The Enchanter Heir (13 page)

Odd. The bridge was closed for repair, and he’d understood that it would be for at least another month. Anyway, why would they be working on the bridge at this time of night?

The wind stirred his hair, and the stench of free magic came to him, stronger than ever, from the direction of the river. Turning off Canal Road, Jonah sprinted up the slight incline toward the bridge.

By the time he reached the foot of the bridge, the deck had stopped high above him. He heard faint cries for help from overhead.

Children?

The door to the access stairs was padlocked. Jonah considered crushing the lock, but disliked the notion of being caged up in the stairwell. Fortunately, the tower seemed made for climbing, a Lego maze of handholds and footrests. Halfway up, he saw the pallid face of a shade peering over the side at him, felt the shade’s fear and hatred boiling down on his head.

So much for the element of surprise.
Jonah climbed faster, worrying that his approach might goad the shade into a quick kill.

The higher he climbed, the stronger the scent of the shade’s host. A corpse, and not particularly fresh, from the smell of it. Jonah was nearly at the top when something came hurtling over the edge, a glowing patch of white in the darkness. At first he thought it was the shade, trying to escape, but it emitted a high-pitched wail as it fell, its arms and legs windmilling. A little girl.

Jonah leaped sideways to intercept her. In a split second, he wrapped both arms around her, shifted her to the crook of one arm, and grabbed back on to the tower with the other hand. She continued to kick and wriggle and screech into his ear, nearly deafening him.

“Shhh,” he said. “Hey. It’s all right. I’ve got you.”

At the sound of his voice, she stopped struggling and buried her face in his sweatshirt as if trying to burrow in. She was sniffling, but no longer screaming, at least. She glowed, like an illuminated painting in a church.

His weary synapses finally fired. She was gifted. A wizardling.

She lifted her head and looked at him. “It’s not polite to stare,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said.

“I was trying to grab the zombie’s knife, and he pushed me, and I
fell
,” she said, as if she thought the situation needed explaining.

“I hate when that happens,” Jonah said. “Can you ride piggyback?”

“Of
course
.”

“Climb on.”

He turned and she clambered onto his back, wrapping her legs tightly around his middle, her arms around his neck in a choke hold.

The shade peered over the side again, a long, sharp knife in one hand, and something in his other hand that reflected an iridescent light. Jonah flinched sideways, worried it might be some new kind of weapon.

Playing it safe, he ducked under the road deck, leaping from handhold to handhold, and surfaced on the far side of the bridge. Pulling himself up onto the deck, he crouched and the girl climbed down.

She studied him with grave brown eyes. She wore a white T-shirt bearing the legend
Trinity Montessori

“I’m Olivia.”

“I’m Jonah.”

“You’re a good climber,” she said, licking a finger and dabbing at a scratch on her arm.

“And you’re brave.” Jonah pointed to the inner wall of the bridge tower. “Stand right there while I kill the . . . the monster. Don’t move.”

To Jonah’s relief, Olivia nodded, eyes wide, and flattened herself against the inside wall of the bridge tower.

Jonah turned to face the shade.

It stood, clothed in a rotting corpse, a cohesion of desperate need in a decaying shell.

Behind him, a dozen small children huddled at the center of the bridge deck. Holding hands, some of them whimpering. They all wore the same white T-shirts with
Trinity Montessori
printed on them, and they all shone with the auras of the gifted. They were nearly all wizards, with a few other mainliners sprinkled in.

Trinity. That was the headquarters of the mainline guilds.

Children? Really? Shades are going after children now? Wizard children in particular? Now, why would that be?

Using children as hosts had never been of much interest to shades. Not when they had a choice. Children were small and not very strong and grown-ups felt the need to pen them up. Shades needed strength and size and freedom of movement. That’s what they aimed for in a borrowed body.

Jonah looked around for potential weapons. Ripping a rusting cross-brace free, he hefted it in his hands, hoping it wasn’t anything structurally critical. He preferred a sword, with its cutting edge, but he often used a staff when sparring in the gym. This would do.

“Hey, Jonah,” the shade said, speaking mind to mind. “’Sup?”

Jonah nearly dropped his staff. “You know who I
am
?” This was another of Jonah’s double-edged gifts. He was the only savant who could communicate, mind to mind, with free shades. Some hosted shades could emit screeches, howls, clicks, and the like, but that was about it.

“You mean you don’t recognize me?” The shade’s tone was bitter, faintly mocking.

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Jonah said, taking a step closer. “I’m guessing you’ve changed a lot since we last met.”

“I’m Brendan Wu,” the shade said. The name was familiar. Jonah paged through mental files. “I can’t quite place where I—”

“I lived at Safe Harbor,” Brendan said. “You’d come there to see Kenzie all the time.” He paused. “I used to watch those nature videos?”

A faint image came to Jonah’s mind. An older boy with stick-straight black hair and bright, intelligent eyes, who spent hours every day in the whirlpool because his skin blistered and sloughed off constantly. A boy who lived with agonizing pain most of the time.

Brendan had died four years ago. Another miss for Safe Passage.

“I remember you, Brendan,” Jonah said. “We used to talk about Antarctica.”

“I loved Antarctica,” Brendan said wistfully. “So cold and clean.” He paused. “I always wished I had a brother like you. But everyone else in my family died in Brazil.”

“That’s what I don’t get . . . after all you’ve been through, how could you kill children?”

“Why are you killing
us
?” Brendan snapped back. “Wizards are to blame for . . . for all of this.” He waved his hand, taking in the children, the bridge, the river below. “We’re all victims of wizards. So why are you fighting against us and not them?”

A question Jonah had asked a thousand times. And yet . . .

“Brendan,” he said softly. “Wouldn’t you like to be at peace?” Memory strobed, like a camera flash. Thing One had used almost the same argument on Jonah. About Kenzie. Brendan laughed bitterly. “I’m aiming a little higher than that.”

“It’s wrong to kill children,” Jonah said with conviction.

His was a strange and brutal life, with few moral anchors, but that was one of them.

“This isn’t about revenge. It’s about our survival. Yours, mine—all of the victims of Thorn Hill. You’re killing
us
.

What’s so different about killing
them
?”

“You think four-year-olds are a threat to you?” Brendan shook his head, jarring several teeth free. They clattered onto the asphalt. “Of course not. But sometimes sacrifices are necessary. And who better to pay this price than mainliners?”

During this conversation, Jonah had eased forward. Now he was close enough to make out the object the shade held in its hand. It was a bottle made of brilliant glass, with an elaborate stopper.

“What’s the bottle for?” Jonah asked.

“It’s for blood magic.” Brendan held up the bottle and tilted it so it caught the light. “This bottle is specially made to capture it. Killing the gifted frees it. The death of a gifted child is the most powerful source.”

Jonah forced back a shudder. “What do you want it for?”

“Give me these guildlings, and I’ll tell you.”

“I can’t give them to you,” Jonah said, slapping the iron bar against his palm. “They don’t belong to me.”

“Jonah,” Brendan pleaded. “Please listen to me. Things are different now. You’ll see. We’re organizing, we’re getting stronger. We’re not going to have to skulk in alleyways anymore, trading bodies every few days.”

Jonah thought of the army of shades that had attacked the canal boat in London. “Why? What’s changed?”

“Everything,” Brendan said eagerly. “Blood magic is the key. We want to partner with you, with everyone at the Anchorage.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Jonah asked. “Are you the one who’s organizing the shades?”

“No,” Brendan said. “You and I would be the liaisons. Lilith wants to meet with Mr. Mandrake.”

“Lilith? Who’s that?” The name was vaguely familiar. Maybe someone he knew at Thorn Hill?

“Lilith Greaves. She’s our new leader. She’s amazing. We think that if you just understood what we were planning, you would all come on board.”

All Jonah could think of was that this was some kind of trap, a trick to gain access to Gabriel and the members of Nightshade.

“Fine,” he said. “Tell me what you’re planning.”

“No,” Brendan said. “Forgive my mistrust, but you’ve slaughtered more of us than the rest of Nightshade combined. First, we require a show of good faith.” He tilted his head at the children and extended the bottle toward Jonah. “Help me extract blood magic from these mainliners. Then I’ll take you to Lilith and she’ll explain how it’s used.”

“No,” Jonah said. “Let them go. Then I’ll hear whatever Lilith has to pitch.”

“Suit yourself,” Brendan said. He raised his hand, a signal.

“Jonah!” Olivia screamed. “Look out!”

Chapter Fourteen
Shadeslayer

Jonah swung around, to see shades swarming over the sides of the bridge deck from all directions. They lined the edges of the bridge, cadavers of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of crowding in behind. They encircled him, all rotting flesh and protruding bones, resembling the cast of a high-budget horror movie.

The children crouched and covered their heads with their arms. It looked kind of like a preschool disaster drill. With zombies.

Jonah assumed a fighting stance, but Brendan held up his hand, and the shades settled in place, making no move to attack.

And then, ludicrously, Jonah’s phone buzzed. He looked, and saw that he had a screenful of texts from Alison.
Where the hell are you?
Swiveling, he took photographs of the shade army and the bridge and texted them back.

“Shadeslayer!”

The voice came from high above him. He looked up, and there, on the rusting framework of the railroad bridge, stood a woman . . . rather, an apparition in the form of a woman, lighting up the entire riverbed. Her garments writhed around her like brilliant vapors, and her arms trailed streamers of light.

“Or would you rather I call you Jonah?”

“You must be Lilith,” Jonah said. “But I still don’t know exactly
what
you are.”

Unlike the rest of the shades, Lilith did not occupy a corpse, but she didn’t resemble a free shade either. Even to a slayer with an amulet, a free shade looked more like a wraith than a person. But this one was remarkably detailed, fully formed, and stable in outline, with silver-blond hair that rippled past her shoulders.

“I’m a Thorn Hill survivor. Like you. I believe the term you use is ‘shade’?”

“If you’re a survivor, you’re not a shade,” Jonah said.

“Oh, is
that
how you justify killing us? The excuse that we’re already dead?” Lilith asked. “I’m as alive as you.”

“If you’re fine the way you are, then why are you constantly stealing other people’s bodies?”

“I didn’t say we were
fine
,” Lilith said. “I said we were
alive
. I suppose you could say we view bodies as prosthetic devices.”

“Think of Kenzie,” Brendan said. “His body is damaged, but he uses adaptive equipment to interact with the world.”

“Leave Kenzie out of this,” Jonah said.

“Kenzie is in this, whether you like it or not,” Lilith said. “As are you.”

Jonah’s skin prickled. He didn’t like their easy familiarity with details of his life. They were cutting too close to his heart. “Brendan said you have a plan,” he began, eager to change the subject.

“Indeed. That’s why I asked him to fetch you.”

“You brought me here on purpose?” Jonah looked around, at the circle of shades, feeling foolish. The legendary Slayer, Jonah Kinlock, had walked right into a trap.

“Brendan said you were fond of children,” Lilith said. “Given your history as a slayer, I didn’t believe him, but here you are.”

“Here I am,” Jonah said. “What do you want, then? Why am I still alive?”

“I wanted to talk to you about alternatives to this road we’re going down now.”

“I’m listening,” Jonah said.

“We would like to partner with the Anchorage. We’re hoping you can use your persuasive skills to bring Gabriel Mandrake on board, too.”

“If your plan involves killing mainliners, he’ll never sign on for it.”

“Even if he doesn’t, we’re hoping you will,” Brendan said. “We know you and Gabriel don’t always see eye to eye.”

“I still don’t know what your plan is,” Jonah said. “Or what the blood magic is for.”

“And you won’t know until you commit to us,” Lilith said.

“By killing children.”

“Something
you
seem to be incredibly good at,” Lilith snapped. “How many of us have you killed so far? My own daughter died at Thorn Hill. I’ve been looking for her ever since. But maybe you’ve already killed her.” She paused. “Tell me, Shadeslayer,” she said softly. “What would you do if you ran into Marcie?” Jonah’s palms were sweating, his heart thudding painfully. Lilith seemed to know exactly how to find his open wounds. “I’d want to save her from . . . from this,” he said, gesturing at the assembly of decaying corpses.

“Then we are allies,” Lilith said. “Why do you think I’m doing this? Why are
these
children . . .” She gestured toward the preschoolers on the bridge. “Why are
they
more important than my daughter, and your brother and sister?”