“I’m not just going to drop this and kick it under the rug.”
“I figured you’d say that,” she said. To my surprise, she pulled her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and handed it to me. “Give me your phone number. If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”
I raised an eyebrow, skeptical. Even if Lauren was telling the truth, I was sure that BRS had plenty of ways to keep an eye on Lauren’s communications. “Won’t your dad find out?”
“He’s not Big Brother,” she declared, retracting the phone. “He doesn’t monitor every aspect of my life. If you don’t want to, it’s fine. But don’t expect me to come looking for you.”
In a split-second decision, I grabbed the phone, typed my number in, and handed it back to Lauren. She busied herself with it for a moment, and then my own phone, tucked in the pocket of my winter coat, vibrated.
“Now you have my number too,” she said. “I’ll keep you posted. And Nicole, for the love of God, if you’re going to follow someone, learn how to do it stealthily.”
I left Lauren to the comfort of her dorm room and decided to risk a trip to the library. If BRS already knew what I was doing, there was no additional harm in conducting further research in the public eye. After all, I was still a student at Waverly, and I had as much right as everyone else to study on campus.
The campus had woken up during my conversation with Lauren. The quad teemed with students on their way to early morning classes. I cut a pathway through them, but as soon as I left the brown grass and stepped onto the icy sidewalk, I caught sight of a bicycle whizzing toward me in my peripheral. The cyclist swerved, but it was too late. The wheels slid out on the ice and took me out at the knees. We went down in a painful tangle of limbs and bicycle parts. My messenger bag tore open, spilling all of my belongings, including a couple folders of my thesis research, across the ground.
“I’m so sorry,” said the cyclist. She was young, a freshman and unfamiliar with the hazards of riding so recklessly through a college campus. “I lost control. The ice—”
Her helmet was askew, but other than a mild scrape on the palm of her hand, she seemed unharmed. I, on the other hand, did not fare quite as well. Sharp stabbing pains radiated through both of my knees where the bike had hit me, and a burning sensation on my stomach let me know that my winter jacket had ridden up during the collision and exposed my skin to a healthy dose of road rash. My right wrist ached from where I’d braced myself against the ground, and all in all, I thought I might break down and cry right there in front of the sputtering freshman girl.
“It’s fine,” I managed. The breeze attempted to whisk away a few pages of my thesis notes, but I snatched them up, narrowly avoiding getting my fingers stepped on by another passing student.
The cyclist went after a few of the windswept pages and brought them back to me. “I’m really sorry,” she said again, sticking her hand out to me.
I let her pull me to my feet, grimacing as my knees protested the movement. “Just watch where you’re going.”
“Yeah, totally. Sorry.”
As she mounted her bike again and took off, I examined what was left of my messenger bag. It had split right down the seam in the collision. I shoved my notes inside, folding one torn flap over the other, and tucked the bag inside my coat for safekeeping. Then, no longer in the mood to spend any time in the library, I limped in the direction of home.
I found Wes sitting on the bottom step of our apartment building. He rose as I walked toward him, his mouth dropping open when he saw the state I was in.
“What happened?”
“Bicycle took me out,” I said, stifling a groan as Wes inspected my wrist. A bright purple bruise had already bloomed there. “Damn kids don’t pay attention at all, do they?”
Wes pressed worried lips to my forehead as he hugged me lightly. “I’m afraid I have to ruin your day further.”
I drew back. “What do you mean?”
“Follow me.”
Wes led me to the parking lot around the back side of the building. There, his police cruiser was parked in its usual space, but it rested on slashed, deflated tires. On its hood, someone had spray-painted the BRS logo in red, and along the side, the words “watch your back” had been stamped in black.
I dropped my head into my aching hands. “Are you fucking kidding me? Did you call the force?”
“Yup,” said Wes. “They’re on their way now to tow it. Wilson said they want to take pictures and look for fingerprints—that kind of stuff—to see if they can find out who did it.”
“It’s kind of obvious, Wes,” I said, pointing to the red crest on the hood. “The Black Raptor Society strikes again.”
“According to Wilson, the Black Raptor Society doesn’t exist,” said Wes, kicking one of the ruined tires in frustration. “It’s freaking me out, Nic, because I can’t help but wonder if one of the boys on the force is responsible for this.”
I bit my lip, unwilling to add to Wes’s stress by agreeing.
“And that’s not all,” he went on. “Jo Mitchell was arrested for public intoxication last night. I saw them bring her in during my night shift, and I overhead Whitehall speaking with some university official. She’s going to be kicked out of Waverly.”
“No way.”
This was the kind of stuff Lauren had warned me about less than half an hour ago. She was right. BRS knew who I was and what I had been doing. They’d vandalized Wes’s cruiser to make their point clear, and they’d obviously figured out that
