Page 49 of Rejected Hollow

People stepped aside for me in the corridors now. They moved for Kaelen Vance because they were afraid of him. With me, it was different. They gave me room because they weren’t quite sure what I was anymore, and because they wanted to keep watching without getting too close.

A Solace girl with gold beads woven through her braids passed me on the stairs and said, “Nice run, Stray.” She said the word so differently from Delphine that for a second I didn’t recognize it as an insult. It almost sounded friendly, which left me with no idea what expression I was supposed to make.

Two Fenhall seniors who were friends with Callum Rourke stopped talking whenever I limped into a room. They would watch me until I left again, as if they were waiting for me to do something worth talking about. Portia Vale handled it differently. She looked straight through me whenever we crossed paths and somehow made that feel more deliberate than staring.

“I’ve drafted a banner,” Tamsin announced at lunch on the second day.

She unrolled a sheet of paper across the table. FIRST HOLLOW IN FORTY YEARS was written across it in enormous bubble letters, surrounded by shapes that I thought were supposed to be stars, although several of them looked suspiciously like otters.

Ah yes. I was the first Hollow in forty years to complete the Moonrun without getting caught. And Tamsin was my number one fan for that, as it seemed.

“For the parade,” she added.

“There’s not going to be a parade.”

“There should be a parade.”

“Tam.” I lowered my head onto the table beside my soup. “I have a sprained ankle and a cold. I want a nap. Ideally, I want one that lasts until the end of term.”

She patted my hair with great sympathy and rolled the banner back up.

“I’ll keep it for later,” she said. “You’ll do something else amazing. I can feel it.”

I didn’t feel amazing. I felt bruised, exhausted, and increasingly confused, because every time I went back over that night, I found something else that didn’t make sense.

I had smelled things I should never have been able to smell. I had felt the moon pulling at my skin. The ache in my chest had warned me before a wolf twice my size turned and ran. Somehow, I had hummed at a grizzly bear and made it listen.

Hollows weren’t supposed to do any of that.

At least, I was fairly sure they weren’t.

On the third morning, I found another rose on the step outside my door. It was dark red, almost black, and freshly cut, with every thorn still intact. I put it in the jug beside the first rose, which had begun to brown along the edges, and stood there looking at both of them for longer than I would ever have admitted to anyone.

One rose could have been a joke. It could have been a mistake, a dare, or somebody’s idea of making fun of me.

Two roses were harder to explain away.

Someone had climbed two hundred and twelve stairs in the dark on two separate nights to leave a thorn-covered rose outside the door of a girl the entire school called the Stray. Without me hearing them, by the way.

Since the first rose appeared, a black wolf had paced beneath my window, and that same wolf had followed me through the Hollow Wood.

I wanted so badly for the roses to be from him that I distrusted the idea immediately. Wanting something had never been enough to make it true.

Mistress Fenwick excused me from Shift Control until my ankle healed. From the look on her face, I suspected she considered it a kindness in more than one sense.

She noticed the limp from halfway across the yard. I braced myself for questions, paperwork, and eventually Mr. Aske, but none of that happened. Instead, she wrote sprained ankle on a slip of paper, folded it once, and tucked it into her own pocket.

“Mine,” she said. “Not his.”

It was the first time anyone at Ironmoor had openly told me they were keeping something from the Council on my behalf, and I had no idea what to do with that kind of protection.

Being excused from Shift Control left me with too much time and too many questions, none of which anyone seemed willing to answer.

So I went back to the only place on the island that had given me anything close to an answer.

“The reading room closes at nine, Miss Hale.”

“I know.”