by Chloe Neill
Scout closed her eyes, then pursed her lips and blew into the house’s tiny window. By the time she opened her eyes, the house was silent and dark again, as if its tiny residents had gone back to sleep.
She put it carefully back on its shelf, then looked at me. “Daniel’s been teaching me how to ward the basement doors—it’s supposed to keep the nasties out or send out an alarm if they make it through. You know, since they kidnapped me and all.”
“I do recall that,” I agreed supportively—and wondered if that was what she’d been working on in her room.
“This house was keyed to the vault door in the basement—the big metal one with the locks and stuff?”
“So the house is, what, some kind of alarm?”
She nodded, then grabbed a pair of jeans from her closet. “Pretty much. Now, go get dressed. We’re going to have to handle this.”
My stomach knotted, nerves beginning to build. “What do you think it is?”
She blew out a breath. “I don’t know. But I’m guessing it’s not going to be pretty.”
Unfortunately, I guessed she was right.
We’d both pulled on jeans, shirts, and sneakers to make our way downstairs. We’d decided we didn’t want to be captured by Reapers or rescued by Adepts—or worse—in silly pajamas. The school was quiet as we moved through the hallways, probably not a surprise since it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. On the other hand, I half expected M.K. to jump out from behind a corner. I figured her being out on some secret rendezvous was only slightly less likely than the possibility that we’d soon be staring down half a dozen creeping monsters.
We made it through the Great Hall and labyrinth room, then through the door that led to the stairs. We stayed quiet until we’d made our way into the locked corridor that led down, after two staircases and a handful of hallways, into the basement. I’d taken this route before—the first time I’d followed Scout on one of her midnight rambles, actually. And we all knew how that had ultimately turned out.
“Do we have a plan of action here?” I quietly asked, tiptoeing behind Scout.
She adjusted the strap of her messenger bag. “If I’m as good as I think I am, we don’t need one.”
“Because your ward worked.”
“Not exactly. This was only my first time warding, so I’m not expecting much. But I also worked a little magic of my own. And if that works—I am officially da bomb.”
“Wow. You really went there.”
“I totally did.”
“What kind of magic did you work?”
“Well, turns out, Daniel’s a protector.”
“You are seriously stalking him, aren’t you?”
“Ha. You’d be amazed what you can find on the Internet. Anyway, a protector is a guardian angel type. His magic’s all about protecting breaches. But his magic works more like an alarm. I like to be a little more walk and a little less talk. A little less conversation and a little more action.”
I guessed her endgame. “You booby-trapped it, didn’t you?”
“Little bit,” she said, then stopped short. She glanced back at me and put a finger to her lips as we neared the final corridor. “I’ll go first,” she whispered. “You follow and firespell me if my hex didn’t work.”
I nodded. “Good luck.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she said, and we moved.
The door was nearly twice as tall as I was. The entire thing was edged in rivets, and a huge flywheel took up most of the middle of the door, as did a giant steel bar.
But the bar and the flywheel and the fact that the door itself weighed a ton hadn’t stopped the two girls who lay on the floor in front of it, arms and legs pinned to their sides, rolling around on the floor.
I couldn’t stop my mouth from dropping open. “What the—”
“Oh, nice,” Scout smugly said. She walked into the corridor, hands on her hips, and surveyed the damage. One of the girls wore a green-and-gold cheerleading uniform, her wavy, dark blond hair spilling out on the floor as she rolled around, trying to unglue her arms and legs. The second girl was curvier and wore an oversized dark T-shirt and jeans over big, clunky shoes. She was pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
Realizing they weren’t alone, the Reapers took the opportunity to blister our ears with insults. Scout rolled her eyes. “Hey, this is a convent, Reapers. Watch your language.”
“Unmake this spell, Millicent Green,” spat out the cheerleader, half sitting up to get a look at us. “Right now.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough to unmake it, Lauren Fleming.” There was equal venom in Scout’s voice. Obviously, she and Lauren were acquainted. “What are you doing in our territory?”
The second girl lifted her head from the floor. “What do you think we’re doing here, genius?”
“Being completely and totally hexbound would be my first guess. Lily?”
Technically, I had no idea what “hexbound” was, but Scout had said she’d done a hex, and these two girls seemed like they were tied up with some kind of invisible magic, so I made an educated guess. “Certainly looks that way. How do you two know each other?”
“Millicent remembers the agony of defeat,” the second girl put in.
Scout’s lip curled. “There was no defeat. I forfeited the game because Lauren locked me in the green room.”
“Like that mattered. You would have lost anyway. I’d been training for six weeks straight.”
“Because your mom was your coach.”
“At least my mom was in the state at the time.”
The room went silent, and my gaze darted back and forth between the two of them. I was waiting for Scout to growl or hiss or reach out to rake her nails across Lauren’s face.
“So, what game?” I asked. “Basketball or softball or . . . ?”
“Quiz Club,” they simultaneously said.
I had to bite back a snicker, and got a nasty look from Scout.
She walked closer and prodded Lauren’s cheer shoe with a toe. “How did you get through the door?”
“How do you think? Your wards are crap.”
“It was locked the old-fashioned way.”
“Hello?” said the second girl. “I’m a gatekeeper? I pick locks?”
Lauren made a sound of irritation. I got the sense she wasn’t friends with her uncheerleadery teammate. On the other hand, Reapers probably didn’t care much about friendship when teaming up for infiltrations. They were evil, after all. Being BFFs probably didn’t figure into it.
“Frick,” Scout muttered. “I didn’t know they had a gatekeeper.”
“Clearly,” snarked out the apparent gatekeeper.
Scout rolled her eyes. “Let’s recall who’s spindled on the floor and who’s standing victoriously over you, shall we? Geez. There’s a hierarchy, ladies.”
“Whatever,” Lauren said petulantly.
“Yeah, well, you can ‘whatever’ this, cheer-reaper.” Scout began to clap her hands and stomp her feet in rhythm, her own little cheer. “Hey,” she said, “it’s getting cold in here. There must be some Reapers in the at-mo-sphere.”
Lauren made some really offensive suggestions about Scout’s mom. Did she cheer with that mouth?
“I’m going to ignore those very classless suggestions about my parentals,” she said. “Why don’t we go back to my first question? Why were you trying to break into St. Sophia’s?”
“We didn’t just try,” said the gatekeeper. “We accomplished .”
“Two feet inside the door hardly qualifies as accomplished, mi amiga. Unless you’d like your mouths hexbound as well, I suggest you talk.” Scout held up her hands and closed her eyes and began to recite some magical words. But since those words were “abracadabra” and “mumbo jumbo” and “hocus pocus,” I guessed she was playing chicken.
“You know why we’re here,” the gatekeeper quickly answered, her voice squeaking in her effort to get out the words.
“Me and my Gr
imoire?”
“Like you’re so freakin’ special,” Lauren muttered.
Scout squared her shoulders. “Special enough. My Grimoire is out of reach, and even if you got me, I’m sure as hell not going to go willingly. Did you two think you could just walk in here and carry me out?”
Lauren laughed. “Um, yes? Hello, hypnosis power?”
Scout moved closer and peered down at Lauren. “Ah, there it is,” she said, pointing down at Lauren’s neck. I took a closer look. Around Lauren’s neck was a small, round watch on a gold chain.
“Have you ever seen those old movies where some evil psychiatrist hypnotizes someone by swinging their watch back and forth? She can do that.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s a pretty narrow power.” Not that it made me any less happy that her hands were bound. These two seemed like the type to write “loser” on your forehead in permanent market once they’d gotten you down.
“Very narrow,” Scout agreed with a wicked grin. “And you know what they say about girls with very narrow powers?”
“What’s that?”
Scout paused for a minute. “Oh, I don’t know. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d make it all the way through the joke.”
Lauren did a little more swearing. Gatekeeper girl tried to join in, but she just wasn’t as good at it.
“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted. “How can someone be dumber than a baguette?”
“It means you’re stupid.”
I thought back to my nearly perfect trig homework. “Try again.” But that just reminded me that we had class—including trig—in a few hours. Exhaustion suddenly hitting me in a wave, I worked to get us back on track. “What do you want to do now?”
Scout looked back at me. “Well, we’re in the convent, and they’re in the convent. That’s two too many people in the convent.”
Five minutes later, we were dragging two squirming girls through the vault door and into the corridor behind it—and out of St. Sophia’s. They were hard to move, not just because they were fidgety, but because every time we gripped them near the shoulders they tried to bite us.
“Isn’t there a better way to do this?” I wondered, standing over Scout. “I mean, if you’d knocked them completely unconscious they’d be a lot easier to move.”
“Yeah, but we’d be leaving them completely at the mercy of whatever else might roam the tunnels at night. And that would be such a Reaper thing to do.”
Lauren growled.
We finally managed it by dragging them by their hexbound feet into the tunnel. But it wasn’t pretty, and the swearing didn’t get any better. Neither of them—especially not the cheerleader—was thrilled to be dragged through five or six feet of underground tunnel on their backs.
When they were on the other side of the door, Scout put her hands on her hips and looked down at them. “And what did we learn today, ladies?”
“That you suck.”
Scout rolled her eyes. I raised a hand. “While we’re here, I have a question.”
“Go for it, Lils. All right, cheer-reaper and gatekeeper—”
“I’m in the band.”
“Sorry?”
“You call her cheer-reaper, I figure you should call me by my title, too. I’m in the band. I play the French horn.”
Scout and I shared a grin.
“’Course you do,” Scout said. “Okay, cheer-reaper and French hornist, my friend here has a question for you.”
“Thanks,” I offered.
“Anytime.”
I turned toward them. “Have you two seen anything weird in the tunnels lately?”
“Oh,” French horn said, “you mean the rat thingies?”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought it was going to be quite that easy. “Well, actually, yeah. You know anything about those?”
The French horn player huffed. “Well, of course we do. We—”
She was interrupted by Lauren’s screaming. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!” And she didn’t stop there. She kept screaming and screaming. Scout and I both hitched back a little, then shared a wary glance. That kind of noise was surely going to attract attention.
“Shut it, Fleming,” Scout said, kicking her toe a little, then glancing at me. “That may be our cue to depart.”
“They know something,” I pointed out.
“I know something, too. I know we’re going to attract a lot of unwanted attention if they keep screaming. And then we have to make up some ridiculous explanation about how we heard screaming through the vents in our rooms, and we followed the sound back to the basement, and we found these girls lying on the ground and pretending to be tied up by invisible rope because they’re practicing for the regional mime championships.”
I blinked at her. “Is that explanation more or less believable than we woke up because two girls who are actually evil magicians tripped a magical alarm wired to a door in the basement we aren’t supposed to know about?”
Scout paused for a minute, the nodded. “Point made. Let’s go home. Ladies, have a pleasant evening.”
Not surprisingly, Lauren stopped screaming. But that just meant the curses were a little less loud than they had been before.
We left a flashlight on the ground between them, then slipped through the door again. When we were both on the other side, we used all our weight to push the thing closed again, muffling the sounds of cursing that were coming from the other side. I took a step back while Scout spun the flywheel and slid the security bar into place, metallic cranking and grinding echoing through the corridor.
“They’ve seen the rat things,” I said.
“And if Lauren’s screaming means anything, they’ve done more than just that. They know more than just that, which means the Reapers and the rats are definitely tied together. It wasn’t a coincidence that Detroit and Naya saw the slime outside that sanctuary.” She put her hands on her hips and looked at the closed door. “I also guess I have to try to ward the door again.”
“You can do it!” I said, giving her a chipper thumbs-up.
“Daniel could do it,” she said. “And without a spell. Me? He says, ‘Go for it, Scout,’ and I have to rough out a few lines—hardly have time to pay attention to the meter, to the melody, the rhythm—ugh,” she said, and the irritation in her voice was really the only part of the monologue I understood.
“So, what does that mean? Dumb it down like you’re talking to a girl who’s only had magic for, like, a few weeks.”
She smiled a little, which had been the point. “You’ve seen me work my magic. Putting together an incantation is hard work, and wards are harder than most. There’s no physical charm—like the origami I used on the thingies—to boost the words. Daniel didn’t give me a lot of direction, and he certainly didn’t give me time to do it well. The ward won’t really keep out anyone with any skill, and the hex isn’t going to last much longer.” She glanced down at her watch. “Fifteen minutes or a half an hour, tops?”
Probably not enough time to find Daniel and get him into the basement, even if he was already in the Enclave. A blast of firespell wasn’t going to do much to the door, and opening up the door again to firespell the Reapers into unconsciousness would just be a waste of time. They’d eventually wake up, and we’d still have doors with breach problems.
We needed stronger wards, and we needed them now.
I grinned slowly, an idea blossoming. “Maybe I can do for you what I did for Naya and Temperance.”
Scout tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if I could funnel energy through Naya, maybe I could funnel it through you. To strengthen the wards, I mean.”
“Huh,” she said, then looked at the ground, frowning as she considered the possibility. “So you’re thinking the trouble isn’t that the wards didn’t work, but that they weren’t strong enough to keep the Reapers out.”
I nodded. “I mean, you’re the expert on wards so you’d know better than me, but if we pump up the power, wo
uldn’t it make the ward harder to break through?”
“It might,” she said with a nod. “It definitely might. Do you need to recharge or whatever?”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“I’ll assume that’s a general yes, so we’ll do this and go back to sleep. What do I need to do?”
“What do you have to do to work your magic?”
“Remember the triple I?”
“Um, intent, incantation, incarnation?”
She nodded and held out a hand. I took it in mind. With her free hand, she pressed her palm to a flat spot on the door. She closed her eyes, and her lips began to move with words I couldn’t hear. The door began to glow, pale green light filling the corridor.
“Now,” she quietly said, her eyes still closed.
I closed my own eyes, and tried to imagine the power around me, the atomic potential in the air. I imagined it flowing through my fingers, then my arm, then across my body. I felt her jump when it reached her, and her fingers tightened on mine.
“You okay?”
“Keep it coming,” she gritted out.
“Try not to flinch,” I said, “and don’t try to fight it. Just let it flow across you and into the door. Let me do the work.”
Scout let out a muffled sound, but she kept her fingers tight on mine. She kept the current intact.
A low hum began to fill the air. I opened my eyes a little. The hum was coming from the rivets as they vibrated in their sockets. The green glow was also deeper now, the light more intense as Scout transmitted the magic into the door.
“How’s it coming?”
“I think we’re . . . almost there. I can feel it filling up. Sealing. Closing up the cracks.”
That was great, but it was late, and I was exhausted, and Scout wasn’t exactly a finicky magic eater. I could feel her capacity power, like a cavern of magical potential.
And that potential liked firespell.
“Okay, I think we’re done, Lily.”
I tried to pull back, to slow down the flood of power to a trickle, but it didn’t want to stop. Scout’s magic kept sucking more power, and I couldn’t close that door.
