face just like this, her fingertip just lightly under my chin, and she smelled like warm perfume and

hairspray. Without the hairspray it was almost like my mother, and after a little bit I’d started fidgeting and in the end made some half-embarrassed excuse and got away while she was trying to sell

me eye shadow. This reminded me of that.

Shanks drew in a soft breath. Christophe was utterly silent behind me, but warm tendrils of applepie scent curled across the cold rain-washed breeze.

I smelled wet earth waking up after winter, the river sending up a flat tang of oily water, the city all

around the Schola Prima’s grounds in a tide of concrete and exhaust, the classrooms full of chalk

dust and the war of young and old. Sap rising in the trees, the hardy green smell of grass’s first

spring growth mowed in the morning.

The wingbeats crested, like a little feathered thing in my hand, its heart beating frantically. Gran

said it was no trick to charm sparrows out of the sky; you had to charm them and return them safely,

that was the trick.

No use doing what you dunno to undo—or even if’n you kin undo. You mind me now, Dru.

My hand jabbed out, index finger pointing. I opened my eyes and the world rushed in so hard I had

to squint against it. Darts of sun speared my eyes, and I had to blink to focus. Hot tears swelled up,

trickling down my cheeks.

The lump in my throat wasn’t mine. It was Graves’s. I could see him, a shadowy ghost in the gathering dusk, like powder on a moth’s wings. He left a scorch on the air, like a hot kettle set on a

counter. It was helpless anger, a ball of rage I would never have suspected him of feeling. He was

always so . . .

You don’t know anything about this kid, Dru.

He stamped away toward the baseball diamond, coat flapping silently. Phantom pins and needles

slid through my fingers and toes. I leaned forward, saw him veer away from the baseball field. He

crouched and sprang, his hands jetting out, grabbed the top railing of the bleachers, and cleared it in

a swoop of graceful authority no human body would have been able to pull off.

He’d taken to being loup-garou like a duck to water.

He stood up on the bleachers, irresolute, his head tipped back as if he was watching the sky. It

would have been dark and cold—the middle of the Schola’s “day.” Shanks would have been inside,

trying to calm me down and get me to my room.

The ghost of Graves hunched down, a supple movement. His attention focused outward now, alert.

His hair stood up in long curling spikes, vital and powdery black at this distance. You couldn’t see

his roots.