to, since it jumps from 300 to 1000. I will have to wait for illumination.
Angel is really doing the heavy lifting regarding the Others and the actual events happening in the school. She’s the one who can see the packs of slobbering Others feasting on the girls. She’s the one who can see that as the ice season progresses, more and more Others arrive. And Angel is the one who has heard the truth about the curse laid on the school: that it can be mitigated each generation by the sacrifice of (of course) a young girl.
In the meantime, things are getting worse. Angel sees the Others possessing the students in a gruesome scene of exaggerated human actions. And she sees the teacher Mrs Hawk in sleep paralysis, aware of and horrified by the Others feeding on her.
It’s a grim little chapter, full of horror, and the only light spot is her moment with Mavi—which involves them talking about such cheerful things as dead relatives and the nature of ghosts.
Chapter 11: Mavi
Mrs. Hawk abandons ship and flees. Though there is a lot of concern about how, exactly, she left, but Morency and Carmela aren’t discussing it. Also, one of the students—Sara—is sick from the Others’ attentions. Carmela’s fragile mental state becomes a little clearer when Mr. Lamb has a serious case of foot in mouth and suggests one of these girls might be a successor to Carmela’s legacy.
And Mavi finally has “proof” that something very wrong is going on at the school, besides bad feelings, nightmares, when a ghost girl shows up in her room. A pre-teen, who resembles Domenico. And she’s a new anomaly in the book: not whatever Angel is, not an other, but a previous (presumably) victim of the curse. She tells Mavi about the Others, and that Sara’s not sick, but drained. She tells Mavi she should leave and take all the staff and students with her. But Mavi, in the best traditions of horror book protagonists, has a slew of reasons to stay.
But Mavi is now stirred and worried. Yesi is no help, because she’s caught up in the book she’s writing. She talks to Dom. And “Dom” confirms that Mavi didn’t have a nightmare and that Sara doesn’t have a virus.
So she’s even more worried at the end of her chapter.
It’s getting harder to keep myself to a couple chapters at a time.
lane robins 