Scout chuckled. “If that was so easy, I’d have saved her years ago. How do you separate someone who doesn’t want to be separated?”
I thought about that for a minute. “Don’t give her a choice.”
“I’m not going to kidnap Veronica.”
“That’s not where I was going, but good to know.” I shook my head. “No, we need to make her want to be there.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I’m still working on that part.”
While we thought it through, we sat on the stone rail and finished our chocolate quietly, watching the passersby. They all looked normal, but then, so did we.
I turned to Scout. “How many of these people know about magic, do you think?”
“None of them, if we’re playing the odds. There are six Enclaves in Chicago. Figure twenty or so JV Adepts per Enclave.”
“Twenty? That’s a ton.” We had only seven.
“We’re wee. Most Adepts don’t go to school in the Loop.”
She had a point.
“So twenty JVs per Enclave, six Enclaves in the city, that’s roughly one hundred and twenty Adepts total. Maybe add in a few who don’t know they have magic or haven’t been identified—”
“Or just don’t want to be involved,” I added, feeling sympathetic.
“Or that. I don’t know—maybe you end up with two hundred active Adepts at any given time. And in a city of nearly three million, if we’re talking members of the Community, probably more than that. They don’t ‘age out’ like we do, so their numbers grow over time. Well, unless Reapers take them out.”
We got quiet at that suggestion. I didn’t want to think about the Community members I’d met so far being harmed because they agreed to help us. Of course, they seemed to believe in the cause, so maybe it wasn’t a hard choice for them.
“So odds are, most of these people walking past don’t know about us.” I sipped at my chocolate. It was cooling, so it was getting thicker and almost gritty—and it was already chocolaty enough that it made my teeth ache. But it was the best kind of hurt.
“Probably not,” Scout said.
Realization struck as I took the final sip. “We’re thinking about this Veronica thing too hard.”
“How so?” Scout asked.
“She’s already thinking about another guy, right? Someone other than Creed? She said so at her locker the other day. She just doesn’t know who the other guy is.”
“So?”
“So we bring the guy to her.”
“Parker, I am intrigued.”
“I knew you would be,” I said, and laid out our plan.
12
I didn’t waste time when we got back to the suite. Scout headed to her room to unload and organize her stuff from the shop. I was still thinking about the stuff we’d heard at the shop, including that fairy tale the “old” Reapers were supposedly talking about.
And what was the most efficient way to learn more about Reaper topics of conversation? Ask one. So I headed to my room, grabbed my phone, and called Sebastian.
“Lily?” he answered.
I sat down on my bed. “Hey, I need a favor. Well, information, anyway.”
“Okay,” he slowly said. “What do you want to know?”
I swallowed down a moment of panic, then threw it out there. “Do you know the story of Campbell? The fairy tale, I mean?”
There was a pause. “The fairy tale of Campbell?”
There was something strange in his voice, but I kept going. “So, there’s this fairy tale about a boy named Campbell who overthrew an evil baron or something. I hear Reapers are talking about that story a lot—maybe because they’re unhappy with Jeremiah. Do you know anything about it? Have you heard the story?”
Another pause, which just seemed that much more suspicious.
“Sebastian?”
“I’m here.”
“Okay. Any ideas?”
“I have—I have to go,” he said, and the line went dead.
I blinked at the phone for a minute, then flipped it in my hand while I thought through the call.
I’d asked Sebastian only about a fairy tale, and he seemed to freak out. He definitely hung up. Did the fairy tale mean something to him? Or did he know a boy named “Campbell” the Reapers might be secretly referring to?
“Maybe there’s a Campbell out there trying to make a name for himself,” I said quietly.
I grabbed my laptop from the bookshelf and carried it back to the bed, then flipped it open. The hard drive whirred a bit while the computer started up. As soon as it was ready, I dug into the Internet and tried my first search: the words “Campbell” and “fairy tale.”
Sure enough, I found a Web site of old Scottish fairy tales, including one called “Campbell and the Evil Lorde” that was pretty much the same as Kite had explained. Boy managed to win despite huge odds against him, but boy became as evil as the guy he’d overthrown. I think the moral of the story was basically “the grass isn’t always greener.”
Chin in my hand, I scrolled through the search results just in case there was anything else interesting. I didn’t see anything . . . until I got to the end of the fourth page. There, on the very bottom, was another Campbell story—a news report. The title read: CAMPBELL KIN RETURNS TO CITY FATHER CALLED HOME. And when I clicked on the article . . . a color picture of Fayden freaking Campbell stared back at me.
“Oh, crap,” I muttered, an uncomfortable flutter in my chest, as I scanned the article.
Turns out, Fayden Campbell’s father—Sebastian’s uncle—was from Chicago. He’d been a big shot in a tech company in California before he died earlier in the year. And just like Sebastian had said, Fayden had moved from California to Chicago, her father’s hometown, to finish law school.
So, to review:
Sebastian’s cousin, Fayden, just moved to Chicago. The Reaper gossip was about some fairy tale “Campbell” who was looking to take over the Reapers. And Sebastian’s cousin’s last name was “Campbell.”
Sebastian said she didn’t have magic. But this whole “Campbell” thing was a coincidence, wasn’t it?
Crap—I’d just told Sebastian that we suspected a “Campbell” might be involved. Sure, only in fairy tale terms, but I’d just given him the only clue I had, and he’d immediately hung up. What if he’d called Fayden and given her a heads-up?