Scout hopped across one of the rails in the concrete floor, flashlight in her hand,
her signature messenger bag—with its grinning skull and crossbones—bouncing as she moved.
“All right,” she said. “Off again.”
I blew out a breath, and pulled the power back out again. It was like turning the lights on, but in reverse—letting the power release again, freeing it from the bulbs in which it was bound. For a moment, the lights wavered, then went dark.
Jason took my free hand and laced our fingers together. “Your control is seriously improving.”
“Only because I’ve been working on it like two hours a day.”
Scout glanced back, her features thrown into strange relief by the flashlight beneath her face. “Hobbies are fun, aren’t they?”
“In this case, they would be more fun if I had any clue what I was doing.”
Jason leaned toward me. “You’re doing great, Lily,” he said, squeezing my hand.
I squeezed back.
“I’m doing better than I was,” I agreed. “But I’d feel a whole lot better if I could do it on command every time. I’m still a little unpredictable.”
“One of these days,” Jason said. Since his eyes were on Scout and Michael,
who were walking side by side in front of us, Michael’s arm around her shoulders, I assumed Jason was no longer talking about me.
“One of these days,” I agreed. “They’ll be good for each other. They are good for each other.”
“Yes, they are,” he said, before his gaze shifted back to me again. “But enough about them. You know, we haven’t had a lot of time to talk. To get to know each other.”
The warmth on my cheeks was a weird contrast to the chilly tunnel air. “That’s true,” I said, my heart suddenly thudding in my chest. What was it about this guy that made me feel like a nervous kid? I hated feeling that way, so I took the lead.
“So, say something.”
“Something.”
I bumped him with my shoulder. “I’m serious.”
“So was I. Maybe you just don’t appreciate my sense of humor.” But when I gave him a flat stare, he laughed. “Okay, okay. So, um, what is Sagamore like compared to Chicago?”
“Oh. Well, it’s beautiful,” I told him. “It’s a small town, kind of in the country. Trees everywhere, rolling hills. Our neighborhood was on a hill, so when you looked outside in the fall, you could see the fog over the valley. It was like living in a fairy land.”
“Wasn’t ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ supposed to take place in New York?”
I frowned. “I don’t know. Was it?”
“I wanna say we learned that last year in English.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.
Could be wrong. Anyway, if it was, probably says a lot about upstate New York,
right?”
“Are you suggesting I was living in a fairy land?”
“Well, at least a land with headless horsemen.” He dropped my hand and half turned around, fingers arched into claws. “Headless horsemen who cut the heads off fair maidens in the night!” He tweaked my waist, just enough to make me yelp. I batted his hands away.
Scout glanced back, eyebrow arched. “What’s going on back there?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Some dork is trying to scare me with tales of murderous creatures.”
She snorted. “What, ’cause that’s so different from an average Monday around here?”
“Seriously, right?”
“People,” Jason said, “I’m busy trying to work my mojo.”
Michael turned around and offered Jason his fist, and they did a manly knuckle-
bump thing.
Scout and I simultaneously rolled our eyes. But before I could respond, Jason grabbed my hand again and pulled me to a stop. My stomach fluttering, I kept my eyes on Scout and Michael, who continued in front of us, flashlights bobbing until they realized that we weren’t following behind.
Scout looked back. “What’s up, peeps?”
“Could you, maybe, give us a minute?” Jason asked.
“You are not serious.”
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find time to kiss an Adept?”
Scout blew out a dramatic breath that puffed out her cheeks, grabbed Michael’s hand, and pulled him down the hall. “Fine. Have a hot make-out session. But we’re going to be like twenty feet down the hallway. I hope they get eaten by one of those headless horsemen,” she muttered. “Or the Chicago version, anyway.”
As they walked down the hallway, I kept my gaze on them, still too nervous to look at Jason.
“What would that be exactly?” I heard Michael ask.
“What would what be?”
“The Chicago version of the headless horseman?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a fangless vampire? Or—or a werewolf with mange?”
“We can still hear you!” Jason called out. “And werewolves don’t get mange!”
That earned him a huff from Scout. I finally screwed up my courage and looked back at Jason.
He had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. But they weren’t royal blue or the blue you’d see in the middle of a rainbow. They were so blue they were nearly turquoise,
the color so deep it seemed that he stared out with precious jewels instead of irises.
Currently, those crazy eyes were trained on me. His lips curled, the dimple at the corner of his mouth puckering as he smiled.
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?”