The Marked by Inara Scott

“She was trapped in there.”
    “Well, you got her. Can we go now?”
    I turned to Barrett. “I thought we were just hanging out. I can’t leave.”
    “Come on,” he said in a singsongy voice. “You can’t stay here. The music will rot your brain. Not to mention the company.”
    “Barrett!” I looked back toward the house, feeling guiltier by the second. “You guys go without me.”
    “There’s a spot nearby where we can get a little privacy,” he said. “Luke’s dog will keep watch for us. You can practice levitating.”
    I stuck out my jaw. “I am not levitating.”
    We’d started arguing about this a couple of weeks earlier. Since I could manipulate gravity, Barrett thought I should be able to make myself fly. I, meanwhile, wanted nothing to do with levitation. I was terrified of heights. And I knew better than anyone that my focus still needed work. If my attention wavered while I was levitating, I’d fall like a rock. This had happened a number of times with objects I had attempted to manipulate. I was not prepared for it to happen to me.
    “You can practice on me,” Barrett said. He walked around to the back of the truck and climbed onto the bumper. “I’ll jump off here. Just a few feet off the ground. No one will notice.”
    “I’ll drop you if I get distracted,” I warned.
    “Don’t get distracted,” he argued. “Focus.”
    “Easy for you to say, Zen master. I just started training! You’ve been doing it for years.”
    Tara eyed me. “I wouldn’t mind if you dropped Barrett on his butt, D.”
    I rolled my eyes. “I know you’d like it, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”
    Barrett climbed down, apparently having accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to change my mind. “You’re getting better, D. Last week you moved that chair across the room without blinking.”
    “You are not a chair.”
    He grabbed a can of soda from the seat beside Tara and popped open the top. “So you’ll try harder. It’s good to raise the stakes.”
    “Kids,” Esteban broke in, sotto voce, “sorry to interrupt, but is it just me or is there a menacing gang of thugs headed our way?”
    Everyone moved away from the car to get a better look. I strained to see the shapes in the darkness. There were at least eight of them, perhaps more, but it was hard to tell, because every time they got close to a streetlight, a tiny figure would step out of formation and touch the lamppost. Then there would be a fizzing sound, and the light would flare brightly, then go dark.
    Without being able to see their faces, it was hard to describe what made these people so frightening, other than the fact that one of them had the power to short-circuit streetlights. It must have been the way they moved—in a phalanx, a stocky guy at the front walking purposefully as they headed toward Anna’s house. They also weren’t talking. That sent the creepy factor up several notches.
    “Not just you,” Barrett confirmed. “Definitely menacing.”
    “Should we go in the house?” I whispered. Suddenly, I desperately wanted Cam next to me.
    Right next to me.
    Or, better still, in front of me.
    They were just a few houses away now, and I could see that there was a mix of male and female, at least ten altogether, some with long coats, others with vests, all wearing red bandannas in one style or another—around the forehead like a headband for the girls, at the wrist or neck for the boys.
    There was enough light from the remaining streetlamps and Anna’s house to illuminate their faces as they got closer. They were all teenagers, I guessed. The guy in front looked a little older, maybe twenty. The others were hard to make out, especially the ones in the back, but they were all grim and silent, and they were staring right at us.
    Cam must have heard my prayers. Or maybe, I realized with no small amount of trepidation, he had felt someone using a Level Three Talent. As the phalanx neared, music spilled out of Anna’s