“Any of that sound right to you?” I ask Devon once the window is back up and we’re rolling forward again.
“Noneof this sounds right,” he says. “I don’t understand any of this.” He sounds bewildered. “The strategy, the motives…” He shakes his head.
“Exactly!” I throw my hands up. “What spawn would do this? Waste time and energy this way?” Rather than, you know, just killing me.
“But it definitely sounds like it’s getting worse,” he adds. “What do you want to do?”
For lack of any other idea, my original plan was to start from the very beginning, at Branwick. I wasn’t paying any attentionwhen I left my room yesterday morning, focused only on getting to Lennie.
Maybe there was something I missed. No idea what, but checking was at least more effective than curling up in a corner in defeat. Which was my next best option.
Plus, it would give me the benefit of changing into clothes I actually owned and seeing what, if anything, the police had left behind. I was hoping for my phone, or at the very least my laptop. I wanted to see my missed-call log for myself.
But now, it seems like a better idea to go where the action is… or was, most recently. Something about that earthquake or sinkhole idea… it bothers me. Like a cold, unfamiliar fingertip tracing down my spine.
The ground. It came from the ground.I shiver reflexively.
“When you pulled me away from that girl, Izzy…” I begin, then I shake my head. “Never mind.”
“What?” Devon asks, looking over at me. The lack of judgment in his expression pushes me to continue.
Still, I hesitate because it sounds utterly bizarre. “Did you feel the power? Did you feel…” I try to think how best to describe the sensation. “The pull. It wasn’t like being fed on from a distance. It felt more like being devoured from below. Like it was pulling me under, toward the ground.”
Devon shakes his head. “I didn’t, but I was focused on breaking the connection as fast as possible.” He executes a quick move to cut around a double-parked car before an oncoming car blocks our path. “I told you, though, this whole place has an odd feel to it. I thought maybe it was your claim, but—”
“I haven’t, I didn’t,” I say quickly. A part of the ritual and rites of the Old Ones that I saw no need to participate in. Not tomention, I didn’t want to draw that kind of attention to myself from anyone who happened to be keeping tabs on that kind of thing. My goal was to be just Jocasta Trelane. Normal human, nothing else.
“Right,” he says. “So then, what is it? Something to do with the campus itself?”
“It can’t be Beecher. Itcan’t. I’ve been here for three years, and nothing like this has happened before,” I say, more to myself than to Devon. “If there was something inherently… magic-related about this location, I would have seen it or felt it before now.” Wouldn’t I?
Plus, magic doesn’t really work like that. Some places are dead zones, where all the life or energy has been drawn out or where echoes of powerful magic remain, but that’s becausesomeonedid that.
People—or whatever you want to call the Old Ones and those of us who are spawn—wield magic, not places. As far as I know, anyway.
I’d blame my carefully cultivated ignorance of the Old Ones for this, but Devon doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on, either, and he was raised in the community.
Devon reaches the four-way stop at the intersection near the chapel, and he glances over at me for direction.
“Let’s just get as close as we can to Old Campus,” I say. “See what we can see.”
Even cutting through parking lots and taking odd turns down indirect side streets, it takes us a full fifteen minutes to make it from one side of campus to the other.
When we finally reach Old Campus, just past Branwick Hall,we can’t get very far. Right at the start of Greek Row, a barricade of orange and white sawhorses with flashing lights block the road, with several construction signs indicating “ROAD CLOSED” and “DANGER AHEAD.” A dozen or so students are still scrambling to get out of nearby houses, lugging suitcases and backpacks awkwardly down steps and into waiting vehicles or up the sidewalk toward the athletic center.
Behind the barricade, several police officers pace back and forth, talking to each other and into their radios. A fire truck is parked on the opposite end of the street, at some distance from the disruption. Sirens aren’t running but the lights are still flashing and a team of firefighters in full protective gear are inspecting something around the edges of the broken asphalt.
The road is raised in jagged uneven chunks around the perimeter of a large hole, like something has tunneled beneath, leaving space for the whole thing to collapse in on itself.
“Whoa,” Devon says.
“Yeah.” I want to shout, “This isn’t right!” but we already know that and it’s starting to feel downright repetitive.
But more intriguing than the damage itself is the obvious directionality of the disturbance. It ends in front of the Foreign Language House porch, the frozen yard and sidewalk all churned up.
Following the destruction in the opposite direction with my gaze, I find it leads very clearly back to one place and one place only: the old gated cemetery.
The destruction is lesser there, as if whatever it was had to build up a head of steam first. But even from here, I can see that the ground beneath the various monuments and gravestones within has shifted, and that the markers in turn have moved. Not sunken in or toppled, just… tilted. Or lifted up. It’s as if the earth underthem shuddered, like a dog’s skin rippling at the feel of fleas jumping and skittering in its fur.
