Capture (8 page)

I paused the video, grabbed the basketball off my bedside table, then flopped back on my bed and set the ball to spinning on my fingertips, one finger at a time.
After a couple of minutes, watching the brownish orange blur helped clear my head.

I was probably worrying for nothing.
Tarah had been smart enough to keep her Clann side a secret this long. If not for the openly rebellious crowd she hung out with and her slinging clearly anarchist views in World History class, I never would have guessed her for the Clann type. Maybe I could talk to her in between classes, get her to see that hanging out with her current group of friends was too dangerous for her. Unlike my dad, Tarah's parents must have never warned her that our friends in high school were like team mates in a four year long game of basketball. We didn't have to like our friends, but we did have to choose them carefully and make sure they didn't bring us down or trip us up.

Right now, Tarah's choice of friends was an added danger she couldn't afford.
It was only a matter of time before her opinions and their loose lips got all of them into trouble.

Tarah had always been stubborn and opinionated, but surely she'd listen to a former friend and change up her game plan.

Especially if it meant keeping her butt out of an internment camp.
Or worse.

CHAPTER 4

Saturday, December 12th

6:14 am

T
he nightmare that night hit me hard and fast. It was nothing I hadn’t dreamed about or seen in person before...full of the smoke of burning leaves and trees and human flesh and screams, and Damon shouting my name.

But what happened when I woke up was definitely not the norm.

It took a few minutes to separate myself from the dream, to resist the urge to lash out at no one.  I peeled the sweaty sheets away from me and let the air conditioner dry me off.

Then I realized I was levitating three feet above my bed’s mattress.

I hissed out a curse. This could not be happening! Not now. If my parents saw this...

C
alm down, Shepherd,
I told myself over and over, forcing my breathing to slow down.

Slowly my body lowered back down to the mattress. But even then I couldn’t fully relax. This was getting out of control again. I had to find a way to rein it in. But how? My only guide had been Damon.

Damon. He might be gone, but surely he’d left behind something that might help...a journal or notes or a spellbook maybe?

Walking as quietly as I could on bare feet, I eased down the second floor hallway, its unyielding hardwood surface cold against my clammy soles, until I reached the door that no one, not even the housekeeper, dared touch.

I hesitated there for a minute, trying to gather my courage. I hadn’t been in my brother’s room in months. And yet when I finally made my hand turn the doorknob and open the door, the room was exactly the same as I’d remembered it. The desk, computer monitor, nightstand and shelves full of sports trophies were all dust free too. Mom must have been in here to clean it.

Would she have thrown out any magic books Damon might have had lying around?

No. This place was like a shrine to my brother’s memory. Even embarassing or potentially soon-to-be-banned books would never be thrown away. She might have hidden them somewhere out of sight, though.

I opened the window’s curtains so the sunlight could
come in and give me something to see better by. Then I started checking drawers and under the bed and mattress, finding a couple of dirty magazines that would have made Mom gasp, but nothing that would have tarnished Dad’s ultra conservative political rep.

The closet. It was the last place left to check.

I ignored the floor’s pile of cleats, muddy sneakers, baseball mitts and footballs, and went straight for the shelf that ran above the hanging rod of clothes. The shelf was full of shoeboxes with weird stuff in them...dried plants, rocks, some velvet pouches I wasn’t stupid or brave enough to open.

No books or journals
, though.

Then my hand dropped down to the clothes hanging below the shelf, and as if drawn like metal to a magnet, my fingertips found fabric I would never forget the feeling of till the day I died.

The robes were made out of something coarse and nubby, like some kind of old fashioned, hand woven wool. I’d never asked Damon where he and his buddies had gotten them, or what had possessed them to choose a fabric that must have been hotter than Hell itself in the East Texas summers. Not that I’d had to personally deal with that problem, considering Damon hadn’t let me wear the robes because he'd claimed I was still too much of a newbie.

“You’ve got to earn them, jerkface,” Damon had said with a laugh, taking my punch to his arm with nothing more than a cocky grin.

I’d vowed to buy my own robes if necessary. But I’d never gotten the chance.

"I thought your mother threw that out."  Dad's voice inside the bedroom doorway made me nearly jump out of my skin.

It took a few seconds to catch my breath and think of a reply.  "I guess not."

"She always was overly sentimental."  He stayed in the doorway, as if something about the room disgusted him.  "What are you doing in here?"

I shrugged, my heart racing.  "Had bad dreams and was thinking about him."

Dad nodded.  "I come in here too sometimes when I'm missing him more than usual.  He was a great kid."

"A great brother too."  My throat tightened to the point of pain.

"Too bad he had to act so stupid sometimes."

"You mean…the party?"  I'd lied to my parents about it too, never once even hinting that the real reason Damon had taken me to that secret gathering was so I could learn how to control the magic growing like a cancer inside me, waiting to lash out if I didn’t put a leash on it.  The training sessons had been a secret Damon had tried to pass down to me. A secret he’d ultimately died for.

"
He never should have been there.  Never should have gotten involved with that crowd.  I warned him about having friends like that. Damon died because of them."  Dad's voice was harsh, grating with barely controlled fury. "He wouldn’t listen to me. He was always too good hearted, always looking to make friends with anyone at all. Always looking for the good in others, even when there wasn’t any good to find.  I couldn’t make him see how important it was to fit in. He thought being nice made it okay to be different, that he didn't have to worry about trying to fit in.  And he paid for it with his life."

So Dad had spent the last
few months pounding the lesson into my head instead.

"But what happened to Da
mon won't happen to you because you understand, don't you?"  Dad’s tone and the way he was staring at me made the words sound more like a warning than a reassurance.

I felt old, weighed down by something
invisible on my shoulders and back as I shut the closet door.  "Yeah, Dad, I understand.  No matter what, fit in."

"That's right."  He reached out and ruffled my hair as I passed him
on my way out of the room, even though we were both six foot two and he had to reach up to do it.  Then he shut the door behind us both.

I
returned to my room.  But going back to sleep was out of the question.  Somehow, I had to learn how to control the magic inside me.  Otherwise, my secret would be blown in no time.  And then I’d wind up in an internment camp too.

Okay, so Da
mon's room and the public libraries were out.  Probably the big bookstores had already gotten rid of all their magic books too by now.  But what about small bookshops?  The ones in the small towns might have reacted quickly to the government’s new anti-magic stance.  But the ones in the big cities might not have.

I pulled up the Internet, did a quick search, and found four independent bookshops in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro area, which was only a couple hours' drive away.  Surely one of them still had something about magic.

I didn't risk looking up their book catalogs online, though.  Dad had told me a long time ago how all Internet activity was rerouted through NSA servers housed in the AT&T building in San Francisco.  By now, they would definitely be tagging all searches for magic-related keywords.  And maybe even arresting people based on it.

I would just have to go to the bookshops in person and see what I could find.

“Hey, kiddo, where you headed to in such a rush?” Mom called out from the kitchen as I tried to jog past.

I grabbed onto the kitchen doorjamb to stop myself.
My sneakers squeaked on the tile floor in protest. “Oh, just headed into town.”

It wasn’t a complete lie. I just wasn’t saying which town.

“Okay.” Mom glanced up from the blender she was filling with chopped greens, probably for yet another wedding she was catering for, and frowned. “Are you feeling all right?”

“
Sure. Why?”

“
Because you haven't gone out with any of your friends after school all week, and you look terrible this morning. Are you coming down with something? Maybe you should get some breakfast before heading out.”

“
I'm fine. I'm not hungry. I’ll grab some coffee later.”

“
Mochas aren’t breakfast. Come here.”

I groaned.
“Mom—”

She snapped her fingers then pointed at the floor beside her as if I were a puppy in need of obedience training.

Grumbling, I gave in and walked around the granite and oak island that took up most of the room, feeling like a kindergartner again as I stopped before her for inspection.

She slid a hand under my hair to test my forehead.
“Hmm. You feel okay. But maybe you ought to drink some orange juice to boost your immune system, just in case.”

“
Mom, I feel fine.”

Her lips pursed.
“Are you sleeping well? You've got such dark circles under your eyes.”

I tried not to
wince. “I said I was fine.”

One perfectly waxed eyebrow arched in doubt.
“At least have a glass of orange juice. Or I could make you a quick smoothie if you want.” She reached for the blender as if to dump out its contents into a nearby bowl. Or maybe use those green and orange contents to make me a liquid breakfast.

I darted around the island to the fridge, grabbed the orange juice from inside, and chugged down a few long gulps of acid straight from the carton, nearly wearing it when her gasp of disapproval tried to make me laugh.

I dragged my
coat sleeve across my mouth and managed half a smile. “Good enough?”

“
Ugh. Do you have any idea how disgusting that is? I swear, I must have raised you in a barn and didn't know it.”

I shoved the juice carton back into the fridge then gave her a quick kiss on her cheek.
“Later.”

“
Speaking of, don't be late! Remember, your curfew's midnight.”

“
Aw, come on, Mom!” I yelled out from the foyer, my hand on the front door’s handle now. “I'm eighteen now. I'm going to college soon. You going to be there to tuck me in at midnight too? Two o'clock at the earliest.”

“
Keep being such a pain in my butt and you’ll never live to see college. Midnight and not a minute later or I take the keys.”

“
Fine,” I grumbled for the sake of getting out the door sometime this year.

I eased the heavy wrought iron, glass and oak front door shut behind me, then jogged across the front lawn to the circle drive where my pride and joy waited.

Even though I was in a hurry and worried about hiding the magic that now felt like a curse running through my veins, I still felt a flash of joy as I climbed into the cab of my new baby, which my parents had just given me in August for my eighteenth birthday. The gleaming white Ford F-150X Super Cab Hybrid was the single coolest personal truck I'd ever seen, complete with voice-activated heads-up display, twelve CD changer music system, a 4-wheel drive system that I had yet to manage to get stuck in the mud with, a super extended cab big enough to handle the entire Raiders basketball starting team, computerized back up and parallel parking assistance, and a towing package with a computer sensor to help overcome wind or bumpy roads while towing up to eight thousand pounds. So far, I'd only used the tow kit to help pull some of the Raiders basketball team's wimpier trucks out of the mud. But Dad had promised we'd get to try out this feature for real with the family boat next summer before I went off to Yale.

In the meantime, I was enjoying the fact that nobody else in
East Texas probably had a truck like mine yet. Dad had to pull in some private favors to get one of the first hybrid personal trucks off the assembly line for my birthday last August. He liked the “green effect” it added to his political image. I just liked the freedom it gave me. Its electric/gas hybrid fuel system with increased battery storage meant I no longer had to ask the parents for gas money or explain why I'd put so many miles on it already. All I had to do was plug it in every night and it was ready to go another 100 miles the next morning without using a drop of gas.

Thankfully, it also had
a GPS, making it easy for me to get directions to the bookstore.

If only girls
like Tarah came with some sort of GPS to help us guys navigate their minds.

The first two bookshops were total busts. Not even a Harry Potter
book in sight, so they must have already cleared their shelves of all magic related books, both fictional and nonfiction. And the third shop came with its own set of problems, namely a group of loud protestors out front that had drawn the attraction of a local news crew.

I debated skipping this shop entirely. The last thing I needed was for my face to show up on the news right now. But with only one other bookstore to check after this one and the odds so high against its having anything on magic to help me, either, I decided to ri
sk it. If I pulled up my hoodie and kept my face turned away from the cameras, nobody should even notice me much less recognize me.

I parked around the corner from the street the shop was on, shoved my hands in my pocket, and slowly joined the edge of the group shouting and holding posters saying things like “Save Our Country!” and the words “Demon Worshippers” with a big red circle and a line through it over them.
A few feet away from them, a smaller knot of people shouted back, calling them bigots. Gleefully shouting right back into their faces was some idiot with shaggy blond hair that could have been Kyle, but I couldn’t be sure because all I could see from this angle was the back of his head.