Across the Pond

CHAPTER ONE
Callie pressed her forehead to the thick windowpane and looked out across the rolling hills. She wanted to drink in everything at once-the infinite shades of green, the mossy stone walls along winding paths, the sheep grazing in far- off fields. A draft danced across the back of her neck, but the chill was quickly replaced by a flicker of something Callie hadn’t felt in ages. Maybe ever.
Possibility.
At home, her life was small. Small apartment, small people. Making herself smaller and smaller until she almost disappeared.
But here, in an actual castle where everything was larger than any life she’d ever known, where the grassy fields beyond the window stretched out like an ocean of green, she already felt her world expanding.
She felt her self expanding.
Callie wasn’t the kind of girl who traveled to Europe, like Kate, who “wintered” in Switzerland, or Imogen, who spent her birthday in Paris. The only place Callie had ever traveled was Phoenix. It was sadly lacking in magical fire- birds.
But now here she was. In Scotland. In an actual castle. Even the exhaustion of the endless travel from San Diego to New York to London to Edinburgh to the village of South Kingsferry couldn’t extinguish the new thing bubbling up inside her.
“Hey kiddo,” her dad said, peeking his head into the billiards room. “Are you joining us for the rest of the tour?”
Of course she was. Callie wanted to turn over every stone in this fortress of a place, from the servants’ quar- ters to the castle keep, an enormous tower at the castle’s center. For hundreds of years, the keep had been a lookout to watch for enemies and take refuge if the worst should happen.
“Where’s the moat?” Callie’s little brother, Jax, had asked when they first arrived. Their parents had laughed. It wasn’t such a silly question, though. Some of Callie’s daydreams in the months leading up to the trip definitely included moats. But her parents had been here before. To them it was less of a fantasy.