Firespell

by Chloe Neill

  “Upstate New York.”

  “New York,” he repeated. “How exotic.”

  “Not all that exotic,” I said, twirling a finger to point out the architecture around us. “And you Midwesterners seem to do things pretty well.”

  A smile blossomed on John Creed’s face, but there was still something dark in his eyes—something melancholy. Melancholy or not, the words that came out of his mouth were still very teenage boy.

  “Even Midwesterners appreciate . . . pretty things,” he said, his gaze traveling from my boots to my knot of dark hair. When he reached my gaze again, he gave me a knowing smile. It was a compliment, I guessed, that he thought I looked good, but coming from him, that compliment was a little creepy.

  “Cool your jets, Creed,” Veronica interrupted. “And before this conversation crosses a line, we should get back to campus. Curfew,” she added, then offered Jason a coy smile. “Nice to meet you, Jason.”

  “Same here,” he said, bobbing his head at her, then glancing at me. “Lily.”

  I bobbed my head at him, a flush rising on my cheeks, and wished I’d stayed in my room.

  12

  I’d spared myself a confrontation with Scout earlier in the day. Since she and Lesley were playing cards at the coffee table when I returned to the suite, two brat packers in line behind me, my time for avoidance was up.

  I stopped short in the doorway when I saw them, Amie and Veronica nearly ramming me in the back.

  “Down in front,” Veronica muttered, squeezing through the door around me, bringing a tornado of shopping bags into the common room.

  Scout glanced up when I opened the door. At first, she seemed excited to see me. But when she realized who’d followed me in, her expression morphed into something significantly nastier.

  I probably deserved that.

  “Shopping?” she asked, an eyebrow arched as Amie and Veronica skirted the couch on their way to Amie’s room.

  “Fresh air,” I said.

  Scout made a disdainful sound, shook her head, and dropped her gaze to the fan of cards in her hand. “I think it’s your turn,” she told Lesley, her voice flat.

  Lesley looked up at me. “You were out—with them?”

  Barnaby wasn’t much for subtlety.

  “Fresh air,” Scout repeated, then put a card onto the table with a snap of sound. “Lily needed fresh air.”

  Amie unlocked her bedroom door and moved inside. But before Veronica went in, she stopped and gazed back at me. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes,” Scout bit out, flipping one card, then a second and third, onto the table. “You should go. You have shoes to try on, Carrie, or Miranda, or whoever you’re pretending to be today.”

  Veronica snorted, her features screwing into that ratlike pinch. “Better than hanging out here with geeks ’r’ us.”

  “Geeks ’r’ us?” I repeated.

  “She uses a bag with a pirate symbol on it,” Veronica said. “What kind of Disney fantasy is she living?”

  Oh, right, I thought. That’s why I hated these girls. “And yet,” I pointed out, “you hung out with me today. And you know Scout and I are friends.”

  “All evidence to the contrary,” Scout muttered.

  “We were giving you the benefit of the doubt,” Veronica said.

  Scout made a sarcastic sound. “No, Lively, you felt guilty.”

  “Ladies,” Barnaby said, standing up to reveal the unicorn-print T-shirt she’d matched with a pleated skirt. “I don’t think Lily wants to be fought over. This is beneath all of you.”

  I forced a nod in agreement—although it wasn’t that horrible to be fought over.

  “Uh-huh,” Veronica said, then looked at me. “We did the nice thing, Parker. You’re new to St. Sophia’s, so we offered to help you out. We gave you a warning, and because you handled our little game in the basement, we gave you a chance.”

  “So very thoughtful,” Scout bit out, “to make her a charity case.”

  Veronica ignored her. “Fine. You want to be honest? Let’s be honest. Friends matter, Parker. And if you’re not friends with the right people, the fact that you went to St. Sophia’s won’t make a damn bit of difference. Even St. Sophia’s has its misfits, after all.” As if to punctuate her remark, she glanced over at Scout and Lesley, then glanced back at me, one eyebrow raised, willing me to get her point.

  I’m not sure if she was better or worse for it, but the bitchiness of her comment aside, there was earnestness in her expression. Veronica believed what she was saying—really, truly believed it. Had Veronica been a misfit once?

  Not that the answer was all that important right now. “If you’re saying that I have to dump one set of friends in order to keep another,” I told her, “I think you know what the answer’s going to be.”

  “There are only two kinds of people in this world,” Veronica said. “Friends—and enemies.”

  Was this girl for real? “I’m willing to take my chances.”

  She snorted indignantly, then walked into Amie’s room. “Your loss,” she said, the door shutting with a decided click behind her.

  The room was quiet for a moment.

  I blew out a breath, then glanced over at Scout. Ever so calmly, without saying a word or making eye contact, she laid the rest of her cards flat on the table, stood up, marched into her room, and slammed the door.

  The coffee table rattled.

  I undraped the scarf from around my neck and dropped onto the couch.

  Lesley crossed her legs and sat down on the floor, then began to order the deck of cards into a tidy pile. “Granted,” she said, “I’ve only known you for a couple of days, but that was not the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She bobbed her head toward Scout’s closed door, which had begun to rattle with the bass of Veruca Salt’s “Seether.”

  “How ballistic do you think she’s gonna be?” I asked, my gaze on the vibrating door.

  “Intercontinental missile ballistic.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  Lesley placed her stack of cards gingerly on the tabletop, then looked over at me. “But you’re still going in there, right?”

  I nodded. “As soon as I’m ready.”

  “Anything you want in your eulogy?”

  Lesley smiled tightly. I gathered up my scarf, rose from the couch, and headed for Scout’s door.

  “Just tell my parents I loved them,” I said, and reached out my hand to knock.

  13

  Four minutes later, when Scout finally said, “Come in,” I opened the door. Scout was on her bed, legs crossed, a spread of books before her.

  She lifted her gaze and arched an eyebrow at me. “Well. Look who we have here.”

  I managed a half smile.

  She closed a book, then uncrossed her legs and rose from the bed. After turning down the stereo to a lowish roar, she moved to her shelves and began straightening the items in her tiny museum. “You want to tell me why you’ve been avoiding me?”

  Because I’m afraid, I silently thought. “I’m not avoiding you.”

  She glanced over with skeptical eyes. “You ignored me all weekend. You’ve either been holed up in your room or hanging with the brat pack. And since I know there’s no love lost there . . .” She shrugged.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You’re freaked out about the magic, aren’t you? I knew it. I knew it was going to freak you out.” She plucked one of the tiny, glittered houses from a shelf, raised it to eye level, and peered through the tiny window. “I shouldn’t have told you. Shouldn’t have gotten you wrapped up in it.” Shaking her head again, she put the house back onto the shelf and picked up the one beside it.

  “You’d think I’d be used to this by now,” she said, suddenly turning around, the second house in her hand. “I mean, it’s not like this is the first time someone has walked away because I’m, you know, weird. You think my parents didn’t notice that I cou
ld do stuff?”

  As if proving her point, she adjusted the house so that it sat in the palm of her outstretched hand, then whispered a series of staccato words.

  The interior of the house began to glow.

  “Look inside,” she quietly said.

  “Inside?”

  Carefully, she placed the illuminated house back on the shelf, then moved to the side so I could stand beside her. I stepped into the space she’d made, then leaned down and peeked into one of the tiny windows.

  The house—this tiny, glittered, paper house on Scout’s bookshelf—now bustled with activity. Like a dollhouse come to life, holograms of tiny figures moved inside amongst tiny pieces of furniture, like a living snow globe. Furniture lined the walls; lamps glowed with the spark of whatever life she’d managed to breathe into it with the mere sound of her voice.

  I stood up again and glanced at her, eyes wide. “You did that?”

  Her gaze on the house, she nodded. “That’s my talent—I make magic from words. Like you said, from lists. Letters.” She paused. “I did it the first time when I was twelve. I mean, not that particular spell; that’s just an animation thing, hardly a page of text, and I condensed it a long time ago. That means I made it shorter,” she said at my raised brows. “Like zipping a computer file.”

  “That’s . . . amazing,” I said, lifting my gaze to the house again. Shadows passed before the tiny glassine windows, lives being lived in miniature.

  “Amazing or not, my mother freaked out. My parents made calls, and I was sent right into private school. I was put in a place away from average kids. Put into a home.” She lifted her gaze and glanced around the room. “A prison, of sorts.”

  That explained Scout’s tiny museum—the room she’d made her own, the four walls she’d filled with the detritus of her life, from junior high to St. Sophia’s. It was her magical respite.

  Her cell.

  “So, yeah,” she said after a moment, waving a hand in front of the paper house, the lights in the windows dimming and fading, a tiny world extinguished. “I’m used to rejection because of my magic.”

  “It’s not you,” I quietly said.

  Scout barked out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s the first time I’ve heard that one.” She straightened the house, adjusting it so that it sat neatly beside its neighbors. “If we’re going to break up, let’s just get it over with, okay?”

  I figured out something about Scout in that moment, something that made my heart clench with protective-ness. However brave she might have been in fighting Reapers, in protecting humans, in running through underground tunnels in the middle of the night, fighting back against fire- and earthquake-bearing baddies, she was very afraid of one thing: that I’d abandon her. She was afraid she’d made a friend who was going to walk away like her parents had done, walk out and leave her alone in her room. That’s what finally snapped me out of nearly forty-eight hours of freaking out about something that I knew, without a doubt, was going to change my life forever.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I finally said.

  I watched the change in her expression—from preparing for defeat, to relief, to crisis management.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  When I frowned back at her, she glared back at me, daring me to argue.

  Recognizing the inevitability of my defeat, I sighed, but turned around and lifted up the back of my shirt.

  The room went silent.

  “You have a darkening,” she said.

  “A what? I think it’s just a funky bruise or something?” It wasn’t, of course, just a funky bruise, but I was willing to cling to those last few seconds of normalcy.

  “When did you get it?”

  I stepped away from her, pulling down my T- shirt and wrapping my arms around my waist self-consciously. “I don’t know. A couple of . . . days ago.”

  Silence.

  “Like, a couple of firespell days ago?”

  I nodded.

  “You’ve been marked.” Her voice was soft, tremulous.

  My fingers still knotted in the hem of the shirt, I glanced behind me. Scout stood there, eyes wide, lips parted in shock. “Scout?”

  She shook her head, then looked up at me. “This isn’t supposed to happen.”

  The emotion in her voice—awe—raised the hair on my arms and made my stomach sink. “What isn’t supposed to happen?”

  She stood up, then frowned and nibbled the edge of her lip; then she walked to one end of the room and back again. She was pacing, apparently trying to puzzle out something. “Right after you got hit by the firespell. But you’ve never had powers before, and you don’t have powers now—” She paused and glanced over at me. “Do you?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course I don’t.”

  She resumed talking so quickly, I wasn’t sure she’d even heard my answer. “I mean, I guess it’s possible.” She hit the end of the room and, neatly sideswiping a footlocker, turned around again. “I’d have to check the Grimoire to be sure. If you don’t have power, then you weren’t really triggered, but maybe it’s some kind of tattoo from the firespell? I can’t imagine how you could have gotten a darkening without the power—”

  “Scout.”

  “But maybe it’s happened before.”

  “Scout.” My voice was loud enough that she finally stopped and looked at me.

  “Hmm?”

  I pointed behind me. “Hello? My back?”

  “Right, right.” She walked back to me and began to pull up the hem of her shirt.

  “Um, I’m not sure stripping down is the solution here, Scout.”

  “Prude,” she said dryly, but when she reached me again, she turned around.

  At the small of her back, in pale green, was a mark like mine—well, not exactly like mine. The symbols inside her circle were different, but the general idea was the same.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  Scout dropped the back of her T-shirt and turned, nodding her head. “Yep. So I guess it’s settled now.”

  “Settled?”

  “You’re one of us.”

  14

  Forty minutes—and Scout’s rifling through a two-foot-high stack of books—later, we were headed downstairs. If she’d found anything in the giant leather volumes she pulled out of a plastic tub beneath her bed, she didn’t say. The only conclusion she’d reached was that she needed to talk to the rest of the Adepts in Enclave Three, so she’d pulled out her phone, popped open the keyboard and, fingers flying, sent out a dispatch. And then we were on our way.

  The route we took this time was different still from the last couple of trips I’d made. We used a new doorway to the basement level—this one a wooden panel in a side hallway in the main building—and descended a narrower, steeper staircase. Once we were in the basement, we walked a maze through limestone hallways. I was beginning to think the labyrinth on the floor was more than just decoration. It served as a pretty good symbol of what lay beneath the convent.

  Despite how confusing it was, Scout clearly knew the route, barely pausing at the corners, her speed quick and movements efficient. She moved silently, striding through the hallways and tunnels like a woman on a mission. I stumbled at a half run, half walk behind her, just trying to keep up. My speed wasn’t much helped by my stomach’s rolling, both because we were actually going into the basement again—by choice—and for the reason we were going there.

  Because I was her mission.

  Or so I assumed.

  “You could slow down a little, you know.”

  “Slowing down would make it harder for me to punish you by making you keep up,” she said, but came to a stop as we reached the dead end of a limestone corridor that ended in a nondescript metal door.

  “Why are you punishing me?”

  Scout reached up, pulled a key from above the threshold, and slipped it into the lock. When the door popped open, she put back the key, then glanced at me. “Um, you abandoned me for the brat pack?”

  “A
bandoned is a harsh word.”

  “So are they,” she pointed out, holding the door open so I could move inside. “The last time you hung out with them, they put you in the hospital.”

  “That was actually your fault.”

  “Details,” she said.

  My feet still on the limestone, hand on the threshold of the door, I peeked inside. She was leading me into an old tunnel. It was narrow, with an arched ceiling, the entire tunnel paved in concrete, narrow tracks along the concrete floor. Lights in round, industrial fittings were suspended from the ceiling every dozen yards or so. The half illumination didn’t do much for the ambience. A couple of inches of rusty water covered the tracks on the floor, and the concrete walls were covered with graffiti—words of every shape and size, big and small, monotone and multicolored.

  “What is this?”

  “Chicago Tunnel Company Railroad,” she said, nudging me forward. I took a step into dirty water, glad I’d worn boots for my shopping excursion, and glad I still had on a jacket. It was chilly, probably because we were underground.

  “It’s an old railroad line,” Scout said, then stepped beside me. Cold, musty air stirred as she closed the door behind us. Somewhere down the line, water dripped. “The cars used to move between downtown buildings to deliver coal and dump ash and stuff. Parts of the tunnel run under the river, and some of those parts were accidentally breached by the city, so if you see a tsunami, find a bulkhead and make a run for it.”

  “I’ll make a point of it.”

  Scout reached into her messenger bag and pulled out two flashlights. She took one, then handed me the second. While the tunnels were lit, it made me feel better to have the weight in my hand.

  Flashlights in hand, we walked. We took one branch, then another, then another, making so many turns that I had no clue which direction we were actually moving in.

  “So this mark thing,” I began, as we stepped gingerly through murky water. “What is it, exactly?”