Free Demon High by Lori Devoti Page B

might make it easier for me to face her.
    While the muffins were baking, I went out front to swipe the neighbor’s paper. Nana loved reading the daily, but had stopped our subscription a year earlier. Conveniently though, our neighbor three doors down left his lying in the gutter for days. I half suspected the older man ordered the paper just so I could steal it.
    With it tucked under my arm, I scurried back home. I didn’t want to waste his good intentions by getting caught.
    The muffins were done, so I pulled them from the oven and arranged them on a plate. Then I set the table, placing the paper folded lengthwise next to Nana’s setting. As I did, I couldn’t miss the headline.
    “Three College Students Missing.”
    My heart dropped an inch and my butt hit the seat I’d just pulled out in preparation for Nana.
    “Two nineteen-year-old and one twenty-year-old male students at State College at Bethel disappeared after a night drinking. Witnesses saw the boys buying large quantities of alcohol early in the evening. They attended a party together, but left early. Although their car was recovered a few miles south of Bethel, the boys have not been seen. There was no sign of foul play obvious in the vehicle.”
    The paper went on to report that the store that sold the three the alcohol had been shut down for selling to minors. The paper seemed to think the boys’ disappearance was related to drinking.
    My heart beating loudly, I dropped the paper onto the table. Related to alcohol? If the boys were the three I thought they were, yeah, you could say that. Except probably not exactly in the way the reporter imagined.
    I picked up a muffin, and turned it around, studying its perfectly domed top. But their car had been found. That meant they had left the field. Of course I knew that already. Even as shaken as I was the night before, I wouldn’t have missed something as big as a car.
    So, since they had left the field, their disappearance couldn’t have anything to do with the calling, or the dark shapes I had seen flowing around the circle. Could it?
    Unable to stand the direction my thoughts were going, I dropped the muffin onto the table, and went to get dressed. Looked like Brittany’s and my silence was over. I needed to get to school and talk to her. Hopefully, she would tell me it was three totally different boys, that I was freaking over nothing.
    But as I knotted my “vintage” red and purple striped cardigan around my waist, I couldn’t really get myself to believe it.
    o0o
     
    Brittany kept her back to me as I walked up. I knew she had seen me though; I could tell by the quiver of disapproval that traveled through her body. She shut her locker door with a click and spoke into the metal. “Smoking rock, three minutes. And, dear God, lose the sweater.”
    It was chilly out, in that summer-is-gone, but too-early-for-fall kind of way, and I’d planned to wear the cardigan when outside, but I could tell by how Brittany shook her head, as if she was clearing some kind of hideous image from her brain, that she wasn’t going to give on my apparent fashion no. I jerked off the sweater and shoved it into her locker.
    With luck it would fall out when the fashion foursome, as I’d termed a particular clique of popular juniors, strolled by. That would teach my childhood friend to shudder at my wardrobe.
    After that uncharitable act, I hauled myself out to the rock and waited. She arrived ten minutes later.
    She had a denim jacket in her hand. “Here, classic fifties. It was my grandfather’s.” She thrust it toward me. “Not quite the statement of your sweater, but at least people won’t be looking for your little car and big shoes.”
    I took the jacket, but after her gracious comment, kept the thanks to myself.
    She plopped onto the rock next to me. “You saw the paper?”
    I pulled on the jacket. It was big, but not sloppy. Her grandfather must have been tiny. My hands in the pockets, I pulled it around me