Charmfall
Page 5Detroit’s magic was the ability to make things—gadgets, machines, electronics. In the short time I’d been an Adept, she’d shown off a machine that helped ghosts communicate with Adepts and a locket that was actually a projector. I wasn’t sure if the blackout was affecting her in the same way, but it would be a shame if she lost those skills.
Scout might not have been dating Michael, but she wasn’t above bullying him. “Keep your mind and your mitts off Detroit.”
“Whatever you say, mi reina.”
Scout made a humphing noise, but she showed a little secret smile that said she didn’t mind when Michael gave her nicknames in Spanish. It did sound pretty hot.
And speaking of hotness . . . Jason looked at Michael and Scout. “Can you give us a minute?”
Scout and Michael looked at each other, then made goofy kissing noises.
“You’re both five years old,” Jason said. But they did walk down the tunnel, giving us some privacy. Not that anything was going to happen; it wasn’t exactly romantic down here. On the other hand, we didn’t have a lot of free time, and moments in the tunnels were sometimes the only “dates” we got.
“Some days,” Jason whispered, his eyes on the couple, “I feel like the only adult in the room.”
“But if you need someone to cheer you up, you can’t do much better than Michael. He is always on.”
Jason looked back at me, a glint in his eye, and my stomach went hot.
“Okay, so you can do a little better,” I cheekily said. “I’m a pretty great girlfriend.”
He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he took my hand and began to kiss the edges of my fingertips. I practically melted right then and there.
Jason sighed, then wrapped his arms around me. I buried my head in his chest. I felt safe in his arms. Secure. Like even if monsters in the dark popped out at me, he could handle them. He might be furry when he did that handling, but still . . . He suddenly tensed up, and I knew he was thinking about the curse.
“You okay?”
He just sighed. “Yeah. Things are just . . . unsettled at home, and now I’m, like, the only Adept in town who has any kind of power. That’s a lot of pressure.”
“What’s going on at home?” He’d hinted before that because of the curse, werewolves saw the world differently and tended to live apart from humans. At some point, his parents would even choose a bride for him from some other werewolf family. And here he was, far from home, hanging out in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the country. I bet that didn’t sit well with the parentals.
“Things are . . . moving along,” he said. “I’ve got cousins who are causing trouble, being more public about their fur than they should be, and that ends up putting more pressure on me.”
He’d told me his family would pull him back at some point. I just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
“I thought you’d have more time?”
“I might have,” he said darkly, “if my cousins weren’t acting like hoodlums. That changes the math. I have to step up earlier than before. When it’s all said and done, my cousins may not listen to me, but at least I can be a good example.”
Okay, I silently thought, but a good example of what?
He brushed a lock of hair back from my face. “You’re important to me. I wanted you to know that.”
I appreciated the thought, but I still moved back a little bit, giving myself some space and distance. I knew there was a risk—a really good risk—that I’d end up being hurt if we kept dating. I just didn’t think it would be right now. So soon.
“Fair enough,” he said. He chuckled lightly, and before I could tweak him for laughing at me, his lips were on mine. He pulled me closer and kissed me like he was desperate to do it, like he might never get another chance. And as much as I wanted to just sink into the kiss and forget about the world for a little while, the world continued to spin around us. He was still a werewolf with a family that believed in curses, and I was still a girl who didn’t want a broken heart.
My hesitation didn’t seem to scare him. He held me even tighter, his arms enclosing me like he meant to protect me from the rest of the world. If only he could. If only it were that easy.
Eventually he pulled back and kissed my forehead. “We should get back to school. Tomorrow morning awaits. And it’s a Monday.”
“Yeah,” I quietly said. There was no pretending I was excited about that. I mean, being an Adept was hard. But being a junior in high school was a completely different animal.
Jason called out Michael’s name, and after a moment he came jogging down the tunnel, water splashing at his feet, crimson on his cheeks. It wasn’t hard to guess what he and Scout had been doing a couple of passages away.
“You ready?” Jason asked.
Michael nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”
“Then let’s hit the road. It’s waffle day in the cafeteria tomorrow, and I don’t want to sleep through it again.”
Michael rubbed his hands together. “And that, my friend, is why I love Mondays.”
That was the only reason to like a Monday, if you asked me.
“I’ll text you tomorrow,” Jason told me. I squeezed his hand.
Michael gave me a little wave. “See you later, Lily.”
“ ’Bye, guys.” I watched as they moved down the tunnel, trying not to get panicky about my werewolf boyfriend returning to the family who wanted to pick a bride for him. Was it wrong that I totally wanted to lecture his cousins?
Fear heavy in my heart, I tucked my hands into my pockets and walked down the passageway until I found Scout.
It was good to have a best friend, even if neither one of us was in a chipper mood as we walked back to the dorms. Turns out Michael had asked Scout about her dress for Sneak. I’m sure he asked only because he was excited, but she didn’t have a dress and got panicky about “being a girly-girl.”
As we walked down one dark tunnel after another, I filled her in about Jason and his possible disappearance.
She looked about as excited as I felt. “You ever have those days where you wish your life was like a keyboard with an ‘undo’ button? You could just hit the button and rewind recent events, go back to the way stuff was before?”
“More often than you can imagine,” I said.
“Can’t we just skip Sneak?” she asked. “It’s not like we don’t have other stuff to worry about.”
“If you don’t go with Michael, he’ll have to find someone else to go with, and I know you wouldn’t like that. What if he had to take Veronica? Or Mary Katherine?”
“He wouldn’t dare,” she said through gritted teeth. She was so easy to bait.
“So we’re going to Sneak,” I said, linking an arm though hers. We’ll get you a dress, and me a dress, and we’ll be good to go.”
“Yes. Because we have souls. And brains. And senses of humor.”
“And personalities.”
This time, we did a fist bump. The boys were right; it was kinda fun.
“At least we don’t have to deal with parents’ night, too.”
Surprised, I looked over at her. “Parents’ night?”
Her expression fell. “Oh, crap on toast. I totally forgot to tell you about parents’ night, didn’t I?”
“That would be ‘yes.’”
“The night before Sneak, all the parents come in and have dinner with their kids. It’s not an official event or anything—that has something to do with insurance.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “My parents don’t come.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me because my parents are God knows where?”
She just frowned. “Sorry.”
I shrugged, but it hurt. Not because she hadn’t told me, but because she was right. I knew where they wouldn’t be—having dinner with me the night before Sneak. They wouldn’t be asking me how school was going. They wouldn’t be checking out my room, or asking me about Jason, or lecturing me about how late I should be staying out or whether I was spending enough time on homework.
I wouldn’t be telling them about magic and Adepts and firespell and Reapers—assuming they didn’t already know. (I was a little suspicious about that.) I wouldn’t be complaining about Enclaves and sanctuaries and Darkenings and vampires and the tunnels beneath St. Sophia’s.
Maybe that was for the best.
Even if it was for the best, misery loved company. “Why don’t your parents come?” I asked Scout.
She shrugged. “They have their roles, and I have mine. My role is staying put at St. Sophia’s and not interrupting them. Their roles are using their money, traveling, being ‘the Montgomery Greens.’”
“That’s your dad?”
She nodded. “My mother doesn’t even hardly use her name anymore. She’s just ‘Mrs. Montgomery Green.’” She shrugged. “I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t want to have a kid and then stick her in a private school where I didn’t have to see her or know who she was. But they came from money, and both of them went to boarding school. It’s how they were raised. It’s normal for them.”
It was clear she wanted more, that she longed to know her parents—and for them to know her. But she also seemed to accept that they were who they were, and they were unlikely to change.
I had parents who wanted to be involved but who, for some mysterious reason, couldn’t. She had parents who could be involved but, for some mysterious reason, didn’t want to.
Sometimes, people just didn’t make any sense.
“I wonder if I should even tell them about parents’ night,” I finally said, glancing over at her. “Will I feel better or worse when they tell me they want to come but can’t?”
“That’s a question for the ages, Parker.”
Lost in our thoughts, we walked silently back to St. Sophia’s, then froze.
The basement was shielded from the tunnels by an antique, heavy metal door. There was a giant flywheel that locked it, and a metal bar that added a little extra security. It didn’t do much to keep out Reapers with magic, but it did keep out the nastier creepy-crawlies that occasionally trolled the tunnels.
But tonight, the door was cracked open, light from the basement shining through. Now there was no magical barrier at all to whoever—or whatever—tried to sneak into the school.
My heart began to thud. “Who?” was the only question I could manage.
“I don’t know.” She straightened her messenger bag. “But we better go look.”
I nodded, and we crept to the sliver of light beside the door and peeked into the hallway. It was empty. Whatever had opened the door—or come through it—was gone.
We walked inside and closed the door behind us, but not all the way.
“Probably shouldn’t lock it in case we need to chase out whatever got in,” I quietly said. She nodded. We crept down the hallway, which was pretty short, and then to the next corner. That hallway was empty, as well, but another door was open. It was marked JANITOR’S CLOSET, but it was actually called the City Room. A small model of the entire city of Chicago made in gray cardboard was spread out across the floor, like a short, three-dimensional map.
The brat pack had locked me in the City Room one night, which actually led to my getting firespell. So I guess I had Veronica to thank for that. Not that I was getting her a card or anything . . . That was an odd place for someone to sneak into; not exactly the kind of place you expected an evil monster to hide. What was going on?
Scout pointed at the door, and I nodded. Silently, we crept along the wall to the City Room and looked inside.
“Holy crap,” Scout said.
There in the middle of the City Room, legs straddled over the city of Chicago, stood Nicu, head of the newest coven of Chicago vampires.
He turned back to look at us, his black, military-style coat fluttering around his knees as he moved. He looked young, but he was handsome in an old-fashioned way. Pale skin, wavy dark hair, blue eyes. And when he was vamped out, inch-long fangs. Tonight he wore knee-high boots, snug pants, and a blousy white shirt.
No one looked that good accidentally. He looked date-night good, and that made me nervous. Really nervous. Was he waiting for Veronica? Had he ignored the fact that her memory had been erased and actually contacted her? Surely he wouldn’t be that stupid. Sure, she might talk to him—but the press would be the second number on her speed dial, and vampires wouldn’t be a secret in Chicago anymore.
And that was the other reason I was nervous. He was a vampire. With the bloodsucking and the fangs and a pretty obvious dislike of humans. Most humans, anyway.
“What are you doing here?” Scout asked.
Nicu’s eyes narrowed dangerously and he flashed his fangs, as if to remind us that he wasn’t a child we could boss around.
“I do not answer to you.” His voice carried a deep accent, and he glowered at us—and that’s the only word I could use to describe it. Glowering.
Sure, my instincts told me to run in the other direction and hunker down, but instead I took a step forward. I was tired, and I was out of patience for supernaturals today.
“You’re in our territory,” I said for the second time in a night. “You most definitely answer to us. And I repeat the question—what are you doing here?”