Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(14)

She took off down the street.

I ducked into a hole in a former office building. From the outside it looked like the interior had completely collapsed there, but there was a narrow gap on the right, if you knew where to look. I squeezed through it, into the gloom, jogged a dozen feet to the inner wall, and jumped up. My hands caught the familiar handholds on pure muscle memory, and I scrambled up, all the way to the exposed third floor. I padded to the half-wrecked wall and glanced out of the gap, keeping myself hidden.

The female knight jogged out of the traffic and halted below. If she was tracking me by magic, she would have no problem finding me. If she tracked by scent, she would likely follow Tulip. A horse’s scent was stronger and easier to track than the rider’s.

She looked left. She looked right. She looked confused.

Lost something?

The knight turned in a slow circle, scanning the streets, and went right, down Trinity Avenue. Neither magic nor scent then, just plain old eyesight. She’d lost me, and she correctly figured out that I would be going to the crime scene, so instead of wasting time on finding me, she decided to go to the crime scene as well and wait.

On paper, Trinity Avenue would be a good way to get to Pastor Haywood’s church. But Trinity Avenue ran into Wolf Bridge, which spanned the rubble and crossed over I-85. This time of day the reclamation teams would be bringing in the first loads of salvage from Downtown. At the same time, the teamsters would be transferring this morning’s freight from the north ley line to the west. Wolf Bridge would be packed hoof to bumper. It would cost her at least half an hour, forty-five minutes if it was a busy shipping day. She was likely a capable knight. Nick didn’t tolerate incompetency. But she spoke with a touch of Upper Midwest, and I’d been running away from monsters on these streets for as long as I could walk. Atlanta was my city.

I climbed down and whistled. A few seconds later Tulip came trotting from around the corner. I mounted and headed south on Turner.

Twenty-five minutes later I dismounted in front of Garden Lane Chapel. If there were gardens here, no trace of them remained. The street bordered the Warren, a patchwork of ruined houses and crumbling apartments that had been hit by magic so many times, everyone who could afford to move had. The neighborhood looked bleak; abandoned buildings staring at the world with black-hole windows, ugly grey lichens on the walls that seemed to suck the color out of the paint and stucco, and black trees. The trees were the worst, their bark coal-black and slightly fuzzy. Even their leaves had turned dark and narrow, sharp enough to cut.

Against this backdrop, the chapel all but glowed. White and freshly painted, with a bright red door, it perched on the corner like a beacon of safety. A young cop stood by the door, a gladius on one hip and a service revolver on the other. Traces of magic sometimes lingered even during the tech waves now, and the revolvers tended to misfire less than semi-automatics.

Personally, I preferred blades. They always worked.

The cop tilted his head, presenting me with a flat expression. In his mid-twenties, tan and fit, with blue-black hair, he wasn’t a rookie or a veteran putting in time till retirement. He was in the prime of his copness, and the way he stood told me he enjoyed every minute of it.

He took in the tattered cloak that hid most of me, the worn saddlebag on Tulip, and the bow protruding from the scabbard attached to her saddle and classified me as “move along.” I clearly had no business on this street.

I pushed back my hood. He blinked. The flat expression slid off his face. Suddenly he was alert and professional. He was treating me to his “polite badass” persona.

The face strikes again.

Like many teenage girls, I had gone through a stage when I thought I was the ugliest thing on Earth, but by eighteen, I had realized that I was pretty. I used to have one of those pixie faces that could look beautiful or mousy. My old face was like a simple black dress. I could dress it up or dress it down.

That was no longer an option. My new face made an impact no matter what I did to it. Dirty, clean, makeup, no makeup, it didn’t matter. The eye I had absorbed reshaped me. Nobody even remembered my old face except me.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” the cop asked.

I pulled out my freshly minted Order ID and presented it to him. “I’m here to take this murder off your hands.”

“I haven’t seen you before. I would have remembered if we met.” His face moved a little. He had considered hitting me with his “smooth smile” but decided that the professional colleague angle might work better.

“I just transferred.”

He gave me an understanding look. “New guys get all the shit jobs.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” I smiled at him.

He raised his eyebrows slightly. I waited, but nothing came out of his mouth.

“I would like to see the crime scene, Officer…” I let it hang.

“Officer Fleming. This way.”

He opened the red door and walked through. I followed.

The inside of the church was clean and bright. Sunshine flooded through the windows and the round skylight right above where the pulpit would have been, so the pastor standing at it would have been bathed in light during the sermon. But the pulpit was nowhere to be found.

Fleming strode down the aisle between the pews. “You’re not from around here.”

“No,” I lied.

“So where is home?”