On the other hand, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t ignore leads or information just to make him more comfortable. That was definitely not good Adept behavior.

“Do it,” Daniel said. “Arrange a meeting, and make it formal. Maybe we’ll get to her before then and it won’t be necessary. But we have to do something.”

I agreed. I just hoped this was the right something.

15

Getting Daniel to agree to let us meet Sebastian was easy. Getting Sebastian to agree to meet us was a little harder. He wasn’t answering his phone, and he didn’t call me back until the next morning. Turned out, that was fine, because the apartment building had been a dead end anyway. There’d been no sign of Fayden when Daniel—or whichever troops he’d called out—had arrived.

The hardest part? Working out the details of the meeting.

Daniel sent a message with a whole list of rules and procedures for us to follow. We had to set a time (way too early in the morning), a location (the middle of the bridge over State Street), and the rules that applied to the meeting (no magic allowed, which was easy since we didn’t exactly have any). Daniel also asked Jill and Jamie to take positions near the bridge just in case Sebastian tried something. Since he’d had plenty of other chances to zap me without Adept bystanders, I felt pretty safe.

Unfortunately, once word got out, I was afraid I wouldn’t be hearing from Jason anytime soon. That thought hurt, but there was nothing I could do about it now. The wheels were already in motion.

Daniel got an okay from Foley for us to skip art history, although we probably could have snuck out without much trouble, as we realized when we walked outside and watched one wickedly expensive car after another pull into the drive in front of St. Sophia’s. As the blue and yellow flag above the door waved in the wind, a Mercedes convertible pulled up, followed by a Bentley, a Rolls-Royce, and a really long limo driven by a white-capped driver.

I’d forgotten—the dance was tomorrow, so this was parents’ night.

“Aren’t they here early?”

“There are events throughout the day,” Scout explained. “They have breakfast together; then, while the girls go to class, the parents go to seminars about raising bratty little monsters or something.”

“Or financial aid for college,” I said.

“Like these kids need financial aid,” Scout grumbled. “Let’s go.”

I pulled my hoodie around me and followed Scout down the street.

The city smelled like smoke and wetness and dirt, and there was a chill in the air that said winter wasn’t far away. I wasn’t looking forward to that any more than I was looking forward to putting Scout and Sebastian together in the same place. She’d watched him knock me out with firespell, he’d been there when the Reapers had kidnapped her, and he was at least part of the reason I was sad about Jason. So he wasn’t exactly at the top of her popularity list.

We walked silently toward the river through a part of downtown Chicago I hadn’t seen yet. The streets were a little quieter over here, and there weren’t as many tourists. It looked more residential, like the folks who worked and shopped in the busier parts of downtown lived here. Even the bars and restaurants looked smaller—more like neighborhood joints. They all had little patio areas with stand-up heaters, I guess for Chicagoans who weren’t quite ready to give up the fight to winter.

The bridge appeared at the top of a rise in the road. There was a stone tower on each side of the roadway, and symbols were carved into the walls. As we walked closer, I could tell there were two kinds of symbols—a “Y” within a circle, and a quatrefoil. These were the signs of the Adepts and Reapers. Appropriate meeting place, I thought.

There were cars on the bridge, and plenty of tourists and businesspeople going about their days, but no Reapers as far as I could see. We walked to the edge of the bridge where the sidewalk narrowed to cross it, then stopped. Scout put her hands on her hips and surveyed the area with a critical eye.

“He’s not here yet,” she said.

I frowned. I couldn’t see the other side of the street because of the angle, and she wasn’t much taller than I. “How do you know that?” I wondered, a little spark of hope fluttering that maybe, somehow, she’d gotten her magic back.

That wishful thinking didn’t last long.

“Jill just signaled it,” Scout said, then pointed over to one of the high-rise buildings that lined the river.

Jill stood beside the building’s front door, arms wrapped around herself in the chill, her long auburn hair nearly horizontal in the wind. She uncurled a hand and gave me a little wave. But her head suddenly whipped to the side toward the river—she’d seen something.

When she looked back at us, she raised her index finger, then made a fist, then pointed to the bridge.

“A Reaper has arrived,” Scout translated. “That must be Sebastian.”

“I guess so.” I pushed down a bolt of fear. Fear wasn’t going to do any good right now. Besides, if Sebastian didn’t have magic, what could he do? Water balloons? Slap fight? It didn’t seem likely that he’d start punching two girls in the middle of downtown Chicago.

I glanced at Scout. “Are you okay with this?”

“Am I ready to have a civil conversation with a Reaper who didn’t lift a hand to help me when I was lying on the table? I’m not sure. I’m certainly not ready to forgive someone who had a chance to do the right thing but cowarded out. And I’m not convinced he’s the good guy you think he is.”