The metal shelf was hard, and I probably should have brought my sneakers down here with me. And an extra blanket. But I just unrolled the sleeping bag and made sure the key was in my pocket for the fiftieth time.

You know that feeling—you’ve got your bus ticket or something important in your pocket, and you have to keep checking just to make sure it’s there? Like that. It’s like a nervous tic or something when you’re traveling or really, really bushed. Or maybe I’m the only person who does it, I don’t know.

Ash’s breathing was steady. He lay curled up under the shelf-bed, and there was another sticky tray in the corner. I’d gotten close enough to it to smell the red copper of blood, and the image of a brown Jersey cow popped up big as life inside my head, the touch throbbing. I’d retreated to the other side of the room in a hurry. At least he was being fed. I would have a crazy well-fed werwulf to contend with instead of a crazy hungry one.

You take what you can get, I suppose.

I plopped the pillow down, fluffed it up, then stood and stared at the sleeping bag. It smelled like Graves. Healthy teenage boy, his deodorant, and the cold moonlight tang of loup-garou.

I eased myself down cautiously, my knees complaining when they hit cold concrete. My wrapped wrist twinged, too. I peeked under the shelf.

There was a faint orange gleam of eyes in the deeper shadow. His breathing hadn’t changed, but he was awake. Every inhale ended on a slight bubbling sound through his ruined mouth.

“I’m sorry about shooting you.” The words surprised me. Even more than that, I was surprised to find out I really was sorry. Even if Benjamin was right and the only thing keeping him from doing what Sergej wanted and killing me was a faceful of silver grain, I still felt bad about shooting him. “It must hurt, huh?”

The shadow didn’t move, but I could tell he was paying attention by the way the silence in the room changed. Ordinary people can hear that, too—what happens when someone is suddenly paying attention.

“Go figure.” The cold of the floor grabbed the bruises on my legs with bony fingers. “This is about the only place I feel safe. And you could bite my head off without even thinking about it. Do I smell weird to you, too? I guess I must.”

No answer. Just the soft burble of his breath. The tiny glimmers of his eyes winked out, and he settled farther back, against the wall.

I didn’t zip the sleeping bag up, but I did tuck it all around me. The metal was hard and uncomfortable, but no worse than a motel-room floor. I just couldn’t get easy, especially with the bruises and muscle aches playing pinball all through me. Every time I shifted my weight the bag’s zipper would rub a little bit against the metal bed, or a bruise would set up a yell of pain, or some damn thing. But I was exhausted, and pretty soon I started to feel drowsy.

I woke with a start, hearing the deathly stillness of everyone in the Schola gone to their early-morning rest. It took me a few sleepy seconds to realize it was before Ash usually began his regular 3:00 a.m. yowling, and he wasn’t making a sound. Instead, I blinked fuzzily a few times, and in the faint illumination through the barred aperture in the door I saw a long furred shape with orange eyes.

He lay across the threshold, narrow head on his paws, and watched me.

That should really creep me out. But I fell back asleep again. A long slow velvet time of dreamless darkness enfolded me.

And then . . .

The hall was long and narrow, and the door at the end of it glided open. I remembered this feeling—a buzzing cord tied around my waist, drawing me on. I should have been cold in my sock feet and T-shirt, and for a moment I wondered where my hoodie had gone. Then I realized I was dreaming, and the question fell away.

The buzzing started, vibrating through my fingers and toes. It was like static between channels in the back ends of America, the ancient televisions in fly-spotted, grease-carpeted motel rooms all tuned to blank snow. Some of those places advertise cable, but good luck coaxing the TV to home in on anything resembling a signal.

I remembered this feeling, like pins and needles crawling through numb flesh. I held up a hand and wasn’t surprised to see translucent copies of my nail-chewed fingers. They wiggled when I wiggled them, obediently, and I put my hand down. My feet just brushed the floor. I was moving slowly. Like waterskiing but only at about quarter-speed, leaning back against the pull.

Up the stairs, past the hall that held my room, and the pull intensified. The Schola’s stone walls wavered like seaweed. A soft thunder of wingbeats surrounded me, insulating me from the prickling buzz.

The Schola flickered, came back with the colors bled out. Everything was shifting, like really old movies where the grainy color has faded. Or like those painted photographs you see in antique stores—black-and-white portraits with weird blushes over the cheeks and eyes, caught in dusty frames and staring out past speckled, dirty glass.

The voices faded in through the static. I recognized one of them, and the walls of the Schola pulled away. I was outside, the trees shimmering—one moment fully-leafed, the next bare grasping branches.

The voices came back as the trees burst into full summer green again, their shadows turning everything around them to liquid even as color flooded my sight. Sound wavered, but then it was like finding the radio station you want, a chance bump in the road moving your finger on the dial just that perfect amount so the song comes in clear and loud.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It will get better.”

“She hates me.” There was a clack of wood hitting wood, and a short sharp sound of frustration. “I want to go home.”

“She can’t do anything to you. Not with me here. First form, Elizabeth.”

A heatless pang went through me.

It was a half-ruined chapel, vines growing up the stone walls. It was vaguely familiar, and I realized why in a dreamy sort of way. I’d been drawing it for weeks now. There was a wide grassy center and a stone altar, and she appeared between the veils of mist. Her achingly beautiful heart-shaped face, a few long ringlets escaping to bob against her cheeks. She wore black capris and a white button-down, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back. The cut of the clothes somehow said “old.” You could just tell she wanted to iron her hair flat and do some macramé.

She held malaika, the slightly curving wooden swords, with sweet natural grace. One of them made a half-circle, so sharp you could hear the air being cut. Perched atop the altar, her Keds shuffling as she stepped back and the swords made a complicated pattern, she was a deadly beautiful bird mantling its wings.

“Straighten your leg,” Christophe said from the shadow under the wall on the right. The sunlight was a physical weight, golden-grainy like old honey. His eyes burned blue, and he watched her critically, his eyebrows pulled together.

Each time I saw him, it was as if I’d forgotten how well his face worked together, every angle and line fitting just so. He was in jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair pure Liverpool mod touched with blond highlights. “Wrist,” he said mildly, and my mother stopped. She half-turned and gave him a Look.

Oh but I recognized that; it was the way she’d look at Dad when he was late for dinner, or when he said something joking about her washing dishes. It was the mock-glare of a pretty woman looking at a man she knows very well. Half-teasing, almost angry, and very aware of him looking at her.