Defiance

The baths in Schola locker rooms are weird, to say the least. The sunken tubs are full of a bubbling whitish fluid that clings to your skin and hardens like paraffin wax when the air hits it. It speeds up the healing processes like crazy, and when you wash it out in the shower, it just slides right down the drain like jelly, taking a lot of the hurt and inflammation with it. It even helps with the sandy-headed feeling you get after not enough sleep, running around with wulfen, and getting your ass handed to you by a supercilious djamphir.

When it gets in your hair, though, it takes a while to rinse out even in the showers, where the water pressure can strip your skin off.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I outright love the Schola showers. I’ve cleaned up in too many cheap-ass hotel rooms where you barely get a dribble of tepid rust-stained fluid that might’ve been water once.

Another good thing here: the hot water never runs out. I was in there long enough to turn into a prune before I got the waxy stuff out of my curls. When I shut the water off, the whole locker room echoed. On the boys’ side of any Schola gym, there’s always plenty of tubs and showers, and I’d guess it’s probably always full of noise after classes.

What, you thought I’d go in there to check it out? No thanks.

On the girls’ side, there’s never more than three tubs and four showers. Everything is scrubbed and bleached, and the steam in the air, rising from the roiling surfaces of the tubs, moves in shifting veils. It’s as lonely as a tumbleweed town.

I grabbed a fresh white towel and wrapped it around my hair, scrubbed at the rest of me with another one. The bruises were green-yellow now, and the road rash from last night looked weeks old instead of poppin’ fresh. At least I hadn’t hurt myself on the daylight run.

I was standing there, looking at the scrape on my leg and trying to determine how much it had really shrunk, when I heard a soft sliding sound.

Gooseflesh roughened my skin. I wrapped the second towel around me tightly and glanced at the tubs.

There was nobody in here with me. Just the three tubs, boiling away with their peculiar burbling chuckles. The showerhead, dripping. All the mirrors were steam-fogged, and I couldn’t even see the wall in front of the door. Benjamin would be on guard out in the hall, and nobody would get past him. Christophe would be along any second, cleaned up and imperturbable, to collect me for Aspect Mastery tutoring.

Of all my classes, I like that one least. I’d rather be sparring. And that says something.

I shivered. My breath turned into a white cloud, and electric nervousness ran along my skin, thrumming in my bones.

I know that feeling like an old friend. It’s the kind of cold that hits right before seriously-weird happens along to say howdy.

The steam-fog began to flush pink along its cloud-edges. My mother’s locket, lying against my breastbone, cooled rapidly as well. Had it done this when Dad wore it? He wasn’t around to ask, and boy, was that the wrong thing to think.

Because if I did, I thought of the tapping sound a zombie’s fingers made against cold glass, and my entire body wanted to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere dark and safe.

Or at least dark. I was getting to think nowhere was really, truly safe.

The pink edges to the fog did not look friendly. They looked like raw meat. I tasted a ghost of danger candy, just faint enough to make me wonder if I was imagining things.

But I know better. It don’t matter if you’re imagining or if something is really going on. Move first, worry about looking like an idiot later.

Dad never said that. But I knew he would approve.

I edged for my clean clothes, neatly folded on the counter next to the nearest sink. Bare feet gripping the rough-tiled floor, the towel on my hair sliding free and hitting with a small sodden sound, I took three steps, trying to look everywhere at once. My switchblade lay right on top of the black T-shirt I was going to wear next, and the honest silver loading the flat of the blade was far from the worst ally you could have at a time like this.

What the hell is going on? I took another couple steps, and more pink threaded through the steam. I lunged for my clothes, grabbed a fistful, and stumbled back as the fog turned an angry crimson and bulleted forward as if it had been thrown. It hit the mirror, which gave a high hard crack and shivered into pieces. I let out a blurting scream, my feet slipping, and dodged back into the shower stall. My jeans hit the tiled floor on the way, so did the shirt, but the switchblade snicked open as my shoulders hit the wall. I dropped my last towel, too—that thing was fast, whatever it was, and if I was clinging to modesty, I might end up seriously hurt.

Great. Now I was trapped in the shower stall in my birthday suit, and all the steam rising from the tubs was beginning to look like red ink in water, only it was bubbling and taking on a solidity I didn’t like. The tub closest the door was really roiling red, the other two just faintly pink. Still, my skin roughened up into sandpaper gooseflesh.

I was just sitting in that! Bile rose in my throat. But that wouldn’t do me any good. What was this thing? Bodiless for sure, at least at the moment, which meant it could be a bad spirit or a hex. But maybe it was going to coalesce, which would make it something else. I ran through the catalog of the weird I held stored in my head—everything Dad and I had ever seen, everything Gran had told me about, everything I’d dug up in moldering leather-bound books, everything I’d heard stories about while we went on our sixteen-state odyssey of the strange and dangerous.

Nothing came even remotely close.

The ghost of wax oranges lingered on the back of my tongue. Weird. Usually the aura was the first thing to warn me of the hinky going down, but it wasn’t spiking now. I firmed my grip on the switchblade, silver glinting as I jabbed forward experimentally.

The crimson mist cringed a little, thickening. My mother’s locket was icy; it bounced as I retreated again. I reached up, twisted the shower knob with my free hand—running water’s a barrier to a lot of things. Couldn’t hurt.

Then the smell hit me. Salt, and something rotting, the reek crawled down my throat and I retched, hot water welling in my eyes. I slashed again as the mist slid a tendril into the shower stall, and the blade passed through it, sparking. A thin spatter of red fluid hit the floor, washed away by the shower’s steady spray. It smelled like something dying in a dark wet corner, and I retched again, my breath still making a cloud even though the shower was scorch-hot, needles of spray hitting my hip.

I’d seen that in the Real World before. Things that need to drain all the energy out of the air to hold themselves together, making the temperature go all wonky. Gran’s advice was to “disrupt” them—find the thing pulling all the energy together and short out its connection to the snarled, tangled fabric of the fleshly. It’s kind of like feeling around in a bathtub full of squirming maggots for a plug, and hoping it’d drain once you yanked it.

Okay. So here I was, naked, with my mother’s locket, my switchblade, hot water, and my wits. Not to mention my Lefevre pride, dammit. Why wasn’t Benjamin breaking down the door? Could he not hear what was going on? Did he think the breaking glass was a weird girl ritual or something?

Or could he not hear me at all? That was most likely. Anyway, I was on my own.

Well, wasn’t that depressingly usual.

The mist pressed closer. It was so thick I couldn’t see the rest of the locker room now, a solid wall of billowing crimson. The hot water was keeping it back, and I slashed again as it slid a tentacle finger into the shower stall. This time there was resistance against the blade, the silver sparked more definitely, and the tentacle actually plopped down before dissolving in the water.

Great. I switched the knife to my right hand, the blade reversed flat along my forearm, and shook out my wet, prune-wrinkled left hand. Hit ’em where they hold themselves too tight, Gran would say. You can see it if you don’t look.

Believe it or not, that’s not the most confusing thing she ever said to me. Not even close.

It’s kind of hard to concentrate when a wall of red fog is pressing forward, trying to creep into a shower stall. I dropped back into a crouch, ribs heaving as I struggled not to hyperventilate or puke, trying to keep as much of the shower’s spray as possible between me and the thing. It was billowing up, too, trying to slide under the blue- tiled upper lip of the stall.

Probably so it could get to the showerhead and Do Something Nasty to it. Don’t ask me how I knew.