The Ravens Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Acknowledgments

  Escape to Another World

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Copyright © 2020 by Alloy Entertainment, LLC

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Produced by Alloy Entertainment

  30 Hudson Yards

  New York, NY 10001

  Cover illustration © 2020 by Shyama Golden

  Cover design by Jessica Handelman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Morgan, Kass, author. | Paige, Danielle (Novelist), author.

  Title: The Ravens / by Kass Morgan and Danielle Paige.

  Description: Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2021] | Audience: Ages 14 and up. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: Loner Vivi Deveraux is thrilled to join Westerly College’s Kappas, who are secretly witches, until she meets perfect, polished Scarlett Winter, who will stop at nothing to be the sorority’s next president.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019052298 (print) | LCCN 2019052299 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358098232 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358098195 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Witchcraft—Fiction. | Magic—Fiction. | Greek letter societies—Fiction. | Colleges and universities—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.M8249 Rav 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.M8249 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052298

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052299

  v1.1020

  For my mother, Marcia Bloom, who taught me the best kind of witchcraft—how to see beauty all around and find magic in unexpected places

  —Kass

  For Andrea, Sienna, Fiona, and the rest of my coven. And for my mother, Shirley Paige, whose magic will always be with me

  —Danielle

  Prologue

  The witch looked at the blond girl cowering on the ground, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Don’t look at me that way. I told you, I don’t want to do this,” the witch said as she drew the circle, lit the candles, and checked the contents of the bubbling cauldron. The knife, already sharpened, glinted on the altar next to her offering.

  The girl moaned in response, tears streaking down her face. Her mouth was bound, but her words rang crystal-clear in the witch’s head.

  Remember who I am. Remember who you are. Remember the Ravens.

  The witch hardened her heart. No doubt the girl thought she sensed an opportunity in her captor’s apologetic tone. A chance to persuade her to stop. A chance to hope. A chance to live.

  It was too late for that. Magic didn’t preach. It gave and took. This was the gift. This was the cost.

  The witch knelt beside the girl and tested the bonds one last time. Tight, though not enough to cut off her circulation. She wasn’t a monster.

  The girl’s screams began again, piercing through the gag stuffed in her mouth.

  The witch gritted her teeth. She’d much prefer the girl to be unconscious. But the rite she’d dug up had been very specific. If this was going to work, she needed to do it perfectly. If it didn’t . . .

  She shut her eyes. She couldn’t think about that possibility. It had to work. There was no other way.

  She picked up the knife and began to chant.

  In the end, she was surprised at how easy it was. A slash and a shower of red, followed by the unmistakable electric crackle of magic bleeding into the air . . .

  Magic that was now all hers.

  Chapter One

  Vivi

  “Vivian.” Daphne Devereaux stood in her daughter’s doorway, her face twisted in exaggerated anguish. Even in the unforgiving Reno heat, she wore a floor-length black housecoat edged in gold tassels and had wrapped a velvet scarf around her dark, unruly hair. “You can’t go. I’ve had a premonition.”

  Vivi glanced at her mother, suppressed a sigh, and returned to her packing. She was leaving for Westerly College in Savannah that afternoon and was trying to fit her entire life into two suitcases and a backpack. Luckily, Vivi had had a lifetime of practice. Whenever Daphne Devereaux got one of her “premonitions,” they tended to leave the next morning, unpaid rent and unpacked belongings be damned. “It’s healthy to start fresh, sugar snap,” Daphne said once when eight-year-old Vivi begged to go back for her stuffed hippo, Philip. “You don’t want to carry that bad energy with you.”

  “Let me guess,” Vivi said now, shoving several books into her backpack. Daphne was moving too, trading Reno for Louisville, and Vivi didn’t trust her mom to take her library. “You’ve seen a powerful darkness headed my way.”

  “It’s not safe for you at that . . . place.”

  Vivi closed her eyes and took what she hoped would be a calming breath. Her mother hadn’t been able to bring herself to say the word college for months. “It’s called Westerly. It’s not a curse word.”

  Far from it. Westerly was Vivi’s lifeline. She’d been shocked when she received a full scholarship to Westerly, a school she’d considered to be way out of her league. Vivi had always been a strong student, but she’d attended three different high schools—two of which she’d started midyear—and her transcript contained nearly as many incompletes as it did As.

  Daphne, however, had been adamantly against it. “You’ll hate Westerly,” she’d said with surprising conviction. “I’d never set foot on that campus.”

  That was what sealed the deal for Vivi. If her mom hated it that much, it was clearly the perfect place for Vivi to start a brand-new life.

  As Daphne stood mournfully in the doorway, Vivi looked at the Westerly calendar she’d tacked to the yellowing wall, the only decoration she’d bothered with this time around. Of all the places they’d lived over the years, this apartment was her least favorite. It was a stucco-filled two-bedroom above a pawnshop in Reno, and the whole place reeked of cigarettes and desperation. Much like the whole dusty state of Nevada. The calendar’s photos, glossy odes to ivy-covered buildings and mossy live oaks, had become a beacon of hope. They were a reminder of something better, a future she could carve out for herself�
�away from her mother and her portents of evil.

  But then she saw the tears in her mother’s eyes and Vivi felt her frustration relent, just a little. Although Daphne was a supremely accomplished actress—a necessity when your livelihood depended on parting strangers from their money—she’d never been able to fake tears.

  Vivi abandoned her packing and took a few steps across her cramped bedroom toward her mother. “It’s going to be okay, Mom,” Vivi said. “I won’t be gone long. Thanksgiving will be here before you know it.”

  Her mother sniffed and extended her pale arm. Vivi shared her mother’s fair coloring, which meant that she burned after fifteen minutes in the desert sun. “Look what I drew as your cross card.”

  It was a tarot card. Daphne made a living “reading the fortunes” of all the sad, wretched people who sought her out and forked over good money in exchange for bullshit platitudes: Yes, your lazy husband will find work soon; no, your deadbeat dad doesn’t hate you—in fact, he’s trying to find you too . . .

  As a child, Vivi had loved watching her beautiful mother dazzle the customers with her wisdom and glamour. But as she grew older, seeing her mother profiting from their pain began to set Vivi’s teeth on edge. She couldn’t bear to watch people being taken advantage of, yet there was nothing she could do about it. Daphne’s readings were their one source of income, the only way to pay for their shitty apartments and discount groceries.

  But not anymore. Vivi had finally found a way out. A new beginning, far from her mother’s impulsive behaviors. The kind that had led them to uproot their whole lives time and again based on nothing more than Daphne’s “premonitions.”

  “Let me guess,” Vivi said, raising an eyebrow at the tarot card in her mother’s hand. “Death?”

  Her mother’s face darkened, and when Daphne spoke, her normally melodic voice was chillingly sharp and quiet. “Vivi, I know you don’t believe in tarot, but for once, just listen to me.”

  Vivi took the card and turned it over. Sure enough, a skeleton carrying a scythe glared up from the card. Its eyes were hollowed-out gouges and its mouth curved up in an almost gleeful leer. Disembodied hands and feet pushed up from the loamy earth as the sun sank in a blood-red sky. Vivi felt an odd tremor of vertigo, like she was standing at the edge of a great precipice and looking down into a vast nothingness instead of standing in her bedroom, where the only view was the neon-yellow WE BUY GOLD sign across the street.

  “I told you. Westerly isn’t a safe place, not for people like you,” Daphne whispered. “You have an ability to see beyond the veil. It makes you a target for dark forces.”

  “Beyond the veil?” Vivi repeated wearily. “I thought you weren’t going to say stuff like that anymore.” Throughout Vivi’s childhood, Daphne had tried to draw her into her world of tarot and séances and crystals, claiming that Vivi had “special powers” waiting to be unlocked. She’d even trained Vivi to do simple readings for clients, who’d been mesmerized by the sight of a small child communing with the spirits. But eventually, Vivi had realized the truth—she didn’t have any power; she was just another pawn in her mother’s game.

  “I can’t control which card I draw. It’s foolish to ignore a warning like this.”

  A horn honked outside and someone yelled an expletive. Vivi sighed and shook her head. “But you taught me yourself that Death is a symbol of transformation.” Vivi tried to hand the card back to her mother, but Daphne’s arms remained resolutely at her sides. “Obviously that’s what it means. College is my fresh start.”

  No more random midnight moves to new cities; no uprooting themselves every time Vivi was about to finally form a real friendship. For the next four years, she could reinvent herself as a normal college student. She’d make friends, have a social life, maybe sign up for a few extracurricular activities—or, at the very least, figure out what activities she enjoyed. They’d moved around so much that she hadn’t had the chance to get good at anything. She’d been forced to quit the flute after three months and abandon softball midseason, and she’d given up Intro to French so many times that all she knew how to reliably say was Bonjour, je m’appelle Vivian. Je suis nouvelle.

  Her mother shook her head. “In the reading, Death was accompanied by the Ten of Swords and the Tower. Betrayal and sudden violence. Vivian, I have a terrible feeling—”

  Vivi gave up and tucked the card into her suitcase, then reached up and took Daphne’s hands in hers. “This is a big change for both of us. It’s okay to be upset. Just tell me you’re going to miss me, like a normal parent would, instead of turning this into some sign from the spirit world.”

  Her mother squeezed her hands tightly. “I know I can’t make this decision for you—”

  “Then stop trying to. Please.” Vivi laced her fingers through her mother’s the way she used to when she was little. “I don’t want to spend our last day fighting.”

  Daphne’s shoulders slumped as if she’d finally realized this was a losing battle. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Remember, things aren’t always as they appear. Even something that seems good can be dangerous.”

  “Is this your way of telling me I’m secretly evil?”

  Her mother gave her a withering look. “Just be smart, Viv.”

  “That I can definitely do.” Vivi’s smile widened enough to make Daphne roll her eyes.

  “I’ve raised an egomaniac.” But her mother leaned in to hug her all the same.

  “I blame you for all the ‘you’re magic and you can do anything’ talks,” Vivi said, letting go of her hands to finish zipping the suitcase shut. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”

  And she would be. She knew bad things could happen in college. Bad things happened everywhere, but Daphne was fooling herself if she thought some silly tarot reading meant anything. There was no such thing as magic.

  Or so Vivi thought.

  Chapter Two

  Scarlett

  You don’t choose your sisters. The magic does, Scarlett Winter’s nanny, Minnie, had told her years before Scarlett joined Kappa Rho Nu. The words came back to Scarlett now as her mother drove through the wrought-iron gates of Westerly College’s campus, passing clusters of girls. Some clutched suitcases, looking nervous and young; others gazed at the campus with a hungry look, as if they were ready to conquer it. Somewhere in this sea of girls was the new class of Kappa recruits. A new class of Ravens, as the sisters called themselves, who, if everything went according to her plan—and if the magic was willing—would look up to Scarlett as their leader in just one year’s time.

  Once they passed through the gates, she felt freer and stronger. As if she were stepping out of her family’s shadow and into the light. It made no sense, really, because Marjorie, her mother, and Eugenie, her older sister, were everywhere in Kappa House. Their pictures were in the group photos on the wall. Their names were on the lips of the older sorority sisters. They had made their mark here before her. But as much as the expectation weighed on her, Scarlett was determined to show everyone that the best Winter was yet to come. She would be president, as they had, but she would be better, brighter, stronger, and more unforgettable than they had been. That was the beauty of coming after: she could still exceed them. Or so she told herself.

  “You really should have worn the red dress,” Marjorie said, frowning at her daughter in the rearview mirror. “It’s more presidential. You need to convey power, taste, leadership capability . . .”

  Scarlett caught her reflection behind her mother’s in the rearview mirror. Scarlett, Eugenie, and Marjorie were different shades of brown. Each was objectively striking, but Eugenie was the spitting image of their mother while Scarlett’s look was all her own, distinguished by a sharp nose and wide-set eyes. Growing up, Scarlett had always envied her mother and Eugenie for sharing so much, right down to their perfect noses.

  Scarlett smoothed down her green A-line dress. “Mama, I doubt Dahlia is going to name the next Kappa president based on her dress the first day of school.
And wearing red when your name is Scarlett is a little on the nose.”

  Marjorie’s expression went deadly serious. “Scarlett, everything goes into consideration.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Eugenie put in from the front seat.

  “Listen to your sister. She was president two years in a row,” Marjorie said proudly. “And now it’s your turn to carry on the family tradition.”

  Eugenie smirked. “Unless, of course, you’re content with just sitting on the sidelines.”

  “Of course not. I’m a Winter, aren’t I?” Scarlett straightened her spine and glared at her sister. She wasn’t sure why Eugenie had insisted on coming to drop her off at Westerly; she was always going on about how busy she was as a junior associate at their mother’s law firm. Then again, Eugenie took every opportunity she could to put Scarlett in her place. Including managing to ride shotgun on Scarlett’s first day back while Scarlett herself was re­legated to the back seat.

  Her mother nodded sharply. “Don’t ever forget it, my dear.”

  She shifted to look back at Scarlett, and Scarlett caught a whiff of her perfume, a light jasmine scent that reminded her of the way her mother used to sneak into her room after a long night at the firm and plant a kiss on her forehead. Scarlett always pretended to be sleeping, because her mother tried so hard not to wake her. But she didn’t mind being woken. It reminded her how much her mother cared, something that Scarlett didn’t always feel during her waking hours.

  And what her mother cared most about was each of her two daughters following in her footsteps and becoming president of Kappa. Scarlett grew up hearing, A Kappa president cannot be just one thing, Scarlett. She must be everything. Smart, stylish, kind. The type of girl who inspires envy and respect in equal measure. The type of girl who puts her sisters first—and is powerful enough to change the world.

  Scarlett had known for as long as she could remember that she was a witch and that Kappa was her destiny. To be accepted into its ranks was a necessity; to become president in her own right was the most basic expectation. Which was why Minnie, who had been Scarlett’s mother’s nanny before she was hers, had spent the better part of her golden years training Scarlett in the ways of their magic, just as she had done with her sister and mother before her.