“I don’t think he’s a good guy,” I said, not realizing I’d decided that until I said the words aloud. “But our lives are weird, and sometimes you make friends with strange people.”

“Frenemies?”

“I guess so.” I nodded with confidence, trying to convince myself as much as her. “Let’s do this.”

We started across the bridge, and as we walked closer to the middle, Sebastian appeared over the hill. He wore jeans and a black leather jacket, his hands tucked into his pockets. With the dark hair and blue eyes, he looked like a bad boy from a movie poster—the kind that was charming and handsome, but turned out to be not so good by the end.

It probably looked like I was a helpless schoolgirl in a plaid uniform, but my guard was all the way up.

We met him a few feet from the middle, a gap between us.

Sebastian looked at Scout, then me, and it felt like his eyes were boring into my soul—like he knew I had doubts.

He raised his hands, palms facing us.

Scout did the same thing. They looked like street performers pretending to be stuck behind a glass wall. She elbowed me. “Hands up,” she murmured.

“Why?” I asked, but did what she said.

“Tradition. Proves you aren’t holding a wand or something.”

“I could have a wand?”

“It’s a personal preference. Come on.” Apparently satisfied that Sebastian wasn’t about to throw bad magic at us, she put down her hands and walked forward.

We walked closer and faced him down, two Adepts against a Reaper.

“I request a temporary cease-fire,” Sebastian said.

“Granted,” Scout said. “South side rules, no snipe hunt.”

Slowly, I turned my head to look at Scout and tried to ask a question with my eyes: What in the crap are you talking about?

But it was Sebastian who understood the look and answered me. “Cease-fire means no magic will be used during this meeting. South side rules mean we’re fair game after we leave the bridge, but we can’t snipe hunt—so only the people on the bridge can work the magic, not the folks we brought with us.”

I guess it was a tradition, but it seemed silly to have rules like that when there was no magic to use.

“We didn’t bring anyone with us,” Scout said. She didn’t make a very good liar.

Sebastian didn’t take the bait. “We did,” he said, then pointed behind him. Two teenagers stood at the edge of the bridge. One was Alex, a blonde who’d been with Sebastian when he hit me with firespell. She’d also attacked us when we went in to rescue Scout. She was not one of my favorite people.

The other was a really tall girl with dark skin and really short hair. She wore a T-shirt with what looked like a techie joke, skinny jeans, and a really big pair of mean-looking boots. She smiled. She was a pretty girl, but that didn’t mean I wanted to run into the business end of those boots anytime soon.

“None of them have magic,” I said, looking back at Sebastian.

His gaze shifted to me. “Not at the moment. And that’s why we’re here. What did you want to know?”

Scout got to the point. “We think your cousin is behind this, and we don’t think that comes as a surprise to you.”

Sebastian looked at me. “She didn’t tell me she was a member of the Dark Elite.”

“I know,” I said. “We saw you fighting outside the store.”

“Spying on me?” he asked.

“Honestly, yes,” I said. He’d seen us outside the store, so there was really no point in lying. “You hung up on me really fast when I asked about the fairy tale. I thought that was worth a little consideration. But that’s not the point—we actually saw Fayden do magic. She has firespell.”

“I know.”

“Tell us what you’ve seen,” I said.

He didn’t look at me, but his face was tense. He definitely knew something. “I can’t.”

“You can, and you have to,” I said. “The blackout is taking your magic, too. The only way we solve this problem is if we work together.”

“You want us to work together?” he asked, but there was a little bit of a smile in one corner of his mouth. I think he was actually enjoying this.

“It’s a limited-time offer,” I said. “We want things to get back to normal.” If chasing Reapers through tunnels beneath Chicago could ever be considered normal. “Start at the beginning. How did you find out she was involved?”

“When I realized she was the only one in the city who could actually do magic.”

“You might have mentioned that to us,” Scout grumbled.

“I didn’t know. Not until I saw her turn off a light. I think she forgot she was standing in front of me. And I wasn’t exactly thrilled. She played it off like it wasn’t any big thing. Like being the only person in town with magic wasn’t any big thing.”

“Why would she be doing this?”

He turned to face the river, putting his hands on the railing.

“I don’t know. I mean, she was a bully when we were growing up. Bossy. Manipulative. Always telling the younger kids what to do.”

“She mentioned something last night about a ‘new era,’” Scout said. “We know people are unhappy with Jeremiah right now, and we know the old Reapers are talking about a fairy tale involving someone named Campbell, like, overthrowing the government or something. Is it possible she’s working the blackout because she wants that kind of control? Because she wants to determine who gets to use magic and under what circumstances?”