After all, we were getting used to that distance.
10
The best way to top off an evening of Reaper spying had to be a morning of trigonometry exams. Not.
But we were students as well as Adepts, so we headed into trig class after cramming as much as possible in the few hours we had left, took our seats, got out our freshly sharpened St. Sophia’s pencils, and waited for the show to start.
“Good luck,” I whispered to Scout, who was in the seat behind me.
She gave me a serious nod. However silly Scout may be most of the time, she was apparently serious about magic . . . and trig tests.
“Make us proud, Parker,” she whispered.
Our trig teacher went through the normal test-taking rules: Don’t talk. Don’t cheat. Stop when time is called. No calculators. Pencils only. Show your work. Then he passed out the tests and wrote the finish time on the board.
“Begin,” he said, and we got busy.
It took a few minutes for me to get into the zone—but I got there eventually. Each problem had two or three parts, so I tried to focus on finishing each part, quickly checking my work, and then moving on to the next. There were a couple I wasn’t sure about, and I hoped I hadn’t screwed up parts two and three because of some stupid error in part one. But we had a limited time to finish the test, so it wasn’t like I could do anything about it.
We were fifteen minutes from the end when a shrill alarm ripped through the silence.
I nearly jumped out of my chair. Some of the other girls did, grabbing their books and dropping their half-finished tests on Dorsey’s desk before running out of the room.
“Fire alarm,” Dorsey dryly said. “If I had ten dollars every time a fire alarm went off in the middle of a test, I’d . . . well, I’d certainly drive a much better car. Turn in your tests and exit the building.”
“But I’m not finished!” cried out one of the brainier girls in the class, the kind who raised her hand to answer every question and always asked about extra credit points, even though there was no way she needed them.
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Dorsey said, holding his hand out and staring her down with a stern expression until she walked toward him and handed it over. It took her a moment, but she finally did, then trotted out of the room with a pile of scratch paper and pencils in hand.
I glanced back at Scout, who was shoving her stuff back into her messenger bag. “Fire alarm?” I wondered.
“For now we assume it’s a fire alarm. And then we see.”
We turned in our tests and joined the traffic toward the exit doors. When we got outside, we clumped together with Lesley, just close enough to the classroom building that we could get a look at the action. But there wasn’t any action that we could see, not even the sound of a fire truck rushing down the block toward us. And there were always fire trucks in downtown Chicago. There was a station pretty close to the convent, and rarely a night went by when we didn’t hear at least one call.
But now . . . nothing.
“I don’t smell smoke,” Lesley said.
“And the building’s stone,” Scout added. “There’s not a lot in there that could actually go up in flames.”
“Suspicious,” I said, watching Foley emerge from the main building followed by a gaggle of dragon ladies.
I looked back at Scout. “We need to know what’s going on—if there’s a fire, or if this is some kind of distraction.”
“And you think Foley’s gonna tell us? Doubtful.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I think we know someone who can get some intel.” I looked at Lesley.
“I’m in,” she simply said, then tilted her head as she looked at Foley and the dragons. “This is easy.”
Without any instructions or warnings, she walked over to Foley. Hands on her hips, she began talking to her. Foley looked surprised, but it looked like she answered whatever Lesley had asked, and then Lesley walked back to us again.
We crowded around her. “What did you say?”
“I asked her if my $78,231 cello was safe in the dorm, or if the dorm was on fire.”
You couldn’t fault her for being direct. “What did she say to that?”
“She said there’s no fire. The company is working to turn off the alarms.”
Scout and I exchanged a glance. “Would someone have tripped the alarm just to get us out of a trig test?” I wondered.
“Like Dorsey said, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Maybe, but it happened now that we know Jeremiah’s gunning for your Grimoire? When he thinks he really needs it? Remember what they said—that they had plans?”
She shrugged. “That’s a lot of coincidence.”
“They could be searching our rooms right now.”
“They could be,” Scout agreed. “But they won’t find it. That would be impossible. And I’m not going to tell you where it is,” she added before I could ask. “I don’t want you tortured for it.”
“In that case, thank you very much. Still, we need to get back inside.”
“Yeah, but that’s not exactly going to be easy, is it?” She gestured to the crowd around us, which was still growing as folks filed out of all the school’s buildings. “There are people everywhere.”
“We need a distraction.”
“I’ll take this one, too,” Lesley said, her expression kind of devilish. She cleared her throat and smoothed out her plaid skirt, then began waving her arms in the air.
“My cello! My cello! My gorgeous cello from 1894 that may be burning to a crisp right now! What if it’s on fire? What if it feels pain? Oh, woe, my cello!”
She sounded completely ridiculous, and she looked pretty ridiculous, too. She was running back and forth in a zigzag across the grass, arms flopping around in the air like she’d completely lost it. But she did make a really good distraction. Everyone turned around to look at the crazy teenager who was yelling about her cello. You just didn’t see that kind of thing every day.
As soon as Foley’s back was turned and the rest of the girls were watching Lesley, we snuck around the corner of the building and then raced back to the dorms. But I stopped her before we went inside.
“If this is part of their plan to take the Grimoire, they could still be in there.”
She looked down at her empty hands. “Days like this make me wish I had a wand, you know.” She made two finger guns and pointed them at the door. “Pew pew! Abracadabra.”