The headache started that afternoon, a dull throbbing at the base of my skull. I thought I was imagining it, at first, making myself think I could feel the early onset of bonding withdrawals, but by the time I went to bed in the guest room at Kimi’s parents’ house, it was pretty clear that withdrawals had started. It had taken a little over a day for my separation from Nik to affect me physically. Maybe thirty hours. Good to know.
When I woke the next morning, I was disoriented and in a moderate amount of pain. It took me a solid ten seconds to remember where I was and why was there. The bedroom I’d slept in was small but cozy. The sheets were soft, and the curtain was of the blackout variety, leaving the room almost entirely devoid of light. I had no idea what time it was. I propped myself up on one elbow and glanced at the clock on the nightstand.
Just after six in the morning. It was almost time for my alarm to go off.
I flopped back onto the bed and rested my palms on my forehead, fingers twined together. My head throbbed, and I had no doubt that Nik was feeling the effects of withdrawals too. Because of me. I felt a twinge of guilt at knowing that I’d caused him pain.
I wondered if he was worried about me—if he cared that I’d left, beyond the physical pain my absence was causing him—until I remembered that he was fully capable of tracking me down whenever he wanted, thanks to the At ink on my left palm and both forearms. Even if it was currently invisible, it was still there; I could feel it. Which then led me to wonder why he hadn’t found me yet. Much to my annoyance, it bothered me that he hadn’t.
Stupid, I know. I hadn’t run off wanting to be chased. But now, I wanted to be found.
I scooted to the edge of the bed and lowered my feet to the floor. Standing, I made my way over to the window and pulled the curtain to the side. The neighborhood street outside was dark, with pools of light pouring down from streetlamps every fifty yards or so.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Nik was out there, somewhere. If he was watching me. Part of me very distinctly hoped he was.
With a sigh, I let the curtain fall back in place and walked to the bedroom door, flipping on the light switch on the wall. I rubbed my eyes, wiping away crusty sleep, and yawned. Moving more slowly than usual, I changed out of the T-shirt I’d borrowed from Kimi’s little sister, Nina, to sleep in and back into my jeans, tank top, and zip-up hoodie. I opted for leaving my leather coat here, figuring the sweatshirt would draw less attention at the high school. Ready for school—something that earned an internal chuckle for its sheer ridiculousness—I made my way downstairs.
Breakfast was boxed cereal, fruit, and yogurt, and Nina and I both filled up to-go mugs with coffee. She added milk and a pack of hot cocoa to hers. Thinking that looked like a pretty damn fantastic idea, I did the same. Instant mocha. Yum.
I’d never met Nina before coming to stay at her house, but I’d have pegged her as Kimi’s sister in an instant had I run into her pretty much anywhere. She looked just like Kimi, only bigger—not older-looking, just larger. Apparently, she was super athletic, with broad shoulders and narrow hips and muscles toned enough to make even me envious—and I spend a crap-ton of time training my body. She would’ve made one hell of a fighter.
“So, what should I call you?” Nina said as she drove us through the streets of her neighborhood on the way to school. The people who lived here really didn’t want anyone speeding; there were speed bumps every one hundred yards, it seemed. “I mean, like, around other people.” She snickered. “I assume ‘Goddess’ is out?”
I shifted my attention from the window to Nina’s face. She was biting her lip, holding in more laughter. I was impressed with her ability to not freak out around me. I chalked it up to the fact that she hadn’t actually contracted the Cascade Virus, so she and I didn’t share that extra-special connection.
“Hilarious,” I said dryly. “But seriously, just call me Kat. No one will make the connection between me and, well, me.”
Nina eyed me, none too certain. She knew who I really was, so clearly the rest of the school would figure it out, too. That was the way teenage brains worked, after all. Trust me, I’d been dealing with mine for nearly three decades now.
As it turned out, Nina’s doubts were unfounded. Meek, angelic Kat Danley flew under the goddess radar perfectly. And Nina was a popular girl. She had a lot of friends, and they all wanted to meet her mysterious cousin who she’d brought to school seemingly on a whim. Not a single person uttered the name “Kat Dubois” or whispered the G word in my earshot. I just had to keep my skin from glowing, and this would be easy.
It was surreal, walking the halls of a high school I’d already spent so much time at in my dreams. Making it doubly strange was the fact that I’d never had the chance to finish my senior year, at least, not actually at school. I’d been in Egypt, helping fend off another mystical catastrophe, and Heru had pulled some strings to make sure I received my diploma, and, well . . . it was a long story. Point is, it had been a while.
High school now was both different and the same as I remembered it. My high school in Seattle had been a single brick building, with multiple floors and classrooms laid out in a very traditional 1950s layout. Newport, on the other hand, had more of a 70s vibe with its single, sprawling level, the classrooms spread throughout the wings branching off from the main hall. But the locker-lined walls, the buzzing crowd, the eclectic array of teachers watching the organized chaos—that was all the same.
I spotted Alison—Ms. Cramer—monitoring the halls as Nina and I headed to her first-period class. After the dream of her dying, it was an insane relief to see her alive and well. Or well enough.
I was tempted to go talk to her—I really wanted to find out what happened with her and Joe the other night—but she wouldn’t have recognized me, and it would’ve taken too long to explain who I was and why I looked so different. The shadows under her eyes were visible even through her makeup, and her features were tensed, stare searching. This place was wearing her down. I didn’t think she would be able to stick it out much longer.
If I did my job right, she wouldn’t have to.
Nina had Spanish first period, and the teacher made her introduce me to the class in Spanish. Now, I’d taken Spanish back in high school, but that was over twenty years ago, and I barely remembered even the most basic words. All I could manage was a quick wave and a weak “Hola.”
And can I just say that standing up in front of a classroom of high school kids sucked when I was an actual teenager, and it was just as bad now that I was a confident, kick-ass thirty-eight-year-old. Just proof that high school is the worst.
The rest of first period flew by in a flurry of incomprehensible words and not a single sign of an ominous, soul-sucking shadow. I figured that maybe the kids were too tired to drum up the heightened emotions that tended to get the shadows all riled up. I worried it would take hours for the sluggish teens to wake up enough to make things start to happen, and I wanted to get to testing my distraction theory sooner rather than later. There was no way to predict which night the massacre was slated to happen—could be a week from now, could be tonight.
While the Spanish teacher conjugated verbs on the whiteboard, I stared dreamily at the fire alarm. Just one little tug of that red switch was sure to cause a spike of adrenaline that would wake everyone up. My fingers itched to pull the alarm, but somehow, I managed to resist.
Nina had chemistry second period, and the class split up among their lab stations to work on an experiment that involved Bunsen burners and stinky chemicals. I’d enjoyed science back during my own school days, and I was having a genuine good time helping Nina measure out the right amount of this or that liquid using pipettes and test tubes.
The shadow appeared suddenly, moving through a wall into the chemistry room. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and froze, pipette in hand.
“What?” Nina asked, staring at me. She leaned in closer and whispered, “Is it one of them?”
I nodded, never taking my eyes off the thing. “Here,” I said, handing her the pipette. “You do the rest.” I shifted on my stool to get a better view of the shadow.
It moved to the opposite side of the classroom, stopping to lurk in the space between two girls at neighboring lab stations passing a note back and forth. For minutes, I watched the thing just hover there, wondering what had drawn it to that specific spot.
One of the girls unfolded the note, face reddening as she skimmed the words on the notebook paper. Her features tensed, and her chin quivered. Whatever the other girl had written had clearly upset her. She tore the note up and wadded the pieces of paper into a ball, all the while glaring at the other girl, who seemed to be ignoring her, though her smug expression suggested otherwise. I nicknamed her bitchface in my head, and man oh man was I rooting for the other girl—the sad one—to march straight over there and smack the smug smile right off her face.
On sad girl’s next exhale, her breath was faintly visible. The temperature was dropping.
The shadow moved closer to her, and she hugged herself, shivering. I could see faint tendrils of her emerald-green soul being leeched off of her by the shadow.
I gripped the edge of the counter, fighting the urge to tackle the thing, if only to get it away from the poor girl.
She held out for a solid thirty seconds, but finally her hand shot up. “Mr. Hale,” she said, waving her hand for attention.
The chemistry teacher, Mr. Hale, looked up from the lab station two over from the girl’s, where he was helping a couple of students relight their Bunsen burner. He raised a finger. “Just a minute, Marcy.”
The girl—Marcy—lowered her arm and slumped forward on her stool, her elbows resting on the counter in front of her. The angry red in her cheeks from minutes before was gone, leaving her face washed out, her lips the palest pink.
The shadow hovered directly behind her, almost seeming to curl around her. Nina kept looking from me to Marcy and back, eyes squinted and mouth pinched, like she was trying to see what I could see. It was crazy to me that I was the only one who could see it—could see the thing draining the soul-energy out of this poor girl. It seemed even crazier to me that I was just sitting there, watching it happen.
How much longer until Marcy passed out? I wasn’t eager about taking on one of the shadows in the middle of a classroom full of students, but I couldn’t just sit there and watch it consuming this girl’s soul.
“Shit,” I breathed. I had to do something.
I stood and, as nonchalantly as possible, wandered over to Marcy’s lab station. I crouched nearby, like I was stopping to re-tie my bootlaces. Face angled downward, I watched the shadow out of the corner of my eye. I took a deep breath and reached out until my fingertips were barely a centimeter away from the shadow’s smoky ankle.
I could feel the cold wafting off of it, but even this close, it didn’t seem to be stealing any of my life-force. I thought I might just be able to pull this off. So long as the shadow remained focused on Marcy . . . so long as I didn’t actually touch it.
I willed the strands of At and anti-At streaking through my ba to extend out of my fingertips. “Don’t glow,” I thought to myself. “Don’t fucking glow.” If I was going to stay under the radar here, I couldn’t call on the collective soul-energy for help. Lighting up like a Christmas tree would make this whole charade useless. It was all on me, now. Just me.
Slowly, almost painfully so, those otherworldly strands emerged from my skin. They were thicker than before, more like yarn than thread. It was a little disturbing, but at the moment, I hoped the increased amount of otherworldly material marbling my soul would lend a little more oomph to my cleansing touch.
Those moonstone and onyx strands latched onto the shadow’s ankle, wrapping around it and climbing higher like an impossibly fast-growing vine. And everywhere they made contact with the shadow, cracks appeared in that unrelenting darkness, letting the pristine teal of healthy soul-energy peek through. It was exactly like what had happened when I’d cured all of those people infected with the Cascade Virus.
Which led to me believe the post on the message board was right about this being directly related to the Cascade Virus, and that these shadows, these poor, tainted souls, were the virus’s victims. The people I’d been too late to save. I supposed it didn’t really matter now.
What did matter was that my plan was working. The taint was being pulled out of the shadow, leaving the true brilliance of the soul beneath to shine through. I could feel that taint flowing through my ba, following the twisting, winding paths of At and anti-At marbling my soul, then leaving me, rendered inert by the process.
After ten seconds, the shadow’s leg was almost entirely teal. After twenty, almost the whole left side was transformed.
“What are you doing?” someone said, tone snide and voice loud enough for at least everyone on this side of the classroom to hear. It was bitchface. I recognized her sneakers, planted just a few feet off to my right. “Freak.”
Shit. The strands of At and anti-At snapped back into my hand, and I shot a quick glance around the classroom. At least a third of the eyes were on me.
Thinking fast, I cupped my hands together like I was holding something between them. “There was a moth,” I said, standing. I looked at bitchface, but only for a moment. “Hey,” I said, nudging Marcy’s arm with my elbow, careful not to touch the shadow soul still hovering over her. “Do you mind opening the door so I can let this thing outside?” If I couldn’t cleanse the shadow right then and there, at least I could get the girl it was feeding on away from it before it drained her of her soul-energy completely.
Marcy glanced up at me, eyes partially glazed over. “What?” She was running out of time.
“Can you get the door?” I asked again, nodding toward the back corner of the classroom. “You know, because every life matters.” I raised my cupped hands a little. “I’ve got a moth . . .”
“Oh,” Marcy said, scrunching her brow. “Sure.” She pushed her stool back a couple inches and stood, her legs visibly shaky. Not surprising, considering a damn ghostly leech had just been sucking the life out of her.
I followed Marcy to the back of the classroom, pleased the shadow wasn’t following. It floated in the other direction, disappearing through the wall, probably lured by some more bountiful feast. So long as it stayed away from Marcy, I was happy. For now.
Marcy pushed the door open, and I stuck my hands out through the opening to release my nonexistent moth.
“Fly free, little friend,” I said, then turned to Marcy.
She was staring at me, her eyelids opened wide and mouth forming a tiny “O.” Recognition lit her hazel eyes. It was almost like she knew who I was. Like she could see the real me, even though my reflection in the door’s narrow window told me my disguise was still in place.
Not a second later, Marcy’s eyes rolled back into her head and her knees gave out. I barely managed to catch her on her way down.