CHAPTER 6: THE RIVAL BUS

Jessie

The bass follows me out the closet door, vibrating somewhere behind my teeth.

I don't look for Tinsley. Don't look for Brooke. Don't look back at all. My boots hit the sticky floor and I keep going, past the pool table, out the front door into air that burns on the way in.

I don't stop until the neon sign is just a smear behind me.

Gold eyes. Then brown. Then the parking lot, and salt crunching under my Vans.

I'm tired. That's the whole explanation. It has to be.

***

The hair dryer wakes me up before my alarm does.

"You ghosted us." Tinsley says it around a mouthful of toothpaste, not looking over. "Brooke thought you left with Nolan's friend."

"Headache. Went home early." It's thin and I know it's thin, but neither of them wants to push, so I let it sit there.

Brooke glances up long enough to make a face. "You look like death. Like, actively decomposing death."

"Thanks. Love that for me."

I almost laugh.

My boots are still by the door. Frost is packed into the tread, branching, white, like it grew there while I slept. I was inside last night. I know I was inside.

I shove them under the bed and get dressed before either roommate sees my hands.

***

Marlon's text came at six. Intern duty. Inventory. Don't be late. Now I'm crossing the quad with papers under my arm and wind trying to steal them.

A banner's taped to the lamppost by the library, red and gold, hand-painted, a little crooked.

GOLDEN WOLVES vs. DULUTH | EXHIBITION TONIGHT.

A cluster of guys in team scarves is already chanting, half serious, half bored, one of them landing a beat late every single time. "WOLVES! WOLVES!" At ten in the morning.

I pull my collar up. Keep my head down. The tightness in my chest is the cold. That's all it is.

***

Air brakes shriek somewhere behind me and I turn before I decide to. Not a campus shuttle. A full coach, dark gray, Duluth crest on the side, diesel rolling off it thick enough to taste.

My feet just stop.

The doors fold open and guys start filing out, big through the shoulders. One shoulders his bag straight into another kid on the sidewalk and doesn't look back to see if he's okay. They move like the block already belongs to them, and it isn't even their campus.

Then one of them steps down last.

Leaner. Dark jacket, collar up. He doesn't glance at the banner. His head turns, slow, and finds me across maybe sixty feet of frozen grass, like he already knew exactly where I'd be standing before the bus even parked.

He smiles. Not warm. The kind of smile you give something you were expecting.

My stomach turns. Not attraction. Something older, something that feels like hearing a word in a language I used to know and forgot I ever spoke.

The diesel thins out and something else crawls under it. Old iron. Wet fur, like a dog left out too long in the rain.

My fingers tighten on the papers until the edges bite.

I don't know him.

So why can't I breathe right?

I take a step back. My boot slides on a patch of ice and I catch myself, papers scattering across the grass.

He takes a step forward.

Then a shoulder cuts into my line of sight, wide and sudden, and I realize I'm not the only thing he's looking at anymore.

Silas. Weight settled low, the same stance he uses in the crease when he's reading a shot before it's taken. His scent gets to me before his voice does, black tea, wet earth, the air right after rain lets up, and it cuts clean through the iron stink until my lungs remember how to work.

He doesn't say anything.

The guy in the jacket stops. Tilts his head, studying Silas like he's a problem he didn't expect to run into today. A beat passes, then he lifts two fingers off his jacket in a lazy little salute and turns back toward his teammates.

Silas doesn't relax until the bus doors hiss shut and the engine fades toward the lot.

Then he turns to me.

"Go inside."

"What was…"

"Inside, Jessie."

Two words. Flat. Final.

He walks off toward the rink without looking back, and I stand there with papers scattered around my boots. I'm angry that he gets to decide how much I'm allowed to know, and underneath that, worse somehow, I'm grateful he showed up at all.

My fingers won't warm up, even tucked inside my sleeves.

***

Marlon doesn't look up when I dump the sheets on his desk. Both hands buried in a bin of skate guards, grumbling about synthetic versus real leather like it personally wronged him.

"You look like you saw a ghost, Marlowe."

"Just cold."

"It's November. Everybody's cold. Count the shin guards."

I count the shin guards. Write the number twice because the first time my hand shakes too much to read it back. My hand drifts to my throat at some point, and I catch myself rubbing the spot where stubble scraped me last night, and I drop it fast, like I got caught doing something.

***

POV: Silas Vane

By two the visitor locker area is loud with normal noise, gear bags dropping, somebody's music too tinny through a phone speaker. Diego sits apart from the rest of them on the bench, a pocketknife open in his hand.

He isn't carving his name.

Three lines, angled, deliberate. I've seen that shape exactly once before, in the back of my mother's journal, on a page she turned so fast I barely got a look. She told me if I ever saw it again, I was to walk away and say nothing.

I don't walk away. I get my phone up instead.

Two photos, no flash, the shutter buried under the noise of guys packing gear. My thumb goes still over the last shot.

I don't know what the symbol means. I know enough to understand my mother's voice went quiet in a way it never did for anything else.

I pocket the phone and decide, right there, not to tell Jessie a thing.

***

POV: Jessie Marlowe

By evening I'm back at the rink because Marlon asked me to run towels, and saying yes was easier than explaining why I don't want to be here alone.

The WOLVES chant is muffled through the tunnel glass. One of the Duluth guys drives a Golden Wolf into the boards a full second after the whistle blows and doesn't even flinch about it.

He's out there too, moving with the rest, but his head keeps turning. The stands. The tunnel. Me.

I press back behind the equipment cart, towels bunched in both fists.

A whistle blows. He skates to the boards, pulls his helmet off, breathing hard, and looks straight into the tunnel. Straight at me. He doesn't smile this time, just looks, like he's confirming something he already believed.

The towels slip out of my hands and hit the mat with a soft whap.

His mouth moves. Two words. I can't hear them over the crowd and I can't read them either.

He skates off.

I back up until my shoulder hits the wall, the cold of it soaking through my hoodie in seconds. I want to leave. My body won't cooperate.

A hand closes on the back of my hoodie. Not grabbing. Steadying, fingers spread wide between my shoulder blades.

Silas again. Doesn't look at me, eyes locked on Diego's retreating back. His hand stays three seconds, maybe four, then he's gone, mask coming down over his face as he steps past me toward the bench.

I breathe out. I didn't know I'd stopped.

***

Nine thirty. The visitor locker room sits empty, door propped open, everybody long gone. I cut through the corridor to skip the crowd out front.

I almost walk past the bench.

Then I stop.

Something's carved into the wood. Fresh. Pale shavings still caught in the grooves. Three lines crossing at one end, with an arced arrow in the middle. Something about the pattern makes my eyes sting if I hold my gaze on it too long, a pressure building right behind them.

I don't know what it means. My body seems to, though. Same tight pull behind my ribs. Same wrongness from the quad this morning.

My phone buzzes.

Unknown number. No text, just a photo. The same symbol, carved into older wood, weathered like it's been there for years.

Under it, three words.

He found you.

The hallway is empty. Rink lights buzz somewhere overhead and I go still without meaning to.

Behind me, something clicks. Soft. Almost nothing.

I spin around.

The corridor's empty, the bench, the door, the row of lockers with their padlocks hanging open. But right where the overhead light cuts off near the bench leg, a shape is still pulling back into the dark, like someone stood there a half second too long before they remembered to disappear.