“Four.”
“Oh, shit,” Jug Ears said, and started pushing for the door.
“Three.”
“This is ridiculous!” Red Face spluttered. “You’re harboring illegal children alongside Pythian initiates—”
“What is ridiculous is that we are in a war,” I said, low and furious. “The war, because if we lose it there won’t be another. And this”—I gestured at the goddamn chicken—“is what you focus on?”
The man started to say something, but his older companion cut him off. “Do what she says. Take it outside.”
“Damn. And I wanted to see what happened when you reached one,” Roy said.
I shot him a look and he disappeared, too, taking the wide-eyed initiates with him. Jiao stayed where he was, but the chicken suddenly keeled over, landing back against the pan, propped up on its wings like its little feet hurt. I knew the feeling.
I knelt in front of him. “You okay?”
He nodded.
And then he crumpled, and I caught him on the way to the floor, because he was just a kid, and a war mage had had him at gunpoint. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know. It’s all right.”
He shook his head. “It’s not. I messed up. But I was just—the girls, they wanted to see—”
“The initiates asked you to show them what you could do.”
He swallowed, and nodded. “They . . . some of them are just little, you know? And they aren’t like us. They aren’t used to . . . all this.” He gestured around at an amorphous “this” composed of gods and wars, or more likely from his perspective, of fear and pain and constant anxiety, because that was what he’d known before he met Tami.
It was what almost all Tami’s kids had known, including me, before she came into our lives and changed everything.
She only had one biological child, a son named Jesse, who had been born with an unauthorized ability. In his case, he was a fire starter, which had gotten him a fast trip to one of the Circle’s schools for dangerously talented youth, as soon as his power manifested. This had not gone down well with Tami, who was not the sort you wanted to piss off. Not when she had somewhat unusual magic herself, being a null, a witch who could suck the magic out of anyone or anything she met.
Including the wards the Circle used on their schools.
Jesse had shortly thereafter been back home, and the Circle had had a new vigilante to worry about, someone who made it a habit to waltz past their wards, pick up children at risk of spending the rest of their lives locked away, and waltz back out with them. She’d also collected runaways like me, eventually ending up with quite a collection of jinxes, telekinetics, invokers, taunters, dream walkers, and yes, even necromancers. Jiao was one of the latter, and he had a favorite parlor trick.
Only, from the Circle’s perspective, the unauthorized animation of a chicken was apparently on par with raising an undead army.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I told him.
“Then why do they say it is? Why do they—” He cut off, biting his lip, refusing to cry in front of me, because he wasn’t a little boy anymore. But he wasn’t a man yet, either, being all of twelve or thirteen, and hard-jawed stoicism was out of his range. So he just stood there, looking miserable, and making me want to send a certain war mage to the middle of the ocean.
“Because they’re afraid.”
“Afraid . . . of me?” He looked up. “But I can’t do anything—”
“Not yet. They’re not afraid of what you can do, but of what you might do. They don’t understand magic like ours, and it scares them—”
“Like . . . ours?”
“My father was a necromancer. I have a little of his ability.”
Jiao looked at the chicken, and I laughed. “No, I can’t do that. I don’t . . . It’s not bodies with us, but ghosts. But it’s still considered necromancy. And you know what?”
He shook his head.
“It saved me this morning. You know we had a battle?”
His eyes brightened. “Everyone knows. They won’t let us watch it, though—”
“Watch it?”
“On the security replay. Some of the vamps said it came through pretty good—until the cameras blew off. But Tami won’t let us see—”
Good, I thought, making a mental note to thank her.
“—but maybe you could—”
“There’s not much to see,” I said. “I left my body behind, and . . . did some things . . . and the video won’t show that.”
“But if people saw—they always say what I can do is wrong, but if you used it—”
“It isn’t wrong, Jiao. It’s not the magic, but what you use it for, that counts. You understand?”
“I understand, but they don’t. They want to lock us all away—”
“They’re not going to do that.”
“But they have done it,” he insisted. “They’re still doing it! There were lots of necromancers at school—”
“Lots? I was always told it was a rare gift.”
He shook his head. “Not really. But those who aren’t that strong, who don’t have accidents that keep happening, they try to hide it. The Circle lets almost anyone out before us. They think we’re evil—”
“But you’re not,” I said firmly.
“No, we’re not,” he said, looking at me. And then he hugged me, spontaneously, as the sound of arguing came from outside.
I hung my head. “Stay here,” I told him.
“But—”
“Right. Here. Okay?”
He sighed. “Right here,” he said, and slumped back against the cabinets.
And I went out to see what fresh hell had just descended on us, only to discover—it was the same old crap.
But it seemed there was a new twist this time.
Tami was standing in between a war mage in full battle kit, and a hard-nosed coven witch in . . . Well, I wasn’t sure. Unlike the Circle, the covens didn’t appear to have a dress code. Or if they did, it might be summed up as “Come at me, bro.”
Two full sleeves of tats, some of them magical, crawled over arms almost as muscular as a man’s. They were visible because of the sleeveless T-shirt she was wearing, over a pair of old jeans. More were visible on her neck, disappearing into her short, dark hair. And her piercings ran the gamut from eyebrow, to multiple earlobe, to nose, to a barbell through her bottom lip.
If I’d been trying to find someone less spit-and-polished than the Circle’s crew, I couldn’t have done any better. But looks didn’t equate to power, and there was enough leaking off her that I was surprised it wasn’t sparking off the fridge. Because she was furious.
I didn’t know what the war mage had said, but the tension in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife. At least, it was for a second. Until they found out exactly what a pissed-off null could do.