Chapter 24
West Ridge announced the Winter Formal on Monday.
December twenty-first.
Jake read the poster three times.
WINTER LIGHTS.
MUSIC. FOOD. BONFIRE. SENIOR RECOGNITION.
Football stadium and practice field.
Seven to eleven.
Marcus appeared beside him.
“That seems bad.”
“Very.”
Noah joined them.
He read the date.
“They’re putting hundreds of people directly over the threshold.”
Jake nodded.
The Three of Cups.
The Sun.
Celebration.
Public joy.
They had interpreted the cards correctly.
Just not the event.
Jake pulled the poster down.
Assistant Principal Greene appeared from nowhere.
“Mr. Miller.”
Jake slowly put it back.
“It fell.”
Greene looked at the tape still attached to all four corners.
“Remarkable.”
Jake smoothed it against the wall.
“Winter humidity.”
Noah walked away before he laughed.
Marcus followed.
Jake caught up.
“We have to cancel it.”
Marcus shook his head.
“How?”
“Gas leak.”
“You already used that.”
“Bomb threat?”
Noah stopped.
“Absolutely not.”
“Fake raccoon infestation?”
Marcus considered.
“Strong.”
Noah stared at both of them.
Jake sighed.
“Fine. Responsible ideas only.”
Marcus raised his hand.
“I’m out.”
***
Mrs. Henson gave them access to old school records after hours.
Technically, she gave Jake access.
Marcus entered through a side door Noah forgot to lock.
“Forgot,” Noah said.
Marcus saluted him.
The oldest yearbooks were kept in a cabinet in the library.
West Ridge had opened in 1992.
The land had been purchased three years earlier.
Jake flipped through newspaper clippings Mrs. Henson had printed.
Human remains discovered during construction.
Work halted.
County investigation.
Remains determined historic.
Construction resumed.
Noah pointed at a photograph.
A group of people stood behind a temporary fence.
Mara Bennett was one of them.
Beside her stood Ana Miller.
Jake’s grandmother.
And beside Ana stood a teenage boy.
Daniel.
Jake touched the photograph.
Memory flashed.
Mara shouting at a construction foreman.
Ana drawing a mark in the dirt with her shoe.
Daniel, maybe ten, watching.
A man in a county jacket telling them the remains would be relocated.
Mara saying, They are not the problem.
The man asking, Then what is?
Mara looking directly toward the place where West Ridge’s football field would someday stand.
Jake came back gasping.
Noah steadied him.
“What?”
“They knew.”
Jake looked at the picture.
“Before the school existed.”
Marcus turned another page.
“Uh.”
Jake looked.
A dedication photograph from 1992.
WEST RIDGE HIGH SCHOOL — BUILDING TOMORROW.
Several county officials held ceremonial shovels.
One man stood in the back.
Young.
Dark suit.
Thomas Voss.
Ethan had said his father was not always a hunter.
Apparently he had always been close.
Noah tapped another face.
“Who’s that?”
Jake didn’t know.
Mrs. Henson did.
She leaned over them.
“Dr. Malcolm Reeves. First superintendent.”
Marcus searched the name.
His expression changed.
“He died in 2008.”
Jake’s heart kicked.
Daniel’s year.
“How?”
Marcus read.
“Car accident.”
Noah smelled the page.
“Silver.”
Jake stared at him.
“On a thirty-four-year-old yearbook?”
“Yeah.”
Jake touched Reeves’s photograph.
Nothing happened.
Then Claire, standing behind them, whispered, “Let me.”
Claire put two fingers on the page.
Her eyes went gold.
She inhaled sharply.
“He was Circle.”
Ethan swore.
Claire kept her fingers there.
“He arranged the school.”
Jake said, “For what?”
Claire’s voice changed.
Not completely.
Just enough to make Jake’s skin crawl.
“A building full of young minds makes memory quickly.”
She jerked her hand away.
Silence filled the library.
Marcus whispered, “That is the creepiest sentence anyone has ever said in a school.”
Jake looked around.
Thirty-four years of first kisses.
Fights.
Games.
Breakups.
Deaths.
Graduations.
Fear.
Joy.
Thousands of teenagers leaving pieces of themselves in the same place.
The Circle had not built a school over the threshold by accident.
They had built a battery.
***
Noah turned nineteen six days before the solstice.
He tried not to tell anyone.
This failed because Elena was his mother.
Lisa decorated the kitchen with blue streamers.
Sofia brought a cake that leaned visibly to the left.
Marcus brought a card containing twenty dollars and the message PLEASE BUY PANTS BEFORE ENTERING ANY MORE FORESTS.
Jake gave him a small box.
Noah looked suspicious.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
Inside was a plain silver-colored keychain.
Noah looked at Jake.
“You bought a werewolf silver?”
“Stainless steel.”
“Important distinction.”
The charm was a tiny compass.
On the back Jake had engraved two words.
COME HOME.
Noah stared at it.
Jake suddenly wished he had bought socks.
“It’s not a mate thing,” he said quickly. “Or a tracking thing. It’s just—your whole life has been running. And I thought maybe—”
Noah kissed him.
Marcus groaned.
“Cake first.”
Noah pulled back.
His eyes were wet.
“Thank you.”
Jake touched his forehead to Noah’s.
“Happy birthday.”
Sofia cleared her throat.
“Before this becomes unbearable, the cake is collapsing.”
It was.
They ate it anyway.
***
The birthday ended quietly.
Lisa went to bed.
Elena and Sofia took Claire and Ethan home.
Marcus left after stealing three pieces of cake.
Jake and Noah stayed on the couch.
The television played a movie neither was watching.
Noah turned the compass charm between his fingers.
“Come home.”
Jake looked at him.
“Too much?”
“No.”
Noah leaned against him.
“I don’t know what home means yet.”
Jake understood.
Noah had spent months sleeping wherever his family thought hunters would not find him.
Then the woods.
Then Jake’s house.
Then cabins and safe rooms and borrowed bedrooms.
“It doesn’t have to mean my house,” Jake said.
Noah looked up.
“I know.”
“It can mean your mom. Sofia. College. Some terrible apartment where your upstairs neighbor owns a bowling ball.”
“Why a bowling ball?”
“Upstairs neighbors always do.”
Noah smiled.
Jake took his hand.
“I just want you to have somewhere you’re going toward instead of somewhere you’re running from.”
Noah kissed him.
Slowly.
They had kissed enough by then that Jake knew the difference between joking kisses, nervous kisses, hungry kisses, and the ones that meant stop talking.
This was the last kind.
Jake stopped talking.
Later, when the house was quiet, they went upstairs together.
There was no prophecy in it.
No magical pull they could blame.
They talked.
They checked in.
They changed their minds about one thing and laughed about another.
Nothing happened because a wolf demanded it.
Nothing happened because eighteen-year-old Jake had found eighteen-year-old Noah naked beneath an oak months earlier.
They were together because they wanted to be.
When the bedroom light finally went out, Jake heard Noah whisper, “Still okay?”
Jake smiled in the dark.
“Yeah.”
In the morning Noah was wearing Jake’s hoodie again.
Jake opened one eye.
“You have your own clothes.”
“I like this one.”
“That one says Miller.”
Noah looked down.
“I can read.”
Jake pulled him back into bed.
The world could end in five days.
For another ten minutes, it could wait.