I lift my chin, challenging him. “Excuse me while I go fit the mold.” I try to sidestep him, but he blocks my way. “Move,” I command, glaring at him.

He puts his hands up, and I brush past him, hitting his shoulder. “Oh, but I did want to ask you—what happened to Vera?”

I have to give him props. He got straight to the point, no false friendships or feigned interest, just business.

I turn to face him. “Vera?”

“Yeah.” His lips lift, and his eyes gleam like obsidian. It’s unsettling and makes me hyperaware of everything. “The dead girl who usually hangs outside Emerson. Where is she?”

How does he know about the dead girl? The creature that’s taken up residence in my chest has claws, and they dig deep, deep, deep, just grazing my heart, beating hard in my chest.

Fit the mold, Anora. Don’t let him know about you.

So I say, “Are you high?”

Thane’s unfazed and takes a step toward me, closing the distance between us, and suddenly the air feels heavier. I imagine him as a monster with long claws surrounding me like a cage. His heat is not like Shy’s, which is somehow calming. Thane feels like a burden. How can two boys create such different sensations inside me? And why?

“You aren’t the only one who can see the dead, or did you not know that?”

I avert my gaze, staring at the wall—staring at anything but his abyss-like eyes. I swear I can see flames in them, like he’s the incarnation of hell.

“They will notice,” he continues. “And they’ll search and search and search until they find her…and when they can’t find her, well, they’ll come for you.”

“Are they people like you?” There is bitterness in my voice.

He laughs. “No, not like me. They’re not people at all.”

Those words hang between us—a threat, needlelike, sharp. It draws the air from my lungs and awakens my body like a live wire. I clench my fist tight. The thread’s desperate, burrowing out, grazing the surface of my palm.

“What makes you think I know what happened to Vera?”

“You’re the newest thing to grace Nacoma Knight’s campus in four long years,” he says.

“So you have no evidence?”

He raises a brow—perfect, arched. “Is there ever evidence?”

No, there isn’t.

Didn’t I know that from experience? Evidence doesn’t mean anything, only accusations.

My nails bite into my skin, and the pain releases me from the cage Thane seemed to put around me. I start to turn away when an icy hand grips my left wrist—the hand where the thread lives. Thane’s eyes travel from the tips of my fingers to the center of my palm where blood-filled crescents accompany scars of the same shape.

“Maybe you need to work on your anger,” he says.