Obviously, I wasn’t getting any answers. I rather suspected the horn held some, I wasn’t going to do as Mr. Otter suggested and steal it, though. Even if that was somehow what I was supposed to do.

I wasn’t about to talk to my city-provided therapist about the matter, though. Oh, I’d talked to her plenty, but I wasn’t going to give her ammunition to put me somewhere more, shall we say, secure than the group home.

Which would throw me out as soon as I turned eighteen, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was, in fact, doing my level best not to think about that, but as I went up the steps it felt a little more like home than it had before. I was probably getting used to it. I’d at least managed to finish my ice cream.

Kanesha was at the top of the stairs. She waved cheerfully, then vanished into her room. She’d do well if any of us did – her favorite hobby was studying and she was applying for tons of scholarships.

Me? Wherever I’d been for the first fifteen or so years of my life hadn’t equipped me for high school. I didn’t know any of it, and it wasn’t, I thought, because I’d forgotten it. Sometimes I fantasized that something weird was going on.

Sometimes I thought my life was a comic book, mysterious enemies and hidden past and all. Well, no mysterious enemies, except for Mr. Otter, and he didn’t feel like an enemy.

Or a friend. Mysterious frenemy? Had no ring to it. I headed for my own room, closed and locked the door behind me. They gave us internet access. It was supposed to be for school. I used it to talk to people, but never revealing the truth. My Facebook friends thought I lived in a townhouse in Georgetown with a father who was a banker.

Yeah. We all want to build castles in the air, and I hoped mine would never sink, never fail, never fall. Now I flopped onto my bed, opening my laptop, checking my email.

Somebody was persistent. I’d told this particular person I wasn’t interested in a romance more times than I wanted to think about and certainly more times than I could count. I rolled my eyes and sent the firmest no I could think of. It was annoying that I couldn’t block email the way I could some other means of communication.

That meant two today. I didn’t think I was that hot, but some boys seemed to disagree. Then there was another email, from a sender I didn’t recognize. I almost deleted it, thinking it was spam. Probably I should have.

No name.

“Be careful. You’re being watched. Things are happening.”

As if I was supposed to know what it meant. Maybe I was.