Blood Heir Read online

  How old was he now? Kate was…thirty-eight, so he was forty-one. Is that what people looked like at forty-one?

  He didn’t look weakened by age. If anything, it made him harder. Tall and broad-shouldered, his body conveyed harsh, sinewy strength. His cheekbones had grown more defined. He’d picked up a scar that crossed his left cheek, and his face radiated authority and stoic pessimism. If you catapulted him through time to the convoy of Crusaders with hollow eyes and worn-out armor cutting their way across the Holy Land after years of fighting, he would fit right in.

  He motioned to me with his hand. “Let’s see it.”

  I pulled the Tower out of my pocket and placed it on his desk. It was a metal badge about the size of a playing card with an image of the tower engraved on one side. Nick turned it over. The other side was embossed with number four. A signature ran underneath it, silvery and embedded in metal, as if someone had signed the badge with silver wire while the metal still cooled from the forge. Damian Angevin.

  Nick picked up the badge and held it out. The female knight who’d escorted me in entered, took the Tower, and left.

  Nick studied me with his pale eyes.

  I had spent too much time with my grandmother. Technically, she was my adoptive grand-aunt, but we both agreed that “grandmother” was easier and shorter and better fit our relationship. Erra didn’t age. She was millennia old, but she looked perpetually about forty, and it was an awe-inspiring, regal forty. Nick was forty-one and he looked like he’d seen hell.

  “Have you been well, Knight-Protector?” I shouldn’t have said that. It just slipped out.

  Nick furrowed his eyebrows. “Do we know each other?”

  “No.”

  Magic surged through the world, saturating it in a single breathtaking instant. Suddenly I was lighter, stronger, sharper. My sensate ability kicked in, and vivid color bloomed in my field of vision. Faint swirls of blue in every shade slid over the furniture and floor—recent traces of human magic from the visitors to Nick’s office. A smudge of green from a shapeshifter, a hint of purple, old and fading—the foul track of a vampire—and Nick himself, an amalgam of azure and sapphire streaked with bright, electric yellow. I blinked to turn it off.

  All living things emanated magic, and the intensity of the trail they left behind varied. A human mage walking down the street emanated very little, and that faint trail vanished within minutes. The same mage in a fight for her life would leave behind an explosion of blue that could persist for days, provided tech didn’t wipe it out. The visitors to Nick’s office had been under some pressure. Looking at his stone idol expression, I couldn’t imagine why. He worked so hard to put you at ease.

  In the hallway a woman bit off a curse. The Tower realized that the hand holding it didn’t belong to its owner and activated. Asking the female knight if she needed some aloe for that burn wouldn’t be prudent, but it was very tempting.

  The female knight returned and deposited the badge wrapped in a rag on the desk. “It checks out.” She turned and went back to her post by the door.

  I picked up the badge. A tingle of magic shot through my fingertips and vanished, recognizing me. I slid it back into my pocket. The Tower granted me the right to call on the Order for aid and gave me authority equivalent to a Knight-Captain, which meant I outranked everyone in the office, except for Nick.

  The Knight-Protectors oversaw regional offices, individual chapters of the Order, and their position came with a lot of autonomy. Only Grand Master of the Order and the Knight-Seneschal ranked higher. Technically the Tower constituted a direct order from the Grand Master to render whatever assistance I required. Practically, trying to strong-arm Nick would end in disaster. I needed his cooperation.

  “To get a Tower you had to have performed a service of great value to the Order,” Nick said.

  I had.

  Nick waited. I kept my mouth shut.

  “What’s your relationship with the Grand Master?” Nick asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to answer.”

  Erra liked to describe her relationship with the head of the Order as “complicated.” From my point of view, there was nothing complicated about it. Damian Angevin was desperately in love with my grandmother. After he granted her the first Tower, she gave it to me. He found out and presented her with another one, so she would have one of her own just in case. My grandmother liked him; however, her heart belonged to a man who’d died over two thousand years ago. Damian knew this, but he was never one to back down from a challenge.

  Nick leaned back into his chair, doing an excellent impression of a granite boulder. “I’ve never heard of you, Ms. Ryder.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “There are only four Towers in existence,” Nick said.

  Five, but who was counting?

  “I know all four recipients of the Tower.”

  Great. Just my luck.

  “Your Tower is registered to you, which means that one of the four granted you authority to use it. Who do you belong to, Ms. Ryder?”

  I belonged to New Shinar and to my grandmother, the Plaguebringer, the City Eater, Rigmur Pana-Shinar—the Voice of the Old Kingdom. In the grand tradition of the royal line, I had earned my share of titles as well, the most famous of which was Dananu Edes-Shinar—the Strength of the New Shinar. Nick had actually heard of me. He just didn’t know it.

  Mentioning any of this nonsense was out of the question because Nick hated my grandfather, my grandmother, and anything to do with Shinar with the passion of a thousand suns. The Tower compelled the Knight-Protector to comply, but if he knew who I was, he would make things as difficult as he could.

  This required tact. Of the four Tower recipients, Nick would likely view Hannah Salazar as the lesser evil. A former officer, she ran a small private army in New Mexico, and her people had saved the local Order chapter during the last flare at great cost.

  “I belong to someone who values discipline and accountability, Knight-Protector. I swore an oath to follow orders, and those orders require me to maintain confidentiality. I don’t enjoy the cloak-and-dagger act. I prefer simple missions where the enemy is clear, but this is the way my chain of command wants to play it, so I must do my best. I hope for your understanding.”

  There you go, I am a mercenary with a military mindset. Don’t mind me. No deep dark secrets here.

  Nick pondered me for a long moment. “Very well. What do you need?”

  I leaned forward. “Three days ago, a man was murdered. I want to take over the investigation into his death.”

  Nick sighed. “This is Atlanta, Ms. Ryder. Be more specific. Which of the seven murders on my desk would you like to play with?”

  “Pastor Haywood’s.”

  Nick thumbed through the stack of files on his desk, pulled one out, and offered it to me. “Fine. It’s all yours.”

  Just like that. Huh.

  Nick studied me. “Is something the matter?”

  “I expected more resistance.”

  “And you will have it. Just not from me. How much do you know about Atlanta?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to.”

  “Stay awhile and you’ll wish you knew less.”

  Nick stood up and pulled at a cord hanging from a roll of plastic secured on the back wall. The plastic unrolled into a map of Atlanta with sections tinted with different colors.

  “The lay of the land,” Nick said. “At least as of last week. Atlanta is less a city and more of a collection of territories claimed by different factions. There are three main roads, I-20 that runs east to west, I-85 that runs north to south, and the Peach Loop, which is a new road that circles the city.”

  He pointed to the northeast where a grey icon depicted a stylized castle sitting in the middle of an area tinted with green. “The Keep, the headquarters of the Pack. Their territory extends almost to I-85.”

  Nick tapped a white palace icon located in the northwest, in the loop between I-85 and I-20, colored with red. “
The Casino. It used to belong to the People, except now our particular People call themselves the Eastern Institute of Necromancy, also known as EIN. They’re still the same People. They still pilot vampires with their minds, finance their research with gambling, and think they’re better than everyone else and therefore are entitled to special treatment.”

  The People had been created by my grandfather. Thousands of years ago, Roland accidentally made the first vampire, and when he awoke in the modern age, he decided to make good use of them. Before his exile, he established the People, an organization of necromancers capable of piloting vampires with their minds. He gave them a modern name, because “navigator” sounded a lot less scary than necromancer, and sent them into the world. The People positioned themselves as part-corporation, part-research institute, and usually owned community-entertaining businesses. Casinos were their favorite.

  Now that Grandfather was no longer in the picture, the People fractured into independent organizations. Atlanta’s EIN was more independent than most. During the final fight between Kate and Roland, the Atlanta’s People threw their lot in with Kate. A lot of other navigators viewed it as a betrayal.

  Nick pointed to a grey section centered on a tower. “The Order’s territory. You are relatively safe here.”

  He moved his finger to an area spreading north and south of I-20 stained with so many colors, it looked like an overenthusiastic toddler with finger paints had gone wild after a serious sugar rush.

  “The Pagans. The Covens are here, the Neo-Vikings over there, then we have the Druids, the Greeks, the Volhvs, the Egyptians, the devotees of the traditional African religions…”

  His hand flicked over the map to the southeast. “The representatives of the Cherokee, Apalachee, Muscogee Creek, and other tribes are here. Also, the major religions each have their own sphere of influence and center of power, dotted throughout the city, with the Christians being the most numerous. Apocalypse or not, we’re still in the Bible Belt.”

  Nick stepped back and waved his hand, encompassing the map.

  “It’s about as fun as it looks. Occasionally, something gets them all united, but most of the time, they can’t agree on where the sun will rise tomorrow. They are like rocks in a sack, grinding against each other. They all want to expand, but there is only so much city to go around, so they watch each other, waiting for an opportunity.”

  “What about that smaller blue-green area in the southeast?”

  Nick grimaced. “That’s the Lennart-Daniels gated community.”

  Really? “Gated community?”

  “Yes. It’s very exclusive.”

  I bet it is. “Meaning?”

  “Stay out of there. Lennart once led the Pack, and Daniels has claimed—her word, not mine—the entire city in the past. Now they spend most of their time up in Wilmington because their son attends a private school there, but they come back in the summer to visit family and friends. That family is complicated.”

  You don’t say.

  “They have issues with the Pack and EIN, and they are not receptive to outsiders. The entire neighborhood consists of shapeshifter families that left the Pack with them. Imagine three streets full of werebears and former Pack heavy hitters fanatically loyal to Lennart and Daniels. If you trespass, I may not be able to get you out.”

  That was a lie. Nick visited my family on a regular basis. Kate considered him her stepbrother. Conlan called him “Uncle.” Sometimes, when Nick did something particularly boneheaded, Kate referred to him as “Uncle Stupidhead” and not always out of his earshot.

  If one of Nick’s knights accidentally happened to wander into their neighborhood and made a mess of things, Kate and Curran would absolutely return the poor lost lamb to Nick. Besides, as the Knight-Protector, Nick could and would go anywhere in the city, and all the bigwigs whose territory he invaded would have to mind their manners when they politely asked him to leave.

  “While you’re at it, keep clear of the Mercenary Guild. Lennart and Daniels don’t run it anymore, but they still own a chunk of it, so don’t go in there looking for your people.”

  Well, my ploy to pose as one of Hannah Salazar’s private soldiers worked. He thought I was a mercenary, clearly a profession he wasn’t fond of. That and my barging in and taking one of his cases likely meant that if I did get in trouble, the Knight-Protector wouldn’t be in a rush to rescue me. Good thing I didn’t often require rescue.

  “The murder of Pastor Nathan Haywood happened here.” Nick touched an area in the southeast, close to the Peach Loop. “In no man’s land. You have the Warren to the east. It’s an impoverished area, full of the homeless and street gangs. The PAD doesn’t make many trips to the Warren. Pastor Haywood deliberately chose this neighborhood. He was a true Christian. He lived simply, he was humble, and he worked miracles. This was a man who ministered to anyone in need, especially to the poor. He fed them, he healed them, and he spread the word of his god.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I saw him cure people. He wasn’t a fraud.”

  Post-Shift, faith had power. If enough people believed in a god, the deity would grow in power and sometimes its priests gained magic abilities. Nobody quite knew if those powers were the result of the deity imbuing its chosen with magic or if the faith of the congregation empowered the clergy directly, but their new abilities were a fact.

  “Pastor Haywood never took any money or credit for what he did. His magic was faith-based, so it only worked on those who shared his beliefs, but when it worked, it was extraordinary. He was a good man, who thought he had no magic of his own and saw himself as an instrument of a higher power. Do you know how this kind miracle worker died?”

  “No.”

  “Look in the file.”

  I opened the file. A colored photograph stared back at me. A stump of a body sprawled in a puddle of blood on the floor. The head was missing, torn off, judging by the ragged shreds of skin around the neck. His chest was a gory mess. Something with vicious claws had ripped him open, breaking his ribs, and their shards jutted out of the red-smeared flesh. Thick, dark blood pooled inside the chest cavity where vital organs used to be.

  “It took his heart,” I said.

  “Yes.” Nick sat back in his chair. “It’s too early to say if the culprit is an ‘it.’ The force and the claws required to open a human being like that could indicate a shapeshifter or a vampire or half a dozen magical beasts seen recently within the city limits. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  He sounded bored. Nick didn’t know how to be apathetic about his job. He never phoned anything in, but here was a holy man, a pastor he personally knew and clearly admired, murdered in a horrifying way and Nick was pretending not to care. He wasn’t giving me any details either.

  Why so indifferent, Uncle? What are you hiding?

  “Did he have any enemies? Do you have any leads or suspects?”

  “No and no. Pastor Haywood was beloved by his congregation and respected by his peers. The murder was announced in the paper two days ago, and there are still hundreds of mourners standing vigil at the church where he was a deacon.”

  I studied the photograph and slid it back into the file gently. I had seen plenty of dead bodies. I had made a lot of bodies dead, and sometimes my handiwork looked worse than this. But there was something profoundly sad about Pastor Haywood’s murder. The brutality of it, the sheer savagery of it made you want to punch something. He was a man with a kind heart, and someone had literally ripped it out. He was a light in the world. We had so few lights.

  I traced the body with my fingertips. You won’t be forgotten. I promise you I will find the one responsible and stop them from hurting anyone else.

  I realized Nick was watching me and closed the file.

  “The Order was asked by the Methodist Bishop of North Georgia to step in because the manner of death makes this case a political time bomb. The PAD was overjoyed to send it over. It landed on my desk this morning. Everything we know is in t
hat file and now it’s yours.”

  Nick opened a drawer in his desk, took out a form, wrote on it in indecipherable cursive, and held it out.

  “For the purposes of this investigation, we’re going to make you a Knight-Defender.”

  Rank and file member of the Order. Perfect.

  “Go down the hall, take a left, second door on the right, give them this paper, and they will make you your very own junior detective badge. While in possession of said badge, you represent the Order of Merciful Aid. Should you fuck up, you’ll find me less than merciful, and no matter what favor your superior thinks they’re owed, I’ll kick your ass right out of Atlanta. Understood?”

  Right. That’s all he was going to give me. “Understood. Any advice?”

  Nick grinned like a wolf baring his fangs. “Have fun, don’t offend anybody, and try not to die.”

  4

  Three minutes after I left the Order’s chapter, I realized I’d picked up a tail. To be fair, the tail was almost painfully obvious, so it wasn’t that much of an achievement.

  I shifted in the saddle, turning my head slightly. The female knight who’d escorted me to Nick’s office was following me on foot, making no effort to hide herself. She must’ve decided that even if I knew she was there, I couldn’t do much about it.

  I let her follow me down Magnum, across the post-Shift bridge that spanned the railroad tracks, and down the narrow Packard Street. Normally I would’ve just ignored her and let her merrily tail me wherever, but I was going to the murder scene, and I had a feeling there were things there I didn’t want her to see.

  Packard brought me to Ted Turner Drive, lined with reclamation shops and construction offices. Turner ran next to the ruined Downtown. Scavenging the ruins for metal and other usable materials was a big business. The traffic went from nonexistent to heavy, as the street channeled carts with supplies, craftsmen, and laborers. Both of my parents used to work here.