Page 69 of Fractured Fates

And while it’s been easy as fuck to stroll straight into her mind and peruse all her thoughts like I’m window shopping, there are some memories she’s keeping locked away. Memories I can’t reach without strapping her to a chair and invading her mind. Memories I’m not sure the girl even knows she possesses.

I’m not ready to admit I’ve been unable to lock them. Not yet.

“You don’t like her?” my friend says, after several moments of silence.

“I never said that.”

“Phoenix–”

“She was unregistered.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that. He knows how I feel about those who shirk their duties.

“There may have been a good reason,” he says finally.

I stare at my friend. Is he out of his mind? The authorities’ enforcer? His very job is to collect those unregistered and hand them in for the punishment they deserve.

“There is never a good enough reason,” I snap.

The girl may have some talent. There are even times I catch myself captivated by her because she’s goddamn beautiful, those big honey eyes of hers, too mesmerizing for words. But she’s also a brat. A brat who has every intention of fleeing as soon as she gets the chance.

“She reminds me of you,” my friend says. “How you were when we first started at the academy. Always bristling for a fight – with the teachers as well as the other pupils.”

I scrape my fingers through my beard. That’s because I’d learned the hard way always to strike first. If I’d let them, those rich kids and snotty teachers would have ground me to dust.

It’s a lesson the girl needs to learn. And quickly. The Academy, Los Magicos, the society in which we live, is not one of unicorns and rainbows.

“How about you?” I ask. “What have you learned about her?”

He lowers his beer bottle to the bar top.

“Nothing so far. There were whispers about a woman and a girl a few years ago. Somewhere down South. They disappeared. It was thought to be a false rumor.”

“And the name? Blackwaters? Did you find out anything about that?”

He spins in his stool and taps the beer bottle on the counter. “There are no files with that name. No official ones, anyway.”

“What do your sources say?”

“The name’s familiar to them but nobody can quite remember the story that goes with it.”

“Have you asked your father?”

My friend looks at me like I suggested he dip his cock in a pool full of piranha. He avoids his dad as best he can. Unlike me, my friend comes from a family with a reputation and connections. His father had planned on a political career for his son. His son had other ideas.

“If I turn up and start asking him about some family name, he’s going to want to know why and that isn’t a conversation I want to have.”

I scrub my hand over my chin. “Yeah.” We’re the only ones that know. The girl, she seems utterly oblivious. It gives us options, choices. It gives me time to find a way to undo this mess. It’s best we keep this knowledge to ourselves.

“You need to keep prying. See if you can find anything more out about her family,” he says.

I grimace, lowering my bottle of beer. “Her mind is a cesspit.”

My friend laughs. “I thought you were used to delving into the minds of teenage delinquents.”

“No, seriously. It’s a cesspit. Her way of trying to keep me out. You should have seen the images she was conjuring up this morning.”

“This morning?” my friend says, all innocent like, but I see the way his spine stiffens ever so slightly.