James:have you heard from cora at all?
Dee’s lips pressed together in a frown. She glanced up at the teacher; his back was to the room, his attention on the whiteboard as he sketched out a new polygon. Hastily, she typed a response.
No. Why?
His reply came a moment later:she’s gone quiet for a week. making me nervous, tbh.
A cool tendril of dread seemed to settle in her stomach. This wasn’t anything out of the norm, she reasoned. Cora might have given up or become busy with other responsibilities. She had sisters, if Dee remembered right. There were plenty of reasons that Cora might have relinquished her vendetta against the Daemon.
But then Dee remembered the look on Cora’s face: bedrock certainty, accompanied by an unhealthy amount of righteous fury.
No. Cora would not have given up.
Perhaps—
No.
Dee refused to even let herself think the words.
But they rolled around in her brain until she typed them out.
You don’t think, she texted,that Cora did something. Interfered somehow. And the Daemon got angry.
James’s response took a good minute to come and that was enough to make Dee jittery with nerves.
maybe.
Her lips formed a silent curse and she picked up her pencil and shoved her phone beneath a stack of graph paper. She couldn’t think about this right now. Cora was strong-willed; she was independent; if she was going to do something stupid, it would take more than the likes of Dee or James to stop her.
Another thought occurred to her—one so horrible that Dee immediately reached for her phone again.
How angry do you think the Daemon would be if we interfered?
Another long pause; another frightful minute of her teacher droning on about x-coordinates. The sound of the rain on the windows almost drowned him out and he was having to speak more loudly.
U saw him after Cal died, came James’s reply.
And abruptly, an old memory came back to her. A party in the Grover dorm, a handful of pretzels, and a very drunk girl with a prosthetic arm saying,They won’t kill people. Not can’t, but won’t. My demon, she said that it’s too much trouble for what they get out of it.
Not can’t—won’t.
Dee texted James one last time before jamming her phone back into her bag.
We should check on Cora tonight.
Sneaking off campus was becoming frighteningly easy.
She told her dorm monitor she was off to the library. As a junior and a known quiet student, she was given more freedom than perhaps she should have been.
Dee hurried to where James was waiting in his Mom Car. The wind tore at her hair and she slid into the car with undisguised relief. “It’s getting bad out here,” said James, by way of greeting. “You sure you want to come along?”
Dee gave him a look. “You think I should stay at home while you go tracking down Cora?”
He was trying hard not to smile. “You look as though I’ve slipped from gallant to patronizing.”
“Maybe you have.”
“Or,” he said, abruptly serious, “it’s possible that I’m worried about what we’re walking into, and I’d rather not see you get hurt.”
