* * *

We didn’t press our luck, and got out of there was soon as we had enough pictures. And as soon as we were a safe distance away from the building, we called Daniel and filled him in. All the Adepts—except Jason—agreed to meet back at the Enclave to work on the magic solution. I wasn’t sure if seeing the spindle was going to actually help out Scout, but she definitely seemed energized. It certainly couldn’t have hurt.

The problem was, we were blocks from St. Sophia’s, and we were even farther from the Enclave. And, we were aboveground. There were ways to get into the tunnel from street level without having to sneak back into St. Sophia’s and out again. But they involved walking through the Pedway.

The Pedway was a system of tunnels and passageways that ran through buildings in downtown Chicago and gave people a way to move through the city in the wintertime. There were access points from the Pedway to the tunnels, but there was a catch. The Pedway was the territory of vampires, and vampires didn’t like Adepts. They also didn’t really like competing vampire covens. That was precisely the fight Veronica had walked into.

“We need the Pedway,” Scout said, looking at a map on her phone. “There’s an entrance in a building a block from here, and we can hop right into the tunnels. It will be so much faster than going the long way.”

“And it risks getting caught in a vampire fight that will take us a lot longer to deal with,” I pointed out.

“There is one thing we could do.”

“What’s that?”

“You could call your favorite vampire and ask him for an escort.”

I just blinked at her. “You cannot be serious. I already had to run one errand for him this week.”

“Speed,” Scout stressed. “We need it. He can give it to us.”

I sighed, but knew I’d been beaten. So I dialed up Nicu and when he answered, gave him our address. “We need to get into the tunnels, and we have to go into the Pedway to do that. Can you meet us and, like, escort us through?”

His voice was grumbly and cold. “What will you do for me in return?”

I rolled my eyes. “Haven’t I done enough for you this week? Like, given you a happily-ever-after with one of St. Sophia’s finest?”

“I do not understand your sarcasm.”

Scout tapped her watch impatiently.

“Fine,” I said. “What do you want in return?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I wish to attend this dance I have heard about.”

You could have bowled me over. “Are you asking my permission to take Veronica Lively to Sneak?”

Scout made a gagging sound.

“It is your territory,” Nicu said. “It is only appropriate that I ask for your permission before I enter it.”

“Fine,” I said, glad someone wanted to go to the dance. “Go to the dance. Live happily ever after. Can you just meet us?”

“I will meet you. Two minutes.”

I figured he was exaggerating, but it took three minutes for Scout and me to take the elevator down into the building’s basement Pedway access, and Nicu was already waiting for us.

In a tuxedo.

I’ll be honest—he cleaned up pretty well.

“You look . . . lovely,” he said, glancing between Scout and me.

“Thanks,” she said. “But let’s get this show on the road. We have spells to cast.”

“You can teach me to slow dance?” he asked, as we walked down the Pedway.

Could this night possibly get any weirder?

18

Why did I even ask questions like that? Because no sooner did I ask it than I ended up in a room beneath the city, trying to explain to a bunch of teenagers how we’d just seen a magical floating spool in a deserted building on Michigan Avenue.

Unfortunately, even having seen the pumping station and the magic Fayden had made, Scout didn’t have any better ideas about how to stop it. For nearly an hour—while the rest of the St. Sophia’s girls were starting to get their dance on—Scout frantically scribbled numbers and figures and symbols that didn’t mean anything to me on the dry-erase board . . . and unfortunately didn’t seem to mean much to her, either.

Right now it looked like a bad abstract drawn by a bunch of kindergartners. I could do better than that. I may not be able to understand their equations . . . but I could draw.

Ooooh, I thought. That was something. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way.”

“How so?” Daniel asked.

“We need a new perspective.” I walked over to the dry-erase board. “Can I erase this?”

“Not that it’s doing any good,” Scout said, so I took that as permission, swabbed it down with an eraser, and grabbed a marker.

“Let’s think about the magic like a story.”

“Like a story?” Paul asked. “How?”

“Um,” I said for a second, pausing as I tried to actually figure out what I might have meant. Thank goodness, an idea popped into my head. “Well, instead of thinking about how the parts go together, like a recipe, we’ll storyboard it, like we’re deciding which scenes to put in a movie.”

I drew a grid on the board, three squares across and two squares down, six squares in all. “Now we need to fill in the pictures.” In the last square, I drew a little caricature of Scout casting a spell.

“The happily-ever-after is that we get our magic back,” Paul said.