Infatuate by Aimee Agresti

the underworld. There was nothing simple about that; they would fight to the death—and they certainly had earlier this year—but I could do it.
    “Okay, smile on three. One, two, three!” I called out in my perkiest voice, which sounded so unnatural to my own ears, and snapped the shot. I reviewed it fast. Another good one. “Thanks!” I returned to my seat beside Lance.
    “So you got some good shots?” he asked, knowingly.
    “Yeah, all set,” I answered, tucking my camera in my bag. I set it back on the empty chair beside me. I was saving a seat for Sabine, who had texted that she was just a block away. She had insisted on going home after tutoring to change before dinner. Emma, it seemed, had paid her the ultimate compliment. “Are you sure you’re not southern?” the redhead had asked in a delicate drawl when she had broken off from our group to head home. Sabine, flattered, had blushed.
    Dante sat across from me, beside Max, and the two of them seemed completely lost in their own world, talking and laughing like old friends. You never would’ve guessed they’d met only last week. The other guys had clustered at the half of the table near Connor.
    “So,” I said to Lance, “anything new next door?”
    He had already drained his Diet Coke and was crunching on pieces of ice, thinking. “Same old. The whole thing is a mess,” he said flatly, adjusting his glasses.
    “The foyer was bad enough.”
    “The rest is much worse. Parts of it were burned. Other parts are just these rotted beams. It’s like an x-ray of a building. You can see in between the different floors, hollow spots everywhere.”
    “Could you tell at all if anyone had, um, been upstairs?” I whispered, my fingers dancing over my necklace.
    “I don’t really know. There sort of isn’t an upstairs right now.” He wasn’t looking straight at me, the way spies meeting up in movies rarely look at each other but talk into that space in front of them with their eyes scanning from side to side. “The place is so structurally unsound that we have to work our way up with the restoration. But I’ll get up there soon, one way or another.”
    Tuxedo-clad waiters appeared bearing overflowing baskets of bread. Dante excused himself to go to the men’s room. Lance and I traded quick glances and I rose from my seat and slipped away without a word. I found Dante fooling with his cell phone outside the restrooms, at the end of a dim hallway. He looked up at the sound of my footsteps approaching, shoving the phone back in his pocket and pulling out a tiny tin.
    “I can’t help but feel like we’re wasting this,” I whispered as I got closer.
    “I’ll figure something out, I swear. But for now, I just think it’s the best thing to do.” I knew he was right, but I lived in fear of when those precious antidotes would run out. We had been taking them daily since the first night.
    “For now, here,” he said. I reached in to pick out a leaf, thin as a moth’s wing, and let it dissolve on my tongue.
    Lance appeared at the end of the hallway, as expected, striding toward us. Dante offered the tin to Lance too. But just as he reached in to take a tiny leaf, a door opened, the light suddenly shining on us, and Sabine appeared behind him.
    “Hey, guys!” she greeted us. “So here’s the real party!” Lance quickly popped the leaf into his mouth. “Did I miss anything? Oooh, are those mints? Can I snag one?”
    Dante snapped the tin shut. “That was my last one, sorry,” he said with an easy smile. I, on the other hand, felt completely rattled. “See you in there,” he pointed in the direction of the dining room. “I’m starved!” And with that he slipped away to rejoin the group.
    “You’re just in time for dinner,” I said, trying to play it cool. “Didn’t miss a thing.”
    “I’ll catch up with you,” Lance said, continuing on to the men’s room.
    “I just had to put myself together. I feel so blah from the long day in the