Blood Heir Read online

  A small noise made me turn to the right. Something moved between the pews. Slowly, gingerly, Officer Fleming stood up. Two wide eyes stared at me from a face smudged with soot.

  The door burst open, and the female knight tore into the church.

  “You missed it.” I swiped my cloak off the floor, slipped it on, and walked off the platform.

  She swore.

  I walked past Fleming. “Sorry about the windows, Big Town.”

  He gaped at me. I winked at him and headed to the door.

  5

  I brought Tulip to a halt on the corner of Jonesboro and Gammon Street, two blocks away from Pastor Haywood’s church. Around me black trees crowded the road, their sharp leaves unnaturally still despite a slight breeze. A small two-story building with boarded-up windows perched on the corner to the right, its grimy brown bricks stained with grey mold. Back when I ran the streets, this building served as a rallying point for the North Warren kid gangs.

  Street kids knew Pastor Haywood. He fed them, he healed them, and he probably had hidden them when the occasion required.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out an ounce of silver, and held it up. Silver was the go-to metal for most magic-related work. It was easy to shape, took enchantment better than any other metal, even gold, and was poisonous to a wide variety of magical creatures, all of which made it hellishly expensive. It could be bought in several forms: dust, rod, bar, and wire. I was holding a one-ounce bar, five centimeters long, three centimeters wide, and about as thin as ten pieces of paper stacked together. On the street, it was worth roughly fifty bucks.

  I tossed the bar into the air and caught it in my fist. “Silver.”

  No answer.

  They knew all the cops in the area, so they realized I wasn’t one. I was a stranger, and therefore scary, but I also offered silver. Paper money could be ripped or burned. Some of the older pre-Shift notes contained plastic and sometimes fell apart in the magic waves. But silver always held value, and it was easy to hide and sell.

  “Pastor Haywood.” I held the bar up. “Hurry up. I have things to do.”

  The boarded-up window on the first floor quaked. The entire section swung out, and a figure squirmed out and landed on the grass. A boy ran up to me. Ten, maybe twelve, skinny, filthy, smelly, his hair a brown mess on his head. A rat’s tail hung from a loop on his pants. When I’d left, the Rat Tails were a small gang on the east side of the Warren. They must have expanded.

  Light blue eyes looked at me from a grimy face. “What do you want to know, lady?”

  I studied the silver in my hand. “Did anything strange happen with Pastor Haywood in the last couple of weeks?”

  “Silver first.”

  I sneered at him and tensed slightly. Tulip started walking.

  “Wait, wait!” The kid jumped in front of my horse.

  Tulip bared her teeth.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” I told him. “She bites.”

  He stepped to the side. “A guy came to see him. We know everybody who comes but we hadn’t seen him before. We’d remember him.”

  “Why? Tell me about him.” I dropped the bar.

  He snatched it out of the air with a catlike quickness and let out a squeak. Shutters banged, bushes rustled, and five kids closed in, all under twelve years old, all equally filthy. They kept their distance in a ragged semicircle.

  I took another silver bar out. “Tell me about the stranger. Where were you when you saw him?”

  The leader stared at a small child, maybe about seven or eight, with twigs and beads in her dark hair. “Tell her.”

  “I saw him,” the girl said.

  “Where were you when you saw him?”

  “Inside.”

  “Why were you inside?”

  “Pastor had cookies,” the girl said.

  “What kind of cookies?”

  “Oatmeal. If you got hurt, he would heal you and give you a cookie.”

  Ah. So that’s where this was going. “You hurt yourself to get a cookie?”

  She nodded.

  “How?”

  “I ran and fell.”

  “What happened when you went to see the pastor?”

  “He magicked my leg and gave me milk and a cookie. It was this big.” She held fingers of her small hands far apart.

  “Did you eat the cookie in the church?”

  She nodded.

  “Then what happened?”

  “I was eating the cookie and a fatso came.”

  Fatso meant someone well-off, good clothes, expensive jewelry, well-fed. A good mark.

  “Did anybody else see the fatso?” I asked.

  The kids shook their heads.

  That’s what I thought. It wasn’t “we hadn’t seen him before.” It was she hadn’t seen him before.

  I needed to separate her from them. I’d get more information that way.

  “You know where Central Market is?”

  She nodded.

  I leaned down and offered the girl my hand. “Show me and you can tell me about the fatso on the way. I’ll give you this silver at the end.”

  The leader stepped in front of the girl. “No. We don’t know you.”

  I added a second ounce to the first.

  He shook his head.

  The little girl tried to push past him, and he blocked her. “I said no. Not safe.”

  A street kid who took care of the younger children. Rare. He was probably new to the life. Some people thought that street kid gangs were like the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. It wasn’t like that at all. On the street, it was all about survival. The stronger kids preyed on the weaker ones. This boy wouldn’t last long.

  I pulled out my Order badge and showed it to him. “I won’t hurt her.”

  He stared at the badge, thinking. “Okay.”

  Yep, new. Still trusted law enforcement.

  I reached down. The little girl grabbed my arm. I lifted her into the saddle in front of me. She weighed nothing. We set off north, toward the old I-75.

  “What did the fatso look like?”

  “Big.”

  “Tall or short?”

  “Tall.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Brown.”

  “Was his skin brown or pale?”

  “Pale.”

  The little gang was trailing us, trying to be inconspicuous as they darted through the brush past the ruined houses.

  “What did his face look like?”

  She frowned. “He had fake eyes. Like he is nice when other people can see him, but not when he’s by himself.”

  “Did he look like the kind of guy who would hit you if you stole from him?”

  She nodded. Her shoulders hunched a little. She’d been hit before, and she’d learned to roll into a ball.

  “Do you remember what the fatso said to the pastor?”

  “He said he had a holy artifact.”

  Jackpot. “What kind of holy artifact?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember. I wasn’t listening good. Pastor and he talked, and then Pastor said he would think about it, and the fatso left.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The next day a car came, and Pastor got into it. He never gets into cars. He came back later.”

  “Did he seem okay when he came back?”

  She nodded. “The next morning, he got killed.” Her voice got really quiet. “He was nice.”

  He was, and now he was gone. No more milk and cookies. No more healing when you got hurt. She’d lost the only safe place she’d had. She was the smallest and the weakest of the gang. I could feel her ribs rubbing against my arm. Starved. So starved, she’d learned to hurt herself to get food.

  I wanted to take her off the street. I had to.

  If I took her with me, where would I put her? I had a job to do. Sooner or later I’d become a target. Anyone close to me would be a potential hostage. If I left her in the fake shabby section of the house, she’d get bored and go out. S
he was a street kid, used to moving around. If I left her in the inner chamber, she wouldn’t be able to keep her hands to herself. There were things in that room that could eat her or turn her skin inside out.

  I had promised my grandmother that I would stop trying to rescue every homeless child I saw off the streets. It was a luxury I didn’t have. As a princess of Shinar, my job was to see to all street children, not just the one in front of me, and to enact changes that would ensure no more kids would be thrown away like garbage. I had done that, and the New Shinar was on the way to being a place where no child went hungry, but New Shinar was far away, and the child in my arms was here now.

  Erra had tried to save everyone, and she’d allowed herself to become a monster for the sake of her people. She didn’t want me to go down the same road. She said it would unravel my soul thread by thread. My position gave me the ability to bring about sweeping change and I had to concentrate on that, because not everyone understood all that, but the little girl in front of me was so tiny.

  Even if she survived for the next couple of years, I knew exactly what lay ahead: abuse, more abuse, rape, beatings, drugs, death. Few of the kids endured to adulthood, and those who managed it didn’t live long.

  But if the priests of Moloch saw her with me and got their claws on her, they would cook her alive just to hurt me. I had to let her go. Once this was over, I would find her again.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Marten.”

  Usually street kids had nicknames like Rat or Weasel. “Who named you that?”

  “I named me.”

  “Why Marten?”

  “Because they’re smart and cute. And fast. You can’t catch them.”

  “Squirrels are fast.”

  “Squirrels are dumb. Pine Martens eat squirrels.”

  Fair enough. “There was a blue building on the corner of Harpy Street, Marten. Is it still there?”

  She nodded.

  I dropped the silver into her grimy hand. “They’ll take it away from you as soon as I’m gone. Let them have it.”

  She sighed. “Dougie doesn’t take our money. Dougie is too nice. He isn’t mean. He is…”

  “Soft.”

  Marten nodded. She wasn’t soft. Not even a little bit. Dougie was bigger and older, but she would last longer.

  “Give him the silver anyway.” She couldn’t protect it, and it would only make her a target. “Come to the blue building tomorrow. Go through the second doorway. Inside turn left, count eight steps. There is a loose board in the floor. I’ll leave something there for you.”

  She squinted at me.

  “Keep low for the next few days. If something else weird happens or if anybody else comes asking about this, hide from them and go straight to the Order and ask for Aurelia. They’ll keep you safe until I get there. Tell the other kids, too. Anybody shows up with questions about Pastor Haywood, bolt and hide.”

  I let her off the horse. She ran back, skinny legs flying, the silver clutched in her small fist. The little gang closed about her. Dougie wrapped his arm around Marten’s shoulders, gave me a wary look, and the lot of them ran away around the corner.

  She was me. Except I was thirteen when Kate took me off the streets.

  Suddenly I wanted to go home. It scraped at me like claws, ripping through my resolve to the vulnerable soft place I’d been trying to armor. I could picture it in my head, the sunlit kitchen; Curran gliding through the house, quiet like a ghost; Conlan leaping over the fence after running in the woods next door, the big, smelly poodle trailing him; and Kate standing in the kitchen, cooking something, her sword within reach. I wanted to go home and hug the three of them. I’d been gone for eight years. Talking on the phone wasn’t enough. Meeting Conlan in Roland’s magic prison was nothing compared to getting a hug in person. I was so homesick, if I were a wolf, I would’ve howled. I needed to see my family and make sure they were okay.

  But if I did, they would die.

  I exhaled slowly, reasserting control.

  This city was bad for me. It was tearing wounds open that had long ago scabbed over.

  I was a princess of Shinar. More, I was the child Kate raised. People in our family didn’t waste time feeling sorry for ourselves. We killed the monster blocking the front door, so we could go home.

  I urged Tulip on, and she started down the street, light on her feet. Although many denominations, Methodists included, rejected holy relics, the existence of magical artifacts and relics was a fact. Some religious items had gained magical properties after the Shift. Finding and selling these artifacts became a small but lucrative business and even spawned its own profession: relic hunters.

  These hunters were a rough crowd. These were people with nothing to lose, who crawled into abandoned temples, opened cursed tombs, and dug graves out of sacred ground at a time when myths proved real and phantom monsters turned flesh. They would do just about anything for a profit.

  According to Nick’s file, Pastor Haywood had very few assets, so it was unlikely relic hunters had tried to sell him a magical artifact. Most likely, they’d wanted to know if the object they’d found was the real deal. As a man of his god, Pastor Haywood would have been able to recognize a relic of his deity and assess its power.

  I was looking for someone who had or thought he had a Christian holy item. The first step would be to contact Pastor Haywood’s chain of command and see if they referred anyone to him.

  I didn’t hold out much hope. Pastor Haywood was famous enough that someone might have found him even without a referral. But it was still worth a try.

  Unfortunately, all of that had to wait. I had to go home to put up wards, and I had to do it now.

  When I’d mentioned shapeshifters to Fleming, he didn’t contradict me, and he didn’t ask questions. A law enforcement officer who’d had no idea shapeshifters had trampled the crime scene he’d been guarding would want to know the details. Why did I think shapeshifters had been there? How many shapeshifters? When did they visit? Fleming had just let it drop. He must’ve owed the Pack a favor or he had taken their money. Either way, he would contact them the first chance he got. A team would be dispatched to the scene, and they would track me.

  There were ways to knock a shapeshifter off your scent. Wolfsbane worked well. It had the same effect on a shapeshifter as sticking your head into a bucket of pine pollen would have on a human. If a single shapeshifter was following my scent, using it might have been an option. But I wouldn’t be tracked by a single shapeshifter. I would be tracked by a team, so sanding my trail with wolfsbane was futile. I might get the leading tracker, but the rest would just go around the wolfsbane, spread out, and pick up my scent again.

  A confrontation with the Pack’s people was imminent, and I wanted to have it on my home turf, safe behind my wards.

  I’d been in Atlanta for less than a day. It was entirely too early to start killing people.

  I was in the decoy kitchen, sliding the first batch of cookies into the oven, when something brushed against the edge of my outer ward. It was almost eight in the evening. Took them long enough.

  I’d cut through the Central Market on my way back. They must’ve had a devil of a time trying to follow my trail through the open-air market. Hard to track a scent after a horse peed on it.

  I draped the kitchen towel over my shoulder and walked to the front door, left open to vent the heat from the stove. The sunset burned across the sky, a gory, violent orange. I concentrated, sinking into my sensate vision. Three… two…

  Contact. Magic nipped at me. A bright green flash pulsed in the empty air and vanished. To the left, a dark four-legged shape jumped out from behind some rubble and dashed down the street, little more than a blur in the fading light. The shapeshifter who’d found my house, hurrying to report.

  I went back to the kitchen, sat at my strategically sad table, and waited. I felt spent. Fatigue wrapped around my shoulders like a heavy blanket. Too much magic expended too quickly this afternoo
n setting up the defensive perimeter.

  I’d learned the art of wards from my grandfather. Roland loved to teach, and I’d been hungry to learn. Later my grandmother and her servants refined my education, but the foundation of my magic expertise was built by Roland. If you have to learn magic, studying under a brilliant megalomaniac wizard who thinks he’s always right and can’t wait to dazzle you with several millennia of knowledge was a really good choice.

  In the few hours since coming back from the Central Market, I’d set three concentric rings of wards. The outer ward, undetectable by most of the people and creatures who crossed it, warned me that someone was coming, sampled the intruder’s magic, and flashed it in a burst of color invisible to anyone who wasn’t a sensate.

  The middle ward wrapped around the building, shielding the front entrance. I’d chosen a rune ward, a simple defensive barrier that relied on Elder Futhark runes carved on bone stakes driven into the ground. Solid, powerful, and common enough to not raise any eyebrows. It was also the first ward the Order’s Academy taught to prospective knights, so it went along with my disguise.

  The third ward sealed off the hallway leading to the front bedroom and to the secret door, protecting the entire inner chamber. I had raised Enki’s Shield in four hours instead of the full twelve it usually required and got a throbbing headache for my trouble. Still, Grandfather would be proud.

  I missed him. He was the monster in our family of monsters, but he was still my grandfather, if not by birth then by choice. When my grandfather wanted to be liked, he was an unstoppable force, and he wanted me to like him. Roland wasn’t bored in his prison—he was far too brilliant for that—but he planned to get out, and Conlan and I were his link to the outside world. It had been over six weeks since my last visit. I was overdue.

  Magic pinched me. I peeked out of the kitchen in time to see the street light up with green through the doorway. Ascanio walked out of the shadows and strolled up to my house. I’d thought that trail of grass-green magic I’d noticed at the murder scene looked familiar.