17
“What are we going to do?” I asked, watching two of Marlena’s minions drag a cursing Veronica down the Pedway. Her hair was falling down and her cheeks were streaked with tears and mascara, but it didn’t look like she’d been bitten.
On the other hand, total brat drama had now become Adept drama.
“What is she doing down here?” I whispered.
Scout sighed heavily. “She probably followed us into the basement one night, then decided to play Nancy Drew. She’s been watching us like a hawk this week.”
“And she probably thinks we were with John Creed,” I realized, the puzzle pieces falling together. “She’s been interrogating me about him all week. She thinks we’re buds because he and Jason are friends.”
“Nothing to do about it now,” Scout said, taking a step into the Pedway. I followed, and Detroit did the same.
The vampires began to hoot, the minions’ grip on Veronica tightening as she began to demand that they let her go.
Marlena stepped around her vampires, this time wearing a tweed dress, fur wrap, and those old-fashioned stockings with the dark line up the back. She put her hands on her hips. “Did you lose something, darlings?”
“Let her go,” Scout said. “Or you get magic and firespell and a silver-tipped walking stick, and you get knocked back into the nineteen forties where you belong.”
Marlena hissed. “This is not a game, little one.”
“I am so sick of people telling me that,” I muttered, raising my hands. I relaxed and let the power begin to flow, letting it collect in my hands so that I could toss it out if necessary.
“Did you invade St. Sophia’s?” Scout asked.
Marlena arched a darkly penciled eyebrow. “We hardly have need for that, iubitu. Not when she is wandering through the corridors alone.”
“Bingo,” Scout muttered.
“Let go of me!”Veronica screamed again, yanking at her arms as she attempted to break free.
Marlena had apparently had enough. She turned and slapped Veronica across the face, leaving a red welt across her cheek. “Silence!”
Veronica’s howls turned to silent weeping. Scout took a precautionary step forward.
“Marlena, if you have issues with us, you need to let her go. She’s not one of us, and has nothing to do with this. She will only bring attention to your kind.”
Marlena’s expression faltered for a second, but then went stone-cold again. “Liar.”
“She’s a normal,” I confirmed. “You keep her down here, and things get very, very ugly for you.”
“Uh, ladies, speaking of ugly, we’ve got a problem.” We turned to see Detroit looking behind us.
I hated to turn around, but I wasn’t exactly in a position to run. Slowly, I glanced back as well.
Vampires. An entire crowd of them, moving in from behind us.
But these were a different kind of vampire. They were Nicu’s.
Nicu stepped through them to the front of the horde. He nodded at me and Scout and Detroit, then took in Marlena.
“They are children,” he said. “Let her go.”
“She is mine. My catch. My bounty. My prize.” She rolled the R in ‘prize’ like an opera singer, and the sound sent a chill down my spine.
“She is not part of this world, and your bringing her into it will not help.” He inched closer, as did the vampires behind him.
“When it’s time,” I whispered, “I’ll grab Veronica. You two jump to the right, and then we make a run for it.”
Detroit nodded, but Scout looked worried.
“Firespell,” I reminded her. “If they get me, I take them out.”
She blew out a breath and nodded, then turned her attention back to the vampires and the turf war we’d gotten stuck in . . . again.
Marlena put her hands on her hips. “You choose children over your own kind?”
“They have offered their help. They have come to us with information and have treated us as equals. In this, yes. We choose children over those who would forsake us.”
In the silence, Nicu and his vampires took another step forward, then another, until they were directly behind us. I wasn’t thrilled about the proximity, but I trusted him a lot more right now than I did Marlena.
“Then let us decide this once and for all.”
“Not liking the sound of this,” Scout said.
“Detroit,” I whispered, hoping the myths about vampires were true, “when I give the word, point the locket at the vamps holding Veronica.”
“Got it,” she said with a nod.
“On one,” I said, leaning forward just a bit to prepare myself for the steal. “Three . . . two . . . one!”
Detroit popped open her locket, light flashing into the corridor as she aimed it toward Marlena’s vampires. They raised their hands to their faces, hissing at the light, releasing Veronica. I jumped forward and grabbed her, then pulled her back behind the half wall, Detroit and Scout behind me.
I dumped Veronica onto the floor, looking her over for wounds. She was quiet now, shock obviously setting in. In the vacuum behind us, the covens of vampires rushed together, Nicu’s vampires scratching and clawing as they fought for the right to exist, Marlena fighting back the vampires who’d tried to escape her.
Nicu ran through the fray to reach us, stopping as he stared down at Veronica. She looked up at him with wide eyes, and his own widened in surprise.
I glanced over at Scout, who shrugged.
A second later, Nicu blinked, then looked at me. “Run,” he said. “As fast as you can. Get her to safety and then find the monsters. Dispatch them.”
We ran.
Detroit led the way back to the Enclave. Scout and I each had an arm around Veronica, half walking and half carrying her through the dark tunnels, the light of Detroit’s locket guiding the way. Detroit used Scout’s phone to send a message to Daniel. By the time we arrived at the Enclave, we found Katie, Smith, Daniel, Michael, Jason, and Paul waiting. The twins must have still been off on their own mission.
The mood wasn’t exactly light, and seeing Veronica didn’t help. But Daniel stayed calm. He directed Katie and Smith to help Veronica, then clustered the rest of us together.
“The vampires are missing one of their coven,” he said. “The Reapers have, perhaps, used the sanctuary to build these monsters. They have put Adepts and vampires, the Pedway and St. Sophia’s—the whole city—at risk. This ends tonight.”
Scout and I looked at each other, but nodded. We knew what needed to be done. We had to find them, and we had to take them out.
“We’ll deal with the girl,” he said. “You start at the sanctuary. God willing, it will still be empty of Reapers. Either way, destroy the monsters.”
“We’ll do it,” Jason said.
“You’ve got to,” Daniel advised. “If you can’t, we’re all in trouble.”
Jason took the lead, and Paul was at our back. The rest of us—Michael, Scout, Detroit, and me—were clustered into groups in the middle.
This time, we needed speed, so we decided to try the shortcut, hoping the vampire squabble had played itself out. We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary until we made it to the Pedway. But when we emerged from the janitor’s closet—one careful Adept at a time—things got more interesting.
The hallway was empty but for five scratched and bleeding vampires—Nicu and four others.
“Is she okay?” Nicu asked.
If he’d developed a thing for Veronica, I was going to be totally freaked-out.
“She’s fine,” I told him. “She’s being cared for.”
“Will you erase her memory of these events?”
I looked over at Scout, who nodded. “She’s not the type we’d trust in the community. She might use the information against us. One of the other Adepts will work their magic, and she’ll have no memory of what transpired. It won’t hurt her,” she added, at the obvious heartbreak in Nicu’s eyes.
Did love at first sight really operate that quickly?
“Then that’s the way it must be,” he said, resigned.
“And your coven?” I asked him. “Are you okay?”
“We have survived the night,” Nicu said, “so we are now a coven in our own right.”
Oh, awesome, I thought. We’d actually helped the vampires establish themselves. I really hoped that didn’t bite us in the butt later.
“Good night, Adepts.” Nicu placed his hand over his heart, and then the entire group of them—all at once—bowed to us.
Detroit worked her magic on the stairwell doors, and we popped back into the tunnels again. If the rats were back, there wasn’t any sign of them.
“You think that means they’re gone?” Scout asked.
“I think that means they don’t shed slime all the time,” Jason said. “At least, that’s my guess.”
“And even if they were here,” Scout said, “the Reapers could have cleaned up after them. Who knows?”
When we reached the sanctuary, we peeked around the alcove and into the final corridor. The doors were closed, the lights off.
But there was a trail of slime that led from the corridor into the sanctuary.
“And they’re back,” Michael muttered.
“Honestly,” Detroit said, “I’m a little glad to see the slime. I was beginning to worry that I’d imagined it all.”
“No such luck,” Scout and I simultaneously said. Scout glanced over at Detroit. “The trip wires,” she said. “Got anything for that?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” After searching her pants pockets, Detroit popped another black pill into the hallway, letting the magic smoke illuminate the trip wires. Then she unzipped a long pocket along her knee and pulled out a child’s spinning top.
“Quick invention,” she said, “but I think it will work.” She crouched down and put the top on the floor, then gave it a twirl. It wobbled, but began to spin, whirring as it gathered speed and moved down the hallway toward the double doors.
And as it spun, it began to spindle both the magic smoke and the trip wires the smoke had revealed. In a few seconds, the hallway was clean, the top glowing with newly bundled magic.
“Seriously, I think that’s the coolest thing you’ve done so far.” Scout’s tone was reverent.
“Glad you like it,” Detroit said. She walked down and collected the top, then held it out to Scout. “I thought you could have it. You can unspindle the trip wires. Make them your own.” >
With her eyes gleaming like it was Christmas morning, Scout accepted the gift.
“All right,” Jason said. “Now that the coast is relatively clear, let’s get this show on the road.” He stopped in front of the double doors and glanced back. “Everybody ready?”
When we nodded, he pushed them open. One by one, we tiptoed inside.
“Lily,” he whispered. “Lights.”
I pulled the power and sent it upward. Long rows of fluorescent lights above us stuttered to life.
We were in a hallway—the kind you might see in a hospital. Wide corridor, pale green walls, doors on the right and left . . . and a long trail of slime leading back toward other rooms.
“Stay here,” Jason said, then began to move forward, peeking through the rooms on the right-hand side of the corridor. When he reached the second door, he stopped.
“What is it?” Scout whispered.
He beckoned us forward, then walked inside. We followed him . . . and gaped.
Temperance had thought the sanctuary was a clinic. But this didn’t look like any clinic I’d ever seen. The center of the room was lined with counters topped by pieces of medical equipment. And the walls were covered by whiteboards. Some with lines and lines of formulas, others with writing—theories about vampires and immortality and magic.
And how to keep it forever.
We stopped and stared at the last board.
Photographs had been stuck there with magnets—photos of Reaper works in progress. The rats, from tiny nubbins to full-grown creatures. For a second, I felt a little sorry for them.
“We were right,” I said. “They were doing experiments, and vampires were their model.”
Hands on her hips, Scout gazed at the pictures. “What were they trying to do? Build some kind of forever-magic superbeings?”
“Maybe,” Jason said. “Or maybe just figure out if there was a source for the immortality.”
“Maybe it has something to do with the slime,” I suggested. “Maybe the slime served some kind of purpose. Like, I don’t know, some kind of immortality elixir or something.”
“That is totally rank,” Scout said, her face screwed into a look of disgust. “But I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“Temperance must not have known what these were,” Detroit said. “If she had, she’d have known this wasn’t a clinic.”
“I’m sure she did the best she could,” Scout said.
“We’ll let our guys figure out the details,” Jason said. “Scout, take pictures of the whiteboards so we can turn them over. Lily, as soon as she’s done, erase them. All of them. We’re not helping them preserve whatever ‘science’ they’ve done here.”
We followed his directions. Scout walked slowly around the room, snapping photos with her camera so we had proof of what the Reapers had been up to. I followed behind her. Each time she snapped a photo, I used my sleeve to wipe off the writing.
When the room was clean and Scout’s phone was tucked away again, we headed back into the hallway. The rest of the rooms on the mazelike floor were either research labs, or more like the medical facilities Temperance had described. There were needles, bandages, and monitors just like she’d said, but not for healing. For experimenting.
The whole place had an awful vibe. And then we rounded a corner . . . and walked right into the nest.
The rats had taken up an entire corridor, the walls and floor coated with slime. Dozens of them slept in a pile in one corner.
Home sweet home, I thought.
Detroit screamed.
Chaos erupted.
Jason immediately shifted, his giant silver wolf taking the attack. He pounced on the back of a rat, which began squealing and screeching and trying to throw him off.
I looked over at Michael, who stood in the middle of the room, eyes wide with fear. I pulled him away, then planted him beside the wall on the other end of the corridor. “Stay here, okay?”
He nodded, but pointed at Scout. “I think she needs help.”
Scout was throwing what looked like marbles at the rats. Each time they made impact, they sent a shock wave through the creatures—their skin wobbling in circular ripples just like on a slow-motion camera. Unfortunately, while the shock waves moved the rats back a few feet, they didn’t stop coming.
I looked around the room—and found the same problem all over. Everything we were doing was working, but only to a point.
“This isn’t doing much good,” Paul yelled, tossing one rat over his shoulder. “It’s not killing the rats!”
That was when the gears clicked into place. Scout’s spell might have worked before, but normal combat wasn’t going to do the trick. “That’s because they’re not really rats!” I yelled over the din of battle. “Scout, what takes out vampires?”
“The usual stuff!” she yelled back. “Fire, stakes, garlic, crosses, silver, and, you know, dismemberment.”
I decided to leave that one to Jason. “Remember they’re related to vampires!” I called out to everyone else. “So hit ’em where it hurts!”
I went with my best weapon. Firespell wasn’t exactly fire—it was Jamie who had that power—but it was as close as I was going to get. There was too much chaos to try an all-out burst of it—too high a chance that I’d hit an Adept. But Sebastian had said I could use it in pinpoint fashion. Might as well try that now.
I maneuvered around until I had a clear shot at one of them, then squeezed my hands into fists. I opened myself to the power, but instead of trying to throw it all back out again, I lifted a single hand, my fingers cupped, and visualized sending that single burst of magic into one of the creatures, the way Sebastian had taught me.
And then I let it go. It still warped the air, but it was focused—the firespell moving in the air in a tight spiral that ripped toward the monster and hit him square in the chest.
He went down . . . and he didn’t get back up.
Sebastian might have been evil—but he definitely had some firespell skills. And maybe because it was kind of like fire, vampires weren’t immune to it.
Together, the four of us used our magic to knock out the rats one by one. It wasn’t easy—there were so many of them, we hardly had time to get one on the floor before the next one attacked. Even with my focused attack, I’d gotten too close to their claws and had burning scratches up and down my arms and legs as I fought back the army.
I finished up the knot closest to me, then glanced over at Scout. She was using a pencil from her bag—a make-do wooden stake—to take out a rat in front of her. It worked, and he hit the ground, but the rest of them were beginning to surround her.
“Scout!” I yelled over the sounds of fighting and squealing monsters. “Duck!”
She did, and I threw out another dose of firespell, which put the creature lurking behind her on the floor. Then she popped up again, gave me a thumbs-up, and knocked out the one in front of her.
“Lily!”
At the sound of Detroit’s voice, I glanced back, expecting to see her encircled by monsters. But there was a pile of them at her feet, her silver-tipped walking stick between both hands like she was wielding a sword. For an Adept who wasn’t supposed to be a fighter, she was definitely holding her own. But she used the stick to point into the other corner—where Jason was quickly getting surrounded.
I couldn’t see Jason’s entire body, just bits of bloody fur as he leaped and rolled with the monsters.
“Jason!” I ran forward toward the melee, my hands outstretched, spiraling the firespell at each monster that jumped forward to attack him.
One of them jumped out at me, but I tossed firespell in his direction. He was too close for a shot and the bobbling air nearly bounced back to knock me down as I moved toward Jason, but I shimmied and sidestepped it.
I became a dervish, spinning and tossing firespell at anything and everything that stood between me and him. I finally reached him and helped him claw his way out of the pile. When the path was clear, he sat back on his haunches, tongue lolling as he caught his breath.
I couldn’t help but smile down at him. “Good dog.”
He might have been in wolf form, but the look he gave back was all Jason Shepherd. He shifted back, scratches on his face and arms, and looked around. “Thanks,” he told me. I nodded and squeezed his hand.
We stood, chests heaving, in the middle of a room full of dead rats. Whatever genetic engineering the Reapers had done, they really hadn’t done much for their postmortem longevity. They were beginning to smell.
He glanced around. “Everyone okay?”
Scout wiped at her brow with the back of her hand. “I’m good.”
“I’m tired, but fine,” I added.
Michael and Paul gave waves from their corners of the room.
Detroit looked up. “I’m—I’m not” was all she got out before pulling up the knee of her pants. There was a giant bite on the outside of her calf; blood was everywhere. Jason reached out to grab her before she went down, but didn’t quite make it. She stumbled backward into the wall—and into some kind of emergency button.
A piercing alarm began to ring through the sanctuary.
Jason let out a curse. “That might alert the Reapers,” he yelled over it. “We’ve put the monsters down, and now we have got to get out of here.”
Detroit slid onto the floor. “I’m not sure I can make it out.”
“You just need a little help,” he said soothingly, then scooped her up and into his arms. “I’m taking the lead, and I’m going as fast as I can. Stay close behind in case we missed anything.”
He began running down the hallway. Michael snatched Detroit’s walking stick and took off behind him. Scout and I followed through one corridor after another . . . at least until she stopped short. I watched Jason, Paul, and Michael disappear around another corner.
“Scout, come on! Reapers might be coming, and we need to go.” I tugged her arm, but she wouldn’t move.
She pulled her arm free. “I can’t go, Lily. I’ve been in the missing vampire’s position—being hurt and alone. And what they’ve done is awful. We can’t leave it intact and let them continue the work. We just can’t.”
“Scout, we have to go. Detroit’s injured and—”
“You don’t have to be here. I’ve been working on a spell. I can plant it alone and get out afterward. You don’t have to be here.”
That, I realized, was what she’d been working on her in room. Getting rid of the sanctuary had been her plan all along.
“I was one of them, Lily. I know how they work—how much it hurts, how bad it feels.” She slapped a hand to her chest. “I’m an Adept. I make a promise every day to help the people they try to hurt. To stop them from doing it. I can’t leave this place here for them to use at will. I can’t.”
Tears began to brim in her eyes. “I can’t.”
We looked at each other for a moment, before I nodded. “Then I stay. And I help.”
She shook her head. “You should go. You used up all your firespell.”
“I think Sebastian taught me how to make my own power.”
Her eyes went even wider. “Lily—” she began, but I shook my head.
“I’ve already kind of tried it, and I think it will work. You need it, and that’s all I need to know to try again. What’s your spell supposed to do?”
“Implode the sanctuary.”
Well, that would probably do it.
“Won’t that take down the buildings on the street?”
She shook her head. “It’s a pinpoint spell. It’ll wipe down the interior, but leave the architecture—the hardware—intact. It’s like cleaning off your hard drive—the hard drive’s still there afterward, right?”
I still wasn’t crazy about the idea—one wrong move, and we single-handedly brought down whatever building happened to be above us—but she was right—we couldn’t just leave this place intact. Decision made, I nodded back at her. “Okay. What do we do?”
She reached into her bag and pulled out one of the tiny houses from her shelf. “We have to set this spell. Then I give the incantation, and we run.”
“Can you take down a building this big?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t actually tried it. And even better, I’m only going to get one shot.”
An idea bloomed. I reached out my hand toward Scout. “Then we make that one shot count. Give me your hand.”
“You want to help me trigger it?”
“It worked last time.”
“It hurt last time.”
“And it’s probably going to hurt this time, too. But if that’s what we need to do, it’s what we need to do. And we’re in this together.”
“You’re the best.”
“I know. But mostly I want to get out of here. Preferably in one piece.”
She nodded, then walked into the room and put the tiny house on one of the tables. When she made it back to me, we let the door close in front of us. Scout offered her hand. I gripped it tightly in mine.
Before we could begin, Michael ran back around the corner. “What are you doing? We need to go.”
“Michael,” I said. “Run. Tell Jason to get out of the building, and tell everyone to huddle down at the other end of the corridor. We’ll be right behind you. We promise. But for now, we’ve got to take care of the sanctuary. Go now.”
I saw the hitch—he wasn’t sure if he should leave us. >
Scout looked back at him. “Do you trust me?”
His face fell. “Scout—”
She shook her head. “I have to do this, Michael. And I need you to trust me. Okay?”
He ran to her and whispered something in her ear. She threw her arms around his neck and gave him a fierce hug, then pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“Run,” she said, and Michael took off. I trusted Scout just like he did, but that didn’t mean I didn’t still cross my fingers for luck.
Scout moved back, took my hand, and closed her eyes. “Your cue is ‘night.’ When I hit that, fill me up.”
“Let’s do this,” I agreed, and then she began.
“We are bringers of light.”
I closed my eyes. Instead of pulling in power from the world around us—power that I’d had trouble controlling the last time—I imagined a spark blooming of its own accord. Bright and green, shaped like a dandelion.
“We are fighters of right.”
I opened my eyes. There, in front of me, hovered a tiny green spark. Small, but condensed. A lot of power in one tiny ember.
“We must pull this place in, and make safe the night.”
I pulled the spark into both of us. It bloomed and blossomed and spilled outward. I opened my eyes, and through the window in the door saw the tiny house explode into shards of light.
And then it began.
Like a tornado had suddenly kicked up in the Chicago underground, all the stuff in the building—doors, walls, tables, medical implements—was sucked behind us.
Scout and I yanked our hands away from each other. It definitely hurt—my fingers burning like I’d stuck them into a roaring fire—but we were still on our feet.
And then we ran like the rats were still after us.
We hurdled spinning lamps and dodged computer gear, pushing ourselves against walls to avoid the doors that came hurtling toward us. Scout stumbled over an office chair, and I grabbed and pulled her along until she was on her feet again. And the sound—it was like a freight train roaring toward us.
The walls began to evaporate, drywall and wiring sucking back toward the center of the spell. Finally, we turned a corner, and there were Jason and Michael, holding open the double doors that led out of the sanctuary.
It was getting even harder to run, like we were swimming through molasses. The nightmare flashed through my mind, the door I hadn’t been able to reach.
But this was real life, and I wasn’t about to go down in a sanctuary in some nasty tunnel. I pushed forward like I was racing for the finish line. We made it through the doors just as they were pulled off their hinges and into the current.
We ran to the other end of the corridor and hunkered down in the threshold of the tunnel with Jason, Michael, Paul, and Detroit, and then we watched it happen.
All of the stuff—everything but the concrete support columns—was sucked backward into an ever-tightening spiral. It swirled around and closed in, becoming a sphere of stuff. And then, with a pop and a burst of light, it was gone.
There was silence for a moment as we stared at the husk of the sanctuary—a place the Reapers could no longer use to hurt anyone, or try to further their own magic.
“Now that,” Scout said, “was a good spell.”