We stayed at Becca’s house until half past nine, when Austin announced he had to get me home and then get home himself because, as he put it, his parents were going to ground him until Jesus bothered showing up if he wasn’t in the house before ten. So that night ended not with a romantic dinner but with a quick peck from Austin and a lot of unanswered questions. Becca’s revelation about Mr. Warbrath had changed my view of him completely, and it showed an impressive amount of diligence and intelligence, but it hadn’t answered the fundamental question of why Makayla had killed him. The only thing we knew was that there was a connection between Belshazzar’s Feast, Makayla, and Mr. Warbrath, and that connection had ended in Mr. Warbrath’s death.
After Austin dropped me off, I went into Sara’s house. It felt like weeks had passed since that afternoon when I had faced Ginny Coyote in Sage and found myself dragged through one of the worst memories of my life. A small old clock hanging above the stairs chimed ten o’clock as I closed the door behind me, and I felt a pang for Austin; hopefully, his parents wouldn’t be too hard on him.
As the chiming faded, a prickling uncertainty swept over me. Something was off about the house, but I couldn’t tell what it was. The sofa was in the same place. The chairs hadn’t been moved. The faint smell of lilac hung in the air, mixing with the scent of old cedar and iron that had been built into the bones of the house, and I assumed that the lilac smell was Sara’s effort to make the space smell more . . . feminine, I decided, although that didn’t really seem like the right word.
In the kitchen, the loaf of Wonder Bread was neatly tied and tucked back on the counter, and a knife and cutting board stained with tomato juice sat in the sink. Outside, the wind had picked up, and it was prying at the window with cold fingers, causing the screen and the frame to rattle and then go silent and then rattle again. I scrubbed the cutting board and knife and dried them and I pushed in the chair at the table and I wondered why in the hell I felt like something was different.
And then I saw it. The basement door was open, and up the stairs blew a chilly draft that carried the smell of bare cement and dust. It made me think of a graveyard, of one of those Hollywood mausoleums, and when I moved to shut the door, I saw that the light in the basement was on.
Struggling against my fatigue, I opened my inner sight. Since my encounter with Ginny, my ability seemed off. I hadn’t been able to connect with the sheriff, and that made me think that Ginny’s efforts to guide me had caused more harm than good. But I could still see the world through my inner sight, tracing the unseen fabric of the universe. No spectral traces lingered, though, and there was no sign of anyone living. As far as I could tell, by both my supernatural and natural sense, I was alone. But that didn’t convince the hairs on my neck to settle down.
I eased my weight onto the first step, and then again, and down until my sneakers scuffed the cement. Nobody but me down here. I was being silly, but I had an excuse: it had been a long, weird day. It only made sense that, home alone in a place that was still new to me, I might start to freak myself out. Reaching up for the switch, I thought about what Austin would say. He’d probably kiss me and tell me I wasn’t being silly; I was just being cautious. He generally found a way to make me sound less crazy than I actually was.
I froze with my fingers brushing the old, exposed switch. The lid of the red footlocker stood open. It was crazy, but it was true. And not only was the lid open, but someone had dragged the footlocker halfway across the basement, so that it stood next to a stand of folding dining trays, four blackened fireplace tools on a brass hanger, and what looked like the rightmost half of a teal vinyl sofa that had, at some point, been sawn in half. The sofa had to be at least thirty years old, and a perplexed corner of my brain wondered why it had been sawn in half and what had happened to the rest of it.
Crossing the exposed concrete of the basement, I felt the cold seeping through my sneakers. It seemed to drag at me, slowing my steps. When I reached the footlocker, I forced myself to look. The uniform was still there, neatly wrapped in its plastic sleeves. But the papers were gone.
Someone had broken into the house; that much was obvious. Why had they dragged the footlocker across the basement? I had no idea. Maybe to sit on the remaining half of the teal sofa. Why they had come, though, was obvious: the papers about Harold Hanshew. Long after I’d showered and crawled into bed, I lay awake, listening to the wind and trying to decide who could have known about those papers and why they had decided to take them.
The next day, Austin and I got stopped just outside the high school, only this time it wasn’t by Kaden. It was Hannah and Tyler: blond, blue-eyed, dressed in clothes that managed to look clean and neat and already worn-out, like these kids had come straight out of the Depression.
“Hi, Vie,” Tyler said.
“Hi, Vie,” Hannah said. “Who’s this?”
“Why are you holding his hand?” Tyler asked.
Hannah’s eyes grew huge. “Ew,” she squealed. “Gross!”
Throwing me a sidelong glance, Austin said, “Uh . . .”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “This is Austin. He’s my friend.”
“He’s your boyfriend,” Hannah squealed again, only this squeal had gone up an octave. Now it didn’t sound disgusted. It sounded excited. The kind of excited that could break glass.
“He is?” Tyler said. Uncertainty was plain on his face.
“Yeah. He plays football.”
Tyler processed this for a moment, then he grinned and held out one small hand.
“Austin Miller.” He looked somewhere between baffled and amused as they shook.
“Tyler Cribbs.” Tyler screwed up his face into an expression that was meant to be intimidating. “And you’d better be nice to Vie.”
“He is,” I said quickly. “Really nice.”
“Our mom’s home,” Hannah announced, interrupting as she danced with excitement. “Vie, did you hear? She finished her job and came home.” Hannah hesitated and then blurted, “She’s shouting all the time. She never used to shout like that.”
“She’s tired,” Tyler hurried to put in. “She’s worn out from working so hard because she had to make money for us.”
“Vie, when are you coming over for dinner?” Hannah asked.
“Austin, you can come too,” Tyler said.
“Thanks,” Austin said, now wearing a huge smile.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty—” I stopped before I could finish because of the disappointment building on their faces. “I need to ask your grandma first. And if your mom is tired—”
“We already asked her,” Hannah screeched.
“I asked her,” Tyler said.
“You did not. I said, ‘Grandma, can Vie come over for dinner?’ And she said—”
“And she didn’t even know who Vie was,” Tyler interrupted, “so I had to tell her. Then I asked her and she said yes.”
“You did not!” Hannah turned a tearful gaze at me. “He did not, Vie. He didn’t. He’s lying. I asked first, I did, just ask my grandma.”
“It’s ok,” I said, smoothing her hair without thinking about it. “You did it together. You asked first, and then Tyler explained who I was. That’s a great team.”
I caught a glimpse of Austin. His smile had faded, and his expression was unreadable—almost cold.
“You can come over tonight,” Hannah said, squeezing my hand. “Come tonight.”
“I can’t. I really do have to ask your grandma first.”
“But she said you can come whenever,” Tyler said. “Promise, she really did. Come tonight.”
“Come tonight,” Hannah mock-whined.
They both started tugging at my hands, repeating the demand over and over again. Freshmen streaming past stared at us, and my face heated. I shook myself loose and, fighting a laugh, said, “All right. I’ll at least stop by your house and talk to your grandma.”
“Come at six,” Tyler said. “We always eat at six.”
“Get to school,” I said.
As they raced off, I heard Hannah saying, “We do not always eat at six, Tyler. Last night we ate at six-o-five.”
And then they were out of earshot and sprinting towards the elementary school. A moment later the five-minute warning bell rang, and Austin slipped his arm through mine and gave me a gentle tug towards the school. His face was still strangely serious as we headed up the stairs and into the building. I stared at the Homecoming banner as we passed it, but Austin didn’t seem to notice. I was starting to worry that maybe Becca was right. Maybe I was supposed to ask him. Or maybe we needed to talk about it first to figure out who asked whom.
“What’s up with you?” I asked.
Shaking himself from what looked like a suspiciously deep thought, Austin said, “Oh. Just wondering how you knew those kids.”
“They lived next door to me. The boy, he’s the one that got shot.”
Austin nodded. “Yeah, I remember. I thought they were just neighbors. I didn’t know you actually knew them.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“No.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to run. See you in gym.”
I kissed his cheek, ignoring the cluster of sophomore girls who giggled and cackled and looked like they were each wearing enough makeup to break a sherpa’s back.
Math with Mr. Lynch was awful, as usual, but it wasn’t any more awful than normal. History passed by in a series of droning web clips discussing the origins of iron tools. By the time the bell rang, I had a line in my forehead from where I had lain against the desk, and a drool patch the size of a silver dollar darkened the knee of my jeans. In gym, I was reunited with Austin and Colton and Kaden. We moved around from station to station—this whole month was basketball, I guessed—but it was hard to pretend things were normal. Kaden tried his hardest: he had that smile white and a mile high like the Hollywood sign, and he laughed and joked and hustled, but he wouldn’t meet Austin’s eyes, and when he looked at me, he looked angry. Maybe he was a little afraid, but mostly anger shone like two sparks in his eyes. Colton seemed oblivious—he was too busy trying to get a knee or elbow into my kidneys when Austin wasn’t looking—but Austin noticed the change in Kaden. Gym ended before we had a chance to talk about it, though, and I went on to chemistry.
Mrs. Troutt looked particularly massive today in a grey cardigan that had been stretched so far to fit her shoulders that a portion of the garment, right at the center of her back, had become transparent. An old-fashioned cameo brooch, featuring the simple black lines of a woman’s silhouette, held the frilly collar of her blouse closed.
Apparently unconvinced that Mr. Warbrath had taught us anything before he was killed, Mrs. Troutt started from the beginning: how to light and use a Bunsen burner. She put us in pairs at the lab tables, where we were supposed to practice safely assembling and lighting the burners. Somehow, though, I ended up without a partner, so Mrs. Troutt put me at the front of the classroom near her desk.
I gathered a length of rubber hose and a burner and carried them back to the lab table. As I set to work attaching the hose, the sounds of the other students grew louder. They were talking and laughing as they worked. The hiss of gas came on infrequently, along with an occasional whiff of its odor, while the scrape and click of the lighters kept a steady rhythm. This particular lab was easy enough, and once I had the burner attached, I opened the gas valve and struck the lighter. A bluish flame with a tinge of yellow appeared.
When Mrs. Troutt spoke, I jumped in surprise. I hadn’t heard her approach. “Put it out now, please.”
I turned off the gas.
“Class, we’re going to have a demonstration by our own Vie Eliot. Vie, please go through the appropriate steps for attaching and lighting a Bunsen burner.”
She leaned over the table, her shoulders taking up so much room that I shifted a few feet away. The smell that came off her was overpoweringly sweet and floral, the kind of perfume that immediately made me think of grandmothers. I half-expected to look up and see Mrs. Troutt wearing a pair of bifocals on a chain around her neck.
“Class, notice how Vie is being lazy and taking foolish risks.”
“What?”
Grabbing the burner and the hose, she twisted it so that the hose slid back until it was barely hanging onto the burner’s input line. “The hose should be firmly and fully connected,” she continued, sliding the hose into place.
“It was,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“The hose was fine. You moved it.”
“I did move it. I connected it correctly.”
“No, you—”
“Do you want to speak with Mr. Hillenbrand, Vie?”
Struggling to keep my face composed, I shook my head.
“Go on, then. You’re wasting the class’s time.”
This time, I made sure the hose was tightly attached both to the burner and to the gas valve. I reached for the lighter only to have Mrs. Troutt interrupt me again.
“Notice, children, that he didn’t carefully check to make sure that the burner itself is free of debris or cloggage.”
The classroom had gone silent, but uneasy murmurs started at the back. “Why does he need to check?” a voice called from the back. “He’s already lit it; he knows there’s nothing in there.” The voice was a girl’s, and it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t see who it was.
“Who said that?” Mrs. Troutt called in a high, tight voice. I knew that voice. I knew what it meant. It was the sound of someone who loves being in control and, at the same time, is uncertain of her power. “Who? I demand to know right now.”
No one moved. I wasn’t even sure they were breathing.
Mrs. Troutt shifted her weight, her color high, and another explosion of that floral perfume hit me. Now, though, it was mixed with the smell of wet wool and sweat.
“Another outburst like that,” Mrs. Troutt said in that same high, tight voice, planting hands on her hips, “and it will be detention for the whole class.” Dark rings under her arms marked the cardigan.
This time, a few of the students laughed, and some of the more daring ones at the back whispered the word detention in derisive tones.
“Very well,” Mrs. Troutt said, her voice cracking on the second word. She licked her lips; her face had gone blotchy, and a sheen of sweat stood out on her forehead. “I shall let Mr. Hillenbrand deal with you. He will deal with all of you.” Her voice cracked again. “First, though, Vie will finish this inept, bungling demonstration, or I will not release you at the bell.” She slapped her hands onto the lab table. With swollen, protruding knuckles and rough, scaly skin, they looked big enough that they could have come straight off a steam shovel.
Murmurs grew, dissatisfied and mutinous. It was probably best for everyone if I hurried up—we were already going to have to deal with Mr. Hillenbrand. I opened the gas valve and struck the lighter. A flame puffed up, steady and blue. Then it flickered and went out.
“Ha,” Mrs. Troutt scoffed in her shrill, furious voice. “Try again.”
I struck the lighter, and another blue flame appeared. This time, it was obvious that the flame was steadily going—there was no flickering, no sputtering. But all the same, the flame winked out again.
“This,” Mrs. Troutt trilled, “is why you must always check for obstructions in the burner. Vie has done an absolutely terrible job at this. He will receive a zero for the assignment.”
I opened my mouth to say something, and then I noticed her hands. Or rather, not her hands, but the hard black tabletop I could see between her fingers: it was covered in a furry layer of frost. There wasn’t much of it, and it was already melting, but I could see it.
Some of the students were protesting her decision. I recognized the girl in the back who had spoken up: she was a small Native American girl who I’d seen around school before. I was fairly sure her name was Suzie or Susan or Susanna—something like that.
With a grimace, I opened my inner sight. Again, the world took on that unfamiliar depth and complexity. I glanced at Mrs. Troutt, hoping to catch some sign of what she was doing, but I didn’t glimpse an aura or anything that might have marked her as different or that might have revealed her use of her ability. I struck the lighter again, and again the flame caught. In the rich detail of my inner sight, I watched as tiny ice crystals fuzzed between Mrs. Troutt’s fingers and raced towards the Bunsen burner to strangle the flame.
Before they reached the burner, though, something seemed to shift in the room. It was a subtle shift; if I hadn’t had my inner sight open, I never would have felt it. The closest thing I can compare it to is gravity; imagine if there were a very weak gravity pulling on you and all of the sudden it shifted to the opposite direction. You wouldn’t fly up in the air, because in this example, gravity isn’t very strong, but you would notice the change. It was something like that, like some fundamental force had reversed direction—had been forced to reverse direction. The line of icy energy sped back towards Mrs. Troutt, and then she screamed and staggered away from the lab table.
Her hands were smoking—not with heat, but with cold. Somehow, her power had been turned back against her, and it had frozen her hands to the table. Raw, bloody patches covered her palms where she had ripped the skin away by pulling her hands free.
Mrs. Troutt stared at her hands, gave a warbling, despairing shriek, and ran for the door. She knocked kids out of her way like they were bowling pins, and her shriek trailed after her down the long hallway.
The Bunsen burner’s flame glowed a steady blue, but it wasn’t the flame I was focused on. It was the ghost who now stood at the back of the classroom, just behind Susan or Susie or Susanna or whatever her name was. I focused, forcing my inner sight to its clearest, and suddenly I could see past the bluish-white glow that the ghost cast. We locked gazes for a moment, and then the ghost vanished, but I knew who it was: my dead half-brother, River Lang.