As Adepts, we promise to give up our magic, to give it back to the universe before it turns us into soul-suckers. Reapers don’t. And in order to keep their suddenly hungry power from devouring them from the inside out, they have to feed from the souls of Adepts or humans.
So, yeah. Reapers—or, as they called themselves, the Dark Elite—weren’t going to win any congeniality awards.
That put us pretty squarely against each other, like a football rivalry but with much higher stakes. So by day, we were high school juniors—wearing our plaid uniforms, doing our homework, ignoring our brattier classmates, and wishing we were in a public high school without a two-hour mandatory study hall.
And by night, we were dueling Adepts.
Scout suddenly sighed, a long, haggard breath that made her entire body shudder. She still looked a little pale, and she still had blue circles under her eyes.
A wounded Adept.
These were the scars left over from her own experience with the Reapers. She’d been kidnapped, and her room had been ransacked. It had been me and the other Junior Varsity Adepts from Enclave Three—and very little help from the Varsity Adepts, the college-age kids—that had fought to get her back from the Reaper sanctuary where Jeremiah, the baddest of the baddies, had begun the process of stripping away her soul.
It was days before she could sleep without nightmares, nearly a week before she was mostly back to her old self. But I still saw shadows from her time in the sanctuary—those moments when she disappeared into herself, when her mind was pulled back into the empty spot the Reapers had created.
Regardless, she was here now. We’d gotten her back.
Not everyone was so lucky. Sometimes we discovered too late that a Reaper had been befriending someone, too late for Adepts, friends, family, coaches, or teachers to pull him or her back from the brink.
Sometimes, fighting the good fight meant losing a battle or two.
That was a hard lesson at almost-sixteen.
“Lils, any thoughts about running away and joining a circus?”
I smiled over at Scout. “Are we talking pink poodles and clowns stuffed into a car, or creepy freak show?”
Scout snorted. “Since it’s us, probably freak show. We could travel around the country from city to city, putting up one of those giant red-and-white-striped tents and sleeping in a silver trailer shaped like a bullet.” She slid me a knowing glance. “You could bring along your own personal freak show.”
This time, it wasn’t just the sun that heated my cheeks. “He’s not my freak show.”
“He’d like to be.”
“Whatever. And he’s not a freak show.” I glanced around to make sure we were alone. “He’s a werewolf.”
“Close enough. The point is, he’d be your werewolf if you let him.”
It was the “letting him” that was the hard part. Jason Shepherd, the resident werewolf of Enclave Three, was definitely interested. He was sixteen years old and, like Michael Garcia, another Adept with a massive crush on Scout, was a student at Montclare Academy, St. Sophia’s brother school. I’d learned Jason had been born in Naperville, a suburb west of Chicago, listened to whatever music happened to be on the radio at the time, and was a devoted White Sox fan. He didn’t like football and loved pepperoni pizza. And, of course, there was the werewolf thing.
I guess I was interested back, but spending nights fighting evil didn’t exactly make it easy to get to know a boy.
“It’s too soon,” I told her, trying to make my voice sound as casual as possible. “Besides, you’re the one who warned me away from him.”
“I did do that,” she quietly said. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.” Problem was, she wouldn’t tell me why she thought that might happen. She kept saying I needed to hear it from him, and that wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that made a girl feel comfortable about a boy.
“There’s always something,” I whispered. As if on cue, a grim-looking cloud passed over the sun, a dark streak in the sky that sang of impending rain. The breeze blew colder, raising goose bumps on my arms.
Scout and I exchanged a glance. “Inside?” I asked.
She nodded, then pointed at her shoes. “The glue’s not waterproof.”
Decision made, we gathered up our books and walked back across the campus’s side lawn and around to the main building. The school—a former convent—was dark and gothic-looking, a weird contrast to the rest of the glass-and-steel architecture in this part of downtown Chicago.
That was what I was thinking when I happened to glance across the street . . . and saw him.
Sebastian Born.
He stood on the sidewalk in jeans and a dark polo shirt, his hands tucked into his pockets. His blue eyes gleamed, but not like Jason’s eyes gleamed. Jason’s eyes were spring-bright. Sebastian’s were darker. Deeper. Colder.