Charmfall

Nicu looked at me, a little bit of panic in his eyes. Was he . . . embarrassed about wanting to see Veronica?

As much as I would have liked to call him out—just to tone down his attitude—I was grateful for what he’d done, so I held it in.

“He was coming to see us,” I told Daniel, earning me looks from all the Adepts. “We promised him a meeting. Kind of.”

Nicu relaxed a little.

“Tomorrow,” I promised. “We owe you one, and we’ll get that meeting arranged tomorrow.”

He nodded, and with a flurry of fabric, he was gone.

If only all supernatural problems disappeared so quickly.

* * *

Scout and I were exhausted when we made it back to St. Sophia’s, but still too wired to sleep. That was the bad thing about late-night espionage—it was physically and emotionally tiring, but your brain was still pretty ramped up when bedtime finally came around.

After sneaking back into the suite, we went to her room. I sat down on the edge of her bed. She went to a drawer and pulled out a plastic zip bag of trail mix. She poured some in her hand, and when I extended mine, did the same for me. She dropped the bag on top of the bookshelf and stretched out on the floor.

For a few minutes, we quietly munched our snack. I picked through the pile in my palm, eating the raisins and other dried fruit first to get them out of the way before moving on to the nuts and—last but not least—chocolate chips. There may not be an order to the world, but there was definitely an order to trail mix.

“It happens, you know.”

I munched a piece of pineapple in half. “What does?”

“Some Adepts can’t hack it. Sometimes they decide they’re going full stop with the magic, but after years with powers, they can’t do it. They feel empty, or they miss the camaraderie, or they don’t want to go back to feeling plain or ordinary. Usual.”

I guess that explained what she’d been thinking about.

“It’s easy to be brave when the decision isn’t staring you down. When you’re young and powerful and the world is your oyster. It’s easier to judge a hard decision when you don’t yet have to make it. It’s a lot harder from the other side when you feel like the one thing that makes you who you are has been taken away.”

“I can see that,” I said. “And I can definitely see that in the Enclave. It’s hard for them, this decision. And having to face down the life after magic is clearly not looking as fun as they thought it would.”

“Not being responsible for the fight against Reapers is one thing. Being average, though, is something completely different. You’re no longer one of the Dark Elite; you’re just one of the millions of people in Chicago. You work. You raise a family. You pay your taxes. Stealing a little of someone’s essence might feel like a small price to pay to feel like you matter.”

“Are you regretting it?”

“Not regretting it.” She looked up at me. “But definitely thinking about, I don’t know, the gravity of it? When you talked to Sebastian that first time, I wasn’t thrilled. Or the second time. But you said some things about the world being gray instead of black and white. That makes more sense to me now.”

“So you’re saying I was right?”

I thought I was being funny, but I got a peanut in the face for my trouble. I tossed it back at her, but it landed on the shelf behind her in front of one of her tiny owls. She had a collection of those, too. In our more magical days—like last week—I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the owl come to life and pounce on the peanut. But now . . . it was just a bit of wood and some glue.

“There is something to be said for believing in magic,” I agreed. “It’s the keeping it that’s the trouble.”

“You said it.” She finished the rest of her trail mix and dusted off her hands on her pants. “Honestly,” she said, “who am I without magic?”

“You’re a girl,” I said. “A smart girl with a great education, rich parents, fabulous fashion sense, and a great friend. And even if not having magic means you’ll be closer to ‘ordinary’ than ‘magical,’ you’re still pretty extraordinary if you ask me.”

“I’m glad your parents dumped you in Chicago, Parker.”

“Right back at you, Green.” Time to talk about even more uncomfortable subjects. “Jeremiah is gunning for you and your magic. It’s probably time to think about getting the Grimoire somewhere safe.”

“The safest place to keep the Grimoire is with me.”

“Yeah, but what if you’re the Reapers’ target? What if they take you again to get to the Grimoire?”

“I understand the point,” she said, her voice low and serious. It wasn’t a tone I heard her use often. “But there’s no way I’m giving up my Grimoire. That’s exactly what they want—to separate me from it and get their hands on it. That’s why they took me to the sanctuary in the first place.” She shook her head. “No. The Grimoire stays with me. I’ll find a hiding place for it.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re the expert.” I looked around her room, imagining where she might hide it. A cutout inside another book? A secret compartment in her closet? Under her mattress?

“Where are you going to put it?” I wondered.

“I’m not sure yet.”

We sat quietly for a second.

I wanted to be supportive, but I wasn’t really sure how. “Do you want me to stay . . . or go?”

“You should go,” she said, but she didn’t sound happy about it. “If they think you’re the key to the Grimoire, they’ll use you to get it.”

Maybe, but it didn’t make me feel any better that I wouldn’t have any information to tell them. Wasn’t that when they usually stopped the torture on television—when someone gave up the goods? But this wasn’t the time to bring that up.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is between you and your book.” She nodded, and I stood up and walked to the door. “Just don’t forget where it is.”

“Fat chance,” she said.

I walked into the common room and closed the door behind me. This was one of those things she’d have to do on her own. Putting distance between herself and her magic wasn’t comfortable, I knew, but we also couldn’t deny the reality.

After all, we were getting used to that distance.

10

The best way to top off an evening of Reaper spying had to be a morning of trigonometry exams. Not.

But we were students as well as Adepts, so we headed into trig class after cramming as much as possible in the few hours we had left, took our seats, got out our freshly sharpened St. Sophia’s pencils, and waited for the show to start.

“Good luck,” I whispered to Scout, who was in the seat behind me.

She gave me a serious nod. However silly Scout may be most of the time, she was apparently serious about magic . . . and trig tests.

“Make us proud, Parker,” she whispered.

Our trig teacher went through the normal test-taking rules: Don’t talk. Don’t cheat. Stop when time is called. No calculators. Pencils only. Show your work. Then he passed out the tests and wrote the finish time on the board.

“Begin,” he said, and we got busy.

It took a few minutes for me to get into the zone—but I got there eventually. Each problem had two or three parts, so I tried to focus on finishing each part, quickly checking my work, and then moving on to the next. There were a couple I wasn’t sure about, and I hoped I hadn’t screwed up parts two and three because of some stupid error in part one. But we had a limited time to finish the test, so it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.

We were fifteen minutes from the end when a shrill alarm ripped through the silence.

I nearly jumped out of my chair. Some of the other girls did, grabbing their books and dropping their half-finished tests on Dorsey’s desk before running out of the room.

“Fire alarm,” Dorsey dryly said. “If I had ten dollars every time a fire alarm went off in the middle of a test, I’d . . . well, I’d certainly drive a much better car. Turn in your tests and exit the building.”

“But I’m not finished!” cried out one of the brainier girls in the class, the kind who raised her hand to answer every question and always asked about extra credit points, even though there was no way she needed them.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” Dorsey said, holding his hand out and staring her down with a stern expression until she walked toward him and handed it over. It took her a moment, but she finally did, then trotted out of the room with a pile of scratch paper and pencils in hand.

I glanced back at Scout, who was shoving her stuff back into her messenger bag. “Fire alarm?” I wondered.

“For now we assume it’s a fire alarm. And then we see.”

We turned in our tests and joined the traffic toward the exit doors. When we got outside, we clumped together with Lesley, just close enough to the classroom building that we could get a look at the action. But there wasn’t any action that we could see, not even the sound of a fire truck rushing down the block toward us. And there were always fire trucks in downtown Chicago. There was a station pretty close to the convent, and rarely a night went by when we didn’t hear at least one call.

But now . . . nothing.

“I don’t smell smoke,” Lesley said.

“And the building’s stone,” Scout added. “There’s not a lot in there that could actually go up in flames.”

“Suspicious,” I said, watching Foley emerge from the main building followed by a gaggle of dragon ladies.

I looked back at Scout. “We need to know what’s going on—if there’s a fire, or if this is some kind of distraction.”

“And you think Foley’s gonna tell us? Doubtful.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I think we know someone who can get some intel.” I looked at Lesley.

“I’m in,” she simply said, then tilted her head as she looked at Foley and the dragons. “This is easy.”

Without any instructions or warnings, she walked over to Foley. Hands on her hips, she began talking to her. Foley looked surprised, but it looked like she answered whatever Lesley had asked, and then Lesley walked back to us again.

We crowded around her. “What did you say?”

“I asked her if my $78,231 cello was safe in the dorm, or if the dorm was on fire.”

You couldn’t fault her for being direct. “What did she say to that?”

“She said there’s no fire. The company is working to turn off the alarms.”

Scout and I exchanged a glance. “Would someone have tripped the alarm just to get us out of a trig test?” I wondered.

“Like Dorsey said, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Maybe, but it happened now that we know Jeremiah’s gunning for your Grimoire? When he thinks he really needs it? Remember what they said—that they had plans?”

She shrugged. “That’s a lot of coincidence.”

“They could be searching our rooms right now.”

“They could be,” Scout agreed. “But they won’t find it. That would be impossible. And I’m not going to tell you where it is,” she added before I could ask. “I don’t want you tortured for it.”

“In that case, thank you very much. Still, we need to get back inside.”

“Yeah, but that’s not exactly going to be easy, is it?” She gestured to the crowd around us, which was still growing as folks filed out of all the school’s buildings. “There are people everywhere.”

“We need a distraction.”

“I’ll take this one, too,” Lesley said, her expression kind of devilish. She cleared her throat and smoothed out her plaid skirt, then began waving her arms in the air.

“My cello! My cello! My gorgeous cello from 1894 that may be burning to a crisp right now! What if it’s on fire? What if it feels pain? Oh, woe, my cello!”

She sounded completely ridiculous, and she looked pretty ridiculous, too. She was running back and forth in a zigzag across the grass, arms flopping around in the air like she’d completely lost it. But she did make a really good distraction. Everyone turned around to look at the crazy teenager who was yelling about her cello. You just didn’t see that kind of thing every day.

As soon as Foley’s back was turned and the rest of the girls were watching Lesley, we snuck around the corner of the building and then raced back to the dorms. But I stopped her before we went inside.

“If this is part of their plan to take the Grimoire, they could still be in there.”

She looked down at her empty hands. “Days like this make me wish I had a wand, you know.” She made two finger guns and pointed them at the door. “Pew pew! Abracadabra.”

“Not really the time for humor.”

“Sorry. I’m nervous.”

I nodded my head, completely understanding the emotion. I was freaking out too, and not just because we might soon be facing down Reapers again. As if last night hadn’t been enough.

What if we were also facing down Sebastian? What if he was part of a team sent to destroy our rooms to find the Grimoire? What if I’d been totally wrong, and he was even worse than I thought he was? What if helping me had all been a plot to get closer to me and Scout . . . and her spellbook?

He was right. I’d never really be able to trust him. I’d never really be able to ignore the possibility that I was being played and he really was as bad as everyone else thought. The first question in my mind would always be “what if,” and I didn’t think there’d ever be a good answer. Especially not if I found him rifling through my stuff.