Chapter 12 #2
“What was I supposed to say?” She flung her hands up helplessly. “He’s so… intense. He just looked at me. Even I know that it’s weird how safe I feel with him around, but I don’t actually know how to talk to him about it. So… I got flustered and left.”
They both had it bad. Might as well just lay things out there.
“I promised I would ask you about letting him be more of an official bodyguard. Just until Blake is dealt with and there are no more contracts out on you.”
Her gaze darted to mine, then away. I didn’t need siren magic to know what she was thinking.
“I can’t ask him to do that,” she murmured.
“You didn’t ask. He’s basically insisting.
Which means he’s going to be looking out for you, with or without your permission.
If you don’t want him all up in your business, that’s fine, and I will always support your decisions.
But I promise you he’ll just keep watching your back from a greater distance, where he won’t be nearly as effective. ”
“But why?” Kes demanded plaintively. “Why is he doing this? Why does he even care?”
“I guess you’ll have to ask him?” I suggested tentatively.
She shot me a dirty look. “Fine. Yes. I guess he can be our official bodyguard,” she agreed, sounding somewhere between grumpy and secretly relieved. “For now. But none of this staying out all night on rooftops anymore. He also has to take care of himself, or the deal is off.”
“Great,” I said blandly, “because I think he’ll be moving into the apartment next to ours.”
Her eyes flared wide in something that looked like silent emotional flailing, but all she said was, “Okay?” It was unmistakably a question, just not one with an actual answer.
“Also, I think you should be the one to text him to let him know.”
This time she definitely glared at me, but she also didn’t say no.
“And…” This one might be the most difficult of all. “I think Ethan should come with me today.”
“To work?” Kes didn’t sound optimistic.
“No, I’m off duty until further notice,” I informed her. “I’m investigating a missing teen until we get more leads on…” I swallowed a quick surge of nausea and fear “…on Callum’s condition.”
She put a sympathetic hand on my arm. “They’re going to find an antidote. I know it.”
I nodded. I wanted to believe her, but I also wanted to be ready for whatever might be coming. Angelica had been right about that part.
“Ethan should be safe enough,” she said hesitantly. “He’s just so…”
Purposeless. I worried about that almost as much as his magic. He walked around like an automaton most of the time, as if he had no idea what to do with even the small amount of freedom this new life allowed.
“I’m hoping that a change of scenery will help him feel less aimless. Show him that he’s not living in a cage anymore, and give him something to focus on besides…”
Besides his own endless waiting for a solution that might never come.
“And we need to split everyone up for the move, anyway.”
“Just try not to involve him in anything unpredictable or dangerous,” Kes warned. “I can’t promise what his magic will do if he feels threatened.”
I didn’t always know what my magic would do under threat.
“We’ll be careful,” I promised. I was just planning to go have another chat with Monique, and take a second look around Jeremiah’s room.
Wait to hear about the fingerprints, and try not to check my phone a million times while waiting for Draven or Rath to send news.
“And we can take Logan and drop him off on our way.”
For once, I was grateful that we didn’t own much. Our essentials were easy to pack and would probably take only a few trips to sneak out in the form of a school backpack, overstuffed pillows, a couple of random shipping boxes, and a gym bag.
We moved the living room furniture into one of the bedrooms, watered the plants, and then Kes left with Ari. Kira, Logan, and I locked up a few minutes later—only after checking the hallway for any more irate neighbors—and then headed up to the rooftop for Ethan.
We found him sitting on the floor, his lean body wedged into a corner, chin tilted down, his shaggy dark hair covering most of his face. Just in front of him, a black and white cat skittered back and forth, her ears pinned back and her tail twitching madly as she batted at something on the ground.
It was a beanbag of sorts, made out of the same fabric as Ethan’s ragged, dark shirt. It had a string for a tail and buttons for ears, and it moved despite the fact that no one was touching it—an incredible display of perfectly controlled air magic.
But then Logan accidentally kicked one of the chairs. Ethan’s chin jerked up, the mouse disappeared into one of his pockets, and he stood up.
The cat looked offended and stalked off, tail still twitching.
Ethan wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I never wanted you to feel like you aren’t allowed to use your magic,” I assured him.
His hands slid into his pockets. “You know it never actually goes away,” he mumbled defensively. “Not completely. It just gets quiet enough I don’t have to listen to it anymore.”
Concerning, but there was nothing I could do about it now. Nothing but give him something else to focus on instead.
“I’ve got something I was hoping you could help me with.”
His head tilted, his pose suddenly alert and slightly wary. “Like what?”
I hesitated. I hadn’t thought about whether this case might trigger his own bad memories. Even now, I knew so little about what his life had been like before we met in the fae prison.
“You don’t have to,” I added. “I understand if it feels too risky. But a human boy is missing, and… it looks like magic was involved. I thought you might be up for joining the search.”
His chin came up so fast, I almost took a step back. His hair parted, and I saw his eyes gleaming behind the strands—dark and intense, glimmering with hints of power. “Why would you trust me with that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
He regarded me intently, as if wondering what I was hoping to gain. As if he could somehow see through me and decipher my motives. Read my mind. Determine my endgame.
“Everyone wants to use me,” he said softly. “Or control me. Keep me safe. Keep others safe from me. It’s always about the magic, whether they need it or fear it. So what is it you want?”
He’d been exploited for so long, he wasn’t yet ready to believe that we wouldn’t do the same, and I didn’t blame him. We were going to have to show him our intentions, one day at a time.
“I want you to have the chance to choose a life for yourself,” I told him.
“Now we both know that won’t be fully possible until we find a solution for controlling your magic.
I hate it, I know you hate it, but it’s reality and we can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist. But in the meantime, I want you to have choices, even if they’re small ones.
I want you to see what the world can be like when we have family who actually gives a crap.
And I want you to know what it feels like to have a purpose.
Even if it’s something small.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets and shrugged.
“I know I don’t have a lot to offer you right now.
We’re still being hunted, most of the courts are pissed at me, and I was in the middle of an incident at work last night that shut the whole place down. ”
He wasn’t giving me much of a reaction, but I could tell he was still listening, so I kept going.
“But we also have people who care about us. We have a place to live, and I have a boss who didn’t fire me because he knew the incident wasn’t my fault. And it’s those things I want you to know you’re a part of.”
“All that and you’re going to go looking for some dumb kid?” he demanded. “Why?”
“Because that kid doesn’t have anyone else. His mom loves him, but she’s human. She can’t do anything about this magical world we live in. But we… we can.”
Perhaps better than anyone else, because we’d been on both sides of that divide.
“No one came looking for me,” Ethan said savagely. “Why should I care?”
“You don’t have to care,” I said calmly. “And I’m not going to judge you if you decide you don’t want to get involved.”
“I would,” Logan muttered under his breath. “I want to help, but they never let me do anything.”
I threw him a side-eye. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I let you do the dishes almost every night.”
His answering eye roll was a truly spectacular example of its kind, so I turned back to Ethan.
“No matter what you decide, we do need to leave soon. We’re moving out so Faris can fix the water damage, but we’re trying to keep it on the down low to avoid the neighbors finding out.”
If the woman across the hall got wind of it now—right after she’d accused us of abducting her daughter—she would probably start screeching again about how guilty we were.
“Are you also going to be looking for Tabitha?” Ethan asked in an oddly casual tone. “Or does your compassion only go so far?”
“Who’s Tabitha?”
“The girl across the hall?” Logan supplied, in a tone that suggested I was unbelievably dumb for not knowing that. “She’s a little older than me. But what happened to her?”
“She’s missing too,” I admitted. “Hey, I thought you said you only know like one person outside the family.”
He suddenly seemed fascinated by the toes of his shoes. “I don’t, like, know her know her. But I’ve seen her. We’ve talked a few times.”
Huh. Was that a blush starting to appear?
“How do you know she’s missing?”
“Her mom thinks we had something to do with her disappearance,” I admitted.
Logan’s brows lowered, and I could tell he was starting to be genuinely worried. “How long has she been gone?”
“Since last night. But her mom didn’t hear or see anything out of the ordinary. She was in her room, and then she was just gone this morning.”
Just like Jeremiah.
Playing online games…
Monique had mentioned Jeremiah spending all his time online, chatting with friends and playing games.
It seemed so unlikely that these two cases could be connected, and yet, what if they were?
I couldn’t sit here and claim I cared about human exploitation if I was only willing to help one and not the other.
But how could I find out more about Tabitha without being forced to talk to her mom again?
“Logan, do you know anything about what kind of online games she might have been playing?”
His gaze dropped, and I could have sworn he looked a little guilty.
“I might.”
“I’m not going to be mad,” I reassured him. “I just want to figure out if there’s any way we might be able to help her. Tabitha’s mom said she’d been playing online games and talking about magic.”
“There’s a website,” he confessed. “It’s also an app, and I have it on my tablet.
” He cast me a furtive sideways glance. “Gio told me about it, and Kes okayed it. There’s lots of different games.
Some are scary, but some are just kiddie games.
We get on and play with each other. I’m safe, and I don’t use my real name or anything. ”
“Did you ever play with Tabitha?”
He shook his head. “I wanted to ask her for her username, but…” He shrugged.
Okay. It still seemed unlikely, but we couldn’t overlook the possibility that the two missing kids were connected just because it seemed farfetched.
“Then I want you to come with me too,” I told Logan. “I need to find out whether the missing boy had any connection to this same gaming website.”
He bounced up onto his toes and punched the air. “Yes!” Then he settled back down, shoved his hands in his pockets, and shot Ethan a bit of a side-eye. “You coming or not?” he challenged.
“I’ll come,” Ethan agreed, with an annoyed look that made him appear little older than Logan. “But only so I don’t have to walk.”