Before they could answer, there was another knock on the door. Before I could answer, a scrubs-clad nurse walked in, tray in hand.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “How are you feeling?” She shooed Scout off the bed, then put the tray—which held a small plastic tumbler of water, a small plastic pitcher, and a chocolate pudding cup.
“Okay. Considering.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said, then came to my bedside and measured my pulse. She pulled the end of a tube from a machine connected to the wall, then held it toward me.
“Stick out your tongue,” she said. When I did, she stuck the chunk of cold plastic beneath my tongue, then watched a read-out behind me. “Shouldn’t you all be in school right now?” she asked without glancing up.
“We have passes,” Scout said.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said again. When the machine beeped, she pulled out the thermometer, put it away, and then moved to the end of my bed, where she scribbled something on my chart. When she’d returned it to its slot, she looked at me. “Visiting hours are over in an hour.”
“Sure,” I said. After a final warning glance at Scout, Michael, and Jason, she disappeared out the door again.
Suddenly starving, I pointed at the tray at the end of the bed. “Hand me the pudding cup and get on with the story,” I told Scout. She peeled off the foil top, then handed me the cup and spoon as she licked the remnant of chocolate pudding from the foil. I dug in.
“No soul sucking,” Michael continued. “From our perspective, keeping the power isn’t worth it—not to feed off others. We aren’t willing to pay that cost, to take lives so we can wax poetic about how great it is to be an Adept.”
I swallowed a giant spoonful of chocolate pudding—magical near misses really built up the appetite—then lifted my brows at him. “Adept?”
“Those of us with magic,” he said, “but who are willing to give it up. It’s what we call ourselves. Our philosophy is, we hit twenty-five, and we return our power to the universe. We stop using it. We make a promise, take a vow.”
“It’s an even trade,” Scout said, with a small smile. “No more power, but no more upsetting the balance of the universe.”
“No more being Adepts,” Jason said, his voice quieter and, I thought, a little wistful, as if he’d considered the blow that giving up his magic would be, and he wasn’t thrilled about it.
“Okay,” I said. “So, to review, you’ve got kids with magical powers running around Chicago. Some of them are willing to give it up when the magic gets predatory—that would be you guys.”
Scout bobbed her head.
“And some of them aren’t willing to give it up, so they have a future of soul sucking to look forward to.”
“That’s a fair summary,” Michael said with a nod.
“But that doesn’t explain why you guys are running around under the convent throwing, what, firespell, at one another.”
Scout looked up at Michael, who nodded, as if giving her permission to answer the question. “We found a list,” she said. “A list of, well, I guess you’d call them leads. Kids who’ve been scoped out by Reapers. Kids they’re targeting for a power lunch, no pun intended.”
I nodded my understanding.
“I’ve been working out a spell of protection, a little half charm, half curse, to keep the Reapers from being able to zero in on their targets.”
“How do you do that?”
“Have you ever tried to look at a faraway star,” Scout asked, “but the closer you look at it, the fuzzier it gets?”
“Sure. Why?”
“That’s what Scout’s trying to do here,” Michael said, crossing his arms and bobbing his head in her direction. “Making the targets invisible to the Reapers. She’s been working on a kid who lives in a condo on Michigan, goes to a high school in South Loop. They haven’t been real thrilled with that.”
“And that’s why they’ve been chasing you?” I asked, sliding my gaze to Scout.
“As you might imagine,” she said, “we aren’t exactly popular. Our ideas about giving up our power don’t exactly put us in the majority.”
“The gifted are proud to have magic,” Jason said, “as well they should be. But most of them don’t want to give it up.”
“That puts us in the minority,” Michael added. “Rebels, of a sort.”
“A magic splinter cell?”
“Kinda,” Scout said with a rueful smile. “So the Reapers identify targets—folks who make a good psychic lunch—and kids who are coming into their own, coming into their own gifts. Spotters,” she added, anticipating my question. “Their particular gift is the ability to find magic. To detect it.”
“Once a kid is identified,” Michael said, “the Reapers circle like lions around prey. They’ll talk to the kid, sometimes their parents, about the gift, figure out the parameters, exactly what the kid can do. And they’ll teach the kid that the gift is nothing to be embarrassed about, and that any souls they take are worth it.”
“The Reapers try to teach the kids that the idea of giving up your power willingly is a conspiracy,” Jason said, “that feeding on someone else’s energy, their essence, is a kind of magical natural selection—the strong feeding on the weak or something. We disagree. We work our protective spells on the targets, or we try to intercede more directly with the gifted, to get the kids to think for themselves, to think about the consequences of their magic.”
“For better or worse,” Scout added.
“So you try to steal their pledges,” I concluded.
“You got it,” Scout said. “We try to teach kids with powers that giving up their powers is the best thing for humanity. You know, because of the soul sucking.”
I smiled lightly. “Right.”
“That makes us pretty unpopular with them, and it makes the Reapers none too popular with us,” she added. “We didn’t need the original Reapers. And we certainly don’t need Reapers spawning out there.”
“Seriously,” Jason muttered. “There’re already enough Cubs fans in Chicago.”
Michael coughed, but the cough sounded a lot like, “Northside.”
I arched an eyebrow, and returned my glance to Scout. “Northside?”
“Where the Cubs are,” she said. “They’re territorial.”