Hexbound (The Dark Elite 2)

“We try to keep it light,” Scout said. “There’s more than enough darkness in the world as it is.”

“The dark isn’t as dark as you’d think.” We all glanced over at Naya, who was walking with arm extended, the tips of her fingers trailing against the wall.

“What do you mean?” Scout quietly asked.

She glanced back at us, her cloud of coffee-colored hair bobbing as she moved. “We aren’t the only ones here, or there, or anywhere. They’re all around us. They live in the gray land—the not-quite world—all around us.”

I swallowed thickly, goose bumps lifting on my arms as I fought the urge to look around me, scanning the near darkness for shadowy figures.

“Can you see them?” Scout quietly asked, and Naya shrugged.

“Sometimes. Mostly, I call to them. Talk to them. It takes a lot of energy to become visible. Sound is easier. Temperature is lots easier.” Suddenly, she stopped, eyes wide. “Have you ever been somewhere dark and quiet, and you felt a cold chill? Like the wind had blown right through your soul?”

I nodded, eyes wide, like a kid around a spooky camp-fire. I also wondered about that first time—the first time she’d seen them, or heard them, or called them. Can you imagine what it would have been like to learn about the other in the world by hearing, suddenly one day, the living dead?

I decided learning a weird tattoo and a little electricity was a pretty good way to go.

Detroit glanced over at Scout. “So Daniel said you were a spellbinder?”

“Yeah,” Scout said. “Why?”

“I heard you were a spellcaster. And I thought, wow, big whoop, spellcaster, dime a dozen.”

“Dime a dozen?” Scout asked. “I thought spellcasters were a myth?”

“Do you know what a spellcaster is?”

I lifted a hand. “I actually don’t.”

Detroit held out her hand. “Okay, so there’re the three I’s, right?”

“Intent, incantation, incarnation,” I offered up.

“Right. So it takes intent and incantation to get to the incarnation part. Writing the incantation is basically the spellbinding. You’re putting the right words together in the right order to create a spell. So when you’re looking through your Grimoire—you’re looking at a flip book of spells, which are the result of the spellbinding.”

“Following you so far,” I added (helpfully).

“Once you get to saying the incantation, using the intent of it to make an incarnation of some kind happen, you’ve got the spellcasting. Making the magic take life. Spellcasters just work from Grimoires that have been passed on to them. Or the Internet.”

Scout lifted her eyebrows. “They get spells from the Internet?”

“Well, not all of them.”

Okay, apparently the Internet was a magical forest just waiting to be explored.

Detroit waved her hand. “But you’ve got something special, Scout. You can do more than just repeat some words and make magic happen. You can bind the spells in the first place. You can transmute them from letters and words into magic.”

“That’s why the Reapers were so interested in you,” I said. “You said they mentioned that, right, when you were at the sanctuary? That they were after your Grimoire , and that they were talking about the difference between spellcasters and spellbinders?”

Scout nodded. “That would explain why they came after me, and why they wanted my book.”

“That makes sense,” Detroit agreed. “It’s a rare power. And if the whole point of your organization is to support the use of magic, finding someone who can actually make new spells would be huge.”

“Wicked huge,” Scout agreed. “I had no idea. I mean, I just assumed I did what everyone else did, you know? Writing spells, then actually making the incantations work.”

“Wow,” I said. “For once, you were actually being too modest.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. Probably I deserved that.

We eventually came to a fork in the tunnels and took the path to the left. This one sloped upward, and continued on for only a few dozen yards.

We stopped at a jagged hole that had been ripped into the brick.

“In there,” Detroit said.

Scout gave the hole in the wall a suspicious look. “What do you mean, ‘in there’? Where does that thing lead?”

“Into a janitor’s closet, actually,” Detroit said. “We have to switch over from the railway tunnels to the Pedway.”

I leaned toward Scout. “What’s the Pedway again?”

“Stands for pedestrian walkway,” she said.

“The Pedway is a set of walkways through buildings in the Loop,” Detroit said. “Some aboveground, some underground. It’s supposed to give people a way to get around downtown when it’s too cold to walk outside. It’s also lit and a lot less damp.”

Scout looked weirdly unhappy about the possibility of walking through what I assumed were aboveground, carpeted hallways. “We usually try to avoid the Pedway,” she said.

Detroit nodded solemnly. “I know.”

I made a mental list of the things we might be trying to avoid: security guards, security cameras, locked doors. Or maybe anyone who thought a band of teenagers running around Chicago in the middle of the night was a little off.

“Vamps patrol the Pedway at night,” Scout complained.

Well, I obviously forgot to mention them. “What do you mean ‘vamps’?”

“The usual,” Scout said with a dismissive gesture. “Goth, fangs, death by crucifix, never see ’em eating garlic bread. Vampires aren’t friendly with Adepts.”

“They aren’t friendly with anybody,” Detroit said. “It’s not personal. And we might not even see any. The covens stick to quiet parts of the Pedway. The odds we’d actually run across them are pretty low.”

Scout didn’t look impressed with the logic.

“Look,” Detroit said. “The Pedway is a shortcut. It takes a lot longer if we stick to the tunnels. And we’ll only be in the corridor for a few blocks before we drop back into the tunnels anyway.”

We stood there for a few minutes, the Adepts of Enclave Three exchanging glances as they figured out what to do. Since I was still a newbie, I figured I’d leave the decision-making to the more experienced members.

Jason looked at Jill, Jamie, and Paul. “What do you think?”