“You’re right,” she said. “I can totally do this. But it’s going to take a few minutes, and I need space to work.”
We all looked down at the creatures, which were beginning to stir again, heads lolling as they fought off the firespell.
“First off,” Scout said, “let’s all back up a little.”
Carefully and quietly, we took a few more steps backward, putting space between us and them.
“And now for something a little more formal,” Scout said. She looked around at the floor of the tunnel, which was relatively dry compared to some of the other areas we’d been in.
“Protection circle?” Jason asked.
“Protection circle,” she confirmed with a nod.
“What’s a protection circle?” I asked.
“It’s like a safety bubble,” Scout said, fumbling around in her messenger bag. “Like a little snow globe of happiness that will keep us safe from them.” She pulled out a small zip-top case. She opened it, then pulled out a small plastic hourglass filled with bright orange sand.
“You keep an hourglass in your messenger bag?” I wondered.
“Found it at a thrift store. Kept it for just such an occasion. Keep an eye on the biters.”
I made sure Jason and Michael were doing just that, then turned back to watch Scout work her juju. No way was I going to miss this.
She pulled a small screwdriver from the case and pried off the end of the hourglass. And then, starting behind us, she began to pour the sand in an arc around me. She completed most of a six-foot circle, but stopped when a gap of about a foot separated the two ends.
“Everyone inside,” she said. Michael and Jason both stepped carefully over the sand circle. When we were all inside, she went to her knees, put her hands on the floor, and pressed her lips to the gap in the circle.
“What’s she doing?” I whispered to Michael.
“She’s starting the Triple I,” he answered without looking back. “It stands for ‘intent, incantation, incarnation. ’ The three parts of a major spell.”
Okay, magic had officially become school.
“We ask a wish,” Scout said, sitting back on her heels. “We ask for peace. We ask for space between us and those who would harm us.”
She held the hourglass in her hands, then closed her eyes.
After a moment of silence, I leaned toward Michael again. “Is this part of it?”
“This is the part where I have to draft a spell on the fly since I haven’t poured a circle in forever,” Scout huffed. “It’s also the part where it helps if Adepts don’t ask questions while I do it.”
I zipped up my lips, just in time for Jason and Michael to take a step backward, bumping into me a little.
“They’re moving, Scout,” Michael said. “Draft faster.”
I glanced back. The
things
were starting to stumble their way to their feet.
Scout cleared her throat, then began her incantation. “Silence, serenity, solitude, space. We ask for protections inside of this place. Empower this circle with magical grace, and keep us all safe . . .”
She stopped. I looked over and saw the blank expression on her face.
“. . . and keep us all safe,” she repeated, desperation in her voice. She couldn’t seem to find the right phrase to end the poem.
“Hurry
up
, Scout.”
At Jason’s harried tone, I looked up again. All five of the creatures were on their feet, and they looked pretty angry. There were only ten or fifteen feet between us, and they were lumbering forward, fangs bared, claws beginning to scrape the concrete like nails on a chalkboard.
“Don’t listen to them,” I told her, “and don’t worry—you can do this.”
“And keep us all safe . . .”
Michael glanced back. “Anytime now!”
She snapped her fingers. “—in this circle we trace!” She poured the rest of the sand in a line, just as claws struck out at Michael. He jumped back, but she’d finished the circle just in time—the creature was out of luck.
The bubblelike shield shimmered as the creature made contact with it, then disappeared again when it yanked back its claw with a fierce whine. The pain didn’t deter it or the rest of them. They all began to attack. We stood there and watched them claw and scrape at the energy to get at us. The shield shimmered a little every time they made contact, but it held.
“Just in time,” Scout finally said.
Jason nodded. “You did good. Now, are you actually going to transmogrify them?”
Scout nodded, then knelt on the floor and began to pull stuff from her messenger bag. “A woman’s work never ceases.”
Scout Greene was a taskmaster worthy of any St. Sophia’s professor. She folded a piece of paper from a notebook into an origami cup in the shape of a bird, and started quizzing us to find stuff to put into it.
So far, I’d offered up a chunk of granola bar and three drops of water from my bottle. Jason and Michael didn’t have man purses, so she took stuff from their pockets—sixty-two cents, a ball of stringy blue jeans lint, and a tube of lip balm. Together, all that stuff was supposed to represent our sacrifice of various bits of earth—water, metal, food, etc.
When everything was in the paper cup, she folded the top carefully again, then scribbled out what I assumed was an incantation on another piece of paper. While she drafted, the monsters poked around the bubble, looking for a weak spot. Although they weren’t successful, from what I could tell, the shield wasn’t going to last forever.
When Scout had the finished incantation in one hand and the closed paper cup in another, she glanced around at each of us. “Are we ready?”
“I’ve never been more ready to climb into bed,” I told her. Michael and Jason nodded in agreement.
“Here’s the plan.” She held up the piece of paper. “I’m going to repeat the incantation, and as soon as I’m done, I’m gonna wipe out the circle and throw the charm. If I’ve done this right, the spell will trigger as soon as the charm hits.”
Michael pulled the cell phone from his pocket.
“Really,” Scout said flatly, “you’re going to make a call right now?”
Michael aimed the phone toward the creatures and began snapping. “I’m going to take pictures of these things in the likely event Smith and Katie don’t believe what we saw.” Smith and Katie were Varsity Adepts and the former leaders of Enclave Three. They’d held the reins when Scout had been kidnapped. Good riddance, if you asked me.
“Oh. Well, good call,” Scout allowed.
Michael smiled sweetly at her. “I’m entitled to a few good ideas, you know.”
She blushed.
When Michael was done and the cell phone was tucked away again, Jason clapped his hands together. “Okay, let’s get this show on the road. Everyone in the back of the bubble. Puts more space between us and them when the circle goes down,” he explained.
When we’d stepped back, Scout glanced at each of us in turn. “Are we ready?” When we’d all nodded, she did the same. “Then here goes nothing.”
Michael, Jason, and I each put up our fists, like we were heading into a schoolyard fight.
Scout closed her eyes and held the crane in her lifted hands. “Beauty comes in many sizes, but these guys just aren’t prizes. Give them all a new disguise, and make them change before our eyes!”
She cocked back her arm to throw the bird. “And three . . . two . . . and one!” She used her toe to push some sand out the circle. As soon as it was breached, the shield gave one final shimmer and dropped away. They lunged forward, and Scout threw the paper bird into the middle of the group.
The tunnel exploded into noise and white light.
I dropped down, hands over my head, waiting for an attack—that didn’t come.
I opened an eye. The air was filled with a thousand tiny white paper cranes, all of them flapping their little paper wings as they spun around us. The creatures were nowhere to be seen.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“She transmogrified them,” Michael said, surprise in his voice.
I stood up, waving a hand in front of my face so that I could see through the cranes. After a moment, they formed a long
V
and flew past us down the tunnel, leaving us alone, the floor littered with bits of origami confetti.
Michael stared openmouthed at the birds as they disappeared into the next chunk of the tunnel. “This is just . . . fricking amazing! You did it! You actually did it!” He picked Scout up and spun her around in the air, just like in the movies.
I grinned at the look of total shock on her face. Considering the fact that she’d actually kissed him a few minutes ago, my math said Garcia, two. Scout, zero.
“It was teamwork,” she said, adjusting her shirt when he finally put her down again. Her cheeks were pink, but I could tell she was trying really hard not to smile. Before I could say anything to her, Scout jumped at me and wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Can’t breathe,” I said, patting her back. “Dial it back.”
When she finally loosened up, I rubbed my neck. “What was that for?”
“You believed in me,” she said simply, and then put an arm around my shoulders.
“Of course I did. Now, shouldn’t we tell somebody about those things?”
“On it,” Michael said, tapping the keyboard on his phone. “Gave Daniel the heads-up,” he said, then nodded when the phone beeped only a second later. “Enclave tomorrow night for the debriefing.”
“Then I think that means our work here is done,” Scout said. “Let’s go home.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Just in case there were any more nasties lumbering around, Jason and Michael escorted us to the door into St. Sophia’s. And then, wolfless, Scout and I made our way back through the main part of the convent and the Great Hall, where we studied during our mandatory two-hour study hall (I know, right?), to the building that housed our suite. The common room was dark when we unlocked the door and tiptoed inside, as was Lesley’s room.
But Amie’s door was open. The bedroom light was off, but Veronica was standing in the doorway.
My stomach turned.
Veronica took a step forward, closing Amie’s door behind her. She was dressed for bed in yoga pants and a tank top, her hair long and styled straight, circles beneath her eyes. She looked us over.
“Where have you two been?” she asked, crossing her arms and leaning back against the doorway.
I glanced between mine and Scout’s rooms, which faced each other across the suite, the doors wide open. That was an obvious signal that we weren’t tucked in like we were supposed to be—and hadn’t been for a while.
But Scout stayed calm. “We couldn’t sleep,” she said, “so we walked around for a little while.” She walked toward her room. When Veronica didn’t budge, Scout stopped and looked back at her. “What are you doing in our suite anyway?”
Veronica took a step forward and closed Amie’s door behind her. “We were studying. Unlike the two of you.”
Her voice rose at the end, like she was asking a question—or daring us to prove her wrong.
“I mean, it’s pretty weird,” she said. “You two just heading out to walk around or whatever. It doesn’t even look like you’ve been in bed at all.”
Scout and I exchanged a glance. This was going to be tricky. If we stuck to our “we were just walking around” story, she might think we were lying and do some investigating that would only inconvenience both of us.
We obviously couldn’t exactly tell her what we’d really been doing. But maybe if we told her something a
little bit
bad, we might answer her questions . . . and keep her from asking too many more.
“I went to meet my boyfriend,” I threw out. Okay, so I was fudging about our status, but the rest was true enough. “And Scout went with me. To, you know, prop the door open so I wouldn’t get locked out.” That sounded legit to me, anyway.
“You haven’t been here that long. You don’t have a boyfriend.”
I managed a bored eye roll. “That you
know of
.”
“Who is it?”
I made a little mental apology to Jason for outing our almost-relationship, but figured he’d get over it. “Jason Shepherd.”
Veronica’s eyes widened, and she uncrossed her arms. “From Montclare?”
I nodded.
“Isn’t he, like, John Creed’s friend?”
I opened my mouth to answer yes—Creed was a friend of Jason’s, a guy I’d met when Veronica and I had had our afternoon of friendship. He’d shared a flirty moment with Veronica at the store where we’d met them. Creed had dark hair and dark eyes, and just looked
wealthy
. It was obvious in the way he carried himself, in the way he talked. He was just comfortable in a way that said, “The world is at my feet.” But most important, he had a unique look. Funky designer watch, square-toed shoes, that kind of thing. I’d known rich kids who were joiners—who dressed just like everyone else—and rich kids who were so rich they didn’t have to be joiners. He was the nonjoiner type.