I squeezed her hand, faking a confident smile I didn’t really feel. “We do. But we can do it. I promise.”

She blew out a breath, and off we went.

We trekked up to our floor and peeked into the dim hallway. Our door was open, a beam of light shining into the hallway. We could hear rifling and throwing of objects even down the hall. That was when our moods changed.

“You know what?” she whispered. “I was scared. But now I’m really ticked. Who do these people think they are?”

“Infallible, apparently.”

Scout harrumphed, and we tiptoed down the hallway to the suite door. She pointed to herself, and then she pointed up. She pointed at me, and then she pointed down. I think she was telling me to go low, and she’d go high.

I nodded, and just like two totem pole heads, we peeked into the room.

The suite was in shambles. Every bedroom door was open, and our formerly organized belongings were thrown about everywhere, including little bits of pink from Amie’s room that were mixed into the rubble. It looked like her stuff had bled into the room. Either they didn’t know whose room was whose, or they had a suspicion that Scout had hidden her Grimoire in there. As if.

And on the floor in front of my doorway was the fractured remains of the crappy—but important—ashtray that Ashley, my best friend from my hometown in New York, had made for me. One big hunk and a lot of shards and crumbs were all that was left of a treasured memento.

I probably could have cried a little, but instead I got even angrier.

We couldn’t see the Reapers, but it sounded like there were two of them—one in Scout’s room and one in mine. I glanced down at the floor of the suite and looked for a weapon. There was a pink golf club on the floor—expensive-looking and surely Amie’s.

I crept inside and picked it up, then held it like a baseball bat. Scout did the same thing with a silver desk lamp that had probably been in Lesley’s room.

“All right, buttwipes!” she yelled out. The noise stopped immediately. “We’re here, and the cops are on their way. You aren’t going to find what you’re looking for, so I suggest you find your way out of our rooms before we move in with our crew to bust some heads!”

“Our crew?” I silently mouthed to Scout. She just shrugged, but I took her point. We probably weren’t much of a threat on our own.

“One, two, three!” she mouthed, and then let out a loud whoop and charged toward her room. Sucking in a breath, I did the same thing toward mine, and stared in shock.

There was a cheerreaper in my room—a Reaper in a green and gold cheerleading uniform, complete with blond ponytail and bow perched right at the top of her head.

Lauren Fleming, a Reaper who’d tried to sneak into the school before, was standing in the middle of the room, a pair of my quilted patent leather boots under one arm, the remains of the rest of my stuff at her feet.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, raising the golf club.

She snarled at me like a crazy little Chihuahua. “Get out of my way, peon.”

“Yeah, that’s nice language. The cops are on their way, so you might want to put down the boots. If you leave now, since you clearly aren’t going to find what you’re looking for”—the expression on her face proved that was true—“we might manage to not beat the crap out of you for breaking in here.”

“Whatever,” she said, then hurled the boots at me. I half turned to dodge them, then swung out with the golf club. I missed, and took a chunk of stone out of the wall. Lauren darted around and plucked books from my bookshelf, then began hurling them at me. I batted them back with the golf club, but missed my history book and winced when it hit me in the shoulder.

Lauren saw her chance and tried to slip past me into the common room. I managed to swat her back with the club, but the shot didn’t land very hard. She took off out of the suite and down the hallway. I ran out and pulled out my camera, snapping a picture of her back before she took the stairs.

Since I could still hear the sounds of fighting coming from Scout’s room, she apparently didn’t have any regrets about leaving her partner behind. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket and ran to Scout’s room.

Despite years of being a teenager and months of being an Adept, there in the middle of Scout’s room was probably the strangest thing I’d ever seen.

Lying on the floor was a girl I knew only as “French Horn”—another Reaper who’d previously tried to break into the school with Lauren. She and Lauren hadn’t been friends then, and if Lauren was willing to run away without helping her partner, I was guessing they hadn’t gotten any closer.

She was a larger girl, and she had a thing for black clothes and Goth looks. And she lay in the middle of Scout’s room on her stomach, with a very angry-looking spellbinder sitting on her back, lamp in the air like a samurai sword.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

French Horn spewed some curse words that were pretty typical Reaper.

“Language, language,” Scout said, tapping the bottom of the lamp gently against the Reaper’s head.

“Did she come in through the tunnel again?” I wondered.

More cursing.

“Seriously, I don’t know about your high school for angry misfits and teamsters, but we are classy at St. Sophia’s. Enough with the swearing. Now answer the girl’s question.”

“Tunnel,” she said, then turned her head away. Reaper or not, this couldn’t exactly be a comfortable position for her to be in, especially since her partner had left her at the mercy of two irritated Adepts.