“It’s letting me through!”
“Like that’s agoodthing?”Sophie said.“It’s pissed off now!”
“Maybe.But we gotta check it out, right?”Noah asked, and then disappeared through the surface of the wall—taking the hand I still had on his shoulder along with him.
The ward didn’t shock me, either, maybe because I was holding onto somebody it liked.Or maybe for another reason, I thought, as I stumbled through after him.And found myself in what could only be described as a den.
It wasn’t much nicer than the area outside, except for not having signs of scorching, and the ceiling was still up.But there were blankets, ratty sleeping bags, and an old army cot scattered around, making up half a dozen beds.Along with enough take-out containers to constitute a fire hazard.
But I barely noticed because of the scent.It was pure pack, with a bunch of different signatures threaded through it, dozens and dozens of them, going back months.And one I recognized, overlaying all the others.
Jace had been here recently, but hadn’t stayed.
Maybe because of that, I thought, staring at the blood red letters dripping down the wall, their color originating from a can of spray paint still lying on the floor underneath: Don’t Stay, Not Safe.And then, under that, in all caps: RUN.
And it seemed that the people here had taken their own advice.They’d left their stuff, including the bedding, which looked to be fine, if a little odorous.But nothing a trip to a laundromat couldn’t have fixed.
“They bugged out fast,” I said, warding my hand and crouching down to look through one of the sleeping bags.And finding only a dirty sock.
“Something spooked them,” Noah agreed.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?”I asked because he wasn’t looking surprised.
“Yeah, there are loads of these kinds of places around, only they’re normally hidden, not plastered with an ad on the door.”
“These places?”
“Hideaways.Usually near where a lot of boys are holed up.My group had a camp out by Nellis, in a vacant lot.But it was pretty exposed, so we set up a safe house at this abandoned gas station, just in case.There wasn’t a lot of room, and it had a rat problem, but—”
“In case of what?”I asked, looking through the trash for some clue as to where Jace might have gone.And not coming up with anything there, either, except for the fact that somebody liked McDonald’s.
Noah didn’t say anything.
I looked up.“What is it?”
“You really have no idea what it’s like, do you?”
“What what is like?
“Yeah,” he said, getting on my level and searching my face.“You were basically an outcast from Lobizon ‘cause you wouldn’t let them Change you, but you had another side of your family to fall back on.One to provide a decent place to live, food, safety.We didn’t.Those of us who were turfed out of our clans… everyone just hoped we’d die.And most of us did.The rest…”
He looked around.“We ended up in places like this.Scared as hell of everybody, including you guys—the Corps—who would take us off to one of those schools if you found us—”
“Wouldn’t that have been better?”I asked.Because yes, the schools the Corps ran for people with unsanctioned magic weren’t great, but the “students” there did get three hots and a cot, plus an education, protection, and some money to start a new life after they “graduated.”
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but neither was this.Only Noah didn’t look like he agreed.He looked like he thought I might have lost my mind.
“They hate us there!”he whispered violently, I guessed in case the ward was porous enough to let sound through.“The clans have been turning out morevargulfsthan ever in recent years, and guess where a lot of those have ended up?I knew a guy who escaped from one of those schools, just fought his way free one day, because a friend of his had been taken to one of the prisons—the places they put you when you don’t play nice.The places where you never get out!
“He wasn’t going to end up like that, he said, and he didn’t.He died of an infection in his wounds a few weeks later—the ones the Corps gave him rather than let him go!Sweating and screaming on a pallet in our safe house, because there was nowhere else for him to go—”
“Nowhere else?”I said, horrified.“The Corps wouldn’t—”
“Don’t tell me what the Corps wouldn’t do!’he snarled.“They would have saved his life—maybe—and then taken it away again by locking him up as an incorrigible afterwards!He’d hurt two of their men getting free, and they don’t forget stuff like that.He was screaming, ‘Don’t take me back!Don’t take me back!’and made us promise.And human hospitals were out, because no money, and if we’d gone to the emergency room and they’d run a blood test—”
“It would have been better than letting himdie, Noah!”
“It would have been the same.”The blue eyes were steady on mine.“The clans kill us if we do anything that threatens to expose them.There’s nowhere for us to go, except some of the local native tribes—the human ones.They don’t judge; I guess they know what it’s like to be an outcast.We sent somebody for a medicine man who’d helped us before, but he didn’t get there in time.”
