Firespell

She lifted her eyebrows. “That’s a surprisingly mature attitude.”

“I’m surprisingly mature.” It wasn’t that I wanted to snark back to the principal of my high school, the head honcho (honchess?) of the place I lived, slept, ate, and learned. But her attitude, her assumption that I was here because I lacked some fundamental ability to keep myself safe, practically begged for snark.

On the other hand, since I’d made the decision to move deeper into the convent instead of heading back to my room, maybe I did.

Foley lifted her brows, and her expression made her thoughts on my snark pretty clear. “Ms. Parker, we take the well-being of our students and the reputation of our institution very seriously.”

Given what was going on beneath her institution, I wondered about that. But I managed to keep my mouth shut.

“I expect you’ll return to St. Sophia’s tomorrow?”

“That’s what they say.”

Foley nodded. “Very well. I’ve asked Ms. Green to gather your assignments. Given that tomorrow’s Saturday, you’ll have some time to complete them before classes resume. I’ll arrange for a car to transport you back to St. Sophia’s. If you require anything before your return, you may contact our staff.”

I nodded. Her work apparently done, she walked toward the door. But then she glanced back.

“About our conversation,” she said, “perhaps I was . . . ill informed about your parents’ professions.”

I stared at her for a few seconds, trying to make sense of the about-face. “Ill informed?”

“I recognize that you, of course, would know better than I the nature of your parents’ work.” She glanced down at her watch. “I need to return to the school. Enjoy your evening.”

My mind began to race, but I managed to bob my head as she disappeared around the corner, then opened and closed the door again.

I stared down at the remote control in my hand for a minute after she’d left, flipping it through my fingers as I ruminated.

It was weird enough that she’d dropped by in the first place—I mean, how many high school principals visited their students in the hospital? She clearly had her own theories about what had happened to me—namely, that it was my fault. I guess she wanted to cover her bases, make sure I wasn’t going to spill to the media or call a lawyer about my “accident.”

But then, out of the blue, she brought up my parents and changed her story? And even weirder, she actually seemed sincere. Contrite, even, and Foley didn’t exactly seem like the nurturing type, much less the type to admit when she was wrong.

I gnawed the edge of my lip and gave the remote a final flip. Call it what you want—Reapers, Adepts, magic, firespell, whatever. Things were seriously weird at St. Sophia’s.

True to the doc’s word, I was released the next morning. True to Foley’s word, one of the glasses-clad matrons who usually patrolled the study hall brought casual clothes for me to change into—jeans and a T-shirt, probably selected by Scout—and signed me out. A nurse wheeled me, invalid style, to the front door of the clinic and the St. Sophia’s-branded minivan that sat at the curb. The matron was silent on the way back to the convent, but it was a pretty short ride—only a few blocks back to my new home on Erie. They dropped me off at the front door without a word, and I headed up the stairs and into the building. Although I’d been gone only a couple of days, the convent seemed almost . . . foreign. It hadn’t yet begun to feel like home, but now, it felt farther from Sagamore than ever.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the main building was all but empty. A handful of students peppered the study hall, maybe catching up on weekend homework or trying to get ahead to pad their academic resumes. The halls that held the suites were louder, music and television spilling into the hallway as St. Sophia’s girls relaxed and enjoyed the weekend.

I unlocked the door to our suite. Scout jumped up from the couch, decked out in jeans and layered T-shirts, her hair pulled into a short ponytail, and practically knocked me over to get in a hug.

“Thank God,” she said. “The brat packers were getting almost unbearable.” She let me go, then gave me an up-and-down appraisal. “Is everything where I left it?”

“Last time I checked,” I said with a smile, then waved at Barnaby, who sat on the couch behind us. She wore a fitted pale blue T-shirt with a rainbow across the front, and her hair was up in some kind of complicated knot. It was very Sound of Music.

“Hello, Lily,” she said.

“Hi, Lesley.”

The door to Amie’s suite opened. Amie, M.K., and Veronica piled out of the room, their smiles fading as they realized I’d come home. They were all dressed in athletic shorts, snug tank tops, and sneakers. I assumed it was workout time.

Amie’s smile faded to an expression that was a lot heavier on the contrition and apology. M.K.’s smile was haughty. Veronica was using both hands to pull her hair into a ponytail. I wasn’t even on her radar.

“You were in the hospital,” M.K. said. There was no apology behind her words, no indication that she thought they might have been responsible for anything that happened to me. They weren’t, of course, responsible, but they didn’t know that. I’d hoped for something a little more contrite, honestly—maybe something in a nice “sheepish embarrassment.”

“Yep,” I said.

“What happened to you?” M.K. had apparently skipped embarrassment and gone right to being accusatory.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I told them.

“Why? Is it catching?” M.K. snickered at her joke. “Something contagious?”

“There are certain . . . liability issues,” I said, then looked over at Amie. She was the worrywart of the group, so I figured she was my most effective target. “Insurance issues. Parental liability issues. Probably best not to talk about it. We don’t want to have to get the lawyers involved. Not yet, anyway.”

Scout, half turning so that only I could see her, winked at me.

Veronica and Amie exchanged a nervous glance.

“But thanks for the tour,” I added as I headed for my bedroom. I unlocked the door, then stood there as Scout and Barnaby skipped inside.

“It was very educational,” I said, then winked at the brat pack, walked inside, and closed the door behind us.

As dramatic exits went, it wasn’t bad.

I gave Scout and Lesley a mini- update, at least the parts I could talk about in Lesley’s company. Lesley wasn’t an Adept, at least as far as I was aware, so I kept my replay of Foley’s visit and my chat with Jason purely PG. But I shooed them out of my room pretty quickly.

I needed a shower.

A superhot, superlong, environmentally irresponsible shower. As soon as they were out the door, I changed into my reversible robe (stripes for perky days, deep blue for serious ones), grabbed my bucket o’ toiletries, and headed for the bathroom.

I spent the first few minutes with my hands against the wall, my head dunked under the spray. The heat probably didn’t do much good for my hair, but I needed it. I had basement and hospital grime to wash off, not to mention the emotional grime of (1) more of Foley’s questioning of my parents’ honesty; (2) having been unconscious and apparently near death for twelve hours; (3) having been the victim of a prank that led to point number two; and (4) having been carried out of a dangerous situation by a ridiculously pretty boy and having almost no memory of it whatsoever. That last one was just a crime against nature.

And, of course, there was the other thing.

The magic thing.

Varsity, Junior Varsity, Adepts, firespell, Reapers, enclaves. These people had their own vocabulary and apparently a pretty strong belief that they had magical powers.

Sure, I’d seen something. And whatever was going on beneath St. Sophia’s, beneath the city, I wasn’t about to rat them out. But still—what had I seen? Was it really magic? I mean—magic, as in unicorns and spells and wizards and witchcraft magic?

That, I wasn’t so sure about.

I gave it some thought as I repacked my gear and padded back to the room in my shower shoes, then waved at Scout and Lesley, who were playing cards in the common room. I gave it some thought as I scrubbed my hair dry, pulled flannel pajama bottoms from the drawer of my bureau, and got dressed again.

There was a single, quick rap at the door. I turned around to face it, but the knocking stopped, replaced by a pink packet that appeared beneath my door. I hung the damp towel on the closet doorknob, then plucked the packet from the floor. Out of an abundance of caution—I couldn’t be too sure these days—I held it up to my ear. When I was pretty sure it wasn’t ticking, I slipped a finger beneath the tab of tape that held the sides together.

And smiled.

Wrapped in the pink paper—that could only have come from Amie’s room—was the rest of the bag of licorice Scotties I’d started on before my trip to the basement. I wasn’t sure if the gift was supposed to be an apology or a bribe.

Either way, I thought, as I nipped the head from another unfortunate Scottie, I liked it.

Unfortunately, as I had realized on my way to pick up the Scotties, my knees still ached from the double falls on the limestone floor. I put my prize on the bureau, rolled up my pants legs, and moved in front of the mirror to check them out. Purple bruises bloomed on my kneecaps, evidence of my run-in with . . . well, whatever they were.

My back had cramped as I rolled the hems of my pants down. I twisted halfway around in the mirror, then tugged up the back of the Ramones T-shirt I’d paired with my flannel pajama bottoms to check out the place where the firespell had hit me. I expected to see another bruise, some indication of the force that had pushed me to the floor and knocked the breath from my lungs.

There was no bruise, at least that I could see from my position—half-turned as I was to face the mirror, one hip cocked out, neck twisted. I almost dropped the bottom of my shirt and went on my merry way—straight into bed with the coffee table’s Vogue.

But then I saw it.

My heart skipped a beat, something tightening in my chest.

At the small of my back was a mark. It wasn’t a bruise—the color wasn’t right. It wasn’t the purple or blue or even that funny yellow that bruises take on.

It was green. Candy apple green—the same color as the firespell that had bitten into my skin.

More important, there was a defined shape. It was a symbol—a glyph on the small on my back, like a tattoo I hadn’t asked for.

It was a circle with some complicated set of symbols inside it.

I’d been marked.

11

I stood in front of the mirror for fifteen minutes, worrying about the mark on my back. I turned this way and that, my hem rolled up in my hands, neck aching as I stretched until I thought to grab a compact from my makeup bag. I flipped it open, turned around, and aimed it at the mirror.

It wasn’t just a mark, or a freckle, or a weird wrinkle caused by lounging in a hospital bed for twenty-four hours.

It was a circle—a perfect circle. A circle too perfect to be an accident. Too perfect to be anything but purposeful. And inside the circle were symbols—squiggles and lines, all distinct, but not organized in any pattern that looked familiar to me.

But still, even though I didn’t know what they meant, I could tell what they weren’t. The lines were clear, the shapes distinct. They were much too perfect to be a biological accident.

I frowned and dropped my arm, staring in confusion at the floor. Where had it come from? Had something happened to me when I was unconscious? Had I been tattooed by an overeager ER doctor?

Or was the answer even simpler . . . and more complex?

The mark was in the same place I’d been hit with the firespell, where that rush of heat and fire (and magic) thrown by Sebastian had roared up my spine.

I had no idea how firespell could have had anything to do with the symbol, but what else could it have been? What else would have put it there?

Without warning, there was a knock at the door. Instinctively, I flipped the compact shut and pulled down my T-shirt. “Yeah?”

“Hey,” Scout said from the other side of the closed door. “We’re going to grab a Rainbow Cone at a place down the street. You wanna come with? It’s only three or four blocks. Might be nice to get some fresh air?”

Something in my stomach turned over, maybe at the realization that, at some point, I’d have to tell Scout about the mark and enlist her help to figure out what it was. That didn’t sit well. Her telling me about her adventures was one thing. My being part of those adventures and part of this whole magic thing—being permanently marked by it—was something else.

“No, thanks,” I said, giving the closed door the guilty look I couldn’t stand to give Scout. “I’m not feeling so great, so I think I’m just going to rest for a little while.”

“Oh, okay. Do you want us to bring some back?”

“Uh, no thanks. I’m not really hungry.” That was the absolute truth.

She was quiet for a minute. “Are you okay in there?” she finally asked.

“Yeah. Just, you know, tired. I didn’t get much sleep in the hospital.” Also the truth, but I felt bad enough that I crossed my fingers, anyway.

“Okay. Well, take a nap, maybe,” she suggested. “We’ll check in later.”

“Thanks, Scout,” I said. When footsteps echoed across the suite, I turned and pressed my back against the door and blew out a breath.

What had I gotten myself into?

True to my word, I climbed into bed, pulling the twin-spired symbols of St. Sophia’s over my head as I tried, unsuccessfully, to nap. I’d been supportive of Scout and the Adept story in the hospital. I’d made a commitment to believe them, to believe in them, even when Foley showed up. I’d also made a commitment not to let the basement drama—whatever it was about—affect my friendship with Scout.