Charmfall (23 page)

Not surprisingly, M.K. didn’t look convinced. But this time, it was Veronica who spoke.

“Just leave them alone,” she said. “We need to put the confetti on the tables.”

M.K. slowly looked behind her, apparently shocked that she’d intervened. I understood the emotion. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious about the party,” Veronica said, grabbing her hand. “I don’t want these little twerps getting in the way. Let’s go.”

M.K. rolled her eyes, clearly not convinced she shouldn’t make fun of us for a while, but let Veronica pull her back toward the party room. They bounced back into the main hall, but not before Veronica glanced back and looked right at me. She didn’t say anything before turning around again.

“What do you think that was about?” Scout whispered.

“Maybe Nicu told her about us? I don’t know, and I’m deciding not to worry about it. There are just not enough hours in the day.”

“I hear ya.”

*  *  *

We were pretty far down Michigan Avenue, so we snuck out to a cab for the ride to the pumping station. When we arrived a few minutes later, we stopped near a group of trees and scoped it out.

The building was located in a little park tucked between skyscrapers—the type people tended to ignore as they rushed around to high-end shops. It was short and made of big chunks of rough stone. There were rectangular windows all the way around it, two on each side, all placed the same distance apart. If you sliced it down the middle like a cake, both sides would look exactly the same.

And all the windows were covered on the inside with blue paper. It was thick enough that I couldn’t tell whether the lights inside were on or off, but there was no movement in or around the building, so we moved closer.

A sign had been posted a few yards away from the door. It was from some development company and talked about how the building was going to be rehabbed. But that rehab was months away, which explained the
NO TRESPASSING
warning below it.

“It doesn’t look like we can see much from out here,” I whispered.

“Let’s walk around,” Scout said, and we tiptoed around three of the building’s four sides. Every window was covered, so we couldn’t get even a small peek inside.

Finally, on the fourth and final side, we struck gold. Someone hadn’t been entirely careful putting the blue paper over one of the windows, and the bottom corners had started to roll up, giving us two little views of the interior of the building.

Scout and I nodded at each other . . . and leaned in.

She squeaked almost immediately.

Sebastian had been right—there were huge pipes in the room, each one probably three or four feet wide. They lay across the floor in a complicated grid pattern, and at the end of each pipe was a huge piece of machinery. Maybe a generator or something. The size of the things was just amazing. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing about the pumping station.

The entire room was filled with bright blue light—emanating from a huge circle that floated in the air above the pipes. It had to be twenty feet wide, and it was empty in the middle—like a giant’s bracelet. It rotated slowly, humming as it moved.

“Oh, my God, Lils, are you seeing this?”

“I’m seeing . . . I’m seeing something. I’m not sure what.”

Scout pressed a hand to the glass, and she didn’t look nearly as horrified as I’d expected.

“This is a bad thing, remember?”

“Oh, I know,” Scout said. “But it’s like the kid in the science fair who creates face-eating bacteria. The idea is awful, but you have to be impressed by the initiative.”

“I guess. What is it, exactly?”

“Some kind of magic spool, I think. Like a spindle.” Her voice got even quieter, and I think she forgot I was there. It sounded like she was just talking it over. “Pulling all the magic into it, maybe, with some kind of controls so she can take it away in parts. First the Adepts, then the Reapers. That’s probably the big plan for later—use it to divvy up the magic so she can hand it over to whomever she wants whenever she wants.”

While Scout thought it through, I scanned the rest of the room. Fayden Campbell stood in one corner dressed in a black bodysuit like a comic book bad girl, her hair pulled into a high ponytail, her signature glasses perched on her nose.

And she wasn’t alone. There were a few other people in the room. I guess they wanted to be part of her new world order, at least if our theory was right. And one of them looked familiar. . . . “That’s Charlie Andrews,” I told Scout, pointing him out. “The Reaper who was attacking Lisbeth. The guy I hit with a suitcase.”

“We wondered why he was Reaping out in the open,” she said. “I guess we know.”

“She isn’t working alone,” I whispered. “That explains how she managed this with firespell. Maybe it’s also why you haven’t been able to figure out how she made the magic—why the equations didn’t make sense. It’s because she’s not the only one doing it. It’s the combination of
their
magic, too.”

“Holy toast, Parker, that is a good idea. Grab your phone,” she added, as she pulled hers out. “Get pictures of their faces. Maybe we can figure out who the rest of them are and what their powers are.”

“And if we do that, you have a little more information to add to the equation.”

She nodded and began snapping photos. I did the same, and hoped we’d find the answers she needed.

*  *  *

We didn’t press our luck, and got out of there was soon as we had enough pictures. And as soon as we were a safe distance away from the building, we called Daniel and filled him in. All the Adepts—except Jason—agreed to meet back at the Enclave to work on the magic solution. I wasn’t sure if seeing the spindle was going to actually help out Scout, but she definitely seemed energized. It certainly couldn’t have hurt.

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

W
hy 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 circle 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.