Based off of the grumbling, whoever had pulled the fire alarm was not going to be very popular. Sure, we were getting to miss class.

But it was raining and not everyone had been close enough to their locker to grab outerwear or umbrellas. I sure hadn’t been, and now my bookbag was getting soaked. I hugged it to myself, hoping that would keep the contents dry. Or dryish, anyway.

Then the explosion happened. It wasn’t a huge explosion, but it was definitely an explosion. I thought it was vaguely in the area of the chemistry lab.

“Oh man. Somebody’s experiment went really wrong.”

I shook my head and narrowed my eyes. No sign of fyrhunds…mine had wandered off when I stopped working somewhere with industrial ovens…fairies, or anything else suspicious. For once, it didn’t seem to be magic. So, that guess was right. “Guess so. Didn’t think it could be a real fire.”

Which meant none of us were getting back inside to get our coats any time soon. The rain didn’t bother me particularly, but I wasn’t about to let anyone know that, so I shivered – if anything more than the others.

“I left my phone in my locker,” one girl was complaining. “And now they won’t let us in for hours.”

“Shouldn’t be using it at school anyway.”

“Yes, but if I don’t have it turned on the moment school ends, I’ll be yelled at.” She sounded pretty miserable.

I had a little bit of sympathy for her, but not much. Such problems tended to shrink when you were hunting vampires and worried about demonic stalkers, after all. Sometimes I felt that other people only thought they had problems. Then I reminded myself that was an unfair thought.

Leaving her phone in a burning building probably was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I reminded myself of that as the rain came down even harder and colder.

A teacher was doing a head count. Hopefully that meant they’d get us somewhere indoors soon. I wasn’t sure how, though. The firefighters were there, moving into the building to check it. But everything was connected to everything else.

We were, yes, stuck on the sports field. Another student was whining about how she was going to catch pneumonia out here. Which seemed unlikely, but I was betting there would be a lot of people sick.

“We can’t go back in until the fire department confirms it’s contained.”

There were groans. One boy yelled, “Just let us go home.”

Another was pulling out a cell phone and breaking the rules by texting. Probably to get their parents to come get them.

“It won’t…”

The noise became a cacophony. I wasn’t surprised. Nobody wanted to be standing outside in this, and I wondered how many would slip off now the head count was done.

That was when I started to sense a tension in the air.