Хлоя Нейл - Hexbound

“I know, I know. But maybe you could, you know, focus it in a more productive direction. Like drawing.”

“I don’t like to draw.”

“I know.” I shut the door behind us. “But you know who does like to draw?” Don’t you love a good segue?

“You?”

I rolled my eyes. “Other than me, goofus.”

“I give up.”

“Our intrepid leader. Daniel’s my studio teacher.”

“No. Freaking. Way.”

“Totally.” I dropped my bag and sat down on the edge of her bed. “He walks in,

and I was like, ‘Holy frick, that’s Daniel.’”

“You would say that. Is he good at drawing?”

“Well, I didn’t see a portfolio or anything, but since Foley hired him, I’d assume so.” And then I thought about what I’d just said. “Unless she hired him because he’s an Adept. Would she do something like that?”

Scout frowned. “Well, she does know about us. I wouldn’t put it past her to offer an Adept a job. On the other hand, the board of directors would have her head if she hired anyone less than worthy of her St. Sophia’s girls.”

“True. I can tell you this—he likes to give out homework in studio just like he does in the Enclave.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Draw a building downtown.” I pulled up my legs and crossed them. “I had an idea —I’m thinking about drawing the SRF building.”

“Really?” I saw the instant she realized what I was up to. “Your parents,” she said. “You think you might learn something?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. And Foley basically told me not to ask questions about my parents. But it seems like a way to get a good look at the building, maybe glance around inside, without causing trouble.”

Scout bobbed her head left and right. “That is true. I don’t know how they could connect you back with your parents, anyway.” She gestured toward my skirt. “They might guess you go to St. Sophia’s, but they’re practically next door. They probably see the uniforms all the time, so they wouldn’t think too much of it.”

“That sounds reasonable. You can actually come up with pretty good ideas when you put your mind to it.”

“Even though I’m not going to win a talent contest anytime soon?”

“Well, not at singing anyway.”

She hit me with a pillow. I probably deserved that.

“So, at lunch today, Jason didn’t ask me to Sneak.”

“Lils, you’ve barely even planned Sneak yet. Give it time. He’ll get there.”

“He did ask me out on Saturday.”

“OMG, you two are totally getting married and having a litter of babies. Ooh, what if that’s literally true?”

I gave her a push on the arm, then changed the subject. “Did Michael ask you to Sneak?”

“Not exactly.”

She sounded a little odd, so I glanced over at her. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Did it come up?”

“Yeah, I mean, we talked about it . . .”

It took me a minute to figure out what she was dancing around. “You asked him,

didn’t you?”

Her cheeks flushed. “Maybe that was discussed in a general sense.”

I poked a finger in her shoulder. “Ha! I knew you had a thing for him!”

I’d expected a look of irritation; instead, she was blushing.

“Oh, my God,” I said, realization hitting. “You guys totally made out behind the concrete things.”

“Oh, my God, shut up,” she said.

We spent the next couple of hours like true geeks. We studied trig, then rounded out the night with some European-history review, and I sent messages to my parents. I walked a weird line between missing them, worrying about them, and trying—like Foley had suggested—to keep them out of my mind. But I was surrounded by weirdness, and that just made me think of them even more. There was so much I wanted to tell them—about Scout and Jason, about being an Adept,

about the underground world I’d discovered in Chicago.

Maybe they already knew some of it. Foley had hinted around that they might know about the Dark Elite. But they didn’t know about Jason or firespell, and they certainly couldn’t know how my life had changed over the last couple of weeks. I wasn’t going to break it to them now—not over the phone or via text message and not when they were thousands of miles away. For now I’d trust Foley. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to check out the SRF building. After all, how much trouble could drawing a building get me into?

When it got late enough that my eyes were drifting shut, I packed up my stuff to head back to my room.

“You can sleep here if you want,” Scout said.

I looked up at her from my spot on the floor, a little surprised. I’d slept over before, when Scout had had trouble sleeping after her rescue. But I hadn’t done it in a few days, and I wondered if everything was okay. “You good?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. We’re teenagers,” she reminded me. She uncurled her legs, then bent over the side of her bed and pulled out a thick blanket in a boxy plastic wrapping. It was the same one she gave me every time I bunked over.

“We’re not setting a precedent here or anything.”

“And they definitely don’t do bed checks or anything.”

“M.K. thanks her lucky stars for that,” Scout muttered.

“Seriously—that is grade A disturbing. I don’t want to think about the extracurricular field trips she’s taking.” I hitched a thumb toward the door. “I’m going to go throw on some pajamas.”

“Go for it.” Scout punched her pillow a couple of times, then snagged a sleeping blindfold from one of the bedposts. She slid it on, then climbed under the covers.

“Nice look.”

She humphed. “If I’m asleep when you come back, let’s keep it that way.”

“Whatever. You snore.”

“I am a very delicate sleeper. It complements my delicate beauty.”

“You’re a delicate dork.”

“Night, Lils.”

“Night, Scout.”

I woke up suddenly, a shrill sound filling the air. “What the frick?”

“Whoozit?” Scout said, sitting up in bed, the sleeping mask across her eyes. She whipped it off, then blinked to orient herself.

I glanced around. The source of the noise was one of the tiny paper houses on her bookshelves. It was fully aglow from the inside, and it sounded like a fire alarm was going off inside it.

Scout let out a string of curses, then fumbled out of bed. And I do mean fumbled —she got caught in the mix of blankets and comforters, and ended up on the floor,

half-trapped in quilts, before she managed to stand up and pluck the house from the bookshelf.

“Oh, crap,” she intoned, lifting up the house to eye level so that she could peer into it. When she looked back at me, forehead pinched, I knew we were in trouble.

“That’s my alarm. My ward got tripped.”

I stood up and walked toward her. “What does that mean, ‘My ward got tripped’?”

Scout closed her eyes, then pursed her lips and blew into the house’s tiny window. By the time she opened her eyes, the house was silent and dark again, as if its tiny residents had gone back to sleep.

She put it carefully back on its shelf, then looked at me. “Daniel’s been teaching me how to ward the basement doors—it’s supposed to keep the nasties out or send out an alarm if they make it through. You know, since they kidnapped me and all.”

“I do recall that,” I agreed supportively—and wondered if that was what she’d been working on in her room.

“This house was keyed to the vault door in the basement—the big metal one with the locks and stuff?”

“So the house is, what, some kind of alarm?”

She nodded, then grabbed a pair of jeans from her closet. “Pretty much. Now, go get dressed. We’re going to have to handle this.”