Page 60 of Runaway Magic
“There’s a time and a place, Jack.” The unnamed man’s voice came from inside the blue sphere. “Let’s just give him a minute to calm down, okay?”
Fourteen’s heartbeat was so rapid it was hard for him to breathe. Calming down sounded like a good idea, but he couldn’t figure out how to accomplish it. If he could, he probably wouldn’t have tried to kill all three of these guys the second they arrived.
Fourteen was better than this. He wouldn’t have lived as long as he had if he couldn’t think under pressure. He hadn’t been thinking at all just now. Only reacting.
Fucking hell.
He had to get his shit together now, otherwise he was going to get taken out by a handful of asshole witches.
For lack of a better thing to do, he crouched down on the ground, a position that allowed him to rest and prepare to wreak maximum damage on all sides. He needed to get a handle on his body. If he could calm it down, he could regain control.
He closed his eyes. He’d still be able to hear the witches if they tried anything.
For the count of one hundred and thirty breaths, Fourteen listened to his heart race. His captors stayed silent, allowing him the illusion of solitude. When his heartbeat slowed, he saw past the bloodlust burning in his mind. It allowed him to start thinking again.
Fourteen’s first thought was that this fight wasn’t anything like his earlier battles with witches. From the moment the Blaikes arrived on the scene, they’d done nothing but throw spells, heedless of innocent bystanders. This skirmish, while brief, was nearly one-sided.
Now that Fourteen wasn’t being controlled by the mess inside his head, he could see the possibility that the people he was currently up against might not be part of the Blaike family.
Everything inside of him stopped. His stomach lurched as he realized he might have just attacked innocent people. It didn’t matter to him that they could easily take care of themselves. He wondered what Cym would think of him.
Without opening his eyes, he asked, “Are you Blaikes?”
An audible sigh of relief came from his left and the unnamed man said, “No, we’re guardians, actually. We were brought here by a blanket spell. We had one set up over the city to let us know if another magical battle occurred. We almost didn’t come, you know.” Fourteen could hear amusement in the man’s voice. “The spell claimed that a battle was both happening and not happening at the same time. I’m guessing that had something to do with you.”
“Guardians.” Fourteen opened his eyes. “That means nothing to me.” Which was a lie. He remembered Cym saying something about the Guard shortly after he met him. It wasn’t a stretch to assume the guardians were connected to it in some way, but he preferred to play dumb. It was his favorite method for gathering information from a potential hostile.
The blue shield went transparent, revealing the face of the man he’d tried to murder in cold blood moments earlier. Instead of anger, Fourteen saw calm in his eyes.
The man continued, saying, “We’re members of the Guard, an organization that oversees the magical community. Guardians are like peacekeepers. We try to keep everyone, including norms like yourself—” His speech was interrupted by a snort from the rainbow sphere.
The sphere became transparent as Jack said, “If you think this guy is a norm, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“I just meant that he has no inner magic. Obviously there is something different about him, er, you.” The man turned his attention back to Fourteen. “Forgive my rudeness, I’m usually better at this sort of thing. The past twenty-four hours have been… especially challenging. I’m Marshall, by the way.”
The third sphere became transparent as well, but the woman inside stayed silent, her face radiating a calm presence similar to Marshall’s.
Fourteen didn’t know what to think of these people. He’d done everything in his power to kill them. Up til now, that had meant the target died, sometimes horribly. His captors should be raging at him, torturing him, or even attempting to kill him, but instead he was getting treated like a potential ally. Like a person.
It was… weird.
Fourteen rolled his aching shoulder and wondered if they would feel threatened if he reached into his pocket for some aspirin. Deciding not to chance it, he tucked the pain away behind a door in his mind.
“Peacekeeper Marshall, huh?”
“Guardian Marshall, actually, but yeah. We’re the good guys.”
“You realize that’s something a bad guy would say, right?” Fourteen should know.
“Ye-es-ss,” Marshall drew the word out into far more syllables than the word should be capable of, “but, for right now, let’s say for the sake of argument we aren’t. On the off chance that we are all on the same side, it couldn’t hurt us all to talk for a moment, can it?”
“Being trapped doesn’t make me feel very chatty,” he said pointedly.
“And having someone try to fill me with holes doesn’t make me feel very chatty, either.” The woman—Adelle, he thought he’d heard her called at the beginning of their fight—was looking down at him with reproach.
Marshall gave her a hard look and said, “Can we call a truce for five minutes? You promise not to attack us, and we’ll let you out. Sound fair?”
Fourteen had broken promises before because, until now, they had meant nothing to him. Only a man could be held accountable for his actions; he had been merely a tool.
