“On three, we pull ourselves apart! Agreed?”

I swallowed, but nodded. “On three!”

She nodded back, and we began the countdown. “One—two—and three!”

We yanked our hands apart, but it wasn’t easy. It felt like I was pulling back a twenty-pound concrete block. I managed to untangle my fingers from hers, but the power was still pouring out, and it wanted to move. Since it couldn’t flow into Scout anymore, it pushed her away—and me with it.

I flew down the corridor and hit the floor five or six feet away. I heard the echoing thump as Scout hit the floor in the other direction.

“Ow.”

Very slowly, I sat up, hands braced on the ground to push myself upright. “Oh, crap, that hurt.”

“Seriously,” she said groggily, sitting up again, a hand on her forehead. It took a moment before she turned her head to look at me. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better. Are you okay?”

She checked her arms and legs. “Nothing broken, I think.”

One hand on the wall for support, I stood up, but had to wait until the room stopped spinning. “I have to say, that totally sucked.”

Scout tried to flatten down her hair, which was still sticking up in odd angles. “I guess our magics hate each other.”

“Or really like each other, since we had trouble prying ourselves apart. Either way, I don’t think we should do that again.”

“And we also probably should not tell Katie or Smith or Daniel that just happened. Lecture,” she added in explanation.

Very, very slowly—my bones aching from the fall—I moved back to the door and reached out a hand to Scout.

“Definitely don’t need a lecture,” I agreed as I pulled her to her feet. “I do need fourteen or fifteen hours of sleep and a giant cheeseburger.”

“Aren’t you a vegetarian?”

“That’s my point.”

When we were both on our feet, we looked back at the door. It still pulsed like a severed heart in a horror film.

“You know, that’s really gonna be noticeable if someone comes down here.”

“I guess we could try to ward the door upstairs to keep people from coming down.”

I gave her an exceptionally dry look. “No way am I going through that again. Got a better idea?”

“Well, the firespell fades over time—I mean, people wake up after they get knocked unconscious with it. You did, anyway.”

“I love being a cautionary tale.”

“So maybe it works the same way here, too. Cop a squat.” Without waiting for me to move, she turned her back to the wall across from the door, crossed one foot over the other, and sat down on the floor.

“We’re going to wait it out?” I could hear the grumpy sleepiness in my voice. I felt bad about it, but it was late. I wanted to be curled up in bed—or even in a wrinkled blanket on Scout’s floor—fast asleep.

“Just until we’re sure the green is fading,” she said. “If we know it’s fading, that means it’s going back to normal. And if it’s going back to normal, we’ll sleep a lot better later.”

She had a point. And it would have been pretty irresponsible to just walk away. Adepts were supposed to be a secret, but it wouldn’t be long before anyone who saw the door started asking questions.

“Fine,” I said, and sat down on the floor beside her. She immediately pulled out her cell phone and began texting.

“Daniel?” I wondered.

“Daniel,” she agreed. “We need to tell him about the breach, and we definitely need to tell him the Reapers know about the creatures. That raises all sorts of nasty questions.”

“Like?”

“Like whether they’re trying to domesticate them to use as some kind of weapon.”

I grimaced. “In the interest of my ever sleeping well again, let’s pretend that’s just not possible.”

When the texting was done, Scout put her phone away. She sighed, then dropped her head to my shoulder. “Does the door look any different to you now?”

“Not really. You?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ll just give it a few more minutes.”

If only.

12

There are nightmares, and then there are nightmares. You know the dream where you’re in class, but you totally forgot to take a shower and stuff? How about the dream where you wake up beside your best friend in the basement of a private school fifteen minutes before classes start?

Long story short, that dream ends with you running through the school in yesterday’s clothes in front of pretty much the entire junior and senior classes.

Luckily, the fact that we were nearly late for class kept us from having to explain to the dragon ladies what we’d been doing in the main building so early. But I heard Scout yell “Fell asleep studying!” three or four times before we were back in our rooms.

There was no time for a shower, so I cleaned up the best I could, brushed my teeth, and pulled on my uniform—plaid skirt, button-up shirt, fuzzy boots, and a cardigan. I pulled my hair into a topknot. My only accessory was the classic—my room key on its blue ribbon.

I met Scout in the common room, both of us pulling on messenger bags and hustling through the door. I handed over a smushed granola bar. She ripped into the plastic with her teeth, then stuffed the wrapper into her bag.

“If only the brat pack knew how glamorous we truly were,” she muttered, taking a huge bite of the bar. With her wrinkled skirt, untucked shirt, and mismatched sneakers, she didn’t look much better than I did.