It figured.
Hunter slammed through the underbrush surrounding the property. He was exhausted, but fury rode him hard. He kept replaying those last minutes with his dad.
And a small nagging voice at the back of his head kept insisting that his dad had left for a potentially dangerous assignment, and for the first time, he hadn’t said good-bye.
Hunter hesitated and pulled the phone out of his pocket. He tapped out a text to Uncle Jay.
Tell Dad I’m sorry.
Before he could press SEND, someone tackled him from behind. The phone went flying, disappearing beneath the leaves.
“Payback’s a bitch, huh?”
Jeremy Rasmussen.
A foot kicked Hunter in the side. “Someone’s a bitch.”
Garrett Watts.
Normally Hunter would fight them enough to stay alive, to keep his dignity. Anything more always seemed to up the ante.
Today wasn’t the day for that.
It took him less than three minutes to have them both on the ground. Jeremy’s head had collided with a tree trunk, and he lay unconscious in the leaves. Garrett’s arm was pinned behind his back, and he was whimpering. Hunter was all but kneeling on his throat.
And for the first time, Hunter considered driving his knee down, crushing Garrett’s windpipe.
He thought of his father’s question, of whether he could do it.
Thinking and doing were two very different things.
The world would be a better place without a jerk like Garrett Watts.
Just like the world probably would have been a better place without a man like Clare’s father. Hunter’s dad was right—he should have shot to kill.
But Garrett was a kid. He still had time to figure out what kind of man he was going to be.
So did Hunter.
He stood. “Get your friend out of here,” he said. “If you guys ambush me again, I won’t stop there.”
Then Hunter picked up his backpack and started walking. But he headed for home, instead of school. If his dad was gone, there was no one to crack the whip. He had a lot more use for a day spent sleeping.
When he got there, the car was back in the driveway.
His dad and Uncle Jay were in the kitchen.
They didn’t say anything when Hunter walked in, and he wondered if he could feed them a line about forgetting a textbook.
Then his dad said, “I changed my mind.”
Changed his mind? After everything? Hunter could count on one hand the number of times his father had changed his mind. Now it made Hunter wonder whether he’d made the wrong decision in the woods just now—or the right one.
He dropped his backpack. “You . . . what?”
His dad glanced at Jay. “Your uncle convinced me. Go pack a bag. You can come with us.”
Turn the page for a sneak peek at
Spark,
the second book in the exciting Elemental Series, available this September.
CHAPTER 1
Gabriel Merrick stared at the dead leaf in his palm and willed it to burn.
It refused.
He had a lighter in his pocket, but that always felt like cheating. He should be able to call flame to something this dry. The damn thing had been stuck in the corner of his window screen since last winter. But the leaf only seemed interested in flaking onto his trigonometry textbook.
He was seriously ready to take the lighter to that.
A knock sounded on his bedroom wall.
“Black,” he called. Nicky always slept late, always knocked on his wall to ask what color he was wearing. If he didn’t, they ended up dressing alike.
Gabriel looked back at the leaf—and it was just that, a dead leaf. No hint of power. Behind the drywall, electricity sang to him. In the lamp on his desk, he could sense the burning filament. Even the weak threads of sunlight that managed to burn through the clouds left some trace of his element. If the power was there, Gabriel could speak to it, ask it to bend to his will.
If the power wasn’t, he had nothing.
His door swung open. Nick stood there in a green hoodie and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. A girl on the cheer squad had once asked Gabriel if having a twin was like looking in a mirror all the time. He’d asked her if being a cheerleader was like being an idiot all the time—but really, it was a good question. He and Nick shared the same dark hair, the same blue eyes, the same few freckles across their cheekbones.
Right now, Nick leaned on a crutch, a knee brace strapped around his left leg, evidence of the only thing they didn’t share: a formerly broken leg.
Gabriel glanced away from that. “Hey.”
“What are you doing?”
Gabriel flicked the leaf into the wastebasket beneath his desk. “Nothing. You ready for school?”
“Is that your trig book?”