The Sorcerer Heir (Heir Chronicles) (9 page)

Gabriel sighed wearily. “Give Trinity a try if you like. I can get you some help moving your things. We’ll keep your room open for you, so feel free to leave anything heavy or bulky there. I would ask you to keep details about the Anchorage and what we do here confidential. Sometimes, the less the mainliners know, the better off we are.”

“Thank you,” Emma said, relief washing over her. “Thank you so much.”

Somehow, she’d pulled it off. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for this man who’d devoted the last ten years of his life to helping the survivors of Thorn Hill. And now someone—probably Jonah Kinlock—was doing everything possible to destroy what he’d built.

For a moment, she was tempted to tell Gabriel Mandrake everything—about Rowan DeVries and her father and the fact that his protégé, Jonah, was probably behind the murders of mainliners.

Why shouldn’t she? She could give over the responsibility for handling it to someone else. Someone who wasn’t in love with a murderer.

Except for this one thing: she still couldn’t bring herself to believe that Jonah had killed Grace Moss. And if he didn’t commit those murders, maybe he wasn’t responsible for Tyler’s either.

I need more information, she told herself, before I begin accusing Jonah Kinlock of anything. She tried to dismiss the notion that she was just postponing the inevitable.

But then, just as she turned toward the door, Gabriel called after her. “One more thing. We still need to get you evaluated.”

Emma shook her head. “No. I don’t go to doctors. They just find things that are wrong with you.”

“Did someone tell you to avoid doctors sometime in the past?” Gabriel asked.

“No!” Emma blurted. “It’s just—my grandfather Sonny Lee—he never went to doctors. If you don’t have insurance, you’re better off not knowing you’re sick.”

Gabriel entered a few notes into the computer. “I’m not talking about seeing a doctor. Natalie will do the evaluation. It’s nonnegotiable, if you want to maintain a connection here at the Anchorage. I’m responsible for you, whether you’re here or in Trinity.”

A
s he had five nights previously, the physically gifted, quick, and agile Jonah Kinlock prepped for the hunt. T-shirt, jeans, leathers overtop, Nightshade amulet—the amulet that enabled him to see unhosted shades. He missed the reassuring weight of Fragarach between his shoulder blades. But it couldn’t be helped. On these hunts, he was serving as bait, and a massive sword would send the wrong message.

Charlie, Mike, Thérèse, and Alison were gearing up, too, only, unlike Jonah, they were armed to the teeth. All carried the shiv-launchers Jonah had first seen during the sweep of the Flats. They made Jonah uneasy. In the hands of a trigger-happy slayer, they could give the game away. If Lilith showed up hosted in a physical body, they wouldn’t do any good until the cadaver was out of the way.

He hoped that Lilith would once again leave the cadaver at home. Then she’d be vulnerable to a quick strike from Jonah. And he could avoid the blowback pain of a shiv kill.

Alison still seemed moody and withdrawn, even pricklier than usual.

As if to compensate, the other three were joking around with a kind of forced cheerfulness, as if to say,
This is serious work, but we shadeslayers, we’re full of camaraderie. And we love you, Jonah, even though you went a little crazy for a while and called us murderers
.

Jonah guessed they all had a little bit of that old bloodlust. Each of them longed to put the Lilith Greaves notch in their belts. Once she was out of the way, they hoped the shade army would disperse, and the slayers of Nightshade could go back to business as usual.

Jonah wasn’t so sure. The murders had opened a wound in Trinity that wouldn’t heal up any time soon. Whoever set off the bomb at Safe Harbor would be incentivized to try again. Jonah could sense trouble brewing, but had no idea how to put a stop to it.

You’ve kept too many secrets, Gabriel, Jonah thought. If mainliners knew what we were up against, if we’d told them the truth, if we’d partnered with them back in the day, we’d have some credit to draw upon. Maybe even allies going forward.

Thérèse put her hand on Jonah’s shoulder, squeezing it through the leather. “I know this is hard, to go out there unarmed. But we’re glad to have you back on the team, Jonah.” She smiled, the light illuminating her faded brown eyes.

“Should we try a different part of town?” Mike said. “Maybe they’ve moved their headquarters elsewhere.”

Charlie shook his head. “The Flats and the Warehouse District are still the hotspots for shade activity. We’ve been pushing pretty hard in downtown, and yet they keep hanging around. Maybe it’s because there are so many people on the street late at night.”

“Should we try somebody else as bait?” Thérèse said. “Maybe they don’t want to tangle with Jonah again.”

“No,” Jonah said, “I don’t like playing this part, but I’m the only one who can talk to them. They don’t target savants as a rule. They avoid us, in fact, but they need to go through me to get to Gabriel. Remember, even if we make contact, you may not actually get a kill tonight. You don’t make a move unless you have a clean shot, because I can’t play this same card twice. And I want you to hang back until I’ve had a chance to talk to Lilith.”

The other four exchanged glances. He knew what they were thinking: (1) It didn’t take long for Jonah to start bossing them around. And (2) Gabriel had said not to give Lilith a chance to talk them into anything.

She’s a sorcerer, Jonah thought. Or was. Not an enchanter. What’s Gabriel afraid of?

“That seems risky,” Charlie said finally. “They’ve tried to kill you a couple of times already.”

“If Lilith wanted to kill me, I’d be dead,” Jonah said. “She obviously wants to have a conversation. I want to know why.” He shrugged into his jacket. “Let’s go.”

It was just after two in the morning—time for the bars to let out, yet the streets were unusually empty. A cold rain was whipping in off the lake, a rain that hit Jonah’s face like needles of ice. It might just turn to ice before dawn, he thought. He had to keep moving or freeze.

Their routine was that Jonah would descend into the Flats by himself, with the rest of the slayers following at a safe distance. He’d stride along, trying to look like he was headed somewhere, which is amazingly hard to do when you’re not. Sometimes he’d walk down one side of the river, cross on one of the old iron bridges, and walk up the other side like he was lost. On a mission, going nowhere.

He probably looked like some kind of idiot tourist, ripe to get his wallet lifted. He almost hoped that would happen. An attempted mugging would at least give him something to do.

He’d walk the Warehouse District, too, though he was too young to get into some places. Sometimes, as he passed the open doorway of a crowded club, he caught a whiff of mischief, that mingling of rotting flesh and magic that meant hosted shades were nearby. He’d either lurk around the entrance, getting harassed by bouncers, or talk his way in, only to get harassed by the other patrons. He’d repeat over and over, “No, I don’t want a drink. I’m looking for a friend. No, I don’t mean I want to
make
friends; I’m looking for a friend I already
have
.”

Now and then, he heard a sound, or saw a flicker of movement that told him his shadows were nearby.

After hanging around by the river for a while, Jonah climbed the hill. He was just passing a jazz club when a voice spoke inside his head.
Jonah.
He caught a strong scent of magic, untainted by the scent of decay.

He turned, and a thirtyish stranger beckoned to Jonah and disappeared into the club. Jonah followed, pushing his way through the crowd, growling at those who tried to speak with him.

The stranger sat down at a table in the back and motioned for Jonah to join him. Warily, Jonah took a seat with his back to the wall and took a good, long look at his companion, a slickly handsome man with back-combed hair and a huge diamond ring on his pinkie. Hopefully, it wasn’t just another person hitting on him.

Then, on closer inspection, Jonah noticed that the stranger’s nose had been broken several times, and his skin was just a bit too sallow to be healthy.

You’ll have to order for us, Jonah,
the stranger said, mind-to-mind.
Speech is still complicated when you’re in a borrowed body. I sound like film dialogue being run at the wrong speed.

The silent voice, the rush of mingled resentment, disappointment, yearning, and hope—it was familiar.

“Brendan?” Jonah whispered, incredulous.

That’s me,
Brendan said.

It was Brendan Wu, Kenzie’s friend who’d died at Safe Harbor four years ago. Now he seemed to be Lilith’s right-hand shade.

Brendan struck a pose.
What do you think?

“I think you don’t look like yourself.”

Thank God,
Brendan said, shuddering.
Nobody wanted to be in my body, there at the end. Not even me.

“Whose body is that?”

I don’t know the
specifics
,
Brendan said,
but he
was
kind of a thug. I was high on drugs for the first week, and it seems to have an addiction to nicotine. But, otherwise, it’s in great shape, and it seems to have retained some street-fighting moves.

But Jonah was hung up on something Brendan had said. “For the first week? How long have you been...occupying this body?”

Brendan furrowed his brow, thinking.
Going on a month.

“A month!” Jonah breathed in deeply. “And still fresh? How is that possible?”

That’s the advantage of blood magic,
Brendan said.
We believe that it might be an effective therapy for the living survivors of Thorn Hill as well as the dead.
He leaned across the table.
Imagine what it would be like if Kenzie was healthy, Jonah. For good.

Just for a moment that image pinwheeled through Jonah’s mind, a searing explosion of hope. With some effort, he forced it away.

Imagine what it would be like for you to be able to kiss a girl,
Brendan whispered.
To caress her skin. To—

Jonah raised his gloved hands. “I get the picture. I’m curious, though. How good is your sense of smell, of touch, of hearing? How well does a shade connect with a stolen body?”

Brendan shrugged.
Not perfectly.
He looked down at his hands.
My skin feels numb. I have to be careful not to injure myself without realizing. Hearing and vision are probably the best.

“Can you eat?” Jonah said.

Brendan rocked his hand back and forth.
If it’s the right consistency. Eating, like talking, is complex. It still sometimes goes down the wrong way, and tastes like sawdust.

As if on cue, the server drifted up. Jonah ordered for both of them.

We’re constantly learning more about how this all works,
Brendan said,
developing new methods to occupy a body with all systems intact. Now that we’re no longer bumbling around, we’re making faster progress. Lilith is a genius.

“That’s why I’m here. I want to meet with Lilith.”

This was met by a jab of bitter mirth.
Oh, Jonah,
Brendan said.
That is so not going to happen. Why is it that you slayers always assume that we’re stupid? Is it the shambling? Or the stench? Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s what’s inside that counts?

Jonah opened his mouth to respond, but Jonah Kinlock, master of pretty speech, had nothing to say.

The sandwiches came, but neither one of them ate much. Jonah suspected that Brendan didn’t want to eat in front of him.

I used to envy you,
Brendan said.
You had such a perfect body, so strong and graceful. Sometimes, when I was younger, I
’d
go with Kenzie to the gym just to see what you could do. I envied Kenzie, too, because you were his brother, and you were devoted to him. But the one thing savants have never understood about shades is that we are survivors, too. I was ignorant before, but I was never arrogant. You, Jonah Kinlock, are arrogant.

That’s when it struck Jonah—an epiphany. This person across the table looked nothing like the Brendan Wu Jonah had known back at Safe Harbor—the frail Brendan, racked with intolerable pain, the one who yearned for the soothing cold of Antarctica. And yet, this man had Brendan’s moves, his way of tilting his head and peering at you from under his eyebrows. Jonah had been stung by Brendan’s sense of humor often enough to recognize it. This was Brendan Wu in all ways save for the body that had failed him. This was Brendan in every way that mattered.

He’d always sort of known it—it had been the basis of countless ethical debates with Gabriel. He’d argued that the shades they were riffing were real souls, and that riffing was real murder, no matter how hard you tried to pretty it up with a new name.

But he’d known it in a dispassionate, intellectual way. Was this why Gabriel wanted to avoid communication between shades and slayers? Was there too much of a risk that slayers would lose their taste for virtual blood?

Was this why the Safe Passage program, the preemptive riffing of dying savants, had been established? So these kinds of encounters wouldn’t happen? This way Jonah would never run into Mose Butterfield, their late great guitarist, and realize that everything that he loved about Mose was still there.

“You’re right,” Jonah said. “I am arrogant, and I’m probably guilty of whatever charge you want to lay on me. But where do we go from here? How do we resolve this? It’s not fair to kill innocent people so you can go on living.”

Is any mainliner really innocent?
Brendan said.
Don’t they all share responsibility for what happened at Thorn Hill, before and after the disaster?

“No,” Jonah said, thinking of Grace Moss. “They don’t.”

Fine,
Brendan said.
Whatever. With what we’re learning, maybe one day that will no longer be necessary. We won’t have to rely on cadavers—we’ll be able to possess a living body. Permanently.

“It seems to me like you’re trying to start a war. Us against you, mainliners against us, wizards against everyone who isn’t a wizard. How does that help you?”

Brendan said nothing for a long moment. Just looked at him, dead on.

And then it dawned on Jonah. “That’s the point, isn’t it? A major magical battle will release enough blood magic to fuel a shade army for years.”

Brendan shook his head.
A major magical battle will release enough blood magic to carry out the research that is needed to end this. That’s what we’re hoping for, anyway. And who better to pay a price than the ones who tried to murder us in the first place? And who now despise and discriminate against the survivors.

“So what do you need us for? Why not go it alone?” The subtext was,
If you knew this was a trap, why did you show up?

First and foremost, we need Gabriel’s cooperation to pull this off,
Brendan said.
Second of all, we want to save you, too.