by Chloe Neill
I thought I was being funny, but I got a peanut in the face for my trouble. I tossed it back at her, but it landed on the shelf behind her in front of one of her tiny owls. She had a collection of those, too. In our more magical days—like last week—I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the owl come to life and pounce on the peanut. But now . . . it was just a bit of wood and some glue.
“There is something to be said for believing in magic,” I agreed. “It’s the keeping it that’s the trouble.”
“You said it.” She finished the rest of her trail mix and dusted off her hands on her pants. “Honestly,” she said, “who am I without magic?”
“You’re a girl,” I said. “A smart girl with a great education, rich parents, fabulous fashion sense, and a great friend. And even if not having magic means you’ll be closer to ‘ordinary’ than ‘magical,’ you’re still pretty extraordinary if you ask me.”
“I’m glad your parents dumped you in Chicago, Parker.”
“Right back at you, Green.” Time to talk about even more uncomfortable subjects. “Jeremiah is gunning for you and your magic. It’s probably time to think about getting the Grimoire somewhere safe.”
“The safest place to keep the Grimoire is with me.”
“Yeah, but what if you’re the Reapers’ target? What if they take you again to get to the Grimoire?”
“I understand the point,” she said, her voice low and serious. It wasn’t a tone I heard her use often. “But there’s no way I’m giving up my Grimoire. That’s exactly what they want—to separate me from it and get their hands on it. That’s why they took me to the sanctuary in the first place.” She shook her head. “No. The Grimoire stays with me. I’ll find a hiding place for it.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re the expert.” I looked around her room, imagining where she might hide it. A cutout inside another book? A secret compartment in her closet? Under her mattress?
“Where are you going to put it?” I wondered.
“I’m not sure yet.”
We sat quietly for a second.
I wanted to be supportive, but I wasn’t really sure how. “Do you want me to stay . . . or go?”
“You should go,” she said, but she didn’t sound happy about it. “If they think you’re the key to the Grimoire, they’ll use you to get it.”
Maybe, but it didn’t make me feel any better that I wouldn’t have any information to tell them. Wasn’t that when they usually stopped the torture on television—when someone gave up the goods? But this wasn’t the time to bring that up.
“You’re right,” I said. “This is between you and your book.” She nodded, and I stood up and walked to the door. “Just don’t forget where it is.”
“Fat chance,” she said.
I walked into the common room and closed the door behind me. This was one of those things she’d have to do on her own. Putting distance between herself and her magic wasn’t comfortable, I knew, but we also couldn’t deny the reality.
After all, we were getting used to that distance.
10
The best way to top off an evening of Reaper spying had to be a morning of trigonometry exams. Not.
But we were students as well as Adepts, so we headed into trig class after cramming as much as possible in the few hours we had left, took our seats, got out our freshly sharpened St. Sophia’s pencils, and waited for the show to start.
“Good luck,” I whispered to Scout, who was in the seat behind me.
She gave me a serious nod. However silly Scout may be most of the time, she was apparently serious about magic . . . and trig tests.
“Make us proud, Parker,” she whispered.
Our trig teacher went through the normal test-taking rules: Don’t talk. Don’t cheat. Stop when time is called. No calculators. Pencils only. Show your work. Then he passed out the tests and wrote the finish time on the board.
“Begin,” he said, and we got busy.
It took a few minutes for me to get into the zone—but I got there eventually. Each problem had two or three parts, so I tried to focus on finishing each part, quickly checking my work, and then moving on to the next. There were a couple I wasn’t sure about, and I hoped I hadn’t screwed up parts two and three because of some stupid error in part one. But we had a limited time to finish the test, so it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.
We were fifteen minutes from the end when a shrill alarm ripped through the silence.
I nearly jumped out of my chair. Some of the other girls did, grabbing their books and dropping their half-finished tests on Dorsey’s desk before running out of the room.
“Fire alarm,” Dorsey dryly said. “If I had ten dollars every time a fire alarm went off in the middle of a test, I’d . . . well, I’d certainly drive a much better car. Turn in your tests and exit the building.”
“But I’m not finished!” cried out one of the brainier girls in the class, the kind who raised her hand to answer every question and always asked about extra credit points, even though there was no way she needed them.
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Dorsey said, holding his hand out and staring her down with a stern expression until she walked toward him and handed it over. It took her a moment, but she finally did, then trotted out of the room with a pile of scratch paper and pencils in hand.
I glanced back at Scout, who was shoving her stuff back into her messenger bag. “Fire alarm?” I wondered.
“For now we assume it’s a fire alarm. And then we see.”
We turned in our tests and joined the traffic toward the exit doors. When we got outside, we clumped together with Lesley, just close enough to the classroom building that we could get a look at the action. But there wasn’t any action that we could see, not even the sound of a fire truck rushing down the block toward us. And there were always fire trucks in downtown Chicago. There was a station pretty close to the convent, and rarely a night went by when we didn’t hear at least one call.
But now . . . nothing.
“I don’t smell smoke,” Lesley said.
“And the building’s stone,” Scout added. “There’s not a lot in there that could actually go up in flames.”
“Suspicious,” I said, watching Foley emerge from the main building followed by a gaggle of dragon ladies.
I looked back at Scout. “We need to know what’s going on—if there’s a fire, or if this is some kind of distraction.”
“And you think Foley’s gonna tell us? Doubtful.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I think we know someone who can get some intel.” I looked at Lesley.
“I’m in,” she simply said, then tilted her head as she looked at Foley and the dragons. “This is easy.”
Without any instructions or warnings, she walked over to Foley. Hands on her hips, she began talking to her. Foley looked surprised, but it looked like she answered whatever Lesley had asked, and then Lesley walked back to us again.
We crowded around her. “What did you say?”
“I asked her if my $78,231 cello was safe in the dorm, or if the dorm was on fire.”
You couldn’t fault her for being direct. “What did she say to that?”
“She said there’s no fire. The company is working to turn off the alarms.”
Scout and I exchanged a glance. “Would someone have tripped the alarm just to get us out of a trig test?” I wondered.
“Like Dorsey said, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Maybe, but it happened now that we know Jeremiah’s gunning for your Grimoire? When he thinks he really needs it? Remember what they said—that they had plans?”
She shrugged. “That’s a lot of coincidence.”
“They could be searching our rooms right now.”
“They could be,” Scout ag
reed. “But they won’t find it. That would be impossible. And I’m not going to tell you where it is,” she added before I could ask. “I don’t want you tortured for it.”
“In that case, thank you very much. Still, we need to get back inside.”
“Yeah, but that’s not exactly going to be easy, is it?” She gestured to the crowd around us, which was still growing as folks filed out of all the school’s buildings. “There are people everywhere.”
“We need a distraction.”
“I’ll take this one, too,” Lesley said, her expression kind of devilish. She cleared her throat and smoothed out her plaid skirt, then began waving her arms in the air.
“My cello! My cello! My gorgeous cello from 1894 that may be burning to a crisp right now! What if it’s on fire? What if it feels pain? Oh, woe, my cello!”
She sounded completely ridiculous, and she looked pretty ridiculous, too. She was running back and forth in a zigzag across the grass, arms flopping around in the air like she’d completely lost it. But she did make a really good distraction. Everyone turned around to look at the crazy teenager who was yelling about her cello. You just didn’t see that kind of thing every day.
As soon as Foley’s back was turned and the rest of the girls were watching Lesley, we snuck around the corner of the building and then raced back to the dorms. But I stopped her before we went inside.
“If this is part of their plan to take the Grimoire, they could still be in there.”
She looked down at her empty hands. “Days like this make me wish I had a wand, you know.” She made two finger guns and pointed them at the door. “Pew pew! Abracadabra.”
“Not really the time for humor.”
“Sorry. I’m nervous.”
I nodded my head, completely understanding the emotion. I was freaking out too, and not just because we might soon be facing down Reapers again. As if last night hadn’t been enough.
What if we were also facing down Sebastian? What if he was part of a team sent to destroy our rooms to find the Grimoire? What if I’d been totally wrong, and he was even worse than I thought he was? What if helping me had all been a plot to get closer to me and Scout . . . and her spellbook?
He was right. I’d never really be able to trust him. I’d never really be able to ignore the possibility that I was being played and he really was as bad as everyone else thought. The first question in my mind would always be “what if,” and I didn’t think there’d ever be a good answer. Especially not if I found him rifling through my stuff.
Oh, God—what if he was rifling through my underwear drawer?
I didn’t hear my name until Scout shouted it. “Lily!”
“What?”
“Where were you just then?”
“You don’t want to know.” I gestured at the door. “Are you ready to go?”
“We have no magic, no weapons, and a school full of dragon ladies on high alert. ‘Ready’ doesn’t really cut it.”
“Actually, we aren’t completely unprepared.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. “It’s broad daylight, and any Reapers would be trespassing. Even if we can’t nail them magically, we can nail them with the law.”
“That totally deserves to be a line in an action movie. I mean, a really crappy action movie, but still.” When I rolled my eyes, she held up her hands. “I know, I know, inappropriate timing. Let’s do this. First sign of trouble, you dial nine-one-one. Got it?”
“Right behind you, Tex.”
We slowly pushed open the door to the dorm building, then walked inside and held it until it closed slowly behind us. We stood inside for a moment, just looking and listening.
And for a moment we didn’t hear anything . . . but then we heard rustling and shuffling that didn’t sound like dragon ladies looking for fire or St. Sophia’s girls returning to their rooms.
“They’re up there, aren’t they?” I asked, my stomach beginning to ball with nerves.
“It sounds like it.” She looked back at me, fear in her eyes. “We have to do this, don’t we?”
I squeezed her hand, faking a confident smile I didn’t really feel. “We do. But we can do it. I promise.”
She blew out a breath, and off we went.
We trekked up to our floor and peeked into the dim hallway. Our door was open, a beam of light shining into the hallway. We could hear rifling and throwing of objects even down the hall. That was when our moods changed.
“You know what?” she whispered. “I was scared. But now I’m really ticked. Who do these people think they are?”
“Infallible, apparently.”
Scout harrumphed, and we tiptoed down the hallway to the suite door. She pointed to herself, and then she pointed up. She pointed at me, and then she pointed down. I think she was telling me to go low, and she’d go high.
I nodded, and just like two totem pole heads, we peeked into the room.
The suite was in shambles. Every bedroom door was open, and our formerly organized belongings were thrown about everywhere, including little bits of pink from Amie’s room that were mixed into the rubble. It looked like her stuff had bled into the room. Either they didn’t know whose room was whose, or they had a suspicion that Scout had hidden her Grimoire in there. As if.
And on the floor in front of my doorway was the fractured remains of the crappy—but important—ashtray that Ashley, my best friend from my hometown in New York, had made for me. One big hunk and a lot of shards and crumbs were all that was left of a treasured memento.
I probably could have cried a little, but instead I got even angrier.
We couldn’t see the Reapers, but it sounded like there were two of them—one in Scout’s room and one in mine. I glanced down at the floor of the suite and looked for a weapon. There was a pink golf club on the floor—expensive-looking and surely Amie’s.
I crept inside and picked it up, then held it like a baseball bat. Scout did the same thing with a silver desk lamp that had probably been in Lesley’s room.
“All right, buttwipes!” she yelled out. The noise stopped immediately. “We’re here, and the cops are on their way. You aren’t going to find what you’re looking for, so I suggest you find your way out of our rooms before we move in with our crew to bust some heads!”
“Our crew?” I silently mouthed to Scout. She just shrugged, but I took her point. We probably weren’t much of a threat on our own.
“One, two, three!” she mouthed, and then let out a loud whoop and charged toward her room. Sucking in a breath, I did the same thing toward mine, and stared in shock.
There was a cheerreaper in my room—a Reaper in a green and gold cheerleading uniform, complete with blond ponytail and bow perched right at the top of her head.
Lauren Fleming, a Reaper who’d tried to sneak into the school before, was standing in the middle of the room, a pair of my quilted patent leather boots under one arm, the remains of the rest of my stuff at her feet.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, raising the golf club.
She snarled at me like a crazy little Chihuahua. “Get out of my way, peon.”
“Yeah, that’s nice language. The cops are on their way, so you might want to put down the boots. If you leave now, since you clearly aren’t going to find what you’re looking for”—the expression on her face proved that was true—“we might manage to not beat the crap out of you for breaking in here.”
“Whatever,” she said, then hurled the boots at me. I half turned to dodge them, then swung out with the golf club. I missed, and took a chunk of stone out of the wall. Lauren darted around and plucked books from my bookshelf, then began hurling them at me. I batted them back with the golf club, but missed my history book and winced when it hit me in the shoulder.
Lauren saw her chance and tried to slip past me into th
e common room. I managed to swat her back with the club, but the shot didn’t land very hard. She took off out of the suite and down the hallway. I ran out and pulled out my camera, snapping a picture of her back before she took the stairs.
Since I could still hear the sounds of fighting coming from Scout’s room, she apparently didn’t have any regrets about leaving her partner behind. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and ran to Scout’s room.
Despite years of being a teenager and months of being an Adept, there in the middle of Scout’s room was probably the strangest thing I’d ever seen.
Lying on the floor was a girl I knew only as “French Horn”—another Reaper who’d previously tried to break into the school with Lauren. She and Lauren hadn’t been friends then, and if Lauren was willing to run away without helping her partner, I was guessing they hadn’t gotten any closer.
She was a larger girl, and she had a thing for black clothes and Goth looks. And she lay in the middle of Scout’s room on her stomach, with a very angry-looking spellbinder sitting on her back, lamp in the air like a samurai sword.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
French Horn spewed some curse words that were pretty typical Reaper.
“Language, language,” Scout said, tapping the bottom of the lamp gently against the Reaper’s head.
“Did she come in through the tunnel again?” I wondered.
More cursing.
“Seriously, I don’t know about your high school for angry misfits and teamsters, but we are classy at St. Sophia’s. Enough with the swearing. Now answer the girl’s question.”
“Tunnel,” she said, then turned her head away. Reaper or not, this couldn’t exactly be a comfortable position for her to be in, especially since her partner had left her at the mercy of two irritated Adepts.
“Tunnel plus fire alarm equals breaking and entering,” Scout said. “And I’m going to guess you’re looking for something that doesn’t belong to you.”
When French Horn began to answer, Scout flicked her on the head. “I wasn’t asking for a response. Hear this, Reaper. What’s in my book won’t help you. If it did, don’t you think we’d have used it already?”