“I don’t care what people like,” I retort. I give his sternum a poke.
Again, he sighs. “Come on. We’re wasting time here.”
I drop my hand. “Fine. Truce. Although I would have enjoyed turning you into something small and squishable.” I squint around the dim room. “What do we know about the robbery?”
“The cash box is gone,” Byron says. “And the movies.”
“Can’t imagine why they’d want to steal Agent Zero IV,” I quip. “That movie sucked.”
Byron ignores me. “I’ve pulled some fingerprints from the counter, and it seems like one of the perps left his hat.” He points to a filthy brown knit cap. “I haven’t checked the storeroom or the crawl space or the—”
“I get it,” I say. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
Part of the problem is that we need more good cops in the City. Byron is a natural, but there are too many officers who pledged allegiance to the New Order or General Bloom (or both), and it’s tough to trust them. But the Council is training new forces every day. They know we need to stop the current crime wave. If we don’t, say the newspapers, we risk the City falling into irreversible chaos.
“Do you think it’s the Family?” I ask.
Byron shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
He hands me a spare flashlight and we search the main theater and the bathrooms. There’s nothing but old ticket stubs and more spilled popcorn.
Then we walk back toward the storeroom—and we see the foot.
I stop short, my breath catching in my throat. I desperately want to believe that we’ll turn the corner and find some lazy kid asleep on the job.
But I’d have to be pretty stupid to think that, and I am not stupid.
Byron strides forward and rounds the corner, and reluctantly I follow him. On the floor is a girl, probably fifteen or sixteen. Her arms are covered in lacerations, and her neck is bent at a strange angle. She’s lying halfway through the door of the storeroom. The stack of napkins she’d gone back to get is scattered around her. Many are red with her blood.
I feel like I’m going to be sick. I grab Byron’s arm to steady myself.
“DOA,” he says softly, almost to himself.
“They could have just shut the door,” I cry. “Locked her in so she couldn’t call for help. They didn’t need to kill her.”
Byron says nothing. He points to the graffiti on the wall. The letters are a dark, violent purple, and almost as big as he is. “No, they didn’t need to kill her,” he finally says. “But they wanted to.”
Take what you want, the spray-painted letters read. It belongs to you—the Family.
A chill shivers up my spine. “It’s one thing to take money—but the life of an innocent girl? Why?” I whisper.
Byron’s tone is matter-of-fact. “To provoke terror,” he says.
Two gruesome deaths in one day, and a heinous message scrawled for everyone to see. My heart is pounding hard in my chest, and adrenaline sparks in my limbs.
“Well, it’s working.”
Chapter 5
Darrius
THE LITTLE BOY expertly juggles a soccer ball with his knees: sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy times without letting it touch the ground once. But his black eyes keep darting over to the Academy Theater. He’s waiting for the girl to come out.
Not the one who worked there—she’s never coming out again.
Well, not alive anyway, he thinks, unable to suppress a snicker.
Sure, it was too bad she had to die. She’d seemed nice, and she wore such pretty dresses, and she’d begged so fervently for her life. But orders were orders, and the Family always followed their orders.
Orders, of course, which he had given to them.
No, the boy is waiting to see the other girl. Wisteria Allgood: the one with the name of a flower and the heat of a bonfire. The one they call witch.
He’s getting impatient, though. He kicks at his stupid ball and it turns, instantly, to dust. It’s time to shift things around a little bit. His outline shivers, then fades.
A moment later, there’s no boy. Instead there’s a homeless woman, dressed head to toe in filthy rags. She shuffles back and forth in front of the theater, muttering to herself. She pulls at her long, rank hair. She’s no more patient than the boy.
“Such incompetence,” she grunts through a nearly toothless mouth. She could tell that smarmy police investigator anything he needed to know, if he’d only step outside. And then she could see the fire girl, too. She’d like to whisper things into that pale, delicate ear.
But… perhaps not in this form. The old woman’s smell might be a bit of a turnoff.
Around her, a crowd has begun to gather. People are nervous, and rumors swirl in the air. “It was just kids, breaking windows,” says someone. “No,” says someone else. “It was the Family.”
Bingo! she thinks gleefully.
Then she scoots toward the back of the crowd, and they give her a wide berth—she really does stink—then she vanishes in a tiny burst of light.
When she reappears, in her true form, it’s as a handsome young man with cold, pitiless golden eyes. He is Darrius Z: the father, so to speak, of the Family.
He sidles up behind a pretty girl with a long gold braid. Smooth and light as air, his hand slips into her purse and withdraws her wallet. He grazes her hip with his fingers. “Finders keepers,” he whispers.
Then he’s gone, and the girl has a smile on her face.
Yes, Darrius can make being robbed feel nice.
He straightens his broad shoulders, and muscles ripple down his long, lean torso. He looks like an athlete, but games don’t interest him, unless the consequences are life-and-death.
Such are the games he plans on playing with Wisteria, once they finally meet.
Chapter 6
Wisty
IT’S A TOTAL mosh pit of people outside the Academy, except that no one’s dancing: they’re just milling around like a bunch of frightened sheep. They want to know what happened, why the police have cordoned off the theater.
They don’t know about the dead girl yet. When they do, things are going to get a lot nastier. These people think the new government’s too young, too inexperienced, and too soft on crime—and they’re going to want to take their fear and frustration out on someone.
Personally, I think Byron’s as good a target as any. So, it’s time for yours truly to split.
I give him a quick pat on the shoulder and wave. “Sayonara, Swain,” I say. “Make some new friends, why don’t ya?”
His eyes flash nervously, but he’s too proud to ask me to stay.
The only problem with my quick exit, though? My motorcycle is gone.
That’s right: gone.
I shove my way through the throngs in the street, scanning madly in all directions for a glimpse of it. I strain to hear the roar of its engine. My fingers begin to tingle in fiery anticipation—I’m probably about to erupt in flames of rage—but then, from far away, I hear the sound of a horn. My bike’s horn.
Instantly I’m sprinting toward the sound, down a narrow alley lined with trinket shops and toy boutiques, most of them still shuttered. My feet slam on the old cobblestones as I dodge rain barrels and trash cans and skinny stray cats.
I know the thief can’t be too far away. This part of the City is old and labyrinthine, full of blind alleys and pathways that suddenly get so narrow only a street rat could slip through. I push myself to go faster, and my lungs scream in pain.
When I race around the next corner, nearly losing my footing on a pile of gravel, I see my motorcycle in the lane ahead. On top of it is a hunched, unfamiliar figure in black.
As the bike slows to navigate around a crater in the road—an ugly reminder of The One’s bombing campaign—the driver wobbles and the engine almost stalls. I grit my teeth as I speed up.
If that thief wrecks my motorcycle, today is his LAST day on earth.
“Police business!” I shout,
just in case anyone’s watching as I leap onto an old dirt bike parked in front of a grocery store. I fire an ignition spark from the tip of my finger straight into the engine. The bike coughs, rattles, and then sputters to life. I yank the throttle back and peel out, tires screeching.
By now the thief’s made it to open ground, as the buildings give way to the wide streets and concrete lots of the old industrial side of town. Steering with one hand, I make a fireball with the other. It shoots into the sky and arcs down, exploding just ahead of the thief. He swerves, nearly losing control again.
Okay, that was a bad idea. While I wouldn’t mind seeing him smash his face into a brick wall, I want my bike back unscathed. I realize I’m going to have to get ahead of him—and cut him off.
Up ahead the road splits, and I follow the thief through the high stone gates of a cemetery. I swerve off the road and tear over the grass, dodging angel statues, obelisks, and bunches of fake flowers. I’m gaining on the thief, but the dirt bike’s rattling like its wheels are going to fall off, and my headlamp’s not working.
If you’ve ever wanted to ride a motorcycle fast and blind, here’s some advice: don’t.
I send another jolt of magic into the engine. The bike shudders, then shoots forward like a rocket. I brake and pull a hard right, skidding to a stop in the road—
To see the thief barreling toward me.
He’s not going to stop.
I raise my hands over my head, and lightning shoots out in crackling stars. A ball of fire condenses in front of me. It grows lighter, brighter, until it blazes so hot he’s got to feel like he’s driving into the sun.
At the last possible moment, he spins out. My bike tilts—it’s falling—it’s going to crash—
Quickly I use my powers to right it, but I let the thief land hard. Then I lower my incandescent hands.
I look closer at the dark form crumpled on the ground. Holy M: the thief is a girl. “Are you insane?” I yell.
Her eyes spark dangerously as she stands up. “Take what you want,” she intones. “It belongs to you.”
I see the glint of a knife in her hand, but she could have a cannon for all I care. “Yeah, I’ve heard your stupid motto before,” I spit. “And since this does belong to me, I’ll be taking it.”
She cocks her arm and flings the knife. The blade grazes my cheek, and I feel a gash open up. If she does something like that again, I’m going to charbroil her like a shish kebab.
And sure enough, she’s whipped out another little dagger. I feint left, then whirl to face her. My flames burn higher. Hotter.
She begins to cower in the light. I can see the tattoo on her wrist in sharp relief: the cursive Fs circling her wrist like a daisy chain, or like handcuffs. F, for Family.
But suddenly I see her tense, then charge. Some people never learn!
I lob a fireball at her. It explodes right at her chest, and she’s beating at her shirt and screaming like she’s been struck by a comet. It takes her a minute to realize that there was no heat, no burn. It was only light: a trick.
She collapses in sobs on the ground.
“Don’t steal. And especially not from a witch,” I hiss, and then I sling my leg over the back of my motorcycle and roar away into the dark.
Chapter 7
Whit
JANINE IS YANKING me down the street toward the Government Towers, where the Council is holding some kind of special nighttime session. “Hurry up, Whit,” she’s saying. “We’re going to be late.”
“I’d rather play spin the bottle with the Lost Ones than go to a Council meeting right now,” I grumble. “Or give a bunch of zombie wolves a flea bath.”
Janine laughs. “It’s not going to be that bad.”
“So you say.” I don’t care what the meeting’s about. All I can think about is what happened this morning at the hospital. My mind swirls with brutal, heartbreaking images. Every time I blink, I see Pearl again: gasping, bleeding out, dying.
What if Wisty was wrong? What if someone else—like a doctor instead of a wizard—could have saved her?
I’ll never know the answer to that question, and I feel like it’s going to haunt me until the day I die.
“Earth to Whit,” Janine says, interrupting my dark thoughts. “I don’t think you’ve heard a word I said.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close, breathing in the sweet, lilac scent of her hair. “What were you saying?”
She smiles sadly. “You’re thinking about Pearl, aren’t you?”
“I can’t stop,” I admit. “What if using magic was the wrong choice?”
Janine leans her head against my chest. “You can’t think that way,” she says. “You did what you believed was right.” Then she gazes up at me, her green eyes serious. “And just in case you have any doubts, I think it was right, too.”
I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I had no idea how much I needed to hear those words.
We enter the meeting room hand in hand. The benches are full of Council members and spectators, all whispering excitedly. The air is hot and close.
A moment later, the gavel raps against the marble podium, and all eyes turn to our new Speaker, seventeen-year-old Terrence Rino. He’s small and pale—he sort of looks like a grubworm, if you ask me—but his power of speech is already legendary.
“Good evening, citizens,” Terrence says. He brushes a piece of lank blond hair away from his brow. “Thank you for coming out on this fine evening. I realize the hour is late, but I have an extremely important announcement.” He pauses and lets his eyes slowly scan the room. He’s purposely building the suspense.
Sure enough, everyone leans forward in their seats. They’re desperate to know what he has to say, and pretty soon they’re going to start panting for it like dogs do for scraps.
“Like a phoenix, our new Council rose from the ashes of old despotic powers. Together we began to rebuild,” Terrence says. “And now, in these days of growing turmoil, we must recommit to our common cause and our fundamental equality.”
Everyone’s nodding, and a few people clap. Yes, we’re united! But Terrence is far from done.
“Seared by the memory of all we have lost, we know too well the cost of unchecked powers,” he cries. “It is time to take steps we consider both necessary and legitimate to preserve peace and order. We must all be equal.”
Equality’s great—so why are the hairs rising on the back of my neck? Something is coming, and I’m not going to like it.
“Which is why I have the pleasure of announcing the development of a new, cutting-edge scientific process.” Terrence pauses dramatically. “We call it,” he finally says, “Excision.”
Behind him, a short kid in an argyle sweater nods approvingly. But no one else reacts, because they have no idea what he’s talking about.
“It is a precise and methodical process whereby unnatural powers are extracted from their host,” Terrence declares. He looks around the room expectantly.
It takes everyone—including me—a minute to realize what he means. He’s talking about submission.
I feel my stomach lurch as the room erupts. Suddenly everyone’s jabbering, calling out, demanding more information. Me, though, I’m stunned into silence.
I guess I had hoped that submission was just a rumor. But it’s a reality. And the Council wants us to do it.
“We have seen the damage that magic can do,” Terrence cries. “And is doing this very minute, as the Family and its anonymous wizard leader threaten the safety of our fair City.” Terrence is flushed now. He’s loving his moment in the spotlight. “Magic, my fellow citizens, too often leads to madness and thirst for power. It is time to minimize its risks.”
I swear I’m having déjà vu. Terrence sounds like General Bloom did, back when he declared acts of magic forbidden and made everyone with powers register them with the Council.
Janine reaches for my hand. Her fingers seem small and cold. Little Sarah Thomp
son shoots me a worried glance from across the room. So does her brother, Tommy. These kids can levitate a little, and their cousin Hank can shape-shift. But he can only ever become a dog, and who wants to go around peeing on tree trunks and sniffing strangers’ butts? What kind of threat do these kids pose?
Of course, not all of us are harmless. My sister, Wisty, for example. But she uses her powers for good.
Mostly.
“You know the phrase—power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Terrence shouts. “It is time for us all to be equal, and to build our community on traditional human strengths.”
The room is in an uproar, and I feel like my head’s going to explode. Then the door gets flung open, and a bright blaze of light nearly blinds us all. The flames advance into the Council chamber, and people start to panic, tripping over one another to get out of the way.
Then, from inside the light, comes a familiar voice.
“So,” Wisty calls out, “what’d I miss?”
Chapter 8
Wisty
I HAVE A SUPERGOOD EXCUSE for being late (hello, grand theft motorcycle), so I don’t know why Terrence Rino is looking at me like I’m some dead piece of rodent flesh that a stray cat dragged in.
I’m wearing a clean dress and a pair of cute sling-back shoes—not to mention a little spritz of perfume so I don’t smell like gasoline and singed thief. And hey, I used to be on this Council, so I think I deserve a slightly warmer welcome at its tedious meeting.
“Take a seat,” commands the secretary, a girl with weird, unflattering purple glasses.
My flames (little ones—just decorative, really) sizzle out, and I slide into a seat next to Whit and Janine. Whit glances over at my cheek with an alarmed look on his face.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I say, wiping away a smear of blood. “Just looks bad. It doesn’t actually hurt.”