What, you won’t get involved unless I’m getting beat up? And since when are you worried about detention, for chrissake? A sour taste filled my mouth. “Fine.” But I didn’t let go of his coat.
Dylan would probably be along any second. “Go on, then.”
“You don’t understand—” Maddeningly, he shut his mouth and glared at me, like I was the problem. The bell rang again, urgently, and he tore himself free and headed out the door, the coat flapping around his calves.
Leaving me all alone in the empty classroom. My fingers stung, like from rug burn. My mother’s locket was a cold, heavy weight under my layered shirts.
The bell finished ringing, and the weird staticky silence of the Schola under siege crawled into my head.
The boys all had jobs when that bell rang. Battle stations, some of them in the armory passing out weapons, others meeting at predetermined points and waiting. The oldest students and the teachers went out to sweep the grounds.
Last time, some of them had come back beat up pretty bad. Bleeding, even. From the suckers.
I stood there for a few seconds, my hand scraped raw from the rough cotton of Graves’ coat, yanked free of my grasp. This made the fourth Restriction. Someone always showed up to take me back to my room.
Not this time. Seconds ticked by, one after another. The fluorescents buzzed, and cobwebs in the upper corners drifted like seaweed. Some of the ceiling tiles were crumbling too.
This place is falling apart. Jeez.
It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d been really alone outside my room since I got here. I hunched my shoulders, pulled my sweater sleeves down, and realized I was waiting for someone to show up and tell me what to do. The switchblade was a heavy weight in my ass pocket, covered up by the sweater and the edge of Graves’ flannel shirt.
Way to go, Dru. There was probably something else I could be doing. Anything. I’d been Dad’s helper since Gran died, moving from town to town, getting rid of the nasty things that go bump in the night. Just standing here wasn’t going to help anything. And waiting for someone to come back and shove me into my room wasn’t going to help either.
The silence took on a new quality, static draining away, replaced with breathlessness. I blinked hard, twice, and turned around sharply. My hair fanned out in an arc, I moved so fast.
Perched on the back of the couch I’d sat on, Gran’s owl ruffled its white feathers, each tipped with a shadow of gray. Its black beak looked unholy sharp. Yellow eyes held mine, and I let out a sharp sigh of mingled relief and pain.
Oh, thank God. Where have you been?
It was the first time I’d seen Gran’s owl since I got here, outside of dreaming. The usual ringing started in my ears, a high clear thin tone like a bell stroked over and over. It filled my skull like cotton wool.
The owl cocked its head, a what’s up, boss? look. I blinked. Dust motes hung suspended in the air, and the round clock fastened up over the door had gone silent. It wasn’t even ticking.
This was the space between precognition and something weird happening. Something weird or Seriously Bad. It was too soon to tell which.
Whoosh. The owl took wing in a flurry of feathers. It was a big bird, almost too big for the room, turning in tight circles and heading for the door. Its wings thopped down just as it was about to hit them on the jamb on either side; it turned, smart as a spaceship in a movie, and was gone out into the hall.
Sudden certainty filled me. I was supposed to follow it.
Gran had always told me to trust this feeling, and Dad always told me not to let the backwoods foolishness take the place of clear logic. But he also never stopped me when I got that look on my face, the look that said I was seeing something he couldn’t.
Gran was famous for “the touch” for miles around, and I’d always assumed I’d gotten it from her.
After all, she’d trained me, right?
But now I was wondering just what I’d gotten from where.
The owl had shown up on my windowsill the last morning I’d seen Dad alive. Last time, the owl had led me to Dad’s truck, and Christophe. The streak-headed werwulf that had bitten Graves had also been there, but that was incidental.
Wasn’t it?
I didn’t have time to sit around. I bolted after Gran’s owl, my legs full of heavy unwillingness.
The world slowed down to something covered in hard goopy plastic, a clear fluid I had to force my way through to move anywhere. This was also part of the space-between, that heaviness. I didn’t have time to wonder if I was moving too quickly for the world to catch up, or if I just had to reach through a little more space to reach the body I moved around in on a daily basis.
My bruised shoulder clipped the door on the way out, and a zigzag of red pain shot all the way down my ribs. My sneakers slapped the stone floor, and I got up a good head of speed even through the clinging flood of whatever slows the world down when you’re following your dead grandmother’s owl.
The hall receded like a mirrored passage in a fun house, the kind where everything is multiplied into infinity. The yellow-pale glare of fluorescent lighting crawled into each crack and chip in the walls. Stone floor with occasional bursts of worn industrial carpet or old linoleum blurred under my squeaking sneaker soles. The Schola receded around me, its halls warping. One sleeve of the too-big blue sweater unrolled and flapped around my left hand, but I didn’t have time to pull it up. It was hard work keeping the owl in sight as I slipped and skidded, bouncing off walls and on the verge of tripping countless times. Until it banked again, zooming down another short hall, and a pair of double doors was in front of me.