Ink and Bone Read Online Free Page B

something about a motorcycle that drew attention, not all of it good. Except on the road, where other drivers often seemed not to see her at all.
    Shouldering her backpack, she slipped her phone from her pocket and checked the time. Forty minutes until the exam, more than enough time to get an espresso from the commissary and go over her notes in the classroom.
    “I’m ready,” she whispered to herself. “I’ve got this.”
    As she drew nearer to the building, she saw two girls she recognized from her abnormal psychology class. They were walking arm-in-arm, laughing at something they were viewing on a smart phone. She lifted a hand in a timid wave, but they didn’t see her, never glancing up from the screen. Lowering her arm awkwardly, she thought with a sting that she hadn’t made any friends in The Hollows, and she probably never would, freak that she was. Meanwhile, her few friends in Seattle were drifting further and further away, and maybe they’d never been real friends in the first place. Maybe they’d just been people with whom it was easy to get intotrouble. And once you weren’t looking for trouble, suddenly you weren’t fun anymore. Her sour mood deepened.
    When the noise came back it was so loud that it actually startled her, stopping her in her tracks.
    SQUEAK-CLINK.
    Her heart fluttering, she glanced around at the idyllic college campus in autumn, a near-perfect catalog picture of trees and buildings and kids with bright futures carrying backpacks. Nothing dark or odd or out of place. I control my awareness , she said to herself pointlessly. It does not control me.
    A swath of gray clouds washed the sun away, and the air grew cooler. Finley kept moving, passing a beat-up landscaping truck parked near the sidewalk. Beside it, an old man in a wide straw hat languidly trimmed stray branches with an enormous pair of clippers. She felt his eyes on her, but his face was in the shadow of his hat brim.
    He wasn’t the only one staring. A few feet away stood another man, this one young, tousled, leaned against the wall of the building, smoking a cigarette, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. Baggy jeans, sweatshirt too big. Looked like he could use a shower. Had she seen him before?
    “Nice ride,” he said as she drew nearer.
    He had sunken hazel eyes and the determined slouch of the very tall. He must have been over six feet. She did know him, actually. He always sat in the back row of the lecture hall. He had a look about him that she knew too well, heavy lidded and glassy—a stoner like the people she was trying to get away from in Seattle. She could even smell it on him a little, that sweet tang under the tobacco.
    “Thanks,” she said, glancing behind her. The roadster was out of sight, but he must have seen her ride in.
    “Ready for the exam?” he asked.
    The noise had quieted a bit, but she could still hear it. What did it mean? Was she supposed to know why the noise had come back?
    She glanced around, but as per usual in The Hollows, there was nothing to see but trees and sky. Not that it was a bad thing, really,the nothingness. She needed a little less excitement in her life, didn’t she? That’s why she’d come here—to get quiet, to study, to learn more about her abilities from Eloise, to figure out what the hell she was going to do with her life. In the absolutely-zero-going-on department, The Hollows seemed happy to oblige.
    “Maybe,” she said. “You?”
    “I might do okay,” he said.
    He offered a smile that managed to be sweet and a little mischievous all at once.
    He stuck out a hand. “Jason,” he said.
    “Finley.”
    The sound was gone. She looked around and there was just the landscaper trimming, snip, snip, snip . Finley sensed that the gardener was still staring beneath the wide brim of that hat. She couldn’t see his face really, but she could feel the heat of his gaze.
    Dirty old man.
    In another life, she’d have flipped him off. But she was trying to