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 theGrimoire 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?”
“Right, right.” She walked back to me and began to pull up the hem of her shirt.
“Um, I’m not sure stripping down is the solution here, Scout.”
“Prude,” she said dryly, but when she reached me again, she turned around.
At the small of her back, in pale green, was a mark like mine—well, not exactly like mine. The symbols inside her circle were different, but the general idea was the same.
“Oh, my God,” I said.
Scout dropped the back of her T-shirt and turned, nodding her head. “Yep. So I guess it’s settled now.”
“Settled?”
“You’re one of us.”
Forty minutes—and Scout’s rifling through a two-foot-high stack of books—later, we were headed downstairs. If she’d found anything in the giant leather volumes she pulled out of a plastic tub beneath her bed, she didn’t say. The only conclusion she’d reached was that she needed to talk to the rest of the Adepts in Enclave Three, so she’d pulled out her phone, popped open the keyboard and, fingers flying, sent out a dispatch. And then we were on our way.
The route we took this time was different still from the last couple of trips I’d made. We used a new doorway to the basement level—this one a wooden panel in a side hallway in the main building—and descended a narrower, steeper staircase. Once we were in the basement, we walked a maze through limestone hallways. I was beginning to think the labyrinth on the floor was more than just decoration. It served as a pretty good symbol of what lay beneath the convent.
Despite how confusing it was, Scout clearly knew the route, barely pausing at the corners, her speed quick and movements efficient. She moved silently, striding through the hallways and tunnels like a woman on a mission. I stumbled at a half run, half walk behind her, just trying to keep up. My speed wasn’t much helped by my stomach’s rolling, both because we were actually going into the basement again—by choice—and for the reason we were going there.
Because I was her mission.
Or so I assumed.
“You could slow down a little, you know.”
“Slowing down would make it harder for me to punish you by making you keep up,” she said,
but came to a stop as we reached the dead end of a limestone corridor that ended in a nondescript metal door.
“Why are you punishing me?”
Scout reached up, pulled a key from above the threshold, and slipped it into the lock. When the door popped open, she put back the key, then glanced at me. “Um, you abandoned me for the brat pack?”
“Abandoned is a harsh word.”
“So are they,” she pointed out, holding the door open so I could move inside. “The last time you hung out with them, they put you in the hospital.”
“That was actually your fault.”
“Details,” she said.
My feet still on the limestone, hand on the threshold of the door, I peeked inside. She was leading me into an old tunnel. It was narrow, with an arched ceiling, the entire tunnel paved in concrete, narrow tracks along the concrete floor. Lights in round, industrial fittings were suspended from the ceiling every dozen yards or so. The half illumination didn’t do much for the ambience. A couple of inches of rusty water covered the tracks on the floor, and the concrete walls were covered with graffiti—words of every shape and size, big and small, monotone and multicolored.
“What is this?”
“Chicago Tunnel Company Railroad,” she said, nudging me forward. I took a step into dirty water, glad I’d worn boots for my shopping excursion, and glad I still had on a jacket. It was chilly, probably because we were underground.
“It’s an old railroad line,” Scout said, then stepped beside me. Cold, musty air stirred as she closed the door
