“The safest place to keep the Grimoire is with me.”

“Yeah, but what if you’re the Reapers’ target? What if they take you again to get to the Grimoire?”

“I understand the point,” she said, her voice low and serious. It wasn’t a tone I heard her use often. “But there’s no way I’m giving up my Grimoire. That’s exactly what they want—to separate me from it and get their hands on it. That’s why they took me to the sanctuary in the first place.” She shook her head. “No. The Grimoire stays with me. I’ll find a hiding place for it.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re the expert.” I looked around her room, imagining where she might hide it. A cutout inside another book? A secret compartment in her closet? Under her mattress?

“Where are you going to put it?” I wondered.

“I’m not sure yet.”

We sat quietly for a second.

I wanted to be supportive, but I wasn’t really sure how. “Do you want me to stay . . . or go?”

“You should go,” she said, but she didn’t sound happy about it. “If they think you’re the key to the Grimoire, they’ll use you to get it.”

Maybe, but it didn’t make me feel any better that I wouldn’t have any information to tell them. Wasn’t that when they usually stopped the torture on television—when someone gave up the goods? But this wasn’t the time to bring that up.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is between you and your book.” She nodded, and I stood up and walked to the door. “Just don’t forget where it is.”

“Fat chance,” she said.

I walked into the common room and closed the door behind me. This was one of those things she’d have to do on her own. Putting distance between herself and her magic wasn’t comfortable, I knew, but we also couldn’t deny the reality.

After all, we were getting used to that distance.

10

The best way to top off an evening of Reaper spying had to be a morning of trigonometry exams. Not.

But we were students as well as Adepts, so we headed into trig class after cramming as much as possible in the few hours we had left, took our seats, got out our freshly sharpened St. Sophia’s pencils, and waited for the show to start.

“Good luck,” I whispered to Scout, who was in the seat behind me.

She gave me a serious nod. However silly Scout may be most of the time, she was apparently serious about magic . . . and trig tests.

“Make us proud, Parker,” she whispered.

Our trig teacher went through the normal test-taking rules: Don’t talk. Don’t cheat. Stop when time is called. No calculators. Pencils only. Show your work. Then he passed out the tests and wrote the finish time on the board.

“Begin,” he said, and we got busy.

It took a few minutes for me to get into the zone—but I got there eventually. Each problem had two or three parts, so I tried to focus on finishing each part, quickly checking my work, and then moving on to the next. There were a couple I wasn’t sure about, and I hoped I hadn’t screwed up parts two and three because of some stupid error in part one. But we had a limited time to finish the test, so it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.

We were fifteen minutes from the end when a shrill alarm ripped through the silence.

I nearly jumped out of my chair. Some of the other girls did, grabbing their books and dropping their half-finished tests on Dorsey’s desk before running out of the room.

“Fire alarm,” Dorsey dryly said. “If I had ten dollars every time a fire alarm went off in the middle of a test, I’d . . . well, I’d certainly drive a much better car. Turn in your tests and exit the building.”

“But I’m not finished!” cried out one of the brainier girls in the class, the kind who raised her hand to answer every question and always asked about extra credit points, even though there was no way she needed them.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” Dorsey said, holding his hand out and staring her down with a stern expression until she walked toward him and handed it over. It took her a moment, but she finally did, then trotted out of the room with a pile of scratch paper and pencils in hand.

I glanced back at Scout, who was shoving her stuff back into her messenger bag. “Fire alarm?” I wondered.

“For now we assume it’s a fire alarm. And then we see.”

We turned in our tests and joined the traffic toward the exit doors. When we got outside, we clumped together with Lesley, just close enough to the classroom building that we could get a look at the action. But there wasn’t any action that we could see, not even the sound of a fire truck rushing down the block toward us. And there were always fire trucks in downtown Chicago. There was a station pretty close to the convent, and rarely a night went by when we didn’t hear at least one call.

But now . . . nothing.

“I don’t smell smoke,” Lesley said.

“And the building’s stone,” Scout added. “There’s not a lot in there that could actually go up in flames.”

“Suspicious,” I said, watching Foley emerge from the main building followed by a gaggle of dragon ladies.

I looked back at Scout. “We need to know what’s going on—if there’s a fire, or if this is some kind of distraction.”

“And you think Foley’s gonna tell us? Doubtful.”