I knelt in front of him. “You okay?”
He nodded.
And then he crumpled, and I caught him on the way to the floor, because he was just a kid, and a war mage had had him at gunpoint. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know. It’s all right.”
He shook his head. “It’s not. I messed up. But I was just—the girls, they wanted to see—”
“The initiates asked you to show them what you could do.”
He swallowed, and nodded. “They . . . some of them are just little, you know? And they aren’t like us. They aren’t used to . . . all this.” He gestured around at an amorphous “this” composed of gods and wars, or more likely from his perspective, of fear and pain and constant anxiety, because that was what he’d known before he met Tami.
It was what almost all Tami’s kids had known, including me, before she came into our lives and changed everything.
She only had one biological child, a son named Jesse, who had been born with an unauthorized ability. In his case, he was a fire starter, which had gotten him a fast trip to one of the Circle’s schools for dangerously talented youth, as soon as his power manifested. This had not gone down well with Tami, who was not the sort you wanted to piss off. Not when she had somewhat unusual magic herself, being a null, a witch who could suck the magic out of anyone or anything she met.
Including the wards the Circle used on their schools.
Jesse had shortly thereafter been back home, and the Circle had had a new vigilante to worry about, someone who made it a habit to waltz past their wards, pick up children at risk of spending the rest of their lives locked away, and waltz back out with them. She’d also collected runaways like me, eventually ending up with quite a collection of jinxes, telekinetics, invokers, taunters, dream walkers, and yes, even necromancers. Jiao was one of the latter, and he had a favorite parlor trick.
Only, from the Circle’s perspective, the unauthorized animation of a chicken was apparently on par with raising an undead army.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I told him.
“Then why do they say it is? Why do they—” He cut off, biting his lip, refusing to cry in front of me, because he wasn’t a little boy anymore. But he wasn’t a man yet, either, being all of twelve or thirteen, and hard-jawed stoicism was out of his range. So he just stood there, looking miserable, and making me want to send a certain war mage to the middle of the ocean.
“Because they’re afraid.”
“Afraid . . . of me?” He looked up. “But I can’t do anything—”
“Not yet. They’re not afraid of what you can do, but of what you might do. They don’t understand magic like ours, and it scares them—”
“Like . . . ours?”
“My father was a necromancer. I have a little of his ability.”
Jiao looked at the chicken, and I laughed. “No, I can’t do that. I don’t . . . It’s not bodies with us, but ghosts. But it’s still considered necromancy. And you know what?”
He shook his head.
“It saved me this morning. You know we had a battle?”
His eyes brightened. “Everyone knows. They won’t let us watch it, though—”
“Watch it?”
“On the security replay. Some of the vamps said it came through pretty good—until the cameras blew off. But Tami won’t let us see—”
Good, I thought, making a mental note to thank her.
“—but maybe you could—”
“There’s not much to see,” I said. “I left my body behind, and . . . did some things . . . and the video won’t show that.”
“But if people saw—they always say what I can do is wrong, but if you used it—”
“It isn’t wrong, Jiao. It’s not the magic, but what you use it for, that counts. You understand?”