Cold Burn of Magic(55)

We worked in silence for several minutes, but Felix kept shooting me little glances, obviously dying to ask me more questions.

“What was foster care like?” he finally asked, giving in to his undeniable urge to chat. “You did that for a while, right?”

I shrugged. “Some of the homes were good, some of them were bad, but most of them were pretty indifferent.”

“Indifferent how?” Devon asked, the first time he’d spoken since our fight.

I shrugged again. “Too many kids and not enough hours in the day for the adults to see to them all. Most of them focused on the younger kids who needed them more. After a while, I stopped trying to get anybody’s attention. It was easier to keep my head down and blend in.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Felix said in a tentative voice.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Then why didn’t you stay?” he asked, gesturing out at the basement. “Surely, it would have been easier than doing all of . . . this.”

“I got into a fight with one of the older boys. He’d been taking food from some of the younger kids, and I told him to stop. He thought because he was bigger and stronger than me that I’d be an easy target. I showed him how wrong he was.”

“What did you do?” Devon asked.

“I busted his nose and told him that if he ever took anyone’s food again, he’d be drinking through a straw for six months. He got the message.”

Devon grinned. “I would have liked to have seen that.”

Despite our fight, I grinned back at him. “His nose swelled up like a grapefruit. It was awesome.”

“I’m sensing a but in there,” Felix said.

“But the couple who ran things didn’t like fights, so I got shipped to another foster home,” I said. “This one was actually a lot better. The Hendersons had a four-year-old girl of their own, and she was the sweetest thing ever.”

The Henderson family. I still thought about them sometimes. I’d been with them for two months, and it had been a good two months—until the end.

“What happened?” Devon asked in a soft voice, picking up on my sudden sadness.

“They were a nice couple, but they didn’t have a lot of money, and they lived in a bad part of town, near the lochness bridge. You know where that is?”

Devon and Felix both nodded.

“Anyway, they had this teeny-tiny backyard. One day, their daughter was out there playing, laughing and running around. Then, suddenly, she wasn’t. I couldn’t hear her anymore, so I went out to check on her, only she was down on the ground, flat on her back, with a copper crusher wrapped around her chest.”

Devon and Felix both winced. They knew that copper crushers were nasty creatures, oversize boa constrictors really, with shimmering, copper-colored scales who could coil themselves up tight enough to crush rocks—and human rib cages. And if they didn’t kill you with their coils, then they could do it with their bite, since their venom was highly poisonous.

“So I snatched up this plastic baseball bat she’d been playing with, and I started hitting the crusher with it. The mom came out into the backyard just in time to see me hit the crusher a final time before it let go of the girl and slithered away. She thought it was just a very large garden snake. Of course, the little girl told her mom that it was really a monster, but the mom didn’t listen to her. The next morning, I got shipped out to another home.”

“I’m so sorry,” Felix said.

I shrugged. The fear in the Hendersons’ eyes had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen and felt with my soulsight—because they’d been afraid of me. But I couldn’t blame them for it. Nobody wanted a violent kid in their home, sleeping down the hall from their little girl.

“Why didn’t you tell the parents what it really was?” Devon asked.

“I tried, but they were mortals. These folks knew about monsters, but they didn’t want to think about them being in their backyard. They thought they were doing the right thing sending me away. The Hendersons were just looking out for their kid. Their real kid.”

Devon and Felix shared a guilty glance. They didn’t ask me any more questions, but I decided to fill in the rest of the blanks. Might as well get it all out in the open. Hopefully, after tonight, I’d never have to talk about it again.

“After that, I went to one more foster home—a bad one.”

“What happened?” Felix asked.

“One night, the husband tried to sneak into the room I was sharing with two other girls,” I said. “I broke his nose, too. He called the cops, but I told them what he’d been about to do to me and those other girls. So they took him to jail instead of me. After that, I decided that I’d had enough. I packed up my stuff and left that same night. I’ve been on my own ever since.”

“But what about Mo?” Devon asked. “Why didn’t you go live with him?”

I made a face. “Mo offered, he always offered, but I didn’t want to be around anyone then. Not even him. Besides, he’s a total slob.”

I made the bad joke so they wouldn’t realize how hard it was for me to talk about all this. I’d wanted to stay with Mo, but I also hadn’t wanted to be a burden and have him reject me like the Hendersons had done. Yeah, I knew that he wouldn’t have, but I couldn’t keep myself from worrying about it all the same. Because if Mo had turned his back on me, then I would have had nowhere to go and absolutely no one to help me. So I’d decided to lean on him as little as possible.