“You know, I came up to you that night because I had a feeling you were different.”

“Huh?” Rey asked from where she sat hunched over fixing the sink.

Sitting back she craned her head to look at Finn, who had propped himself up near the window again and asked, “Different how?

If the words came out testy, she didn’t mind. After all, she spent her whole life trying to prove herself otherwise. Being different wasn’t really a good thing to be in her book.

He gazed at her warmly, despite her tone, a look that happened more often these days.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Rey. I mean… I mean I felt like if I went up to you, that you’d be able to help me. Like there was… something less uncomfortable about you.”

Rey perked up. “Uncomfortable?”

“Yeah, I always felt kinda weird around the others. Like it wasn’t just the fact that they were criminals that made me uncomfortable, it was something more than that.”

Rey felt glad she stopped working to listen to Finn speak.

Magic always felt a certain way to all non-magical humans and it was fascinating to finally hear someone else talk about it. The pecking order at the orphanage always made sure Rey never got close enough to others like her.

Rey wondered if Finn ever felt empty too, but she bit her tongue before the question slipped out.

Better save it for another time.

Finn gave a short bitter laugh that brought her attention back. “What am I saying? Up until a few nights ago, I was a criminal too and I just didn’t realize that I couldn’t be a part of that life until… well, you know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

A dead friend followed by a rough wake-up call.

Rey remembered the bits and pieces he’d been willing to tell her the day after taking him in.

He had been a grunt, the bottom of the bottom prior to becoming a soldier in the ranks. A job went bad and his only friend was fatally shot. That meant no matter how good of a healer he was, it wasn’t going to matter. Rey had asked for his name and Finn couldn’t tell her.

Grunts didn’t have names until they were promoted.

Then who gave him his, Rey had asked. Finn went quiet first. Then he said it was somebody he met on one of his missions and that it was a story for another time. Either way, the loss of his friend had been the tipping point before he found himself here, sitting in her apartment.

“You don’t get much free time, do you?” Finn had been eyeing the sink.

Rey nodded. “Not really."

Especially not now, she thought.

Lately, Plutt had been increasing her workload for no apparent reason. While he always had his reasons for doing so, Rey could not think of a particular instance in the past few months that she’d slighted him in any way. But, then again, did cruel men ever need a reason to be cruel?

“He’s an asshole and all that’s going for him is the fact that he owns this building. Otherwise, he looks like a bumbling glutton.” Finn growled. “His own mother probably can’t bear to look at him. You deserve better, Rey. When all this dies down, let’s get us both outta here. I don’t know where we’ll go, but we’ll figure it out. But that’s…” Finn grinned sheepishly. “That’s only if you want to.”

“I’ll think about it,” Rey replied kindly, though that was all she was willing to say on the matter. Finn had broached a topic that she had long left untouched because her nose had simply been shoved too close to the grindstone to do otherwise. She had spent so long surviving that she just didn’t know where to go that wouldn’t place her back under the same conditions if not worse.

But maybe things would be different now that she had Finn. Maybe they really could work towards a better existence together.

All Rey could do was hope that it would all work out in the end.

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Plutt was overweight and plodding and past his prime.

He had long accepted that he was all of these things.

But he wasn’t stupid.

Nor was he incapable for he could use magic as well as any landlord in New York, honed by years of suspicion and treachery.

It had taken him more than a few days since to confirm, but now there was no doubt left.

Within his building of more than one hundred people, he had at one point or another sensed their presence: coming down the elevator, walking to or past his office, or when he personally evicted debt-ridden tenants. He kept his hearing enhanced throughout the majority of the day and he heard anything from their breathing to their heartbeat to their footsteps.

But for some reason he had always had immense difficulty sensing Rey Smith since she had come to work for him. He would always remember how the skinny, little girl nearly gave him a heart attack as she seemed to just appear in his office out of thin air. And since then she continued making so little noise that he often would not notice her unless he came across her directly. And while he could tell he made her nervous, he could not hear the palpitations for himself.

Now there was no doubt left.

Speed-dialing the number, he brought the cellphone to his ear as the receiving end picked up after the second ring.

“Plutt.” Came the gruff greeting.

“I’m callin’ to discuss payment.” Although he kept his voice level, knowing who he was speaking with, greed pulled back his many jowls into a nasty grin.

“What for?” The voice growled back in a tone Plutt was all too familiar with. These mafioso and their high and mighty attitudes.

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“I found your little rat.” He drawled sweetly into the receiver. They had been looking high and low with increasing desperation.

The other end went silent for several beats. And then, “You’ve seen him?”

Plutt almost wanted to scream that the man was fool! He didn’t have to see him to know.

After all, he had heard the clear, steady beating of his heart while Rey Smith had been out running through the impossible list of tasks he made sure to pile on to her these past few days.

“He’ll be ready for pickup in room 918. Jus’ stop by around 9 pm tonight,” Then he added almost as an afterthought. “And tell your sergeant not to worry about casualties. Nothing I can’t help clean up afterwards.”

The voice on the other end grunted noncommittally yet Plutt still felt a rush of self-satisfaction.

They would both get what they wanted.

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“Excuse me.”

Rey said it as apologetically as she could while practically sliding down the steps in her rush, just barely skirting around the dark-haired man that floated past her wordlessly. Ever since she had to start buying enough food for two people and with the recent increase in workload from her boss, Rey had been hard pressed to finish all her errands and still get enough sleep for the night.

As she got further down the steps, she was suddenly struck with a slew of pins and needles along her arms and legs, a sharp difference to what she now understood was how non-magical people reacted to magic. Odd, she thought, I’ve never felt like this before. Off kilter, she shook it off and finished the rest of the trip downstairs and hurried over to the trash.

Do this and then I’m done for the night. Rey thought eagerly.

Fully loaded in a matter of seconds, Rey shot out towards the dumpster, ready to get this over with. It was in this manner that Rey planned to complete the rest of her trips.

Until she was suddenly struck by a tremor so strong that she nearly tore the plastic on the bags.

“What the hell?” She gasped.

Something was wrong. Something was seriously, seriously wrong.

A roiling suspicion bloomed in her gut as the shudders subsided. For some reason, her mind immediately slipped back to the man on the stairs.

Why hadn’t he taken the elevator? Tenants rarely climbed the stairs because magic took effort unless they lived on the second or third floor. And Rey had been coming from the fifth.

But it was the indoors sunglasses that made everything click in place.

Didn’t Finn say they always traveled in pairs?

Rey threw down the bags and then launched herself back into the building.

Tearing up the stairs in a sprint, her heart hammered against her chest as she hissed, “Finn,” under her breath and prayed he was safe.

Nine floors. She prayed too that her gut was wrong. Please be wrong.

Because she had no idea what to do if she was right.

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Finn had learned to sleep with one eye open. Or at least as close to sleeping with an eye open as he could. All in all, he had become a light sleeper due to his tenure in a mafia he never wanted to join.

So when the door to Rey’s apartment opened and then closed, Finn was already wide awake. But that was all the heads up he’d get short of Rey’s bedroom door opening up. The soldiers would know to muffle their movements with magic.

But Finn could outsmart them.

He got up as quietly as possible, making sure to keep his breathing and heartbeat even since the soldiers would be keeping tabs on those to ensure he was still sleeping. Then he reached for the baseball bat that Rey had bought for situations just like this.

They would have guns, but only one would be armed while the other would most likely have a wire out for strangling. It was always much cleaner and quieter than a gunshot, even one that was silenced.

Finn could already picture it in his head. He’d smash the baseball bat down and stun one soldier while he used him as a human shield against the one with the gun. Then he’d beat feet out the door and hit the emergency stairwell.

The door cracked open and a man’s head peered through it.

Finn swung the bat down. Hard.

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Luca stood guard outside the dingy apartment, a smirk spreading across his face as his soldier slipped past the door.

It had been a fluke.

Although there was no explanation for how a grunt had eluded them for so long, longer than any other runaway he’d ever dealt with, the matter would be taken care of. Once their contacts turned something up, the rest had been history. Their target had been fast asleep when they arrived.

The grunt would be put down and then Luca could return to establishing his place as the newest sergeant in their capo’s platoon.

A spike of alarm pierced his mind.

Luca startled out of his reverie and drew his gun. Rosario? He pushed out mentally for a response but none came. He enhanced his hearing and heard two rapid heartbeats, but only one person breathing hard.

That could only mean one thing.

Luca kicked open the door with his gun up and came face to face with a boy holding a bloody bat, Rosario at his feet. For an instant, Luca was struck by just how young the boy was. He couldn’t have been any older than his early twenties. And then the revelation slipped away as fast as it came.

Judging from the blood, it looked like the kid got more than a few hits in and Rosario hadn’t reinforced his skin like he should’ve.

“Hands up, kid. And drop the bat.”

When the boy made no move to do so, he aimed the gun at the space in between his eyes. “Looks like you leave me no choice. We underestimated you but that ain’t happenin’ again.”

He pooled magic into his hand and eyes.

“You ain’t got no magic, do ya kid? In that case, there’s no point. I won’t miss.”

He cocked the hammer back.“Goodbye.” Luca put pressure on the trigger.

“NO!”

Before he could turn his head to see who had screamed, a hand closed down over his wrist and pulled.

The silencer made a sound the equivalent of the slammed car door, but Luca couldn’t hear it, not at all.

“You…” He looked into watery, hazel eyes.

A girl. And she was crying. Why? His mind seemed so hazy all of a sudden. He was having the strangest sensation. His power, his magic was… slipping… somehow. His vision seemed to degrade, his hand lost strength and the gun fell loose on to the floor, and his ears started to fill with a loud rushing.

“What are you doing to me…?” Luca trailed off. He was feeling so weak, so dizzy. So tired.

When the ground rose up to meet him, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. And still his magic continued slipping and slipping. It all seemed to be going towards that firm grip on his wrist.

“You’re a…” Before his eyes closed, Luca had one last distinct feeling.

A deep, deep loneliness that bore down to the soul, a loneliness he might never be able to wake up from.

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Pure power surged through every muscle and Rey nearly swooned from a wave of near euphoria.

She had never felt so alive. So… complete.

The sound of her name broke her out of the reverie. She looked up from where the man lay on the ground, the man who had collapsed after she touched him. Finn’s mouth was moving but a terrible roaring in her own ears drowned him out. His face, Rey suddenly could see every minute expression on his skin from the pinched valley of his brows to the firm clamp of his lips. He was shaken and it was because of her.

The collapsed man began to convulse.

Rey felt as if she were watching the scene from afar with herself, glassy eyed and numb, gazing emptily as legs and arms made dulled, sporadic thuds on the floor. Rey forced her head back to Finn and asked him in sluggish words, What’s happening? She saw him flinch.

The man was foaming at the mouth now and, as his eyes opened reveal an empty, sickening white, Finn reached for a small towel and then shoved it into his mouth. Sinking to his knees, Finn positioned himself beside the man’s chest.

She sank down across from Finn, losing the will to stand.

Finn was trying to save his life.

He proceeded to pump at the man’s chest. He was still flailing, choking but less noticeably. His breathing had slowed and his heart… his heart beat like it was dying or what Rey thought a dying heart should sound like. Yet it beat so loudly she could hear it from here.

Finn… Finn… Rey tried to work her throat but it felt thick. The scene was starting to blur.

“F… Finn… It’s no use.”

“What do you mean “it’s no use”?” He pumped his hands down harder.

Warmth trailed down her cheeks and Rey realized she was crying. “I don’t know. His heart… he’s going to die soon.”

“How do you know? How-?”

Suddenly the man on the floor gurgled, reminiscent of a fish gasping out of water. His eyes looked normal in that moment, brown eyes gazing desperately at the sky. He wasn’t looking at her, but she felt that gaze regardless like a brand on her skin. Like an accusation.

Then his head thudded back, the gurgling cutting off, and silence filled the room once more.