Shattered (The Protectors 11)

“Yeah,” Dalton said. “Listen, about that kid you guys had with you… the one with the weird eyes?”

“Have you seen him?” I asked as I snapped my fingers at Ronan to keep him from leaving the room. I put the phone on speaker.

“Yeah, he’s with me.”

“What?” I asked in surprise.

“I picked him up when I saw him walking along the highway leading to the interstate.”

“Thank God,” I muttered as I sat down on the bed. “Where are you? We’ll come to you.”

“Um, yeah, well…”

“What?” I asked at Dalton’s hedging.

“He only agreed to get in my car if I promised not to take him back to the lodge. I tried to find out why, but he won’t talk to me. Just told me to take him to the nearest bus station. I asked him if he even had money for a bus ticket.”

“What did he say?” I asked. I knew Silver likely didn’t have any money.

“Said it wasn’t a problem. Said he’d be able to earn some.”

I swallowed hard because I knew exactly how the young man was planning to earn it.

“Don’t take him there, Dalton. We’ll come get him. We’ll talk to him.”

Dalton was silent for a moment. “I got him to agree to come with me, Jace. Back to Elkton. He fell asleep a few minutes ago, so I wanted to call you to give you a heads-up.”

“You’re taking him home with you?” I asked.

“Well, I wasn’t going to let him fucking do whatever it was he was gonna do to get money for a bus ticket,” Dalton snapped.

Dalton’s agitation surprised me. He rarely showed any kind of anger – he was more of a slow burn type who was likely to shut down before blowing up. “What are you planning to do with him, Dalton?” I asked.

“No fucking clue,” the man muttered. Dalton lowered his voice. “But the kid is messed up. Only way I could get him to agree to come with me was to promise I’d give him the money he would have earned at the bus station.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“He thinks I’m buying him for the night, Jace,” Dalton said in a harsh whisper.

“Dalton—”

“Don’t, Jace,” Dalton snapped. “You know I wouldn’t—”

“I know that. That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

I took the phone off speaker to give Dalton privacy for what I wanted to say next. “Dalton, I know you’re hurting right now… more than usual. Silver isn’t your responsibility. Let me come get him.”

“Silver? That’s his name?” Dalton asked softly. He went silent and I could practically see him looking at the young man in his passenger seat. “He wouldn’t say how he knew you guys.”

“He saved Willa. We owe him everything.”

The man was silent for a moment, then said, “I’ll call you when we get to my house, Jace.”

With that, he hung up. I shook my head and looked at Ronan. “Let’s see what things look like in the morning.”

Ronan nodded. “We can fly down there and get him if your friend can convince him to come with us. But we can’t force him.”

I nodded. Caleb sat down next to me and put his hand on my knee. Ronan said his goodbyes and left the room. To Caleb, I said, “He’ll be okay. Dalton will take care of him.”

Caleb sent me a small smile, then reached up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Let’s get some rest, Jace. Things will look brighter tomorrow.”

I wasn’t as certain, but I nodded anyway and didn’t argue when Caleb took my phone and set it on the nightstand, then did what he did best.

He took care of me.

Things didn’t look brighter the next day or any in the week that followed. We hadn’t had much time to dwell on the fact that no amount of convincing could get Silver to come to Seattle. Fortunately, he was still with Dalton, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last. The idea of the young man disappearing all together terrified me. With no money or family, he literally had nothing, and there were only two places he could end up if he left Dalton’s place.

Either on his knees in an alley somewhere servicing a random stranger for a few bucks.

Or dead.

As much as I would have liked to go to Maryland myself to try and talk to Silver, Caleb had to be my first priority.

Because for all the progress he’d made in the past few weeks, it had become more and more difficult for him to hold it together as we’d neared the date of the pre-trial hearing. I’d managed to get him to share his feelings, rather than him bottling them up, but he was still a wreck about the whole thing.

“It’ll be okay,” I said softly as I squeezed my fingers tighter around Caleb’s hand. We were standing outside the judge’s chambers waiting for the prosecutor.