Charmfall (19 page)

“That’s probably an early apology since they’ll miss parents’ night.”

Even I was disappointed in that. Someday I’d like to meet Scout’s parents, the man and woman responsible for creating this totally brilliant, unique person . . . and then ignoring her.

“I’m sorry, Scout.”

“Eh,” she said, hanging up the clothes again. She may not have liked them, and she may not have worn them, and she clearly wasn’t happy about what they represented. But the clothes were still hanging in her closet, taking up space. She probably preferred to have her parents here, but I guess if she couldn’t have them, she kept their gifts as a substitute.

“You know,” I said, fingering the nubby tweed on the jacket, “some of these things aren’t bad. Maybe I’ll borrow them sometime.”

“Knock yourself out,” she said. And then her phone began to whine out a really loud piece of classical music that sounded a lot like buzzing insects.

“This is Scout,” she answered. When her eyes went wide, I assumed it was interesting news. “Okay. Thanks for letting us know, Kite. ’Bye.”

She put the phone down and looked at me. “You might have gotten your wish earlier than you thought.”

“Sebastian?”

“He’s in the store,” she confirmed. “Let’s get moving.”

*  *  *

We decided it was too risky to wait for backup, but we should let someone know where we were going. I wasn’t about to call Jason. If he wasn’t ready to talk, I certainly wasn’t going to call him first, so Scout called Michael and told him the plan.

We changed into dark street clothes and geared up, then snuck out the same cellar door through which I’d followed Veronica outside.

We walked quietly over to Gaslight, then crept along the edge of the building and peeked inside one of the storefront windows. At first, we didn’t see anything, but we could hear muted yelling from inside the store. After a couple of minutes we spied the source. Sebastian and Fayden emerged from an aisle.

She was in the lead, rolling her eyes in irritation, a Gaslight Goods bag in hand. She looked like she was making an emergency visit. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy topknot, and she wore her dark, cat-eye glasses. She wore a thin T-shirt, yoga pants, and flip-flops. She was very trim, so the outfit didn’t look bad, but it was definitely more suited to running errands in California than in Chicago.

Sebastian was behind her, dressed in clothes more appropriate for fall. But his gaze was narrowed at the back of her head, and he looked really, really unhappy.

“We may have just missed some fireworks,” I murmured.

“Apparently,” Scout said. “They’re heading for the door. Let’s get out of the line of sight.”

We scooted into the doorway of the pharmacy next door to Gaslight. When the bell on the Gaslight Goods door began to ring, we snuck a peek.

Fayden walked out first. Sebastian followed her. They made it to the end of the dark and empty block before they started talking.

“You need to chill, cuz,” Fayden said. “I told you this would all be fine.”

His eyes narrowed. “You lied to me.”

“No, the family just omitted a few things. My status in the DE isn’t your concern.”

“You don’t think I should know that another member of my family has magic?”

Her bag on her arm, she poked an escaping tendril of hair back into her topknot. “I think unless it affects you, it’s not really any of your beeswax.” She patted his arm. “Maybe this blackout is getting to you. But never fear. I think you’ll find, cousin, that your life is about to get a lot more interesting.”

She took a deep breath of chilly Chicago air. “A whole new world is about to open up.”

Sebastian grabbed her arm. Hard. “What is that supposed to mean? Do you have something to do with the blackout? Have you taken magic from us?”

Fayden had been all smiles, but in that second her expression changed to something much more nasty. “You will take your hand off me right now or you won’t live to regret it.”

Whatever Sebastian saw in her eyes must have convinced him, because he pulled his hand away.

“Much better,” she said, smiling again. “The blackout is what the blackout is. Don’t you think it’s an exciting time, though? There’s something new in the air. Something mysterious. A new era.”

A taxi pulled up to the curb, and before Sebastian could argue the point, Fayden hopped inside. “Thanks for the chat. I’ll catch you later.”

The cab pulled away.

“We have got to follow her,” Scout said. As soon as the cab had passed, Scout ran to the street and hailed another one. I followed her to the street, and Sebastian picked that moment to look over at us.

I gave him an apologetic look. He nodded back—an acknowledgment, maybe that something was up that bridged the gap between Reapers and Adepts.

A cab screeched to a stop, and we jumped inside. “Follow that cab,” Scout said. “But not too close.”

The driver looked at us in the rearview mirror. “We don’t really do that—”

“Follow the cab,” Scout repeated, “and there’s a hundred dollar tip in it for you.”

“Following the cab,” the driver said, and pulled into traffic.

Wherever Fayden was going, she was going there in a hurry. We zigzagged other cars, and I think we were moving toward the lake.

“Do you think she knows we’re back here?” I wondered.

Scout looked around at the traffic. It was night, so it wasn’t exactly heavy, but there were taxis here and there. “Hopefully she thinks we’re just coincidentally moving in the same direction.” She glanced down at the driver’s badge, which was stuck to the dashboard. “And John here is doing a fantastic job of keeping a few cars behind her.”

“I drive NASCAR on the weekends,” John dryly muttered. “This is just my day job.”

Scout rolled her eyes.

“I think she’s stopping,” John said. Sure enough, the cab ahead of us pulled to a stop at the next corner. John sneakily pulled his cab into a parking space at the other end of the block. Scout pulled a hundred dollar bill out of her wallet and pushed it through the little box in the plastic guard between the seats.

“Run the meter,” she said, “and there’s another hundred in it for you.”

“You’re the boss.”

“I guess being a Green pays off sometimes,” I whispered. Scout humphed.

We got out of the cab, but hung back between the cars until Fayden got out. She walked toward a fancy-looking apartment building that was eight or ten stories tall. If she disappeared in there, we’d never find her.

“Let’s get closer,” Scout whispered. “Maybe we can at least figure out which apartment she’s going into.”

We moved up, peering at the door from behind a four-foot-tall hedge that surrounded the building. Turned out, we didn’t need to know where she was going. We needed only to watch how she got in there.

The front door had a really big keypad lock. Fayden held out a finger like she was going to punch in a code.

“Maybe she lives here,” I suggested softly, thinking she meant to unlock the door. But no sooner had I said that than a giant green spark shot from her finger and right into the keypad. The door unlocked with an audible
click
, and she walked right inside.

That was
magic
. And not just magic—like, electrical power–related magic with its pretty green tinge.

“Holy crap,” Scout said.

“Holy crap,” I agreed. “Fayden Campbell has
firespell
. And hers is still working.”

I guess that answered the blackout question.

Problem was, even if we had pretty good evidence Fayden Campbell had used her still-existent magic to create the blackout, we didn’t know why she’d done it, or where she’d done it. Maybe most important, we didn’t know
how
she’d done it. Firespell, as far as I knew, was the ability to control energy—turning off lights and sending shock waves and stuff. So how had she managed to turn off everyone else’s magic?

We let the cab wait for a few minutes while Scout called Daniel and filled him in. He promised to get eyes on the building and try to figure out what Fayden was doing there—and if she’d managed to stash some sort of ongoing spell or magic machine that we could hack or destroy or just plain turn off.

But I had another idea.

I wiggled my fingers to borrow the phone from Scout.

“Hold on, Daniel,” she said. “Lily wants to talk to you.” She handed it over.

“I think Fayden lied to Sebastian,” I said into the phone. “And I don’t think he was happy about it.”

“And your point is?”

“My point is I suggest we set up a meeting with him. If he feels like he’s been betrayed by his cousin, maybe he’ll be willing to talk about her. Maybe he can tell us more about her powers, or who her friends are, or something like that.”

Daniel was quiet for a second, giving me time to think about the consequences of what I was asking. Yes, a meeting with Sebastian was necessary to solve the mystery and try to get our magic back. But Jason wasn’t going to be happy about it. He was probably going to be even madder than he already was, if that was possible.

On the other hand, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t ignore leads or information just to make him more comfortable. That was definitely not good Adept behavior.

“Do it,” Daniel said. “Arrange a meeting, and make it formal. Maybe we’ll get to her before then and it won’t be necessary. But we have to do something.”

I agreed. I just hoped this was the
right
something.

15

G
etting Daniel to agree to let us meet Sebastian was easy. Getting Sebastian to agree to meet us was a little harder. He wasn’t answering his phone, and he didn’t call me back until the next morning. Turned out, that was fine, because the apartment building had been a dead end anyway. There’d been no sign of Fayden when Daniel—or whichever troops he’d called out—had arrived.

The hardest part? Working out the details of the meeting.

Daniel sent a message with a whole list of rules and procedures for us to follow. We had to set a time (way too early in the morning), a location (the middle of the bridge over State Street), and the rules that applied to the meeting (no magic allowed, which was easy since we didn’t exactly have any). Daniel also asked Jill and Jamie to take positions near the bridge just in case Sebastian tried something. Since he’d had plenty of other chances to zap me without Adept bystanders, I felt pretty safe.

Unfortunately, once word got out, I was afraid I wouldn’t be hearing from Jason anytime soon. That thought hurt, but there was nothing I could do about it now. The wheels were already in motion.

Daniel got an okay from Foley for us to skip art history, although we probably could have snuck out without much trouble, as we realized when we walked outside and watched one wickedly expensive car after another pull into the drive in front of St. Sophia’s. As the blue and yellow flag above the door waved in the wind, a Mercedes convertible pulled up, followed by a Bentley, a Rolls-Royce, and a really long limo driven by a white-capped driver.

I’d forgotten—the dance was tomorrow, so this was parents’ night.

“Aren’t they here early?”

“There are events throughout the day,” Scout explained. “They have breakfast together; then, while the girls go to class, the parents go to seminars about raising bratty little monsters or something.”

“Or financial aid for college,” I said.

“Like these kids need financial aid,” Scout grumbled. “Let’s go.”

I pulled my hoodie around me and followed Scout down the street.

The city smelled like smoke and wetness and dirt, and there was a chill in the air that said winter wasn’t far away. I wasn’t looking forward to that any more than I was looking forward to putting Scout and Sebastian together in the same place. She’d watched him knock me out with firespell, he’d been there when the Reapers had kidnapped her, and he was at least part of the reason I was sad about Jason. So he wasn’t exactly at the top of her popularity list.

We walked silently toward the river through a part of downtown Chicago I hadn’t seen yet. The streets were a little quieter over here, and there weren’t as many tourists. It looked more residential, like the folks who worked and shopped in the busier parts of downtown lived here. Even the bars and restaurants looked smaller—more like neighborhood joints. They all had little patio areas with stand-up heaters, I guess for Chicagoans who weren’t quite ready to give up the fight to winter.

The bridge appeared at the top of a rise in the road. There was a stone tower on each side of the roadway, and symbols were carved into the walls. As we walked closer, I could tell there were two kinds of symbols—a “Y” within a circle, and a quatrefoil. These were the signs of the Adepts and Reapers.
Appropriate meeting place,
I thought.

There were cars on the bridge, and plenty of tourists and businesspeople going about their days, but no Reapers as far as I could see. We walked to the edge of the bridge where the sidewalk narrowed to cross it, then stopped. Scout put her hands on her hips and surveyed the area with a critical eye.

“He’s not here yet,” she said.

I frowned. I couldn’t see the other side of the street because of the angle, and she wasn’t much taller than I. “How do you know that?” I wondered, a little spark of hope fluttering that maybe, somehow, she’d gotten her magic back.

That wishful thinking didn’t last long.

“Jill just signaled it,” Scout said, then pointed over to one of the high-rise buildings that lined the river.

Jill stood beside the building’s front door, arms wrapped around herself in the chill, her long auburn hair nearly horizontal in the wind. She uncurled a hand and gave me a little wave. But her head suddenly whipped to the side toward the river—she’d seen something.

When she looked back at us, she raised her index finger, then made a fist, then pointed to the bridge.

“A Reaper has arrived,” Scout translated. “That must be Sebastian.”

“I guess so.” I pushed down a bolt of fear. Fear wasn’t going to do any good right now. Besides, if Sebastian didn’t have magic, what could he do? Water balloons? Slap fight? It didn’t seem likely that he’d start punching two girls in the middle of downtown Chicago.