Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(20)

A confrontation with the Pack’s people was imminent, and I wanted to have it on my home turf, safe behind my wards.

I’d been in Atlanta for less than a day. It was entirely too early to start killing people.





*



I was in the decoy kitchen, sliding the first batch of cookies into the oven, when something brushed against the edge of my outer ward. It was almost eight in the evening. Took them long enough.

I’d cut through the Central Market on my way back. They must’ve had a devil of a time trying to follow my trail through the open-air market. Hard to track a scent after a horse peed on it.

I draped the kitchen towel over my shoulder and walked to the front door, left open to vent the heat from the stove. The sunset burned across the sky, a gory, violent orange. I concentrated, sinking into my sensate vision. Three… two…

Contact. Magic nipped at me. A bright green flash pulsed in the empty air and vanished. To the left, a dark four-legged shape jumped out from behind some rubble and dashed down the street, little more than a blur in the fading light. The shapeshifter who’d found my house, hurrying to report.

I went back to the kitchen, sat at my strategically sad table, and waited. I felt spent. Fatigue wrapped around my shoulders like a heavy blanket. Too much magic expended too quickly this afternoon setting up the defensive perimeter.

I’d learned the art of wards from my grandfather. Roland loved to teach, and I’d been hungry to learn. Later my grandmother and her servants refined my education, but the foundation of my magic expertise was built by Roland. If you have to learn magic, studying under a brilliant megalomaniac wizard who thinks he’s always right and can’t wait to dazzle you with several millennia of knowledge was a really good choice.

In the few hours since coming back from the Central Market, I’d set three concentric rings of wards. The outer ward, undetectable by most of the people and creatures who crossed it, warned me that someone was coming, sampled the intruder’s magic, and flashed it in a burst of color invisible to anyone who wasn’t a sensate.

The middle ward wrapped around the building, shielding the front entrance. I’d chosen a rune ward, a simple defensive barrier that relied on Elder Futhark runes carved on bone stakes driven into the ground. Solid, powerful, and common enough to not raise any eyebrows. It was also the first ward the Order’s Academy taught to prospective knights, so it went along with my disguise.

The third ward sealed off the hallway leading to the front bedroom and to the secret door, protecting the entire inner chamber. I had raised Enki’s Shield in four hours instead of the full twelve it usually required and got a throbbing headache for my trouble. Still, Grandfather would be proud.

I missed him. He was the monster in our family of monsters, but he was still my grandfather, if not by birth then by choice. When my grandfather wanted to be liked, he was an unstoppable force, and he wanted me to like him. Roland wasn’t bored in his prison—he was far too brilliant for that—but he planned to get out, and Conlan and I were his link to the outside world. It had been over six weeks since my last visit. I was overdue.

Magic pinched me. I peeked out of the kitchen in time to see the street light up with green through the doorway. Ascanio walked out of the shadows and strolled up to my house. I’d thought that trail of grass-green magic I’d noticed at the murder scene looked familiar.

Someone from the Pack was interested in Pastor Haywood’s murder and they’d sent Ascanio to figure it out. Why? Had this order come from the top, or was this a Clan Bouda affair? Was someone pulling his strings or was he doing it on his own? All good questions.

Ascanio was never big on following orders. It wouldn’t be out of character for him to do this on his own, but he never acted without aiming for some sort of benefit.

He knocked on my doorframe. I walked out of the kitchen and to the front door.

“The shapeshifter hero. We meet again, and so soon.”

Ascanio froze.

Before I’d been on horseback, in the dark, a dozen yards away with my hood up. Now less than three feet separated us. He could see my face, and it burned a fuse in his brain. For a moment Ascanio forgot to be suave and simply stared with unnerving, focused intensity.

My timer went off.

Ascanio blinked. “Are you baking cookies?”

“Yes, I am. Excuse me.”

I went into the kitchen. Behind me, magic tolled through the house, like a gong. Ascanio had tried to follow and walked right into my second ward.

I pulled the batch of cookies out of the oven, slid the second tray in, reset my mechanical timer, and went back to the door.

Ascanio leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, a slight smile on his lips. It had to be his sexy, nonchalant pose. I wasn’t sure if I was expected to toss my underwear at his feet or just fall back with my legs in the air. He must’ve realized that he’d stared like an idiot and overcorrected, like a driver who drifted onto the shoulder and jerked the wheel trying to get back on the highway.

“Nice ward,” he said.

“Keeps out the riffraff.”

A ruby light rolled over his irises. “Can I have a cookie?”

“No.”

He gave a mock sigh. “I have a feeling this conversation has gotten off to the wrong foot.”

“Not just a hero, but a master detective as well,” I kept my voice quiet and friendly. In my head, I grabbed him and shook him until all the things I wanted to know about Pastor Haywood’s murder fell out of his shockingly handsome head.