Charmfall

“You don’t even know me.”

“And you don’t know me, but that didn’t stop you from kidnapping me.”

“I didn’t kidnap you.”

“Your friends did,” she countered, “and that’s close enough for me. And it’s not like you stopped them, did you?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I helped Lily get you out.”

That wasn’t enough to sway her. “You’re a malicious little jerk who takes things that don’t belong to him.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I?” She put on her best know-it-all expression. “Sucked any souls lately?”

His expression went flat. “We have a gift. And if we can’t use it? Then what happens?”

“The rest of us live happily ever after?”

“Our magic helps people. If we don’t have the magic, we don’t get to help.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Help? Name one thing Reapers have done to help anyone.”

“What we do is confidential.”

“What you do is nothing. I’ve heard the ‘confidential’ story before, Sebastian. You think they don’t try to sway us with the nonsense?”

Okay, I wasn’t thrilled my BFF and a Reaper were arguing in the middle of a bridge, magic or not. But this was stuff I hadn’t heard about before.

“Who is ‘they’?” I asked. “And what’s confidential?”

“‘They’ are the Scions,” Scout said, narrowed gaze on Sebastian. “The ones who make decisions for the Dark Elite. And the confidential crap is just that—a load of crap.”

Sebastian looked at me. “It’s a long story, and there are details I can’t reveal. But we do help people. I promise you, Lily.”

Scout was standing there, but I still felt like he was saying that just to me. I definitely believed they were doing secret things; I just wasn’t convinced they were for anyone’s good but their own. Willing to believe? Maybe. But I was going to need hard evidence, and we didn’t have time for that kind of proof today. So I changed the subject.

“Let’s save the argument for another time,” I said. “Right now we have a more immediate problem.”

“She’s your cousin,” Scout said. “You can just call her up and tell her to give you your magic back.”

“If she’s done something, invented something, whatever, that takes magic away from whoever she wants, do you think she’ll just give it back to me because I ask her? She’s too manipulative for that, and I don’t even know if she can. Besides, I’m not going to help her do whatever she’s doing. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Everybody makes their own decisions about whether to keep their magic or not. That goes for you and us.”

“But not the humans whose souls you take?”

“Are you so sure about that?”

Scout growled, and I could see we were getting nowhere fast. It was time to talk about concrete options or they were going to start slap fighting right here on the bridge.

“Fine,” I said. “You two can agree to disagree.” I looked at Sebastian. “Does Jeremiah know about Fayden?”

“Not yet. She’s my cousin,” he said, pity in his voice. “He’ll go postal. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

“Where can we find her?” Scout asked.

“I don’t know. Her apartment is in Hyde Park near U of C. She wasn’t there. I’ve called her a few times, but no answer. I haven’t talked to her mom yet. I didn’t want to scare her if I wasn’t sure what was going on.”

“She hasn’t been in Chicago very long,” I said. “How many hiding places could she even know about? Wait.” I pointed at Sebastian. “You played tour guide. Where did you take her? I mean, did she seem really interested in anywhere in particular? Was there anything unusual she really wanted to see?”

He frowned and looked down at the ground as he considered. “Not that I can think of. I showed her all the tourist spots. Field Museum. Navy Pier. Wrigley Field. The planetarium. She hadn’t been to Chicago in years. She wanted to see pretty much everything.”

I nibbled on the edge of my thumb as I racked my brain, trying to figure out our next move. This was when the crew from Scooby Doo or Buffy or Star Trek or one of those other shows where people solved a mystery at the end would have been really handy.

“If I tell Jeremiah,” he finally said, “he’ll rush in and try to take whatever is there for his own use.”

“He’s your boss.”

“But that doesn’t mean I do everything he tells me. And that definitely doesn’t mean I want him using Fayden. If this is really her doing, I’m not a fan of it. But I wouldn’t be a fan of Jeremiah doing it, either, and I don’t think he could stop himself. Not when there’s that much power up for grabs.”

Scout and Sebastian looked at each other for a minute, like they were taking each other’s measure.

“Perhaps an agreement could be worked out,” he carefully said.

“I’m listening,” Scout said.

“You need Jeremiah off your back. I need you to take care of Fayden because you’ll be nicer to her than he would.”

“How do we know we can trust you?” Scout asked.

“You can’t. That’s the nature of trust—it’s always a risk. And I’m not crazy about trusting someone I know hates me. But what better options do we have?”

Hands on her hips, Scout looked at him for a minute. Finally, she held out a hand. “Deal under those terms. The détente is extended between your crew and mine until Fayden is neutralized.”

He held out his hand, and they shook on it. “Deal.” He gave me a nod, then turned and headed back down the bridge again. He met Alex and the tall girl and must have given them a little bit of a summary because they both gave us dirty looks. Maybe they weren’t thrilled about the plan . . . or maybe he’d told them what Scout had said about Reapers.

When I turned around again, Scout was leaning over the railing, her fingers linked together over the water. I joined her.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

She laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.

“What about the confidentiality stuff? Do you think they’re really helping people?”

She sighed, and it sounded tired. “A few years ago, there was a big Dark Elite PR campaign about Reapers being secret government weapons—helping solve crimes and fix problems and stuff. But no one believed it. It was made up.”

That was the part that bothered me—how could she know it was made up any more than she could know it was true?

“So what do we do now?”

“We tell Daniel,” she said. “And we hope he likes the deal we just worked out.”

My fingers were crossed.

16

After the excitement of our morning meeting, classes passed by in a blur. The teachers still technically did the teaching, but everybody was focused on parents’ night. Dinner was actually awesome—the girls attending parents’ night got a full-on catered meal, so the kitchen staff didn’t have time to cook a separate round of slurry for us. Instead, they ordered pizzas. A lot of pizzas. The bites I choked down were delicious, but I was nervous enough about our lingering problems that I didn’t have much of an appetite.

Study hall was also canceled, which made our evening plans a lot simpler. As soon as we made it back to the room after dinner, Scout dialed up Gaslight Goods, switched it to speakerphone, and put the phone down on the table.

“Gaslight Goods. Let us be your light in the midst of life’s darkness, the sunlight in your foggy day, the candle in your wind. This is Kite. How can I help you today?”

I grimaced. That was their opener?

“Kite, it’s Scout.”

“Hi, Scout. What can I do you for?”

“Information,” she said. “We need to know what Fayden Campbell bought from your store. Do you by chance remember what that was?”

“I’m sorry, Scout, I don’t. I didn’t process her order.”

“Kite,” Scout said, her tone serious. “We have a really strong suspicion that she’s behind the blackout. If you tell me what she bought, that might help us stop her. But if we can’t stop her, and no one has magic, pretty soon she will be your only real customer. I will not be dropping my parents’ hard-earned dough on the newest-fangled salt because I will have no magic. And nobody else will, either. Is that what you want?”

There was silence on the line. Then Kite said, “I don’t know . . . but I could probably look it up on the computer for you.”

Hands in the air, Scout did a weird little dance that was fifty percent running, fifty percent jumping, and one hundred percent awkward.

“Yes, please,” she said.

“ ’Kay,” he said. “And sorry; you know I have to do this.”

I didn’t know what he was about to do, but it sounded suspicious to me. But not to Scout, apparently.

“Go ahead,” she said.

Kite cleared his throat. “Gaslight Goods is a nonparty to any disputes among members of the Dark Elite. Gaslight Goods has an official position of neutrality with respect to any such disputes, and the provision of information to one party or other is not an indication in a change in that position, nor a statement of support. All rights of Gaslight Goods are reserved. Phew,” he added. “Sorry about that.”

“No worries.”

“So, now that that’s out of the way, here’s what she bought.”

Scout snatched up the same notebook she’d been using for our list and a purple pen, tilted and ready to write.

“Quartz. Pink salt. Some heavy-duty magnets. Dried feverfew. Oh, and a rod of copper. That just came in yesterday, actually.”

“That’s it?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

“Okay. Thanks, Kite. If it turns out we’re right, you’ll be the first person we call.”

“I’d appreciate it. I’ve got to run. Later, Scout.” Kite hung up the phone, and Scout stuffed hers away again.

“What was with the legalese?” I asked.

“That’s the official disclaimer that they’re still neutral even if they give you information. It’s so they don’t get blamed for stuff the Reapers or Adepts do.”

“Why didn’t they have to do it before—when we were in the store, I mean?”

Scout shrugged. “That was just chatting. You get official, with people looking up records, and they want to keep their names out of the discussion. That’s the disclaimer.”

Magical rules were just bizarro. But that wasn’t important. “So we know what she bought. Does that help you?”

Scout looked down at her paper. “This isn’t stuff you just buy for the heck of it. So whatever she’s doing with the blackout, it’s magical. She has created a spell, a hex, a machine, something that has taken away all of our power—”

“Except hers,” I finished.

“Exactly. I don’t know exactly what she’s brewing up. I’m going to have to think about it, let it float around in my head a little. But I’ll figure it out.” She waved the notebook. “This is the key, Lily. We still have work to do, but this is the key.”

Thank goodness I’d finally done something right.

* * *

An hour later Scout had scribbled through a bunch of pages in the notebook and she’d chomped through half a pack of gum.

“I chew gum when I’m working magical equations,” she said.

I still wasn’t entirely sure what was meant by “equations.” I flipped through the pages of her notebook, which were filled with what looked like those puzzles where a picture is supposed to symbolize a word—an image of an eye is supposed to mean “I” and so forth.

In Scout’s case, the drawings looked a lot like Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Are you, like, trying to add salt to quartz and then subtract the magnets or—”

She flopped back on the bed. “I have no idea what I’m trying to do. None of these things go together. It’s like trying to add blue and twelve and a dandelion. That kind of math doesn’t work.”

“So you don’t have any ideas?”

“Not unless”—she picked up her notebook and turned it so that she was reading it upside down—“Fayden Campbell is attempting to work bacon-typewriter-earmuff magic.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Yep.” She tossed the notebook back on the bed and rubbed her hands over her face. “What am I missing? What am I missing?”

“Is there, like, a secret ingredient? Like a catalyst or something? Like, you have to heat everything up, or maybe you have to use the things in a particular order?”

“That’s magic 101, Parker. All accounted for.”

It might be introductory magic for an Adept who’d been doing it for years, but it was pretty advanced stuff for me.

“So we know what she bought, but we don’t know why she bought it?”

“Yep.”

“And we can’t try to fix the magical blackout if we don’t know how she made it happen in the first place.”

“Since we have no magic because of said magical blackout, that is correct.”

I put a hand on her arm. “It may be time to accept temporary defeat. Or at least to call Daniel.”