Page 97 of Magical Academy for Delinquents
“Ginny? I thought his secretary was named Tina.”
Mom laughed. “Oh no. Tina’s been gone for months.” She made a ridiculous face. She swiped through her phone. “That girl’s brain wasn’t bigger than her nipple.”
I just smiled and shook my head at her. My parents used to make a game of trying to embarrass Matthew and me by saying scandalous things. It felt like our talk had brought back the old version of her, if just for a moment.
Mom just continued, “When Claude found Ginny, it was a godsend. Oh, look, here she is at dinner with us, we took her out for her birthday.” Mom turned the phone around to show a picture of her and Claude huddled together in a booth. On Claude’s other side, huddled way too close to him, was a girl with unnatural cherry red hair. His arm disappeared underneath the tabletop in a way that was suspect to anyone except my oblivious mother. But it wasn’t the hand that drew my eyes. It was Ginny’s face. Her very young (very unpierced in that picture) face.
Emelia’s face.
Thunderbolts lanced my chest.That bitch. Claude sent her to spy on me.
It was a good thing I’d spent three years practicing my arrogant, disinterested face. Because otherwise, I would have blown everything. “Hmm.” I took the phone and looked at the date.
It was a match for Ginny Stone’s birthday. I glanced up at the photo again. Ginny must have had an excellent plastic surgeon. Or else her spell writing was beyond formidable. I was betting it was the latter.
Dad had said Claude was having an affair with his secretary. He’d forgotten to mention that the bitch was way more than just a secretary. She was the Pinnacle’s top Darklight.
Chapter 38
The guys workedand lived out of Grayson’s pool house. The pool worked well for when we staged full re-enactments in case Gray ended up dropping us. He was good enough to slow us down and flip us over so we could belly flop ‘gently’ into the pool. Z’s smart mouth got him in trouble more than once.
“Come on, Preschool, it’s not like this is hard.” Z’s taunt made Gray’s eyebrows draw together and the rich boy dropped my Tock from twenty feet, flipping him face down so that his belly smacked hard against the water. When Z surfaced, sputtering, his belly was as red as a Classic Crayon.
A few of Grayson’s “friends” from Crush flew out from Cali and showed us the best ways to outfox animals in case we had any trouble during the “Stampede” part of our plan—aptly named by Z. My power to blind shifters only worked half as well as I wanted, because their noses were so good. Burning their paw pads was our quickest solution, because I could blast them with light, and it didn’t require spell writing or amulets. We were already going to need to carry two amulets as it was.
Malcolm tried repeatedly to write some spells that simulated the pheromones of a female shifter in heat. He wanted to drive the shifters mad at the Unnatural Ball. When he thought he’d found the right combination, he grabbed a cooler full of pheromones and brought us all out to the woods to test it. “So, we get everyone outside with part one: Stinky Stampede. Then we use the sprinkler system and add this.” He held up a test tube full of pale pink sparkling magic.
“Why are pheromones pink?” I asked, offended. That seemed like a bunch of bullshit.
“They just are,” Malcolm responded.
“I don’t like this idea. Think about the chaos,” Evan protested.
“Exactly,” Malcolm replied, pushing aside a branch as we walked deeper into the shade of the trees. “If we get lucky, a couple guards will abandon their posts over at the Pinnacle to help deal with a group of rut-crazed shifters. If I can get enough different animal scents mixed in there, it will be a shit show of different shifters running around trying to mate. The prairie dogs will be so distracted, the outdoor videos will be full of chaos, it will make our flight to the seventh floor and the first part of the night way easier.”
“Except that will mean a hundred sets of eyes outdoors that could see us,” Evan protested.
Malcolm shook his head. “Let’s say you scent a female in heat. You really gonna look up to the sky to find her? Nope. You’re gonna be scanning all around you. You think the woman next to you is gonna look up if you shift and go full grizzly? Nope. She’s gonna scream and book it. I’ve made sure not to get any avian pheromones, so we don’t worry about flying shifters. Now, come here please,” Malcolm gestured toward a large oak tree in Gray’s yard. Wrapped around the massive trunk was a thick chain.
“What is that?”
“Well, I have to test out my pheromones.”
“But Gray has friends—” Evan looked to me for support.
“We don’t need outsiders knowing every part of our plan,” Gray replied. “Even though they’re my guys … we should only trust anyone outside this circle with limited info. They know their role. I pay them. That’s it. No questions asked.”
I gave Evan an apologetic shrug. “At least, if it makes you horny, once you’re human again, I can—”
Evan clipped the metal restraint around his waist immediately. He turned to Malcolm. “Okay. Go.”
Malcolm stepped forward with his spelled vial full of ‘female shifter in heat’ pheromones. Z reached into the cooler at Malcolm’s feet and grabbed another, a grin on his face as he swirled the liquid back and forth inside it.
“Hey, Z, that’s overkill, don’t you think just one—” Evan didn’t even get to finish his sentence before Malcolm tossed the sparkling pink liquid into the air in front of my stalker.
When Evan shifted with a roar, it was a frightening sight. His skin crackled with lightning and he roared as his clothing ripped and shredded. Hair sprouted all over as his bones morphed and he grew three feet taller.
I scooted closer to Malcolm as Evan wildly strained against the chains that held him. “Um, so, it worked,” I said in a low voice, as Evan swiped at us, his claws looking as long and terrible as daggers.
