Chapter 175

The burden of their suspicious stares weighed heavily down upon me. Every surreptitious sideways glance through narrowed eyes. Every blatant, bold glare filled with revulsion and mistrust. Every cold scowl that followed me wherever I went. I felt them all. And I certainly didn't need any powers of telepathy to know what they were thinking. Traitor, they accused silently. Traitor, traitor, traitor. Eventually the uncomfortable silence beat so loudly against my skull that I went in search of Harper, although I wasn't sure whether I was leaping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. He had hardly spoken a word to me himself since I had left Le Loup Rouge and filled them all in on what had occurred while inside. I found him, laying down on our make-shift bed in the school hall, which had been appropriated into a dormitory of sorts with the old gym mats used as beds. The scent of blood still hung in the air after the survivors of Oxleas and the Second Cleansing had fled