Firespell (The Dark Elite 1)

I’d heard someone say that bravery was doing the thing you were afraid to do, despite your fear. If that was true, I was the bravest person I knew; the lights that flickered above me as I walked through the hallway—an EKG of my emotions—were proof enough of that.

At the metal door, I reached up on tiptoes and felt for the key Scout had pulled down on our first trip to the enclave. I had a moment of heart- fluttering panic when I couldn’t feel anything but dust above the threshold, but I calmed down a little when my fingertips brushed cold metal. I grabbed the key, slipped it into the lock, and unlocked the door.

It popped open with a whoosh of cold, stale air. My stomach rolled nervously, but I battled through it. I pulled out the flashlight, flicked the button, and took the step.

But I left the door open behind me, just in case.

“All right,” I muttered, swinging the beam of the flashlight from one side of the tunnel to the other, trying to figure out the message Foley had given me.

Look for the tags, she’d said.

While I was willing to do a little backtracking in the tidy limestone basement, backtracking through musty, dirty, damp, and dark tunnels wasn’t going to happen. I needed the right route the first time through. And that meant I needed an answer.

“Tags, tags, tags,” I whispered, my gaze tracking from railcar tracks to concrete walls to arched ceiling. “Gift tags?” I wondered aloud, even at a whisper, my voice echoing through the hall. “Clothing tags?”

The circle of light swung across the curvaceous graffiti that swirled across one of the walls. I froze, my lips tipping up into a smile.

Turned out, Foley hadn’t meant the gift kind or the clothing kind or the HTML kind.

She’d meant the spray paint kind.

Graffiti tags.

The walls were covered in them—a mishmash of pictures and words. Portraits. Political messages. Simple tags: “Louie” had been here a lot. Complicated tags: Thick, curvalicious letters that wrapped around one another into amoebas of words I couldn’t even read. However abandoned these tunnels seemed now, they’d been the site of a lot of spray painting, a lot of artistry.

I walked slowly down the first section of the tunnel, moving the circle of light from one wall to the other, trying to find the key that would decipher the code. It was hard enough to read them, much less to decipher them, the letters intertwined, the tags overlapping.

My eye caught a short tag in tidy, white letters, which was centered over an arch-shaped opening that led to the left.

MILLIE 23, it read.

I stilled the flashlight and stared at the tag.

St. Sophia’s was located at 23 East Erie, and I’d bet money that Millie was short for Millicent—Scout’s first name.

I peeked inside the tunnel and aimed the flashlight beam at the arches at the end of that part of the tunnel. One was blank.

The other, the one on the right, was tagged MILLIE 23.

“Very clever, Scout,” I said, and stepped inside.

Thirteen tags, thirteen tunnels, and twelve minutes later, I emerged into the final corridor, stopping before the arched, wooden door of Enclave Three.

I wet my lips, tightened my fingers into a hand, and opened the door.

Heads turned immediately, their expressions none too friendly.

Smith stared at me, eyes wide, fury in his face, hair matted to his forehead. “What the hell are you doing here? And where’s Scout?”

“She’s gone,” I said. “And I need your help.”

“Gone?” asked a skeptical voice. Katie stepped beside him, her slim figure tucked into capri-cut jeans and layered V-neck T-shirts beneath a leather letterman jacket. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

“She’s been taken.” I ignored their gazes and looked to the folks more likely to actually believe me.

“She got a page at noon,” I told Michael and Jason, both in uniform, both moving closer to me as I began to explain. “She thought it was strange, but she went anyway. Said she had to go back to her room. She didn’t come back to class, and when I got back to the suite after school, her room was trashed.”

“Trashed?” Michael asked, a pale cast to his face. “What do you mean, ‘trashed’?”

“She has all sorts of collections—books and sculptures and these little houses. All of it was on the floor. Her pillows were slashed. Someone tore the sheets off the bed, emptied her drawers. And then there’s this.”

I rearranged her messenger bag on my shoulder, revealing the skull and crossbones. “It was still in her room. She never goes anywhere without this bag.”

Michael slowly closed his eyes, grief in his expression. “They lured her out.”

“Wait,” Jason said, “Just wait. Let’s not jump to conclusions.” He looked at me. “She didn’t say anything about meeting someone somewhere? About where she was supposed to be going? About what the emergency was?”

I shook my head.

“What about her cell phone?” asked one of the twins—Jamie or Jill, I wasn’t sure—stepping forward. She brushed a waterfall of auburn hair over her shoulder, as if preparing to get down to business. “Do you have it?”

I glanced down at Scout’s messenger bag. It had seemed empty after I’d taken her books out, but there was no harm in checking. I slipped a hand into the side pockets, then the interior pocket. Nothing, until I heard something clank against the snap that kept the front flap closed. I looked closer, found a small slit in the flap, and when I reached in a hand, touched cold, hard plastic. My heart sinking, I pulled out Scout’s cell phone. Too bad I hadn’t found it before, but at least I had it now.

“See who called her,” Jamie quietly said. “See what the message said.”

I slid the phone open and scanned her recent calls, recent texts, but there was nothing there. “Nothing,” I announced. “She must have deleted it.”

“We usually do,” Michael said softly. “Delete them, I mean. To protect the identities of the Adepts, to keep the locations to ourselves. Simpler that way.”

Unfortunately, that meant we wouldn’t be able to figure out who’d sent Scout the text. But if she’d erased it as part of her standard Adept protocol, then she’d assumed the message was from another Adept.

Had the person who’d sent it, who’d lured her out, been in this room?

“They’ll use her,” Michael said. “They’ve taken her, and they’ll use her.” He walked to the other end of the room, picked up a backpack, and slung it over one shoulder. “I’m going after her.”