Page 4 of Runaway Magic
Silence fell around him, and the senses that had gotten him through many dangerous missions told him he and the boy werealone. Only two heartbeats sounded on the dark street, so they were probably safe.
Though after what he had just seen, anything was possible. And relying onprobably safetended to get people killed. He needed to question the boy somewhere less exposed to find out what the hell Fourteen had gotten himself into.
The boy was slowly pulling himself up, using the car beside him as leverage. “I don’t know if it was just him, but if it was, you’ve bought us a little time. Let’s go.” He turned and made it two steps before collapsing like a broken puppet. As shaky as the kid had been, it came as no surprise to Fourteen that he’d reached the end of his resources.
Steeling himself, he reached down to check the boy’s pulse. When skin brushed skin, he was engulfed with the sense-memory of sunshine on clean cotton. It made him think of bright, blue skies and wispy clouds. Made him think of… Mom?
Before he could cling to the forgotten memory, he was swept into another memory. He was high in the air and felt like he was flying. His small hand reached forward to steady himself, and it met his father’s head. Together they ran down a hill at breakneck speed, but instead of being afraid, Fourteen felt safe and confident. As long as his father was around, nothing bad could happen to him. They were a team.
Peace stole over Fourteen’s body, temporarily rendering him insensate to the outside world.
If an attack came now, he would be defenseless, but in that moment, he didn’t care. Walls that had taken years to forge through unbearable pain and anger had vanished. More suffering than most people saw in a lifetime had gone into building his barriers. And now they were gone.
He snatched his hand away from the boy’s skin, and the sensation disappeared. Hesitantly, he reached out and touchedthe boy’s cheek. It felt like his entire body had been plunged into warm sunshine after being cold for far too long.
It burned.
He wanted more.
Who was this boy?
Chapter 3
The Boy
When The Boy opened his eyes, he was facing an unfamiliar wall. He could see a heavily chipped, ancient porcelain sink with exposed piping underneath that was more rust than it was metal. Normally, waking up in an unfamiliar room would be cause for alarm, but the shabbiness of the room let him know his family didn’t have him. If they had, he either would have woken up in the suffocating luxury of his bedroom back home, or he wouldn’t have woken up at all.
Closing his eyes again, he listened to see if he was alone in the room. He couldn’t be sure, because even though he didn’t hear anything, it felt like he wasn’t alone.
With effort, he managed to get his mind to cough up a memory of the strange man from last night. He’d only gotten fleeting impressions of the man in the gloom and chaos of the night, but the feeling he inspired in The Boy’s gut was concrete.
Safe.
From the day he’d been stuffed into his gilded cage, to the moment he’d found himself running into a gunfight, safety had been as mythical to him as Santa Claus. The fact that his gut had decided to feel safe in the middle of a shootout next to a stranger told him that he needed his head examined.
He wasn’t even sure he knew what the stranger looked like. It had been too dark to know for sure.
He did know one thing. The man had shown no signs of the fiery anger The Boy was used to inspiring in others. Instead of coldly ignoring him or yelling at him or, even worse, attacking him like The Boy had grown accustomed to, the man had actually tried to help him. Twice.
Being close to him in the abandoned house had been intriguing. The gentle buzz of the man’s aura rubbing against his own had intensified his sense of safety, and—exhausted as he’d been—it had been tempting to stay with him.
But he couldn’t; he had needed to get away from the stranger. In his experience, there was no such thing as a safe person. If by some small chance of fate, the stranger was safe, The Boy didn’t want to bring the wrath of his family down on him. As capable as the man seemed, he wasn’t prepared for that. Even with The Boy’s untrained senses, he could tell the man was just a norm.
So The Boy had left him, intending to blend in with the crowd, but his growling stomach overrode his better judgment. Instead of taking a more populated route that would have taken him an hour to traverse, he’d chosen a shortcut that would get him to his last stash of supplies quickly.
His body had been shouting at him, using every available method to convince him it needed the contents of that backpack ASAP, and it had convinced him that as soon as he got a granola bar inside his belly and shoes on his feet, he would be able to think his way to freedom.
The fifty-dollar bill he remembered putting in there wouldn’t hurt his chances of escape either. And, of course, a change of clothes. He needed that the most.
That lapse in judgment had cost him, and now it would cost the stranger, too.
What he didn’t understand was why the stranger had followed him and saved him again. How had the man survived the spell Astin had thrown at him? The insane amount of power his cousin had used should have destroyed the stranger instantly. Instead, the spell had merely hovered around him for a moment like a confused dog, looking for the ball its owner had only pretended to throw.
“I know you’re awake.” The low voice of his savior broke him from his reverie.
The Boy gave up all pretense of sleeping and rolled over to examine his surroundings. The bed under him was a futon kept off the floor by old pallets. When he shoved aside the army-green wool blanket, he noted with relief that he was still fully dressed. So often in the stories he read, for some weird reason, people felt compelled to undress someone after they passed out. It was good to know it wasn’t a common practice in reality.
He wasn’t ready to look at his savior yet—wasn’t prepared to put on the mantle ofboy on the runagain, so he continued to inspect the spartan room to buy some time. It might have been an office or an apartment at some point in the distant past.
