Of course he did not get far. Effortlessly, without even moving her body, the tyrannosaur lowered her muscular neck and opened wide her terrible mouth and picked him up with her terrible teeth. She tossed him up into the air, a cat playing with a mouse, and caught him in her jaws. And bit down once, hard, snuffing him out.

With a lightning-fast whipcrack motion, she jerked her head around and flung the body into the bonfire. And roared. A long and earsplitting sound every citizen who was there that day will hear in dreams for the rest of their lives. Will tell their grandchildren about. The sound of power, of ferocity. Of a mother protecting her baby. Of order and balance restored.

Sixty-Seven

Ash

We were late.

I broke laws, getting there. Driving through yellow lights that were really already red. Speeding. Praying Sheffield would still be waiting. That he hadn’t gone to strike a match and set the school, the woods—and likely half the town—ablaze.

“Calm down,” Connor said, uncomfortable with my very minor transgressions.

“You texted him?”

“He hasn’t responded.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Solomon said. “Whether he’s there or not. He’ll have someone else start the fire for him.”

Neither Connor nor I had anything to say to that, because it was probably true.

He was still there, when we got to the empty movie theater parking lot. Sitting in his car with the door open, listening to music.

“What can I do for you three fine upstanding citizens?” he asked, when we got out and walked up to him, and I could tell by the hostility in his face that he knew. What we were up to. The conversations we’d had with his teammates. The photos we’d showed them.

“Call it off,” Connor said. “The fire.”

“Whatever do you mean?” he said.

Solomon muttered something under his breath, and wandered away.

“You know what we mean,” I said.

Sheffield’s smug smile started the shivering up in my spine. It triggered rage, but something else.

Vision.

I could see things. The pain under Sheffield’s bravado. Big and jagged, like a spider made of black broken glass.

It was her, I knew. The Ash on the other side. Her magic. Leaking into me.

I could see the future. Sheffield’s future. He’d go to an Ivy League school; enter the corporate world and keep on manipulating people into doing terrible things for him. He’d become one of the wicked men who run the world.

Like Mr. Barrett.

But I could see another future. A different one. Where he broke the cycle, confronted it, and grew from it, and moved on. Where he made the world better, instead of worse. Where he acted out of love instead of hurt and manipulation.

“I know what he did to you,” I said.

“What who—”

“Mr. Barrett,” I said.