THE ELECTRIC HEIR

by Lee, Victoria

  “So we start leaking what we have now,” Claire said. “Noam gets us more. We leak that too. And then, when people are finally starting to realize what a shitty person Lehrer really is, we find a nice and public way to kill him.”

  “He’s speaking on Independence Day,” Noam said suddenly, the realization dropping into his mind perfectly packaged. “At the catastrophe memorial, in March. They haven’t announced it yet, but he’ll be there. That’s an unsecured location—only Lehrer won’t have bodyguards. He’s too proud for that. It’ll be internationally televised.”

  Priya set down her beer, a clink of glass on wood. “Perfect. Noam, making sure Lehrer is injected with the vaccine will be up to you. You’ll have to do it when he’s already onstage, in front of the cameras, or he’ll cancel. We’ll have snipers in place.”

  Noam had the brief vision of the look on Lehrer’s face when he sank the needle into his neck. Lips parting with surprise, anger already rising up behind his eyes like a storm. And maybe there would be betrayal, too, just a hint of hurt.

  Or maybe Noam was lying to himself again. Lehrer didn’t care enough about him for that. He didn’t care about anyone.

  “Two months,” Dara interjected flatly. All gazes swung back to him. He put his cigarette out on the ashtray and arched a brow. “You’re saying we have to wait two months to kill him.”

  Noam frowned. “Dara, you said yourself—”

  “It’s not that. But we’re planning on two months with you and him. Together. Wasn’t it just the other day that you estimated four weeks at most before Lehrer realized what you’re really doing?”

  Claire had been watching Dara, but now her gaze swung around to fix on Noam instead. “What have you told Lehrer? Where does he think you are right now?”

  Shit. Noam had hoped he’d get away with just not telling the whole of Black Magnolia how thin the line he walked really was. He should have known they were smarter than that.

  On the other hand, if she was asking, then Dara had kept Noam’s secret.

  That had to mean something.

  Even so, Dara’s expression was as tight and angry as it always was nowadays; when Dara met Noam’s gaze, his eyes glittered with malevolence.

  “Presumably he thinks I’m in the barracks,” Noam said, drawing both hands up at his sides in an open gesture, as if to say, You can read me like a book. “It’s not as if he tracks my every move.”

  He wasn’t sure how good they were at reading faces. Wasn’t sure how good his face was at hiding things, for that matter.

  He turned toward Leo so all Claire and Priya could see was his profile, pushing his glass across the counter for Leo to refill. But if Noam hoped his expression was uninterpretable, Leo’s was a blank sheet. Nothing moved behind that gaze as he handed Noam a fresh drink.

  How well did Dara really know this guy? Noam frowned back at Leo, attention skimming down from Leo’s face to his arms, braced against the bar top. They were still well muscled, like he’d just gotten off active duty yesterday. Not the arms of a man whose only exercise was using a cocktail shaker.

  “But you’re within his sphere of influence,” Dara said. “Isn’t this plan extremely dangerous? Not just for Noam, but all of us. Lehrer wouldn’t confront Noam—he’d track him here. He’d have us all dead in half a second.”

  “This whole fucking plan is dangerous,” Noam snapped. “Going into that gala with a gun in your trousers was dangerous. Trying to dose Lehrer with suppressants was dangerous. At least I have the magic to defend myself.”

  Dara’s posture went wooden, but Noam didn’t take it back. It was true. What the hell had Dara thought would happen, walking into that party like that—with his face, with his weaknesses? Lehrer might not be willing to kill Dara right in front of all those people, but he easily could have used persuasion to trap Dara in place. Would have, if he’d realized Dara was powerless.

  “It’s the best plan we’ve got, Dara,” Claire said with an unexpected gentleness. A muscle twitched in Dara’s jaw.

  Noam straightened his arm, tugging the sleeve of his shirt high enough he could glance down at the face of his wristwatch. “I have to go,” he said. “It’s late. I have basic in the morning.”

  He half expected Dara to lob another sharp comment after him, but he didn’t. Noam made it to the door and onto the whiteout street, Dara’s gaze burning a hole in his back the whole way.

  Claire caught up with him before he made it to the corner.

  “Hey, Álvaro,” she said, fumbling to get her coat hood up against the gale winds. “Thought we could talk.”

  “About what?”

  She grimaced and gestured one gloved hand toward his whole body, his soaked sweater clinging to his shoulders and his umbrella tangling up in the wind. “Didn’t you bring a jacket?”

  “Nope. What’s up?”

  “We didn’t get a chance to go into much detail about the aftermath of the assassination attempt, back there,” Claire said, falling into step alongside him with both arms hugged around her middle. “But now that we’ve made such a visible move, I expect things’ll get complicated. Lehrer will be upping his security, I’m sure. You’ll need to keep an eye out for that, or any other changes he makes to his plans.”

  “I’m not actually sure he will up security,” Noam said. Claire grimaced and shook her head. It took Noam a second to realize she meant she couldn’t hear him over the shrieking winds. He raised his voice and repeated himself, then added, “There’s a reason you don’t see Lehrer walking around flanked by the Chancellarian Guard all the time. He hates having bodyguards, thinks it makes him look weak. The very fact you managed to shoot him at all makes him look weak, actually. He’ll probably be working twice as hard to remind people how omnipotent he is.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Claire said grimly. “Have you . . . has he done anything like this before? I mean . . . surviving a head shot . . . it’s a little bit extra, even for Lehrer.”

  “You’re talking about the same guy who single-handedly destroyed DC. I don’t think we should assume there’s anything he isn’t capable of.”

  They walked in silence a few more paces, Noam squinting against the snow that blew into his eyes. His lashes were already freezing. He tried to focus on making the air molecules closest to him speed up, but he clearly didn’t understand the science behind heat well enough, because it made absolutely no difference.

  “You saw him very soon after it happened,” Claire said eventually. And if Noam wasn’t mistaken, there was a lilt of suspicion to her voice—which made sense, really. For all she knew, he’d never dosed Lehrer in the first place. “Did he summon you personally? A . . . Level IV cadet?”

  Awkward. Because . . . no. Lehrer hadn’t summoned Noam. He hadn’t needed to.

  But Noam couldn’t just be like Nah, I dropped everything and ran to his side, but that doesn’t mean anything, I swear.

  “No-o,” Noam said, dragging the word out. Not that stalling did him much good. “But when I saw the news, I was worried about . . . I wanted to know if he’d realized who was responsible. So I went to him.”

  Claire didn’t immediately respond. It was impossible to tell if her eyes were narrowed because she didn’t believe him or just because of the wind.

  “And did he?” Claire said. “Know who did it?”

  Noam shook his head. “No. But I’ll have to tell him it was you. He won’t trust me if it looks like I’m keeping secrets.”

  She snorted. “That’s fine. Yeah. You know what? I want him to know it was me that shot him. I want him to know some crazy Texas bitch with a sniper rifle shot Calix Lehrer right in the skull.”

  “You’re Texan?” he asked, latching on to that with a slight sense of desperation. He couldn’t escape the sense that if they kept on this track, she’d see him too clearly—take a good long look at Noam and see how much touching Lehrer in that office, Lehrer’s skin bloody but his skin warm, had felt like heartbreak.

  “Yep. Studied
engineering at Austin. I was going to get a master’s degree, only then I got drafted and spent the next three years playing sniper for the army.”

  “I thought Texas exiled all their witchings to the QZ.”

  “Oh, they do,” Claire said bitterly. “I was two months out from discharge. Someone broke quarantine protocol after a QZ mission, and my whole unit got sick. I was the only survivor. Woke up in the hospital and realized I could move things around with my mind. I didn’t want to wait for the police to come for me, so I did their work for them and exiled myself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Claire shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. I ran into one of the communities out there a few weeks in. I was able to have a life, sort of. I met Priya.”

  “But then Dara showed up?”

  “Nope. Then Lehrer destroyed the vaccine lab Priya was working in, and she barely got out with her life. It was six weeks before we were sure she was even gonna make it. Lost a lot of friends in that attack—a lot of good people trying to cure the worst plague this world’s ever seen. Then Dara turned up.”

  Noam had spent a lot of time trying to imagine what the QZ was like for Dara. He knew what the QZ was generally like, obviously—he’d been there plenty of times with Lehrer or on Level IV training missions—but living there was something completely different. Before he and Lehrer had started searching out the vaccine, he’d had no idea people had settled out there. Or not really. They’d all heard rumors of squatters in the wilderness, surviving off mushrooms and wild animals, half-feral with fevermadness. But he hadn’t imagined whole communities. Whole labs high tech enough to develop vaccine research programs.

  “So,” he said, once they’d turned onto the street that would take Noam almost all the way back to the government complex if he stayed on it, “y’all had like . . . a whole town? Or what?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “There are lots of abandoned cities out in the QZ. A lot of them are uninhabitable—they got all grown over with magic and plants, or they’re all irradiated still—but there are a few that are just a little crumbly. People have been living out there since the catastrophe. Some never left. They just hunkered down and stayed put—and were lucky enough to survive the virus when they inevitably got infected. It’s a town like any town you might have in Carolinia. Only all witching. And maybe a little more communal, I guess. People do what they can.”

  “It’s amazing no one knows about these towns.”

  “Not really. I mean, passenger jets have a minimum height they have to fly over the QZ to avoid getting caught up in magic. Governments probably have satellite data on us, but for the most part we’re harmless. They let us be.”

  “Till now,” he said.

  “Till Lehrer.”

  There was no arguing with that. They parted ways close to downtown; Claire couldn’t risk being recognized on CCTV, had to head back to the apartment she and Priya had rented on the east side.

  And maybe Noam was personally complicit on some level for the destruction of Claire and Priya’s way of life out there. After all, he’d helped Lehrer do his dirty work. Before Noam had figured out Faraday, he’d even believed in it. He had convinced himself that the threat of letting the vaccine fall into the wrong hands—Texan hands—was great enough to justify destroying those labs. Lehrer was a lot of things, but he was right about the threat the rest of the world posed to witching survival. Lehrer knew that much from personal experience.

  Noam had seen how those labs affected Lehrer. So many of the facilities were built in old hospitals—and there was always something particularly vicious about the way Lehrer destroyed those. The nights following, Noam would wake up to find Lehrer upright in bed beside him, staring blank faced into the darkness like he could see something in the shadows that Noam couldn’t.

  I hate doctors, Lehrer had said in his office, still covered in blood, and . . . god. Noam should have realized the moment he stepped into that room, the moment he saw how Lehrer flinched back from the stethoscopes and gloved hands. He should have—

  Don’t sympathize with him, Noam ordered himself.

  Another voice answered: Too late.

  Lehrer was still awake when Noam returned. He’d made it halfway to the barracks before his phone buzzed in his pocket with a text from Lehrer—Come back to the apartment when you’re done—and he’d had to turn around in the middle of the atrium to take the stairs up to the west wing instead.

  Lehrer was in the living room, reclining on the sofa with Wolf curled at his feet and a book open in his hand. He put it down when Noam entered, resting its pages open atop his stomach.

  Noam glanced around the room—an empty mug of tea sat on the floor by Lehrer’s hip, the lights dimmed so low he was amazed Lehrer could read the words on the page. Wolf’s pink tongue flicked out to lap at Lehrer’s ankle; the dog didn’t even look at Noam when he came in.

  “Is everything . . . okay?” Noam said, because Lehrer didn’t look well. He was paler than usual, his usually neat hair messy like he’d been raking his fingers through it. Fingers that trembled, however minutely, where they rested atop his book.

  “Sit down,” Lehrer said instead of answering.

  Noam paced over to the empty armchair nearest the sofa, perching on the edge of the seat and gripping the cushion beneath him. He couldn’t stop looking at Lehrer. He felt—concern, maybe, but something else too. Wariness.

  An injured predator could be lethal.

  Lehrer’s cool gaze drifted over Noam’s face, as if cataloging it. “I met with my personal physician,” he said. “As you might imagine, I lost a lot of blood in the assassination attempt.”

  Noam’s mind flashed back to the images he’d seen on the TV—all that blood black like tar on the sidewalk. Soaking Lehrer’s shirt as he stripped it off in his office.

  Lehrer seemed to be waiting for a response. Noam nodded.

  “Unfortunately,” Lehrer began, and that unsteady hand curled into a fist. “Unfortunately, my body has not yet been able to recover on its own. And I spent too much magic healing myself in the moment; I can’t risk using more.”

  “Oh.” Noam bit the inside of his lip, fingertips pressing harder into the seat cushion. “I . . . you know that I don’t know healing magic. Maybe Bethany . . . ?”

  “Not that,” Lehrer said, a humorless smile passing over his mouth. He drew the book aside and pushed himself up. Slowly, like his joints were stiff and painful. He swung his legs off the sofa to plant his feet flat on the ground, facing Noam. “I was rather hoping I might convince you to loan me your blood.”

  Noam was so used to thinking of magic as the solution for everything, these days, that for a moment he almost laughed—almost said, What, are you a vampire now?—and Lehrer must have recognized the look on his face before he arched a brow and interjected:

  “A transfusion, Noam. I need a blood transfusion.”

  A dull heat rose in Noam’s cheeks, one he tried to push away by folding his arms over his stomach and lifting his chin. Right. Of course.

  “So . . . ,” he said, not really sure where he was going with this but needing to fill the awkward silence that had welled up in the wake of Lehrer’s words. “You need . . .”

  “We have the same blood type,” Lehrer said. “I checked your records from the red ward. You can understand why I want to keep this as discreet as possible. There are ways to track who receives transfusions delivered through the usual donation system. I can’t afford to seem weak right now.”

  That much was true. Especially after an attempt on his life—Lehrer was right, it was a PR shitshow. Lehrer was supposed to be untouchable, and now there was video footage of his blood all over the ground. Witnesses who could say they’d seen him with a bullet in his head. It wasn’t exactly Lehrer’s brand.

  “Okay,” Noam said. “Sure. I mean . . . yes. All right.”

  He didn’t know what he’d expected—that Lehrer might make him an appointment at the hospital the following day, perhaps, send him to
some clinical office with white walls that smelled of antiseptic—but an hour later he was sitting on the edge of Lehrer’s bathtub, Lehrer’s personal physician kneeling at his feet as she scrubbed his forearm with an alcohol wipe.

  “This might sting,” she murmured and slid the hollow needle into his vein.

  Noam’s blood was dark as garnet as it slid out of his arm and into the clear tubing that snaked down past his knee toward the bag on the floor. He squeezed the rubber ball she’d given him to hold.

  “I suppose it’s a good thing I’ve never been afraid of blood,” he said and attempted a grin she didn’t return.

  Lehrer stood in the doorway, a silhouette watching in silence. He met Noam’s gaze when Noam lifted his head, then turned away. His footsteps retreated through the bedroom and down the hall, toward the living room.

  Lehrer sent him back to the barracks when it was done. Noam kept his shirtsleeve rolled down to cover the gauze taped to his inner elbow; he couldn’t explain this to Ames. Couldn’t even really explain it to himself. It was harmless, it was—it wasn’t like Noam could have said no.

  But still.

  He went to bed early, curling up under the sheets and clutching his arm to his chest; his skin throbbed where the needle went in, and he felt . . . tired, drained, like that doctor had drawn more than just blood. But he couldn’t sleep. He kept twisting under his blankets, sweat beading at the small of his back, until finally he kicked the duvet away and grabbed his bottle of sleeping pills, swallowed five with his head stuck under the sink faucet.

  When he finally slept, his dreams were haunted by shadows and beasts.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DARA

  Sometimes, Dara missed the quarantined zone.

  Not the social life, of course—there were about 150 people total living in the little commune Claire and Priya and the others had built up. Not that being back in Durham was much better, given Dara couldn’t even leave this damn apartment without seeing his face plastered on every missing person poster from here to Raleigh.

  But the rest of it. The way it felt to be no one. To live somewhere that his identity didn’t matter—no one respected him more because he was Lehrer’s ward. No one heard him say Level IV and raised their brows. He didn’t have to overhear the endless monologue inside people’s heads: always either Will he tell Lehrer about this? or Can’t get over how pretty that boy is. Like Dara could be reduced to those two attributes: Lehrer and looks. Nothing more.