I just wanted to tell you guys, I've had this first scene in my head before I had even started writing Ch. 1. I hope you guys will love it as much as I did.

4

So take me away!
'Cuz I don't wanna be there
I should learn to speak up
And I'm wanting out.

- "Wanting Out," by Michelle Branch

Layla stretched her neck, rubbing her tired eyes. Next to her, she felt Rose shift. Her little sister had fallen onto her lap at one point, and was clutching a sofa pillow in her sleep. Next to Rose, Danny was slumped over on the armrest, snoring softly.

Smiling, Layla glanced over at the other side of the couch- and her smile disappeared. There was a large gap where one pyro best friend had once sat, but now clearly had vacated the area. Considering the events from the day before, it was understandable that he would want to hightail it out of there. Hell, it was amazing that he stayed overnight at all. She had no right to feel disappointed, even if she kind of was.

He was a good friend. She was just messed up.

Moving as slowly as physically possible, Layla extracted herself from her sister's grip and got up from the couch. Luckily for her, both of her siblings were heavy sleepers, so neither one of them so much as flinched.

She glanced at the clock they kept over the TV and did a double-take. It was 10:12?! She never slept this late! This was so not good…

Layla headed over to the kitchen, and stopped in her tracks. There was food on the table. She was the only one who cooked in the family. Her mother couldn't boil water (and also didn't like to cook, simply for the fact that most recipes involve the use of dead animals), and her father's idea of eating in was to order take-out.

Stepping forward cautiously, she stopped once more once the full kitchen came into view. Warren… was in her kitchen… cooking. She felt like her brain had just imploded.

"Uhh… Warren?" she asked softly, staring at the kitchen table, which was weighed down with several pounds of freshly cooked food. "What are we, umm, making?"

Warren glanced over at her and nodded in hello. "You didn't have a whole lot in your kitchen, but I made bacon, some kind of nasty tofu bacon, pancakes, chocolate chip pancakes, real bacon cheese omelets, and a broccoli and cheese omelet- I can't swear by that one, though, but I know you won't eat any kind of meat."

She smiled, leaning against the refrigerator for support. "You really didn't have to do all of this," she said, rubbing her bare arms. She was only in a yellow tank top and a pair of slightly baggy jeans. She was cold and still sleepy, and the idea of Warren cooking for her family was a little too early in the morning to properly process. True, she was a morning person, but she wasn't used to sleeping on the couch.

"It's no big deal, hippie," he said, turning back to the oven and flipping one of the pancakes on the frying pan.

Layla shook her head, and then ran her fingers through her messy red hair. She winced when her fingers caught on a few knots, and knew it must've looked like hell. "It is kind of a big deal, Warren," she said, keeping her voice barely above a whisper. "Which is why I'm really grateful."

Warren just grunted in response. She knew it was an automatic response for him. He was pretty bad when it came to dealing with compliments. Anymore, if he didn't react that way, she'd probably be concerned.

"I'm going to call Will in a little bit," Layla said, wiping under eyes, and hoped she had removed any smudges of eyeliner or mascara residue. "I figure I can take them to the movies and out to lunch. Anything to avoid this house."

Turning back to face her, he grimaced and said, "Well, I hate to be the one to admit this, but I was already thinking along the same lines. I called Will to set up something similar, and he called the rest of them- Magenta, Zach, and Ethan. They're coming over around 11:30."

Stunned into silence, all she found she could do was blink at him. That was… helpful. One less thing for her to do, not to mention there would be plenty of her friends around if she had to deal with Gigantic Disaster: The Sequel. Actually, she probably couldn't deal with another fight with her parents, period. They were just too draining.

Dislodging her tongue from the roof of her mouth, Layla whispered, "Thanks."

"Dude, did you make breakfast?!"

Layla immediately plastered on a grin, and turned around to face Danny and Rose, the latter of which was still yawning and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "Yeah," Layla said, "Warren made breakfast for us, which was very nice of him."

"Awesome!" Danny exclaimed. Rose was still to sleepy to talk, so she merely smiled blithely and nodded her head. Glancing over at his older sister, he added, "And here I thought you were the only one who knew how to cook."

Turning her head, she met Warren's gaze and shrugged, straightening up and stepping away from the fridge. "I guess not."

Considering how it started, the weekend ended pretty well. She spent nearly all of her time with Danny and Rose, and spent chunks hanging out with Magenta, Zach, Ethan, and Warren. Twice Will took Layla and her siblings out to dinner, and once with his parents in tow. She suspected, though she never asked, that Josie had made her son bring them along because she knew something was up in the Williams' household.

Clover didn't come back until late Saturday night, around two in the morning. Layla made sure her siblings didn't wake up, but she sure as hell wasn't sleeping. She made her mother crash on the couch, purposefully ignoring the stench of booze that clung to her hair and skin. She was too drunk at that point, but Layla had every intention of giving that woman a piece of her mind when she sobered up the next morning.

As it turned out, that wasn't necessary. Clover was out of the house before Layla had a chance to wake up, and tacked some B.S. note on the fridge, claiming she was going to "pop by the animal shelter for an hour." She didn't come back until 1:34. A.M.

But, it was Monday now, which meant Layla would get the chance to go back to a place where she felt normal and could finally relax, if only for a few hours. Whoever thought high school could be synonymous to home?

"You sure you don't want to take Danny and Rose over to my house tonight? It's no big with my parents," Magenta said as the two juniors crossed the sea of students, all filing out to their next classes.

Layla rolled her eyes. "Mage, you've got three sisters and a brother of your own," she said, accidentally walking through a kid- he had some power that allowed him to walk through walls. "I'm sure your parents don't need to deal with another three kids, especially if they're not their own."

Now it was Magenta's turn to roll her eyes. "Please," she said, "They can handle it."

"We'll be fine, I swear," Layla said, walking over to her locker and entering in her combination. She opened the locker and pulled out her lunch, along with the books she'd need for the next two classes. "Besides, it's better if I take care of Danny and Rose on my own. If I keep moving them around, they'll probably get freaked out. And they don't need to get any more freaked out."

Magenta had already retrieved her books and waited patiently for her friend, her eyebrows crinkling together in concern. "Layla, Danny's going to be a freshman next year, remember? And Rose is in sixth grade. They're getting old enough that they should be able to handle this crap without your protection. Actually, from what I've seen, they're handling it great. I think you need to cut the two of them some slack."

Layla sighed and shut her locker door. "Can we talk about something else?" she asked as they began to make their way down to the cafeteria.

"Sure," Magenta said, shouldering her purple plaid messenger bag. "How are you and Will doing?"

Layla smiled briefly. "He's really been great through all of this."

That much was true. Once she had a chance, she pulled Will aside and told him the truth. She didn't hold back a single thing, and it felt great to get all of that off of her chest. And, of course, Will made it his top priority to make sure they had an awesome weekend and forgot all about their crazy parents.

She stopped thinking about her sweet and loveable boyfriend once they walked through the doors of the cafeteria. Everyone seemed to be giving a certain table a very wide berth. It didn't take long to figure out that the table in question was the same one Layla and Magenta had been sitting at for the past three years.

"Uh-oh," Magenta muttered under her breath. Their pace slowed down, and watched from far away as a familiar blonde guy leaned over their table, talking to Warren with a smirk on his face. Will was standing up, behind the blonde guy, waiting for the tiniest signal from his best friend to take this guy out. Ethan and Zach flanked either side of Will, the two looking just as serious.

"Isn't that…?" Layla said, trailing off in a whisper. Her grip tightened on her books and she sent her friend a sidelong look.

Magenta didn't meet her gaze as she said, "Eric Drake. Devastatingly hot, and just as devastatingly evil. What's this, the fourth time this month he's come out of hiding long enough to threaten Warren?"

"Fifth," Layla replied. "It's because of their parents."

"No," the shape-shifter said, "It's because of their dads."

Layla exhaled sharply through her nose, but didn't say anything else. Magenta wasn't wrong. Eric's father was the infamous Skele. There was something in his bones that made them as hard as steel, but were able to move at his slightest command and actually push through his skin and even grow to something akin to armor. He could also shoot his sharp spike-like bones from his body.

Skele was serving several life sentences of his own, just like Warren's father. Baron has suffered from a psychotic break and ended up blowing up three buildings and killing several hundred innocent bystanders. Skele, meanwhile, had held eighty people hostage and ended up impaling about seventy of them and killing 53. Because the two both needed special power-zapping jail cells, it was only logical that they would have adjacent jail cells. For whatever odd reason, this seemed to give Eric the idea that it was perfectly acceptable to pester Warren with never-ending conversations about their respective fathers.

It was never a smart idea to pester Warren about anything. Unless you were looking to sustain third-degree burns and a wicked all-over charred tan.

"Should we do something?" Magenta asked, propping her books against hip. "Like restrain Warren or duct tape Eric's mouth shut or something?"

Layla glanced over at Magenta. "I don't think there's anything that will be able to restrain Warren," she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. "And the same goes for Eric. No, I think we need to give them space. Warren's a good person. He knows better to do something stupid."

The words wee barely out of her mouth when Warren stood up suddenly and grabbed Eric with one hand by the collar of his shirt, dragging him several inches off of the floor. Will immediately sprang into action, grabbing Warren and pulling him away from Eric.

"What were you saying again?" Magenta asked, raising a thin eyebrow skeptically.

Sighing, Layla shrugged. "Oh, well," she said, looking over at her best female friend. "Will'll keep him from doing anything danger to… well, anyone. Everyone. Anybody that gets in the way of one of his fireballs."

"How many people do you think that'll be?" she asked, tilting her head to one side and squinting.

"Honestly, I don't know, and I don't want to know," Layla replied, smiling briefly when Warren released Eric, who backed off and headed to back to the 'bad guy' table. Will said something quietly, and Warren jerked away from him and stormed off, most likely to the library. Whenever Warren sulked or exploded, he hid in the library, a place rarely visited by the rest of the student population.

Magenta shifted her weight to her other hip and eyed the redhead with detached curiosity. "So… you going to try to safely disable the ticking bomb that is our hothead?" she asked, a bitter smirk curling up one side of her mouth.

Layla mumbled something indiscernible and handed her books and lunch over to Magenta. She wasn't particularly looking forward to this conversation, but she knew she was the only one qualified to deal with Warren when he was like this. Will was never good with emotions and talking about feelings, Zach was clueless half of the time, Ethan was still slightly afraid of him, and Magenta had been known to snap back when he got mouthy.

As she left the cafeteria and headed down the hallway in search of the library, she wondered to herself what Eric might've said to Warren to get him so angry. Warren had mellowed out quite a bit after becoming friends with the rest of the gang. This meant it usually took at least ten to fifteen minutes for him to start flinging fireballs and lifting people off of their feet.

He really was a charming guy.

Layla yawned tiredly as she walked into the empty library. She hadn't slept well the night before, or on Saturday night (no thanks to Clover), and sleeping on a couch on Friday night had not been one of her better choices.

Anymore, she was tired all the time but couldn't sleep a wink at night, just tossed and turned until she was beginning to drift off and then her alarm would go off. This had been going on for over a week, but she figured one day she'd crash and sleep in the entire day. Hopefully it'd be on a Saturday, so she wouldn't have to worry about missing school.

Walking through the library's many aisles, she admitted to herself that it probably wasn't the healthiest plan, but, at this point, it was all she had. Staying awake and taking care of her siblings were more important than sleeping a few measly hours.

By the time Layla reached the eighth aisle, she realized that Warren wasn't in the library. He was the only one that visited the library on any kind of regular basis, other than Sky High's computer lab teacher who would drag all the freshman out every year to go over the wonders of the Dewey Decimal System. But he wasn't here. She didn't hear him- normally, she could always hear him grumbling and muttering obscenities under his breath and accidentally singeing things because his hands were so hot.

There wasn't any noise. She could probably hear a pin drop, it was that quiet in here. It was kind of creepy, in a dusty, never used kind of way. Especially when she considered the fact that she was all alone in this little library.

In fact, she reasoned to herself, it would probably be best if she got going. Now. Just so she could find out where Warren was, and hopefully keep him from doing any major damage to the surrounding area.

"Well, well, well. Now who do we have here?"

Layla spun around, only to realize with a sudden burst of clarity that she was in a poorly lit, rarely visited library, cornered, facing none other than…

Eric Drake.

4

I am just rife with cliffhangers in this story! I ended up cutting out what would've been a pretty long scene right between Warren making breakfast and the Monday after, mostly because it was long and detracted from the storyline. Otherwise, this could've easily been another 3 pages longer.

I was wrong, this was shorter than Chapter 1, but it also took me a lot longer to write. I got a little stuck and I had to spend some time on other things (like starting school again… yuck), which gave me time to consider how I was going to wrap this puppy up and what I would do with Chapter 4. Luckily for you guys, I think this means Chapter 4 will come out much sooner! Yay! Because I feel guilty!

Anyway, hoped this kept you guys happy… for now. ;)