Charmfall

  The problem was, we were blocks from St. Sophia’s, and we were even farther from the Enclave. And, we were aboveground. There were ways to get into the tunnel from street level without having to sneak back into St. Sophia’s and out again. But they involved walking through the Pedway.

  The Pedway was a system of tunnels and passageways that ran through buildings in downtown Chicago and gave people a way to move through the city in the wintertime. There were access points from the Pedway to the tunnels, but there was a catch. The Pedway was the territory of vampires, and vampires didn’t like Adepts. They also didn’t really like competing vampire covens. That was precisely the fight Veronica had walked into.

  “We need the Pedway,” Scout said, looking at a map on her phone. “There’s an entrance in a building a block from here, and we can hop right into the tunnels. It will be so much faster than going the long way.”

  “And it risks getting caught in a vampire fight that will take us a lot longer to deal with,” I pointed out.

  “There is one thing we could do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You could call your favorite vampire and ask him for an escort.”

  I just blinked at her. “You cannot be serious. I already had to run one errand for him this week.”

  “Speed,” Scout stressed. “We need it. He can give it to us.”

  I sighed, but knew I’d been beaten. So I dialed up Nicu and when he answered, gave him our address. “We need to get into the tunnels, and we have to go into the Pedway to do that. Can you meet us and, like, escort us through?”

  His voice was grumbly and cold. “What will you do for me in return?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Haven’t I done enough for you this week? Like, given you a happily-ever-after with one of St. Sophia’s finest?”

  “I do not understand your sarcasm.”

  Scout tapped her watch impatiently.

  “Fine,” I said. “What do you want in return?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I wish to attend this dance I have heard about.”

  You could have bowled me over. “Are you asking my permission to take Veronica Lively to Sneak?”

  Scout made a gagging sound.

  “It is your territory,” Nicu said. “It is only appropriate that I ask for your permission before I enter it.”

  “Fine,” I said, glad someone wanted to go to the dance. “Go to the dance. Live happily ever after. Can you just meet us?”

  “I will meet you. Two minutes.”

  I figured he was exaggerating, but it took three minutes for Scout and me to take the elevator down into the building’s basement Pedway access, and Nicu was already waiting for us.

  In a tuxedo.

  I’ll be honest—he cleaned up pretty well.

  “You look . . . lovely,” he said, glancing between Scout and me.

  “Thanks,” she said. “But let’s get this show on the road. We have spells to cast.”

  “You can teach me to slow dance?” he asked, as we walked down the Pedway.

  Could this night possibly get any weirder?

  18

  Why did I even ask questions like that? Because no sooner did I ask it than I ended up in a room beneath the city, trying to explain to a bunch of teenagers how we’d just seen a magical floating spool in a deserted building on Michigan Avenue.

  Unfortunately, even having seen the pumping station and the magic Fayden had made, Scout didn’t have any better ideas about how to stop it. For nearly an hour—while the rest of the St. Sophia’s girls were starting to get their dance on—Scout frantically scribbled numbers and figures and symbols that didn’t mean anything to me on the dry-erase board . . . and unfortunately didn’t seem to mean much to her, either.

  Right now it looked like a bad abstract drawn by a bunch of kindergartners. I could do better than that. I may not be able to understand their equations . . . but I could draw.

  Ooooh, I thought. That was something. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way.”

  “How so?” Daniel asked.

  “We need a new perspective.” I walked over to the dry-erase board. “Can I erase this?”

  “Not that it’s doing any good,” Scout said, so I took that as permission, swabbed it down with an eraser, and grabbed a marker.

  “Let’s think about the magic like a story.”

  “Like a story?” Paul asked. “How?”

  “Um,” I said for a second, pausing as I tried to actually figure out what I might have meant. Thank goodness, an idea popped into my head. “Well, instead of thinking about how the parts go together, like a recipe, we’ll storyboard it, like we’re deciding which scenes to put in a movie.”

  I drew a grid on the board, three squares across and two squares down, six squares in all. “Now we need to fill in the pictures.” In the last square, I drew a little caricature of Scout casting a spell.

  “The happily-ever-after is that we get our magic back,” Paul said.

  “Exactly. So, what has to happen in the square before that one for you to get your magic back?”

  Scout leaned forward at the table, and that’s when I knew I had her attention. “Fayden’s magic has to be interrupted.”

  “Like, um, a cog in the wheel?” I asked.

  “Yes!”

  In the next to last frame, I drew Fayden’s circle, then smudged away a little part at the top to show that it had been broken; then I looked back at the room.

  “So maybe we don’t have to dissect the spell exactly, or know the exact combination of stuff they used to make it. Maybe all we need is to figure out a way to break the circle. And there has to be more than one way to do that, right? Like, um, could we throw something through the circle and break it?”

  As an example, in the square before the circle was broken, I drew another, smaller circle with an arrow flying toward it. “Like that? The circle looked like it was just made of light. That should break pretty easily.”

  “But it’s magic,” Scout said. “A physical object won’t interrupt that kind of magic. Otherwise every time a bit of dust hit the circle the thing would explode.”

  “Okay,” I said, “then we need something magic to throw.” I drew little squiggly lines along my arrow.

  “Is that supposed to be magic?” Daniel asked, but there was a smile on his face. I blushed a little, forgetting that my studio art teacher—at least when we actually had time for class—was standing in the room.

  “Those are magical indication lines. It’s a very, you know, technical phenomenon,” I totally made up. But he chuckled, and I felt better that the mood was a little lighter. “If only we had some, you know, magic.”

  Scout jumped off her chair and ran around one table to another, where she flipped through a book on the table. “Parker, Parker, Parker, I love you almost as much as I love strawberry soda. You might actually have something there.” She scanned the page, then ran over to the board and snatched up another marker. She popped off the lid and started scribbling.

  “So we don’t actually have any magic, right? But we need magic to blow a hole in the circle and destroy the spell.”

  She moved back one more square and drew another arrow. Then she drew a plus sign and something that looked like a beaker.

  “What’s in the jar?” I asked.

  She put the marker down, then looked back at everyone else in the room, who had gone completely silent. “A pre-spell,” she said, fanning out her hands for effect. “An almost-spell. A spell-to-be.” She looked back at me. “A spell that isn’t actually a spell until it hits the magical catalyst.”

  “The circle,” I guessed.

  “Exactly. We rig some kind of projectile, and since we can’t actually activate any magic right now, we equip it with a pre-spell. The c
ircle is magic, so as soon as our projectile hits the circle, kapow. The spell activates and breaks apart the circle, and we all get our magic back.”

  Dang. I guess drawing on the board had been a pretty good idea. I leaned toward Scout. “I get credit for this, right?”

  “Totes,” she said, and wrapped me in a big hug. “You helped me get my mojo back.”

  “Just get me a projectile with pre-spell,” I told her. “Then we’ll worry about mojo.”

  And just like that, we went back to work. Which as far as I could tell, meant Jamie, Paul, and Jill mixed ingredients in a big glass bowl while Scout worked out the incantation to go along with the spell. See, there were three parts to every magic spell—intent, incantation, incarnation. She definitely had the intent, and the stuff being mixed together would form the incarnation. The incantation was the part you said aloud that made the spell take root—assuming Scout’s theory was right, and putting the spell into the circle would give it enough magic to make the spell work.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like Scout was feeling the rhymes today.

  She stood at the dry-erase board with giant black earphones over her ears, bobbing along to the beat of some hip-hop song she’d downloaded. Every few seconds, she’d lift up her marker and start scribbling something out, and then she’d immediately erase it again.

  She had magical writer’s block. So far, she’d rejected “Break this circle, so our magic we can encircle!” and “Break this circle, or you’re a big fat jerk-el.”

  Those were truly awful, but to be fair, not much rhymed with “circle.”

  Hip-hop didn’t help. Switching to country didn’t help. Musical soundtracks didn’t help. Nothing helped until we found a station for Scout that played ragey alternative stuff. Those people were angry. But it worked. Scout draped the earphones from a corner of the dry-erase board, and we bounced around to the music until Scout got in the mood. And when the rhyme finally came, I wrote it down while she called it out.

  “It’s a circle of fear,” she sang. “A circle of control. You wanna wreak havoc? Then you have to pay the toll. You take our power. You try to take our souls. But in this case, honey, it’s you who’s gotta go. We’re breaking your circle; we’re tearing up your goal, and most of all we’re taking back the magic that you stole!”

  The room went silent.

  For five full minutes, Scout walked back and forth in front of the board, fingers on her chin, mulling it over, deciding whether it passed some unspoken incantation test.

  And then, finally, she spoke.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s our rhyme.”

  Every Adept in the room let out a whoop.

  We carefully wrote down the incantation on three different pieces of paper. I had a copy, Scout had a copy, and we gave the third to Daniel for safekeeping. But when it came time to pick the projectile—the thing we’d actually use to break the spell—we were at a loss again.

  “If only we really had an arrow,” Michael said.

  “Then we’d also have to have a bow and someone with really good aim,” Scout pointed out. “Too complicated.”

  “What’s our plan to get into the pumping station?” I asked, and everyone looked at me. “The object we pick should be easy to get into the building, right? And easy to actually get into the circle?”

  “Right,” Scout said with a nod. “We’ll want something inconspicuous. They aren’t going to want to let us into the building just because we ask nicely.”

  “Pizza delivery?” Michael suggested.

  “Or Chinese,” Paul said. “Lots of little containers to hide things.”

  “I doubt a building of Reaper rejects are going to have takeout delivered to their secret headquarters.”

  I looked down, and caught sight of the room key around my neck. I’d forgotten to take it off when I’d changed for the dance.

  “They probably wouldn’t order takeout,” I agreed. I pulled the key off and held it out by its ribbon. “But they might talk to a girl with firespell who’s all confused about Adepts and Reapers and why they exist.”

  The room was quiet for a moment.

  “You can’t,” Scout finally said. “You’ve already risked enough this week.”

  I shook my head. “Like it or not, I’m the only one they’ll believe. Fayden saw me talk to Sebastian, so she knows I’m willing to talk to Reapers. And I’m sure someone has filled her in about how I became an Adept and that I’m new to the scene. It makes more sense that I have doubts about Adepts than anyone else.”

  “She has a point,” Daniel said.

  “I don’t like it,” Scout said. “But it is a good plan.”

  She held out her hand, and I handed over my key. Silently, she placed it on the top of the table, then sprinkled the concoction the twins had made—which looked like the gray stuff in the bottom of a vacuum cleaner—over it.

  But nothing happened. The key just lay under its pile of gray fluff.

  “Don’t you at least want to say some magic words?” I asked.

  She gave me a dry look while wiggling her fingers over the tile. “Hocus pocus alamagokus.”

  “Really.” My voice was flat.

  “Abracadabra,” she said, this time with more flourish.

  “Is something supposed to, I don’t know, spark up or something?” I asked.

  “It’s pre-spell,” Scout said, tilting her head at the key. “I’d hoped it might at least light up a little, but until I’ve actually got magic again, none of my spells have juice. So it won’t trigger—it won’t spark—until it hits the circle.” She looked at me. “Repeat the incantation when you get in there, and then immediately throw the key into the circle.”

  “What if she misses?” Michael asked.

  “She won’t miss.”

  “I won’t miss.”

  Scout and I answered simultaneously. She carefully dusted off the key, then handed it back to me. I put it on again and tucked it into my dress. I probably wasn’t going to get zombie putrescence on it, but magical ash and Reaper putrescence? Much more likely.

  “As soon as we get our magic back, we’ll come rescue you.”

  I nodded and blew out a breath, and hoped it worked just like that. But I wasn’t going to bet on it.

  * * *

  With Nicu having been excused to get to the dance, the Adepts of Enclave Three—except for their werewolf—popped back to street level through a secret shortcut Daniel knew about, and walked toward the pumping station. We stopped at the corner one building over. The pumping station looked the same as it had when we’d snuck out to look at it, the blue paper still covering the windows.

  The key around my neck felt like a heavy weight—I was too aware of the magic it held and its importance to Adepts. I was going to have one chance to make this work. If I threw the key and missed, Fayden would undoubtedly figure out that I was up to something and put a stop to it. And if I missed—I’d have no magic.

  I had to get this right, and that was a lot of pressure for a not-quite-sixteen-year-old girl. I couldn’t legally drive, but I had the fates of hundreds of people with magic in my hands. Awesome.

  Luckily, the street was pretty empty, so if we had trouble dealing with Fayden, there were fewer bystanders to injure. But I tried not to think about that. I tried to focus on how relieved I’d feel if the circle was broken and everything was back to (relative) normal again.

  “When,” I reminded myself quietly. “When the circle is broken.”

  But I was really nervous. Even my palms were sweaty. These kinds of things never went as well as they were supposed to.

  I touched the key around my neck, then looked at Scout.

  “You remember the incantation?”

  I nodded. I’d repeated it over and over and over until it was second nature
. “I remember. I’ll get it done.”

  “Good girl,” she said, and wrapped her arms around me. “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  I blew out a breath, and stepped into the darkness between the buildings. It wasn’t but thirty or forty yards to the pumping station, but the walk felt like forever.

  Heart racing, I walked up the few steps and knocked on the door. It took two more loud knocks, but finally it squeaked open.

  A girl with suspicious eyes and jet-black hair stared back at me. She looked down at my green and lace dress and clearly wasn’t impressed. “What?”

  My heart was pounding, but I forced myself to smile. “I’m here for the tour.”

  “Wrong time, wrong place.” She gave me an evil smile and tried to close the door again, but I stuck a foot in it.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s a tour.”

  The girl growled and opened the door just enough to step outside and glare down at me. “You have the wrong address, kid. Go make trouble somewhere else.”

  “I have the right address. I need to talk to Fayden.”

  She blinked at me, then stepped back inside and closed the door in my face. But before I could knock again, she opened it, and this time she was grinning.

  It was a predatory grin, and it didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I walked inside and onto a metal balcony that overlooked the giant pipes. I jumped when she slammed the door shut behind me, and blinked from the glare of the circle, which made a low thrush sound every time it completed a rotation.

  “You’re Sebastian’s friend.”

  I turned around. The dark-haired girl was gone, replaced by Fayden Campbell. She wore the same black bodysuit Scout and I had seen her in earlier.