Her cell.
“So, yeah,” she said after a moment, waving a hand in front of the paper house, the lights in the windows dimming and fading, a tiny world extinguished. “I’m used to rejection because of my magic.”
“It’s not you,” I quietly said.
Scout barked out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s the first time I’ve heard that one.” She straightened the house, adjusting it so that it sat neatly beside its neighbors. “If we’re going to break up, let’s just get it over with, okay?”
I figured out something about Scout in that moment, something that made my heart clench with protective-ness. However brave she might have been in fighting Reapers, in protecting humans, in running through underground tunnels in the middle of the night, fighting back against fire- and earthquake-bearing baddies, she was very afraid of one thing: that I’d abandon her. She was afraid she’d made a friend who was going to walk away like her parents had done, walk out and leave her alone in her room. That’s what finally snapped me out of nearly forty-eight hours of freaking out about something that I knew, without a doubt, was going to change my life forever.
“It’s probably nothing,” I finally said.
I watched the change in her expression—from preparing for defeat, to relief, to crisis management.
“Tell me,” she said.
When I frowned back at her, she glared back at me, daring me to argue.
Recognizing the inevitability of my defeat, I sighed, but turned around and lifted up the back of my shirt.
The room went silent.
“You have a darkening,” she said.
“A what? I think it’s just a funky bruise or something?” It wasn’t, of course, just a funky bruise, but I was willing to cling to those last few seconds of normalcy.
“When did you get it?”
I stepped away from her, pulling down my T- shirt and wrapping my arms around my waist self-consciously. “I don’t know. A couple of . . . days ago.”
Silence.
“Like, a couple of firespell days ago?”
I nodded.
“You’ve been marked.” Her voice was soft, tremulous.
My fingers still knotted in the hem of the shirt, I glanced behind me. Scout stood there, eyes wide, lips parted in shock. “Scout?”
She shook her head, then looked up at me. “This isn’t supposed to happen.”
The emotion in her voice—awe—raised the hair on my arms and made my stomach sink. “What isn’t supposed to happen?”
She stood up, then frowned and nibbled the edge of her lip; then she walked to one end of the room and back again. She was pacing, apparently trying to puzzle out something. “Right after you got hit by the firespell. But you’ve never had powers before, and you don’t have powers now—” She paused and glanced over at me. “Do you?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I don’t.”
She resumed talking so quickly, I wasn’t sure she’d even heard my answer. “I mean, I guess it’s possible.” She hit the end of the room and, neatly sideswiping a footlocker, turned around again. “I’d have to check the Grimoire to be sure. If you don’t have power, then you weren’t really triggered, but maybe it’s some kind of tattoo from the firespell? I can’t imagine how you could have gotten a darkening without the power—”
“Scout.”
“But maybe it’s happened before.”
“Scout.” My voice was loud enough that she finally stopped and looked at me.
“Hmm?”
I pointed behind me. “Hello? My back?”