Chapter Two: Spence
Dani jolted awake as the bus turned onto the gravel roads that lead off the highway. It was the same turn off as the bus always took, and thanks to Winchester, nearly everyone was thrown up off their seats. The school was a few back roads away, but it involved a lot of weaving and winding through the forgotten country roads, and even then, if you didn’t know where it was, it would appear to be just another empty field.
Everyone else on the bus was slowly coming back to the land of the living, and there were many moans and groans. Being woken up by violently being tossed off your seat was not a pleasant way to wake up, especially if it was from a bus seat. Regularly bus seats weren’t even close to comfortable, but being tossed in the air and landing on them elevated that discomfort to pure agony, and no one on the bus seemed to enjoy the rough landing. Except, well, Winchester, because a couple times Dani had caught her smiling while everyone else was complaining; Winchester was just weird like that.
Only the ones that didn’t know about the gravel roads were seated at the back of the bus, and even after the initial jolt, they were being thrown around because of how unkempt and rough the back roads were. Where to sit was something that you learned over time, and eventually it would be an epic battle over who would sit where on the bus on the way to and from the school as the year went on. Dani had never sat in the back because she always had preferred the middle her entire life, so she had never had to suffer from Winchester’s bad driving habits like other kids had. Plus, for every time that the bus went to and from the school, she was fast to get out and always got a seat of her choice.
For the few hours that they had been driving, the clouds had cleared considerably. The sky was no longer the iron grey that it had been early on in the morning, and the sun had finally risen in the sky. But its brilliance was drowned out by the sight of Spence.
The new kids gaped at the sight of the school, because it was truly astonishing. One second all there was an empty field surrounded by a dense forest, and the next there was a castle-like structure standing in the middle of it, the drive up it packed with dozens of yellow school buses. There were hundreds of students milling around the giant stone structure, waiting to burst through those ancient wooden doors that had guarded the entrance for generations. On the towers the teachers watched the entire procession, making sure that everything was going smoothly from their lofty perches. The only parts of the staff that weren’t up in the spires were Wolfe and Anderson, because someone had to be down on the ground to make sure every one of the students made it inside and were settled in their respective places in the dorms.
Wolfe guided the bus to its spot, more for the sake of the kids that were on the drive way than anything else. Many of them were young and wandering around, totally lost and oblivious to their surroundings. It was the same routine every year, and so far nothing had been done to improve the system, because even though it was unconventional setup, it worked for everyone that attended the school.
The bus that Dani was on was one of the last to arrive, but there was still a few to come before anyone would be allowed to enter the scarred wooden doors at the front of the school. A few years ago some rebellious students had tried to force their way in through those dark oak doors, but instead of giving, they threw the would-be intruders off the front steps and into the flowerbeds. It was a warning to anyone who had even thought about it, and no one had dared touched those doors again before Anderson did to open them for the first time in the year for all the students to enter.
