Seven (Heirs of the Dark #1)

Prologue

The man watched them from the window.

No curtain, just a thin film of dust on warped glass, catching the late afternoon light and cutting it into neat quadrilaterals across the vinyl floor.

Outside were seven children. Five running in an amoeba, shrieking, hurling gobs of mud from the pit at the edge of the yard. One girl clung to the rusted swing set. Bare toes dug trenches under the seat as if she could dig to somewhere better.

The last, the smallest, knelt in the dirt a dozen feet from the pack, head down, intent on something no one else could see.

The man kept his hands in the pockets of his coat. He monitored the children for a while without asking questions. This wasn't his first rodeo, and what he'd learned from his past attempts to pick the right subject was to observe their behavior instead of listening to the group home staff members.

The children pretended not to notice him, but every so often the man caught the flick of their eyes.

The only one who didn't look up was the small boy in the dirt.

He had a cast on his right arm. It was the kind done in an understaffed ER—thick, dingy white, lumpy.

His fingers poked out the end, muddy and scabbed.

The rest of him was a scaled-down skeleton.

Limbs too long, ribs mapped under skin, denim shorts that had to be folded twice at the waistband, T-shirt bearing the faded logo of a motorbike company.

On the front, was a cartoon bird in a pit-crew helmet, wings spread.

The boy drew in the dirt with a stick.

The man watched his technique. Left hand gripped the tool clumsily, tip worn to a precise graphite point.

Every stroke was methodical, slow, planned.

He wasn't doodling for attention. The lines radiated outward from his knees.

He wasn't drawing people or monsters or rockets.

He was drawing wings. Huge, arched, intricate things that stretched far past his body.

A shadow fell over the pattern. It was one of the other boys, older by at least a couple of years, broad-backed and feral in the way boys in the system became when forced into close quarters with too little food and too much surveillance.

He planted his worn-out Reebok on the center of the wings, grinding the heel. Waited for a response.

The man expected tears or a scream. Instead, the small boy pivoted, planted his good hand in the dirt, and swung his cast up at the older boy's face.

The blow missed, but it was close, and the intent was surgical.

The big kid flinched, staggered, but did not retreat.

His chest puffed. The two of them locked in a silent snarl.

"Leave me alone or I'll break your jaw," the small boy said, voice flat but somehow deadly.

The older boy weighed the options, then glanced to the window.

The man gave no sign. The older boy spat to the side and stalked off, leaving a crumbled print in the center of the wings.

The small boy looked at the ruined drawing for a full ten seconds. Then, with his good hand, he raked the lines smooth, erased all trace of it. Again, he did not look up.

Behind the man, a throat cleared. "We do the best we can to keep them in line," the woman said.

The man turned.

The counselor had dressed for the meeting in her most suitable approximation of Sunday best—blue skirt, white blouse, pale pink lipstick with a hairline crack through the center.

The shoes were orthopedic, the smile careful.

He clocked her in one glance—her own damage, stitched together, the need to keep everyone functional and alive warring with a bone-deep exhaustion.

"How old is he?" The man jerked his chin toward the small boy.

"Seven," the woman supplied. "Though he reads and writes at—" she paused, searched for the polite phrasing, "a much higher level. You saw his art?"

"I did." The man shifted his gaze back to the window. The boy stood up and surveyed his artwork. "How long has he been here?"

"Four months. Intake form says six, but—" another half-second recalibration, "—the first two, he spent mostly in the hospital. He was malnourished when they found him. Severely. Beaten too. The arm was re-broken, so the cast is new. We haven't had any luck finding him a good foster home."

The man watched the way the small boy kept his right side facing the yard, the cast angled forward like a shield. Not fear, he thought. Readiness.

"What happened to his family?"

The counselor hesitated longer this time. "Both parents died last year…in an accident. Father…spent some time in prison. I believe there was a sibling, but we don't know what happened—"

The man waited and watched, allowing the silence to elongate.

He could see it now, the mechanical way the boy's eyes scanned, catalogued, prioritized.

Seven years old. Fragile but unyielding.

Most would have overlooked him—too small, too damaged.

But the visitor saw the advantages. Hard to break something already so fractured.

"Do the other children like him?" he asked.

The counselor gave a small, pinched smile. "You saw it. They're scared of him. He doesn't bluff. Last month, a much bigger boy tried to lock him in the crawl space. The boy put a pencil through his hand."

She glanced at the visitor's face for a reaction. She'd given up on the boy too. Otherwise she wouldn't have mentioned the pencil debacle.

The visitor stepped away from the window. He checked the time on his watch. Twenty-four minutes since he'd entered. He thought of the wings, how the boy had protected them without hesitation. Not the act of a child who believed in rescue.

"He's perfect," the man said. He looked back at the counselor, let the words hang. "I'll take him with me."

The woman's eyes widened, flickered with something close to alarm, but she recovered. "You mean you'd like to foster him?"

"I'd like to adopt him," the man corrected her.