I woke suddenly from a deep dream. Someone was talking to me.

“Um, excuse me—are you going to Wyldcliffe?”

A girl, about eleven or twelve years old, was hovering nervously near my seat on the train. She was dressed in the dark gray and red Wyldcliffe uniform, all new and stiff and slightly too big for her. I was still in jeans and casual clothes.

“I hope I didn’t wake you up,” she said apologetically.

“No—um, of course not, it’s okay.” I shook myself from sleep. “I’d just drifted off. Silly of me.”

“So you are going to Wyldcliffe?” The girl pointed at my luggage on the rack over my head. My suitcase had an address label tied on the handle, printed in Dad’s firm handwriting: Wyldcliffe Abbey School.

“I guess that gives me away.” I smiled up at her, trying to be friendly. “Yes, I am.”

“Can I sit with you?” She had a nasal kind of voice, as though she had a permanent head cold. “I’ve been wandering up and down the train, trying to find another Wyldcliffe girl.”

“Sure. Of course you can.” I moved some magazines from where I had chucked them on the opposite seat and she sat down. “Is this your first term?”

“I was supposed to start in September, but I was ill,” the girl said with a kind of suppressed excitement—or was it fear? She was dark and thin, with a sickly complexion and dull black eyes that seemed to fix themselves onto my face. “Do you like Wyldcliffe?”

I hesitated. I wasn’t going to tell her what I really felt about Wyldcliffe, or what I really knew about the place. “It’s an amazing building,” I began brightly. “Like a castle in the middle of the moors. The teachers are, well, a bit old-fashioned, but they know their stuff. There’s a choir and orchestra, if you like music. And most girls ride on the weekend. Even I’m going to learn.”

It sounded like something I was parroting from the school’s prospectus:

Wyldcliffe is England’s premier traditional boarding school for girls. Located in the stunningly beautiful Wylde Valley, we pride ourselves on the highest academic and social standards….

What the prospectus didn’t say was that Celia Hartle, the High Mistress of Wyldcliffe, had disappeared in strange circumstances at the end of last term. It didn’t say that she was High Mistress not only of the school, but of the deadly coven of Dark Sisters. The authorities had been baffled by Mrs. Hartle’s disappearance, but Sarah, Helen, and I knew that she had vanished after the battle in the crypt. Part of me hoped that she was dead, and yet part of me was sickened by the idea. Either way, whatever had happened to Celia Hartle, the coven would be waiting for me and my Talisman when I got back.

“But horses are unpredictable, aren’t they? It must be really frightening.”

“Oh…um…” I hadn’t really been listening, lost in my own thoughts. “Sorry?”

“Horses,” the girl repeated, looking more scared than ever. “You can get hurt. You know, thrown off and all that. It’s dangerous.”

I laughed shortly. After everything I had faced at Wyldcliffe I wasn’t going to get too worked up about sitting on the back of a well-fed pony. “I don’t suppose I’ll be going very fast,” I said. “So you’re not going to ride then?”

“My mom can’t afford to pay for extras like that.”

“Oh, yeah, of course…” I tried to cover my blunder. “Anyway, Wyldcliffe is a good place to study, though I expect you’ll be a bit homesick to start with—”

“I won’t,” she said abruptly. “There’s nothing for me at home. My dad lives in America and my mom is always working.”

Poor kid, I thought, poor sad kid. She looked so young to be going off to boarding school all on her own. “Couldn’t your mother have traveled with you to Wyldcliffe, you know, on your first day?” I asked.

The girl flushed scarlet and I immediately wished that I hadn’t said anything. It was none of my business if her mother couldn’t be bothered with her, and now I had put my foot in it again. “Mom came to the station, but she couldn’t spare the time to come all the way with me. She said I’d be okay, that there would be other Wyldcliffe students on the train.” The girl frowned for a moment before looking up at me with her disconcerting, hungry eyes. “Anyway, she was right. I’ve got you now, haven’t I?”

I smiled uncomfortably, feeling sorry for her, yet somehow repelled at the same time. There was something needy about this girl, something that would condemn her to being a bit of a misfit. Well, I knew all about that. The Wyldcliffe students had made it clear that I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t a blond, carefree English rose with a nice little trust fund and a pedigree going back to William the Conqueror. I didn’t belong, and I had a funny feeling she wouldn’t either.

Silence fell between us. I didn’t know what else to say, so I took a book from my bag and pretended to read. After a few minutes, she interrupted me with another question.

“Is there a teacher called Miss Scratton?”

“Yes. Why?”

“She taught my mother at Wyldcliffe, years ago. Mom says she was a good teacher but a bit weird. Always on about the past.”

“Well, Miss Scratton’s a history teacher, so I guess that’s natural.”

The past. I can never get away from the past, wherever I go…. Sebastian had said that, and now it was true for me too.

“What are the other teachers like?” the girl asked nervously. “Are they all like her?”

The faces of the Wyldcliffe teachers, or mistresses, flashed in front of my eyes. I let the book fall onto my lap. There were plenty who were a whole lot weirder than Miss Scratton. Miss Dalrymple, for instance, the plump geography mistress, with her bright blond curls and little-girl laugh. Or Miss Raglan, stiff and awkward and angry, who taught math. It wasn’t the love of teaching that kept those two at Wyldcliffe; I was sure of that.

“Well, they tend to be kind of strict,” I said. “There are lots of rules at Wyldcliffe, so you have to be careful, or you’ll end up with a pile of demerits and detentions.”

The girl rummaged in her bag and pulled out a faded booklet. “Have you seen this before?”

My heart thudded as I recognized it. Of course I had seen it before. I had devoured every word of that little book a hundred times over, searching for clues, searching for the truth….

“Yeah, I think so,” I said evasively, taking it from her. The title was printed in gold letters on the blue cover: A Short History of Wyldcliffe Abbey School, by Rev. A. J. Flower-dew. “There’s a copy in the library at school,” I said. “Where did you get this?”

“I told you that my mother was at the school. She’s into all this kind of thing, and I’ve read tons of stuff about Wyldcliffe.” The girl snatched the book back from me, flipping through its pages, searching for something. “Have you seen this picture? Do you know who it is?”

As I looked down at the page, my heart seemed to explode in my chest. Yes, I knew who was in that painting.

“It’s Lady Agnes Templeton,” the girl went on. “Her family owned the Abbey before it became a school. It says here that Lady Agnes died in a riding accident.” She looked up and added confidentially, “But it’s not true. She ran away.”

“What?” I stared at her, utterly astonished.

“All I know is that she went off to London and that it wasn’t her parents who went looking for her. It was a young neighbor of hers, a distant relation. Have you heard about him? His name was Sebastian Fairfax.”

“Um…no…” I lied. But the blood was racing in my head: Sebastian…Sebastian…Sebastian… I switched the girl’s voice off and plunged back into my own private world.

Right now, at this very minute, Sebastian would be fading. The frightening, supernatural process had already begun last term. I remembered his pale face, his weakened voice, his reddened eyes, and his horror at the idea of becoming a demon spirit. Second by second, drop by drop, Sebastian’s existence was draining into the shadow world. Time was running out. Perhaps—the thought tormented me—perhaps it had already happened. Perhaps when I got back to Wyldcliffe I would discover that he had already left this world and vanished into the darkness.

I wouldn’t think that. I wouldn’t let that be true.

There was a way out of this nightmare, and I was going to make it happen. Somehow, I had vowed, I would master every secret of the Talisman that Agnes had bequeathed me and wrench Sebastian’s destiny into my hands. I would not let him fade in torment for my sake. I had to find him, before it was too late. The train rattled out an endless, grinding song: Come back…too late…come back…too late…too late….

“Sebastian Fairfax was crazy.” The girl leaned closer and touched my arm to get my attention. “They say Wyldcliffe is cursed because of him.”

I recoiled from her touch, suddenly furiously angry. This girl knew nothing about the reality behind her stupid tittle-tattle. How dared she drag Sebastian’s life out to be picked over like some cheap newspaper gossip?

“I don’t believe in all that nonsense,” I said coldly.

“Well, everybody says Wyldcliffe is haunted.” The girl slumped against her seat again, looking small and skinny in her badly fitting uniform. “And my mom said that when she was at Wyldcliffe the students were always daring one another to look for Agnes’s ghost after dark. Mom never saw her, though. Have you?”

I stood up abruptly. “I’m going to get some coffee in the buffet car.” As I dug my purse out of my bag, I tried to calm down. After all, she was just a kid going to boarding school for the first time, excited by what she had heard about the old Abbey and its long history. It wasn’t her fault she was awkward and plain and tactless. I tried to force myself to sound friendly, even if I didn’t feel it. “Well, I won’t be long then…um…what is your name?”

“Harriet.” She smiled faintly. “Harriet Templeton. Enjoy your coffee.”

I jumped, as though someone had fired a pistol.

Templeton. Harriet Templeton. Could she…Was she related to Agnes in some way? If so, was she related to me? And why was she so interested in Sebastian?

The train swerved on the track and I stumbled along to the next carriage, where the drinks and snacks were served, my head whirling. I paid for my drink, but I didn’t go back to my seat. I found an empty corner in the corridor and stared out of the window, letting my coffee grow cold as we sped farther and farther from London, and into the far, wild north.