CHAPTER 12 
Instead of going to lunch, Hazel went to the bathroom to splash water on her face, studying her freckles in the mirror, looking past eyeliner and eye shadow to the blue of her iris. She hoped to see someone who knew what she was doing staring back. Someone she could believe would get her out of this. No such luck.
Jack might take her to the revel, but once there, she was going to need to figure out the right questions to ask, the ones that would make them think she knew more than she did, the ones they would answer without knowing they were giving anything away. The girl in the mirror didn’t look like a master of deception, though. She looked as if she was already in over her head.
If she couldn’t trick them, then it would be good if she had something to trade, because with the Folk, nothing was ever free. If she’d been Ben, she could have played a song for them and, even broken-fingered, she would have been so good that they would have granted her any boon. If she’d been like Jack, they would have told her stuff because she was one of them.
But she was Hazel. She had no magic. Which meant she needed to be on her toes, thinking fast and paying attention to everything. With a sigh, she took one of the paper towels from the dispenser, wiped her face, and went into the hall.
A freshman boy came around the corner so fast he nearly knocked into her. His face was wet. Lourdes’s little brother—Michael, she thought that was his name. Tears streamed over his blotchy cheeks. A choking sound came from his throat.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did something happen?”
“I can’t,” he managed through the tears and ragged breaths, wiping at his face furiously. “I can’t stop. She’s coming. She’s almost here.”
That’s when she heard it—sounds of crying coming from inside the classrooms around her. Thin wails that rose to shrieks.
The door to a classroom to Hazel’s right flew open, and seniors flooded into the hall, eyes wild with terror and wet with tears. Megan Rojas fell to her knees and began to tear at her clothes in an orgy of grief.
“Please,” Franklin sobbed, turning his face to Hazel, his anguish so raw she barely recognized him. “Please, make it stop. Kiss me. Make it stop.”
Abruptly, she remembered Jack’s warning: Something even more dangerous than your prince walks in his shadow.
Hazel backed away from Franklin, from his terrified, upturned face. There was a scent in the air like turned leaf mold and vegetal rot.
“It’s so sad,” Liz was saying, over and over, words muffled by tears. “So sad. So very, very sad.”
Hazel had to do something—she had to find Ben before whatever was happening to them happened to him. She started to run, past lockers and closed doors, turning a corner into the art-room hallway. Light streamed in from a bank of windows facing a grass-covered courtyard. One of the freshman Language Arts teachers was locking a door. A burst of laughter came from another classroom. It was as though she hadn’t just come from a hallway full of weeping students.
“Did you come from some kind of assembly?” Ms. Nelson asked. “I heard a lot of noise.”
Hazel began to speak, stammering over words, when, above their heads, a loudspeaker crackled to life. Someone on the other end seemed to be crying. The sound of it stuck in Hazel’s head like taffy.
Ms. Nelson looked puzzled. “Someone must have hit the button in the office without realizing it.”
Hazel could hear the weeping in the liquid drum of her heart. In her every breath. It pricked the back of her eyes. It was so much—so sad, as though all the sorrow she’d ever felt woke in her at once.
Ms. Nelson stumbled, her hand going to the glass. Her breath hit the window, fogging it. Her eyes filled with tears. And then Hazel noticed blotches of something greenish, like mold or moss, creeping across the glass. Outside, black crows began landing on the branches of a tree, cawing to one another.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Hazel whispered in a tear-slurred voice. She stumbled away and heard a body hit the floor, heard the sound of soft, muffled weeping.
Hazel had to think. Her eyes were already filled with hot tears, her throat already thick with them, and everything she’d ever lost was crowding her head. She remembered looking down at Adam Hicks’s half-rotted body and feeling utterly helpless. She thought of being sick during one of her parents’ parties, having eaten a big chunk of cake before she realized it had been soaked in rum. Dizzy, she’d looked for her mother, but everyone had seemed to be a stranger. She’d thrown up in the bathroom for what felt like hours, until some of her throw-up was streaked with blood and a man she didn’t know brought her a glass of water from the tap. Hazel thought of that night and other nights, thought of her brother’s broken fingers, of the way his nails blackened and fell off, one by one. Of all the boys she’d kissed and how the names she remembered first were of the ones who’d hated her after, because she remembered things that hurt more easily than anything nice. Hazel wanted to lie down on the sticky linoleum floor, curl up, weep forever, and never rise again.
It seemed pointless not to give in, to keep standing, but she kept standing anyway. It seemed pointless to cross the hall, but she crossed the hall anyway.
Go over there and pull the fire alarm, she told herself.
You don’t have to believe you can, she told herself. Just do it.
The sound of weeping grew louder, nearly crowding out all other thoughts.
Her fingers closed on the red metal lever. Throwing her weight against it, she brought it down hard.
Immediately, the alarm sounded, louder than the crying, louder than the keening and the shrieking and the cawing of crows. Hazel’s head pounded, but she could think again. After a moment, students started shuffling out of classrooms. Their cheeks were wet, eyes red-rimmed, and faces ashen. Normally the hall would ring with shouting, with gossip, with friends calling to one another. Right then, it was as quiet as a procession of the dead.
“Liz?” The Industrial Arts teacher came over, crouching near Ms. Nelson’s body. “Evans, what happened out here? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said, looking up at the loudspeaker. Moss was spreading up the wall in patches, thickening like fur. If it kept growing like that, it would eventually smother the alarm.
He blinked at her, as if he hadn’t quite processed what he was seeing yet, as if he was still making up excuses in his head.
Ms. Nelson blinked and started to push herself up. “What’s going on?” she asked, voice hoarse. “Is that the fire alarm?”
The shop teacher nodded. “Some kind of emergency. Come on, let’s get you outside.”
A tiny crack started in one corner of the wall. Hazel watched it spread, watched it split into two cracks as vines seeped through.
“There’s a fire?” a sophomore boy with a shaved head asked, coming from another hall in gym clothes.
“Outside!” commanded the shop teacher, pointing toward the exit. “You too, Evans.”
Hazel nodded, but she wasn’t ready to move. She was still staring at the moss and at the looping, pale vines poking through the growing fissures like fingers pushing free from a grave.
Students flooded around her, on their way to line up outside. On their way to wait for the fire department to declare this a false alarm, maybe a prank. Hazel leaned against the windows, taking several shaky breaths.
That was when she saw Molly coming down the hallway, moving against the stream of bodies. She was walking strangely, as if she was half dragging herself along, as if her limbs had become unfamiliar to her. Her expression was blank, her gaze seeming to slide over everything until it fell on Hazel.
Molly’s lips looked blue at first, but the more Hazel stared at them, the more she realized they were stained green, stained from the inside, as though she had been eating sour apple Laffy Taffy.
Hazel stayed still, a hideous chill starting at the base of her spine. She’d been scared when she saw the other kids crying, but the revulsion she felt at the way Molly moved was entirely new. Hazel knew that she might be looking at Molly’s body, but Molly was no longer looking out through her eyes.
“Stay back,” Hazel said as whatever it was got close, throwing up a hand automatically, stopping just short of knocking the girl to the floor.
A syrup-sweet voice came from Molly’s mouth, speaking in singsong. Her head tilted to one side. “I loved him and he’s dead and gone and bones. I loved him and they took him away from me. Where is he? Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. Where is he?”
With every word, clumps of dirt fell from her tongue.
“What are you doing to Molly?” Hazel asked shakily. The hall was nearly empty. The alarm was still ringing, but somehow the voice coming from Molly’s mouth carried easily over the sound.
“I loved him and I loved him and he’s dead and gone and bones. I loved him and they took him away from me. Where is he? Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. My father took him. My brother killed him. Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. Where is he?”
Molly had been Hazel’s best friend for two years, the one she’d stayed up late instant-messaging about boys, the one she’d trusted to trim her bangs. When she and Molly walked through the halls, Hazel had felt like there was nothing wrong with normal, as if maybe she could just focus on having fun and not worrying too much about what came after. Molly didn’t care about faeries in the woods; they were just stories to her. She thought that all the tourist stuff was a scam and that the tourists themselves were boring, desperate for someone to tell them they were special. Seeing Fairfold through Molly’s eyes was like seeing an entirely new place. After Molly dumped her, Hazel sometimes thought she missed seeing the world that way even more than she missed Molly.
Now Molly would have no choice but to believe in the Folk. The thought made Hazel furious.
“You can’t have her,” Hazel said, fumbling for her necklace, the one Ben had made her wear. She pulled the chain strung with rowan wood from around her throat. When the creature didn’t react, Hazel thrust it over Molly’s head, letting the amulet settle at Molly’s throat. “See? So go! Go! You’re not welcome here!”
Abruptly, Molly’s eyes rolled upward, until Hazel saw only the white of her sclera.
Hazel’s heart thundered. Then Molly collapsed to the floor, her whole body going limp at once. Her head hit the linoleum, making a horrible, hollow sound.
“Help!” Hazel called. She knelt down, fumbling for Molly’s wrist, meaning to take her pulse, before she realized she had no idea how to do that. Over and over she screamed the word, and over and over nobody came.
Then Molly opened her eyes, blinking wildly, coughing so hard it was half choking. When she looked at Hazel, the expression that washed over her face was some commingling of embarrassment and terror. It was an entirely human expression.
“Hazel,” Molly croaked, spitting out dirt and what appeared to be leaves.
Sweet, incredulous relief made Hazel lean against the wall. “You’re okay?”
Molly nodded slowly, pushing herself into a half-sitting position, wiping at her chin. Her black hair, usually gelled into spiky precision, was a mess. Blood dribbled from a shallow cut where her head had struck the floor, turning the collar of her white shirt red. “I saw it. The monster. It’s made of old, knotted branches grown over with moss, and it has these horrible black eyes.”
Hazel scooted closer and reached out to take Molly’s hand. Molly squeezed hard.
The alarm was still going, a siren wailing into the emptiness of the halls.
“You always knew this was all real, didn’t you?” she asked, anguished. “How can you stand it?”
Hazel was trying to formulate a reply when Molly’s eyes closed. She shuddered once and collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. Hazel shouted and shook her by her shoulders, but Molly’s body was as limp as Amanda’s had been.
The monster was no longer content to wait in the heart of the forest. It had come to the center of Fairfold in the middle of the day, and Hazel wasn’t sure if it could even be slain.
Whether it had come for Severin, because someone had summoned it, or for a reason beyond Hazel’s comprehension, she had to focus.
She needed to get out of that hallway and she needed to get Molly out, too. Carrying Molly over her shoulders would be possible, but not ideal. Hazel wouldn’t be able to fight and she wouldn’t be able to move fast, either.
“Stay right there,” Hazel said to Molly softly as she got up. She passed the widening crack in the wall, from which tendrils of ivy spilled into the room like snakes, and she went down the hall toward the art room just as two people came barreling around the corner. It was Carter, with a phone in one hand and a hockey stick in the other. Robbie Delmonico was beside him, brandishing a baseball bat. He yelped at the sight of her, stumbling back into a bank of lockers, making them rattle like chains.
Hazel found her hands balled into loose fists. “What the hell?”
“Relax. We were looking for you,” Carter said. He was wearing the rib pad from his football uniform and knee plates. Hazel had never before noticed how much football gear was like armor. With his broad shoulders and excellent jawline, he looked like Sir Morien from the Round Table. “Emergency services people won’t let anyone back into the school. Ben and Jack got stuck out in the parking lot, so they’ve been lecturing me over texts on where you might go.” He gestured vaguely toward the front of the school.
“There’s some kind of thing,” Robbie put in. “We found three freshmen under one of the tables in the cafeteria. They were out cold—or at least I thought they were, but one of them opened her eyes and told me something super creepy—something about bones. Then she passed out again. We carried them to some EMTs through an open window, but figured we’d stay inside until we were sure everyone else got out.”
Hazel nodded. She was forcibly reminded what a good guy Robbie was and why she’d kissed him in the first place, before things had gotten weird. The hardest thing about being wanted was the hardest thing about wanting—wanting badly enough that it gave you a stomachache, wanting in the way that was partly about kissing and partly about swallowing whole, the way a snake gulps down a mouse or the Big Bad Wolf gulps down Red Riding Hood—wanting turned someone you felt like you knew into a stranger. Whether that person was your brother’s best friend or a sleeping prince in a glass prison or a girl who kissed you at a party, the moment you wanted more than just touching your mouth to theirs, they became terrifying and you became terrified. “Dead and gone and bones,” she said.
He lifted his bat higher, eyes widening. “Not you, too!”
Hazel shook her head, sighing. “Molly said that, before she passed out. She was—I don’t know—possessed or something like it.”
“Molly Lipscomb?” Carter looked past Hazel, down the hallway, and stiffened at the sight of Molly’s body. “Did you see the monster? Was it here?”
Hazel shook her head. “We’ve got to move her, though. I’m getting a chair.” She turned to Robbie. “Try to find rope or yarn or something we can tie her with.”
“Yeah, okay.” Robbie nodded, starting toward one of the classrooms.
“Jack says…” Carter seemed to realize he was talking to himself more than them and bit off the thought with the shake of his head. “I’ll stay by Molly. You guys get whatever you think you need.”
Hazel found a swivel chair behind the teacher’s desk in the second classroom she entered and rolled it into the hall, while Robbie managed to discover a spool of heavy bright blue string in one of the closets. Hazel lifted Molly, while Robbie braced the chair so her weight didn’t send it flying suddenly backward. Then Carter helped them tie her in place, as if she were a prisoner about to be interrogated or a fly stuck in a spider’s web. Head lolling to one side, eyes shut, Molly was soon held fast to the chair by layers and layers of crisscrossed string.
Then Hazel went back for a weapon. She found a pair of heavy scissors in the desk and slammed them down until the two pieces came apart and she had made herself twin daggers.
“Jesus, that was loud,” Carter said, hands on the back of Molly’s chair. “Come on.”
They walked down the empty hall together, peering into abandoned classrooms, where jackets were still draped over the backs of chairs and desks still had papers and pens and books lying on them. Whiteboards had been left with math problems half solved, carried ones floating above unadded numerals. A documentary about genetics still played on a projection screen. A few desks in the back of one room were entirely covered in a spreading tide of moss.
The shadows lengthened as they made their way past the gymnasium. Hazel stepped in, her scissors gleaming in the flickering overhead lights. Ivy dripped down from the ceiling, knotting around the cables. Her heart pounded in her chest hard enough that it felt like a fist. Hard enough that her insides felt bruised from it. The gym had never seemed ominous to her before, with its slick, shining floor and the skeletal metal scaffolding of bleachers, but now she was acutely aware of all the places a monster might rest, folded up, looking like nothing more than a pile of mats, long fingers creeping out to grab hold of an ankle.…
“Do you see anything?” Robbie asked from behind her.
Hazel’s muscles tensed. She shook her head, glad not to have otherwise shown how much he’d startled her.
“You don’t have to help us look for stragglers,” Carter said. “Take Molly and head for the front. Your brother is worried about you. My brother is worried about you.”
In the flickering light, the boys seemed different. Robbie looked sallow and a little frantic, the hollowness under his eyes made prominent. Carter looked more like Jack than ever, his face sharpened by shadows. If she tried, she might have been able to pretend he was his brother. For a horrible moment she understood why someone might do what Amanda did. It would be like kissing Severin’s casket. It wouldn’t be real. It couldn’t hurt.
“Why don’t you get out?” she asked him, not particularly nicely, since she didn’t appreciate being condescended to and she didn’t like where her thoughts were going.
“Guilt, mostly. I was the last one to see Amanda—everyone’s saying it and it’s true.”
“What happened?” Hazel asked. They were moving through the literature and history hall, toward the principal’s office and the main doors, passing by the auditorium, where the curtained stage lurked. One of the wheels on Molly’s chair hung up a little, making a small squeal of protest, over and over, as it rolled.
Robbie pushed, flinching over and over at the noise.
There were echoes in some of the rooms, sounds that Hazel couldn’t place. In her mind they became the crawl of the ivy, the slide of a monster’s foot, its nails dragging against a wall. She’d hunted through the woods and knew how magnified noise could become through hyperalertness and adrenaline. She knew how convinced you could be that you’d heard something when it was only your own breathing. And yet she knew how dangerous it was to dismiss your instincts. But at least in the woods she had experience identifying the rustlings and breezes and footfalls. At school, she was lost. Every movement made her teeth grit and the hair along her arms stand.
Carter spoke again, softly, his voice pitched so Robbie might not hear. “We had a fight. Me and Amanda. She said some stuff about Jack that was—ridiculous. Like that he wasn’t even a person. Maybe she was just trying to rile me up, but, well, it worked. I kicked her out of the car, even though she was wearing these huge, dumb heels, and figured she could just walk.
“I got about three blocks before I realized I was being an asshole. Mom would kill me if she found out that I took a girl on a date and then left her someplace, all by herself, with no way home.”
“And?” Hazel asked.
“Amanda wasn’t there when I went back. I didn’t see her again, and her parents won’t let me visit her in the hospital.” He raised his voice slightly. “Hey, Robbie, what about you? How come you’re sticking around, trying to be a hero? Why don’t you get out of here?”
Robbie gave them a lopsided grin. “The one thing I know from movies is never to split up. Besides, you two would be lost without me.”
“True enough,” Carter said amiably, even though that didn’t seem even a little bit true.
“Hey, Hazel, how come you—” Robbie began, but he never got to finish. A scream split the air.
They took off running toward it, the thud of their footfalls pounding against the floor, the shrill squeak of Molly’s chair loud in their ears. The screaming was coming from the girls’ bathroom.
Hazel charged ahead, slamming her shoulder against the door, scissor daggers poised to strike.
Leonie stood near the sinks, water streaming from one of the faucets to puddle on the floor. At the sight of Hazel, she screamed even louder. The room seemed empty, but Hazel’s heart was beating so fast and Leonie seemed so scared that she wasn’t sure. She kicked open the first stall, but there was only the toilet, with three burnt cigarette stubs floating in it. She kicked open the second: empty. She was about to kick open the third when Leonie grabbed her arm.
“What are you doing? Stop!” Leonie said. “You’re freaking me out.”
“I’m freaking you out?” Hazel shouted. “You were the one screaming.”
“The thing—I saw it,” Leonie said. “Jesus—I thought it was safe to go out into the hallway, but then it was there. Oh god, what happened to Molly?”
“Did you get a good look at it?” Carter asked from the doorway. He and Robbie were standing at the threshold, as though, even now, the idea of putting one foot into the girls’ bathroom, with its Pepto-Bismol tile and ancient tampon machine on one wall, was forbidden.
Leonie shook her head. “I saw something. It was horrible—”
“We’re almost to the exit,” Robbie reminded them, shuddering visibly. “Let’s just get out.”
“What if it’s waiting?” Leonie demanded. “It’s somewhere nearby.”
“That’s why we’ve got to go,” Robbie said louder, as if he’d forgotten why they’d been whispering earlier, as if he’d forgotten that they’d stayed inside to get more people out, to be honest.
For a single moment Hazel contemplated walking away from all of them, walking deeper into the school and waiting for the monster there, daggers drawn. She’d imagined fighting it so many times when she was a kid—it was the embodiment of the forest, the embodiment of terror. In her mind, fighting the monster was like the boss battle in a video game. In her mind, if she’d faced it and won, all the other terrors would stop.
Her instincts pushed her toward a fight. Her fingers gripped the scissors more tightly, her blood pumping. She wanted to find the monster and slay it.
“Okay, everyone, shut up!” Carter yelled. “Hazel, what do you think? Should we get out of here or keep looking for more survivors?”
“What are you asking her for?” Robbie demanded.
“Because I know what I think and I know what you think and it doesn’t matter what Molly thinks. And because—” Carter bit off the words and spun. There was a strange sound, as though someone was dragging a dead body through the halls. Abruptly, one of the rods glowing overhead burst into a shower of sparks, and moss began to boil from the sinks. Spots of mold dotted the mirror. Carter pushed Molly’s chair farther into the room, her head lolling to one side, hair over face. Robbie slammed the door closed behind them. Carter slid his hockey stick through the handle and braced to hold the door shut since there was no lock.
No one spoke. Hazel sucked in her breath and held it.
The patterned glass showed a shadow of something move on the other side of the door. It was huge, easily over seven feet in height, and looked roughly human in shape, if a human could be made from branch and vine and soil. It had a hunched back, and the top of its head seemed to twist into a gnarled stump. Impossibly long twig fingers hovered in the air.
It paused a moment, as though it could hear the hammering of their hearts, as though it was listening to their caught breaths. Then it moved past, thudding down the hall.
Hazel counted in her head. One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand. Four one thousand. Five one thousand.
“I vote we go,” she whispered. “I vote we go now.”
Carter opened the door of the bathroom, and they raced for the front of the school, Molly’s chair wheeling faster and faster as Robbie pushed it, Leonie’s sneakers squeaking as they pounded against the hallway floor. Hazel brought up the rear, glancing over her shoulder again and again as she ran. She kept expecting the creature to grab them from the shadows, horrible hands lifting them, dirt choking them. She was swept along by panic and the thwarted urge to fight. It wasn’t until they were through the front doors and gulping down lungfuls of cold, autumn air that she realized they’d made it out of the school.
From the trees all around, cawing crows went to wing in a rush of black feathers, like blackflies rising off a corpse.
The parking lot was lit with the flashing lights of cop cars and an ambulance. A few other cars, too, knots of students beside them, but it seemed as though the majority had already gone home. Those remaining had their faces tinted with stroking blue and red, turning them ghostly.
“Is anyone else in there?” one of the emergency-service people asked as they descended the steps.
“A monster!” Leonie told him. In the clear afternoon light, Hazel could see the way her eye makeup had run, as though she’d been crying.
“There was a gas leak,” he said, looking confused and a little alarmed. “You might have breathed in some.”
Not bothering to answer, Leonie rolled her eyes and walked past him. Carter heaved up Molly’s chair, carrying it, at the same time Ben ran up the steps and hugged Hazel. Her arms went around him, hands still gripping her scissor blades as she pressed them against his back.
“Are you crazy?” he whispered into her hair.
Her eyes went past him, to Jack, seated on the hood of Ben’s car, watching them with his silvery eyes. Three times I will warn you, and that’s all I am permitted, he’d said. Had he known about this, but been forbidden to say?
“You know I’m crazy,” she whispered back.
After Hazel had been checked over by a very solicitous volunteer with the ambulance team, she was told she could go home, but to go to the hospital immediately if she experienced any light-headedness.
Ben was waiting for her by his car, talking with Leonie in low voices. But as she started toward him, Jack caught her arm. When she turned, startled, his gaze made her feel suddenly self-conscious.
“I think the playground meeting is off,” he said.
“You better not be about to tell me you’re not taking me tonight. Not after what just happened,” she said. She tried to keep her voice steady, but it didn’t quite work.
Jack shook his head. The bruise on his cheek looked worse, the swelling more pronounced, turning the skin around his eye the color of a Concord grape. “Come by my house around sundown, but don’t come inside, okay? I’ll sneak out and meet you in the backyard. We can walk from there.”
“Okay,” Hazel said, surprised she hadn’t had to argue even more—surprised and relieved and, despite herself, a little afraid. “So what do I wear?”
His eyes lit with wickedness. For the first time that day, something had amused him. “Anything you like or nothing at all.”
On the way home, Hazel described to Ben the monster she’d seen through the distorted glass and the way the vines and moss had crept over the school. In turn, he explained how Jack had hustled him outside after the first students collapsed. Jack had been about to go back in for Hazel and Carter when several of the teachers had stopped him, forbidding his going inside in a way that made it plain they blamed him for everything that was happening.
“This has got to blow over,” Ben said, sighing. “They have to see he’s got nothing to do with any of this. We all know him.”
Hazel nodded, but she remembered the way people had shrunk back earlier that day, remembered the fresh bruise on his face and the story Leonie had told, the one she’d been keeping to herself for years. How many other people had a story like hers? How many people had seen his mask slip and never quite forgotten?
“And we still have to talk—you and me,” Ben reminded her as he parked his car in front of their house. “About Severin and what happened the night he got free.”
Hazel nodded, even as she hoped she could avoid doing that until after the revel.
Inside, their mother was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. Hazel hadn’t seen her smoke in years. When they came through the door, Mom ground the lit end into her plate and stood. “What is wrong with you? Neither of you picked up your phones. I’ve been freaking out, calling people, trying to figure out what was going on. The school called, but none of their explanations made sense. And now there’s a curfew. I think we should talk about going to stay with your father for a while, in the city—”
“A curfew?” Ben echoed.
“It was announced over the emergency broadcasting thingie on the television,” she said, waving toward it. “Everyone’s supposed to stay inside unless absolutely necessary, and no one is supposed to go out after six tonight under any circumstances.”
“What are they saying the reason is?” Hazel asked.
“Inclement weather,” said her mother, raising her eyebrows. “What really happened today?”
“Inclement weather,” Hazel said, and took the stairs two at a time.
Once in her room, she crossed over to her closet and opened the door. Lots of vintage dresses, worn pairs of jeans, and sweaters with holes in them, some hanging, some in a pile on the floor, covering another pile of shoes. Nothing seemed quite right for a faerie revel. Nothing that would make them believe she was someone to be reckoned with.
After all, the news promised a storm.