Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(18)

“Inside.”

“Why were you inside?”

“Pastor had cookies,” the girl said.

“What kind of cookies?”

“Oatmeal. If you got hurt, he would heal you and give you a cookie.”

Ah. So that’s where this was going. “You hurt yourself to get a cookie?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“I ran and fell.”

“What happened when you went to see the pastor?”

“He magicked my leg and gave me milk and a cookie. It was this big.” She held fingers of her small hands far apart.

“Did you eat the cookie in the church?”

She nodded.

“Then what happened?”

“I was eating the cookie and a fatso came.”

Fatso meant someone well-off, good clothes, expensive jewelry, well-fed. A good mark.

“Did anybody else see the fatso?” I asked.

The kids shook their heads.

That’s what I thought. It wasn’t “we hadn’t seen him before.” It was she hadn’t seen him before.

I needed to separate her from them. I’d get more information that way.

“You know where Central Market is?”

She nodded.

I leaned down and offered the girl my hand. “Show me and you can tell me about the fatso on the way. I’ll give you this silver at the end.”

The leader stepped in front of the girl. “No. We don’t know you.”

I added a second ounce to the first.

He shook his head.

The little girl tried to push past him, and he blocked her. “I said no. Not safe.”

A street kid who took care of the younger children. Rare. He was probably new to the life. Some people thought that street kid gangs were like the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. It wasn’t like that at all. On the street, it was all about survival. The stronger kids preyed on the weaker ones. This boy wouldn’t last long.

I pulled out my Order badge and showed it to him. “I won’t hurt her.”

He stared at the badge, thinking. “Okay.”

Yep, new. Still trusted law enforcement.

I reached down. The little girl grabbed my arm. I lifted her into the saddle in front of me. She weighed nothing. We set off north, toward the old I-75.

“What did the fatso look like?”

“Big.”

“Tall or short?”

“Tall.”

“What color hair?”

“Brown.”

“Was his skin brown or pale?”

“Pale.”

The little gang was trailing us, trying to be inconspicuous as they darted through the brush past the ruined houses.

“What did his face look like?”

She frowned. “He had fake eyes. Like he is nice when other people can see him, but not when he’s by himself.”

“Did he look like the kind of guy who would hit you if you stole from him?”

She nodded. Her shoulders hunched a little. She’d been hit before, and she’d learned to roll into a ball.

“Do you remember what the fatso said to the pastor?”

“He said he had a holy artifact.”

Jackpot. “What kind of holy artifact?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember. I wasn’t listening good. Pastor and he talked, and then Pastor said he would think about it, and the fatso left.”

“Then what happened?”

“The next day a car came, and Pastor got into it. He never gets into cars. He came back later.”

“Did he seem okay when he came back?”

She nodded. “The next morning, he got killed.” Her voice got really quiet. “He was nice.”

He was, and now he was gone. No more milk and cookies. No more healing when you got hurt. She’d lost the only safe place she’d had. She was the smallest and the weakest of the gang. I could feel her ribs rubbing against my arm. Starved. So starved, she’d learned to hurt herself to get food.

I wanted to take her off the street. I had to.

If I took her with me, where would I put her? I had a job to do. Sooner or later I’d become a target. Anyone close to me would be a potential hostage. If I left her in the fake shabby section of the house, she’d get bored and go out. She was a street kid, used to moving around. If I left her in the inner chamber, she wouldn’t be able to keep her hands to herself. There were things in that room that could eat her or turn her skin inside out.

I had promised my grandmother that I would stop trying to rescue every homeless child I saw off the streets. It was a luxury I didn’t have. As a princess of Shinar, my job was to see to all street children, not just the one in front of me, and to enact changes that would ensure no more kids would be thrown away like garbage. I had done that, and the New Shinar was on the way to being a place where no child went hungry, but New Shinar was far away, and the child in my arms was here now.

Erra had tried to save everyone, and she’d allowed herself to become a monster for the sake of her people. She didn’t want me to go down the same road. She said it would unravel my soul thread by thread. My position gave me the ability to bring about sweeping change and I had to concentrate on that, because not everyone understood all that, but the little girl in front of me was so tiny.