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She’d tried, but whatever she’d done hadn’t quite taken.
Scout tightened her grip on my hand, then opened her eyes and glanced over at Michael. “I can’t,” she whispered, tears pooling in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I don’t have any mojo left. They took it, Michael.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said, pressing his lips to her forehead. “You’ll heal. It’s okay.”
“I can spark them again,” Jamie said, “but I need to recharge for a minute, and the wall isn’t going to keep them away for long.”
I inched up to peek over the fire, assessed, and quickly sat down again. “There’re two more of them. Are we toast?”
“Reaper toast,” Scout agreed, then leaned into a fit of coughing.
“Scout?” Michael asked.
When she looked up at him, there were tears in her eyes. “It was a nightmare, a black hole. They trapped me, and they’d have kept going until there was nothing left. No energy, no magic—just a shell.”
“They must have doubled their efforts,” Michael said, his eyes scanning her face, like a doctor checking her injuries. “Siphoned more greedily than their usual one-day-at-a-time protocol. Probably weren’t sure how long they’d be able to keep her.” He glanced at me. “Energy taken from Adepts is more potent, more powerful, than energy from folks without gifts, so they’d have taken what they could get while they could get it, passed it on to elders like Jeremiah. You said they trashed her room, right? Maybe they were looking for her Grimoire, her spell book, something to try and capture some of her gifts, as well as her energy.”
“They’ll keep coming,” Scout said quietly. “They won’t kill us. They’ll just suck us dry until there’s nothing left. Until we leave everyone and everything else behind and do exactly what they want.”
“Like magical brat packers,” I muttered, sarcasm the only way I knew to deal with a future that terrifying.
“What can you do?” Jamie suddenly asked me. “You said something about lights? If we could distract them, maybe we could make a run for the door? Scatter through the tunnels?”
I nodded, my heart pounding, and looked up at the fluorescent lights overhead. I stared at them, concentrating, trying to speed my heart into whatever state was going to trigger the magic. Into whatever state was going to turn off all the lights.
“You can do it, Lil,” Scout whispered, leaning her head against my shoulder. “I know you can.”
I nodded, squeezing my fingers into fists until my nails cut crescents into my palms.
Nothing.
Not even a flicker, even as my heart raced with the effort.
“Scout, I don’t know how,” I said, staring up at the lights again, which burned steadily—not even a hiccup—in their fixtures. “I don’t know how to make it happen.”
“ ’ S okay, Lil,” she said softly. “You’ll learn.”
But not fast enough, I thought.
The ground rumbled again, the flames shaking on their foundations. It was another of Alex’s earthquakes, and that wasn’t all—the wall vibrated, wavered, at three or four other points along the line. They were hammering at it, trying to break through.
And despite my chest being full of fear, there wasn’t so much as a flicker in the lights above us.
Maybe it had been a fluke before, a power surge in the building at the same time I’d been afraid or excited, and not magic after all. Maybe I had been a fluke.
But there was no time to worry about it . . . because the wall began to unravel.
I watched as the strands unbraided, listened as Reapers began to yell around us.
“It’s going,” Jamie warned over the motion and noise.
She was right, but it had help.
The air pressure changed again, the light turning a sickly green.
“Firespell!” I yelled, both Michael and I hunkering down to cover Scout with our bodies, my arms wrapped around her head.
The very walls seemed to contract, then expand with a tremendous force. The shot of firespell Sebastian threw across the room turned Jamie’s fluid fire into a brittle wall that shuddered, then exploded, shards flying out in all directions before crashing to the ground like shattered glass.
When the air was still again, a haze of white smoke filling the room, I glanced over at Jamie. Her eyes were closed, and there was blood rushing from a gash in her forehead.
“Michael?” I asked, shaking white powder from my hair.
He muttered a curse in Spanish. “I’m okay.” He sat up again, chunks of white . . . stuff . . . falling around his body. “Scout?”
I moved my arms and she lifted her head. “I’m okay, too.”
“I think Jamie’s hurt,” I said.
Michael looked at her, then glanced around. The room was in chaos, Reapers yelling at one another, smoke wafting through the room.
“We’ve got to make a run for it,” he said, “use the chaos to our advantage. It’s our best chance.”
I nodded, then put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and shook gently. “Hey, are you okay?”
Her eyelids fluttered, then opened. She raised a hand to her face and wiped at the blood streaming from the gash at her temple.
“Here,” I said, pulling off my plaid tie and wrapping it around her head tight enough to put pressure on the wound and keep the blood out of her eyes.
“Can you get up?” I whispered. “We’re going to try to make a run for it.”
She nodded uncertainly, but it was a nod just the same. I helped her to her feet as Michael helped Scout behind me. As stealthily as we could, we began to move through the smoke and back toward the door, picking our way through the remains of the transfigured wall, me trying to hold Jamie upright, Michael all but carrying Scout.
We made progress, the haze aiding our escape, and managed to get halfway closer to the door . . . at least until a voice rang through it.
“Stop.”
We looked over. Alex emerged from a swirl of white, Sebastian beside her.
She stretched out a hand. “You can come willingly, or I can knock you all on your asses.”
Reapers—the ones we hadn’t been introduced to—began closing in from the left and right.
“Michael?” I asked.
“Um,” was all he said, his own gaze shifting from side to side as he tried to figure a way out.
I’m not sure what made me do it, but I chose that moment to glance at Sebastian, who stood just behind Alex, his hooded gaze on me again. And while I looked at him and he looked back at me, he mouthed something.
