Hexbound

“True. I can tell you this—he likes to give out homework in studio just like he does in the Enclave.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Draw a building downtown.” I pulled up my legs and crossed them. “I had an idea—I’m thinking about drawing the SRF building.”

“Really?” I saw the instant she realized what I was up to. “Your parents,” she said. “You think you might learn something?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. And Foley basically told me not to ask questions about my parents. But it seems like a way to get a good look at the building, maybe glance around inside, without causing trouble.”

Scout bobbed her head left and right. “That is true. I don’t know how they could connect you back with your parents, anyway.” She gestured toward my skirt. “They might guess you go to St. Sophia’s, but they’re practically next door. They probably see the uniforms all the time, so they wouldn’t think too much of it.”

“That sounds reasonable. You can actually come up with pretty good ideas when you put your mind to it.”

“Even though I’m not going to win a talent contest anytime soon?”

“Well, not at singing anyway.”

She hit me with a pillow. I probably deserved that.

“So, at lunch today, Jason didn’t ask me to Sneak.”

“Lils, you’ve barely even planned Sneak yet. Give it time. He’ll get there.”

“He did ask me out on Saturday.”

“OMG, you two are totally getting married and having a litter of babies. Ooh, what if that’s literally true?”

I gave her a push on the arm, then changed the subject. “Did Michael ask you to Sneak?”

“Not exactly.”

She sounded a little odd, so I glanced over at her. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Did it come up?”

“Yeah, I mean, we talked about it . . .”

It took me a minute to figure out what she was dancing around. “You asked him, didn’t you?”

Her cheeks flushed. “Maybe that was discussed in a general sense.”

I poked a finger in her shoulder. “Ha! I knew you had a thing for him!”

I’d expected a look of irritation; instead, she was blushing.

“Oh, my God,” I said, realization hitting. “You guys totally made out behind the concrete things.”

“Oh, my God, shut up,” she said.

We spent the next couple of hours like true geeks. We studied trig, then rounded out the night with some European-history review, and I sent messages to my parents. I walked a weird line between missing them, worrying about them, and trying—like Foley had suggested—to keep them out of my mind. But I was surrounded by weirdness, and that just made me think of them even more. There was so much I wanted to tell them—about Scout and Jason, about being an Adept, about the underground world I’d discovered in Chicago.

Maybe they already knew some of it. Foley had hinted around that they might know about the Dark Elite. But they didn’t know about Jason or firespell, and they certainly couldn’t know how my life had changed over the last couple of weeks. I wasn’t going to break it to them now—not over the phone or via text message and not when they were thousands of miles away. For now I’d trust Foley. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to check out the SRF building. After all, how much trouble could drawing a building get me into?

When it got late enough that my eyes were drifting shut, I packed up my stuff to head back to my room.

“You can sleep here if you want,” Scout said.

I looked up at her from my spot on the floor, a little surprised. I’d slept over before, when Scout had had trouble sleeping after her rescue. But I hadn’t done it in a few days, and I wondered if everything was okay. “You good?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. We’re teenagers,” she reminded me. She uncurled her legs, then bent over the side of her bed and pulled out a thick blanket in a boxy plastic wrapping. It was the same one she gave me every time I bunked over. “We’re not setting a precedent here or anything.”

“And they definitely don’t do bed checks or anything.”

“M.K. thanks her lucky stars for that,” Scout muttered.

“Seriously—that is grade A disturbing. I don’t want to think about the extracurricular field trips she’s taking.” I hitched a thumb toward the door. “I’m going to go throw on some pajamas.”

“Go for it.” Scout punched her pillow a couple of times, then snagged a sleeping blindfold from one of the bedposts. She slid it on, then climbed under the covers.

“Nice look.”

She humphed. “If I’m asleep when you come back, let’s keep it that way.”

“Whatever. You snore.”

“I am a very delicate sleeper. It complements my delicate beauty.”

“You’re a delicate dork.”

“Night, Lils.”

“Night, Scout.”

I woke up suddenly, a shrill sound filling the air. “What the frick?”

“Whoozit?” Scout said, sitting up in bed, the sleeping mask across her eyes. She whipped it off, then blinked to orient herself.

I glanced around. The source of the noise was one of the tiny paper houses on her bookshelves. It was fully aglow from the inside, and it sounded like a fire alarm was going off inside it.

Scout let out a string of curses, then fumbled out of bed. And I do mean fumbled—she got caught in the mix of blankets and comforters, and ended up on the floor, half-trapped in quilts, before she managed to stand up and pluck the house from the bookshelf.

“Oh, crap,” she intoned, lifting up the house to eye level so that she could peer into it. When she looked back at me, forehead pinched, I knew we were in trouble. “That’s my alarm. My ward got tripped.”

11

I stood up and walked toward her. “What does that mean, ‘My ward got tripped’?”

Scout closed her eyes, then pursed her lips and blew into the house’s tiny window. By the time she opened her eyes, the house was silent and dark again, as if its tiny residents had gone back to sleep.

She put it carefully back on its shelf, then looked at me. “Daniel’s been teaching me how to ward the basement doors—it’s supposed to keep the nasties out or send out an alarm if they make it through. You know, since they kidnapped me and all.”

“I do recall that,” I agreed supportively—and wondered if that was what she’d been working on in her room.

“This house was keyed to the vault door in the basement—the big metal one with the locks and stuff?”

“So the house is, what, some kind of alarm?”

She nodded, then grabbed a pair of jeans from her closet. “Pretty much. Now, go get dressed. We’re going to have to handle this.”

My stomach knotted, nerves beginning to build. “What do you think it is?”

She blew out a breath. “I don’t know. But I’m guessing it’s not going to be pretty.”

Unfortunately, I guessed she was right.

We’d both pulled on jeans, shirts, and sneakers to make our way downstairs. We’d decided we didn’t want to be captured by Reapers or rescued by Adepts—or worse—in silly pajamas. The school was quiet as we moved through the hallways, probably not a surprise since it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. On the other hand, I half expected M.K. to jump out from behind a corner. I figured her being out on some secret rendezvous was only slightly less likely than the possibility that we’d soon be staring down half a dozen creeping monsters.

We made it through the Great Hall and labyrinth room, then through the door that led to the stairs. We stayed quiet until we’d made our way into the locked corridor that led down, after two staircases and a handful of hallways, into the basement. I’d taken this route before—the first time I’d followed Scout on one of her midnight rambles, actually. And we all knew how that had ultimately turned out.

“Do we have a plan of action here?” I quietly asked, tiptoeing behind Scout.

She adjusted the strap of her messenger bag. “If I’m as good as I think I am, we don’t need one.”

“Because your ward worked.”

“Not exactly. This was only my first time warding, so I’m not expecting much. But I also worked a little magic of my own. And if that works—I am officially da bomb.”

“Wow. You really went there.”

“I totally did.”

“What kind of magic did you work?”

“Well, turns out, Daniel’s a protector.”

“You are seriously stalking him, aren’t you?”

“Ha. You’d be amazed what you can find on the Internet. Anyway, a protector is a guardian angel type. His magic’s all about protecting breaches. But his magic works more like an alarm. I like to be a little more walk and a little less talk. A little less conversation and a little more action.”

I guessed her endgame. “You booby-trapped it, didn’t you?”

“Little bit,” she said, then stopped short. She glanced back at me and put a finger to her lips as we neared the final corridor. “I’ll go first,” she whispered. “You follow and firespell me if my hex didn’t work.”

I nodded. “Good luck.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she said, and we moved.

The door was nearly twice as tall as I was. The entire thing was edged in rivets, and a huge flywheel took up most of the middle of the door, as did a giant steel bar.

But the bar and the flywheel and the fact that the door itself weighed a ton hadn’t stopped the two girls who lay on the floor in front of it, arms and legs pinned to their sides, rolling around on the floor.

I couldn’t stop my mouth from dropping open. “What the—”

“Oh, nice,” Scout smugly said. She walked into the corridor, hands on her hips, and surveyed the damage. One of the girls wore a green-and-gold cheerleading uniform, her wavy, dark blond hair spilling out on the floor as she rolled around, trying to unglue her arms and legs. The second girl was curvier and wore an oversized dark T-shirt and jeans over big, clunky shoes. She was pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

Realizing they weren’t alone, the Reapers took the opportunity to blister our ears with insults. Scout rolled her eyes. “Hey, this is a convent, Reapers. Watch your language.”

“Unmake this spell, Millicent Green,” spat out the cheerleader, half sitting up to get a look at us. “Right now.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough to unmake it, Lauren Fleming.” There was equal venom in Scout’s voice. Obviously, she and Lauren were acquainted. “What are you doing in our territory?”

The second girl lifted her head from the floor. “What do you think we’re doing here, genius?”

“Being completely and totally hexbound would be my first guess. Lily?”

Technically, I had no idea what “hexbound” was, but Scout had said she’d done a hex, and these two girls seemed like they were tied up with some kind of invisible magic, so I made an educated guess. “Certainly looks that way. How do you two know each other?”

“Millicent remembers the agony of defeat,” the second girl put in.

Scout’s lip curled. “There was no defeat. I forfeited the game because Lauren locked me in the green room.”

“Like that mattered. You would have lost anyway. I’d been training for six weeks straight.”

“Because your mom was your coach.”

“At least my mom was in the state at the time.”

The room went silent, and my gaze darted back and forth between the two of them. I was waiting for Scout to growl or hiss or reach out to rake her nails across Lauren’s face.

“So, what game?” I asked. “Basketball or softball or . . . ?”

“Quiz Club,” they simultaneously said.

I had to bite back a snicker, and got a nasty look from Scout.

She walked closer and prodded Lauren’s cheer shoe with a toe. “How did you get through the door?”

“How do you think? Your wards are crap.”

“It was locked the old-fashioned way.”

“Hello?” said the second girl. “I’m a gatekeeper? I pick locks?”

Lauren made a sound of irritation. I got the sense she wasn’t friends with her uncheerleadery teammate. On the other hand, Reapers probably didn’t care much about friendship when teaming up for infiltrations. They were evil, after all. Being BFFs probably didn’t figure into it.

“Frick,” Scout muttered. “I didn’t know they had a gatekeeper.”

“Clearly,” snarked out the apparent gatekeeper.

Scout rolled her eyes. “Let’s recall who’s spindled on the floor and who’s standing victoriously over you, shall we? Geez. There’s a hierarchy, ladies.”

“Whatever,” Lauren said petulantly.

“Yeah, well, you can ‘whatever’ this, cheer-reaper.” Scout began to clap her hands and stomp her feet in rhythm, her own little cheer. “Hey,” she said, “it’s getting cold in here. There must be some Reapers in the at-mo-sphere.”

Lauren made some really offensive suggestions about Scout’s mom. Did she cheer with that mouth?

“I’m going to ignore those very classless suggestions about my parentals,” she said. “Why don’t we go back to my first question? Why were you trying to break into St. Sophia’s?”