16
After the excitement of our morning meeting, classes passed by in a blur. The teachers still technically did the teaching, but everybody was focused on parents’ night. Dinner was actually awesome—the girls attending parents’ night got a full-on catered meal, so the kitchen staff didn’t have time to cook a separate round of slurry for us. Instead, they ordered pizzas. A lot of pizzas. The bites I choked down were delicious, but I was nervous enough about our lingering problems that I didn’t have much of an appetite.
Study hall was also canceled, which made our evening plans a lot simpler. As soon as we made it back to the room after dinner, Scout dialed up Gaslight Goods, switched it to speakerphone, and put the phone down on the table.
“Gaslight Goods. Let us be your light in the midst of life’s darkness, the sunlight in your foggy day, the candle in your wind. This is Kite. How can I help you today?”
I grimaced. That was their opener?
“Kite, it’s Scout.”
“Hi, Scout. What can I do you for?”
“Information,” she said. “We need to know what Fayden Campbell bought from your store. Do you by chance remember what that was?”
“I’m sorry, Scout, I don’t. I didn’t process her order.”
“Kite,” Scout said, her tone serious. “We have a really strong suspicion that she’s behind the blackout. If you tell me what she bought, that might help us stop her. But if we can’t stop her, and no one has magic, pretty soon she will be your only real customer. I will not be dropping my parents’ hard-earned dough on the newest-fangled salt because I will have no magic. And nobody else will, either. Is that what you want?”
There was silence on the line. Then Kite said, “I don’t know . . . but I could probably look it up on the computer for you.”
Hands in the air, Scout did a weird little dance that was fifty percent running, fifty percent jumping, and one hundred percent awkward.
“Yes, please,” she said.
“ ’Kay,” he said. “And sorry; you know I have to do this.”
I didn’t know what he was about to do, but it sounded suspicious to me. But not to Scout, apparently.
“Go ahead,” she said.
Kite cleared his throat. “Gaslight Goods is a nonparty to any disputes among members of the Dark Elite. Gaslight Goods has an official position of neutrality with respect to any such disputes, and the provision of information to one party or other is not an indication in a change in that position, nor a statement of support. All rights of Gaslight Goods are reserved. Phew,” he added. “Sorry about that.”
“No worries.”
“So, now that that’s out of the way, here’s what she bought.”
Scout snatched up the same notebook she’d been using for our list and a purple pen, tilted and ready to write.
“Quartz. Pink salt. Some heavy-duty magnets. Dried feverfew. Oh, and a rod of copper. That just came in yesterday, actually.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
“Okay. Thanks, Kite. If it turns out we’re right, you’ll be the first person we call.”
“I’d appreciate it. I’ve got to run. Later, Scout.” Kite hung up the phone, and Scout stuffed hers away again.
“What was with the legalese?” I asked.
“That’s the official disclaimer that they’re still neutral even if they give you information. It’s so they don’t get blamed for stuff the Reapers or Adepts do.”
“Why didn’t they have to do it before—when we were in the store, I mean?”
Scout shrugged. “That was just chatting. You get official, with people looking up records, and they want to keep their names out of the discussion. That’s the disclaimer.”
Magical rules were just bizarro. But that wasn’t important. “So we know what she bought. Does that help you?”
Scout looked down at her paper. “This isn’t stuff you just buy for the heck of it. So whatever she’s doing with the blackout, it’s magical. She has created a spell, a hex, a machine, something that has taken away all of our power—”
“Except hers,” I finished.
“Exactly. I don’t know exactly what she’s brewing up. I’m going to have to think about it, let it float around in my head a little. But I’ll figure it out.” She waved the notebook. “This is the key, Lily. We still have work to do, but this is the key.”
Thank goodness I’d finally done something right.
* * *
An hour later Scout had scribbled through a bunch of pages in the notebook and she’d chomped through half a pack of gum.
“I chew gum when I’m working magical equations,” she said.
I still wasn’t entirely sure what was meant by “equations.” I flipped through the pages of her notebook, which were filled with what looked like those puzzles where a picture is supposed to symbolize a word—an image of an eye is supposed to mean “I” and so forth.
In Scout’s case, the drawings looked a lot like Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Are you, like, trying to add salt to quartz and then subtract the magnets or—”
She flopped back on the bed. “I have no idea what I’m trying to do. None of these things go together. It’s like trying to add blue and twelve and a dandelion. That kind of math doesn’t work.”
“So you don’t have any ideas?”
“Not unless”—she picked up her notebook and turned it so that she was reading it upside down—“Fayden Campbell is attempting to work bacon-typewriter-earmuff magic.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Yep.” She tossed the notebook back on the bed and rubbed her hands over her face. “What am I missing? What am I missing?”
“Is there, like, a secret ingredient? Like a catalyst or something? Like, you have to heat everything up, or maybe you have to use the things in a particular order?”
“That’s magic 101, Parker. All accounted for.”
It might be introductory magic for an Adept who’d been doing it for years, but it was pretty advanced stuff for me.
“So we know what she bought, but we don’t know why she bought it?”
“Yep.”
“And we can’t try to fix the magical blackout if we don’t know how she made it happen in the first place.”
“Since we have no magic because of said magical blackout, that is correct.”