Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children, #7)

by Seanan McGuire

even as the girl she’d trusted most in the world had shared a secret that wasn’t hers to share and broken Regan’s heart in half—

I’m talking to a stag, she thought, and it was light and lightning in her veins, it was joy beyond comprehension. It all happened. I was right the whole time. It happened.

The day she was more rat than girl, she would need to be ready to go into hiding, to find a way into the walls in order to save herself from an exterminator’s hands.

too pretty to be clever, too clever to be kind, a pig-in-the-middle girl with her future mapped out for her by the adults who smiled indulgently whenever she tried to ask a question.

on to college for a nice, safe degree, something that would make her better equipped to be a good wife one day, a good helper for a man who was a little less attractive and a little more clever, and maybe both those things were a matter of opinion,

always, always be on display.

“Please, Caroline, please,” she moaned, dropping to her knees in front of one matron, a pretty woman about Miss Lennox’s age, with freckled cheeks and the empty stare of a mannequin. “We were supposed to get out of here together, remember? You and me and whatever door was willing to have us, forever, no matter what anyone said. Don’t you remember?”

The man in front of the door was familiar: she’d seen him around the school with a mop in his hand and a bucket by his

“You,” breathed Miss Lennox. “I remember … I remember you. You’re Headmaster Whitethorn. You didn’t want us to know that. You wanted us to think you were the janitor. You … you hurt me.”