I don’t have the heart to tell him I’ve been given two days of this purgatory.

I start to leave when he stops me. “Oh, hey. I learned something interesting about you yesterday.”

Oh no.

“You did?”

“Your mom works for mine,” he says.

“Really?”

“Yeah… I thought you said your mom moved here for a job.”

“It fell through.”

I’m proud of that lie. It’s smooth; not a flicker of the uncertainty I feel on the inside manages to make its way free, and yet as Shy watches me, I start to waver in my confidence.

It is just my luck Mom would end up working for one of my classmates’ parents. Also my luck that he would be a boy who listens to what I’m saying. I wonder if Shy intended to catch me in a lie.

“Maybe that was for the best. Mom’s happy to have her.”

I smile. “I’ll let her know.”

“See you around.” The smile he gives me as he steps back pulls at my heart, and as he walks away, it unravels at my feet, like it too is made of thread.

I walk into the detention room and Coach David is there, eating a sandwich and scrolling through his phone with his earbuds in. He barely glances up as he takes a giant bite and tips his head toward the desks in the classroom. You’d think an alternative school would have a fair number of students in detention, but I’m the only one here.

I move toward the back of the room and slip into a seat, riffling through my backpack for a notebook to sketch in. I start to draw a map of campus as Coach David chews loudly, occasionally laughing at something on his phone.

As I recall the places I walked on my first day, I mark the possible locations my coin could be on the map. The thing is, I’m not really sure what could even happen if someone did find the coin. I’ve been collecting them, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with them, beyond a feeling deep in my stomach that they shouldn’t just be in a box under my bed, that no one should have access to them. The thread and the coins have been given to me for a reason. If only I knew what it was and how it’s tied to everything that’s been happening over the past few months.

Before I captured her soul, Vera said they would come for me. The feeling of being hunted has been with me ever since I made that first coin. Only here, at Nacoma Knight, it’s so much worse.

I look down at my map and realize I’ve doodled ravens all over it. They look like the ones on my coins.