chapter 4 Glass Rain

The sound of every window in Crestmoor breaking at once is not a crash. It is a sigh.

A long, bright, crystalline exhale, as if the whole building had been holding its breath for a hundred years and had finally decided it was done.

Then the screaming started.

"Down!" Kieran shouted, and I was already moving, though not because he'd said so. Something hit me from the side, hard and warm and fast. I went to the floor of the supply closet with a body curled over mine like a wall, and the world filled with a glittering, deafening rain.

Glass hammered the corridor outside. I heard it bounce off stone, skitter across the tiles, and patter against the broken door like hail.

Then, as quickly as it began, it stopped.

I lay there with my cheek pressed against cold floor and a heartbeat that wasn't mine thudding against my back. Slow. Steady. Much too calm for a boy who'd just thrown himself on top of someone.

"Are you cut?" Rhys said into my hair.

"I don't think so."

"Don't think. Check."

"I'm checking!" I wriggled. He didn't move. "You're crushing me."

A pause. Then the weight lifted, slowly, like he was making sure I was real before he let go. I sat up. There were slivers of glass in my sleeves and in his hair, tiny and bright as fallen stars. None of them had touched me.

All of them had touched him.

"You're bleeding," I said.

He glanced at his forearm like he'd forgotten he had one. A thin line of red had opened along the skin. "It's nothing."

"It's bleeding."

"It'll close." He stood and offered me his hand. "Get up. We're leaving."

I stared at the hand. Twelve years of life had taught me what hands usually meant: carry this, fetch that, move. This one didn't want anything. It was only open.

I took it.

His fingers closed around mine, and a warmth ran up my arm that had nothing to do with the cold floor. My wolf made a small, helpless sound, the sound of something that had just been handed a blanket on a winter night.

Don't, I told her.

I didn't say anything.

You were thinking it.

I was thinking it very quietly.

The corridor looked like a battlefield made of diamonds.

Every window along the east wing had blown inward, and glass lay in drifts against the walls. Students huddled in doorways, pale and wide-eyed. A first-year was crying silently into her sleeve. Somewhere on the floor above, someone was shouting names, the way you do when you're counting heads.

"Lockdown," Sable said, from the end of the hall.

He was standing where Garrick had stood a few minutes ago. His eyes were fixed on the far window, the one at the end of the corridor that looked out over the training yard. Beyond it, the sky had gone the strange yellow-gray of a coming storm, but there wasn't a single cloud.

"They've sealed the gates," he said. "I heard the bolts."

"Who has?" I asked.

"The academy." Kieran was picking glass out of his sleeve with careful distaste. "Crestmoor locks itself when the wards are breached. Every door, every gate, every window that isn't already in pieces." He glanced up. "Which, today, is all of them."

"Breached?"

"Tested," said Rhys.

His voice had changed. The calm was still there, but underneath it ran something sharp and watchful. He was looking at the glass on the floor, and I realized he wasn't seeing glass. He was seeing a pattern.

"A breach means something got in," he said. "This didn't. Look at the way it fell. All of it inward, all at once, in a single pulse." He crouched and picked up a shard. It caught the light. "Someone didn't attack the wards. They knocked on them."

"Why would anyone knock?" I said.

"To see who answers."

A chill went down my spine, slow as cold water.

"Mara." Sable had turned. His green-black eyes were fixed on my face. "Tell me exactly what you felt, right before the windows broke."

"I didn't feel anything. I was..." I stopped.

I had felt something.

Not before. During. In the very instant the glass shattered, my wolf had gone rigid, hackles up, ears flat, every muscle coiled. And in that same instant, a faint, distant thread had tugged at the center of my chest, like a hook sinking in somewhere far away.

Like something had touched me, from very far off, and then let go.

"There was a pull," I said slowly. "Just for a second. Like someone saying my name from the other side of a wall."

None of them said anything.

Rhys and Sable exchanged a look. Kieran stopped picking at his sleeve.

"What?" I said. "What?"

"Nothing," said Rhys.

"That was not a nothing look."

"It was a small something," Kieran offered. "A modest something. The kind that can wait until you've had a hot drink and a sit-down."

"Kieran."

"Fine." He sighed and dropped the glass. "Let's say, hypothetically, that a person were looking for a very specific wolf. And let's say, also hypothetically, that the quickest way to find that wolf was to rattle every cage in the building and see which one rattled back."

My mouth went dry.

"They were looking for me."

"Hypothetically," Kieran said, and for once, his smile was gone entirely.

They wouldn't let me walk back to my dormitory alone, which meant that the walk was neither short nor quiet.

Rhys went ahead, scanning every shadow. Sable took the rear, silent as breath. Kieran strolled along beside me with his hands in his pockets, humming something tuneless and cheerful and wildly off-key, as if the end of the world were a minor inconvenience. It took me four corridors to realize he was doing it on purpose. Every time a student flinched or a door slammed or someone whispered, the humming got louder, and attention swung toward him and away from me.

"You're a terrible singer," I said finally.

"Thank you. I practice." He didn't look at me. "People who are laughing at you can't be afraid of you. Useful trick."

"And you?"

"Hm?"

"Are you afraid?"

He was quiet for three steps. The humming stopped.

"Not of the glass," he said, very lightly. And then, as if he'd said too much, he started humming again.

We reached the girls' wing just as the lockdown bell began to ring. Low, slow, solemn, rolling through the academy like a funeral toll. At the foot of the stairs, a cluster of students had gathered around the notice board, and the low buzz of voices cut off the moment they saw us.

I knew those faces.

Cassia's friends. All of them. Standing in a tight, silent knot, and Cassia herself in the middle, with her hair tied back and a letter in her hands.

Not the sneering, polished, queenly Cassia I'd served for four months. This one looked ten years younger. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her fingers shook so hard the paper rattled.

She looked up and saw me.

I waited for the sneer. The cutting word. The little flick of the fingers that sent me away.

It didn't come.

"They said it wasn't safe," she whispered. "They said the windows, and the gates, and..." She stopped. Swallowed. Looked down at the letter. "I wrote to my father. Again. Just now."

"Why?" I asked, and I honestly wanted to know.

"I don't know." Her voice cracked on the last word. "I don't know, Mara. I was scared."

Something strange moved in my chest. It wasn't forgiveness, not even close. But it was close enough to hurt.

Then she looked at the letter again, and the fear in her face sharpened into something I couldn't read.

"He wrote back," she said.

"Already?"

"Before I even sent mine." She held it out with a shaking hand. "That's what's wrong. He answered a letter I hadn't written yet."

Rhys took the paper. I watched him read it, the muscles in his jaw going tight as drawn wire. Then he handed it to me without a word.

It was four lines of neat, fatherly handwriting.

My dearest Cassia. Do not be afraid. Whatever happens in the coming days, remember that I am always watching over you. Keep Mara close. Keep her very close. She is more valuable than either of you knows.

And if she should try to leave... do not let her.

I read it twice. My hands had gone cold.

Cassia was staring at me, pale as paper.

"Mara," she whispered. "Why does my father think you're valuable?"

Behind me, I heard three Alphas go completely still.

Outside, in the strange yellow sky, something began to howl.