“Hayden, I will be fine. It is only you who should be concerned. You are untrained and very vulnerable to external influences, and your thoughts are allowing them to participate in your life right now. You must learn to focus your will on only what you want.”
I scowled at that. I might not be out of high school yet, but I wasn’t some little kid. I could handle myself out there. “Well, thanks for the book. And, uh…good luck.”
“And the same to you.”
I could only push the front door open a few inches and had to turn sideways to get out of the shop. The bright sunlight was a shock to my eyes as they tried to adjust after being in the dim and cozy shop’s lighting. When I could see again, I thought I was hallucinating. The protestors had gotten hold of several books from a sidewalk sale rack outside the shop and dumped it over to create a pile in the middle of the street. It was a bunch of Harry Potter books, from what I could make out over the heads of the crowd. As I stared in disbelief, someone tossed a plastic lighter at the pile and set it on fire.
Holy hell, they were burning books in the street now! Where were the police, the crowd control teams? This was getting way out of hand.
“Hey, boy, whatcha got there?” Someone grabbed the book I’d just bought.
“Hey! That’s mine!” I yelled, reaching for it, but people shoved in between us and I couldn’t get around them.
The man opened the book, flipped through the pages. “Aw, it’s just some dumb school book,” he yelled to the crowd then tossed it down on the ground dangerously close to the fire.
I ducked down, risking being stomped to death by countless feet as I retrieved the spellbook. As I straightened up, a knee caught my eyebrow and I saw stars. I stumbled, half bent over, trying to find my balance and keep a grip on the spellbook at the same time.
“Hayden, are you okay?” A familiar woman’s voice shouted from somewhere towards my right.
The bookshop owner. She must have known I was in trouble. She shouldn’t be out here. “Go back inside!” I yelled to her. But it was too late. She’d already fully exited the shop.
“There she is!” someone screamed. “Burn the witch!”
She tried to hold onto the door handle, but the anti-magic side of the crowd tore her away, lifting her up off her feet and over their heads like a body surfer at a rock concert.
“No!” I yelled, trying to push through the people nearest me to get to her. “Stop, put her down!”
She thrashed and yelled at the people below her, telling them to let her go. I grabbed shoulders with my free hand and yanked, using the spellbook in my other hand like a battering ram to shove through. But I wasn’t fast enough. Within seconds, the protestors had passed her to the edge of the crowd at the fire.
And then they tossed her onto the flames.
“No!” I shouted, losing control, even as the anti-magic protestors roared with victory and drowned out me and the other pro-magic people.
Weren’t any of the Clann people going to do something to save her?
Her scream unlocked something within me. I cursed, and heat rushed through my body from my chest outwards and down my arms like hot water from a shower racing along my skin.
A burning wind, so hot it could have come straight from the Sahara Desert, whooshed over us all, knocking down half the crowd as it raced towards the fire.
The flames went out.
I climbed over the flattened people to the smoky pile. The bookstore owner’s clothes and hair were burned in places, and the skin on her hands and forearms was red. But she was still alive. She must have used a spell of some kind to keep the fire from burning her worse.
I helped her to her feet, slung one of her arms over my shoulders, and half carried her out past the shocked crowd still struggling to get up.
“Go left,” the shopkeeper said near my ear, and I helped her around the corner of the building. She nodded at a small silver car parked at the curb, and we stumbled over to the driver side door. “Thank you, Hayden,” she whispered as she opened the door and slid inside.
“I’m sorry—“ I tried to say, though I didn’t know what for, but she shook her head and started the car.
“My choice to get involved. Read that book.” She jerked her chin at the book I still clutched in my free hand. “It’ll save your life.”
I shut her door, and she drove away.
I walked the four car lengths down the sidewalk to my truck, unlocked and opened the driver side door, and tossed into the backseat the spellbook that had got me caught up in all this mess to start with. It had better be worth it.
The sound of smashing glass at the bookstore’s front entrance made me jump and look back at the protestors filling the street. At the edge of the crowd stood a girl with a familiar head of thick, wavy black hair above a hot pink quilted coat. I froze, my heart racing again. Surely not...
The girl turned on the sidewalk enough to give me a view of her profile, and I cursed. Yep, it was Tarah. What was she doing here?
I knew I should leave before anyone got a good look at me beneath my hoodie and recognized me as the one who helped the bookstore owner get away.
Instead, I gritted my teeth, ducked my head to hide my face, and walked up behind Tarah in time to hear her shout to someone in front of her, “Dad, give it up already. It’s like I told you, they’re outcasts, not lab rats! They’ll never let you test them.”
The man in front of her half turned to shout back, “Sure they will!” It was her dad. He looked a lot different than I remembered, shorter, skinnier, his hair all gray and wispy now. But he still wore those same wire rimmed glasses. “We’ve just got to make them understand that I can help them learn to control it.”
Dr. Williams turned to shout something in a nearby stranger’s ear. The other man scowled at the professor and moved away.
“Tarah!” I touched her shoulder to get her attention, unsure if she could even hear me over the crowd.
She jumped and twisted away from me, her already large dark eyes going even wider with fear. When she recognized me, her shoulders dropped several inches away from her ears. “Hayden! What are you doing here?”
Before I could answer, her upper lip curled. “Oh. TAC. Of course.” She turned away from me.