Spencer comes between Reece and Trey, resting a hand on Trey’s shoulder and bending his head to the man. Spencer knows exactly how Trey is feeling; I observe it in their matching postures as they stand together. There is a slight slump to each man’s shoulders that hints at the weight they’ll each carry every day of their lives.
“I know what you’ve been through, my friend.” The veneration in Spencer’s voice displays evidence to the way that he feels for this man. He respects him, but moreover, he cares for him as well. I have never seen Spencer speak to anyone this way; somehow I doubt there are many people in the world that he would show such reverence. It pulls at something deep in my stomach, an ache that should not be there. Against my will, my heart begins to wonder what it would feel like to have Spencer’s affection directed its way.
“I understand why you would want to turn her in, I really do.” Spencer gives me a look filled with annoyance, completely destroying my momentary longing for his regard. “She’s a pain in the ass, but she is no murderer. Trust me, my friend, I have seen her soul, and I know that she had nothing to do with what happened to your family.” He raises his voice to be heard throughout the room. “Oberon has just officially declared war with our people. He has stolen our children, forced us to live half-lives, and now is playing on our fear to divide us. He wants to make us scatter apart like filthy roaches at the flip of a switch. I say we don’t let him do it.”
Spencer walks throughout the crowd giving each person he passes the consideration of eye contact. Gone is the vulnerability he displayed in his exchange with Trey, now it is all gravity and strength being projected as he speaks. For the first time, I can see why these people have chosen him as their leader; it’s not the money, or the protection of this building. I can see it in the ferocity of his gaze and the genuine concern for each and every one of them. They think that he may be the salvation of our entire race, but from the solemn look on his face, I think that he believes they are his way to salvation too. If he can win … if he can save these people, he may be able to redeem himself for the failure in saving his family. It’s no wonder that his convictions are unwavering when it comes to this cause, they serve all of these people he cares for so dearly.
“So far in this movement, we have tried to heed the warnings from previous generations who said to keep our race quiet and stay in the shadows. It made sense in the past. We lived in peace and took care of our own while being able to maintain a friendly symbiosis with the commons. Now, I see that it’s time to come out of the shadows. Oberon thinks he can get away with hunting us down on the pretense that the commons don’t care what happens to a bunch of delinquents, but what if we show them the reason we are hunted? What if we use our talents on those streets that the NWO patrol to show them that we won’t be pushed around?”
“What if the commons reject us?” A woman yells from the back of the room. Spencer instantly quiets to let her talk. “What if they want us dead, too, because they’re afraid? What will we do then? We have nowhere else to go. I would rather stay here and let this blow over than risk more of our people. There has to be a better way!” She sounds near hysterics and one of the other women pulls her into their arms.
“That’s Mary,” Reece whispers into my ear. He has been beside me this whole time, his body tense and ready to defend us both at a moment’s notice. “Her husband took their three daughters to the reformatories that day and she stayed back because they were in a fight. She’s been on edge ever since. I haven’t seen her without tears in her eyes a day since Cass and I came to live here. Everyone but Amy, the old woman next to her, stays clear. I think she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Breakdown or not, her points are valid. It’s risky to reveal ourselves to the commons. I would like to think that the race I thought I belonged to for the first twenty-seven years of my life would be willing to stand up for the wrongdoings of Oberon, but without being sure, it’s easy to be afraid.
Spencer remains quiet for a few seconds, seemingly really debating her point. “Mary’s right. I wouldn’t want to force anyone to make this decision lightly. It’s a secret that doesn’t only belong to me; it belongs to all of us. However, I can’t sit back and allow our people to be slaughtered in the streets. I ask you all to think this over, decide amongst yourselves the right way to go. For tonight, I propose a group of us take to the streets and extinguish as many NWO officer’s lives as possible. If we don’t send a message to the commons right away, let’s say we at least send one to the leader of the not-so-free world. We don’t care about his threats anymore. We’re going to fight back.”
A cheer goes up throughout the room. The animosity aimed at me has not been fully extinguished; however, Spencer has been able to stifle it some. His speech elicits energy from not only the crowd, but myself, as well. In the past, I might have been wary of sticking my neck out like this. I just got away from Donovan, so it would be wise to lay low and keep off of his radar, but I know that these people, no matter their feelings for me, are mine. I’m not a common, I’m a Mage and their fight is our fight. I can’t sit back with all of this power and turn a blind eye to the struggle of my own kind. To do so would make me worse than Donovan ever was.
“Reece, I want you to ready a team of ten,” Spencer begins. “Take this group and stake out the west side, particularly near the theaters and bars that cater to the night crowd. I’ll get another ten or so and we’ll patrol near the capitol building. Jinx, take Ophelia to the armory and get her a weapon. I want everyone to meet back here in half an hour before we head out, so we can coordinate the attack and come up with a rally point in case anything goes wrong.”
Spencer stalks out of the room along with most of the other Mages. Jinx wheels his computer chair around and stretches before standing up and motioning for me to follow. Reece is hot on our tails as we scurry out of the ops room and into the elevator. Jinx presses the button for the first floor and leans back against the paneled wall while we wait for the descent.
Reece seems to be on edge. I watch his jaw clenching and unclenching the whole way. Finally, I can no longer take it.
“Reece, what’s wrong?” I ask, concerned.
“What’s wrong?” Reece mimics, in exasperation. “Weren’t you listening to that message from Oberon? He’s hunting us now, Ophelia … and Spencer wants us to go out in the streets, straight to the hunters, and just basically turn ourselves in. It’s bullshit!”
“No, I don’t think that’s what he wants at all.” I turn to him and place my hand on his arm, rubbing it against the soft cotton sleeve of his shirt. “Reece, he wants us to fight. Don’t you get that? The way things were handled before, blowing up possibly innocent people while they were caught unaware, that isn’t the way to fight this war. We have to take the NWO head on if we have any hope of stopping them. Oberon thinks that he has us all under his thumb, so he needs to see that he doesn’t. Instead of cowering in this building, we need to fight. Can’t you see that?”
“I don’t like it,” Reece replies, turning from me as the doors open and we follow Jinx. I don’t know how he can make his way around the building while his nose is pressed into his cell phone, still looking up information, but he manages. Before I know it, we are walking into a massive room with hundreds of weapons lining the front walls and a shooting range on the far side.
“Ummm … there’s a shooting range in this building? What the hell?” I’m amazed. I’ve never heard any noise to indicate that there would be.
“You wouldn’t be surprised to see one in Bruce Wayne’s house, why not here?” Jinx replies, never taking his eyes off his gadget. “How else are we supposed to learn how to shoot?”
“Whatever,” I reply. I vow to no longer be surprised at anything where Mages or Spencer Donnelly is concerned.
I saunter around the room, wondering if Jinx is supposed to be setting me up with one of these guns, but all he is doing is continuing to stare at his phone. Reece has finally broken out of his irrita
tion at Spencer for the moment and is looking at me with an amused expression as I take in the many expensive weapons around us.
“Looking for a pink one?” he teases. I don’t feel like his question dignifies a response, so I continue to peruse the walls.
“Jinx, can I try this one out?” I ask as I look at a black Colt M1911.
“Yeah, just pick one,” he replies.
“Oh, give me a break.” Reece stomps over to where I’m standing. He takes the gun out of the case, walks over to one of the shelves, pulls out the clip and begins to load the rounds into it. He apprehensively looks over his shoulder at me. “Do you even know how to hold one of these correctly?”
I huff over to him and put my hand out for the gun. “Why don’t we see?” I ask.
He tosses me a look that seems to say that he has absolutely no faith in my ability to even locate the trigger of the weapon. I storm off towards the practice range, grab the ear muffs hanging on the wall and put them on. Then I move over to the lane with a target already at the ready, slide off the safety, aim, and fire all seven rounds perfectly in either the chest or the head of the target.
I pull the protectors off my ears, press the button that slides the target back to me, pull it off and walk over to Reece, placing it in his hands. “Think I held it correctly?” I ask.
He looks stunned. “How the heck do you know how to do that?”
“Reece, my mom was abducted and killed from our shop when I was a teenager. One of the first things I did after she was buried was head to the nearest pistol range and sign up for shooting lessons. I wasn’t going to let what happened to her happen to me.”
Reece gets somber at my words and turns to Jinx. “Hey, Mr.Thingamajig, could you put that down and come get Phee everything she’s going to need? Get her a holster for her weapon and some ready clips, come on.”
He turns back to me. “I need to go make sure everyone is prepared for this debacle. I’ll see you back in the ops room.” He comes in to place a kiss on my forehead, but seems to think better of it and backs off, giving me a quick smile before departing the room.
“Sheesh, what did I do?” I mumble to myself in his wake.
Jinx stows his phone away in his pocket and says, “What didn’t you do? This place has been turned upside down since you got here. I used to have time to get in the chat rooms with friends, and now all day long it’s all, Jinx check if there are any new reports on Ophelia, Jinx see if you can track the NWO’s investigation into O’s disappearance. I never get a break. Don’t get me wrong—I can see why everyone is into you. I mean, you have the three Bs that I look for in a girl, but all this … it’s too much work.”
“The three Bs? I’m afraid to ask, but what does that mean?”
“Beautiful brown eyes, a good set of boobies, and a nice, round booty,” he replies as if I should have already known. Okay, I really shouldn’t have asked. Moving on.
“Sorry that you’re being given extra work. Reece is just really worried about my husband getting his hands on me again. If you want, I can ask him to lay off.”
“Reece? He isn’t the one asking me to check every five minutes, Spencer is,” Jinx says with a scowl.
“Oh.” It’s all I can say because I wasn’t expecting to hear that. It seems to be a sore subject anyway, so I decide to ask him something that has been on my mind for some time. “Jinx, how did you end up with Spencer anyway? You’re what, eighteen?”
“Nineteen,” he corrects.
“Oh … then you were fifteen when Oberon started taking the children.” I gaze at him and mentally strip away those years from his face. “Not that I’m not happy that you didn’t end up in one, but how did you manage to evade being sent to a reformatory?”
He’s digging through a cabinet, trying to find a shoulder holster for me, but he stops and gives me a melancholy look at my question. “Do you really want to know, lady?”
“Yes,” I answer as I lean over and help him load clips.
“All right,” he says with a shrug. “My family lived in the apartment directly above this one before the reaping happened. It was my mom and dad and my little sister, Silvia. My sister was a Natural too, like me, only her ability had to do with music and sound. It was so damn cool to watch her sometimes, the gift she had with instruments. She could play anything, but her favorite was the violin.” Jinx closes his eyes and smiles a sad smile. It’s as if he is no longer with me in this stark room but somewhere else, where a little girl with sleek black hair, chocolate eyes, and the same toffee skin as himself is making soul shattering notes emanate from her violin.
“Man, you could hand that girl anything, and she would turn it into an instrument and make it sound better than any pop crap artist out there. And, when she sang … I’m no pussy, but I’ll admit to having to wipe my eyes a few times while listening to her. If what the rest of us do is magic, there’s got to be a better word for what she could do. It was a miracle.” He goes silent for a moment to reminisce and I leave it unbroken. I know that when I am in this mode where I can actually smell my mother through the memories, I’d do anything to prolong it and hold on to it with my fists until my knuckles whiten with the strain of time.
“The funny thing though, was that Silvia’s room was directly above Sammy’s nursery,” Jinx continues and I give him a questioning look. “Sammy is Spencer’s daughter. Her name was Samantha, but Spencer was the only person I ever heard call her that, even Spencer’s wife, Melody, called their daughter Sammy. It used to bug the crap out of him. He was kind of like one of those old lady neighbors that will keep your ball if you hit it over their fence, you know, grumpy all the time. So we, being the kids with the bats, would do little things to piss him off every chance we could. He used to come pounding on our door because Silvia’s music was too loud, or she was stomping around making a drum beat with her feet and waking Sammy up when she was a baby. My parents used to get real pissed off because Spencer was our landlord, and they were worried that our pranks would get us all evicted from the building. We weren’t worried though—Melody loved us like an aunt and there’s no way she would have allowed that to happen.”
I wonder about Spencer’s wife, Melody. I hold a lot of respect for any woman who was able to stick up to Spencer’s crotchety ways. “So what happened when everyone went to the reformatory that day? Spencer told me some of his story. Why didn’t you end up imprisoned like the rest of the children?”
Jinx turns his head to the side, a question in his eyes. “Wait, Spencer told you what happened to him that day?”
I nod. “Some of it, not everything.” Uh oh, I remember Spencer’s warning that day about how his business was his own. Well, telling Jinx that he told me of it isn’t the same as telling him exactly what Spencer said, so I’m really not going against his wishes.
“Damn, he’s never even told me any of it.” Jinx looks a little crestfallen, but recovers quickly. “Anyway, the night before everyone was supposed to go in and be catalogued by the NWO, I got into a massive fight with my dad because he read a post on my facebook page about plans to meet up with some of my hacker friends the next day. Dad was a stickler for keeping away from commons, but seeing as how most of my friends were people I talked to on the internet, it was kind of hard to be choosy. He told me there was no way I could hang out with them and Silvia stood up for me, so he took my computer and her violin away as punishment. I blew my top. It’s dumb … freaking out over meaningless objects the night before I lost everything that really counted. I got so mad, that I stormed out and stayed the night with this girl I was macking on at the time. When I finally calmed down enough to come back to the apartment the next day, they were already gone. I didn’t think it was a big deal, not going with them. At fifteen, stuff like that wasn’t even at the bottom of my list of importance.
“Four days passed and I was alone in that apartment, waiting for them to come back. I had no idea what had happened, all I knew was that the building was empty except for Trey, who liv
ed on the same floor as us. Trey didn’t know what happened to the other Mages either. We don’t have our own news channel and I hadn’t invented the illegal net for our kind yet, so there was no way to find out what had happened to everyone. I was so worried and afraid that I freaked out and just started throwing things in the apartment. I was crashing around, really tearing things up, when what I really wanted to do was tear myself up for not being there with my family, not knowing what they could possibly be going through or where they were … over a fucking computer.” He shakes his head, and I put my hand on his arm to give him some comfort. The pensive expression on his face tells me this is something he still hasn’t forgiven himself for, and while I know that nothing I could say would help to exonerate his guilt, I know that sometimes just listening can help to ease a troubled mind.
“That’s how Spencer found me,” he says. “I was alone, surrounded by shards of glass scattered about from the bathroom mirror I had just put my hand through. I must have looked like a baby, crying and huddled on the bathroom floor like a fool. He told me they were gone … but he also told me that he was still here and that I was going to come live with him for the time being. He told me to have hope because he didn’t know what had happened to Silvia but she may still be alive, and he was going to do everything in his power to help me get her back. He saved my life that day. It was probably hell on him to take in a mouthy kid like me when he was already devastated by his own losses, but he put up with my crap. I’ll never forget what he did, what he still does. I lost my mom and dad … maybe my sister, but with Spencer, I still have someone. I have a brother.” He gives me a stern look and I take it for what it is. A warning against harming the only family he has left.
We finish loading the clips and getting the shoulder holster fitted to me in relative silence. When it’s on right, fitted snug against my black tank top and concealed beneath the leather jacket Spencer gave me on the second morning here, Jinx’s phone vibrates. Before he can look down at the screen, I grab his arm to get his attention. “I just want to thank you for telling me your story, Jinx. I know it’s too late, but I wish I could have done something to stop it. I didn’t know what was happening, but that doesn’t excuse it. I just…”
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