Page 9 of Bows & Eros
She startled, her head jerking up and tossing back her sleek curtain of golden hair. "Noor!" she said in a strangled voice, throwing herself into my arms. "Oh, thank God. Where did yougo?"
"To get help," I whispered back, patting her awkwardly about the shoulders. "Are you okay?"
"I mean, I'm still sane," she replied with a sniffle, pulling back and blinking at me. "So I guess better than Ms. Mayflower and Bert the custodian are, raising dust bunnies in the utility closet! Or worse. It's hard to really say, you know? This is all so surreal."
I squeezed her where I held her by the forearms, skimming over the sea of faces in the classroom in search of Aaron. Almost every pair of eyes in the room was dutifully reflecting back the cartoon sing-along on screen, but I didn't see the face I was looking for.
"I think I can help fix this," I whispered to Hazel, snapping her attention to my face immediately.
"How?!"
"I need Aaron Weaver and that substitute teacher that was filling in for Miss Yelin today. Curie. Do you know where either of them are?"
She wrinkled her brow and did her own quick scan of the classroom, seemingly not realizing until that exact moment that Aaron Weaver was not in her flock. "Oh, crap," she said.
"So that's a no?"
"That's a no," she agreed.
I gave her a little tug and nodded toward the door. "Come out into the hall so we can talk normally for a second. I have Aaron's dad out there to help us find him."
She raised her eyebrows but did not otherwise reply to this nugget of information. We skirted along the wall to avoid stepping on any little hands and slipped out into the eerie quiet of the hallway again where Ethan Weaver was waiting for us, leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest.
He straightened and almost immediately his brows drew together in consternation. "Where's my son?"
"Yes, we're trying to figure that out presently," I snapped back, perhaps more defensively than necessary. "He's not with the other children, and as several of those airplanes have made their way out into the town, I'm beginning to fear that maybe he left campus."
"Oh, God," Hazel moaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. "He's the one throwing the airplanes?"
"Yep."
"What airplanes?!" Ethan demanded.
I took a breath, knowing that there was nothing to do but just say it.
"Look, this is going to sound nuts, but your kid is creating magical paper airplanes and throwing them at people," I said, turning to face him completely so that I could put as much dignified gravity behind that statement as was possible. "Some stranger in a designer suit showed up and taught him how, and now both of them are gone."
Ethan's face went slack for a moment, his jaw setting with an expression I'd describe closer to irritation than disbelief. "The guy in the suit," he said after a moment, "blond? Cherub cheeked?"
I nodded, tilting my head at him.
Ethan's eyes glittered with anger. "And was he wearing wings anywhere on his person? Embroidered on his jacket, maybe?"
Hazel just gaped at us.
"Painted on his shoes?" Ethan prompted.
"Yes!" I realized, my eyes going wide. "Yes, he had little wings etched into the leather of his shoes! I would have missed it if I hadn't been studying him thoroughly."
Ethan cursed, not loudly, but his word choice was scandalous enough to get a little gasp out of both myself and Hazel. Somehow, in all the ways I'd seen this conversation unfolding, I had not for a moment suspected that this scenario would soundfamiliarto Mr. Weaver.
"Were any of the students hit?" he asked Hazel. "The teenagers?"
"A few," she said with a shrug. "We were more concerned with keeping everything PG in the auditorium until we could get the little ones out than with wrangling teenagers. Most of them probably just sneaked away to make out.”
He gave a humorless laugh. "Is that all you did as teenagers?" he asked us. "Make out?"
There was a brief beat of horrified silence.
