by Jack Knight
I made my way back through the hallway and to the main room of the church. Then, I passed all the tables and chairs to the other door on the same wall as the hallway to the bedrooms and walked into the library.
The library was pretty small. Its walls were lined with bookshelves full of dusty old books, most of which happened to be grimoires that nobody needed, yet. If we kept taking in young recruits, chances were that a lot of them would need books of magic to study from.
There was also a long table in the center of the room with a bunch of laptops sitting on it. Occasionally some people would hang out in there to use the laptops, but there was only one person in the Reapers that regularly used a computer, and she had her own room for them.
None of that mattered to me at the moment. I wasn’t in the library for the computers, I was looking for Ezra’s office.
I walked around the table to the bookshelf directly across from the door and pulled one of the grimoires out to reveal a hidden button against the wall.
As soon as I pressed the button, the two bookshelves to my left started sliding apart with a high pitched squealing sound. Whatever made the secret door work needed to be oiled or something, because it actually hurt my ears. And I had listened to Cat babble on for about an hour that day, if anything should have caused me pain, it should’ve been Cat’s voice.
Finally, there was a soft thud and the bookshelves stopped moving, revealing a door to Ezra’s office. I figured the long whine of his secret door was enough to alert him to my presence, so there was no need to knock.
I pushed the door open and walked in on a man with shoulder length black hair and bright blue eyes sitting at at large, oak desk. There were two chairs facing him and a dozen filing cabinets around the room, most of them filled with the files of the new recruits and prospective members that we still needed to scout out.
Ezra ignored me as I walked over to one of the chairs facing him and let myself fall into it. After a few seconds, I said, “You rang?”
Ezra didn’t even bother to look up. He continued to stare at some papers laid out in front of him. He did acknowledge me, though, by holding up a finger, as if to tell me to wait a minute.
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him for what felt like an hour. It was probably only a minute or two, but I hated waiting.
When he finally decided that talking to the person he had just called to his office might be worth his time, he looked up and greeted me with, “Hello, Maddison.”
I felt a familiar tingle run across my skin. Sometimes, magic would burst out of me. Since I had started practicing and using it regularly, it happened a lot less often. Now, hearing my father use my full name, I couldn’t control it.
The paper in front of Ezra burst into flame. The smell of the burning paper hit me immediately. I watched the curls of smoke float into the air without the slightest hint of remorse.
“My apologies,” Ezra said casually. He waved his hand over the paper and the fire went out, the paper looked good as new, like nothing had happened at all. “I meant Maddi.”
“Hey, Pops,” I said with a sarcastic smile.
“How are you adjusting to teaching the new recruits?” Ezra asked. It was like him pissing me off so much that I literally set his shit on fire didn’t even phase him.
“It’s fine,” I grunted. “When am I getting a new target?” I asked in the same breath. “I know supes didn’t stop doing bad shit just because we shut down the vamp factory.”
Ezra gave a small smile and leaned back in his chair.
“You did more for the Hunters than they will ever know. And, if they find out, they will surely hunt you down and kill you.”
“They can fucking try,” I snorted.
Ezra nodded and his smile faded. “Unfortunately, many Hunters are still in town. It seems they are unaware that the factory was shut down and are still searching for it. So, a magically hidden building filled with us Reapers, who are trying to create an organization to rival theirs, will probably not go over well.”
I did not like where this was going.
“Are you telling me I’m supposed to lay low and do nothing?” I snapped.
“For the time being, to avoid the notice of the Hunters, I believe it is in our best interest to stay quiet. We can train the recruits we have, recruit a few as quietly as possible, and build our strength.”
Before I knew it, I was standing.
“This is bullshit,” I said, a little more loudly than I had meant to. “I’m an assassin, not a baby-sitter. We’re supposed to be building up the Shadow Reapers to help people. There are bad supes out there killing people, it’s my job to stop them. I’m not going to sit around and do nothing.”
“You recall,” Ezra said, as if my outburst hadn’t happened, “that there is still the slight problem of one of our members possibly working to take down the Hunters?”
I didn’t just roll my eyes, I rolled my entire head.
“Torn lied. We caught him, he was going to be dragged back here and interrogated. He wanted to give us a reason not to do that, so he lied and said there was someone else working with him. It isn’t true.”
“You’re forgetting that Atasha was also a Reaper and working with him,” Ezra reminded me.
“Yeah, two of the, what, nine people who were here at the time? Sounds like a bit of a stretch that the Reapers had another traitor.”
“Whether it is true or not,” Ezra continued in his infuriatingly calm tone, “it needs to be looked into. Maybe we just take a break from killing everything that might be a threat and you can teach others to do what you do. It’s not as if Asher will ever have the same skillset you do.”
My chest heaved with a deep breath as I crossed my arms over it. “I brought you Matt. I brought you the forty vampires that agreed to come with him. That’s more than half the recruits we’ve gotten right there. I did what you asked, let me do my job.”
“Your job isn’t just killing anymore, Maddi,” Ezra insisted. “You also need to train future assassins. And, I would like to give you a leadership position. It turns out, running an organization of this size is more difficult than managing a dozen people.”
“I’m not a leader,” I told him for what felt like the hundredth time.
“You will be,” he echoed his response from every other time we’d had this argument. “Now, no more assassinations until the Hunters take this city off their radar. Dismissed.”
“Fucking bullshit!” I raged as I stood up so abruptly I knocked my chair to the ground and stormed from the room.
I stomped through the library and the tingle of magic ran down my spine as I heard the library doors slam shut behind me. My feet carried me through the church, and I didn’t care where. My blood felt like it was boiling with my rage, and I could feel my chest heaving with quick, angry breaths.
All my life, I had been trained to kill bad supes. Sure, it had been with the Hunters, who tried to kill me when they realized I was a sorcerer, but still, I was trained for one thing. Now, I was forbidden from doing it? Even when I had been on the run from the Hunters, before the Reapers had found me, I had taken jobs assassinating supes. It’s who I was.
When I finally noticed where I had subconsciously taken myself, I looked up and saw I was in a room filled with computers. Desks lined the walls, and there were at least a dozen monitors that ran around the room, making it look like one really long computer screen.
In one of the rolling chairs that sat in front of each monitor, sat Gen. A short girl with shoulder length blonde hair and glasses that covered her blue eyes, which I currently couldn’t see, because she was engrossed in a monitor that was covered in a bunch of word documents. Asher was standing beside her, leaning against the desk and looking at the same screen.
“Fight with Ezra again?” Gen asked without looking around.
Asher looked up and smiled when he saw me. “Will the daddy issues never resolve themselves?”
“Shut up,” I snapped as I pul
led one of the chairs away from its desk and sat down.
“Listen,” Gen said, as if my anger was irrelevant. “I’ve been tracking some of the Hunters.”
That was enough to distract me for just a second. Hunters were supposed to be impossible to track, they were a secret organization. And, they barely ever used computers.
“How?” I asked in surprise.
Gen spun her chair around so she could face me. “Eyewitness accounts from supes, security camera feeds, simple stuff.”
“Yeah, hacking every camera in the city sounds simple.”
“Exactly. And, I can sometimes pick up audio from people’s cell phones. Well, I can always do that, sometimes it’s useful.”
I just nodded. No point in disrupting her when she got going like this.
“And, there’s something you may want to know,” Gen continued. I could hear the hesitation in her voice. Something told me I was about to get even more pissed.
“What?” I demanded.
Gen looked up at Asher before she met my gaze again. “You’re not gonna like it.”
I snorted. “Oh yeah? Less than I liked Ezra telling me that I’m not allowed to stop murderers anymore.”
Gen shrugged. “I knew about that, I didn’t think you’d like that either.”
“You knew?” I snapped. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Asher chuckled. “Dude, look at you right now. Would you want to be on the receiving end of that?”
Gen nodded. “Ezra told me to stop tracking dangerous supes a couple of days ago.”
I felt my eyes go wide with shock. “You stopped tracking them? So, we don’t even know who’s out there killing people.”
Gen rolled her eyes and a smile crept onto her face. “I said that Ezra told me to stop tracking them. I never said I actually stopped.” She pointed to a monitor a few feet away from me. “That’s got a file all ready to go for you when you decide to disobey the leader of the Shadow Reapers and go on your vigilante mission.”
The anger in me settled down to a simmering heat. Gen was too smart for her own good, and I loved her for it.
“Most of them need a little more recon, there’s only so much I can do from my computer. I mean, they definitely did bad stuff, but there’s not enough info for me to be sure you want to kill them.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded as I sat up straight and lowered my arms to rest on the arms of the chair.
“Well, like that wizard that was killing dirty cops. You didn’t like that, so I figured you’d want to know things like if they really deserved it, or whatever.”
I was actually a little impressed. Gen never seemed to care about things like that. I was pretty sure she saw the world in black and white. She didn’t care if people were killing for a good reason, she only cared that they were killing. I frequently wondered what she thought of me.
“Okay, then what else am I not going to like?” I asked.
Asher touched his finger to his nose and mumbled, “Not it.”
Gen shook her head at him and looked me in the eye when she answered, “The Bishop is in town.”
The Bishop. A member of the Hunters that led half of California. Who I recently learned was now my mother.
The same person who had tried to kill her husband and daughter when she found out they were sorcerers.
“Son of a bitch.”
Chapter 3
My mother was in town. The same city that I lived in. There was no way that was a coincidence.
When I was in the Hunters, I never once heard of the Bishop leaving the sanctum they lived in. It was supposed to be one of those rare occurrences that meant some serious shit was going down.
A few weeks ago, Asher and I had been captured by a couple of Hunters. One of them had been Matt, and the other one had recognized me. There was no way he hadn’t run back to the Hunters and told them that he had found me. I couldn’t think of any other reason that my mother would bother to come to town, except she was trying to get a second chance at killing me.
The memory of my mother coming at me with one of the Hunter’s knives flashed through my mind. I had to push it down, refusing to let myself think about it.
“Okay,” I said before I took a deep breath. “What exactly,” I asked slowly, trying not to panic, “do you know about what she’s doing in San Francisco?”
Asher started shifting uncomfortably, and I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now. The mere thought of my mother being so close was stressing me out. I wanted to punch something. Or someone.
Gen shrugged. She didn’t look uncomfortable, but I could tell she wasn’t happy with the current conversation.
“Not a lot. A bunch of Hunters are coming into the city, it’s like they’re flocking here for some reason.”
I shook my head. “No, the Hunters never gather in large groups outside of their sanctum. She wouldn’t leave Sacramento.”
Gen gave me a stern look. “Are you doubting my information?” she asked, like she was daring me to challenge her.
“Whoa, no, no!” Asher said quickly as he put a hand on Gen’s shoulder. “It just seems hard to believe, right Maddi?”
Gen may have been a mage longer than I had, but they seemed to forget that I was an assassin, and that I had a Hunter’s blade on my belt at that very moment.
“Whatever, fine. Does this have anything to do with the vamp factory we shut down?”
Gen pushed Asher’s hand off her shoulder without breaking eye contact with me. “Nope, they didn’t start coming here in large numbers until after you guys shut it down.”
“Maybe there’s a delay. We don’t know that the Hunters even know we shut it down,” Asher suggested.
I wanted to believe that was the case, but it couldn’t be.
I shook my head and crossed my arms over my chest again. “No, the Hunters are efficient. They wouldn’t have taken so long to respond. They must have gotten the order out to come here a day before they all started showing up.”
Asher just shrugged, like he was out of ideas. I let out a frustrated sigh leaned back in my chair.
Gen turned around in her chair and started typing on her computer as she said, “Looking into it, got it. No need to say thanks.”
I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms again. There was no way I was going to give into Gen’s pity party. She was the one who gathered all the information, it wasn’t my fault she told me about my mother when she barely knew anything. She should’ve known better.
The room was silent for a few minutes. Asher just stood awkwardly looking back and forth between Gen and me.
“Alright,” he said after a while, “not that this isn’t super fun, but I think I’d rather be anywhere else right now.”
Asher hurried across the room and closed the door behind him. With him gone, a tiny bit of guilt started to creep into me.
It seemed possible that maybe it wasn’t Gen’s fault that I had gotten so angry. I doubted she even knew my mother had tried to kill me. Gen had never been a Hunter, and didn’t know how big a deal it was for the Bishop to come to the same city that all the other Hunters were flocking to. She was just telling me because she thought I should know.
“Listen...” I began with a sigh. I didn’t know what to say. Everything that came to mind sounded awkward. I didn’t think I had ever apologized to anyone before.
“Don’t you have to train the new recruits?” Gen asked without turning around.
Fine. If she didn’t want to hear my attempt at an apology, I really didn’t want to give one.
“You know what? You’re right.”
When I stood up, the chair I was sitting in rolled backward so hard it slammed into the desk behind me. Gen turned around immediately, a look of fury on her face, but I barely saw it. I was already turning around to leave. I shut the door as hard as I could, making sure to let Gen know she had pissed me off.
I made my way through the church until I reached one of the ro
oms right next to the entrance. The doors between the pillars led to the only truly large rooms in the building, besides the kitchen. They were the only ones big enough to practice fighting in.
When I walked inside, there were twenty people already waiting for me. They were standing around in groups, some of them sitting on the floor, some leaning against the walls, all of them talking among themselves. The second I closed the door behind me, the room fell silent and they all rushed to stand at attention, facing the same side of the room I stood when teaching them.
The room itself, like the rest of the church, was plain, brownstone walls and identical flooring. There was a large window, probably ten feet tall, that cast the multi-colored light in kaleidoscope patterns all over the room.
When I got to the side I stood at when I was instructing the newbies, I turned to face them. They were standing silently at attention. All looking at me. Even though I did this three times a week for the last couple weeks, it was still a little off putting. I remembered my training with the Hunters. It was strange to be on the other side of it.
“Alright, newbies,” I said as I shoved my fingers into my pants pockets. I was briefly annoyed that my entire hand wouldn’t fit, but I forced myself to focus. “We’re going to be learning battle stances again, since nobody could do it correctly last time.”
Every one of the newbies in front of me fidgeted as soon as I spoke. I noticed a couple of shifters roll their eyes, and I was pretty sure one of the vampires actually bared his fangs at me.
I could’ve ignored all of that. Training had seemed tedious to me when I was going through it, too. What I couldn’t ignore was someone openly challenging me.
“Seriously?” one of the guys in the group groaned. “Again?”
That guy was getting on my nerves. He was in his mid teens, I would’ve guessed by looking at him, maybe fifteen or sixteen. He was a little taller than me, with dark brown hair that was always at least a little messy and hazel eyes. He was a little more muscular than the average sorcerer, my guess was he did some light workouts, but never when I was teaching. He always acted like he didn’t need to learn from me.
