Magic and Shadows: A Collection of YA Fantasy and Paranormal Romances

by T. M. Franklin

  “Alys, let’s talk about this,” he pleaded.

  “No! I don’t want to be here anymore. Let me go!”

  “We can’t just let you leave,” Drake told me.

  “Why not?”

  “If you are in danger, we need to make sure you’re safe.”

  “Who cares! You didn’t know me a week ago, so why does it matter now?”

  “Because you’re our friend,” Troy said. I hadn’t heard him show up. Had he run here or driven?

  I didn’t want to see him. “No, I’m not. Friends trust each other and I don’t even know if you can trust me.”

  “That’s for us to decide, not you,” Troy told me firmly.

  “Just let me go. You don’t want me here, anyway.”

  “If I didn’t want you here, I wouldn’t have taken you from the hospital. Where were you going to go, Alys?”

  “I don’t know. Far away.”

  “Were you going to walk the whole way?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you going to do about food?”

  “I wouldn’t eat,” I said.

  “You can’t not eat. You’ll die.”

  “Maybe that’s better. Maybe I was supposed to die instead of lose my memory. Maybe it’s safer that way.”

  “No one deserves to die,” Drake whispered and then dropped my arm.

  I rubbed where he had been holding it and sniffed to keep the tears at bay. “What if it all comes back to me and I try to hurt you?”

  “You won’t do that,” Troy said.

  “How do you know? If I’m involved in some type of war, I could be crazy.”

  “If you did have someone take your memories away, then maybe you didn’t want to be that person anymore.”

  “I don’t want to be this person, either,” I whispered and wrapped my arms around myself since the night had somehow gotten colder. I was pathetic, mooning over some guy who may or may not like me. It was ridiculous. Troy wasn’t the only man in the world.

  “Then change. You don’t have to stay who you are. People change all the time,” Drake told me.

  “Come on, let’s go back home,” Troy suggested.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to be laughed at anymore!” I yelled.

  Troy took a deep breath and said, “I apologized to you for that.”

  “It doesn’t make it hurt less,” I whispered without looking at him.

  “You laughed at her?” Drake asked him softly.

  “No, I laughed at her reaction to something.”

  “Now I’m cold,” Drake complained and rubbed his arms briskly.

  “You’re the one who chased me,” I reminded him.

  “If I had let you run off like that, Troy would have killed me.”

  “Troy wouldn’t kill you.”

  “That just means that he would be really mad at me,” Drake explained.

  “Why?”

  “Because I would be worried about you and spend the next few days searching for you,” Troy said.

  “You would be worried?” I asked and looked up at him.

  He nodded his head. “I would be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my friend. Plus, I’m the one who took you from the hospital so that sort of makes me responsible for you.”

  “You don’t have to be responsible for me.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m worried about you,” I informed him.

  “Because of what that guy said?” he guessed. I nodded my head. “You don’t need to be. Drake and I can protect ourselves and each other.”

  “You’re not going to let me leave, are you?”

  “Not today,” he said with a shake of his head.

  I sighed and walked to his car, which I could see parked down the street. Drake got in the car too and we drove back to the house.

  “You’re pretty fast,” Drake commented.

  “Maybe you’re just slow,” I growled with my arms folded across my chest.

  “You are pretty out of shape,” Troy teased him.

  “Speak for yourself. I doubt you would have been able to catch her.”

  “You only caught me because that car was going to hit me and scared me into stopping,” I reminded him.

  “A car almost hit her?”

  “She ran out into the street from a side alley.”

  “He tackled me,” I whispered.

  “Did she hit her head?”

  “No, I held it up.”

  “Maybe my memory would come back if I hit my head,” I suggested.

  “Or you could give yourself permanent brain damage,” Troy said.

  “People hit their heads all the time on that funny movie show.”

  “And most have to go to the hospital,” Troy countered.

  He stopped in front of his house and I stared at it with tears burning my eyes. I could have made it if only Drake hadn’t been out running.

  “Thanks for the help,” Troy told Drake.

  “No problem.” He climbed out of the car and when I got out he said, “I live right there.” He pointed to a house just across the street. “If you want to get away from Troy, you don’t have to run away. You can always just come over to my house.”

  I nodded my head and walked into Troy’s house.

  Troy closed the door and I heard him lock it. “Alys,” Troy called, making me stop walking up the stairs to my room. “Why did you run away?”

  “I told you.”

  “Are those the only reasons?”

  “Why are you so nosey?” I asked.

  “Friends are always nosey.”

  “Or maybe you just think I’m lying and want to find out what I could be hiding.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “No.”

  “Alys, when Drake called me and told me that you were running do you know what my first thought was?”

  I shook my head without looking at him.

  “My first thought was that you were in trouble. I thought you were in trouble and running away to try to protect me. I was scared and worried.”

  Tears brimmed in my eyes, but I refused to let them fall.

  “I didn’t once think that you were running because you had been lying to us and didn’t want me to find out. I didn’t once think that I should just let you leave and that I didn’t care. I could only think about finding you and making sure that you were safe and bringing you back home.”

  Why would he think that if he didn’t want me?

  “Please don’t run again, okay?”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if there is a war and they threaten you, I would rather give myself to them.”

  “No.”

  I turned and stared into his hard gaze with my own. “I won’t change my mind about that. My life isn’t worth as much as yours.”

  “Of course it is!” he yelled.

  “That’s how I feel.”

  “If you did that, it would hurt me. I would feel sad and feel like it was my fault.”

  “Why?” I asked in shock.

  “It’s my job to protect you, not the other way around.”

  “Why? If I can protect you, then why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because that’s not for you to decide.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know you don’t understand, but I don’t want you to protect me.”

  “You never explain anything that I want to know. Why not?”

  “I think we’re both tired. Why don’t we go to bed and we can talk in the morning?” he suggested.

  I felt like he was just trying to avoid the conversation, so I went into my room without another word to him. I sat there for a while and then cracked the door open to look out. He was sitting in the hallway in front of his door with his head leaned back against the doorjamb.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

&nb
sp; “Going to sleep.”

  “Why are you in the hallway?”

  “So I will hear you if you try to run away again.”

  That jerk! How could I leave if he was sitting there? “You’re crazy.”

  “Yup.”

  “So you’re just going to sleep there to make sure I don’t run away?”

  “Yup.”

  “What if I never run away again?”

  “Then I’ll have accomplished my goal.”

  “Go get in bed.”

  “Are you going to run away?”

  “No.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “I promise I won’t run away tonight.”

  He rolled his eyes at me and didn’t move.

  “I promise I won’t run away during the night.”

  “Nope.”

  I sighed and asked, “What do you want me to promise?”

  “Promise me that you won’t run away ever again.”

  I could figure out a loophole later. “Fine. I promise I won’t run away. Happy?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Aren’t you going to go to bed?”

  “Nope.”

  “I promised.”

  “I know.”

  “So why are you staying here?”

  “To make sure you keep your promise.”

  I screamed at him and shut my door. “Stupid man.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Good!”

  The next morning, we didn’t talk. I ate the breakfast he had made and sat on the couch to watch TV. Just watching the TV was helping me learn new words and understand things a little better. None of it helped me understand Troy.

  Drake stopped by a little later and Troy went out front to talk to him where I couldn’t hear their conversation. I turned the TV up louder and tried to let the funny people ease my foul mood. It wasn’t working.

  Troy came back in a little while later and sat down on the other end of the couch.

  We ate lunch together and then after a few more hours of TV, I fell asleep on the couch. I felt Troy put a blanket on me, but I didn’t open my eyes or thank him. I was being rude to him now and I knew that, but I was too mad to care at the moment. I dreamed about wars and being chained against a wall while watching them hurt Troy. I woke up crying, but wiped my face before Troy could see me.

  He glanced at me when I woke up and asked, “Do you want something to eat?”

  I shook my head and wrapped the blanket around me. What could that dream have meant? Or did it mean nothing and was it just a strange dream?

  “Do you want to go watch a movie?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you want to play a game?”

  I shrugged.

  He stood up and went to his room. A minute later, he came down with something in his hands. “I’m going to teach you to play Go Fish.”

  “I don’t want to fish,” I told him.

  He smiled. “It’s not real fishing. It’s a card game.”

  He started to pull out the cards when he remembered something and looked at me. “You can’t read the numbers.” I shook my head. “Well, I will just have to show you an example when I want something.”

  “That sounds like a lot of trouble.”

  “Not really,” he said. He began moving the cards between his fingers and making them do weird things. “This is called shuffling,” he explained to me. “It’s to mix the cards up.” He put some cards in front of me and then in front of himself. “Sort them by the symbols at the top,” he explained, “So, you see this one?” he held up one to me. “See this symbol? That’s a three. Find any more in your stack that have that symbol and hold them together and then do that for the other symbols.”

  I tried as best as I could and felt flustered at the end of it. “Okay.”

  “Now, the point of this game is to get all four of one kind. So, if you have four of the same symbols, you put them down like this.” He put four cards that had the same symbol down. “I have four fives, so I put them down.”

  “Okay.” I had one set of four too.

  “Now we start asking the other person for a card to try to complete our sets. For example, I would say, ‘do you have any threes,’ which you would then look in your cards to find a three and if you had one you would give it to me and if not, you say, ‘go fish’.”

  “Go fish,” I said.

  He picked up a card from the stack of cards he had put down earlier. “When you fish you take a card from the deck.”

  “Do you have any of this?” I turned the card around.

  “That’s a four. Here.” He handed me one.

  “Now what?”

  “Now I ask again.”

  I forgot how much time passed or to be mad and as the sun set Troy and I were smiling and happy. I didn’t know what my life had been like before, but spending time with Troy made me very happy…most of the time.

  “Now I’m hungry,” I told him.

  “Me too.”

  He put the cards back in their box and went into the kitchen. I watched him with a smile on my face. “I think I’m going to order pizza,” he said after looking in the kitchen a while.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m going to call a place that cooks pizza, tell them what I want, and they’ll have someone bring it to the house.”

  “People will bring you food?”

  “Yep.”

  Wow.

  “Why don’t you do that all the time instead of cooking?”

  “It’s more expensive than cooking.”

  “Oh.”

  “I better order extra because Drake might stop by.”

  “Is he mad at me?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you want to talk about yesterday?” he asked me. “Before Drake gets here?”

  I did, but I didn’t. “No.” I really didn’t want to ruin the night.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Okay, I’m going to order the food.”

  “Can we get cheesesticks?” I asked.

  “How’d you know about those?”

  “There was a guy talking about them on the TV.”

  “Oh, a commercial. That’s when they advertise items so people will want to buy them.”

  “It works.”

  “Yes, it does. Sure, I haven’t had cheesesticks in a long time.”

  I relaxed on the couch and watched more TV. Troy talked to someone on the phone about pizza and then as soon as he said bye his phone rang. He walked outside as he answered, “Stevens.”

  Was it his work? It seemed like only people at his work called him by his last name.

  The door opened and instead of Troy, Drake walked in. “Hey.”

  “Hi, Drake.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. I learned Go Fish today.”

  “Oh, and did you like it?”

  “It was fun. We’re getting pizza.”

  “Really? Well I came at the perfect time then.”

  “Drake, what’s alcohol?” People talked about it and drank it a lot on the TV shows.

  “It’s a drink that can mess with your head.”

  “Then why do people drink it?”

  “Some people like the taste. Some people like the way they feel after drinking it.”

  “Do you drink it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Can I try some?”

  “You’re not old enough to drink it.”

  “What?”

  “You have to be twenty-one.”

  “Oh.”

  Troy came back inside and Drake said, “You know, even when she turns twenty-one, she won’t be able to drink anywhere.”

  “What?” Troy asked, clearly caught off guard by the topic of our conversation.

  “Since she can’t get an ID, she won’t be able to drink anywhere.”

 
“Or drive,” Troy added.

  “That’s not fair,” I complained.

  “Well, it’s the law unfortunately.”

  “I don’t like that law.”

  Troy smiled and said, “A lot of people don’t like the laws.”

  “Why can you guys drink and I can’t?”

  “Even if you had ID, you can’t drink because you’re too young.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  Troy shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t make the laws, I just enforce them.”

  “What was the call about?” Drake asked him.

  “They cleared me for work. Turns out there were cameras and they had enough witnesses to clear me without even needing a trial.”

  “That’s crazy. I’ve never heard of that happening before,” Drake said.

  “Does that mean you get to get your gun back?” I asked him.

  He nodded his head. “And I’ll be going back to work.”

  “So I’ll be here alone?” I asked nervously.

  “We’ll think of something,” Troy promised me.

  “What kind of pizza did you order?” Drake asked to change the subject.

  “Don’t worry, I got your favorite for you.”

  “Have I ever told you that you’re my best friend and awesome?”

  “Not enough,” Troy teased him.

  “You want a hug?” Drake asked and opened his arms.

  “No.”

  “Troy doesn’t like being touched,” I said without meaning to. I pressed my lips together and stared at the TV.

  “Oh, the mystery starts to unfold,” Drake said.

  “Shut up, Drake. And that’s not true,” Troy said.

  Right, you just don’t like me touching you. Thankfully, I didn’t say it out loud this time. “I beat Troy at Go Fish,” I told Drake instead and hoped they would let the topic change.

  “He loses every game he plays,” Drake told me.

  “I beat you at horseshoes last picnic,” he said.

  “I was drunk.”

  “I still won.”

  “What’s drunk?” I asked them.

  “That’s when you’ve had too much alcohol,” Troy told me. “It makes you stupid.”

  “Hey we should go see that new movie,” Drake said with excitement. He must really want to see it.

  “I don’t know. It’s a lot of action.”

  “That’s fighting, right? I like those movies,” I told Troy. “Unless you don’t.”

  “What action movies have you seen so far?”

  “There was a movie called Rocky and Kickboxer.”

  “See, she’s fine.”