My nerves tumbling, I kept things light.

“So you’re trying to kiss an Adept?”

“Very, very diligently,” Jason said. Before I could get out a snarky answer, he was dipping his head. His lips found mine, his mouth soft and warm. He put his hands at my waist and kissed me until I felt a little light-headed, until my heart fluttered in my chest. I’d been kissed before, sure, but I hadn’t been kissed like this. Not by him, since we’d been interrupted when he’d tried to kiss me before. And not like my feet were going to lift off the ground and I was going to float right up to the ceiling.

I almost opened my eyes to make sure that hadn’t happened—I mean, we were Adepts, after all.

Jason sighed and wrapped his arms around my back, and we kissed in the darkness beneath Chicago.

At least until Scout let out a “Holy crap!” that poured through the tunnel.

We separated and ran full out, relieved when we saw Scout and Michael still standing at the edge of the next segment of tunnel.

“What happened?” Jason asked, his gaze scanning the two of them. “Are you okay?”

“There,” Scout said, swinging her flashlight across the tunnel in front of us.

It took me a minute to process exactly what I was seeing. The floor of the tunnel and part of the walls were coated in some kind of clear slime, five or six trails of it from one end of the corridor to the next.

“Wait,” Jason said. “Is that—Is that slime?”

“Appears to be,” Michael said. “It looks like they filmed Aliens in there.”

Jason kneeled down, found a piece of metal on the tunnel floor, and stuck it into the goo. When he raised it again, he pulled up a long, stringy strand of slime.

“Eww,” Scout said. “That is heinous. That’s even worse than the time we fought off that nematode.”

“What’s a nematode?” I asked.

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said. “I think you should have the joy of looking it up on the Internet and seeing the kind of pictures I had to see.”

“So what did this come from?” I asked. “Some kind of animal?”

“Maybe not,” Michael put in. “Maybe there’s a leak somewhere. Some kind of—I don’t know—industrial fluid or something?”

We all looked up. The ceiling of the tunnel looked old and nasty, but not even a little slimy.

“Hmm,” Jason said, then tossed the metal into a corner. “That’s definitely new.”

“What do we do now?”

Scout put her hands on her hips. “Since the exit is in that direction, I guess we should see how far it goes.”

“Lily and I will take the lead,” Jason said, stepping forward into the tunnel. When I snapped to face him, shocked that we’d be going first, his expression was apologetic.

“Firespell,” he explained. “Just in case we need it.”

It was definitely an adjustment to play the lead heroine, but I sucked it up, nodded, and stepped beside him.

With flashlights aimed before us and Michael and Scout behind us, we took one tentative step into the tunnel. And then another. And then another.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Scout said, flashlight beam circling across the ceiling of the tunnel as she searched out whatever had slimed the corridor.

“One tunnel at a time,” Jason said. My hand in his, we took the lead, walking to the end of the corridor.

I was scanning the walls, bouncing my flashlight beam along them, looking for a hint of slime. So when Jason came to a full stop, I almost tripped forward, but he pulled my hand—and me—back.

That was when I saw them—and screamed.There were five of them—half walking, half crawling toward us. They were human-shaped, but a little smaller than your average adult. They were bald, with pointed ears and milky eyes, and their fingers were thin and tipped by long, pointed white nails. They scowled and snorted as they moved toward us. Their naked skin glistened in the light, a trail of slime on the ground beneath and behind them.

“What—” I began, but Jason shook his head. “Scout, Michael. Stop walking, and move backward. Just a few feet.”

Scout and Michael began to move behind us. With each step they took, we followed suit until the four of us stood in a cluster a dozen feet or so away from the creatures. Still, they lurched in our direction, their movements coordinated like a school of nasty, pasty fish.

I could feel my chest tightening as panic began to take over. Staring down a group of hell-bent teenagers was one thing. This was . . . completely out of my league.

“What the hell are those?” I whispered.

“No clue,” Jason said. “But they don’t exactly look friendly.”

One of them hissed, revealing long fangs amid an entire row of sharp teeth. “Are they some kind of vampire?” Michael asked.

“I’ve never seen a vamp that looked like that,” Scout said.

Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe they were offended by what she’d said. Either way, one of them decided it was time for action. It put its front hands on the ground, then pushed off and leaped toward us.

Okay, not just us—toward me.

But there was someone there to save me.

It started with fur—thick and silver—that sprouted across Jason’s body, replacing his clothes like they were nothing more than an illusion. Then he went down on all fours and stepped in front of me. His nose elongated into a snout, and his hands and feet became long, narrow paws. His tail extended, and the rest of his fur grew in, and by then there was no mistaking what he was—a silvery wolf, bigger than any I’d seen at a zoo.