The Sorcerer Heir (Heir Chronicles) (21 page)

“You’ll have to ask them. Maybe they messed up. Gabriel says that wizards aren’t very good at poisons. I’ve been trying to answer those kinds of questions for years.” He couldn’t resist adding, “That’s why I went to Tyler’s. We’d figured out that he had a connection to Thorn Hill.”

Emma’s lips tightened. Clearly, she was not in the mood to entertain excuses. “So...you’re saying that if you and I...if we die, that’s the way we end
up
?” Her voice cracked.

“I have to assume that’s the case,” Jonah said, “based on what’s happened to the other Thorn Hill victims.”

“How come nobody knows about these shades?” Emma demanded. “How come this isn’t all over the newspapers?”

“Free shades can move easily from place to place, without being seen. Most operate in remote areas of the world, where killing goes on all the time anyway. What’s one more murder during a civil war in a far-off country? And because they work alone, the killing is scattered and sporadic. Until recently. About six months ago, we found out that shades have been organizing under the command of a shade named Lilith Greaves. Now they’re hunting in packs. That makes it harder for us to fight them, because there are a lot more of them than there are of us. We’ve lost several slayers because of that. And it’s only going to get worse.”

Emma sat very still, just looking at him, her emotions a chaotic jumble. Jonah couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not, though what she’d witnessed in the Flats should go a long way toward convincing her. “Why haven’t you at least told the other magical guilds about this so they can defend themselves? Or help you.”

“Some of us would like to see that happen,” Jonah said. “Myself included. What’s stopped us is history. If mainliners found out about this, do you really think they’d partner with us? I don’t. They’ve killed enough of us as it is.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just after Thorn Hill, mainliners slaughtered the most severely injured survivors. Some of us were visibly damaged, and we were all viewed as potentially dangerous mutants. They told themselves it was the merciful thing to do. It was also the expedient thing. If not for Gabriel”—Jonah took a quick breath—“if not for Gabriel, Kenzie would have been one of them. Gabriel has devoted his life to protecting us, to providing a haven where we can live, can go to school, can make a living. The last thing he wants is to have people know that savants turn into vengeful spirits when we die. And yet, he can’t allow shades to prey on the unsuspecting public who had nothing to do with Thorn Hill. So we’re committed to putting them to rest in the kindest way possible.”

Jonah sighed. He was spouting canon again like a recruiting poster for slayers. How much of what he’d just said did he believe?

It’s hard to lose ten years of indoctrination, he thought.

Emma’s skeptical demeanor was fading. “Can they make more shades? You know, like vampires, spreading the infection by biting people?”

“I don’t think anybody wants to make more of us,” Jonah said. “And, no, it’s not contagious. But each time a survivor dies, their numbers increase. We can’t keep up.”

“Won’t you run out sooner or later?” she asked. “Then at least you wouldn’t have to—”

“We won’t run out until I’m dead, too,” Jonah said. “And Nat and Rudy and Alison—everyone I care about. If I’m not the last to die, I guess someone will do the honors for me. If I am...” He shrugged. “Think about who these people are. My parents. My friends. My little sister. I put myself in their shoes because I have to. Isn’t there anyone you loved—and lost—at Thorn Hill?”

Emma stared at him, understanding kindling in her brown eyes. She took a quick breath, then let it out slowly. Jonah felt the sharp rush of pain and guilt.

“Who?” Jonah asked.

“My mother,” Emma whispered. “My mother died at Thorn Hill.”

Jonah looked down at his hands. “Well, then. When you see these hosted shades, and you’re thinking ‘monster,’ imagine your mother wandering the earth, desperate for a body, knowing she’ll never breathe in the scent of a summer day, or hear music, or feel a human touch or a breeze on her skin.”

“She loved music,” Emma whispered. “It was the only thing that could raise her spirits when she was down.” She paused. “And so—you’re saying my mother is out there somewhere?”

Jonah inclined his head. “If she died at Thorn Hill, yes, I’m guessing she’s out there somewhere. Or was, anyway.”

E
mma felt like her head might explode, like there was too much new information getting stuffed in there—information that crowded up against what she’d always known to be true. And none of it matched up.

Images elbowed forward. Her mother working in the garden, dirt smudged on her nose. Smiling as Emma ripped away wrapping paper to find music recordings and sheet music. Waving good-bye in her white coat as she turned toward her lab, and Emma walked to school. Coming home late at night, tiptoeing into Emma’s room, kissing her, and tucking in her covers.

Lying in bed, a cold rag on her forehead, the lights dimmed, while Emma played the piano.

And it hit her—maybe she
wasn’t
an orphan. Not exactly. In the space of one conversation, Emma’s mother had gone from dead to undead to maybe even alive. Maybe.

“If my mother is out there, then I could find her, right?” she said eagerly, leaning toward Jonah. “Maybe the other shades could help me.”

“That’s just not possible,” Jonah said. “It’s not like they can look her up in a directory.”

“But...maybe if I talked to them, they would remember something that would help.” Jonah was still shaking his head, so Emma lifted her chin and said, “I want you to take me to meet them.”

“You already met them,” Jonah said. “You saw what happened. You don’t want to go through that again. It’s too risky. They’re unpredictable. They’re angry—and who can blame them?”

“I have to find a way,” Emma said.

“Look,” Jonah said. “My parents died at Thorn Hill, too, and my little sister. But I’ve been doing this job for seven years, and I’ve not heard a word about them. Shades are scattered all over the world, and they don’t want to be found.”

“Have you even
asked
? Have you even
looked
?”

Jonah shifted his gaze, and Emma knew—he hadn’t asked. He hadn’t looked.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Pain flickered across Jonah’s face. “I was afraid of what I’d find.”

“Well, I’m not like you. I’m not afraid.”

“If you’re not afraid, you should be.”

It was like Jonah had given her back her mother, and then snatched her away again. “Maybe you’ve already killed her. Is that it? You’ve already killed her and you don’t want me to find that out.”

“It’s possible,” Jonah said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Me or somebody else. But I just can’t think about that.”

“You just can’t think about it.” Fury boiled up inside Emma. “Who do you think you are? God? What gives you the right to decide whether my mother—whether all these people—should live or die? You criticize the mainliners for the same damn thing.” Glaring up at the ceiling, she scrubbed her hands through her hair, trying to swallow the huge lump in her throat. Leaping from the couch, she kicked the wall, hard, leaving a major dent in the wallboard.

“Emma,” Jonah said, his voice as sweet and potent as Southern Comfort. “Please. I have to hope that if I have riffed them, that means they’re at peace now.”

“What do you mean, ‘riffed’?”

“It’s our word for—for—”

“Murder?” Emma snorted. “Just because you use another word, that doesn’t make it okay.”

“I never said it was okay.”

“Don’t you realize that you may have killed the only person who might have the answers you need?”

Jonah stared at her, looking confused. “You mean your mother, or—”

“No!” she shouted, tears spilling over, streaking down her face. “Nobody in particular, just—just in general. And would you stop that
soothing
bullshit?”

“I’m sorry,” Jonah said, stiff-backed. “I’m an empath. When I know you’re in pain, it’s just really hard for me not to try to make you feel better.”

“I don’t
want
to feel better! Which you’d know if you asked me.” She took a breath. “As for the shades, maybe you should ask them what
they
want.”

Jonah flinched. “I have,” he said. “I’m the only one who can communicate with them mind-to-mind. They want to live, just like the rest of us, all right? They want to touch and taste and feel—to participate. But it comes at a cost. It was one thing when they stuck to possessing corpses. But now they’re killing people, especially the gifted.”

He paused. “When the gifted die, they release an energy called blood magic. It’s like a tonic to shades. It makes it possible for them to possess a body for long periods of time. It—it also seems to be helpful to living savants. They justify it because of what was done to them. Should we stand by and let them slaughter a preschool class so they can go on living?”

“Of course not.” Emma blotted at her eyes with the backs of her hands, her mind working furiously. “What about when they—when they don’t have a body? They can’t hurt me then, right?”

Jonah sighed. “Are you still talking about going looking for your mother?”

“You don’t understand. She’s all I have left.”

“You’d never find her. An unhosted shade is nearly impossible to see, if you don’t know what you’re looking for....”

“Why? What do they look like?”

Jonah sighed, sounding sad or frustrated or both. “Like a vapor, or—or a thickening of the air. Kind of the way a jelly fish looks in the ocean. Something you don’t notice until it stings you.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. I already saw some.”

“Saw some what?”

“Free shades.”

“That’s unlikely,” Jonah said. He took a quick breath, like he had more to say but thought better of it.

“I saw them,” Emma said stubbornly. “Tonight. When you—when you cut up the corpses, they’d float up. But I wouldn’t call them jellyfish. They were like shimmering spirits. Or—or angels.”

Jonah stared at her. “I don’t know what you saw, but—anyway.” He waved the argument away, seeming reluctant to get into it.

“If they’re so hard to see, then how do you kill them? Do you just grope around blindly until you catch one?”

“Slayers have sefas that allow us to see them.”

“What’s a sefa?”

“It’s a magical object. An amulet—in this case, a pendant. Gabriel provides them to members of Nightshade.”

“Let me borrow yours, then.”

“No,” Jonah said, his voice dropping into the exasperated range. “I’ve already told you too much as it is. You can’t go walking around looking for shades on your own. It’s too dangerous.”

“Isn’t it dangerous for you, too?”

“I have some advantages that you don’t,” Jonah said.

“Can I at least see it?”

“See what?”

“Your amulet.”

“What’s the point?”

“Does everything have to have a point?” Emma was practically shouting.

Scowling, Jonah thrust a hand under his scrubs and pulled out a pendant, holding it up so she could see. It glittered in the overhead lights.

It was identical to the one Tyler had given her. The one that had belonged to her mother.

“Oh! I have one of those!” Emma reached into her neckline and pulled out the pendant her mother had left for her. “I don’t need yours after all.”

Jonah stared at the amulet, the blood draining from his face. “Where did you get that?” he asked, his voice hoarse and strained.

Emma ran her fingers over it, caressing the metal. “It was my mother’s. She left it to me.”

“Your mother—that died at Thorn Hill?”

Emma nodded.

“But these—they weren’t even made until after the massacre...at least, that’s what I was told.” He trailed off. “Why would your mother have one?”

“How would I know? She died when I was six.”

“What was your mother’s name again?”

“Gwyneth Hart. Or Gwen. I guess she kept her own last name when she married.” She shrugged. “She was always ‘Mama’ to me.”

Jonah cocked his head, frowning.

“What?”

“That name’s familiar for some reason.”

“That’s not surprising,” Emma said. “She was at Thorn Hill.”

He looked up, the confusion in his eyes clearing. “That’s just it. She wasn’t.”

“Yes, she was.”

“No. Kenzie and I—we came across the name when we were looking for Tyler Greenwood, your father. We looked for it in the records at Thorn Hill, but it wasn’t there. Tyler Greenwood showed up briefly, right before the disaster. Then disappeared. But Gwyneth Hart was never there.”

“Yes, she was.” Emma’s backbone straightened. “I know we weren’t on the casualty or survivor lists, but Gabriel didn’t seem to think that was a big deal.” She paused, and when Jonah said nothing, added, “I’d know, wouldn’t I?”

“I’d think so. But she wasn’t in the work records either.”

“How do you know? What work records?”

“They kept a record of everyone and the work they did for the commune. Kenzie and I searched them when we were trying to track down somebody who might’ve left Thorn Hill soon before the massacre.” Jonah hesitated. “We thought an adult survivor might be able to tell us something that would help us figure out what happened and who was involved.”

“She
had
to be in the work records,” Emma insisted. “She worked all the time. All. The. Time. She was always worn out. I used to play the piano for her, to calm her down.” Emma tried to swallow down the growing queasiness in her belly.

“It’s probably just a mistake in the records,” Jonah said. “Only...it’s hard to imagine how she could be missing entirely since the work logs were turned in weekly.”

“What do you mean by that? What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing. I just don’t know why—”

“Are any of the records missing? Or...could somebody have messed with them?”

“Why would anyone mess with them?” Jonah said, raising his eyebrow.

Emma began pacing back and forth. Nobody would, she thought. Unless it was someone involved with the poisoning. A person who had something to hide. She looked up to find Jonah watching her like she was a rocket about to go off.

He can read my emotions, Emma reminded herself. Trying not to feel anything just made matters worse.

“Maybe she was there under an assumed name,” Jonah said. “That’s why she isn’t in the records.”

Emma was beginning to question everything she thought she knew about Thorn Hill—and that wasn’t much to begin with. The mind plays tricks, Emma knew that. But, still, her memories of Thorn Hill were so vivid, like those full-color dreams that you stay in, even after you wake up. Even the air she breathed was so rich and moist and full of life—it was like breathing in the jungle itself. When she closed her eyes, she could see the light of Brazil through her eyelids: the way it filtered through the canopy of trees so that it had a green, growing quality.

Could it all have been just a story her mother told her? Could it have been a lie?

It was like a puzzle where you can’t tell what the image is until the last piece falls into place. And then you wonder why you didn’t see it before.

Emma’s mother had worked for Andrew DeVries, who ran a syndicate of assassins. She’d made poisons for him. Maybe she hadn’t come to Thorn Hill to get away from wizards, or to start a new life. Maybe she’d come there on their orders. If Gwen was a sorcerer who made poisons for the Black Rose, she’d be the perfect person to infiltrate what DeVries saw as a hotbed of terrorists. That would also explain why Emma seemed to have escaped the damage that everyone else at the Anchorage had to live with.

That must be why Rowan DeVries and the Black Rose had come to Tyler’s looking for information about the poisons used at Thorn Hill. They, more than anyone, would know where to look.

If you were planning a massacre, you wouldn’t want to use your own name, would you? That wouldn’t be very smart. Tyler had said he’d taken Emma back to the States just before the disaster. Had her mother decided to take advantage of Emma’s absence to carry out her plan? The case was growing against Gwyneth Hart. And if she was guilty, then Emma couldn’t hate the wizards that had ruined so many lives without hating her mother, too. Maybe wizards had given the orders, but her own mother pulled the trigger.

That probably meant that her mother wasn’t really dead. Not even undead. Gwen Hart wasn’t on the casualty list after all. She wouldn’t poison herself, so she wouldn’t be walking the streets as a zombie either. Maybe she was hiding somewhere, like one of those fancy faraway places people move to with blood money. And if Gwyneth was alive, she would have the answers that Jonah so desperately needed.

She should tell them. But that would require confessing all of this to Jonah and Kenzie and Natalie and Rudy. What would they think if they knew that Emma was the daughter of the person who had caused this catastrophe? That she was healthy and well while they paid the price for what her mother did?

“Emma,” Jonah said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Emma looked up to find him watching her closely, eyes narrowed. She pressed her hands into the tabletop to keep them from shaking.

Her stone wasn’t damaged like the others, even though people told her it wasn’t a mainliner stone. What did that mean? What could that possibly mean? And if her mother were still alive, wouldn’t she have come looking for her at Tyler’s or Sonny Lee’s? Would she really just abandon her?

“That just doesn’t make sense,” she whispered, almost to herself. Only maybe it did make sense. Maybe it made too much sense. A cold sweat broke on Emma’s face as the vomit rose in her throat. “Where’s your bathroom?” she croaked.