He smiles. But it doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “Well, you have that effect on me.”
“Sometime thiscentury, please?” Kai again.
“Okay!” I yell back.
I barely make it off the bottom step before Kai is at my side.
“Good. Sit.” He points to the living room, where Kingston is pacing in front of the unlit fireplace. “Sit, Gwenna.”
“Jesus. Okay.” I glare at Kai and do as I’m told, taking the corner of the couch that faces the mantel. Neither ofthemsits, I notice. A pit forms in my stomach, like I’m about to get some kind of lecture, and I self-consciously pin my wrists between my knees, wondering what could possibly be worse than what I saw at Porter’s this afternoon.
Someone’s dying.
Someone’s dead.
Someone’s—
“We’re leaving,” Kai interrupts my thoughts.
I look up, startled. “What?” I don’t understand what he means. Ican’tunderstand what he means.
“We need to leave Caliburn.” Kingston has stopped pacing, arms folded and face serious. “To go somewhere they can’t find us, where they wouldn’t think to look for us?—”
“What?” I say again, my voice cracking on the word. “Stop. Stop. What are you—who’sthey?”
“The Consistory,” Kingston says. “They know. They?—”
“They sent us the monastic equivalent of a fuckin’ severed finger in the mail, is what they did,” Kai interrupts. He digs in his pocket and pulls something out: long, thin, dangling. A necklace?
No, I realize. A scapular. Just like the one Kai had flung off at the table at Easter.
“They gave them to us all for Lent,” Kai says. “One of their little gifts when they visited for Candlemas. You know, normal weird Catholic shit—wear this uncomfortable thing and think about Christ’s suffering, or whatever. But this one isn’t any of ours. This is?—”
“Luther’s.” Kingston finishes for him. “Which he was wearing when…”
The rest of the statement goes unsaid.
Which he was wearing when he died.
A chill sweeps over my skin. “How did they...”
“We don’t know,” Kingston answers. “Maybe they had some way to track them. But if they got this and sent it to us, the message is pretty clear.”
“Yeah.” Kai says. “Watch your ass.Hence, we’re leaving.”
But, I want to say.But. The little word of objection is stuck in my throat, on my tongue.
But what about everyone getting sick?
But what about the dying birds and the dying grass and thesun that didn’t rise for three days?
But what abouthere? What about the place, the institution, the small piece of academic paradise that is Caliburn University?
Except none of that makes it out of my mouth. Because I know all the answers.
You were supposed to be the one to fix all that, Gwenna.
But you didn’t.
