"Caleb attacked your brother? Okay, that goes below the belt." Phil said in disgust, shaking his head and rifling a hand through his black hair. "Who the hell does that? The dude is practically defenseless!"

Sindri really did need to take self-defense classes. This wasn't the first time that someone has cornered and confronted him. Prior to the start of his third year in high school, he was mugged for his cell phone and new sneakers. The robber broke his nose when Sindri moved to defend himself. Whatever spells Caleb and Ophelia directed at Sindri did enough damage to require eight stitches in the stomach and an additional day in the hospital for evaluation.

Eve shrugged and peeled an apple with a knife. "It's definitely Caleb. He has a hobby of attacking people while they're alone and defenseless."

Resh tilted her head at an angle. "How is your brother? Is he doing any better?"

Sundance jumped over Eve and grinned at Resh. "He's fine! He just gotta stay in the hospital a little longer. The guy bruises like a peach!"

She quickly pushed him out of her lap and Sundance fell on the floor with not even a noise. "Kyo and Amera told me they've had no success in finding Caleb. For some reason, Amera carries more of a grudge against Ophelia and Caleb than we do."

"To the contrary, Ophelia's never been the most liked mamodo." Resh advised, fidgeting with a fist of her silver hair. "Even in our world, she has always wreaked havoc and terrorized the other mamodo children. She specializes in the mind and playing with a person's least favored memory or phobia, whether mamodo or human. While they're down, she finishes them off without remorse and if the chance was given, she'd do much more than gamble with people's hearts."

"That explains the flashback, I guess," Eve said while continuing to shave the apple. "I thought I was going crazy."

"Ophelia can affect people in that way," Resh guaranteed with a nod. "While facing her, you should never look straight in the eye. Her win will be definite if so."

Sundance sat up, patting the bump on his head. At spotting the peeled-white apple in Eve's hand, he beamed and grabbed it from her, cradling the apple in his palms as if it were a precious souvenir. "Thanks, Eve!" He ate the skinned apple whole and took the red peels with him to Sindri's room.

Eve turned toward the door. "Don't jump on his bed!"

"I won't!"

"Resh, can I ask you a question?" Eve asked with a shift to her voice.

The mamodo girl nodded. "Of course."

"It's about Sundance," she said, making her voice little enough. "Do you know anything about his family or how his life was in the mamodo world? I'm just really…curious."

Phil smiled down at Resh. "She knows plenty about him."

Resh blushed but it fell away when she told her story. "This may be only a rumor but I've heard it repeated so often. Sundance was…was abandoned as an infant. In our world, depending on your lineage, parents will leave their children on a curb to fend for themselves if their element isn't what is preferred. Let's say, a child is born with the ability of fire to a large family of pyros. Two out of ten clans often ditch their child if they wield no unique ability. The same, I assume, has happened with Sundance."

"Bastards," Phil affirmed. "How could anyone, anyone leave their child for dead?"

Eve shook her head, placing it in her wobbly hands. "I just don't get how anyone could ever..."

"Me neither. I'm lost here, really, what can you say?"

Eve got up from her seat, "I'm going to go check up on him. He's been too quiet since we started talking."

She jerked back her chair to reach the full, uninhabited doorway. Sundance was asleep on Sindri's bed, his hair messy like a rat's nest, a stain of drool stretching down from his mouth to chin. The red skeletons of fruit skin were caught in his fingers. Eve smiled and dug into the linen closet, unfolding a blanket that could engulf a child before she spread it out over Sundance, walking out of the room so he could nap without trouble.

"Check it out, Eve! They're smoking like Sindri does!" Sundance yowled, holding her wrist and pointing eagerly at a horde of teenagers smoking from glass pipes. With the inclusion of a concrete floor, slippery metal skateboard ramps, and dumpsters gagged with sake bottles and poker chips. The park was more known as a child-hazard than a safe zone.

"Sindri smokes cigarettes," Eve said, yawning into her hand. She was clad in sweatpants, a large shirt with a cartoon dragon on the front and slip-on Vans. Her brown-blonde hair was locked in a disorderly bun on top of her head, a chopstick keeping it in place. "That's…illegal candy."

Obviously, she looked terrible because she hadn't planned on leaving the apartment today but Sundance insisted on having tofu bars so an exception had to be made unless she wanted to deal with him one of his tantrums.

Sundance tilted his head. "What makes it illegal?"

"The law. But I'll give you an example. Imagine there's a life-sized donut, complete with frosting and rainbow sprinkles. Because it's so good, it can get you sick enough to go to heaven but people still do it anyway because they like the feeling."

"Like a sugar rush?"

"You can call it that."

"Let's see if they'll share!" Sundance said and removed his hand from her wrist. He sprinted through the mob and Eve ran after him. She made an apology every time someone swore at her when she tripped over their feet.

A teen, undoubtedly the same age as Eve, held herself proud and egotistical among her comrades. She had brown hair and brown eyes that were darker in the sunlight, and was wearing a pink beanie, a white shirt over a black tank top, jeans the color of dead plants and pink snow-boots. She had an impressive tattoo of a scorpion with gold pieces for eyes on her neck but it clearly wasn't done with a needle.

Sundance made his best puppy-eyes smile. "Can I have some of your donut sugar?"

The girl didn't bat an eyelash. "No."

"Sundance, don't run like that!" Eve chastised, hauling him into her arms and covering his mouth but the damage was done. She knew those people as Caleb's friends but nothing more. If they didn't recognize her, it'd be the best day of–

One of the boys gave her the stink-eye. "Aren't you Caleb's girl?"

Over a dozen excuses to why she and Caleb were no longer dating showered her until Scorpion Tattoo chose to interfere. "Didn't you hear, Lucian? Caleb's been missing. Broken up or not, running away from this shithole was the best thing he ever did."

"It's hard to talk about things you know nothing about," Eve retorted.

"I know that Caleb never wanted kids. It's amazing he stuck around with you this long even after he knocked you up." Scorpion Tattoo leered, her stare dawdled on Sundance. "It makes me wonder what he saw in you."

Eve glided a protective arm around Sundance. "A lot of things he obviously didn't see in you."

"Uh-oh, Aoki got that look on her face again," Lucian said with a flinch. "There's gonna be trouble. We better skedaddle."

The entire mob took off. Sundance collapsed onto the ground when he saw that they took the glass pipes, pocket-sized balances, and bags of white powder with them. Aoki (or rather Scorpion Tattoo) stepped back and touched the print on her neck.

"You're gonna pay, Miroashi," Aoki snarled like a cat, dragging a blood orange spell-book out from her backpack on the ground.

"Really? What makes you think so?" Eve asked bravely. The girl didn't even have a mamodo. It didn't make sense that she could have a spell-book. The only probability was that she stole it from someone else.

Eve scouted through her bag for Sundance's book but not before Aoki could get the first spell in.

"Scoplor!"

The scorpion tattoo evaporated as if someone threw water on it and an actual living scorpion, the size of a human, skittered across the concrete on its eight legs and arched its stumpy tail through the air.

Eve covered her mouth and gasped, so dumbfounded she couldn't think of an attack spell. I guess this is karma.

Instead, Sundance laughed and clapped at the scorpion and Aoki as if they were actors in a movie. "How do you do that!? That's so cool!"

So I'm thinking about making this battle a two-to-a-pending-three part thing. I kept on getting stuck on what to write for this last scene so I apologize for the delay.

Random author's side-note to anyone who cares (or doesn't care, just happened to skip upon this and read it), I was originally going to lead this story on Caleb's POV and have him be Sundance's book-owner when I first thought of this fic but I couldn't think of a good antagonist at the time. Caleb was still a total a-hole in the first draft though so nothing's really changed about him except his appearance.

Side-note done. R&R!