Free Raising Innocence by Shannon Mayer

imminent failure. The minute we landed, I’d be screwed. How did I tell them that I couldn’t sense the kids? What would I do with my life if I couldn’t Track?
    I splashed water over my face and put a cold, wet paper towel over the back of my neck. A soft knock on the door barely made me twitch.
    “Ma’am,” the flight attendant said, her voice sharp like she was hoping something was wrong with me. “Are you alright in there?”
    “I’m fine. Bugger off,” I barked. I heard Alex repeat the ‘bugger off’ and the flight attendant gasped; then it went quiet outside the door.
    I tried again to Track the kids, going through their names one by one, hoping by all that was holy in this world that it was a glitch, some sort of freaky accident that was done and gone
    Nope, still nothing.
    Wracking my brain, I wished that I could phone Giselle when we landed, and ask her to help me through this. Bile rose in the back of my throat, coating my tongue. Between the grief of losing my mentor, and the fear of what was happening. I could barely breathe.
    It took everything I had to still my mind and look at this in a more logical way.
    I was going to see another Tracker—he would help me. Jack Feen would know what was going on. He had to. Clinging to the faint hope that a man I’d never met would be able to solve a riddle I didn’t understand, I left the privacy of the bathroom and went back to my seat.
    I didn’t look at the pictures again, couldn’t. Because if I no longer had the ability to Track, I had no idea what I would do with my life.
    From my seat, I listened to the conversations around me, an attempt to subdue the panic in my heart futile. Until I heard a voice I recognized. The kid in the red hoodie, the one who’d come in last and slumped down into his seat. Agent Valley was just leaving him and heading back to his own seat.
    Kyle, that little bastard was on the plane? Here was the distraction I needed.
    Jerking to my feet, I stumbled all the way to the black line, hesitated, and then strode over it. Agent Valley and his partner threw themselves at me, and with a roundhouse and two swift front kicks, I dropped them one right after the other. Hunched in his seat, Kyle seemed oblivious to what was going on. The agents were pulling themselves to their feet, and the flight attendant was standing against the far aisle, her eyes bugging out, her hands twitching.
    Kyle’s hoodie was down, and his ears were plugged with headphones. Perfect, he never even saw me coming, the cocky little shit.
    I reached down and clamped a hand over his shoulder, digging my nails into his scrawny frame. Letting out a yelp, he looked up and paled. I dragged him out of his seat and back to my area of the plane while he begged and pleaded.
    “Rylee, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t keep something like this a secret! A huge government cover up! Please, listen to me, I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I wouldn’t have come to your place or taken the papers, but I couldn’t get back into the FBI files, they blocked me after I hacked in . . . you had the only proof that the government knew about supernatural beings—”
    “Shut the fuck up,” I said as I reached the black line and tossed him over it.
    He scrambled backwards until he was pressed against the far wall, sweat beading up on his forehead.
    “Please don’t kill me.” He whimpered, a tear trickling out the corner of one eye.
    What an idiot. “I’m not going to kill you.”
    “You aren’t?”
    “No, but I’m going to make sure you never do anything so goddamn stupid again.”
    The throb of his Adam's apple as he attempted to swallow was almost comical. More than that, he was giving me an outlet for my own fears. Sure, it wasn’t fair, but the kid deserved at least an ass-kicking for double-crossing me. If he’d been an adult, it would not have gone so easy for him.
    The two agents nearly tumbled over themselves in order to place their bodies between me and