It flew from my hand, warping the air as it moved. It wavered past Jason and Michael, who’d edged against the walls of the tunnel to avoid it, but hit Scout full-on. Her body shook with the impact, and then went slack. I reached out and grabbed her before she fell, and I lowered her gently to the ground, her body cradled in my lap. Tears pricked at my eyes. “Oh, crap—Scout, are you okay? Scout?! Are you all right?”

Michael rushed to her side. He put a hand to her forehead, then tapped her cheeks like he was trying to wake her up. “Scout? Are you all right?”

“Scout, I am so sorry,” I said, panicked at the thought I’d knocked my best friend unconscious. It wasn’t exactly a good way to repay the first girl who’d actually paid attention to me when I’d been shipped to St. Sophia’s a few months ago.

Jason kneeled beside me and looked her over. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. You weren’t going full force, were you?”

“Of course not,” I said, but she had scared me. What if I’d accidentally turned up the firespell volume?

“If you wake up,” I said, “I’ll let you wear my fuzzy boots—those ones you really like? And I won’t complain when you take my chocolate muffin anymore at breakfast. You can have it every day from now on. I swear—just wake up, okay?”

A few seconds passed in silence . . . and then Scout opened one eye and grinned at me. She’d been faking!

“The chocolate muffin, huh?” she said. “And the fuzzy boots? You heard her, boys—you’re my witnesses.”

It didn’t bother me that she landed in the middle of a puddle when I dumped her onto the floor.

Maybe I should have firespelled her a little harder.

2

How did you top off an afternoon of being faked out by your best friend in an abandoned tunnel beneath Chicago?

You helped snooty heiresses make party decorations.

Sure, party preparations were a little out of character for me, but that’s exactly why I was doing it. It wasn’t that I was eager to hang out with the other girls on the committee—most of them were into luxury handbags and money flaunting—but there was something seriously relaxing about playing around with glue and glitter. No rats. No spiders. No Reapers. No “workouts.” Just a little mindless arts-and-craftsing. Yes, please.

Girls in spendy clothes—my fellow members of the Sneak decorating committee—sat in groups on the shiny parquet floor of the St. Sophia’s gym, sticking beady eyes onto cutout ravens and draping faux spider web around everything that sat still long enough to be draped. There were also foam gravestones everywhere, all painted black and coated with chunky black glitter.

Sneak was the fall formal of our junior class, and the St. Sophia’s girls in charge—the brat pack—had decided “graveyard glam” was our decorating theme. (The Sneak committee guys at Montclare, our brother school that Jason and Michael both attended, got to do all the audiovisual and electronic stuff.) The idea wasn’t exactly original, but since I was a fan of dark clothes and good eyeliner, I didn’t mind so much. Besides, St. Sophia’s alumnae had rented out the Field Museum, Chicago’s natural history museum, for the party, which was this Friday. I hadn’t been there yet, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but with all that money and all these decorations, there was no way it wasn’t going to look sweet when we were done.

I was pretty excited about the dance. The brat pack, on the other hand, I could do without. Veronica—an every-hair-in-place type of blonde—was their leader. She was currently using a pencil to point other members of the junior class toward their glittery assignments.

I didn’t like her, but I had been paying more attention to her lately. A few weeks ago, Veronica had walked right into the middle of a civil war between two vampire covens that lived in the Pedway—a bunch of passageways that connected buildings in downtown Chicago. Marlena was the reigning coven queen, and she hadn’t been happy that Nicu, a vamp she’d made, had started his own clan. Nicu helped us save Veronica, and something seemed to pass between them. She’d been spelled to lock down her memories of the fight and the meeting, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she was a magical time bomb waiting to go off.

Number two in the brat pack was Amie. She had a bright pink room in my suite but a quiet attitude, and she was currently painting the ravens I’d been assigned to glitter.

Mary Katherine, the third brat packer, whose dark hair was now streaked with yellow spiral curls and tiny rows of rhinestones, was painting her nails a deep shade of blue. At least, I assumed they were rhinestones. Who really knew?

Lesley Barnaby, another suitemate, walked toward me, a bundle of flat, black birds in her hand. She’d been given the task of carting the birds between the brat pack and me. Since their primary goals were being top of the St. Sophia’s food chain and driving me crazy, I was more than happy to let Lesley play middleman.

“More ravens,” she said, setting them down on the floor.

She sat cross-legged beside the stack, a pair of bright rainbow socks reaching up to her knees. She also wore a T-shirt with a rainbow on it and a small pair of fuzzy black cat ears tucked into her blond hair. Lesley had a very unique sense of style.

I liked clothes, and I definitely had an artistic streak. I hated the matchy-match plaid of our school uniforms. But that stuff just made me a teenager. Lesley was an altogether different type of girl. She acted less like a teenager than like a high-fashion model transplanted from some future world, complete with strange clothes and fuzzy expression. The stuff she wore might be really cool in twenty years, but right now it just seemed odd.