16
After the excitement of our morning meeting, classes passed by in a blur. The teachers still technically did the teaching, but everybody was focused on parents’ night. Dinner was actually awesome—the girls attending parents’ night got a full-on catered meal, so the kitchen staff didn’t have time to cook a separate round of slurry for us. Instead, they ordered pizzas. A lot of pizzas. The bites I choked down were delicious, but I was nervous enough about our lingering problems that I didn’t have much of an appetite.
Study hall was also canceled, which made our evening plans a lot simpler. As soon as we made it back to the room after dinner, Scout dialed up Gaslight Goods, switched it to speakerphone, and put the phone down on the table.
“Gaslight Goods. Let us be your light in the midst of life’s darkness, the sunlight in your foggy day, the candle in your wind. This is Kite. How can I help you today?”
I grimaced. That was their opener?
“Kite, it’s Scout.”
“Hi, Scout. What can I do you for?”
“Information,” she said. “We need to know what Fayden Campbell bought from your store. Do you by chance remember what that was?”
“I’m sorry, Scout, I don’t. I didn’t process her order.”
“Kite,” Scout said, her tone serious. “We have a really strong suspicion that she’s behind the blackout. If you tell me what she bought, that might help us stop her. But if we can’t stop her, and no one has magic, pretty soon she will be your only real customer. I will not be dropping my parents’ hard-earned dough on the newest-fangled salt because I will have no magic. And nobody else will, either. Is that what you want?”
There was silence on the line. Then Kite said, “I don’t know . . . but I could probably look it up on the computer for you.”
Hands in the air, Scout did a weird little dance that was fifty percent running, fifty percent jumping, and one hundred percent awkward.
“Yes, please,” she said.
“ ’Kay,” he said. “And sorry; you know I have to do this.”
I didn’t know what he was about to do, but it sounded suspicious to me. But not to Scout, apparently.
“Go ahead,” she said.
Kite cleared his throat. “Gaslight Goods is a nonparty to any disputes among members of the Dark Elite. Gaslight Goods has an official position of neutrality with respect to any such disputes, and the provision of information to one party or other is not an indication in a change in that position, nor a statement of support. All rights of Gaslight Goods are reserved. Phew,” he added. “Sorry about that.”
“No worries.”
“So, now that that’s out of the way, here’s what she bought.”
Scout snatched up the same notebook she’d been using for our list and a purple pen, tilted and ready to write.
“Quartz. Pink salt. Some heavy-duty magnets. Dried feverfew. Oh, and a rod of copper. That just came in yesterday, actually.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
“Okay. Thanks, Kite. If it turns out we’re right, you’ll be the first person we call.”
“I’d appreciate it. I’ve got to run. Later, Scout.” Kite hung up the phone, and Scout stuffed hers away again.
“What was with the legalese?” I asked.
“That’s the official disclaimer that they’re still neutral even if they give you information. It’s so they don’t get blamed for stuff the Reapers or Adepts do.”
“Why didn’t they have to do it before—when we were in the store, I mean?”
Scout shrugged. “That was just chatting. You get official, with people looking up records, and they want to keep their names out of the discussion. That’s the disclaimer.”
Magical rules were just bizarro. But that wasn’t important. “So we know what she bought. Does that help you?”
Scout looked down at her paper. “This isn’t stuff you just buy for the heck of it. So whatever she’s doing with the blackout, it’s magical. She has created a spell, a hex, a machine, something that has taken away all of our power—”
“Except hers,” I finished.
“Exactly. I don’t know exactly what she’s brewing up. I’m going to have to think about it, let it float around in my head a little. But I’ll figure it out.” She waved the notebook. “This is the key, Lily. We still have work to do, but this is the key.”
Thank goodness I’d finally done something right.
* * *
An hour later Scout had scribbled through a bunch of pages in the notebook and she’d chomped through half a pack of gum.
“I chew gum when I’m working magical equations,” she said.
I still wasn’t entirely sure what was meant by “equations.” I flipped through the pages of her notebook, which were filled with what looked like those puzzles where a picture is supposed to symbolize a word—an image of an eye is supposed to mean “I” and so forth.
In Scout’s case, the drawings looked a lot like Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Are you, like, trying to add salt to quartz and then subtract the magnets or—”
She flopped back on the bed. “I have no idea what I’m trying to do. None of these things go together. It’s like trying to add blue and twelve and a dandelion. That kind of math doesn’t work.”
“So you don’t have any ideas?”
“Not unless”—she picked up her notebook and turned it so that she was reading it upside down—“Fayden Campbell is attempting to work bacon-typewriter-earmuff magic.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Yep.” She tossed the notebook back on the bed and rubbed her hands over her face. “What am I missing? What am I missing?”
“Is there, like, a secret ingredient? Like a catalyst or something? Like, you have to heat everything up, or maybe you have to use the things in a particular order?”
“That’s magic 101, Parker. All accounted for.”
It might be introductory magic for an Adept who’d been doing it for years, but it was pretty advanced stuff for me.
“So we know what she bought, but we don’t know why she bought it?”
“Yep.”
“And we can’t try to fix the magical blackout if we don’t know how she made it happen in the first place.”
“Since we have no magic because of said magical blackout, that is correct.”
I put a hand on her arm. “It may be time to accept temporary defeat. Or at least to call Daniel.”
She sighed. “I’ll call him,” she promised. “But I’m not calling it defeat. How about ‘temporary not-knowingness’?”
“Whatever gets you through the night, Scout.”
* * *
She updated Daniel, and he invited us into the Enclave to work on the magical problem.
When we emerged from her room to head out into the tunnels, the suite was empty; Amie and Lesley were probably both at parents’ night.
The school was equally empty. We could hear the sounds of chatting and music as we walked through the buildings, but we never actually saw the party. We walked silently to the basement door and through the giant metal one, then pulled it shut behind us.
We made it only twenty yards before we stopped short, hearts suddenly pounding.
The tall girl who’d been at the bridge with Sebastian stood in the middle of the tunnel. She wore jeans, knee-high boots, and a long-sleeved top, and she bobbed to the sound of music we could hear faintly from her white earbuds. She had no flashlight, and had apparently been skulking in the dark waiting for us to arrive.
I swallowed down fear, and both Scout and I held up our flashlights like baseball bats. They were the only weapons we had. “Don’t come one step closer.”
She pulled out her earbuds, stuck them in a jeans pocket, and held up her hands. “I’m not going to.”
“Then why are you in our tunnels?”
“It’s nice to meet you, too. I’m Kiara. Sebastian sent me.”
Scout’s eyes narrowed. “To do what?”
“To keep an eye on the door and make sure none of Jeremiah’s Reapers get into the school tonight.”
You could have pushed me over with a feather.
“Could you say that again?” I asked, and Kiara smiled a little.
“You made a deal on the bridge,” she said. “You agreed to help Sebastian’s cousin without turning her over to Jeremiah. In return, we agreed to keep him out of your hair.” She shrugged. “At least as much as we can without giving ourselves up.”
“You aren’t fans of his, either?” I wondered.
“Let’s just say we have different opinions about how the Dark Elite should operate.”
She seemed sincere to me, but Scout wasn’t so easily persuaded. “How do we know you aren’t just making this up? That you won’t sneak into the school as soon as we walk away?”
Kiara shrugged. “You don’t. But I could have waited for you to leave and snuck in without your knowing it. Sebastian trusts you, or at least he trusts her.” She gestured toward me. “And I trust Sebastian.”
“What will you do if Jeremiah’s Reapers show up?” I wondered. “Won’t they be suspicious if you don’t let them into the school?”
Her eyes sparkled a little. She looked even prettier when she did it, but a little scarier, too. “You let me worry about that.”
Scout and I looked at each other for a moment, silently debating what to do.
“Could you excuse us for a minute?” Scout asked. Without waiting for Kiara to answer, she grabbed my hand and pulled me down the tunnel and around the corner.
“Crap on toast. Could these people just give us a break for, like, a couple of days?”
“Apparently not,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
Scout scratched her head and looked really confused. “I don’t know. I mean, can we just leave her here? In the tunnels right by the school?”
“She didn’t have to tell us she was here. She made a good point.”
“Yeah, but maybe that’s just some kind of ploy so she can walk right in.”
Maybe, but I doubted it. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Sebastian had multiple motives in helping us out—like getting his own magic back—but this didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d waste effort on.
“How about this,” I suggested. “Let’s trust her for now, and as soon as we get to the Enclave, we tell Daniel. Maybe he knows more about this movement of underground Reapers or something, and if it’s really stinky he can send us back out or call Foley and give her a heads-up.”
Scout pointed at the tunnel. “Technically, wouldn’t they be underground-underground Reapers?”
“Not the point. Is that okay with you? And I don’t think we have a better option,” I added when she didn’t respond.
“Fine, fine. But let’s add this to the list of things you get to explain to Daniel.”
“Why do I have to explain it?”
“Because you got us mixed up in this Reaper mess.”
I rolled my eyes and walked back to where we’d left Kiara. Scout eventually followed me.
“You know,” I told her, “technically the brat pack got me wrapped up in this Reaper mess, since they’re the ones who locked me in the City Room. Can’t we just blame it on them?”
She nodded. “You’re right. We should blame it on them. That just feels good.”
Or at least as good as it was going to get tonight.
* * *
We made Kiara swear on her iPod that she meant no harm to the school. I’m sure that probably didn’t have much impact on whether she’d wreak havoc or not, but it seemed to make Scout feel better.
Meeting Kiara in the tunnel gave the night a weird vibe, and that vibe continued when we got to the Enclave. Katie and Smith were absent, and they weren’t the only ones. Jason hadn’t shown up.
Apparently noticing the same thing, Scout squeezed my hand when we walked inside.
While we might have been missing an Adept, we had a ton more stuff. The room was full of goodies pulled directly from the shelves at Gaslight Goods. Candles. Icons. Salts in every color. Squares of velvet and silk. Herbs in tiny glass jars. The empty Gaslight Goods bags were scattered on the floor where they’d been emptied.
“Kite must really want his customers back,” Scout said, grinning wildly.
“He’s spending money to make money,” I suggested.
“I guess so.” She started darting around the room from pile to pile, checking out all the stuff Kite had left. “Oh, my God, it’s like those books where you fall asleep in a museum and you get to use all the cool stuff while you’re asleep except I’m actually awake.”
She bubbled on for ten more minutes. And when she was done with her inspection, she threw her messenger bag on the table, pointed at Jill, Jamie, and Paul, and put them to work mixing ingredients and writing out that weird hieroglyphic math on a dry-erase board Kite had also donated.
As far as I could tell, cat plus monkey equaled water bottle.
“And so we begin,” she said, and sat down at a table. Full of energy and ready to work, she immediately pulled out a notebook and started writing.
* * *
Two hours later things had gone completely downhill.
Scout wasn’t any closer to a solution than she had been when we arrived, even with all the goodies, and the Enclave looked like a wreck. There were balled up pieces of paper everywhere, open books, and the dry-erase board was covered on both sides. She seemed completely flustered by the set of materials Fayden had bought, and couldn’t figure out how to reverse-engineer whatever magic Fayden had worked.
I tried to help when I could, but since I was the least experienced Adept, there wasn’t a lot I could do.
We took a break when Daniel brought in turkey sandwiches, veggie sandwiches with extra hummus, and drinks for a late-night supper. Since I hadn’t eaten much at dinner, I pretty much scarfed it down. Scout ate more slowly, picking at her own sammie as she stared hopelessly at the clutter around her. I knew she was frustrated, and I hated that I couldn’t do anything. But I didn’t get the magical math, so I had no idea how to help. It was also getting late. We were all tired, and irritable, and missing our magic. That was a pretty bad combination.
Scout, finished with her sandwich, suddenly threw a dry-erase marker across the room.
The Enclave went silent.
“Scout?” Daniel asked.
“I’m just . . . I am so mad. Who does she think she is, that she has the right to do this? To control who has and doesn’t have magic, and when they get to use it? How is that possibly fair?”
“Hey, we’re all in the same boat,” Paul said. “It’s not like you’re the only one with troubles.”
“Oh, I am well aware of that, Paul. Well aware.” Her voice was snippy and tired, and from the way they glared at each other across the room, this conversation wasn’t going to end well. It seemed most likely to end at the First Immanuel recovery room—as had the last Adepts who’d gotten snippy with one another.
“Hey, hey,” Daniel said. “Everybody bring it down a notch.”
“How am I supposed to bring it down when I am the only one here working on this? I’m trying to reverse engineer magic I haven’t even seen. I don’t even know where she is, much less what she’s managed to make!”
“We’re all trying,” Daniel said. “All of us. You know what? Let’s call it a night. We’re all tired and we’re all stressed out. We can reconvene tomorrow night after classes. We’ll leave all the experiments right where they are, and you can come right back to them.”
“Tomorrow is the dance,” Michael said. “We can’t miss Sneak.”
“I forgot about Sneak,” Daniel said. “I know you all have lives and things to do. This situation isn’t great, but until Fayden makes another move, it’s not crucial. Let’s just all get some sleep, and maybe we’ll have some sort of brainstorm tomorrow. I’ll talk to the Council and see if they have any leads on Fayden, maybe where she is. We’ll figure this out,” he promised.
If only the rest of us could be so sure.
* * *
We’d closed the door on the Enclave only when Jason emerged from the tunnels in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He looked uncomfortable, and he wasn’t the only one. Seeing him was like a punch in the gut. What was I supposed to say? Supposed to feel? Glad to see him? Angry that I was only just seeing him now?
“Hey,” Michael said.
Jason nodded.
“Michael,” Scout said, “why don’t we go talk about . . . the . . . color of your tuxedo for the dance.”
“I have to wear a tuxedo?” he whined, but followed along when Scout dragged him down the hall.
“How are you?” Jason asked.
“I’m fine.” It was a lie, but what was I supposed to say?
“I wanted to talk to you about all this.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention.”
He nodded. “I know. It’s just—we’ve come into this world differently. You see things differently than I do, and differently than my family does. I don’t know. I’m just really confused right now, and my family is putting all this pressure on me. I just needed you to be on my side.”
“I am on your side,” I said. “But sometimes right and wrong aren’t as clear as we want them to be. If you can’t trust me right now, I understand. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. It’s just that sometimes I have to trust myself. And this is one of those times.”
He nodded. “I know.”
We stood there in silence for another few minutes, and it felt like we hadn’t known each other at all. And I guessed we definitely weren’t going to the dance together.
“Well,” he finally said, “it’s late. I should get going.”
I couldn’t do anything but nod and watch as he walked away.
I met Scout a couple of tunnels up, and at her questioning eyes, shook my head. She strode toward me and gave me a hug.
“He’ll come around,” she whispered. “He’ll come around, or he won’t. And if he doesn’t, it’s his loss.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We walked quietly back to St. Sophia’s, and approached the door to the school expecting to see Kiara. But she was gone. She’d been replaced . . . by Sebastian.
He was sitting on the floor, his back to the door. He stood up as we approached.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Guarding the school. Kiara has a paper due, so it was my turn. How are . . . plans?” he carefully asked.
“They’re fine,” Scout said, “which is all you need to know.”
At her snippy tone, Sebastian looked at me. I shrugged. “We’re working on it.”
“You won’t hurt her?”
“We don’t plan on it,” Scout said. “And the odds go up a lot if we can get our work done without Reaper intervention.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“And we appreciate it,” I added, earning me an elbow jab from Scout.
“I’m standing right here,” he dryly said.
“He doesn’t have to be standing here,” I pointed out. “And I’m not taking anyone’s side, but right now both sides need all the friends we can get and all the sleep we can get, too, ’cause I’m really tired. So can we all be happy and just go to bed, please?”
Scout’s lip was still curled, but she nodded. “Fine. But if he destroys the school while we sleep, I’m blaming you.”
“I accept that blame,” I said, and waited until Sebastian moved over a little to unlock and open the vault door. Scout scooted inside, but I glanced back at Sebastian.
“If this is all a ploy—” I began, but he reached out and touched my chin.
“I told you we’d make a good team, and we do. Someday, maybe you can do a favor for me.”
Our eyes met for a brief but weirdly electric second. Then I turned away.
“And so it begins,” I muttered, and walked through the door, my skin still tingling where he’d touched me.
I spun the door’s flywheel and slid home the metal bar that locked it in place. I nearly jumped when I turned around and found Scout leaning against the wall and staring at me, arms crossed.
“What?”
“Flirting much?”
“I wasn’t flirting.”
“He was.”
Yeah, probably so. But I didn’t have any more energy to deal with Sebastian Born today. I’d worry about him tomorrow. . . . 17
The St. Sophia’s alumnae who paid the rental fee for the Field Museum may have been wealthy, but they weren’t so wealthy that they could close down the museum for the entire day. That meant we had a full day of classes before we could head out to hang decorations. Although only a few of us were on the planning committee, everybody got dragged into the decorating. We had only a few hours between the closing of the museum and the start of the party, so we needed as many “St. Sophia’s Girls” as we could find to get things ready.
When classes were over, everyone hustled around, grabbing their dresses, makeup kits, and final party decorations. The school was in a mad rush.
Since I hadn’t had time to arrange anything else, I took Scout up on her offer to let me borrow her green dress. It may have cost a fortune—and I was still nervous about the putrescence issue—but it was better than wearing my St. Sophia’s uniform to Sneak, even if I didn’t have a date. I had no idea what she came up with, but she had a dress bag, too, when she met me in the common room for our trip downstairs.
The limos were all gone tonight, replaced by orange school buses that would ferry us over to the Field Museum. Scout and I got in line with everyone else, the two least excited girls in the pack.
At least she had a date.
St. Sophia’s was a boarding school, so it had been months since I’d been on a bus. There was no need to travel to school when you slept next door to it. Turned out, I hadn’t really missed much. The cool but dangerous girls still sat in the very back. The uncool girls sat in the front, and the middle was like a no-man’s-land of leftovers. It was a minefield.
The bus dropped everyone off in front of the Field Museum. We trudged inside. Honestly, I just wasn’t that excited. Not even considering the boy and magic troubles, I wasn’t much of a museum person. I loved to draw, but museums were usually quiet and stuffy, and I wasn’t one for walking around in silence staring at paintings. Don’t get me wrong—I liked the paintings—it was the atmosphere that sucked. Galleries should be loud, happy places, full of people talking about art and thinking about art and enjoying the experience. Instead, they felt more like libraries, where you were only supposed to whisper. That was not my cup of tea.
But when we arrived, I thought maybe I hadn’t given the Field Museum enough credit.
From the outside, the museum looked like a giant palace. It was a white stone rectangle building with huge columns in front. And the inside wasn’t bad, either. Scout and I took a minitour before getting down to the decorating. There was a giant open room in the middle of the first floor. It was two stories high and held the skeleton of an entire Tyrannosaurus rex. The rooms to the side held glass cases full of historical bits. Clothes, tools, jewelry, baskets, weapons, and everything else you could think of. There were rooms of Native American artifacts, Aztec pottery, and Egyptian sculptures.
The party was being held in the main room on the first floor. Half the space had been filled by round tables arranged by the rental company our wealthy alumnae had hired. One of the Montclare boys was playing DJ at the other end in front of a dance area.
When the decorations went up, this place was going to look unbelievable. At least, if you were at the dance with a date and were into that kind of romantic stuff. Me? I’d been dumped by someone who didn’t even have the guts to tell me I’d been dumped.
I wasn’t sure whether to be sad or angry. I opted for angry. It felt a lot better.
We spent an hour hanging up garland and black glittery decorations, although the rental company had done most of the hard work. They put huge black candelabra on the tables and hung a banner that read ST. SOPHIA’S SNEAK from one of the balconies. The stuff we’d made definitely added a cool “graveyard” vibe, but the alumnae had already gone all out.
When the decorations were done, we headed off to a couple of conference rooms to get ready. I wasn’t thrilled about changing clothes in front of everyone else, but everyone was so worried about their own hair and makeup that they hardly noticed anyone else was in the room.
Scout’s parents may be self-centered, but they knew how to pick out a dress. Luckily, we were about the same size so it fit like a glove. I paired it with some black heels, and Scout helped me pin my hair into a messy updo with lots of twisty tendrils falling around. Add some eyeliner, and I was done.
Scout surprised me, too. When she unzipped her own dress bag, I just about fell over. Inside it was a really simple, but totally beautiful, black dress. It was a sleeveless sheath that fell just below her knees, and had a heart-shaped neckline that was totally flattering. She wore bright yellow heels and some chunky jewelry, and put enough product in her hair that it did the porcupine/pincushion thing.
“You look like a Goth princess,” I told her.
“Oh, my God, I was going to say the same thing to you. You know, cheesy as this party is, we should totally get a picture of ourselves. Who knows when we’ll have time to dress up again?”
“So true,” I said, and pulled out my cell phone for a picture. I was playing with the dials to figure out how to get the flash to work, when genius struck me.
I froze, then looked at Scout.
“What?” Scout said, eyes wild. “Is there a Reaper in here?”
“I know how we can find out where Fayden is.”
She smiled a little, and nodded. “I knew that dress was going to work for you, Parker, I just knew it.”
Dressed in our party finest, we popped back into the hallway, and I dialed up Sebastian. My nerves were already taut, and the fact that he didn’t answer until the fifth ring didn’t exactly help.
“Lily?”
“Camera!” I exclaimed. “Fayden had that big camera around her neck. When you gave her the tour of the city, did she take pictures of anything in particular?”
“As a matter of fact, I kept making fun of her because she had that huge camera but didn’t take pictures of anything until . . .”
“Until what?” I asked, my heart beginning to race as we got closer to our answer.
“The old pumping station on Michigan Avenue—it’s not far from the Hancock building. It used to have all these pipes inside, but I’m not sure what’s in there now. It’s all boarded up for remodeling or something.”
“And she took pictures of it?” I asked.
“Yeah, and we had to be careful because there were No Trespassing signs all over the place. I guess they want to turn it into some kind of museum, but the money hasn’t come through.”
“So she took a bunch of pictures of an empty industrial building,” I summed up. “That doesn’t sound at all suspicious. Thanks, Sebastian.”
“Sure. If you find anything out, will you let me know?”
“Of course,” I said, not entirely sure whether I meant it or not. I hung up the phone and looked at Scout. “I think there’s a pretty good chance we know where Fayden Campbell is.” I explained what Sebastian had said.
“I need to look at the pumping station,” she agreed. “That’s the only way I’m going to make any progress on the spell.”
I checked the time. “The dance starts in, like, an hour. Maybe we should wait for Michael.”
“So Fayden can run away from us again? No, thanks.” She pulled out her own phone. “I’m just going to have him meet us at the Enclave—and everyone else. God willing, I’ll figure something out and we can get the spell working tonight.”
“Fine,” I said, putting my phone away again. “Let’s go see the evil Reaper headquarters.”
Scout jumped around and clapped her hands like I’d given her a unicorn for her birthday.
We headed for the museum’s front door, but didn’t make it very far.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
We glanced back at Mary Katherine, who stood behind us in a slinky gold dress that left very little to the imagination. Veronica and Amie stood behind her, also dressed for the dance. Their gowns were longer and more princessy than M.K.’s.
“We were just going to get some fresh air. Stuffy in here in all this makeup,” Scout said, fanning her face.
“We haven’t seen you around lately,” M.K. said to me.
“We’ve been working in our rooms. You know, ’cause we’re uncool and we never leave them.” The words sounded corny, but what else was I supposed to say? We have a magical prodigy to go spy on?
Not surprisingly, M.K. didn’t look convinced. But this time, it was Veronica who spoke.
“Just leave them alone,” she said. “We need to put the confetti on the tables.”
M.K. slowly looked behind her, apparently shocked that she’d intervened. I understood the emotion. “Are you serious?”
“I’m serious about the party,” Veronica said, grabbing her hand. “I don’t want these little twerps getting in the way. Let’s go.”
M.K. rolled her eyes, clearly not convinced she shouldn’t make fun of us for a while, but let Veronica pull her back toward the party room. They bounced back into the main hall, but not before Veronica glanced back and looked right at me. She didn’t say anything before turning around again.
“What do you think that was about?” Scout whispered.
“Maybe Nicu told her about us? I don’t know, and I’m deciding not to worry about it. There are just not enough hours in the day.”
“I hear ya.”
* * *
We were pretty far down Michigan Avenue, so we snuck out to a cab for the ride to the pumping station. When we arrived a few minutes later, we stopped near a group of trees and scoped it out.
The building was located in a little park tucked between skyscrapers—the type people tended to ignore as they rushed around to high-end shops. It was short and made of big chunks of rough stone. There were rectangular windows all the way around it, two on each side, all placed the same distance apart. If you sliced it down the middle like a cake, both sides would look exactly the same.
And all the windows were covered on the inside with blue paper. It was thick enough that I couldn’t tell whether the lights inside were on or off, but there was no movement in or around the building, so we moved closer.
A sign had been posted a few yards away from the door. It was from some development company and talked about how the building was going to be rehabbed. But that rehab was months away, which explained the NO TRESPASSING warning below it.
“It doesn’t look like we can see much from out here,” I whispered.
“Let’s walk around,” Scout said, and we tiptoed around three of the building’s four sides. Every window was covered, so we couldn’t get even a small peek inside.
Finally, on the fourth and final side, we struck gold. Someone hadn’t been entirely careful putting the blue paper over one of the windows, and the bottom corners had started to roll up, giving us two little views of the interior of the building.
Scout and I nodded at each other . . . and leaned in.
She squeaked almost immediately.
Sebastian had been right—there were huge pipes in the room, each one probably three or four feet wide. They lay across the floor in a complicated grid pattern, and at the end of each pipe was a huge piece of machinery. Maybe a generator or something. The size of the things was just amazing. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing about the pumping station.
The entire room was filled with bright blue light—emanating from a huge circle that floated in the air above the pipes. It had to be twenty feet wide, and it was empty in the middle—like a giant’s bracelet. It rotated slowly, humming as it moved.
“Oh, my God, Lils, are you seeing this?”
“I’m seeing . . . I’m seeing something. I’m not sure what.”
Scout pressed a hand to the glass, and she didn’t look nearly as horrified as I’d expected.
“This is a bad thing, remember?”
“Oh, I know,” Scout said. “But it’s like the kid in the science fair who creates face-eating bacteria. The idea is awful, but you have to be impressed by the initiative.”
“I guess. What is it, exactly?”
“Some kind of magic spool, I think. Like a spindle.” Her voice got even quieter, and I think she forgot I was there. It sounded like she was just talking it over. “Pulling all the magic into it, maybe, with some kind of controls so she can take it away in parts. First the Adepts, then the Reapers. That’s probably the big plan for later—use it to divvy up the magic so she can hand it over to whomever she wants whenever she wants.”
While Scout thought it through, I scanned the rest of the room. Fayden Campbell stood in one corner dressed in a black bodysuit like a comic book bad girl, her hair pulled into a high ponytail, her signature glasses perched on her nose.
And she wasn’t alone. There were a few other people in the room. I guess they wanted to be part of her new world order, at least if our theory was right. And one of them looked familiar. . . . “That’s Charlie Andrews,” I told Scout, pointing him out. “The Reaper who was attacking Lisbeth. The guy I hit with a suitcase.”
“We wondered why he was Reaping out in the open,” she said. “I guess we know.”
“She isn’t working alone,” I whispered. “That explains how she managed this with firespell. Maybe it’s also why you haven’t been able to figure out how she made the magic—why the equations didn’t make sense. It’s because she’s not the only one doing it. It’s the combination of their magic, too.”
“Holy toast, Parker, that is a good idea. Grab your phone,” she added, as she pulled hers out. “Get pictures of their faces. Maybe we can figure out who the rest of them are and what their powers are.”
“And if we do that, you have a little more information to add to the equation.”
She nodded and began snapping photos. I did the same, and hoped we’d find the answers she needed.
* * *
We didn’t press our luck, and got out of there was soon as we had enough pictures. And as soon as we were a safe distance away from the building, we called Daniel and filled him in. All the Adepts—except Jason—agreed to meet back at the Enclave to work on the magic solution. I wasn’t sure if seeing the spindle was going to actually help out Scout, but she definitely seemed energized. It certainly couldn’t have hurt.
The problem was, we were blocks from St. Sophia’s, and we were even farther from the Enclave. And, we were aboveground. There were ways to get into the tunnel from street level without having to sneak back into St. Sophia’s and out again. But they involved walking through the Pedway.
The Pedway was a system of tunnels and passageways that ran through buildings in downtown Chicago and gave people a way to move through the city in the wintertime. There were access points from the Pedway to the tunnels, but there was a catch. The Pedway was the territory of vampires, and vampires didn’t like Adepts. They also didn’t really like competing vampire covens. That was precisely the fight Veronica had walked into.
“We need the Pedway,” Scout said, looking at a map on her phone. “There’s an entrance in a building a block from here, and we can hop right into the tunnels. It will be so much faster than going the long way.”
“And it risks getting caught in a vampire fight that will take us a lot longer to deal with,” I pointed out.
“There is one thing we could do.”
“What’s that?”
“You could call your favorite vampire and ask him for an escort.”
I just blinked at her. “You cannot be serious. I already had to run one errand for him this week.”
“Speed,” Scout stressed. “We need it. He can give it to us.”
I sighed, but knew I’d been beaten. So I dialed up Nicu and when he answered, gave him our address. “We need to get into the tunnels, and we have to go into the Pedway to do that. Can you meet us and, like, escort us through?”
His voice was grumbly and cold. “What will you do for me in return?”
I rolled my eyes. “Haven’t I done enough for you this week? Like, given you a happily-ever-after with one of St. Sophia’s finest?”
“I do not understand your sarcasm.”
Scout tapped her watch impatiently.
“Fine,” I said. “What do you want in return?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I wish to attend this dance I have heard about.”
You could have bowled me over. “Are you asking my permission to take Veronica Lively to Sneak?”
Scout made a gagging sound.
“It is your territory,” Nicu said. “It is only appropriate that I ask for your permission before I enter it.”
“Fine,” I said, glad someone wanted to go to the dance. “Go to the dance. Live happily ever after. Can you just meet us?”
“I will meet you. Two minutes.”
I figured he was exaggerating, but it took three minutes for Scout and me to take the elevator down into the building’s basement Pedway access, and Nicu was already waiting for us.
In a tuxedo.
I’ll be honest—he cleaned up pretty well.
“You look . . . lovely,” he said, glancing between Scout and me.
“Thanks,” she said. “But let’s get this show on the road. We have spells to cast.”
“You can teach me to slow dance?” he asked, as we walked down the Pedway.
Could this night possibly get any weirder?