Blood Heir

by Ilona Andrews

  “I never forget a magic ‘face.’” He tapped his temple. “You’ve evolved. There are layers and layers of power wrapped around your core, but that core remains the same. I remember it from years ago when I first met you. You are still you.”

  He had no idea what those words meant to me.

  “Did I say something wrong?” he asked gently.

  “I have lived through so many versions of me. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

  “This is life,” Luther said. “We change, we alter ourselves, we grow or shrink. It’s part of the human condition. You might have altered your identity, but when I heard you think through the scene, you sounded just like Kate. She always had good instincts and so do you. Hold on to that.”

  Huh. I was still me, and “me” sounded like Kate. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I would need to watch my speech patterns around people who used to know me.

  “Would you mind letting me see your full power for a moment? The cloak is obscuring things.”

  The cloak was supposed to obscure things. That’s why I had painstakingly crafted it and practiced maintaining it until it became second nature. If I let him see my magic, he would learn way too much about me. If I kept hiding, I would shatter any hope of him trusting me. I needed his trust. I had to convince him to keep my secret.

  I met his gaze. “There is a reason I haven’t told my family I’m here. I’ll explain why, but you have to promise not to tell them.”

  “So I would know something the Lennarts don’t?” Luther smiled. “My lips are sealed, pending the explanation.”

  I dropped the cloak.

  Luther became completely still.

  We sat quietly, looking at each other. When Erra helped me to unlock the reservoir of magic inside myself, she told me I shone like a star. And then she made me promise I would never show it to my grandfather.

  Luther came to, as if waking up, cleared his throat, and reached for me. “May I?”

  “Yes.”

  He gently took me by the chin, leaned forward, and examined my face. “Fascinating. What happened?”

  “Transmogrification through magic assimilation. I took someone else’s body part and had to incorporate it.”

  “Incredibly risky, but it clearly paid off. Was it an eye?”

  “Yes.”

  “Physically they look identical, but the concentration of magic in the left eye is much higher.” Luther nodded and sat back. “Beautiful shade of green. The pain must’ve been excruciating.”

  “It was.”

  “How long?”

  “About two months and then I went into a magically induced coma for another nine.”

  “I’m amazed you survived.” Luther leaned forward, his eyes alert. “What possessed you to do a thing like that?”

  “Fear.” I reinstated my cloak.

  “An excellent motivator. Tell me more.”

  “Are you familiar with Moloch?”

  “A Canaanite god, the unpleasant kind. Famous for his dominion over fire and a fondness for child sacrifice. As I recall, he prefers his offerings to be burned alive. There is some murky water around the interpretation of the name.”

  “It’s not a name. It’s a title. It means god-king. It was used by hereditary rulers who descended from Saidoune ibn Canaan, who founded the city of Sidon over seven thousand years ago. They ruled the people who later became known as the Phoenicians, and their kingdom stretched over modern Israel all the way to southern Jerusalem.”

  “Roland’s contemporaries.” Luther grimaced.

  “Not exactly. Moloch’s reign officially ended during the time of Roland’s grandfather. He was the last of his line.”

  In the ancient age, wars could be decided by a single duel between powerful magic users. The rulers of the countries were expected to take the field and defend their land and their people. They went to great lengths to augment their powers. For my adoptive family, that meant dealing with shar, an irresistible urge to claim and protect land. Moloch paid a different price.

  “Moloch’s family feared death,” I told Luther, “so they focused on regeneration. They wanted to become unkillable, and when their natural magic wasn’t enough, they reached for divine power. They allowed themselves to be worshiped as gods.”

  Luther frowned. “Divinity comes with a big price tag.”

  All living things generated magic, but humans with our intelligence and emotions were particularly adept at directing it. Human thoughts carried power, especially when blended with emotion, and few things were more emotional than a prayer. Each plea to a god sent him a portion of the human’s power, especially when it was spoken aloud. Together, the faithful powered up their deities like charging up a battery. The bigger the congregation, the greater the power. In theory, it was limitless. But Luther was right. The arrangement came at a heavy cost.

  “And that’s why Moloch’s kingdom fell,” I said. “He became a god, obsessed with accumulating power through sacrifice and prayer. He lost his grip on the physical world. Normal human needs and urges no longer troubled him. He let his ancestral kingdom be conquered and carved into pieces. As long as the invaders worshipped him, he didn’t care.”

  “Abandoning humanity wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for him,” Luther said. “Once you decide that burning tiny humans alive is a perfectly acceptable method of upgrading, you stop being human. Made the transition to godhood that much easier.”

  I nodded. I’d seen the inside of Moloch’s citadel up close. There were no words to describe that kind of suffering. I hadn’t known human beings could endure that much pain and despair.

  “After the magic civilization collapsed and tech flooded the world in waves, Moloch should have faded away like other ancient gods without a persistent mythos. But he got a boost from the Old Testament. He’s mentioned five times in Leviticus, once in Second Kings, and once in Jeremiah, not counting the allusions in Deuteronomy and Ezekiel. Sometime during the Middle Ages Christians became a bit obsessed with him and he made the transition to demonhood.”

  Luther sighed. “Christianity, the most composite of all religions. Why let a rival god, even a small one, die when you can turn him into a demon and rummage through his rites and holidays for the bits you can scavenge to attract his worshippers?”

  “Exactly.”

  After the first Shift, magic hadn’t disappeared completely. It dropped too low to be useful, but it was still there. Every time Moloch’s name was mentioned, he got a crumb of power. That trickle kept him alive like an IV drip to a coma patient. Then the second Shift flooded the world with magic and delivered a shot of adrenaline to Moloch’s power reserve. He hoarded it, biding his time, until he had accumulated just enough.

  “Four flares ago, Moloch chose to be reborn.”

  Luther leaned back. “An avatar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Flares drop every seven years, which would make him in his mid-thirties. Plenty of time to build a power base.”

  “He has a citadel in Arizona. He is practically indestructible. I dismembered him, cut off his head, and threw his body into his forge, and he popped right back up in less than two years. Near perfect regeneration isn’t his only trick. He is almost impervious to fire. He wields it like a weapon and he’s highly skilled in metallurgy. He overlaps with Hephaestus in powers, and he is taking full advantage of any stray Greek Neo-Pagans that come his way looking to serve a god with a forge.”

  A shadow passed over Luther’s eyes. “Why Arizona?”

  “Metallic mineralization belt. He mines copper, gold, silver, lead, and zinc. It gives him access to some iron, but also tungsten, peridot, and azurite, which he uses to create enchanted weapons. He’s building an army. Also, the area he’s in is mostly empty and hot as hell.”

  “Ha-ha. I get it. Hell as in Tophet,” Luther said. “The Levant is a rather crowded place right now. You can’t swing a sacrificial lamb without hitting some old god.”

&
nbsp; He wasn’t wrong. Any of the fertile regions where ancient civilizations had flourished were becoming hotly contested territories when it came to deities. By contrast, the continental US was a vast and relatively sparsely populated area, especially since the Shift had decimated the population across the board. A lot of areas had fallen to the wilderness. A perfect place for an avatar to hide and quietly grow his power.

  Luther rubbed his chin, thinking. “So, Moloch has free reign in Arizona? None of this is giving me the warm fuzzies, but so far all the bad things you’re describing are over there.” He pointed vaguely to the west. “I imagine you’re about to tell me something that will make it relevant and so much worse.”

  “The Witch Oracle had a vision.”

  “Oh goodie. They always have visions. It’s always vague and it’s always bad. Just once I’d like a prophecy proclaiming that, without a doubt, everything is going to be fine.”

  I waited for him to get it off his chest. When I was in school, I was taught about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which in essence stated that the only way to determine the position and velocity of a subatomic particle was to hit it with another particle. You would know where the target particle was at the moment of collision, but the impact would change the course and speed of that target particle, and its new parameters would be unknown again.

  Prophecies functioned just like that. The very act of knowing what might happen altered the future in complex ways. That’s why everything Sienna revealed was carefully calculated. Luther knew all that. He was just delaying the inevitable.

  Luther sighed dramatically and motioned to me. “Lay it on me. I have braced myself.”

  “When magic crests at its peak, the King of Fire will leave his citadel of misery in the Western Desert and travel east to devour the queen who doesn’t rule and sever bloodline reborn. Only the one who shares his power may oppose him.”

  Luther blinked. “Moloch is going to kill Kate during a flare.”

  “Yes. They meet. Kate dies. The world burns and becomes darkness.”

  “That is…oddly specific for Sienna.”

  “It was a very vivid vision. She had to be sedated afterward.”

  “The future isn’t definite, and Sienna sees the most likely probability,” Luther thought out loud. “Are there are other probabilities where Kate survives?”

  “So far all of her visions have been the same. If Kate comes into contact with Moloch in any way, they fight, she loses, he kills her. If I come into direct contact with Kate, the vision becomes sharper and clearer.”

  “You meeting Kate in person makes her death more likely.”

  “Yes.”

  Luther pondered me. A long moment passed.

  “How old is this prophecy?”

  “Four years.”

  “And you’ve been trying to fight it and failed?”

  I nodded.

  “Moloch’s former divine nature is a significant factor, isn’t it?”

  I nodded again.

  “That’s what I thought.” Luther’s gaze turned dark. “If he were just a human, there would be wiggle room, but he is an avatar, a god made flesh. This isn’t just the most likely version of the future; this is a deity communicating its will and intent through time. This future is incredibly resistant to the change.”

  “Yes.”

  Luther looked at the ceiling. I could practically feel the gears turning in his mind.

  “Does he know of the prophecy?”

  “He does. Sienna has touched his mind.”

  “Risky. Why Kate?”

  “He fears the Shinar. The family has repelled his invasions in the past. He worries about the reunification of Kate and Erra. To his mind, each is a kingdom unto herself and their reach will grow until he is trapped between them. Kate is an easier target than my grandmother.”

  “A follow-up question: why you?”

  “I don’t know. According to Sienna, I’m the wild card. Perhaps it’s because I’m educated by Shinar but the power of my bloodline is fundamentally different from theirs. He hasn’t fought my ancestors. He doesn’t know what I can do.”

  “That seems thin to me.” Luther frowned. He drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair and seemed to come to a decision. “So, you can’t go home.”

  “No.”

  He leaned back and steepled the fingers of his hands. “Tell me how I can help you.”

  I explained the magical artifact, the guardian, and the ma’avirim. “This murder has the same MO as Pastor Haywood’s. I need access and support.”

  “That I can do. I will also keep this conversation to myself. Who else knows you are you?”

  “My grandmother and Conlan. Kate and Curran haven’t seen me since my face changed.”

  “Good,” he said. “Let’s try to keep it that way.”

  10

  I sat inside Alycia Walton’s office behind her desk. The door was open, and the light from the fey lanterns in the hallway drew a long rectangle across the floor. The rest of the room lay shrouded in gloom, and I sank into it, wrapping myself in it like it was a blanket.

  Luther and I had formed an alliance. I would keep him in the loop, and he would allow me unsupervised access to crime scenes I believed were connected. Then a woman from Biohazard had arrived and Luther had to go. PAD and Biohazard finished processing the scene and left too, taking the body with them. Only I remained, waiting.

  Moloch’s priests would come. The ma’avirim were fanatically single-minded. It was just a matter of time.

  I had to get answers this time. The longer I spun my wheels, the greater was the likelihood that Moloch would murder Kate. Every time I thought about it, my throat tried to clench itself into a fist.

  Magic tugged on me, and I sank into Turgan’s vision. The eagle perched at the top of the oak across from the entrance to Bowden Hall. Three people ran across the lawn toward the building, low and fast. One dashed to the entrance, and the two others rounded the corner.

  I disconnected. Just what I needed right now.

  Faint sounds came from beyond the broken window. A light rustling of the hedge, a scrape against the stone. Three, two, one…

  Ascanio jumped through the open window and landed by the rug.

  “What, no combat roll?” I asked.

  He pivoted to me, his eyes flashing with a ruby glow as they caught the light from the hallway. For a moment he looked ready to pounce, then he straightened, his expression nonchalant.

  “You again. We keep meeting like this. It must be fate.”

  Oh no, the return of Mr. Smooth. “What is your interest in Pastor Haywood’s murder?”

  Ascanio picked up a chair, set it before the desk, flipping it around, and saddled it, his arms resting on the chair’s back. “My interest is private. I may be persuaded to exchange information, but you don’t have the authority to question me.”

  “And you don’t have the authority to be here.”

  “Neither do you.”

  I gave him a small smile. “Actually, I do.”

  Ascanio smiled back. “Fine, I’ll play. Says who?”

  “Luther Dillion, the Assistant Director of Biohazard.”

  Ascanio rested his chin on his arms. “If that’s true, I’m intruding on your crime scene. What’s your plan for removing me?”

  Somehow, he managed to make it sound suggestive. “You’re being tiresome.”

  “It’s a personal failing. I was told I can also be invigorating under the right circumstances.”

  I bet. “Does the Beast Lord know you’re here?”

  “This is a clan matter.”

  He had Andrea’s and Raphael’s blessing and was confident that they would back him up if things went bad. “Why does Clan Bouda care about these murders?”

  “You’re still not trading. How about this, I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours?”

  I gave him a theatrical sigh. “You must think that your smile is charming.”

  “Is it not?”
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  “You know what I see when you smile? Teeth. Teeth that can grow into big, scary fangs. We both know it’s a threat.”

  He pushed from the floor, and the chair rolled back with him in it. “Do you feel less threatened now?”

  “Not really. Keep rolling. Out the door, down the hall, down the steps…”

  He tilted his head to the side. He really was stunning, especially when he smiled like right now.

  “Why don’t you like me?” he asked.

  “You menaced me on the bridge, showed up uninvited to my house, made veiled threats, tried to bribe me, and now you are contaminating my crime scene.”

  “The bridge was a misunderstanding. I came to your house to apologize and offer help, and as for the crime scene, I was on this case before you were.” He spread his arms, a picture of innocence. “I’m blameless.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself; it just came out.

  Ascanio leaned forward, feigning concern. “You stopped scowling for a second there. Are you alright?”

  “Pe…” I caught myself. I was about to say “peachy,” and the moment he heard it, the game would be up. It was my mom’s favorite phrase. “Perfectly fine.”

  A warm sensation washed over me. My ears heard a phantom lamentation, offered in an eager voice. My nostrils caught the scent of burning herbs and human flesh. It should have been revolting, and intellectually it was, but there was a part of me that found it comforting. A very small, faint voice whispered in my mind, “This is right, you should be offered this, this is your due.”

  The ma’avirim had arrived.

  The lament echoed in my mind. My pulse sped up. I couldn’t even sense the ma’avir at the first murder scene until I had concentrated on the glyph. This one radiated magic. It pressed on me, like a heated wall, sucking out the air and making it hard to breathe.

  This would be an entirely different fight. I had to get Ascanio out of here. I couldn’t let him get hurt.

  “We are getting nowhere,” he said. “How about this? Each of us asks one question, and the other gives an honest answer?”