Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,25

eagle I don’t know how many times and had never really looked at it closely. But my mind was telling me it looked different tonight, even though I couldn’t conjure an image of what it usually looked like.

I had a vague notion that the eagle was usually just sitting there on its pedestal, gazing majestically out at the city. But tonight its head was slightly lowered, its beak open as if in a shriek, its posture suggesting it was about to leap off and attack some unsuspecting prey. I quickly glanced at the matching figure on the other side of the street, and it, too, looked poised to attack.

It had to be my imagination running wild with me again. No one else walking by was giving the eagle even a brief glance. Then again, the changes were pretty subtle. If I hadn’t already been in a vulnerable state of mind I probably wouldn’t have noticed it myself.

I let out a heavy sigh and shook my head. That was the explanation right there—I was in a vulnerable state of mind, and so the stone eagle suddenly looked menacing to me.

“Get a grip, Becket,” I muttered to myself, shaking my head. I fixed my gaze on the pavement in front of me, ordered myself not to go looking for weirdness, and continued on my way home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The following Monday morning, when I walked to the train station, I paused to take a close look at the eagles. They looked perfectly normal. Not at all threatening. Their heads were up, their beaks closed, their posture rigid and upright.

Obviously I’d let the power of suggestion get the best of me on Friday night. That was the only logical explanation for what I’d thought I saw.

I can’t say I convinced myself, and I felt all cold and shivery for the rest of the trip into school. There comes a point when “logical” explanations stop being logical, and I was perilously close to that point.

I decided I really needed to talk to someone about what was happening to me. Someone who wouldn’t force me to go see a doctor but who might have a little more perspective. The only logical candidate for such a conversation was Piper, but the trick was to get her to hold still for it. Her crammed social calendar made it so I had to plan any get-togethers well in advance, and that was hard to do when Dad still had my phone under lock and key. My best chance was to lurk near her locker and catch her before school started. I wasn’t about to talk about the craziness in school, where just about anyone might hear, but maybe she’d have time to go for a cup of coffee or something after school. It would get me home late once again, but I’d just have to take responsibility for keeping an eye on the time and making sure I wasn’t so late I couldn’t blame the train for it.

Piper was already at her locker when I got there, still dressed in her coat, so she couldn’t have beaten me in by more than a few seconds. I noticed she was wearing a pair of skinny jeans under the coat, and assumed she also had a kilt or tunic on and was just wearing the jeans to keep her legs warm. Or maybe she was planning to change before heading off to homeroom.

“Hey there, Becket,” she said cheerfully as she opened her locker and then slipped her coat off.

I was momentarily at a loss for words, because when she took her coat off I could see that not only was she not wearing a tunic or kilt, she also wasn’t wearing a white button-down shirt. Instead, she had on a faded black T-shirt with a huge marijuana leaf splashed across the chest. Even on the occasional days when we were allowed to come to school out of uniform, that T-shirt wouldn’t have passed muster.

Piper grinned at my shocked expression. “What do you think? Will they send me home or just give me a couple of detentions?”

You get detention for wearing stuff that doesn’t quite meet the uniform code. You don’t get it for completely ignoring the code. Not only was she going to be sent home, she was probably going to be suspended.

“What are you doing?” I asked her, shaking my head.

“I’m sick of school,” she said. “My grades wouldn’t get me into Harvard or Yale or anything, even if I wanted