It was this girl. She could feel it already, even though she couldn't see the girl through the closed office door. But even at this distance, the sensation of power sparked around her, tingling and alive. Whoever this girl was, she was a little powerhouse, and probably remarkably dangerous because of it.
Maybe she was the cause of the double homicide?
No . . . she could sense the child's power, and it burned clean and incandescent. The girl was bright with power and promise, with no taint of death around her. Instead, it was something else that she sensed, something that she only saw dimly sometimes when looking in the mirror, moments when she could see herself and her own magic glowing within her. . . .
The child has magic!
Elizabet opened the door and walked into the office. The girl looked up from where she was seated with her elbows propped on the table. She didn't look like much, just a street kid wearing jeans and a denim jacket over a stained T-shirt, long tangled brown hair, and large green eyes. Those eyes followed Elizabet as she draped her blue suit jacket over the back of the chair and then sat down across from her.
"I'm Elizabet Winters," she said. "Elizabet is a mistake on my birth certificate that I've lived with all these years. You're Kayla, right?" She extended her hand. The kid didn't move, just sat and watched her with those terrified eyes. Elizabet withdrew her hand, wondering how to handle this.
"Who are you?"
The girl's voice was surprisingly soft, Elizabet thought. "I'm a psych therapist working with the police department," she said. "Usually I help the relatives of victims of crime, or work with people who have been through a traumatic experience. Like what you went through tonight. Do you want to talk about that?"
Yes, I'd like to talk about it, but I also don't want to spend the rest of my life in a padded room, Kayla thought, looking at the woman across from her. Elizabet Winters was a beautiful black woman in her fifties, black and silver hair coiled up in a braid. She sat silently, apparently waiting for Kayla to say something.
What am I supposed to say? That some guy killed two people in front of me and shot my best friend, and I created this weird light show to get rid of the bullet holes? No way.
"I've—I've had a bad night," she said at last, choosing her words carefully. "I'm okay, but I'd like to go home."
The older woman nodded. "That's a problem, unfortunately. Detective Cable wanted me to lock you up here for the night and maybe send you to Juvenile Hall in the morning, since it's a little impractical to take you back to the foster home in Orange County in the middle of the night."
"What?" Kayla sat upright in shock.
"I think I have another alternative," Elizabet continued, "since neither a midnight trip to Orange County or a night at Juvenile Hall seems to be the appropriate answer."
"Terrific," Kayla said, and slumped back down in her chair. "So are you going to send me back to Mr. and Mrs. Davis? I know it doesn't matter what I think, but I don't want to go."
"Obviously, or you wouldn't have run away from them." The black woman smiled. "Kayla, if you could do anything, what would you do?"
"I—I don't understand," she answered uncertainly.
"I'll rephrase this. Pretend for a minute that you don't have to go back to that foster home, or Juvie, or anything like that. If you could choose where you wanted to live, what you wanted to do, what would you choose?"
Who is this lady? Kayla wondered. She isn't like any cop or social worker I've ever met before. "I don't know. I guess . . . if I could have anything, I'd want to live with my parents again. But that won't ever happen, I know that." At Elizabet's questioning look, she added, "They disappeared when I was twelve years old. I was at school, Mom never showed up to take me home." The memory of that afternoon was still burned into her mind: how she'd waited and waited at the school, then walked home, to find the police at her house. "Nobody knew how to find any of my relatives, so I ended up in a foster home." She thought about it for a few moments longer. "If I could do anything, I'd want to live with people that understood me. Good people, not like Mr. Davis. People who like to talk about real things, and treat people right, and . . . and read books. People who do more than sit around drinking beer and watching TV."
"You like to read?"
In spite of herself, Kayla blushed. "I love reading," she said, looking down at her sneakers. "Sometimes it's the only way to escape, get away from everything."
"Have you thought of going to college?" Elizabet asked.
"Yeah, sure, but there's a snowball's chance of that, you know? You have to graduate high school before they'll let you go to college."