Firespell (The Dark Elite 1)

Smith stepped in front of him. “You will not go after her.”

The room got very quiet, and very tense.

“She’s missing,” I interjected into the silence. “Like Michael said, she was lured out of her room, she’s been taken by one of the evil Reaper guys, and we need to find her before this messed-up situation gets any worse!”

Smith nailed me with a contentious glare. “We? You are not one of us.”

“Really not the point,” Michael said, stepping forward. “We can debate her membership later.”

“She doesn’t have power,” Katie put in. “She’s not one of us, and she shouldn’t even be down here, much less giving us orders.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Whether she has power or not is irrelevant.”

Smith made a disdainful sound. “You aren’t in charge here, Garcia.”

“If one of our own is in danger—”

“Hey,” I said, interrupting the fight. “Internal squabbling can wait. Scout’s gone, and we need to get her back now. Now, and not after you guys have gone a couple of rounds about the enclave hierarchy.”

Smith shook his head. “We can’t worry about that right now.”

Michael made a sound of disbelief, as if words of shock and awe had caught in this throat. I took the lead on his behalf.

“We can’t worry about that?” I repeated. “She’s one of you! You can’t just leave her . . . wherever she is.”

When no one spoke up, I glanced around the room, from Paul, to Katie, to the twins, to Jason. Guilty heads dropped around the room. No one would look me in the eye.

I put my hands on my hips, the fingers of my right hand tight around Scout’s phone, my link to her. “Seriously? This is how you treat your teammates? Like they’re disposable?”

“Getting dramatic isn’t going to solve anything,” Katie said, crossing her arms over her chest. For a cheerleader type, she managed a bossy, condescending stare pretty well. “We appreciate that you care about Scout, but it’s not that simple.”

I arched my eyebrows. “The hell it’s not.”

“Katie’s right.” Those words from the boy I’d almost decided to have a crush on. As Jason stepped forward, I was glad I’d stuck to “almost.”

“If we go after her,” he said, earnestness in his blue eyes, “we put ourselves, the city, the community around us, at risk. Being a member of the team means accepting the possibility that you’ll become the sacrifice. Scout knew that. Understood it. Accepted that risk.”

My heart tumbled, broken a little that this boy was so willing to give up our friend for the sake of people I wasn’t sure were worth the sacrifice. And that included him.

“Wow,” I said, honestly surprised. “Way to play well with others. Your whole existence is about saving people from Reapers, but you’re willing to let her be a ‘sacrifice’? I thought being Varsity, being Junior Varsity, being an Adept, was about being part of something bigger? Working together? What about all that talk?”

Smith shook his head. “It’s just talk—only talk—if we dump our current agenda—the kids who need protecting—to find her. Think about it, Lily—they’ve managed to lure Scout into their clutches. They’re probably using her as a lure for the rest of us. To pull us in.” Smith shook his head. “If we’re lucky, they’d just try to indoctrinate us. If not”—he glanced over, green eyes slitted shut—“the Reapers would be setting us up for a nasty night. In which we play the role of toast.”

I couldn’t argue with the logic—it probably was a trap.

But still. It was Scout.

I shook my head. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe this. All that talk, and you bail when someone needs you. Trap or not, you make an effort. You make a plan. You try.”

Smith looked away. There might have been a hint of guilt in his eyes, but not enough to force him to act. “I’ll call the higher-ups and alert them,” he said. “But that’s all we can do. We aren’t authorized to send out a rescue team. It’s not done.”

“It can’t be,” Katie put in, this time quietly. “We just can’t do it.”

Guilt—and maybe grief—hung in the silence of Enclave Three.

“You should probably go,” Jason said. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You know your way back?”

It took me a minute of staring daggers at all of them, a minute to overcome the disappointment that tightened my throat, before I could speak. “Yeah.” I nodded. “Yeah. I can find my way back.” My way back to the school and straight into Foley’s office. If the Adepts wouldn’t act, I’d go back to the principal. She’d know something—a source, a contact, a meaty guy with an attitude who could push through surly teenagers to rescue my BFF.

“It was nice knowing all of you,” I said, slipping Scout’s phone back into her bag, and putting the bag on my shoulder, then heading for the door. “No,” I said, glancing back and arching an eyebrow at the blue-eyed werewolf in front of me. “I take that back. It actually wasn’t.”

I walked out and slammed the door shut behind me, its hinges rattling with the effort.

Time for Plan B.

I was roasting—not because of the heat (the tunnels were rocking a pretty steady fifty degrees or so), but because emotionally, I was livid.

Seven people had the power to help Scout—better yet, the magical power to help Scout. What had she called them? Elemental witches? A reader? A warrior?

So far, I wasn’t impressed. Granted, I didn’t know them very well, and their reticence to help her could have been the impact of poor, emo-inspired leadership, but still.

I stopped in the middle of the corridor, water splashing beneath my feet. These guys—these guys who wouldn’t put their butts on the line to save her—they were the best we could do for good and justice? For rebels, they were pretty picky about obeying the rules. Even Smith’s first reaction had been to tell me that I wasn’t one of them—a rule that meant I didn’t have the right to talk to them, much less make demands.

I stopped.

No way was I going out like this.

I turned around.

I went back.

After I pushed open the door, I opened with a biggie. “I can turn on lights.”

Silence.

“You can what?”