by Chloe Neill
“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.
