by Chloe Neill
They looked at one another, shared glances.
“This is your chance to step forward,” I said, my voice low, earnest. “The chance to do the right thing, even if it’s the hard thing.”
“The rules—,” Katie began, but Jason (finally!) shook his head.
“It’s too late for that,” he said. “For rules. We’re losing this battle. Today, we risk losing a spellbinder. We can’t afford that.” More softly, he added, “Not as Adepts, not as friends.”
He walked to me, then reached out his hand and slipped his fingers into mine. A spark slid up my arm at the contact, and I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.
“He’s right,” Michael said, then glanced around from Adept to Adept. “They’re both right, and you know it. All of you know it. It’s time to do things differently. To do the hard thing. Who’s with me?”
Soft sounds filled the room as Adepts looked around, shuffled feet, made their decisions.
“I’m in,” Paul said, then smiled cheekily at me. “And, for the sake of having said it, it’s nice to meet you.”
I smiled back.
Jamie and Jill exchanged a glance, then stepped forward. “We’re in,” Jamie said.
Hands on my hips, a satisfied grin on my face, I glanced back at Katie and Smith, who now stood together, eyes narrowed, fury in their expressions.
“This is not how we operate,” she said. “These are not the rules of the game.”
“Then the rules need to change,” Jason said, then looked over at me. “Let’s go get your girl.”
20
“I was going to find you,” Jason whispered, his fingers still laced through mine as we left the enclave, two angry Varsity Adepts in our wake. But instead of walking toward St. Sophia’s along the Millie 23 path, we moved deeper into the tunnels.
“As soon as I could get away, I was going to find you so we could get Scout together. But I couldn’t say that in front of everyone else.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I vaguely said, not entirely sure I was ready to forgive him for not taking my side the first time around. Of course, I wasn’t so unsure that I let go of his hand.
“Okay,” he said, “then how about this—if you don’t believe me, then consider this my one screw-up.” He looked down at me. “I should have—we all should have—stuck up for her like you did in there. So let me make it up to you now. To both of you.”
I squeezed his hand.
When we reached a crossroads—a union of four tunnels, the ceiling arched above us—we stopped.
“All right,” Jason said, “we’re here, and we’ve got a goal. Now we need a plan.”
Paul snorted. “You mean now that we’ve thoroughly pissed off Varsity?”
“He’s right,” said the slightly taller of the twins. “We’ll get a lecture supreme when we get back.”
“If we get back,” Michael muttered, then lifted worried eyes to Jason. “How are we going to manage this?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out.”
I held up a hand. “First things first. Where are we going?”
“There’s a sanctuary,” Michael said, hitching a thumb toward one of the tunnels. “It’s near here—the Reaper lodge for this part of Chicago. It’s also where they store their vessels.”
“Vessels?” I asked.
“The people—humans or Adepts—the older ones feed from. The ones the younger Reapers siphon energy from.” So a sanctuary was a room of would-be zombies, their lives dripping away because members of the Dark Elite were too self-centered to let go of their magical gifts.
“My God,” I muttered, my skin suddenly crawling. I glanced behind me in the direction of the tunnel we’d come from, suddenly unsure if walking into a trap was a good idea, rescue mission or not.
But then I looked down, my fingers skimming the fabric of Scout’s messenger bag, and got an idea.
“The Reapers probably think we’ll come for her,” I said, looking up at Jason, spring blue eyes staring back. “That we’ll storm the castle, this sanctuary, to get her back.”
“Probably,” Jason agreed, then tilted his head, curiosity in his expression.
“Well, if that’s what they expect, then we should do the thing they aren’t expecting. We flank them—create a distraction. Pull them out and away from Scout. And when they’re distracted, we send in a team to sneak her out again.”
There was silence for a moment, and I had to work not to shuffle my feet.
“That’s actually not bad, Parker,” Jason said. “I’m impressed.”
“I ate a good lunch today.”
“So who does what?” Paul asked.
“I can read the building,” Michael said. “I can read it, figure out where she is.” I guessed that meant Michael was preparing to use his powers.
“In that case, how about Jamie, Michael, and Parker go in, find Scout, get out.” Jason looked at Paul. “You, me and Jill will play the distraction game. Are you guys up for a little snow and ice?”
The twins looked at each other and broke into precocious grins. “Absolutely,” said the taller one, her aqua eyes shining. “Snow and ice are right up my alley.”
Jason nodded managerially. “Then let’s talk details.”
Like the enclave, the Reaper sanctuary was housed underground in the cavelike innards of a former power substation, still connected to the tunnels beneath the city. We’d use two entrances—the main door, where Jill, Paul, and Jason would create their distraction—and the back door, where Jamie, Michael, and I would sneak in, hopefully undetected, find Scout, and get out again. I was solely support staff—Michael and Jamie would handle any Reapers, while I’d help take care of Scout and get her safely from the building. We’d all rendezvous in the crossroads again, hopefully with one additional—and healthy—nose-ringed Adept in tow.
The plans and our cues established, we prepared to split up.
“Are you all right with this?”
I looked over at Jason, my heart quickening at the concern in his eyes, and nodded. “Turning on lights isn’t much, but it’s something. Maybe I can figure out a way to contribute.” Assuming I could learn to control it in the next ten or fifteen minutes, I silently added.
He tilted his head at me. “You were serious about that—the lights?”
I smiled ruefully. “Turns out, the darkening wasn’t a fake.” I raised my hands and shook them in faux excitement. “Yay.”
“All right,” Michael said. “Everybody ready?”
“Ready,” Jason said, then leaned down and whispered, his lips at my cheek, “You take care, Lily Parker. And I’ll see you in a little while.”
Goose bumps pebbled my skin. “You, too,” I whispered.
“All right,” he said, his voice echoing through the tunnels. “Let’s do this.” He nodded at Paul and Jill, and they started on their way, moving through the tunnel to the left.
Michael, Jamie, and I shared a glance, nodded our readiness, and headed to the left.
The walk wasn’t short, but the tunnels allowed us to move swiftly beneath the hustle and bustle of downtown Chicago to find the place where Reapers conducted some of their soul sucking. A few turns and corridors, and then the tunnel opened onto a platform, a set of stairs of corrugated iron leading up to a rusty metal door.
We stopped just inside the edge of the tunnel—Michael signaling quiet with a raised fist—and stared at the platform. No movement. No sound. No indication of surly, magic-bearing teenagers.
“Let’s go,” Michael whispered after a moment, and we crept toward the stairs—Michael in front, me in the middle, Jamie behind. Since Jill was going to be making ice for Jason’s distraction, I assumed Jamie was the twin with fire powers. I still wasn’t sure what a reader or fire witch could do, but I hoped that whatever it was could help us find Scout.
We took the steps to the door, but Michael, in the lead, didn’t open it. Instead, he pressed his palm to it, then closed his eyes. After a moment of silence, he shook his head.
“Pain and loss,” he said. “All through the building, through the steel, the brick, the city above. The pain leaks, fills the city. All because they won’t make the sacrifice.”
Another few seconds of silence passed. I stared at him, rapt, as he communed with the architecture. Suddenly, he yanked his hand back as if the door had gone white-hot. He rubbed the center of his palm with his other hand, then glanced back at us. “She’s in there.”
Jamie smiled softly at Michael “We’ll find her.”
At Michael’s nod that he was ready to move, we tried the door, found it unlocked. It opened into a hallway that led deeper into the building. The hallway was empty. We stood in the threshold for a moment, gazes scanning for Reapers.
“It’s too quiet,” Jamie softly said, her tone unconvinced that it was going to stay that way.
“That’s the point of distraction,” Michael pointed out, “to keep things as quiet as possible for us.”
A frigid breeze suddenly moved through the hallway.
“Jill is working,” Jamie whispered, the breeze apparently evidence of the ice witch’s work. “That’s our cue to move.”
We walked inside, Jamie lagging behind just long enough to ensure that the door closed silently behind us. “All right, Mikey,” she said, “where do we go?”
Michael nodded, then pressed his hand to the hallway wall. “Down the hall. There’s a room. Empty—no, not empty. A girl. A soul. Damaged. But she’s there.”
He opened his eyes again and looked at me, his expression tortured. It wasn’t hard to guess how he felt about her, even if she didn’t reciprocate those feelings. “She’s there.”
Jamie looked at me, her aqua irises suddenly swirling with fire. Goose bumps rose on my arms. “Then let’s go,” she said.
Without warning, a crash echoed through the building, the floor rumbling beneath us. “Alex,” I murmured. The bringer of earthquakes.
“And probably her crew,” Jamie agreed, taking the lead. “We need to move.”
We hustled down the hallway, pausing at each open door to peek inside, look for Scout, make sure we weren’t walking into a bevy of Reapers. But there was no one, nothing. No signs of people—Reaper or otherwise. Nothing but old, industrial equipment and rusty pipes.
“It’s too quiet,” Jamie said as we neared a set of double doors at the end of the hall. “Distraction or not, this is too quiet.”
“Here,” Michael said, suddenly pushing through the double doors without thought of what might await him on the other side. “She’s . . . here.”
I followed him in, lights flickering above us, the rhythm of the lights as quick as my heartbeat. The room was big and concrete, giant tubs and shelving along the sides. It looked like a storage facility they’d tried to turn into some kind of ceremonial hall, a long red carpet running down the middle aisle, a gold quatrefoil on a purple banner hanging from one end. The Reaper symbol, I realized, there for all to see.
And below the banner lay Scout on a long table, her body buckled down with wide leather straps around each ankle and wrist, her arms pinned to her side.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered.
She looked pale—even more so than usual. He cheeks seemed sunken, and dark circles lay beneath her eyes. Her collarbone was visible. Her usually vibrant blond and brown hair lay in a pale corona around her head. But for the rise and fall of her chest, I’d have wondered if we’d arrived too late.
I had to bite my lip to keep tears from slipping over my lashes. “What happened to her?” I whispered.
Michael moved around her and began to work one of the buckles around her ankles. “Reapers,” he said. “This is what they do, Lily. They steal things that don’t belong to them.”
Where there had been sadness, fear, trepidation, in his voice . . . now there was fury. Michael tugged at one leather buckle, freed the pin, then pulled loose the strap. “These kids, these adults, these people, think they have the right to take the lives of others, and for what? For what?”
Michael mumbled a string of words in Spanish, and while I didn’t understand exactly what he’d said, I got the gist. The boy was pissed.
He bobbed his head toward her wrists, which were pinned near her head. “Jamie, keep an eye on the door. Get ready to raise flame if we need it. Lily, get her wrist restraints.”
I jumped to the other end of the table and started fumbling with Scout’s restraints. She lifted her head as I reached her, blinking with the one eye that wasn’t bruised and swollen, but she didn’t speak. They must have hit her while she was being restrained. I hoped she fought back. I hoped she gave as good as she got.
“I think you’ve managed to get yourself into some kind of mess here,” I said with a small grin, trying to make her laugh, trying to keep my heart from thumping out of my chest. “I thought you were going to keep yourself safe?”
She tried a smile, but winced in pain. “I’ll try harder next time, Mom,” she said, her voice cracking.
“You’d better,” I said, fumbling with the latch on the first buckle. “We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?”
She nodded, then put her head back on the table. “I’m tired, Lil. I just—I think I’ll just go home and sleep.”
“Stay awake, Scout. We’re going to get you out, but I need you to stay awake.”
“Hurry, Lily,” Michael implored, and I heard the clank as her first ankle restraint was loosed. “I don’t know how much time we’ll have.” He moved around the table to get a better angle on her other ankle.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I assured him.
We’d just managed to untie her, to loosen all her restraints, and help her sit up and swing her feet over the bed when, without warning, the door at the other end of the room, crashed open, falling in on its hinges.
Dark-haired Sebastian, the boy with firespell, walked inside. My breath quickened at the sight of him, and my back tightened at the memory of the pain he’d inflicted. Alex walked in behind him.
“Stay with Scout,” Michael murmured. I nodded, and braced my body to help support her as he stepped away and in front of us, a human shield.
“Oh, look,” Alex said. “It’s an entire band of Buffy wanna-be’s.”
“Better Buffy wanna-be’s than would-be zombies,” Jamie said. “You guys are rotting corpses waiting to happen. That’s gonna put a hitch in those Abercrombie catalog plans, don’t you think?”
Alex growled and tried to take a step toward us, but Sebastian put a hand on her arm.
“I assume the vitriol means you’re all acquainted,” a third person said. Sebastian and Alex stepped aside, and he stepped into the gap between them.
He was tall, thin, silver haired, distinguished looking. He wore a crisp black suit, with a white, button-up shirt beneath. Every hair was in place, every bit of fabric perfectly creased. His eyes were pale blue, watery, red at the edges. But there was something about his eyes—something wrong. They were empty—dangerously empty.
“Mr. Garcia,” he said, his voice flat, bored, as he bobbed his head toward Michael. Jamie moved to stand beside Michael, a supernatural barrier between us and the bad guys. “Ms. Riley,” he said. I guessed that was Jamie.
And then the man leveled his watery gaze at me, and I shuddered reflexively.
“I don’t believe we’re acquainted,” he said, just before Sebastian leaned in and whispered something to him.
The man’s eyebrows lifted in interest.
My stomach fell, and I hunched a little closer to the table behind me. I was confident I did not want this guy interested in me.
“Aha,” he said, sliding his hands into his pockets. “The girl who, shall we say, became closely acquainted with Mr. Born’s magic?”
I took a moment to glare at Sebastian, who I assumed had mentioned that he’d hit me with firespell during my fateful trip into the basement.
But more interesting was the look I got back from him. I expected disdain or irritation—the emotions on Alex�
�s face. But Sebastian looked almost . . . apologetic.
“I’m Jeremiah,” the older man said, drawing my attention away from Sebastian. “And I can’t tell you how interested I am to make your acquaintance. I hope you weren’t harmed?”
“I’m fine,” I gritted out, doubtful that he cared whether I’d been harmed or not. The lights above us flickered once, then twice. When Jeremiah’s eyes flicked with interest to the fixtures, I knew I had to tamp it down. I didn’t want him knowing that I was now an Adept, thanks to “Mr. Born’s magic,” and that I was now one of his enemies.
As if she understood the struggle, Scout squeezed my hand. I squeezed back and forced myself to stay calm.
Since Jeremiah was older than the Reapers around him, I assumed he was a leader, one of the self-centered asses who’d decided that taking the lifeblood of others was a cost worth paying to keep his own magic.
He looked from me to Michael and Jamie. “Your distraction was just that,” he said. “Merely a distraction. Next time, you might do a little more planning. But, since you’re here, what brings you to our little sanctuary?”
As if he didn’t know. “You kidnapped my friend,” I reminded him.
Jeremiah rolled his eyes as if bored by the accusation. “Kidnapping is a harsh word, Ms. Parker, although given the fact that you’ve undoubtedly been brainwashed by these agitators, these troublemakers, I’ll forgive the transgression. These children don’t understand the gifts they’ve been given. They reject their power. They turn away from it, and they blame us for accepting it. For abiding by the natural order. They cast us as demons.”
“The power corrupts,” Michael said. “We don’t reject it. We give it back.”
“And what do you have to show for that decision?” Alex asked. “A few years of magic until you’re normal again. Ordinary.”