Firespell (The Dark Elite 1)

When every desk was taken, girls began pulling notebooks or laptops from their bags. I’d skipped the laptop today, thinking I had enough to worry about today without adding power outlet locations and midclass system crashes to the list, so I pulled out a notebook, pen, and art history book from my bag and prepared to learn.

The man who’d greeted us, who I assumed was Mr. Hollis, since the name was written in cursive, green letters on the whiteboard, closed the door and walked to the front of the room. He looked pretty much exactly like you’d expect a private school teacher to look: bald, corduroy slacks, button-up shirt, and corduroy blazer with leather patches at the elbows.

Hollis glanced down at his podium, then lifted his gaze and scanned the room. “ ‘What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself?’ ” He turned and uncapped a marker, then wrote “WILLA CATHER” in capital letters below his name. He faced us again, capping and uncapping the marker in his hands with a rhythmic click. Nervous tic, I guessed.

“What do you think Ms. Cather meant? Anyone?”

“Bueller? Bueller?” whispered a voice behind me. I pushed my lips together to bite back a laugh at Scout’s joke as Amie popped a hand into the air.

When Hollis glanced around before calling her name, as if hoping to give someone else a chance, I guessed Amie answered a lot of questions. “Ms. Cherry,” he said.

“She’s talking about a piece of art capturing a moment in time.”

Hollis’s expression softened. “Well put, Ms. Cherry. Anyone else?” He glanced around the room, his gaze finally settling on me. “Ms. Parker?”

My stomach dropped, a flush rising on my cheeks as all eyes turned to me. Didn’t it just figure that I’d be called on during the first day of class? I was more into drawing than talking about art, but I gave it a shot, my voice weirdly loud in the sudden silence.

“Um, moments change and pass, I guess, and we forget about them—the details, how we felt at that moment. You still have a memory of what happened, but memories aren’t exact. But a painting or a poem—those can save the heart of the moment. Capture it, like Amie said. The details. The feelings.”

The room was quiet as Hollis debated whether I’d given him a good answer or a pile of nonsense. “Also well put, Ms. Parker,” he finally said.

My stomach unknotted a little.

Apparently having fulfilled his interest in seeking our input, Hollis turned back to the whiteboard and began to fill the space—and the rest of the hour- long period—with an introduction to major periods in Western art. Hollis clearly loved his subject matter, and his voice got high-pitched when he was really excited. Unfortunately, he also tended to spit the little foamy bits of stuff that gathered in the corners of his mouth.

That wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to see right after breakfast, but I had at least one other form of entertainment—Mary Katherine had this really complicated method of twirling her hair. I mean, the girl had a system. She picked up a lock of dark hair, spun it around her index finger, tugged on the end, then released it. Then she repeated the process. Twirl. Tug. Drop. Twirl. Tug. Drop. Again and again and again.

It was hypnotizing—so hypnotizing that I nearly jumped when bells rang fifty minutes later, signaling the end of class. Girls scattered at the sound, so I grabbed my stuff and followed Scout into the hallway, which was like a six-lane interstate of St. Sophia’s girls hurrying to and fro.

“You’ve got to figure out how to merge!” Scout said over the din, then disappeared into the throng. I hugged my books to my chest and jumped in.

4

A little more than three hours later, we left art history, trig, and civics behind and headed again for the cafeteria.

“Grab a bag,” Scout said when we arrived at the buffet line, and pointed at a tray of paper lunch bags. “We’ll eat outside.”

I’d been a vegetarian since the day I’d hand-fed a lamb at a petting zoo, only to be served lamb chops a few hours later, so I grabbed a bag labeled VEGGIE WRAP and a bottle of water and followed her.

Scout took a winding route from the cafeteria to the main building, finally pushing open the double doors and heading down the sidewalk. I followed her, the city street full of scurrying people—women in office wear and tennis shoes, men nibbling sandwiches on their way back to the office, tourists with Starbucks cups and glossy shopping bags.

Scout pulled an apple from her bag, then nodded down the street and toward the right. “We can’t go far without an escort, but I’ll give you the five-dollar block tour while we eat.”

“I’m not giving you five dollars.”

“You can owe me,” she said. “It’ll be worth it. Like I said, I’ve been here since I was twelve. So if you want to know the real deal, the real scoop, you talk to me.”

I didn’t doubt she knew the real scoop; she’d clearly been here long enough to understand the St. Sophia’s procedures. But given her midnight disappearance, I wasn’t sure she’d pass on “the real scoop” to me.

Of course, the most obvious fact about St. Sophia’s didn’t need explaining. The nuns who built the convent had done a bang-up job of picking real estate—the convent was right in the middle of downtown Chicago. Scout said they’d moved to the spot just after the Chicago Fire of 1871, so the city grew up around them, creating a strip of green amidst skyscrapers, a gothic oasis surrounded by glass, steel, and concrete.

One of those glass, steel, and concrete structures stood directly next door.

“This boxy thing is Burnham National Bank,” Scout said, pointing at the building, which looked like a stack of glass boxes placed unevenly atop one another.

“Very modern,” I said, unwrapping my own lunch. I took a bite of my wrap, munching sprouts and hummus. It wasn’t bad, actually, as wraps went.

“The architecture is modern,” she said, taking a bite of her apple, “but the bank is very old-school Chicago. Old-money Chicago.”

I definitely wasn’t old school or old money (unless my parents really did have way more cash than I thought), so I guessed I wasn’t going to be visiting the BNB Building any time soon. Still, “Good to know,” I said.

We walked to the next building, which was a complete contrast to the bank. This one was a small, squat, squarish thing, the kind of old-fashioned brick building that looked like it had been built by hand in the 1940s. PORTMAN ELECTRIC CO. was chiseled in stone just above the door. The building was pretty in an antique kind of way, but it looked completely out of place in between high-rises and coffee shops and boutique stores.