“She is so moody,” M.K. complained. “I was just being constructive.”
Lesley and I exchanged a glance.
“See what I mean?” she asked.
I definitely did.
* * *
When the drama was over, we all went back to Sneakifying. Earlier, Veronica, as head of the planning committee, had told us Sneak got its name because St. Sophia’s girls of old used to sneak out every year and host an impromptu prom in an old storage building behind the dorms. (The school used to be a convent, so even the storage building was antiquey and cool.) Add twenty years, lots and lots of money, and parents who didn’t want their heiresses playing dress-up in an old storage building, and you had the modern version of Sneak.
I wasn’t one of those heiresses; I’d been sent to Chicago from my home in New York when my parents went to Germany for research work.
Well, that was their story, anyway. I wasn’t exactly buying it. I thought they knew more about magic than they let on, and that they’d sent me to St. Sophia’s specifically because our headmistress, Marceline Foley, also knew magic existed. It wasn’t something we chatted about regularly, and I don’t think Foley was thrilled to be in the know, but she gave us a little bit of room to take care of business.
I poured glitter over the lines of glue Lesley had made. I’m sure I didn’t exactly look like your average teenager—too much eyeliner and weird vintage shoes for that. But I didn’t exactly look like a teenage witch, either. The only real sign I was anything other than a junior at St. Sophia’s School for Girls was the Darkening on my back, a strangely shaped pale green tattoo that had appeared after I’d been struck by a shot of firespell—and had ended up being able to wield the power, too.
Sure—having power was better than ending up the pitiful victim of a Reaper. But was it better or worse than worrying only whether I was as pretty as the girls in Vogue and if my clothes were hot enough?
Lesley had clearly made up her own mind about that one. Scout had, too. She came from money and could have afforded the same stuff the brat pack wore. But she was one hundred percent Scout, and not the type to worry about what anybody else thought. Keeping the world safe from Reapers was number one on her agenda.
I shook the excess glitter from the raven and put it on the floor beside the others.
“Do you have a date for the dance?” I asked Lesley.
“No. I don’t really know any boys. I’m saving that kind of thing for college.” She looked up at me. “Are you going with Jason?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Do you have a dress yet?”
“Not yet.” Spending my evenings trying to save the world—or at least some of the teenagers who fell victim to Reapers—didn’t leave a lot of time to check out the fashion scene. “Scout and I were going to look this week. What about you?”
She shrugged. “I have some ideas.” She stretched out her legs, revealing a worn pair of Converses. “But I’ll probably go with these. They’re so comfortable. And if we’re going to be dancing all night . . . or running from bad guys . . .”
I looked up at her. “What makes you think we’ll be running from bad guys?”
She shrugged. “I’ve seen television. Bad guys always attack the night of the big dance.”
I made a doubtful sound and grabbed another raven, then sprinkled glitter onto its wings. “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen this time. There will be all sorts of Adepts there, and there’s not a Reaper in town who’d attack a party full of high-society teenagers. They don’t want that much attention.”
At least, that was what I hoped . . .
* * *
It was late when Lesley and I headed back toward the dorms. The rest of the girls had left an hour before we had, but I’d been having too much fun with glitter and glue. We left the decorations in the gym, but I carried back the messenger bag that I took pretty much everywhere. Lesley, bucking the trend again, carried a small round suitcase covered in stickers. It was pea green and looked like something from the 1970s that she’d nabbed from a thrift store. Strange, but a pretty good find, actually.
The walk from the gym to the dorms wasn’t far. The campus was made up of a handful of buildings, and the entire thing was surrounded by a fence with a key-carded gate. Foley’d only just had the gate installed. Probably a good idea even without the Reapers. There were weirdos in every city, and most of the St. Sophia’s girls didn’t have firespell to protect them.
The air outside was cool. Winter was coming, something I definitely wasn’t thrilled about. Winters in upstate New York were nothing to laugh at, but I’d heard the wind off Lake Michigan was pretty miserable. I planned on using the emergency credit card my parents had given me to invest in the thickest, downiest coat I could find. I might look like a lumberjack, but at least I’d be warm.
Lesley and I walked quietly past the classroom building. There was a bench outside, where a girl in St. Sophia’s plaid and a dark-haired boy in street clothes—jeans and a long-sleeved jacket—sat. His arm was around her shoulders, and he was whispering in her ear. She stared blankly ahead while he twirled a lock of her hair. I realized it was Lisbeth, the brat pack’s new recruit.
It wasn’t exactly unusual for St. Sophia’s girls to sneak out of the building to meet with a boy. There was an old root cellar door I’d used to sneak out before—although for world-saving-type reasons.
But this seemed different. There was sadness in her eyes, and while he seemed totally into her, she seemed really, really unhappy about it. She gave off a vibe of desperation. That was quite a change from her brat pack bonding of a little while ago . . . but maybe not from the moodiness they’d accused her of.
When we passed them, I pulled Lesley around the corner of the building, my heart beginning to pound.
“That’s Lisbeth,” I whispered. “Who’s the boy?”
“I’ve never seen him before.”
“Did she seem okay to you?”
“She looked sad. Like she didn’t think she’d ever be happy again.”
That rung a bell. It sounded exactly like the effect of a Reaper stealing someone’s soul. In my two months at St. Sophia’s and as an Adept, I hadn’t actually seen any Reaping. I’d seen the effects—girls at school whose motivation was gone, who seemed depressed, who were tired and sleepy and unhappy all the time. That was the effect of having your soul—your will to live—ripped away by a Reaper intent on keeping his magic.