Gaby took a sideways-facing seat near the rear of the bus, and kept her eyes on the road behind them. Her eyes swept the sidewalks, the curbside gutters, the peeling road stripes, watching for a patch of darker pavement that shouldn’t be there. After several stops, having seen nothing, she got out. There was a small plaza here, two stories high, and on the corner was a coffee shop with large windows overlooking the parking lot below. Gaby climbed the stairs quickly, entered the coffee shop, and found a seat at the window, where she could watch the ground below.
She was aware of the barista’s eyes on her, though she did not take her own gaze off the parking lot. She must look peculiar. She had not brushed her hair, and she was still wearing the rumpled sweat pants she’d gone to bed in, and here she was staring fixedly out the window as if her life depended on it. Under the circumstances, it was perfectly legitimate behavior, but no stranger could be blamed for thinking it was odd. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she heard someone come up behind her.
“Hey, are you okay?” the barista asked. Gaby took her eyes off the pavement with great reluctance.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, taking in all the information she could about the barista. She was older, in her twenties maybe, with tight cornrows and three piercings in each ear. Under the apron bearing the coffee shop’s logo, she wore bold red-and-black-striped tights. Her eyes were both sharp and compassionate; Gaby guessed she had had plenty of friends in plenty of kinds of trouble before, and wouldn’t be shy about interfering with a younger person who might need help. “Really,” Gaby repeated. “I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I came out to look at the city. I like to draw early in the morning.” She pulled out her notebook and a pencil, and gave the barista a comradely smile. Surely she had friends who were restless artistic types, if she wasn’t one herself. It took all Gaby’s effort not to glance continually back out the window. The shadows might be gathering now, and she missing them.
The barista smiled back, not entirely convinced, but willing to let it go. “Okay,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything, K?”
Gaby nodded. “Thanks.” As soon as the barista started to move away, she turned her eyes back to the parking lot. Nothing moved. Had they come already? Or not yet? She decided to give them half an hour, and then assume they were already here.
For the eyes of the barista, Gaby began sketching idly, keeping her eyes on the road. She should have made it poetry, she thought. She wasn’t any good at drawing, though Will had tried to teach her a few times. She wasn’t any good at poetry either, but she could have just copied out some of her dad’s lyrics. Oh well, she thought, and ignoring the actual marks they made, she copied the movements she’d seen in Will’s hand and arm so many times. Of the eight Colven children, Paul and Will had inherited considerable artistic talent from somewhere; at seventeen, Paul had been poised to go to art school, and the family had proudly proclaimed that he would make them famous someday. Will was neither as devoted nor as talented—one of the only areas where Will knew himself to be second-best at something—but he had studied with his older brother, and was particularly good with charcoal sketches.
After an amused glance at the meaningless jumble of lines she had produced, Gaby’s attention was arrested by a flicker of movement below. She sat forward, looking keenly. There it was: just the faintest shaded spot on the pavement, moving slowly, like a drifting cloud. She watched for ten full seconds, just to be sure, then threw her notebook and pencil back in the bag and stood up.
She could see the bus stop from the window, and there were a few people gathered there. Enough to keep her safe. She waved to the barista as she hurried out of the coffee shop, down the back stairs, and across to the bus stop. Once she was there, she turned her eyes back to the parking lot, but the light was too dim to see any shadow from here. It didn’t matter, she told herself, exactly where it was, as long as it was following her. She contented herself with watching the ground around her feet, and the spaces between the other people at the bus stop. She probably looked at least as odd as she had in the coffee shop, but she didn’t think anyone here would care.
She boarded the bus, still unsure where the shadow-hound was, and continued with the same game: after several stops, she would get out, find a good vantage point, wait until the hound had caught up, then go on again. Two hours later, it was mid-morning, and she had led her pursuer far downtown. Now for the second stage of the plan. She stopped at a sandwich place that had just opened—she’d had enough of coffee shops to last her a month—and called a taxi company. They said they’d be here in twenty minutes, which suited her fine. If the hound hadn’t caught up to her by then, he’d be close. She ordered a sandwich and sat by the window to wait.
It caught up with her just a minute or two before the taxi arrived. The sunlight was stronger now, and the shadow clearer; its shape was still fuzzy, but the dark patch of pavement outside the shop could not be mistaken. It paced back and forth in front of the window for a minute, then stopped, directly outside Gaby’s place. The shape changed to become vaguely triangular, and Gaby guessed it was sitting down to wait. From here, she knew, it would be sending out its signals—whatever they were—to the other dogs, and possibly to its masters. If Gaby were to stay here all day and into the night, then either she would be attacked like Mr. Colven when no one else was around, or she would disappear like Paul had, or the shop would mysteriously catch fire and burn to rubble while she fled, as any place they had taken shelter had done. But she was only here for a few minutes, and the shop was busy with customers, so she took a strange pleasure in staring at the hound’s shadow, knowing it couldn’t do anything, knowing she was about to slip away from it again.
None of the other people walking by noticed the shadow. Some of them even walked right through it. Gaby and Will had tried to solve the puzzle of how corporeal the shadow-hounds were, but the evidence was contradictory. They could run down a busy highway, seemingly without any fear of being hit, but their assault on Hannah had made it clear that they could both attack and be attacked. Will and Gaby had speculated many times, but had always ended by setting the question in the “Needs More Data” category.
The taxi pulled up to the curb, and Gaby went out to meet it. The shadow changed shape again, and moved toward her, but she walked calmly toward the cab. There was nothing it could do; there were too many witnesses. She got into the cab and glanced out before shutting the door. It was still there, standing just a foot or two away, waiting. Her one worry had been that it might find a way to get into the cab with her, but it didn’t even appear to be trying. With a grin she couldn’t contain, Gaby threw the remains of her sandwich at it.
“See ya, doggy,” she said under her breath. The cab driver was looking at her oddly in the rearview mirror. She grinned at him, too, and gave him the address of her school. The plan was working flawlessly. In a minute she would be speeding back uptown. Well, not speeding exactly; this was Atlanta. But traveling much faster than the dog could follow. By the time they got to the school, it would be miles behind, and she’d have at least an hour to meet up with Will. As they drove out of the parking lot, she looked back, expecting to see the shadow following closely, but she couldn’t find it until she looked back to the side of the curb, where a half-eaten sandwich was disappearing curiously. Let the passers-by wonder about that.
They made good time driving back to the school; they pulled into the parking lot a little after ten. Gaby knew Will must have left his note around lunchtime yesterday, but she was hoping he’d show up early. She paid the driver, and asked him to wait until she got inside; the school lot was nearly deserted, and prudence demanded she not walk alone, even though she was sure her pursuer was miles behind.
She walked slowly toward the school, looking keenly at the shadows of cars, the shadows around the building. For a second she thought she saw something move to her right, and froze, staring at the spot, telling herself it was probably her imagination. Then suddenly it was coming toward her, sliding along the ground, a patch of racing darkness. In the time it took to blink, a second shadow joined it, then a third. Gaby stepped backward slowly, then panic kicked in and she fled toward the cab. Standing with her back to the door, knowing the driver must be staring at her, she scanned the ground. They weren’t chasing her. Looking further back, over the neat lines of the parking lot, she saw the three who had been running toward her fall back, where they were joined by two others. They separated and spread out across the expanse of the lot. Stunned, Gaby watched the five shadows prowling back and forth across the pavement, like searchlights reflected off clouds.
All her morning’s work had been in vain; all her careful drawing-off of that one pursuing hound. How they had known to come here was a question for later. What was she going to do now? Her confidence of the morning had evaporated with the shock of seeing them. She fought to keep her mind clear, assessing the situation, calculating the risks: how many people would be inside the school at this hour? Would the dogs dare follow her inside? Were they here to kill her or only to drive her? It was hard to think clearly when your stomach was twisting in terror. She stood there for five, ten, twenty minutes—she couldn’t have told—until the driver rapped on the window.
“Hey, kid,” he shouted. “You going in or what?”
Gaby shook her head mutely. All calculations aside, she couldn’t walk past them, alone. No chance. She opened the door and climbed trembling back into the cab. She gave him the first address she thought of: a school where her mother taught classes.
“That’ll be another ten,” he said, looking skeptically at her in the rearview mirror.
“Yeah,” said Gaby. She went ahead and pulled out the money. “Here. Just quickly, please.”
They pulled away from the high school, and no longer caring how strange she appeared, Gaby buried her head in her knees. For now, all she could take in was that it had gone wrong. Instead of reuniting with her partner and friend, she was running scared again, running from someone whose knowledge, abilities, and goals she could make no sense of. Running alone.
