“How do you think?” Rachel said, glaring at him. “You’re lucky I’m the forgiving type. In that I don’t forgive you at all, but I’ll still come after you and keep your sorry behind alive.” She pulled a bag off of her shoulder and dropped it at Fort’s feet.

The book of Summoning fell out, with his note on top.

“But… I haven’t been gone that long,” he said, still not believing this. “How did you find my note that quickly?”

“Oh, Rachel’s been keeping an eye on you,” Jia said. “She’s been using—”

“Shh!” Rachel shushed, her eyes wide. “That’s not important!”

Jia snorted, then pushed past Rachel. “Don’t listen to her, she’s all embarrassed about this. She learned the first telepathy magic spell in the book of Mind magic, Detect Mind, when you brought the books to her. Basically she’s had it going since that night, watching over you, making sure you didn’t do anything crazy without us along.”

“You were watching me?” Fort asked, both shocked and offended.

“I couldn’t see anything!” Rachel said, and Fort could tell she was blushing a bit, even in the light of her fireball. “It just told me where you were. Or it did, until you started wearing that amulet. Where’d you even find that? I told Cyrus to make you get rid of it.”

That was what Cyrus had been trying to tell him? “One of the TDA agents made me put it on,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. I’ve been wearing it the whole time I was here. You couldn’t have known.”

“You took it off for a minute or so,” Jia pointed out, over Rachel’s shushing her. “That was the first time we saw you leave the school since you went to New York, so we knew you’d mastered teleportation. It took a little while to find out how to get to you—”

“Basically they came looking for you in our room, hoping to find clues, and I told them where you practiced,” Gabriel said. Fort gave him a betrayed look, but Gabriel shrugged it off. “Hey, you might be protecting them, but I’m watching out for you, roomie. You’re not going to make me feel even an ounce bad about it, so don’t bother.”

“How annoying is teleportation, by the way?” Rachel said, rolling her eyes. “I knew you were below the old school, where you just left a dimensional portal wide open for anyone to walk right through, but because I’d never been down here, I had to teleport us all up to the base above, then tunnel down here using Destruction magic. That’s why we took so long.”