gesture of peace. “Anyone who would kill a child so coldly is the enemy of us all.”
Sparkle Eyes glared at him.
A boy with brown hair and a long scar across his left cheek stepped up next to Sparkle Eyes. “Let’s go, Sasha,” he said with a similar accent. “In case this is some kind of trap.”
“I have a feeling the trap was all of us meeting in anger,” Teresa said, “and this turning into a massacre.”
He flexed his right hand, which made an odd, crackling noise. “There’s still time, lady.”
“Stop it, Tate,” Sasha/Sparkle Eyes said.
Sasha and Tate. We’d found two of the kids that Mai Lynn told us about. Tate, the son of Peter Keene; and Sasha, daughter of Dana Parks. Andrew McTaggert’s half-sister. I glanced at Ethan, who was watching Sasha intently. They weren’t blood-related, but they shared a half-brother, and I knew Ethan well enough to know that meant something to him.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Teresa said, “but Uncle isn’t the savior you want to believe he is. He’s lied to you your entire lives.”
“He saved us,” Tate said.
“One of the boys we rescued from Uncle? Landon? The people Uncle works for murdered his mother and stole him. They fed Landon lies about his father. About all of the Metas imprisoned in Manhattan. And they made his father believe his son was dead.”
“Landon turned against Uncle,” Sasha said. “So did Bethany. They’re traitors. It’s their fault Uncle exiled us. We’ll be his enemies if we side with you.”
“Maybe Uncle will forgive us if we kill the people protecting the traitors,” Tate said, giving our group a significant look. “We should have killed them when we got here.”
The odds of that being Uncle’s intention were pretty high. Six powerful, pissed-off teenagers hell-bent on revenge, not only for the deaths of two of their own, but also for losing the protection of the man who’d raised them? We could have been in serious pain right now if Sasha had been a little less in control. If she’d been as volatile as Bethany.
Sasha looked at Tate, then at us, like she was actually considering his suggestion.
“Do you really want to be our enemies?” Ethan asked. “To go off on your own, the six of you? When you have family out there who will help you? When we want to help you?”
Sasha snorted. “What family? The Banes who murdered children? Who murdered your friends and parents?”
At least they knew their War history. Sort of.
“Your mother, Sasha?” Ethan said. “She had another son. You have a half-brother.”
She stared at him, then narrowed her eyes. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. And I think he’d like to meet you one day.”
“You’re not buying any of this, are you?” asked the boy with the yellow wings. His longish hair matched the feather color, and even the shape of his face was somewhat birdlike. “We decided as a group we wouldn’t go against Uncle. That we’d find a way to fix this.”
“Of course I don’t buy it,” Sasha snapped back.
“Please consider my offer,” Teresa said. “We’ll do our best to protect you. Some of you do still have living family who would love to see you.”
“No.” Sasha stepped back, closing ranks with her group. “Don’t ask again.”
“So what now?” Tate asked. “We can’t just walk out of here. What if Uncle thinks we’ve made a truce with these people? He might think we’re working with them, or that we talked.” His hands crackled again. Kid was spoiling for a fight.
“We’ll deal if that happens.”
“Sash—”
“No, Tate. Let’s go.”
The gymnasium doors burst open, startling everyone in the room. We turned as a group, and the air sparked with energy as instinct brought our powers to the forefront. Two uniformed police officers walked in, firearms drawn, balanced across their flashlights. They stared at us openmouthed, probably trying to understand exactly what they were seeing.
“Nobody move,” Cop One said.
“Officer—” Teresa started to speak, to move forward, and she froze when Cop Two aimed right at her.
“Nobody move, he said,” Cop Two said. “We got an anonymous report about two dead bodies at this location.” He looked down and his eyes widened.
Cop One tucked his flashlight under his arm, then reached for his radio.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the tall boy who’d flown down with Wings. His hands sparkled with blue light.
Cop One paused, then squeezed the radio control. “Central, this is—”
The boy flung his right hand at Cop One. A haze of blue energy, like a baby firework, zoomed across the gym and slammed into Cop One’s radio with amazing precision. Cop One squawked in surprise and squeezed the trigger. Safety off.
My left forearm burned. Something forced me down onto my knees.
Chaos erupted around me. The kids went for the cops. We swooped in to protect the human officers. Guess what happened next.
The fight we were trying so hard to avoid.
Wings swooshed up toward the ceiling, and a big purple orb from Teresa dropped him fast. He hit the floor with a thud that made his friends shout. The cops got off two more shots before a spinning whirlwind knocked them both around like human bowling pins. The whirlwind stopped briefly, revealing Sasha as the source.
Someone grabbed me from behind and pulled me closer to the pile of wreckage from the roof. Took me a second to figure out it was Gage. He ripped off part of his shirt and tied it around my forearm.
“Fuck!” I yelped as white fire raced down my arm. Then I looked at my arm and saw the blood. “I got shot?”
“Yeah, you did,” Gage replied. “Stay put.”
Panther-Marco growled from the other side of the wreckage covering us from the fight. Something exploded. An unfamiliar male voice screamed in pain and anger.
“Try not to hurt them!” Teresa shouted.
I didn’t hear Sasha issuing similar orders.
Speaking of whom, Sasha’s whirlwind spun high into the air above us, swirling the dust and debris. Three of Teresa’s orbs missed, smashing chunks out of the gym walls. More air turned, and then Ethan sailed through the air. He slammed bodily into the whirlwind. Ethan and Sasha both hit the far gym wall, then tumbled to the ground. A blue firework hit him in the back, and Ethan screamed.
I tried to watch the fight, but pain kept blurring my vision. Nowhere near as horrific as those burns had been, but bad. I’d lost my Coltson, too, on the floor about ten feet away. Gage moved off to join the fight, and I felt, as usual, useless to my team. Deadweight.
Ignoring Gage’s order to stay put, I scooted toward my gun.
Something streaked across my line of sight that shocked me into stopping. One of the kids had shrunk down to a perfectly proportioned twelve-inch-tall version of himself, and he ran like a very large rat through the fray, unnoticed. He raced between Teresa’s legs, then suddenly grew into a massive, twelve-foot-tall version of himself. The size shift knocked Teresa backward onto her ass. She blasted him with an orb that hit right in his gut—where her head had been a moment ago—and he crashed backward with a thud that shook the floor.
The other girl from their group was down, too far away for me to see where she was hurt, but her stomach was definitely bleeding. Had she been shot by one of those stray bullets? Tate crouched near her, protective.
