Ascanio held up his hand to stop me and turned away, looking at the wall across the street. A moment later the rest of the shapeshifters turned and looked there, too.
A boy leapt out of the darkness and landed on the corner of the wall, the only spot free of razor wire. He was solid and corded with muscle, only half a foot shorter than me. Dark brown hair cut short, tan face, and grey eyes that were so light, they were practically silver.
Conlan.
When I left, he wasn’t even two years old. We’d seen each other hundreds of times over the years when visiting our grandfather in his otherworldly prison, but it’d been eight years since I’d seen him in person. If we were alone, I would’ve pulled him off that wall and hugged him so hard, he’d need all his shapeshifter strength to wiggle out of it.
Our stares connected.
He gave no indication that he recognized me. My brother, the master of subterfuge.
Ascanio heaved a mocking sigh. “The little prince graces us with his presence. You’re a long way from your parents’ territory, Your Highness.”
His Highness sat cross-legged on the wall. “You’re a long way from your Clan House, Beta Ferara.”
Ascanio smiled slowly, baring his teeth. “Run along now.”
“And if I don’t?” Conlan squinted at Ascanio. “Will you try to put me in your special basement?”
One of the boudas chuckled and choked it off before Ascanio could glare at him.
“This doesn’t concern you,” Ascanio said, his voice harsh.
“I’ll decide what concerns me.” Conlan rested his elbow on his knee and plopped his chin on his fist. “Don’t worry. I won’t get in your way. Please go on with your attempted extortion, robbery, and kidnapping scheme. I just want to see how it all turns out.”
“And then what?” one of the boudas behind me asked. “You gonna run home and tell your daddy?”
My brother turned his head and looked at him. Gold rolled over his eyes and flared into a bright glow. The bouda with the big mouth tried to hold his gaze. A tense second passed. The bouda looked down.
Ascanio couldn’t let that pass. Conlan had just alpha-stared one of his people into submission. I had to diffuse the situation before it broke into violence.
“So it’s not just lone women you hassle in the middle of the night. You also bully children.”
Ascanio glanced back at me.
That’s right. I’m still here.
“I’m going to ride across this bridge,” I told him. “You’re welcome to try and stop me. I’m pretty sure the kid and I can take you.”
“You should try to stop her,” Conlan called out. Flesh flowed over his left hand, snapping into a nightmarish half-hand half-paw, disproportionately large and armed with claws the size of human fingers. “It will be fun.”
“We both remember what happens when you go looking for fun,” Ascanio said. “Do I need to remind you?” He made a show of looking around. “I don’t have loup manacles handy.”
He didn’t have what?
Conlan’s face rippled. He was a hair away from going furry. “That was a long time ago. Why don’t we go find some and see what happens?”
Nothing. That’s what was going to happen.
I nudged Tulip. She lowered her head and stomped to the bridge. The boudas blocking it hesitated.
I fixed them with my stare and barked in the same voice I used when I wanted soldiers in the middle of a slaughter to obey me. “Move.”
The two on the left scrambled aside. The bouda on the right stood alone, not sure what to do.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ascanio wave him off. The bouda backed away.
Ascanio had crunched the numbers and didn’t like the result. In a fight with shapeshifters, there were no guarantees. If Conlan got hurt, or worse, if he hurt someone, there would be a lot of questions. I could just imagine how that conversation would go. “How did Curran’s son get hurt?” “Well, there was this woman…” “And what possessed you to detain a human woman in the middle of the night? Also, why is Bob missing an arm?” Ascanio was an ass, but he wasn’t a fool.
Ascanio flicked his fingers toward the city. The boudas shot past me, leaping onto the bridge, and broke into a run.
I glanced to the wall. Conlan was gone. Good job.
Ascanio turned to me. “You and I will meet again, soon.”
“No, we won’t.”
Blood-red eyes fixed me. “Think about the things I asked you.”
He sprinted past me onto the bridge, catching up to his crew with ridiculous ease. They dashed into the night with a speed that would make racehorses green and vanished from view.
For my first night back in Atlanta, it could’ve been worse. I still had all my limbs, and my hair wasn’t on fire.
What was that about loup manacles? I’d seen Conlan every week or two for years, and my brother never mentioned anything involving Ascanio and loup manacles. In fact, he never mentioned Ascanio, period. I’d have to get to the bottom of this next time we talked...
A ghost of a presence tripped my alarms. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose. Something waited in the depths of the ruins on my left. Watching me. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but I knew it was there, hidden in the darkness, the same way primitive people knew when a tiger lay in wait at the mouth of their cave.
I could get off the horse and say hello, but there was no telling what I would find, and every instinct warned me to back away. Tulip tensed under me. She didn’t like whatever was hiding in the darkness either.
There was no point in looking for trouble. I’d lost enough time as it was. I shifted my weight in the saddle, and Tulip trotted onto the bridge.
Nobody followed us.
I sat on a big chunk of concrete in the middle of the street. Around me the old bones of Midtown spread under the pale grey pre-dawn sky. Jagged corpses of skyscrapers jutted from the sea of rubble. Some had fallen whole; others broke off midway, and their husks stared at the world with black holes of empty windows. Strange lichens sheathed their walls, some coiling in ridges on the brick and stucco like ancient fossil shells, others drooping in long crimson strands that moved and shivered without any wind. Decorative hedges that once bordered sidewalks had grown foot-long thorns. Otherworldly vines, dotted with flowers, spilled from the gutted ruins.
The first magic wave had stabbed Atlanta in the heart, leaving a ragged, gaping wound that cut through Midtown. The wound bled magic even during the strongest tech, and its current had warped this area beyond all recognition. The locals called it Unicorn Lane. Nothing was what it seemed here, and everything tried to kill you. Even the biggest magical heavyweights steered clear of it. To enter Unicorn Lane, you had to be desperate or crazy. Good thing I was both.
In front of me, a small space had been cleared free of rubble. A ten-foot-tall stele thrust from its center, a narrow stone slab with four equal sides. A pack of small russet-furred beasts somewhere on the crossroads of squirrels and mongoose dashed down a narrow path and around it. The thing that chased them had no name. About the size of a large rottweiler, it scrambled over the refuse on six legs. Its fur was a forest of hair-thin black needles. It looked like a sea urchin, except for its head with long jaws and dinosaur teeth. The beast dashed after the pseudo-squirrels, slipped, and slammed into an abandoned car wrapped in orange moss.
The moss turned bright red from the impact. The beast staggered away, swayed, and collapsed, its side awash with scarlet. The needles drooped, liquifying. A thick puddle of brown blood spread from the creature. Dozens of critters no bigger than a rat streamed out of the ruins like a blue-grey tide to drink it.
Tulip neighed at me for the third time.
“Fine.” I got off the rock and untacked her. “Don’t go deep.”
Tulip tossed her head and took off down the street, a splash of white.
“Is that wise?” a familiar female voice asked.
I turned. Sienna stood by the stele. She wore a long dark cloa
k, and her hood was down, revealing her face and strawberry blond hair shorn in a new short bob. Her skin was pale, her features delicate and gentle, and her eyes distant. Before the Shift, people used to draw fae like her. Nobody would ever draw a delicate fae again.
“Tulip will be fine. What happened to the hair?”
She smiled. “Needed power for a spell.”
Sienna was an oracle who saw into the future. I had focused on her prophecies so much over the last four years, sometimes I forgot that she was a witch.
I walked over, and we hugged. She used to be sickly, almost skeletal, and sometimes she still forgot to eat, because she lived with one foot in another time. She felt solid now. Good.
“Why here?” I asked, nodding at the stele.
“I have my reasons.”
Sienna looked at the monument and the single name chiseled on it. SAIMAN.
“I always wondered why nothing else was written here,” she said.
“That’s the way he wanted it.”
I remembered the day we buried him. It rained so hard, all of us looked like we were crying. I wasn’t sure if anyone actually had. He’d stabbed too many of his pallbearers in the back.
A grandson of a frost giant, Saiman had been an expert on magic. He’d also been a polymorph. He could turn himself into anyone he wanted, any age, any gender, any shape within human limits, and he’d used that gift to live a thoroughly selfish life, using people, manipulating them, trampling over them in a hedonistic pursuit of wealth and pleasure. Then the city had had to come together to face a terrible threat, and Saiman had one brief, shining chance to cast aside his cowardice and step up to the plate. He took it, and it killed him.
I hadn’t mourned him, I’d never trusted him, but I was sorry he had died. A lot of people, better people, had also died in that battle.
Sienna looked at the stele, or rather through it, at something only she could see. I waited.
She’d called me yesterday. This is your last chance to stop it. Meet me by Saiman’s grave before sunrise. Then she’d hung up.
Rushing her and asking questions would accomplish nothing. She weighed and measured each word a hundred times before she said it. And even so, most of what she said made no sense until it was too late. I just had to be patient and hope I figured it out in time.
Last chance. The very last one.
Four years ago, she’d called me in the middle of the night. Sienna had foreseen disasters before, wars, plagues, dragons. Nothing rattled her, but that night her voice shook. She told me that an elder god had been reborn as an avatar in Arizona. Moloch, the Child Eater, the deity of the Canaanites condemned in the Old Testament, who took his sustenance from infants burned alive in the fires of his forges and metal bulls. For nearly three decades he had been building up his domain, preparing to expand, and that night Sienna had seen his first target.
Moloch would kill Kate. The woman who raised me as her daughter.
Kate was so much more than my mother. She was the nexus, a point of connection for many people who would otherwise slit each other’s throats. The Pack, who suspected all outsiders; the Masters of the Dead, who piloted vampires with their minds as if they were drones; the Witch Covens that guarded their precious knowledge with beasts and curses; the Neo-Pagans with a persecution chip on their shoulder; the Order of Merciful Aid, who maintained that their way was the only right way—all of them owed favors to Kate. She was respected by all, loved by some, feared by others, but none of them would treat her lightly. Kate was the only person capable of forging the factions of Atlanta into a unified force.
Eight years ago, she had done just that, and Atlanta stood as one against a danger that should have ended it. The city survived against all odds. Now Kate had moved on, to the coast near Wilmington, coming to Atlanta only for the summer, and without her the city had fractured again. But these fractures could still be repaired.
If Moloch killed Kate, Atlanta would collapse upon itself and fall to his power. Everyone I cared about on the East Coast would die trying to avenge her. The conflicts between the factions of the city would flare into war. On the West Coast, Erra, Kate’s aunt and the woman I called my grandmother, was trying to resurrect the ancient kingdom she left behind thousands of years ago. My grandmother once lost herself to vengeance and became an abomination to protect her people. Kate’s death would catapult her down the path of retribution once again, and this time she would not survive.
Sienna told me that I was the wild card. It was up to me to stop the prophecy from coming true.
That night four years ago I’d gotten off the phone with Sienna, and in the morning Erra and I were off to Moloch’s fortress. He thought he was secure in his citadel. I’d gotten myself captured, killed his guards, cut my way to his workshop, and severed his spine. He tore out my eye. My grandfather had told me that Moloch’s power was in his eyes, so I carved one of his out of his skull as he lay by my feet and put it into my head. Then I cut his body into pieces and threw him into his own forge. And then I set his hell fortress on fire.
Within two years Moloch regenerated, as my grandfather had warned me he would. I had bought us some time, but the future remained unchanged. Kate still died. From the moment I felt Moloch’s eye root into my head, everything I had done was to prevent the prophecy from happening. I clashed with Moloch again and again, but no matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t alter Sienna’s visions. If Kate met Moloch, she died. If I went home, she died. If I warned her, she died.
“Moloch spoke to me again,” Sienna said.
Hearing the name said out loud was like being shocked with a live wire. I pushed the rage down. “What did he say?”
She glanced at me. “He taunted me. He can’t see what I see. He worries.”
Anything that worried Moloch was great for us.
“A holy man was murdered. His name was Nathan Haywood. Moloch sent his priests into the city. He wants something connected to this murder.”
“Something or someone?”
Sienna shook her head. I wouldn’t get an answer. “Find it before he does. If he obtains it, everything is lost. The future becomes a certainty.”
Kate would not die. Not while I was still breathing.
“Julie,” Sienna called.
I startled. I had left that name behind me years ago. Julie Olsen was gone, melted down in the crucible of magic. Now I went by Aurelia Ryder.
“Do not go home. If Kate sees you, she will recognize you. She will die. Curran will die. Conlan will die. Everyone you love will be gone.”
A cold spike of fear hammered through my spine. “Conlan saw me.”
“Conlan doesn’t matter. Only Kate does.” She reached out and gripped my hands. “You must stop him this time. No matter the cost. There are no more chances. This is it.”
“I promise,” I told her.
“Carry some lemon juice with you. Just in case.”
She pulled her cloak around her and walked away.
Lemon juice. Right.
I stood by the grave and watched the sun rise, splashing pink and red across the sky. The night was still in full swing in Arizona. Three hours from now Moloch would awaken and look at the sky just as I was. He was drawn to the sun. It was a ball of fire, and fire gave Moloch his power.
You sent your priests into Atlanta, huh? Don’t you worry, Child Eater. I will take good care of them, and when I’m done, you’ll wish you had never been reborn.
I let out a shrill whistle. Turgan took off from the ruin to the right and landed on my arm, all twelve pounds of him. Yellow feet gripped the padded bracer on my forearm with black talons. The golden eagle shifted his weight, wings fanning my head, and stared at me with his amber eyes.
Tulip came running around a heap of rubble. It was time for us to go to our new house and get the keys. I had a murder to solve.
2
Tamyra Miller chewed on her bottom lip. She was about ten years older than me, in her mid-thirties, with dark brown skin, a
wealth of black hair she kept braided, and big round glasses, and she stared at the house in front of us with what could only be described as trepidation. I couldn’t really blame her.
Built at the turn of the 20th century, the house used to be a sprawling antebellum mansion. When I bought it two years ago, it stood three stories tall, with white walls, a wide wraparound porch, and towering ionic columns holding up its gabled roof. Its twenty thousand square feet of living space had been divided into eight apartments, each with a separate entrance and balcony.
Eight months ago, I had hired Tamyra, a structural engineer, to wreck it. She went in with a team of masons and carpenters, reinforced the structure, reconfigured the floor plan according to my instructions, carving out a rectangular living space of about six thousand square feet inside the house, and then carefully collapsed the outer walls, piling additional chunks of concrete and wood from the fallen high-rises nearby.
From the outside, the house looked like a ruin, a heap of rubble topped with a roof, some columns scattered, some still standing, buried in debris. The reinforced stable with the armored door was securely hidden in the back. A narrow path led to the entrance, guarded by a thick steel door with a wooden veneer smeared with dirt. No windows, except for the small one located to the right of the door and guarded by a metal grate that gave me a view of the front yard from my kitchen. No weak points. No sign that it was even habitable, except for the balcony. Invisible from the street unless you climbed another building, the balcony sat recessed under the roof, shielded by thick steel and silver bars that ran all the way down to the cement foundation. I had already seen the inside of the house, and it was everything I wanted it to be.
Tamyra had come to a decision. “Ms. Ryder…”
“Yes?”
“I realize that you’ve sunk a lot of money into this home, but you can’t really put a price on human life.”
“Are you trying to tell me the house isn’t safe?”
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