Page 30 of Spring L.A.W.
She backed away, then rushed toward the end of the counter. She didn’t grab her bag or her coat. Or her dignity. She just shoved through the door and hit the sidewalk like she had somewhere urgent to be, which, if you counted not dying,shetotallydid.
Katie didn’t know where she was going. Justaway. Away from the empty face, the too-sharp teeth, the whisper of rats, and handwriting that wasn’t hers.
She didn’t stop until she saw the subway station and had to make the classic New Yorker decision: down into the rat pit or stay up and join in the outdoor chaos. But before she got there, she ran smack-dab into a man in uniform.
9
She bounced off of him like a pinball and stumbled back with an undignified yelp.
“Whoa, Red. Slow down.”
“OhmygodI’msosorry. Wait, no, you shouldn’t stand there, because I was running, but not likejoggingrunning, more like survival running? There was this guy, only he wasn’t a guy, more like a… a bad Photoshop of a guy, and he had no face, and then there were teeth, and my phone is haunted, and also the coffee shop is probably cursed now, and wait, is that arealgun?”
The man in uniform didn’t flinch. Or blink. Or look remotely surprised that a small, clearly fractured teenager had just delivered an unhinged monologue at full volume at 9:27 a.m.
His gaze swept her up and down once, military, clinical, like he was checking for exit wounds or active possession.
“You saw it,” he said flatly.
Katie blinked. “Uh… The teeth? Oh, I saw the teeth. They were very deadly-looking.”
He exhaled through his nose, as if inconvenienced. “Name?”
“Whose?”
He sighed. “Yours.”
“Kaitlyn MacGregor, but everyone calls me Katie. Why?”
“I’m Major Payne. You’re coming with me.”
At first, she chuckled but then cleared her throat. “Okay, but like, can I ask where? Because usually I wait until after the second date to get kidnapped by a guy with authoritarian vibes.”
“You need my help more than you know.” He turned and started walking without further explanation.
She hesitated, becauseobviously, but then glanced over her shoulder, back toward the coffee shop she’d just fled.
A trash can fell over, seemingly on its own, across the street. Rats scuttled out of it, fleeing in all directions.
She ran to catch up with the Major.
Fort Hamilton didn’t looklike a place that housed supernatural secrets. It looked like a government campus that had given up halfway through modernization and just decided to buff up the bricks and call it “historic.”
Payne led her down a set of stairs that screamed “things go missing here,” through a hallway that didn’t see sunlight, and finally into a cramped basement office full of filing cabinets and a conspicuously large stack of inbox folders labeled EMERGENCY RELOCATION PACKETS.
Katie hovered just inside the door, arms crossed. “This feels like ‘witness protection’ with a side of ‘unsanctioned lobotomy.’ Just saying.”
Payne ignored her. He sat at his desk, pressed a button on the ancient landline phone like it was 1998, and said, “Get me Rayna.”
Then he looked up at Katie, his gray-green eyes sharper than she liked.
“You’re not crazy,” he said.
She blinked. “Wow. Not the first time I’ve heard that, but definitely the first time from someone with medals.”
“It sounds like you’re being hunted. You saw the Gray.”
“Is that what it’s called? The Gray? That’s so vague. It’s like naming your ghost Boo.”
