Why hadn't she told Damon and me about her growing abilities? We were her best friends for years. Did she think we couldn't keep a secret, or that we'd be too afraid of her to want to still be friends? Was that why she stopped hanging out with us and started hanging out with her new friends instead, because they knew what she could do and helped her hide it?
If so, she wasn't nearly as smart as I thought. How many times had Damon and I pretended to be knights saving our Queen Tarah’s life? She had to have known that wasn't only kids' games, that we really would have done anything to help her if she had only asked us to.
Instead, she had entrusted her secrets to people like that hotheaded Gary and Aimee, people who thought it was cool to make videos of themselves standing up to the government and showing off on the internet. They couldn't even keep their own secrets, much less someone else's. As soon as some FBI agent brought them in for questioning, they'd throw Tarah under the bus in a heartbeat just to save themselves.
Damon and I would have died to save her if necessary.
Now Damon was gone, and Tarah hadn't said more than a hundred words to me in years, and she could be thrown into one of those internment camps at any moment...
I took a deep breath, then realized I'd been too lost in thought and missed half an hour of the movie. Time for a break to refocus. Now more than ever I had to stay calm and keep it together.
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
The 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...
Calm 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?"