The Outside

  We kept a few cultures of the vaccine in various homes, including the Hexenmeister’s. The army clucked and muttered over the rest, and they took it with them when they fixed their tank and rolled out in late February. Simmonds said that they had a duty to bring the vaccine to the rest of the world.

  Elijah went with them. I understood that he was searching for something, something that had been unfulfilled at home. I had been there, and I wished him well as he marched away with the soldiers, the only Plain-dressed man in their green ranks. I had given him Ginger’s wedding rings and her glasses, asked him to find her husband and give them to him.

  And there had been no more attacks of the Darkness since the schoolhouse. Alex speculated that somehow, the holiness of our land had been restored.

  I wasn’t sure, but I wanted it to be that way. And I tried my best.

  As the ice thawed, I slowly climbed up on ladders and began to paint hex signs. I painted one over the door of my parents’ house, another over the Hexenmeister’s. I painted them on every barn and house I could find. The work helped me grow stronger, as the ground softened and the grass began to push up from the mud. My parents had even gathered a group of people to do a barn raising, to rebuild the place that had been my sanctuary before the soldiers had taken it over. I had considered moving Horace back into it, but he had grown attached to the Hexemeister’s horses. The three of them were inseparable, and it seemed cruel to take him away.

  Alex had begun to work his way into the fabric of the community, the way that he had worked his way into my life. He started teaching at the schoolhouse. No Outsider had ever been allowed to teach in that room before, but he had a gift for helping the boys and girls understand their numbers and letters. And the older ones felt safe in asking questions about science and philosophy, things living vibrantly in the vast library of his mind. The students would often stay after class, sitting on the steps of the schoolhouse with him and Fenrir and a couple of puppies that looked like wolves with floppy golden retriever ears, listening to him talk about lightning and geography and the history of the printing press. I would come to the school at the end of each day, and we would walk away, hand in hand, with the dogs bounding around us. I knew that the children had never seen this kind of relationship before—a partnership of equals, a Plain woman and an English man.

  Things were changing. I think that we were keeping to the root of who we were, not giving that up. But we were adapting.

  I was working paint into the side of a barn one morning in March when I heard a sound that I hadn’t heard in a very long time: the caw of a raven.

  I turned around to gaze at the field behind me. A solitary raven was walking along the base of a fence, his head bobbing. He was looking at the sky, calling.

  I watched him.

  More of his fellows came. They came from the trees and the blue sky, hundreds of them chattering, swirling in black. It was as if they’d been separated on grand adventures and they were eager to tell each other of their exploits.

  I smiled, knowing that we would have a future. It wouldn’t be a future any of us expected or imagined.

  But there would be a future.

  About the Author

  LAURA BICKLE’s professional background is in criminal justice and library science. When she’s not patrolling the stacks at the public library, she’s dreaming up stories about the monsters under the stairs, and writing contemporary fantasy novels under the name Alayna Williams. Laura lives in Ohio with her husband and five mostly-reformed feral cats. The Hallowed Ones was her first teen novel. For more about Laura, please visit her website at: www.laurabickle.com.