Charmfall

by Chloe Neill

  I muscled through the day without crying even though every minute felt twice as long as usual. And by the end of the day, I was ready for a night of pajamas and movies instead of Enclave drama. But since we were in the middle of a magical crisis, there was no way that was going to happen.

  I was still a member of the Sneak planning committee (however stupid that idea seemed now), so after class I walked to the gym and helped make fringed garland out of sheets of black crepe paper. Lesley was at cello practice, which left me alone in a nest of brat packers and brat pack wannabes. I could hear their sniping across the room while I cut strips of paper, but I was having enough of a pity party that I hardly cared. There was something kind of Zen about cutting one strip of paper after another. It wasn’t exactly exciting work, but I got into a rhythm that helped clear my brain of everything else.

  And sometimes that’s what a girl needed—a clear brain for just a little while.

  It didn’t take long for Veronica and the rest of them to take advantage of the fact that I was vastly outnumbered. Veronica and M.K. walked over, leaving Amie and Lisbeth on the other side of the room.

  “What’s up, Freak?” M.K. asked.

  I ignored her and made eye contact with Veronica. I wondered if she had any idea who’d left the note at her door, or arranged her meeting with Nicu. But if she suspected I was the one, she certainly didn’t look it.

  “I’m here to make garland,” I said. “Not talk to you.”

  “Like we’d talk to you on purpose,” M.K. said, apparently not realizing that’s exactly what she was doing. “Do you even have a date for the dance?”

  Honestly, I had no idea. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. “Of course. And he’s even my age.”

  M.K., who tended to date guys old enough to drink and rent cars, rolled her eyes. “Like you could even get an older guy, Parker. What kind of freak would want you?”

  A werewolf, I guessed, at least before he thought I’d betrayed him.

  They made another snarky comment, then picked up armfuls of the garland and gave me a dirty look before walking back to the rest of the group.

  “Freak,” M.K. muttered.

  “Totally,” Veronica said, but she glanced back at me and dropped her eyes guiltily. Maybe the girl had a conscience after all, as little good as it did. Next time I had the urge to help her out, I decided to stick a pencil in my eye instead. I’d probably get less trouble out of it.

  “Thanks,” I called out. “You’re welcome for the garland.”

  They rolled their eyes and offered snorty laughs.

  Ugh. I was not a fan of today.

  * * *

  I got a little pickup after dinner when Scout found a giant box addressed to her outside the suite door. She brought it inside, but didn’t seem the least bit interested in what was in the box. I was plenty interested, so I followed her back to her room.

  “Don’t you want to open it?”

  She sat down on her bed and rifled through the stuff in her messenger bag. “It’s from my parents. I already have a pretty good idea of what it is.”

  “Which is?”

  “Something stupid expensive.”

  “Electronics? Fine linens? Heavyweight diamonds? What?”

  “Do you really have to know? Like, right this second?”

  “I’m not very patient.”

  Scout rolled her eyes, but gave in. “Fine.”

  She pulled the box onto her lap and slid a fingernail beneath the seal to open the box. When she lifted up the lid, she revealed neatly folded pinstripe tissue paper.

  “Clothes?”

  “Not just,” she said, unfolding one delicate sheet of paper at a time. “Clothes picked out by my mother.”

  She pulled out a dress in the greenest green I’d ever seen. It was sleeveless, knee-length satin with a swingy skirt. The satin was topped by a layer of black lace in huge whorls and flowers.

  “That is hideous,” she said, just as “That is amazing” escaped my lips.

  Our answers were simultaneous, and we immediately looked at each other.

  She held the dress out at arm’s length, nose wrinkled in disgust. “How can you like this thing? It’s so . . . green. And it probably cost, like, three thousand dollars. Somebody at some fancy store convinced her it was the latest thing and she picked it up. I guess the thought is nice, but the dress is awful.”

  “Are you kidding? How can you possibly say that? That lace is fantastic. And I like the green.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s not me. It’s not who I am.” She lowered the dress and looked at me with a sneaky glint in her eye. “But it might be you.”

  “Me? Oh, no.” I shook a finger at her. “First off, I probably don’t even have a date. And even if I did, I’m not wearing a three-thousand-dollar dress. Are you crazy? What if I spilled punch on it? What if I got a rip in it?” I pointed at the ground. “What if demon zombies burst out of the ground and get their, like, putrescence on it?”

  “Putrescence?”

  “Doesn’t that totally sound like something a demon zombie would have? You know, like, oozing from its pores and stuff?”

  “That is heinous. But you have a point.”

  “I always do. That dress is yours. It’s a gift from your parents. What if they found out I’d worn it?”

  “And got zombie putrescence on it?”

  “Precisely. They’d probably get me kicked out of school. Not that there wouldn’t be advantages to that. But, no. No. As much as I appreciate it, that’s a lot of responsibility.”

  Scout looked at me for a moment, and then placed the dress back in the box. “Look, I’m not going to wear it, so it’s only going to sit here. If you decide you’re willing to take on the challenge, you let me know.”

  “I won’t.”

  Scout sighed and packed the box away again. “People always say that, you know. That they won’t succumb to the lure of the money.” Once closed, she shoved the box under her bed.

  “Money isn’t everything.”

  “No,” she said, sitting up again. “It’s not.” She hopped off the bed and walked to her closet. She opened the door, and pulled out a handful of clothes on hangers that still had the tags on them. “But sometimes parents confuse money with attention.”

  “They bought you all that stuff?”

  She tossed a long-sleeved silk shirt onto the bed. “They forgot my thirteenth birthday.” A tweed jacket—that was totally not her style—followed it. “They didn’t come to the beginning-of-year assembly.”

  Scout threw shirt after skirt after jacket onto the bed until there was a pile of brand-new clothes—brand-new expensive clothes—there. “When they forget something important—or when they can’t make room in their schedule of polo watching and suntanning, they buy me things.”

  My eyes widened when I caught the price of one of the shirts. “I guess ‘spare no expense’ is their motto.”

  “Yep.”

  I picked up the stack of clothes and handed them back to her. “And the green dress?”

  “That’s probably an early apology since they’ll miss parents’ night.”

  Even I was disappointed in that. Someday I’d like to meet Scout’s parents, the man and woman responsible for creating this totally brilliant, unique person . . . and then ignoring her.

  “I’m sorry, Scout.”

  “Eh,” she said, hanging up the clothes again. She may not have liked them, and she may not have worn them, and she clearly wasn’t happy about what they represented. But the clothes were still hanging in her closet, taking up space. She probably preferred to have her parents here, but I guess if she couldn’t have them, she kept their gifts as a substitute.

  “You know,” I said, fingering the nubby tweed on the jacket, “some of these
things aren’t bad. Maybe I’ll borrow them sometime.”

  “Knock yourself out,” she said. And then her phone began to whine out a really loud piece of classical music that sounded a lot like buzzing insects.

  “This is Scout,” she answered. When her eyes went wide, I assumed it was interesting news. “Okay. Thanks for letting us know, Kite. ’Bye.”

  She put the phone down and looked at me. “You might have gotten your wish earlier than you thought.”

  “Sebastian?”

  “He’s in the store,” she confirmed. “Let’s get moving.”

  * * *

  We decided it was too risky to wait for backup, but we should let someone know where we were going. I wasn’t about to call Jason. If he wasn’t ready to talk, I certainly wasn’t going to call him first, so Scout called Michael and told him the plan.

  We changed into dark street clothes and geared up, then snuck out the same cellar door through which I’d followed Veronica outside.

  We walked quietly over to Gaslight, then crept along the edge of the building and peeked inside one of the storefront windows. At first, we didn’t see anything, but we could hear muted yelling from inside the store. After a couple of minutes we spied the source. Sebastian and Fayden emerged from an aisle.

  She was in the lead, rolling her eyes in irritation, a Gaslight Goods bag in hand. She looked like she was making an emergency visit. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy topknot, and she wore her dark, cat-eye glasses. She wore a thin T-shirt, yoga pants, and flip-flops. She was very trim, so the outfit didn’t look bad, but it was definitely more suited to running errands in California than in Chicago.

  Sebastian was behind her, dressed in clothes more appropriate for fall. But his gaze was narrowed at the back of her head, and he looked really, really unhappy.

  “We may have just missed some fireworks,” I murmured.

  “Apparently,” Scout said. “They’re heading for the door. Let’s get out of the line of sight.”

  We scooted into the doorway of the pharmacy next door to Gaslight. When the bell on the Gaslight Goods door began to ring, we snuck a peek.

  Fayden walked out first. Sebastian followed her. They made it to the end of the dark and empty block before they started talking.

  “You need to chill, cuz,” Fayden said. “I told you this would all be fine.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You lied to me.”

  “No, the family just omitted a few things. My status in the DE isn’t your concern.”

  “You don’t think I should know that another member of my family has magic?”

  Her bag on her arm, she poked an escaping tendril of hair back into her topknot. “I think unless it affects you, it’s not really any of your beeswax.” She patted his arm. “Maybe this blackout is getting to you. But never fear. I think you’ll find, cousin, that your life is about to get a lot more interesting.”

  She took a deep breath of chilly Chicago air. “A whole new world is about to open up.”

  Sebastian grabbed her arm. Hard. “What is that supposed to mean? Do you have something to do with the blackout? Have you taken magic from us?”

  Fayden had been all smiles, but in that second her expression changed to something much more nasty. “You will take your hand off me right now or you won’t live to regret it.”

  Whatever Sebastian saw in her eyes must have convinced him, because he pulled his hand away.

  “Much better,” she said, smiling again. “The blackout is what the blackout is. Don’t you think it’s an exciting time, though? There’s something new in the air. Something mysterious. A new era.”

  A taxi pulled up to the curb, and before Sebastian could argue the point, Fayden hopped inside. “Thanks for the chat. I’ll catch you later.”

  The cab pulled away.

  “We have got to follow her,” Scout said. As soon as the cab had passed, Scout ran to the street and hailed another one. I followed her to the street, and Sebastian picked that moment to look over at us.

  I gave him an apologetic look. He nodded back—an acknowledgment, maybe that something was up that bridged the gap between Reapers and Adepts.

  A cab screeched to a stop, and we jumped inside. “Follow that cab,” Scout said. “But not too close.”

  The driver looked at us in the rearview mirror. “We don’t really do that—”

  “Follow the cab,” Scout repeated, “and there’s a hundred dollar tip in it for you.”

  “Following the cab,” the driver said, and pulled into traffic.

  Wherever Fayden was going, she was going there in a hurry. We zigzagged other cars, and I think we were moving toward the lake.

  “Do you think she knows we’re back here?” I wondered.

  Scout looked around at the traffic. It was night, so it wasn’t exactly heavy, but there were taxis here and there. “Hopefully she thinks we’re just coincidentally moving in the same direction.” She glanced down at the driver’s badge, which was stuck to the dashboard. “And John here is doing a fantastic job of keeping a few cars behind her.”

  “I drive NASCAR on the weekends,” John dryly muttered. “This is just my day job.”

  Scout rolled her eyes.

  “I think she’s stopping,” John said. Sure enough, the cab ahead of us pulled to a stop at the next corner. John sneakily pulled his cab into a parking space at the other end of the block. Scout pulled a hundred dollar bill out of her wallet and pushed it through the little box in the plastic guard between the seats.

  “Run the meter,” she said, “and there’s another hundred in it for you.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “I guess being a Green pays off sometimes,” I whispered. Scout humphed.

  We got out of the cab, but hung back between the cars until Fayden got out. She walked toward a fancy-looking apartment building that was eight or ten stories tall. If she disappeared in there, we’d never find her.

  “Let’s get closer,” Scout whispered. “Maybe we can at least figure out which apartment she’s going into.”

  We moved up, peering at the door from behind a four-foot-tall hedge that surrounded the building. Turned out, we didn’t need to know where she was going. We needed only to watch how she got in there.

  The front door had a really big keypad lock. Fayden held out a finger like she was going to punch in a code.

  “Maybe she lives here,” I suggested softly, thinking she meant to unlock the door. But no sooner had I said that than a giant green spark shot from her finger and right into the keypad. The door unlocked with an audible click, and she walked right inside.

  That was magic. And not just magic—like, electrical power–related magic with its pretty green tinge.

  “Holy crap,” Scout said.

  “Holy crap,” I agreed. “Fayden Campbell has firespell. And hers is still working.”

  I guess that answered the blackout question.

  Problem was, even if we had pretty good evidence Fayden Campbell had used her still-existent magic to create the blackout, we didn’t know why she’d done it, or where she’d done it. Maybe most important, we didn’t know how she’d done it. Firespell, as far as I knew, was the ability to control energy—turning off lights and sending shock waves and stuff. So how had she managed to turn off everyone else’s magic?

  We let the cab wait for a few minutes while Scout called Daniel and filled him in. He promised to get eyes on the building and try to figure out what Fayden was doing there—and if she’d managed to stash some sort of ongoing spell or magic machine that we could hack or destroy or just plain turn off.

  But I had another idea.

  I wiggled my fingers to borrow the phone from Scout.

  “Hold on, Daniel,” she said. “Lily wants to talk to you.” She handed it over.
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  “I think Fayden lied to Sebastian,” I said into the phone. “And I don’t think he was happy about it.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is I suggest we set up a meeting with him. If he feels like he’s been betrayed by his cousin, maybe he’ll be willing to talk about her. Maybe he can tell us more about her powers, or who her friends are, or something like that.”

  Daniel was quiet for a second, giving me time to think about the consequences of what I was asking. Yes, a meeting with Sebastian was necessary to solve the mystery and try to get our magic back. But Jason wasn’t going to be happy about it. He was probably going to be even madder than he already was, if that was possible.

  On the other hand, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t ignore leads or information just to make him more comfortable. That was definitely not good Adept behavior.

  “Do it,” Daniel said. “Arrange a meeting, and make it formal. Maybe we’ll get to her before then and it won’t be necessary. But we have to do something.”

  I agreed. I just hoped this was the right something.

  15

  Getting Daniel to agree to let us meet Sebastian was easy. Getting Sebastian to agree to meet us was a little harder. He wasn’t answering his phone, and he didn’t call me back until the next morning. Turned out, that was fine, because the apartment building had been a dead end anyway. There’d been no sign of Fayden when Daniel—or whichever troops he’d called out—had arrived.

  The hardest part? Working out the details of the meeting.

  Daniel sent a message with a whole list of rules and procedures for us to follow. We had to set a time (way too early in the morning), a location (the middle of the bridge over State Street), and the rules that applied to the meeting (no magic allowed, which was easy since we didn’t exactly have any). Daniel also asked Jill and Jamie to take positions near the bridge just in case Sebastian tried something. Since he’d had plenty of other chances to zap me without Adept bystanders, I felt pretty safe.

  Unfortunately, once word got out, I was afraid I wouldn’t be hearing from Jason anytime soon. That thought hurt, but there was nothing I could do about it now. The wheels were already in motion.