Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(23)

I let go, and the image faded.

The eagle would call to me if anything happened. As long as the magic stayed up, I would know every move Nick made. Tomorrow I would dig deeper, but before I could do that, I needed to figure out where to start.

I pulled a big stack of papers toward me. I had picked them up on my way home, three months’ worth of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Let’s see if anyone announced their discovery of new Christian relics.





6





I rode out into the city at eight a.m., unsupervised. Ascanio hadn’t left anyone to babysit me. Maybe he decided I wasn’t worth keeping an eye on. Maybe it slipped his mind. Both possibilities were equally unlikely, which meant whoever followed me was staying way back, tracking my trail. By the time I stopped by the blue house to hide the care package for Marten, I’d sprinkled wolfsbane on my tracks twice. It wouldn’t stop my tail, but why make it easy for them?

Twenty minutes later, I rode up to St. Luke’s Methodist Church on the edge of Tuxedo Park.

In the wake of the destruction brought about by the slow-motion magic apocalypse, the affluent of Atlanta fled north. Neighborhoods like Tuxedo Park had the bonus of being older, with historic mansions that fared much better than modern office towers and high-rises. While the skyscrapers fell and crashed, places like Villa Juanita, the ten-thousand-square-foot signature Tuxedo estate, suffered no damage, still as opulent as they had been a century and a half ago.

St. Luke’s Church straddled the divide between the wealthy of Tuxedo Park and the new business center that had sprung up along Peachtree Road. Calling it a church was a bit of an understatement. The massive cathedral, built with brick and white concrete, occupied five acres with its grounds and auxiliary buildings. A testament to the stoic values of the Gothic Revival, the entire complex was a fortress: a hospital, a school, and an administrative center all arranged into a single neat rectangle with the cathedral front and center, looking like a smaller cousin of Notre Dame.

A stretch of lawn bordered the cathedral, the killing ground, another fun real estate peculiarity of our apocalypse. A long walkway cut through the lawn, leading to a wide terrace before the stairway to the church. The terrace was filled with cut flowers. Roses, lilies, and wildflowers rested on the pavement, with candles burning between the blooms and small wooden crosses. The city had turned this space into a memorial to Pastor Haywood. A few mourners still remained, three days later, sitting on the low stone wall bordering the terrace and praying.

I rode to the side parking lot, dismounted, tethered Tulip, and walked up to the doors on foot.

A middle-aged white man with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses met me at the entrance and gave my tattered cloak a long glance. Under the cloak, I wore a green t-shirt, a pair of comfortable brown pants secured by a belt holding pouches of herbs, silver dust, and other useful things, and a pair of running shoes. Nothing special.

This morning I had opened the smaller weapons crate and pulled out two knives identical to the one I lost yesterday. I also carried a leaf short sword, with a twenty-two-inch-long blade that was about two point one inches across in the widest part. At a pound and eleven ounces, it ran on the heavy side, and the weight and the leaf profile made it a good slasher. The cloak hid all that, but it couldn’t hide Dakkan, my spear. My grandmother had a huge problem with that name, because the closest translation of it to English would be “Stabby.” She claimed it wasn’t a proper name for a weapon, so after the first Dakkan broke, I offered to name the new one Sharpy McStabbison, the Son of Stabby, after which she groaned and left my quarters, followed by a throng of her advisors all giving me reproachful looks.

Dakkan rested in two parts in the sheath on my back. When screwed together, it reached six feet. The two shafts protruded over my right shoulder, easy to grab, and the sentry at the church door clearly had trouble figuring out why I was carrying two metal sticks on my back.

After a few awkward seconds, he decided to stop pondering my weapon choice. “How may I help you?”

I took out my Order ID. “My name is Aurelia Ryder. I’m investigating Pastor Haywood’s murder.”

The man flinched slightly. “It’s awful. It feels like a nightmare…” He caught himself. “Would you mind waiting? The bishop is in residence and she may want to speak with you.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Please follow me.”

The inside of the church was ten degrees cooler. Soothing light streamed into the reception area through the stained-glass windows tinted in a dozen shades of blue and red. Through the open doors, I could see the inside of the church, rows and rows of wooden pews with cobalt cushions, the raised pulpit, and the simple wooden lectern upon it. There was no opulence in this church; everything was well made but restrained.

I had done some reading on the topic of Methodists while riding the ley line to the city. The Methodists had always viewed healing as an important theological theme, and after magic had wrecked the world, they focused on it with even greater intensity. As a result, the Methodist congregations swelled, and there came a need to have a point person for large geographical areas, usually a bishop, sometimes elected, sometimes appointed. The bishop I was about to meet was responsible for the entirety of North Georgia. She could open many doors. She could also slam them shut.

A side door opened, and a middle-aged woman in a beige business suit walked in, the man who had met me following close behind. The woman was in her mid-fifties, with straight black hair cut in a flattering bob and features that hinted at East Asian heritage.