Page 45 of Spring L.A.W.
Rayna raised her hand. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re not in trouble.”
The kid bolted.
Katie shouted, “Wait!” and tore after him.
He ducked through a service gate like he’d done it a thousand times. Even though it looked like it was padlocked, it popped open for him with a whisper of light.
Rayna followed, but Katie was in the lead. She had a weird sense again. Her skin felt stretched, and her vision was too clear. Sheknewwhere he’d turn before he did. She didn’t question it. She justran.
They finally caught up to him in an abandoned tunnel, sealed off in the 1980s, which was possibly haunted.
Katie skidded to a stop, panting. “Hey! I don’t want to hurt you!”
The kid spun around. “You’re not supposed to be able toseeme.”
Rayna caught up, eyes glowing slightly from a half-finished spell. “Oh, honey. We’re way past ‘supposed to.’”
The kid backed up. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone! I was just trying to getout!”
“Out of where?” Katie asked.
The kid hesitated. “TheBetween.That place where time forgets you. Where you’re stuck in half a dream.”
Katie’s stomach dropped. “I’ve seen that place in my dreams. With the graffiti that moves.”
The kid looked at her like she was the last honest word in a poem. “Then you’re marked too.”
Rayna’s voice dropped. “Marked for what?”
The tunnel shuddered.Something iscoming.
Not a train. Not a person. Something else. Something… other.
The air around the boy rippled, like a heatwave of distortion. Gray light bled from his skin like mist.
He clutched his head. “It followed me! I didn’t mean to lead it here!”
Rayna barked, “Everyone, shield up! Katie, behind me!”
But Katie didn’t move. She stared at the graffiti curling along the tunnel wall as if it were whispering to her. And then she whispered back.
“Not this time.”
The symbols on the wallignited. And the tunnel exploded with light.
13
Rayna blinked away the afterimage of graffiti-shaped light, hand still half-raised like she’d been about to cast something at a target that no longer existed. “Well,” she said, “that was different.”
The boy slumped to the ground, breathing like a dying accordion. His hoodie hiked up above his waist, his glow dimming to a faint shimmer. Katie crouched beside him, unsure whether to comfort him or slap some sense into him.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I think I un-existed part of the wall,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, you almost launched us into our next lives,” Rayna added, scanning the now-silent tunnel. “Thanks for that.”
The boy flinched. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. It just happens when I get scared. Or mad. Or really anything emotional.”
