Capture (10 page)

“There she is!” someone screamed.  “Burn the witch!”

She tried to hold onto the door handle, but the anti-magic side of the crowd tore her away, lifting her up off her feet and over their heads like a body surfer at a rock concert. 

“No!” I yelled, trying to push through the people nearest me to get to her.  “Stop, put her down!”

She thrashed and yelled at the people below her, telling them to let her go.  I grabbed shoulders with my free hand and yanked, using the spellbook in my other hand like a battering ram to shove through.  But I wasn’t fast enough.  Within seconds, the protestors had passed her to the edge of the crowd at the fire.

And then they tossed her onto the flames.

“No!” I shouted, losing control, even as the anti-magic protestors roared with victory and drowned out me and the other pro-magic people.

Weren’t any of the
Clann people going to do something to save her?

Her scream unlocked something within me. 
I cursed, and heat rushed through my body from my chest outwards and down my arms like hot water from a shower racing along my skin.

A burning wind, so hot it could have come straight from the Sahara Desert, whooshed over us all, knocking down half the crowd as it raced towards the fire. 

The flames went out.

I climbed over the flattened people to the smoky pile.  The
bookstore owner’s clothes and hair were burned in places, and the skin on her hands and forearms was red.  But she was still alive.  She must have used a spell of some kind to keep the fire from burning her worse.

I helped her to her feet, slung one of her arms over my shoulders, and half carried her out past the shocked cro
wd still struggling to get up.

“Go left,” the shopkeeper said near my ear, and I helped her around the corner of the building.  She nodded at a small silver car parked at the curb, and we stumbled over to the driver side door.  “Thank you, Hayden,” she whispered as she opened the door and slid inside.

“I’m sorry—“ I tried to say, though I didn’t know what for, but she shook her head and started the car.

“My choice to get involved.  Read that book.” She jerked her chin at the book I still clutched in my free hand.  “It’ll save your life.”

I shut her door, and she drove away.

I walked the four car lengths down the sidewalk to my truck, unlocked and opened the driver side door, and tossed into the backseat the
spellbook that had got me caught up in all this mess to start with. It had better be worth it.

The sound of smashing glass at the bookstore’s front entrance made me jump and look back at the protestors filling the street.
At the edge of the crowd stood a girl with a familiar head of thick, wavy black hair above a hot pink quilted coat. I froze, my heart racing again. Surely not...

The girl turned on the sidewalk enough to give me a view of her profile, and I cursed.
Yep, it was Tarah. What was she doing here?

I
knew I should leave before anyone got a good look at me beneath my hoodie and recognized me as the one who helped the bookstore owner get away.

Instead, I gritted my teeth, ducked my head to hide my face, and walked up behind
Tarah in time to hear her shout to someone in front of her, “Dad, give it up already. It’s like I told you, they’re outcasts, not lab rats! They’ll never let you test them.”

The man in front of her half turned to shout back,
“Sure they will!” It was her dad. He looked a lot different than I remembered, shorter, skinnier, his hair all gray and wispy now. But he still wore those same wire rimmed glasses. “We’ve just got to make them understand that I can help them learn to control it.”

Dr. Williams
turned to shout something in a nearby stranger’s ear. The other man scowled at the professor and moved away.

“Tarah!” I
touched her shoulder to get her attention, unsure if she could even hear me over the crowd.

She jumped and twisted away from me,
her already large dark eyes going even wider with fear. When she recognized me, her shoulders dropped several inches away from her ears. “Hayden! What are you doing here?”

Before I could answer, her upper lip curled. “Oh. TA
C. Of course.” She turned away from me.

I risked looking a
gain at the anti-magic protestors, spotting Becky’s familiar red bow above her plastic-stiff curly ponytail. So that blond guy I’d seen earlier was Kyle after all. She'd never be at something like this without him. Knowing Kyle, he might have even instigated the whole protest.

I opened my mouth to argue that I wasn’t here with the TA
C, then gave up. She wouldn’t believe me anyway. Why waste time trying? “Tarah, we’ve got to get out of here. It’s not safe.”

“
I’m fine! I’m with my dad.”

Oh sure, the skinny stick of a professor was going to save her. Especially since it sounded like their being here was his idea in the first place.

Suddenly, sirens began to wail in the distance, growing louder with each second. The police. Oh hell.

The crowd went nuts, shoving in all directions as protesters tried to get away but didn’
t know which direction to run. Several tried to run straight over Tarah, crushing us both together and towards the building in the process. Cursing, I braced both forearms against the wall at either side of Tarah's head, using my body to take the hits from the fleeing crowd. Beneath the protestors' screams, I heard Tarah screaming as well.

At the first break in the traffic, I looked around and found her dad a few feet away clinging to a desperate woman's wrist.

“Dr. Williams, we’ve got to get out of here,” I shouted to him, figuring Tarah wouldn’t leave without him.

He held up an index finger
in the air in our general direction, asking us to wait a second as he tried to give the terrified protestor his card.

He was just as nuts as
his daughter was.

Seeing the lost cause that he was, I focused on Tarah. I didn’t care whether she liked it or not. We were getting out of here.

I started pulling her with me, but she fought me. “No! I’m not leaving my dad!”

Another protestor ran past, his shoulder ramming into mine nearly hard enough to knock the breath out of me. When I could speak again, I said,
“Tarah, the cops are going to arrest everybody in sight, including you and your dad!”

“I don’t care, I’m not leaving him.”

Several deep “thumps” sounded several yards away. Instinctively I ducked low, pulling Tarah into a half crouch with me, as we heard what sounded like soda cans hitting the pavement around the edge of the crowd.

Someone screamed out in pain. Smoke formed in a ring around the protestors, growing fast as it ro
se up in the air then spread like a dancing wall of gray.

“Let’s go!” I yelled to Tarah. I couldn’t see her dad anymore through the sulphur
-scented smoke, could barely even see her though I still held her hand.

She twisted, trying to  get loose. Growling, I bent low and threw her over my shoulder, then stood up and started strong arming my way through the panicked crowd
on the sidewalk as people stumbled and fell and pushed and shoved each other in mindless attempts to escape the rotten egg-smelling smoke only to get lost in the streets.

A breeze kicked up, parting the smoke slightly to my left and gi
ving me a glimpse of my truck parked half a basketball court length away at the curb. Keeping a hand on the wall so I couldn’t get lost in the smoke again, I gritted my teeth and fought to stay upright as more elbows and shoulders rammed into my other side.

Tarah
wasn’t helping, either, as she screamed and beat at my back, making it nearly impossible to hold onto her.

I cursed. “Tarah, stop it! We’ll come back for him
after the smoke clears.”

She stopped fighting me, and
a long minute later I finally managed to get down the sidewalk and over to my truck without dropping her.

At my truck,
I quickly threw open the driver side door and set Tarah inside.

She
coughed then spat out, “You arrogant son of a—“

“You can cuss me out later. Get in.” I nudged her legs over so I’d have enough room to get in behind the wheel.
Apparently wanting to avoid being so close to me, she scooted over to the passenger side and reached out towards her door’s handle. But I’d engaged the child safety locks on it long ago to keep Kyle from trying to do any more Chinese fire drills every time he rode with me anywhere and we stopped at a light in town. I hit the electric locks before she ever grabbed the door’s handle.

She
tried the handle anyway, slammed both palms on the door in frustration when it wouldn’t budge, then turned to me, a dangerous light in her eyes.

“Would you settle down?” I told her. “I said we’d go back for your dad and I meant it. Just let the
smoke clear out so we can see him.”

Huffing out a loud sigh, she crossed her arms over her chest but thankfully sat back in her seat and waited.

Satisfied she was calming down a little, I twisted to look over my shoulder, trying to see where Dr. Williams might have run off to. My heartbeat skipped then pounded even harder than it had while I had been running with Tarah over my shoulder.

Those sirens weren’t coming from police cars. They were coming from a bullhorn held by a soldier who stood by a
huge, six wheeled military truck with a khaki-colored canvas roof over the back end that had pulled up at the other end of the street. Even as I watched, soldiers continued to flood out of its cab and back end. All of them were dressed in gas masks and brown camo, none with any patches, each carrying what looked like pump action shotguns that were probably filled with all kinds of anti-riot fun.

I cursed under my breath. “Tarah, get down. If those guys see us in here...”

This time she didn’t argue but slid down low in her seat like I did. We both carefully peered over our seats through the back glass window, watching in silence as protester after protester was grabbed by the soldiers, thrown face down on the asphalt, and their hands zip tied together at their backs.

Then I
noticed something...not a single TAC member had been caught. Because they’d somehow managed to get away in time?

Or had Kyle and his dad been the ones to use their military connections and call in the troops, allowing Kyle to give his TA
C members advance warning so they could escape?

“Oh God. Dad!” she whispered then started crawling across the front seat towards me like she planned to get out through my side of the truck.

I stuck an arm out to block her then looked in the direction she was staring at. Yep, she was right. Now that the smoke was clearing, we could see the soldiers had caught her dad and were zip tying him. He tried to say something to them, and a soldier hit him in the mouth with the butt of a gun.

Tarah shrieked, forcing me to reach out and clamp a hand
over her mouth. With my free hand I pulled her back down low in the seat so we wouldn’t be spotted.

“Tarah, listen to me! We can’t save him, and you’ll only make it harder on him if they catch you too.”

A pointy little elbow jabbed me hard in the ribs. “I don’t care!”

“Your dad does. Do you think he’d want you to be arrested too?”

Tears began to pour down her face, every single drop of them killing me a little more.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “But we can’t just go running out there to try and save him.”

She stared at me with big, pleading eyes...the same look she used to give me when we were kids. She knew how hard it was for me to say no when she used that look on me.

I swore again under my breath. “Stop looking at me like that. You know I’m right.”

She pushed backwards until she flopped down low in the front passenger seat again and stared out the windshield as more tears slid down her cheeks.

Unable to stand seeing her cry anymore, I turned away, watching the soldiers wrapping up their arrests as they
hauled their prisoners up onto their feet then pushed them into the back end of the military truck. I noticed a soldier up in the truck bed was slapping every prisoner’s neck as they were loaded in.

Ten minutes later, the truck started up and slowly pulled
down the street, passing us in the process.

“Start the
engine,” Tarah hissed.

“What?”

“Hurry up, before they get too far ahead of us!”

I stared at her. She’d stopped crying. But now her eyes were dark and narrowed into determined slits
, another look I knew far too well. I think I preferred her crying.

“We are not following them
,” I said.

“Yes we are.
”

I shook my head and started the truck’s engine, planning to take her home instead.