Charmfall

Oh, God—what if he was rifling through my underwear drawer?

I didn’t hear my name until Scout shouted it. “Lily!”

“What?”

“Where were you just then?”

“You don’t want to know.” I gestured at the door. “Are you ready to go?”

“We have no magic, no weapons, and a school full of dragon ladies on high alert. ‘Ready’ doesn’t really cut it.”

“Actually, we aren’t completely unprepared.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. “It’s broad daylight, and any Reapers would be trespassing. Even if we can’t nail them magically, we can nail them with the law.”

“That totally deserves to be a line in an action movie. I mean, a really crappy action movie, but still.” When I rolled my eyes, she held up her hands. “I know, I know, inappropriate timing. Let’s do this. First sign of trouble, you dial nine-one-one. Got it?”

“Right behind you, Tex.”

We slowly pushed open the door to the dorm building, then walked inside and held it until it closed slowly behind us. We stood inside for a moment, just looking and listening.

And for a moment we didn’t hear anything . . . but then we heard rustling and shuffling that didn’t sound like dragon ladies looking for fire or St. Sophia’s girls returning to their rooms.

“They’re up there, aren’t they?” I asked, my stomach beginning to ball with nerves.

“It sounds like it.” She looked back at me, fear in her eyes. “We have to do this, don’t we?”

I squeezed her hand, faking a confident smile I didn’t really feel. “We do. But we can do it. I promise.”

She blew out a breath, and off we went.

We trekked up to our floor and peeked into the dim hallway. Our door was open, a beam of light shining into the hallway. We could hear rifling and throwing of objects even down the hall. That was when our moods changed.

“You know what?” she whispered. “I was scared. But now I’m really ticked. Who do these people think they are?”

“Infallible, apparently.”

Scout harrumphed, and we tiptoed down the hallway to the suite door. She pointed to herself, and then she pointed up. She pointed at me, and then she pointed down. I think she was telling me to go low, and she’d go high.

I nodded, and just like two totem pole heads, we peeked into the room.

The suite was in shambles. Every bedroom door was open, and our formerly organized belongings were thrown about everywhere, including little bits of pink from Amie’s room that were mixed into the rubble. It looked like her stuff had bled into the room. Either they didn’t know whose room was whose, or they had a suspicion that Scout had hidden her Grimoire in there. As if.

And on the floor in front of my doorway was the fractured remains of the crappy—but important—ashtray that Ashley, my best friend from my hometown in New York, had made for me. One big hunk and a lot of shards and crumbs were all that was left of a treasured memento.

I probably could have cried a little, but instead I got even angrier.

We couldn’t see the Reapers, but it sounded like there were two of them—one in Scout’s room and one in mine. I glanced down at the floor of the suite and looked for a weapon. There was a pink golf club on the floor—expensive-looking and surely Amie’s.

I crept inside and picked it up, then held it like a baseball bat. Scout did the same thing with a silver desk lamp that had probably been in Lesley’s room.

“All right, buttwipes!” she yelled out. The noise stopped immediately. “We’re here, and the cops are on their way. You aren’t going to find what you’re looking for, so I suggest you find your way out of our rooms before we move in with our crew to bust some heads!”

“Our crew?” I silently mouthed to Scout. She just shrugged, but I took her point. We probably weren’t much of a threat on our own.

“One, two, three!” she mouthed, and then let out a loud whoop and charged toward her room. Sucking in a breath, I did the same thing toward mine, and stared in shock.

There was a cheerreaper in my room—a Reaper in a green and gold cheerleading uniform, complete with blond ponytail and bow perched right at the top of her head.

Lauren Fleming, a Reaper who’d tried to sneak into the school before, was standing in the middle of the room, a pair of my quilted patent leather boots under one arm, the remains of the rest of my stuff at her feet.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, raising the golf club.

She snarled at me like a crazy little Chihuahua. “Get out of my way, peon.”

“Yeah, that’s nice language. The cops are on their way, so you might want to put down the boots. If you leave now, since you clearly aren’t going to find what you’re looking for”—the expression on her face proved that was true—“we might manage to not beat the crap out of you for breaking in here.”

“Whatever,” she said, then hurled the boots at me. I half turned to dodge them, then swung out with the golf club. I missed, and took a chunk of stone out of the wall. Lauren darted around and plucked books from my bookshelf, then began hurling them at me. I batted them back with the golf club, but missed my history book and winced when it hit me in the shoulder.

Lauren saw her chance and tried to slip past me into the common room. I managed to swat her back with the club, but the shot didn’t land very hard. She took off out of the suite and down the hallway. I ran out and pulled out my camera, snapping a picture of her back before she took the stairs.

Since I could still hear the sounds of fighting coming from Scout’s room, she apparently didn’t have any regrets about leaving her partner behind. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and ran to Scout’s room.

Despite years of being a teenager and months of being an Adept, there in the middle of Scout’s room was probably the strangest thing I’d ever seen.

Lying on the floor was a girl I knew only as “French Horn”—another Reaper who’d previously tried to break into the school with Lauren. She and Lauren hadn’t been friends then, and if Lauren was willing to run away without helping her partner, I was guessing they hadn’t gotten any closer.

She was a larger girl, and she had a thing for black clothes and Goth looks. And she lay in the middle of Scout’s room on her stomach, with a very angry-looking spellbinder sitting on her back, lamp in the air like a samurai sword.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

French Horn spewed some curse words that were pretty typical Reaper.

“Language, language,” Scout said, tapping the bottom of the lamp gently against the Reaper’s head.

“Did she come in through the tunnel again?” I wondered.

More cursing.

“Seriously, I don’t know about your high school for angry misfits and teamsters, but we are classy at St. Sophia’s. Enough with the swearing. Now answer the girl’s question.”

“Tunnel,” she said, then turned her head away. Reaper or not, this couldn’t exactly be a comfortable position for her to be in, especially since her partner had left her at the mercy of two irritated Adepts.

“Tunnel plus fire alarm equals breaking and entering,” Scout said. “And I’m going to guess you’re looking for something that doesn’t belong to you.”

When French Horn began to answer, Scout flicked her on the head. “I wasn’t asking for a response. Hear this, Reaper. What’s in my book won’t help you. If it did, don’t you think we’d have used it already?”

She didn’t seem to have a good answer to that.

“Exactly. So here’s the deal. You’re going to advise your fellow Reapers that my Grimoire isn’t what you’re looking for, and you’re all going to leave me alone. Maybe you could spend a little time working on solving the blackout. After all, it’s probably some irritated Reaper anyway. How about that?”

French Horn opened her mouth—probably to start swearing again—but was interrupted by a tall blonde standing in the doorway.

Foley’s mouth dropped open at the sight. “Green! Parker! What in the name of God is going on in here?”

Scout stood up. Freed from her bonds, French Horn stood up and made a run for the door, before Foley blocked it with her arms.

Go Foley, I thought.

“May I help you, young lady?”

An idea struck. I walked toward Foley and put an arm through the French horn player’s. She seemed sticky.

“As it turns out,” I said, “this lovely individual was walking past the school when she heard the fire alarms and rushed through the building to see if she could help.”

“She did what?” Scout asked.

“She helped,” I insisted, looking intently at French Horn. Yes, I was giving her an escape route, but Scout was right—the Reapers needed to know the Grimoire wasn’t going to help them, and maybe helping her out of this pinch increased the odds she’d take that message back to her sanctuary.

“Scout surprised her and then, you know, fell on her. And then you came in!” I brightly added.

No one in the room seemed convinced of my story, least of all Foley. “You fell on her?” she asked, slowly lifting her gaze to Scout.

Scout looked back at me, and I nodded just a little, hoping she got my silent message: Trust me.

Her expression was easy to read: You better have a good reason for this one, Parker, or I’m bringing the pain.

When I nodded, so did she. “It was the strangest thing.”

“She tripped,” I said.

“I tripped . . . and then I fell on . . . this girl here . . . who was clearly trying to help us out.”

French Horn looked completely flustered, but she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass. “I need to go now,” she said. “I have an . . . appointment.”

“She’s very busy,” I said.

“Very busy,” Scout grumbled.

Foley looked completely shocked, but she pulled in her arms and let French Horn pass. We heard her scurry through the common room, and then the suite door opened and closed again.

Foley looked pointedly at us. “Is there anything else you’d like to share about this particular incident, ladies?”

Scout and I looked at each other. “Is there, Lily?”

“Um, well, someone clearly trashed our rooms during the fire alarm. Perhaps that’s why the fire alarm went off in the first place. Like it was all a ploy or something.”

“A ploy,” Foley repeated. She didn’t exactly sound convinced, but as she glanced around the room, she hardly could have thought we’d done this ourselves. “I don’t believe your suitemates are going to take this very well.”

She couldn’t have timed it better. The brat pack burst into the suite in a flurry of dramatic wailing. Amie, actually, wasn’t all that loud. Veronica and M.K. were doing most of the yelling, and they didn’t even live here.

And then they caught sight of us in Scout’s room.

“This is your fault,” Veronica said, snapping her gaze to Foley’s. “This has to be their fault. They’re always involved in something, always sneaking around.”

You could actually see the shutter going down over Foley’s eyes. They turned cold and glinty, and she narrowed her gaze at Veronica, then Scout and me.

“I’m not entirely sure what went on in here, although I don’t believe either Ms. Parker or Ms. Green were responsible for the destruction.”

I sighed in relief.

“That said, I also must wonder if their behavior somehow tempted this destruction?”

I opened my mouth to argue with her, but what exactly could I say? It wasn’t like we invited the Reapers to pop in and destroy our stuff, but they’d clearly been here—and in Amie’s stuff—because of us.

When neither one of us answered, Foley turned her attention back to Veronica. “Rest assured, Ms. Parker and Ms. Green have already assured me they’ll take full responsibility for cleaning up the mess. I assume that’s an appropriate solution for all parties?”

“Fine by me,” Amie said, her worried gaze on the stuff on the floor.

Foley looked back at me and Scout, her gaze daring us to disagree with her.

“Our responsibility,” Scout muttered, voice defeated. “We’ll clean it up.”

“Sure thing,” I agreed. “But maybe everyone could clear out and give us room to work?”

The brat pack didn’t look thrilled at that suggestion—they probably wanted to lie around on the couch and eat grapes like Cleopatra while we worked, but they eventually nodded. Foley escorted them out.

When the door closed again, I looked over at Scout. “This blows.”

“Yep. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before, but yeah, totally blows.”

I sighed. “I really wish you had magic. You could probably spell the crap out of this and get everything back in order again. That would be sweet.”

“Yes, I could, in fact, go all Fantasia on this mess. But for now there’s only one thing I can do.” She disappeared back into her room, and after a few seconds club music—the kind with the thub thub thub bass—filled the room.

“If we must clean,” Scout yelled over the music, “let’s clean with rhythm.”

And then she shook her butt and got to work.

11

It took us two hours, but we managed to get the suite put back together. And surprisingly, it was pretty easy to figure out where everything came from. Amie’s stuff was all pink, so anything with Barbie coloring went back into her room. Lesley’s stuff was just odd, so anything with unicorns, rainbows, or anime characters went back into hers. (Including tons of Japanese comic books about schoolgirls who were also vampires, or vampires who ate schoolgirls, or something like that. You’d think she saw enough of that kind of thing just being friends with us. But to each her own.)