Cold Burn of Magic
Page 53

By this point, his face had gone as hard as the brick walls around us. “Oh, I get it,” Devon said, his voice even colder than mine. “I’m just some spoiled Family brat, so I couldn’t possibly have any problems, could I? Well, it’s not easy living my life, either. Especially not now.”
“You mean when someone’s trying to kill you?”
Devon opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, but he clamped his lips shut, glaring at me. I gave him an evil look in return.
Felix stepped in between us, his hands held out wide. “Ding, ding, ding. Separate corners, please. This round is finished. Why don’t we start over? Devon and I are sorry we followed you, Lila. We shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why do I hear a but in there?”
Felix grinned. “But now that we’re here, we might as well help you pack. It’s the least we can do, right, Devon?”
He didn’t respond, so Felix rolled his eyes and elbowed him in the side.
“Right?”
“Yeah. Sure,” Devon finally muttered.
“Lila?” Felix asked.
“Fine. Whatever.”
His grin widened. “See? It’s not so hard to play nice now, is it? So where do you want us to start?”
I didn’t really want their help, but I still had stuff to pack, and since they were here, I might as well use them, like Felix had said. So I told them what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to hide, and the three of us got to work.
Felix picked up and folded the clothes he’d knocked to the floor when he’d fallen onto the cot, while Devon moved my mini-fridge, lamp, and metal rack into the back corner of the basement. He also stood the cot up along the wall and stacked cardboard boxes full of books in front of everything, while I tried to creatively fit the rest of my belongings into the two suitcases.
We worked in silence for several minutes, but Felix kept shooting me little glances, obviously dying to ask me more questions.
“What was foster care like?” he finally asked, giving in to his undeniable urge to chat. “You did that for a while, right?”
I shrugged. “Some of the homes were good, some of them were bad, but most of them were pretty indifferent.”
“Indifferent how?” Devon asked, the first time he’d spoken since our fight.
I shrugged again. “Too many kids and not enough hours in the day for the adults to see to them all. Most of them focused on the younger kids who needed them more. After a while, I stopped trying to get anybody’s attention. It was easier to keep my head down and blend in.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Felix said in a tentative voice.
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“Then why didn’t you stay?” he asked, gesturing out at the basement. “Surely, it would have been easier than doing all of . . . this.”
“I got into a fight with one of the older boys. He’d been taking food from some of the younger kids, and I told him to stop. He thought because he was bigger and stronger than me that I’d be an easy target. I showed him how wrong he was.”
“What did you do?” Devon asked.
“I busted his nose and told him that if he ever took anyone’s food again, he’d be drinking through a straw for six months. He got the message.”
Devon grinned. “I would have liked to have seen that.”
Despite our fight, I grinned back at him. “His nose swelled up like a grapefruit. It was awesome.”
“I’m sensing a but in there,” Felix said.
“But the couple who ran things didn’t like fights, so I got shipped to another foster home,” I said. “This one was actually a lot better. The Hendersons had a four-year-old girl of their own, and she was the sweetest thing ever.”
The Henderson family. I still thought about them sometimes. I’d been with them for two months, and it had been a good two months—until the end.
“What happened?” Devon asked in a soft voice, picking up on my sudden sadness.
“They were a nice couple, but they didn’t have a lot of money, and they lived in a bad part of town, near the lochness bridge. You know where that is?”
Devon and Felix both nodded.
“Anyway, they had this teeny-tiny backyard. One day, their daughter was out there playing, laughing and running around. Then, suddenly, she wasn’t. I couldn’t hear her anymore, so I went out to check on her, only she was down on the ground, flat on her back, with a copper crusher wrapped around her chest.”
Devon and Felix both winced. They knew that copper crushers were nasty creatures, oversize boa constrictors really, with shimmering, copper-colored scales who could coil themselves up tight enough to crush rocks—and human rib cages. And if they didn’t kill you with their coils, then they could do it with their bite, since their venom was highly poisonous.
“So I snatched up this plastic baseball bat she’d been playing with, and I started hitting the crusher with it. The mom came out into the backyard just in time to see me hit the crusher a final time before it let go of the girl and slithered away. She thought it was just a very large garden snake. Of course, the little girl told her mom that it was really a monster, but the mom didn’t listen to her. The next morning, I got shipped out to another home.”
“I’m so sorry,” Felix said.
I shrugged. The fear in the Hendersons’ eyes had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen and felt with my soulsight—because they’d been afraid of me. But I couldn’t blame them for it. Nobody wanted a violent kid in their home, sleeping down the hall from their little girl.