they fought and made diplomatic agreements with things the rest of the world didn’t think existed.

Beeswax, lemon polish, smell of old wood and dry stone. And the exhalation of a school—something halfway between janitorial cleansers and the oily aroma of lots of kids breathing the same air

for a long time. There was an uneasy coexistence between the two—the age, and the youth. Any

war was over long ago, and the only thing left was a truce where the parties only glared at each other out of habit.

Benjamin paced in front of me, Leon slightly behind and to my left. Graves, his face damp from a

splashing of cold water, kept close by my right. It was like being the center of an amoeba. The other

two were behind me, and if there’s anything guaranteed to unsettle a girl, it’s teenage djamphir

drifting in her wake and staring at her back. Not that I ever caught them staring, but after being the

new girl in a million schools across America, you get the sense of being looked at.

I’d call it having eyes in the back of your head. But I’ve seen that, and it’s disgusting. There was

this one place in the Oklahoma panhandle—called Wail, if you can believe it—where the guy who

ran the general store had an eye in the back of his shaved and tattooed skull. His front eyes were

brown, and the behind eye was blue. It wept a thin red trickle on cold days.

He kept his cowboy hat on a lot.

People came from miles around to visit. They brought things to pay for what he could do, like providing hexes or potions. The thing he liked most as payment was the part of the body he had an extra of.

He fried them. Said they were crunchy and salty, good with mustard.

I shivered. I’d drawn eyes for weeks afterward, doodling them on margins and shading in the irises

until Dad got that look that said I probably shouldn’t.

“You okay?” Graves muttered without his lips moving.

“Just thinking. About eyes.”

His shoulders hunched a little under the usual black coat. He wore that thing everywhere. It was

kind of comforting. “I know what you mean.”

The familiar weight settled on me. I don’t think you do. Opened my mouth to tell him, shut it. He’d

already been introduced to more than his fair share of the Real World. When Ash’s teeth had punctured his skin, they’d stolen his old life. Never mind that it was a life Graves hadn’t wanted. It was

still my fault.

“I mean,” he continued a little louder, “could it be any more obvious that they’re watching you?

And we can’t trust any of them.”

Benjamin inhaled sharply.