And, of course, the time without school, but it started again entirely too soon. And on the first day they pulled us all together.

They’d made a lot of progress on the repairs over the break, the cafeteria was open again, and things were starting to return to normal.

But they were still cracking down. We were no longer allowed to share food with anyone under any circumstances in case something had bacteria in it or something. I thought of how we’d all chipped in to get something to the free lunch kids…of course, at one point I’d been one of them. They stopped us doing that in another case and there might just be a riot.

And, of course, we were reminded that cell phones weren’t allowed to be used in class – they’d relaxed the rule and let us carry them after the fire, but the teachers had better not see or hear them. Reminded about excessive talking between class; as if there was time for that. There wasn’t even time to pee.

I thought I’d be glad to graduate and get out of here, but I knew I had to stick it out. And besides, after thinking I might have to drop out and disappear, I was almost glad to have rules yelled at me.
Almost. There was a new kid standing near us. Red hair, freckles, kind of cute in his own way. I kept an eye on him – after Mr. Merrifield I didn’t trust anyone new.

Probably a cynical attitude, and he seemed to just be some kid. I hoped he’d keep his head down if something happened. I hoped none of them would have to.

No sign of Merrifield. His replacement was an over-sized black woman with a truly spectacular afro. One that would have been dress coded if seen on a student. I glanced at Kanesha, lips quirking. “Hopefully she won’t turn out to be an African fairy. Are there African fairies?”

“The only ones I know of are Azizas, who are little people and know a lot and are, well, much nicer than European fairies.”

I stored that up. Nice fairies sounded good. “She’s not anything, I think I could tell. But let’s not relax.”

“What we really need is a British librarian who actually knows a lot about demon hunting.”

I laughed. We’d watched a few episodes of the show over Christmas. It was a pretty old show, something our teachers would like, but it was also pretty good.

The vampires were all wrong, though. And far too sexy, but that was a trope these days. We didn’t have to worry about sexy vampires.

Just demons and the vague sense of dread that followed me through my day, but I wasn’t sure that wasn’t just memories of all the crap that kept happening.