by Chloe Neill
“What?” he asked. “We are not so crazy,” he said, a thick accent suddenly in his voice, probably an impersonation of some long-dead celebrity. My dad imagined himself to be quite the comedian.
He had quite an imagination.
“Sure, Dad.” There was a knock at the door. I looked up as Scout walked in. “Listen, I need to run to study hall. Tell Mom I said hi, and good luck with the actual, you know, research stuff.”
“Nighty night, Lils. You take care.”
“I will, Dad. Love you.”
“Love you, too.” I closed the phone and slipped it back into my bag. Scout raised her eyebrows inquisitively.
“My parents are safe and sound in Germany,” I told her.
“I’m glad to hear it. Let’s go make good on their investment with a couple hours of homework.”
The invitation wasn’t exactly thrilling, but it’s not like we had another choice. Study hall was mandatory, after all.
Study hall took place in the Great Hall, the big room with all the tables where I’d first gotten a glimpse of the plaid army. They were in full attendance tonight, nearly two hundred girls in navy plaid filling fifty-odd four-person tables. We headed through the rows toward a couple of empty seats near the main aisle, which would give us a view of the comings and goings of St. Sophia’s finest. They also gave the plaid army a look at us, and look they did, the thwack-thwack of my flip-flops on the limestone floor drawing everyone’s attention my way.
That attention included the pair of stern-looking women in thick-soled black shoes and horn- rimmed glasses. Their squarish figures tucked into black shirts and sweaters, they patrolled the perimeter of the room, clipboards in hand.
“Who are they?” I whispered, as we took seats opposite each other.
Scout glanced up as she pulled notebooks and books from her bag. “The dragon ladies. They monitor lights-out, watch us while we study, and generally make sure that nothing fun occurs on their watch.”
“Awesome,” I said, flipping open my trig book. “I’m a fun hater myself.”
“I figured,” Scout said without looking up, pen scurrying across a page of her notebook. “You had the look.”
One of the roaming dragon ladies walked by our table, her gaze over her glasses and an eyebrow arched at our whispering as she passed. I mouthed, “Sorry,” but she scribbled on her clipboard before walking away.
Scout bit back a smile. “Please quit disturbing the entire school, Parker, jeez.”
I stuck out my tongue at her, but started my homework.
We worked for an hour before she stretched in her chair, then dropped her chin onto her hand. “I’m bored.”
I rubbed my eyes, which were blurring over the tiny print in our European history book. “Do you want me to juggle?”
“You can juggle?”
“Well, not yet. But there’re books everywhere in here,” I pointed out. “There’s gotta be a how-to guide somewhere on those shelves.”
The girl who sat beside me at the table cleared her throat, her gaze still on the books in front of her. “Really trying to do some work here, ladies. Go play Gilmore Girls somewhere else.”
The girl was pretty in a supermodel kind of way—in a French way, if that made sense. Long dark hair, big eyes, wide mouth—and she played irritated pretty well, one perfect eyebrow arched in irritation over brown eyes.
“Collette, Collette,” Scout said, pointing her own pencil at the girl, then at me. “Don’t be bossy. Our new friend Parker, here, will think you’re one of the brat pack.”
Collette snorted, then slid a glance my way. “As if, Green. I assume you’re Parker?”
“Last time I checked,” I agreed.
“Then don’t make me give you more credit than you deserve, Parker. Some of us take our academic achievements very seriously. If I’m not valedictorian next year, I might not get into Yale. And if I don’t get into Yale, I’m going to have a breakdown of monumental proportions. So you and your friend go play clever somewhere else, alrighty? Alrighty,” she said with a bob of her head, then turned back to her books.
“She’s really smart,” Scout said apologetically. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t done much for her personality.”
Collette flipped a page of her book. “I’m still here.” “Gilmore Girls,” Scout repeated, then made a sarcastic sound. Apparently done with studying, she glanced carefully around, then pulled a comic book from her bag. She paused to ensure the coast was clear, then sandwiched the comic between the pages of her trig book.
I arched an eyebrow at the move, but she shrugged happily, and went back to working trig problems, occasionally sneaking in a glazed-eyed perusal of a page or two of the comic.
“Weirdo,” I muttered, but said it with a grin.
After we’d done our couple of mandatory hours in study hall—not all studying, of course, but at least we were in there—we went back to the suite to make use of our last free hour before the sun officially set on my first day as a St. Sophia’s girl. The suite was empty of brat pack members, and Lesley’s door was shut, a line of light beneath it. I nudged Scout as we walked toward her room. She followed the direction of my nod, then nodded back.
“Cello’s gone,” she noted, pointing at the corner of the common room, which was empty of the instrument parked there when I arrived yesterday.
Music suddenly echoed through the suite, the thick, thrumming notes of a Bach cello concerto pouring from Lesley’s room. She played beautifully, and as she moved her bow across the strings, Scout and I stood quietly, reverently, in the common room, our gaze on the closed door before us.
After a couple of minutes, the music stopped, replaced by scuffling on the other side of the door. Without preface, the door opened. A blonde blinked at us from the threshold. She was dressed simply in a fitted T-shirt, cotton A-line skirt, and Mary Janes. Her hair was short and pale blond, a fringe of bangs across her forehead.
“Hi, Lesley,” Scout said, hitching a thumb at me. “This is Lily. She’s the new girl.”
Lesley blinked big blue eyes at me. “Hi,” she said, then turned on one heel, walked back into the room, and shut the door behind her.
“And that was Lesley,” Scout said, unlocking her own door and flipping on her bedroom light.
I followed, then shut the door behind us again. “Lesley’s not much of a talker.”
Scout nodded and sat cross- legged on the bed. “That was actually pretty chatty for Barnaby. She’s always been quiet. Has a kind of savant vibe? Wicked good on the cello.”
“I got goose bumps,” I agreed. “That song is really haunting.”
Scout nodded again, and had just begun to pull a pillow into her lap when her cell phone rang. She reached up, grabbed it from its home on the shelf, and popped it open.
“When?” she asked after a moment of silence, turning away from me, the phone pressed to her ear. Apparently unhappy with the response she got, she muttered a curse, then sighed haggardly. “We should have known they had something planned when we saw her.”
I assumed “her” meant the blonde we’d seen outside at lunch.
More silence ensued as Scout listened to the caller. In the quiet of the room, I could hear a voice, but I couldn’t understand the words. The tone was low, so I guessed the caller was a boy. Michael Garcia, maybe?
“Okay,” she said. “I will.” She closed the phone with a snap and paused before glancing back at me.
“Time to run?”
Scout nodded. And this time, there was a tightness around her eyes. It didn’t thrill me that the tightness looked like fear.
My heart clenched sympathetically. “Do you need backup? Someone else to help clean up the litter?”
Scout smiled, a little of the twinkle back in her eyes. “I’d love it, actually. But community improvement isn’t ready for you, Parker.” She grabbed a jacket and her skull-and-crossbones bag, and we both left her room. Scout headed for a secret rendezvous; I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going
.
“Don’t wait up,” she said with a wink, then opened the door and headed out into the hallway.
Don’t count on it, I thought, having made the decision. This time, I wasn’t going to let her get away with mumbled excuses and a secret nighttime trip—at least not solo.
This time, I was going, too.
She’d closed the door behind her. I cracked it open and watched her slip down the hallway.
“Time to play Nancy Drew,” I murmured, then slipped off my noisy flip- flops, picked them up, and followed her.
5
She was disappearing around the corner as I closed the door to the common room. The hallway was empty and silent but for her footsteps, the limestone floor and walls glowing beneath the golden light of the sconces.
Scout headed toward the stairs, which she took at a trot. I hung back until I was sure she wouldn’t see me as she rounded the second flight of stairs, then followed her down. When she reached the first floor, she headed through the Great Hall, which, even after the required study period, still held a handful of apparently ambitious teenagers. Unfortunately, the aisle between the tables was straight and empty, so if Scout turned around, my cover was blown.
I took a breath and started walking. I made it halfway without incident when, suddenly, Scout paused. I dumped into the closest chair and bent down, faking an adjustment to my flip- flop. When she turned around again and resumed her progression through the room, I stood up, then hustled to squeak through the double doors before they closed behind her.
I just made it through, then flattened myself against the wall of the hallway that led to the domed center of the main building. I peeked around the corner; Scout was hurrying across the tiled labyrinth. I gnawed my lip as I considered my options. This part of playing the new Nancy Drew was tricky—the room was gigantic and empty, at least in the middle, so there weren’t many places to hide.
Without cover, I decided I’d have to wait her out. I watched her cross the labyrinth and move into the hallway opposite mine, then pause before a door. She looked around, probably to see whether she was alone (we’re all wrong sometimes), then slipped the ribboned key from her neck and slid the key into the lock.
The click of tumblers echoed across the room. She winced at the sound, but placed a hand on the door, took a final look around, and disappeared. When she was gone, I jogged across the labyrinth to the other side, then pressed my ear to the door she’d closed behind her. After the sound of her footsteps receded, I twisted the doorknob, found that it was still unlocked and—heart beating like a bass drum in my chest—edged it open.
It was another hallway.
I blew out the breath I’d been holding.
A hallway wasn’t much to get stressed out about. Frankly, the chasing was getting a little repetitive. Hallway. Room. Hallway. Room. I reminded myself that there was a greater purpose here—spying on the girl who’d adopted me as a best friend.
Okay, put that way, it didn’t sound so noble.
Morally questionable or not, I still had a job to do. I walked inside and closed the door behind me. I didn’t see Scout, but I watched her elongated shadow shrink around the corner as she moved. I followed her through the hallway, and then down another set of stairs into what I guessed was the basement, although it didn’t look much different from the first floor, all limestone and golden light and iron sconces. The ceiling was different, though. Instead of the vaults and domes on the first floor, the ceiling here was lower, flatter, and covered in patterned plaster. It looked like a lot of work for a basement.
The stairs led to another hall. I followed the sound of footsteps, but only made it five or six feet before I heard another sound—the clank and grate of metal on metal. I froze and swallowed down the lump of fear that suddenly tightened my throat. I wanted to call her name, to scream it out, but I couldn’t seem to draw breath to make a sound. I forced myself to take another step forward, then another, nearly jumping out of my skin when that bone-chilling gnash of metal echoed through the hallway again.
Oh, screw this, I thought, and forced my lungs to work. “Scout?” I called out. “Are you okay?”
When I got no response, I rounded the corner. The hallway dead-ended in a giant metal door . . . and she was nowhere to be seen.
“Frick,” I muttered. I glanced around, saw nothing else that would help, and moved closer so I could give the door a good look-see.
It was ginormous. At least eight feet high, with an arch in the top, it was outlined in brass rivets and joints. In the middle was a giant flywheel, and beneath the flywheel was a security bar that must have been four or five inches of solid steel. It was in its unlocked position. That explained the metal sounds I’d heard earlier.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that door was keeping out of St. Sophia’s, but Scout was in there. Sure, we hadn’t known each other long, and I wasn’t up on all the comings and goings of her community improvement group, but this seemed like trouble . . . and help was the least I could offer my new suitemate.
After all, what were they going to do—kick me out?
“Sagamore, here I come,” I whispered, and put my hands on the flywheel. I tugged, but the door wouldn’t open. I turned the flywheel, clockwise first, then counterclockwise, but the movement had no effect—at least, not on this side of the door.
Frowning, I scanned the door from top to bottom, looking for another way in—a keyhole, a numeric pad, anything that would have gotten it open and gotten me inside.
But there was nothing. So much for my rescue mission.
I considered my options.
One: I could head back upstairs, tuck into bed, and forget about the fact that my new best friend was somewhere behind a giant locked door in an old convent in downtown Chicago.
Two: I could wait for her to come back, then offer whatever help I could.
I nibbled the edge of my lip for a moment and glanced back at the hallway from which I’d come, my passage back to safety. But I was here, now, and she was in there, getting into God only knew what kind of trouble.
So I sat down on the floor, pulled up my knees, and prepared to wait.
I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I jolted awake at the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door. I jumped up from my spot, the flip-flops I’d pulled off earlier still in my hand, my only weapon. As I faced down the door with only a few inches of green foam as protection, it occurred to me that there might be a stranger—and not Scout—on the other side of the door.
My heart raced hammerlike in my chest, my fingers clenched into the foam of my flip- flops. Suddenly the flywheel began to turn, the spokes rotating clockwise with a metallic scrape as someone sought entrance to the convent basement. Seconds later, oh so slowly, the door began to open, hundreds of pounds of metal rotating toward me.
“Don’t come any closer!” I called out. “I have a weapon.”
Scout’s voice echoed from the other side of the door. “Don’t use it! And get out of the way!”
It wasn’t hard to obey, since I’d been bluffing. I stepped aside, and as soon as the crack in the door was big enough to squeeze through, she slipped through it, chest heaving as she sucked in air.
She muttered a curse and pressed her hands to the door. “I’m going to rail on you in a minute for following me, but in the meantime, help me close this thing!”
Although my head was spinning with ideas about what, exactly, she’d left on the other side of the door, I stepped beside her. With both pairs of hands on the door, arms and legs outstretched, we pushed it closed. The door was as heavy as it was high, and I wondered how she’d gotten it open in the first place.
When the door was shut, Scout spun the flywheel, then reached down to slide the steel bar back into its home. We both jumped back when a crash echoed from the other side, the door shaking on its giant brass hinges in response.
Eyes wide, I stared over at her. “What the hell was that?”
“Litter,” Scout said, s
taring at the closed door, as if making sure that whatever had been chasing her wasn’t going to breach it.
When the door was still and the hallway was silent, Scout turned and looked at me, her bob of blond hair in shambles around her face, jacket hanging from one shoulder . . . and fury in her expression.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing down here?” She pushed at the hair from her face, then pulled up the loose shoulder of her jacket.
“Exercising?”
Scout put her hands on her hips, obviously dubious.
“I was afraid you were in trouble.”
“You were nosy,” she countered. “I asked you to trust me on this.”
“Trusting you about a secret liaison is one thing. Trusting you about your safety is something else.” I bobbed my head toward the door. “Call it community improvement if you want, but it seems pretty apparent that you’re involved in something nasty. I’m not going to just stand by and watch you get hurt.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“Nope,” I agreed. “But I’m your new BFF.”
Her expression softened.
“I don’t need all the details,” I said, holding up my hands, “but I am going to need to know what the hell was on the other side of that door.”
As if on cue, a crash sounded again, and the door jumped on its hinges.
“We get it already!” she yelled. “Crawl back into your hole.” She grabbed my arm and began to pull me down the hall and away from the ominous door. “Let’s go.”
I tugged back, and when she dropped my arm, slipped the flip-flops back onto my feet. She was trucking down the hall, and I had to skip to keep up with her. “Is it an axe murderer?”
“Yeah,” she said dryly. “It’s an axe murderer.”
Most of the walk back was quiet. Scout and I didn’t chat much, and both the main building and the Great Hall were dark and empty of students. The moonlight, tinted red and blue, that streamed through the stained glass windows was the only light along the way.
