Or perhaps the threat was already looking back at him.
“Yeah,” he said, turning quickly to the door. “Everything’s fine.”
As Emrys and Hazel made their way from school, he breathlessly recounted the strange experience in the bathroom, careful to keep his voice down whenever they passed teachers or clumps of other students heading home.
Hazel listened somberly, frowning at every gruesome detail.
“I’d say you were hallucinating,” she remarked as he finished, “if not for what we experienced last night.”
“Something happened to Brian,” Emrys insisted. “Something horrible. I just know it.”
He lifted his phone and was greeted by nearly a dozen text messages from Serena. The last one read: HELLO?? ARE YOU TWO STILL ALIVE? Emrys don’t ignore this! I know you’re off in HOO-HA HORROR LAND!!! Tell Hazel I NEED TO TALK.
He swiped the notification away with a spike of guilt. He’d get back to her soon, but right now, he needed answers. Serena was a popular kid at a fancy private school. She probably had a small army of friends and guidance counselors ready to talk her through any anxious spells. She could deal for a little while longer.
And Emrys had a mystery to solve.
He opened the New Rotterdam Wiki search page.
“Does red sand sound familiar?” he asked Hazel. “I swear I remember it from somewhere.”
Hazel thought about it for a moment, then her eyes brightened.
“Search for ‘Wandering Hour,’ ” she suggested.
Emrys keyed in the name and the article came right up. He held his phone up for Hazel and they scanned the page together. Both gasped at the same time.
“This has got to be it!” Emrys said.
“Oh wow …” Hazel rasped.
“What?” Van Stavern’s voice blurted from the tote. “What did you find?”
“Shhh!” Emrys hissed, pulling it close. “We’re still in public. We’ll tell you soon.”
He glanced at Hazel. “We need to regroup. Do some research and plan our next move.”
She nodded, pulling out her own phone. “I’ll text Serena.”
Emrys awkwardly cleared his throat. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Last night she seemed pretty upset. And her texts today … There were a lot of all-caps messages.”
Hazel shrugged, her eyes on her screen. “She’ll come around. Trust me, I’ve known her since we were toddlers. And it’s not like we can just drop her as a friend because she doesn’t want to join the Order. She can help with research.”
Emrys nodded reluctantly, though Hazel didn’t see it.
Not for the first time, he felt an uncomfortable itch of jealousy creeping in. When he’d first moved to New Rotterdam, it hadn’t really occurred to Emrys that Hazel would already have friends here, even best friends. It should have. And while he’d tried with Serena, he really had, last night only widened the gap that already existed between them. Instead of three friends on a mission, they were now two inverse sets—natural and supernatural—with Hazel linking them at the center. How long could such a strange Venn diagram really survive?
Emrys shook his head. He was being ridiculous. This was bigger than their middle-school drama. Much bigger.
He glanced toward the school entrance …
And gasped.
The two police officers from the morning were still there, but now they were looking right at Emrys and Hazel. There was the tall, reedy one—Emrys noticed his thin teeth were set far apart, almost like a child’s drawing of a mouth. The other, a man with brown skin and wide-set eyes, was as dense and silent as ooze. Neither moved—they simply watched.
A fly trap and a pitcher plant, Emrys thought. The two just seemed … carnivorous.
“Hazel,” Emrys whispered urgently. “Hazel … look.”
Hazel glanced up toward the police, then took a step back. “Why are they looking at us like that?” she whispered.
The invisible world doesn’t like being seen.
Like it or not, that world will only become more insistent with time.
Van Stavern’s warnings echoed in Emrys’s mind. The buzzing behind his right eye had returned, this time he was sure.
“Do you feel that?” he asked.
“… Yes,” Hazel said, absently touching a finger to her temple.
Was this the “double-edged sword” Van Stavern had mentioned? Could even the New Rotterdam police, the adults sworn to protect everyone, be part of the danger? Perhaps the Order’s mysterious second sight was already revealing things Emrys would rather not have known.
“Let’s just get out of here,” he said.
Hazel nodded. The two of them walked past the school entrance, trying to appear casual as they left the grounds.
