“Whatever. And he’s not a freak show.” I glanced around to make sure we were alone. “He’s a werewolf.”

“Close enough. The point is, he’d be your werewolf if you let him.”

It was the “letting him” that was the hard part. Jason Shepherd, the resident werewolf of Enclave Three, was definitely interested. He was sixteen years old and, like Michael Garcia, another Adept with a massive crush on Scout, was a student at Montclare Academy, St. Sophia’s brother school. I’d learned Jason had been born in Naperville, a suburb west of Chicago, listened to whatever music happened to be on the radio at the time, and was a devoted White Sox fan. He didn’t like football and loved pepperoni pizza. And, of course, there was the werewolf thing.

I guess I was interested back, but spending nights fighting evil didn’t exactly make it easy to get to know a boy.

“It’s too soon,” I told her, trying to make my voice sound as casual as possible.

“Besides, you’re the one who warned me away from him.”

“I did do that,” she quietly said. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.” Problem was,

she wouldn’t tell me why she thought that might happen. She kept saying I needed to hear it from him, and that wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that made a girl feel comfortable about a boy.

“There’s always something,” I whispered. As if on cue, a grim-looking cloud passed over the sun, a dark streak in the sky that sang of impending rain. The breeze blew colder, raising goose bumps on my arms.

Scout and I exchanged a glance. “Inside?” I asked.

She nodded, then pointed at her shoes. “The glue’s not waterproof.”

Decision made, we gathered up our books and walked back across the campus’s side lawn and around to the main building. The school—a former convent —was dark and gothic-looking, a weird contrast to the rest of the glass-and-steel architecture in this part of downtown Chicago.