I looked away from her before I lost my mind completely and did something I’d later regret. Like reach for her hand. Or kiss her.
“You still have the dress,” I managed, because my brain had gone fuzzy around the edges. As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized I was an idiot for reminding us both of that night when we meant nothing to each other anymore.
“I wasn’t sure you’d remember, but then I saw your tie,” she said.
I looked down. I hadn’t even noticed which tie I’d put on. It was the one Kaira had bought for me because it was the same color as her dress. Another onslaught of emotions washed over me—emotions I had spent years trying to convince myself had cooled.
It was around the time of my high school prom. I obviously couldn’t bring my secret Magic girlfriend as my date. Prom coincided with re-elections in the Alliance, and my dad was staying in the office day and night. He was even showering at work. So, I had made the necessary excuses to my friends, and as soon as it got dark, Kaira and I had drawn the blinds in my house and decorated it for our own private prom.
She’d worn the dress she had on now, and we’d had a candlelit dinner in the dining room my dad and I never used. We’d eaten Ma Hansley’s leftover lasagna and then had raw cookie dough right out of the package for dessert. After, we’d danced for hours in my bedroom. I remembered the satiny feel of her dress as I held her and the even more satiny feel of her skin when I’d taken the dress off. We’d spent the rest of the night wrapped in each other’s arms.
I didn’t want to think about any of that.
“How’s Ma and Grandma Tashi?” I asked.
“Same as ever,” Kaira replied. “You know them.”
And I did. I had first met the Hansleys when they moved in across the street. I was ten and Kaira was eleven, and we had immediately become friends. We had both been old enough to understand the ins and outs of the high laws, and we knew enough to keep quiet about our friendship. With the hours my dad kept at work, it wasn’t hard to hide how much time we spent together from him. Even though we were neighbors, I don’t think my dad would have recognized any one of the Hansleys on sight. But the Hansleys accepted me without question, and I became a fixture in their house.
Even the very real threat of getting caught hadn’t stopped our friendship from quickly morphing into something more. We had known on a theoretical level how wrong it was to do what we were doing, but it had felt too right to stop. I had never, not for even a single second, been ashamed of loving her. I had only ever felt a mild frustration that I couldn’t brag to the world that the most amazing girl in existence had picked me.
A fortunate turn of events had left Kaira with a house in Back Bay that her paternal grandparents had gifted her when they died. Kaira had convinced Ma that she needed the house to practice her magic where no one else could see her, and it had become our personal sanctuary.
Even with the fact that we never met up in public, we always knew there was a chance we might be discovered. It was a risk we had both understood and accepted. It was the only choice we could make, because not being together was unacceptable.
I never would have guessed the reason everything fell apart would be because Kaira betrayed me.
“You taking any online classes?” I asked.
Kaira was as smart as anyone at the BSMU and a thousand times more talented, but she had given up her chance at a normal future the day she decided to remove the tracking chip in her arm.
“No,” she replied. “I’ve been too busy with work to even think about it.”
I felt an old anger flare to life. I knew what work she was referring to…her illegal work…the work that was a direct violation of the second high law. I was also guilty of breaking the same law, since I knew about Kaira and what she did, and yet I’d never turned her in. It was my choice, but I resented the impossible position she’d put me in.
“I don’t understand why you’d give up your future for Magics who are breaking the law,” I said before my anger overcame me.
“I am one of those Mags,” Kaira pointed out.
I winced at her use of the slang. It wasn’t a slur, exactly, but one didn’t refer to Magics and Naturals as Mags and Nats in good company. After three years at the BSMU, hearing the slang sounded wrong.
Kaira brushed a finger along the dark scar that ran down the inside of her forearm from where she’d cut out her tracker.
“And I do what I do because I’m not the only Mag out there who doesn’t want to be Marked. Except the others don’t have the ability to hide themselves the way I do. They’re scared and trying to avoid execution, and I have the ability to help them.”
“Naturals have to have passports,” I pointed out.
It was a feeble argument, and Kaira jumped all over it.
“It’s not the same thing, and you know it.” Her eyes were bright with anger.
“Then petition for a change, but do it on the right side of the law. Get your degree and work for the Alliance.”
“The Alliance is all politics and mission statements that don’t count for jack in the real world. Besides, any organization that thinks it’s acceptable to implant a tracker inside me isn’t one that will ever see me as an equal.”
I started to argue, but then I chuckled. I couldn’t help it. It was an argument we’d had a hundred times before. We both believed in the same principles…the same rights for Naturals and Magics…but we disagreed about how to achieve them. Neither of us had ever been able to sway the other.
God, I missed arguing with her.
“Guess it’s a good thing we parted ways, huh?” I asked, still smiling a little.
“Yeah, I forgot how I sometimes wanted to kill you,” she replied, but the anger in her eyes had been replaced by something softer.
We just looked at each other for a few seconds. The need to touch her was a physical ache in my chest. I curled my hands into fists in my pockets.
“Well, I better get back,” she said.
“Yeah, me too.”
Kaira stopped walking and looked at me. “Even though I don’t respect the Alliance, I respect what you’re doing. I just wanted you to know…I’m proud of you. I know you’re going to do amazing things.” She reached up and kissed me on the cheek. “The Alliance is lucky to have you.”
I was frozen in place. A whisper of her familiar jasmine scent had me wrestling for control of my arms that wanted to grab hold of her and never let go.
Kaira shifted back into the blonde she’d been earlier. We walked back in the same direction, maintaining a little distance and not speaking.
My thoughts were pulled back to the last months of high school. While I was submitting college applications, Kaira had started to help unMarked Magics who were trying to stay one step ahead of the police.
We had fought constantly during those months. I had hated that she was breaking the second high law, but I’d hated it even more that she was putting her own life in danger for the sake of strangers who had chosen to remove their trackers. It didn’t matter what I said. She had only become more invested in her work. I had my suspicions that she was planning to remove her own tracker, but I’d had no idea how she intended to go about destroying her records.
One day, when my dad was home with the flu, Kaira had walked right into the Magical Marking Office illusioned to look like him. She’d sat down at my dad’s desk, hacked into his computer, and destroyed every record of herself. Then, she’d walked into the room where all the hard copies of the Testing files were kept. She took hers and slipped out of the office—still illusioned as my dad.
When my dad’s boss realized a file was missing, the police had come to our house. My father, who had never committed any crime, let alone a high crime, was taken down to the station in handcuffs.
I still remembered my father, shivering from the fever that had kept him in bed for nearly a week, being shoved into the back of a cop car.
He was accused of aiding an unMarked Magic, which was
a violation of the second high law.
The lawyer my dad hired made the argument that there was no evidence of my dad being involved with deleting any files or tracking information. And since there was no way to tell whose file had been deleted—Kaira had been that thorough—the police couldn’t mount an effective prosecution.
The eventual determination was that my dad had misplaced the file, and some glitch in the system must have been responsible for erasing the tracking data. It happened from time to time…with so many Magics in the system, there were always files that went missing and turned up some time later. Except those kinds of errors never happened on Joseph Galder’s watch. And this particular missing file never re-surfaced.
The case was thrown out before it reached court, both sides having decided carelessness was to blame.
Most people would have been relieved to be exonerated from a high crime offense, but for my dad, the decision had been devastating. My dad loved his work as much as he loved me—more, maybe. He’d been one of the most dedicated members of the organization, and he was demoted to scanning in copies of restaurant receipts from Alliance officials for reimbursements.
As soon as my dad was arrested, I knew whose file had gone missing. I’d begged Kaira to tell me that it hadn’t been her.
I could still see her standing in the kitchen of her Back Bay house, a determined and unapologetic look on her face, as she told me what she’d done. Our fight had been brief. At the end, I’d told her I never wanted to see her again and walked out the door.
I could have forgiven her for breaking the second high law. I could never forgive the permanent damage she’d done to my father.
She had the ability to illusion herself to look like anyone. But she’d chosen my father…whether it was out of convenience or something more vindictive because of his high-powered role in the Magical Marking Office, I didn’t know.
Even now, I didn’t let myself think about the state I’d found my dad in after I’d gotten back from breaking up with Kaira.
The bandage on my aching wounds had been torn off at the sight of her, and I felt raw and exposed all over again.
“Kai.”
She turned to me.
“Yes?”
Why’d you do it? The question that had plagued me for the last three years was on the tip of my tongue.
I shook my head. It didn’t matter now. She had destroyed my dad’s career and almost destroyed his life. She had done it, and that was all that mattered. Besides, there had never been a future for us, only a beautiful illusion.
“Take care of yourself,” I said finally.
She gave me a bright smile that didn’t reach her now-blue eyes.
“You too, Gray.”
She headed toward the road, and I turned to cut back through campus.
It was still early enough that I could go back to the party, but I didn’t feel like trying to put on a good face right now. I decided to head back to the dorm and read those policy updates the Alliance just put out.
I was crossing the quad when I saw the flashing blue and red lights of at least a dozen cop cars. As I got closer, I saw ambulances and two fire trucks. Police were everywhere. They wore bullet-proof vests and held guns in their hands.
And they were all standing right outside my dorm.
CHAPTER 5
Ihad never seen so many police in my life. They were milling around the lawn outside my dorm, surrounded by a gaggle of onlookers. I wondered what the emergency was, since the police just seemed to be waiting for something.
“There he is!” someone called.
I startled as several people began to point at me. Then, the police were swarming me.
My hands were yanked behind my back and my face shoved against the dorm’s brick wall. Lights from a dozen flashlights blinded me, and the harsh voices of as many policemen was deafening.
“What—” I turned, but my head was slammed back against the wall with so much force I saw stars.
“Graysen Galder,” one of the cops said in a voice that was so loud and full of menace I was sure it carried across the whole quad. “You are under arrest for breaking the first high law.”
I was still a little stunned from being thrown against the wall, so it took me a moment to process the cop’s words.
“Magically-motivated murder?” I managed. “I don’t understand.”
Something hard and unyielding hit my lower back. More hands came to restrain me, even though I wasn’t struggling. I was too shocked to do anything.
My hands, now weighed down by handcuffs, were given a vicious yank. I stumbled across the lawn with four cops holding onto me. They steered me toward one of the police cars.
“There’s been some mistake,” I said, squinting against the blinding flashlight beams and headlights. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“So that’s how you’re going to play it, huh?” One of the cops gave me a shake.
“Heard he was a smart shit,” another cop said. “Better read him his rights. Kid’s a law genius or something.” He hauled me close enough that I could smell the stale cigarettes on his breath. “Not that it’ll help you a lick once you get in that courtroom.”
I was aware that more students had joined the crowd of onlookers, and they were staring at me with expressions ranging from horror, to disgust, to hatred. No one had ever looked at me like that before.
My logical brain told me that I just needed to understand what had happened, and then I could begin to untangle this disastrous mistake.
“Who was killed?” I asked, gritting my teeth as I was shoved against the side of the squad car. Rough hands patted me down.
This was insane. I had never carried a weapon in my life.
“You have the wrong guy,” I tried again.
“You Graysen Galder?”
“Yes, but I—”
“Then we’ve got the right guy. Scumbag.”
One of the cops opened the passenger door.
“Graysen Galder,” he said in a voice loud enough for all the onlookers to hear, “you are under arrest for the magically-motivated murder of Penelope Heppurn.”
Penelope?
“No.” I shook my head. “I saw Penelope a little while ago. We were just at a party—”
“Yeah, we know,” the cop replied. “Don’t worry. We know everything. All you have to worry about it is how that orange jumpsuit will look on you when they fry your ass.”
My blood went cold.
Before I could begin to process the implications of what the cop was saying, the crowd parted for a group of EMTs who were wheeling a stretcher down the cobbled path from my dorm. There was a body-sized lump on the stretcher zipped up into a black bag.
One of the cops motioned for the EMTs to stop right next to us. A different cop zipped open the bag enough to display the victim’s face.
I sucked in a breath. Penelope’s pale face was spattered with blood, her white-blonde hair clumped and crusted with it. Her blue eyes, open and vacant, still held the terror of the last seconds of her life. I stared at the slash mark across her throat.
A horrible, keening cry came from nearby. Penelope’s mother was standing on the lawn, surrounded by police. She was screaming and reaching toward her daughter’s body as her husband and the police tried to calm her.
A few girls I recognized as Penelope’s friends hovered just past them. They were holding each other and sobbing.
This couldn’t be. It hadn’t even been an hour since I’d last spoken with her. I had to be hallucinating. Penelope couldn’t be dead….
The cop zipped up the bag and nodded for the EMTs to take the body away while I tried not to throw up. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. Someone had murdered Penelope, and everyone thought I had done it.
“It wasn’t me,” I managed when I found my voice. “We were friends. I would never—”
“You were seen walking back to your dorm with her by no fewer than ten witnesses,” a cop said, sounding a little bored
now.
“You mean to tell me that isn’t your artwork up there?” another asked.
I looked in the direction the cop was pointing. That was when I saw the window of my own dorm room: second floor, two from the left. Across the glass window panes were the words “MAGS GET OUT.” The words had been written in blood.
A voice in the back of my head was screaming, This isn’t happening. You’re dreaming. Penelope isn’t dead….
Adam, my closest friend at the BSMU, stalked up to the cop car. He got as close as the police would let him. I thought he was going to start throwing punches or yelling at the cops that they had the wrong guy. Instead, he glared at me.
“You had us all fooled, didn’t you, Galder?”
“What?”
This had to be some kind of nightmare. If I could just wake up….
“You had us all thinking you were this perfect specimen of humankind, and here you were planning murder. You sick fuck.”
Then, he spit at me. He was too far away for the slimy glob to reach me. It splatted onto the pavement a few feet away.
“Adam, wait—”
I shoved against the cops holding me before remembering my wrists were shackled and I was surrounded. Something hard and metal collided with the side of my head, and for a few seconds, I blacked out.
I was still struggling to get the words out to explain that they were all making a terrible mistake…that I’d been set up…when I was shoved into the cop car.
It wasn’t me! I wanted to scream as I stared out the tinted window at my fellow students’ hate-filled looks. I would never do something like this.
Sirens blared. The retinue of cop cars bumped over the lawn and screeched out onto Storrow Drive. My handcuffs clanked together as we hit a pothole.
The cop sitting in the passenger seat turned to stare at me through the grating. “Hotshot valedictorian falls just like the rest of us.” He smirked. “Think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you?”
“What? No.”
The cop just huffed out a laugh and turned back around.
I sat in numb silence as the car and our escort blew through Boston traffic, sirens blaring. My mind was filled with the image of Penelope’s bloody face and those awful words written across my window.
Mags & Nats 3-Book Box Set Page 4
