“Thanks,” I said, and glanced over at the girls. The brat pack was possibly increasing from three to four. A new recruit, Lisbeth Cannon, had been hanging out with the crew.

“How’s the brat pack?” I asked.

Lesley shrugged. “See for yourself. Veronica’s handing out orders. Amie’s following them. M.K.’s working on her nails.”

“What about Lisbeth?”

“She’s learning how to be like the rest of them.”

I glanced back. As much as I found them repellant, I could admit that I was also kind of intrigued. There was a lot of fighting. They were always pairing off together, leaving one girl out until the other two got mad at each other and decided it was time to switch partners again. Some days I’d find Veronica on the couch in our suite, complaining to Amie about Mary Katherine’s dramatics. M.K. usually complained to Amie that Veronica always had to have her way.

Both complaints seemed right to me.

I was glad to have a steady BFF in Scout, but in an odd way I was a little jealous about the dramatics. What if deciding between BFFs were the only problem I had to face? No magic. No Reapers. No slimy nasties in the tunnels? Just deciding which friend I wanted to wear on any given day.

“You ever wonder what it’s like to be them?”

Lesley looked back at me. “You mean instead of having magic?”

Lesley was one of the few people without magic who was allowed to know about Adepts and Reapers. I wasn’t sure if she knew the entire story, but there was an advantage to not knowing too much—having all the details about the world of underground magic apparently put a Reaper target on your back. Lesley might have been a little odd, but she’d been a friend to us when we needed it, so I certainly didn’t wish that on her.

“I mean to be popular, and for how you look to be the most important thing on your mind.”

Lesley painted lines of glue onto the raven’s feathers. “I play the cello,” she said. “Sometimes I help you and Scout. I speak four languages, I’m super good at physics, and I will probably get into whatever college I want.” She looked up at me, and it was clear she wasn’t bragging. She was just giving me the facts. “So why would I want to spend my time worrying about whether everyone else thinks my shirt is cool enough?”

Like they were following a script, raised voices carried from the brat pack corner of the room.

“I’m trying to do it right,” Lisbeth said. She was attempting to carve a piece of foam into the shape of . . . Well, I’m not really sure what it was supposed to be. A gargoyle, maybe?

Veronica, who’d made her way over to the group, wasn’t buying it. “It certainly doesn’t look like it. You’ve been working on that thing for, like, an hour now.”

“Seriously,” M.K. said. “It looks like an angry terrier, and that’s really off-theme.”

I doubted M.K. cared whether the decoration was right or not. She probably just liked having someone to terrorize. And Lisbeth definitely looked terrorized. She burst into tears and ran from the room, leaving the brat pack rolling their eyes behind her.

“She is so moody,” M.K. complained. “I was just being constructive.”

Lesley and I exchanged a glance.

“See what I mean?” she asked.

I definitely did.

* * *

When the drama was over, we all went back to Sneakifying. Earlier, Veronica, as head of the planning committee, had told us Sneak got its name because St. Sophia’s girls of old used to sneak out every year and host an impromptu prom in an old storage building behind the dorms. (The school used to be a convent, so even the storage building was antiquey and cool.) Add twenty years, lots and lots of money, and parents who didn’t want their heiresses playing dress-up in an old storage building, and you had the modern version of Sneak.

I wasn’t one of those heiresses; I’d been sent to Chicago from my home in New York when my parents went to Germany for research work.

Well, that was their story, anyway. I wasn’t exactly buying it. I thought they knew more about magic than they let on, and that they’d sent me to St. Sophia’s specifically because our headmistress, Marceline Foley, also knew magic existed. It wasn’t something we chatted about regularly, and I don’t think Foley was thrilled to be in the know, but she gave us a little bit of room to take care of business.

I poured glitter over the lines of glue Lesley had made. I’m sure I didn’t exactly look like your average teenager—too much eyeliner and weird vintage shoes for that. But I didn’t exactly look like a teenage witch, either. The only real sign I was anything other than a junior at St. Sophia’s School for Girls was the Darkening on my back, a strangely shaped pale green tattoo that had appeared after I’d been struck by a shot of firespell—and had ended up being able to wield the power, too.

Sure—having power was better than ending up the pitiful victim of a Reaper. But was it better or worse than worrying only whether I was as pretty as the girls in Vogue and if my clothes were hot enough?

Lesley had clearly made up her own mind about that one. Scout had, too. She came from money and could have afforded the same stuff the brat pack wore. But she was one hundred percent Scout, and not the type to worry about what anybody else thought. Keeping the world safe from Reapers was number one on her agenda.

I shook the excess glitter from the raven and put it on the floor beside the others.

“Do you have a date for the dance?” I asked Lesley.