Lauren laughed. “Um, yes? Hello, hypnosis power?”

Scout moved closer and peered down at Lauren. “Ah, there it is,” she said, pointing down at Lauren’s neck. I took a closer look. Around Lauren’s neck was a small, round watch on a gold chain.

“Have you ever seen those old movies where some evil psychiatrist hypnotizes someone by swinging their watch back and forth? She can do that.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s a pretty narrow power.” Not that it made me any less happy that her hands were bound. These two seemed like the type to write “loser” on your forehead in permanent market once they’d gotten you down.

“Very narrow,” Scout agreed with a wicked grin. “And you know what they say about girls with very narrow powers?”

“What’s that?”

Scout paused for a minute. “Oh, I don’t know. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d make it all the way through the joke.”

Lauren did a little more swearing. Gatekeeper girl tried to join in, but she just wasn’t as good at it.

“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted. “How can someone be dumber than a baguette?”

“It means you’re stupid.”

I thought back to my nearly perfect trig homework. “Try again.” But that just reminded me that we had class—including trig—in a few hours. Exhaustion suddenly hitting me in a wave, I worked to get us back on track. “What do you want to do now?”

Scout looked back at me. “Well, we’re in the convent, and they’re in the convent. That’s two too many people in the convent.”

Five minutes later, we were dragging two squirming girls through the vault door and into the corridor behind it—and out of St. Sophia’s. They were hard to move, not just because they were fidgety, but because every time we gripped them near the shoulders they tried to bite us.

“Isn’t there a better way to do this?” I wondered, standing over Scout. “I mean, if you’d knocked them completely unconscious they’d be a lot easier to move.”

“Yeah, but we’d be leaving them completely at the mercy of whatever else might roam the tunnels at night. And that would be such a Reaper thing to do.”

Lauren growled.

We finally managed it by dragging them by their hexbound feet into the tunnel. But it wasn’t pretty, and the swearing didn’t get any better. Neither of them—especially not the cheerleader—was thrilled to be dragged through five or six feet of underground tunnel on their backs.

When they were on the other side of the door, Scout put her hands on her hips and looked down at them. “And what did we learn today, ladies?”

“That you suck.”

Scout rolled her eyes. I raised a hand. “While we’re here, I have a question.”

“Go for it, Lils. All right, cheer-reaper and gatekeeper—”

“I’m in the band.”

“Sorry?”

“You call her cheer-reaper, I figure you should call me by my title, too. I’m in the band. I play the French horn.”

Scout and I shared a grin.

“’Course you do,” Scout said. “Okay, cheer-reaper and French hornist, my friend here has a question for you.”

“Thanks,” I offered.

“Anytime.”

I turned toward them. “Have you two seen anything weird in the tunnels lately?”

“Oh,” French horn said, “you mean the rat thingies?”

I blinked. I hadn’t thought it was going to be quite that easy. “Well, actually, yeah. You know anything about those?”

The French horn player huffed. “Well, of course we do. We—”

She was interrupted by Lauren’s screaming. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!” And she didn’t stop there. She kept screaming and screaming. Scout and I both hitched back a little, then shared a wary glance. That kind of noise was surely going to attract attention.

“Shut it, Fleming,” Scout said, kicking her toe a little, then glancing at me. “That may be our cue to depart.”

“They know something,” I pointed out.

“I know something, too. I know we’re going to attract a lot of unwanted attention if they keep screaming. And then we have to make up some ridiculous explanation about how we heard screaming through the vents in our rooms, and we followed the sound back to the basement, and we found these girls lying on the ground and pretending to be tied up by invisible rope because they’re practicing for the regional mime championships.”

I blinked at her. “Is that explanation more or less believable than we woke up because two girls who are actually evil magicians tripped a magical alarm wired to a door in the basement we aren’t supposed to know about?”

Scout paused for a minute, the nodded. “Point made. Let’s go home. Ladies, have a pleasant evening.”

Not surprisingly, Lauren stopped screaming. But that just meant the curses were a little less loud than they had been before.

We left a flashlight on the ground between them, then slipped through the door again. When we were both on the other side, we used all our weight to push the thing closed again, muffling the sounds of cursing that were coming from the other side. I took a step back while Scout spun the flywheel and slid the security bar into place, metallic cranking and grinding echoing through the corridor.

“They’ve seen the rat things,” I said.