“How do you do that?”
“Have you ever tried to look at a faraway star,” Scout asked, “but the closer you look at it, the fuzzier it gets?”
“Sure. Why?”
“That’s what Scout’s trying to do here,” Michael said, crossing his arms and bobbing his head in her direction. “Making the targets invisible to the Reapers. She’s been working on a kid who lives in a condo on Michigan, goes to a high school in South Loop. They haven’t been real thrilled with that.”
“And that’s why they’ve been chasing you?” I asked, sliding my gaze to Scout.
“As you might imagine,” she said, “we aren’t exactly popular. Our ideas about giving up our power don’t exactly put us in the majority.”
“The gifted are proud to have magic,” Jason said, “as well they should be. But most of them don’t want to give it up.”
“That puts us in the minority,” Michael added. “Rebels, of a sort.”
“A magic splinter cell?”
“Kinda,” Scout said with a rueful smile. “So the Reapers identify targets—folks who make a good psychic lunch—and kids who are coming into their own, coming into their own gifts. Spotters,” she added, anticipating my question. “Their particular gift is the ability to find magic. To detect it.”
“Once a kid is identified,” Michael said, “the Reapers circle like lions around prey. They’ll talk to the kid, sometimes their parents, about the gift, figure out the parameters, exactly what the kid can do. And they’ll teach the kid that the gift is nothing to be embarrassed about, and that any souls they take are worth it.”
“The Reapers try to teach the kids that the idea of giving up your power willingly is a conspiracy,” Jason said, “that feeding on someone else’s energy, their essence, is a kind of magical natural selection—the strong feeding on the weak or something. We disagree. We work our protective spells on the targets, or we try to intercede more directly with the gifted, to get the kids to think for themselves, to think about the consequences of their magic.”
“For better or worse,” Scout added.
“So you try to steal their pledges,” I concluded.
“You got it,” Scout said. “We try to teach kids with powers that giving up their powers is the best thing for humanity. You know, because of the soul sucking.”
I smiled lightly. “Right.”
“That makes us pretty unpopular with them, and it makes the Reapers none too popular with us,” she added. “We didn’t need the original Reapers. And we certainly don’t need Reapers spawning out there.”
“Seriously,” Jason muttered. “There’re already enough Cubs fans in Chicago.”
Michael coughed, but the cough sounded a lot like, “Northside.”
I arched an eyebrow, and returned my glance to Scout. “Northside?”
“Where the Cubs are,” she said. “They’re territorial.”
“I see. So, what do you do about the evangelizing? About the Reaper spawn, I mean?”
“Well, we are the good guys,” Michael said. “They’re bullies, and we’re a nuisance. We make it harder for them to do their jobs—to recruit, to brainwash, to convince kids with magic that they can keep their powers and live long, fulfilling lives as soul-sucking zombies.”
“We thwart with extreme prejudice,” Scout said with a grin. “Right now, we’re doing a lot of protecting targets, and a lot of befriending the gifted who haven’t yet been turned toward the dark side.”
“A lot of things that get you chased,” I pointed out, giving Scout a pointed look.
“That is true,” she said with a nod. “Reapers are tenacious little suckers. We spend a lot of time keeping ourselves alive.”
I crossed my legs beneath the thin blanket. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have let them into St. Sophia’s.”
Scout snorted. “We didn’t let them in. The tunnels beneath the convent connect it to half the buildings in the Loop. Welcome to the Pedway.”
“How many of them are there?” I asked.
“We think about two hundred,” Scout said. “Sounds like a lot, but Chicago is the third-biggest city in the country. Two hundred out of nearly three million isn’t a lot. And we don’t really have an ‘in’ with them, obviously, so two hundred’s only a best guess.”