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.