Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(29)

I slumped against the doorway. It had taken me almost thirty minutes to get to the chapter, and the entire time I was picturing Marten’s broken body discarded like garbage in some ruin.

“Your bag is dripping,” the female knight observed.

I held the bloody bag up. She reached to the side, pulled a metal pan from a drawer, and placed it on her desk. I set the bloody bag into it. She sat behind the desk. The plaque on it said “Stella Davis.”

I leaned against the wall and looked at Marten. “What happened?”

She swallowed. “I went to get cookies.” She gave Stella a suspicious side-eye. “In that place you told me about.”

Clearly the knight of the Order couldn’t be trusted with sensitive information like the location of the cookie stash. Stella rolled her eyes.

“I ate a cookie, and I hid the rest. Then I went back to the Mouse House. There were two scary guys there and a taker there. They had a dog with iron fur.”

The taker meant the highest level of danger, someone to run away from, someone who took the kids and they would never be seen again.

“What were the scary people doing?”

“Talking to Dougie.” Marten took another small bite from her cookie.

Talking to this kid was like pulling teeth. “Could you hear what they were saying?”

She nodded.

Stella growled. “What did you hear?”

“They were asking about the Order woman. Dougie lied and said he would show them where you went. And then he went the wrong way and they followed him.”

“What did you do next?”

“I went to the secret place, got the cookies, and came here. Like you told me to.”

Stella glanced at me. “She showed up here about two hours ago. She’s eaten three giant cookies and drank almost a quart of milk.” She looked at Marten. “Where is it all going?”

“In my tummy.” Marten rubbed her bloated stomach and smiled. Then her smile fell. “Is Dougie okay?”

“Dougie got hurt,” I told her. “He is in the hospital now.”

“Can I see him?”

I shook my head. “I will take you later, when he is feeling better.”

Nick Feldman loomed in the doorway. “What’s going on here? Who is this child?”

“She’s a material witness,” I said.

Nick pointed at my bag. “And what is this?”

“Evidence.”

He squinted at the bag. “Well now I feel bad. I didn’t get you anything. Why is your evidence bleeding all over Knight Davis’ desk?”

I stepped to the desk, opened the bag, and pulled it down. The two knights and Marten stared at the Honeycomber’s head.

“The taker!” Marten said.

All humor evaporated from Nick’s face. “Pick that up and bring it into my office.”

He turned and marched down the hallway.

Stella leaned forward and whispered, “Oooh, you’re in trouble.”

Marten made big eyes. “Oooh.”

I picked up the tray and followed the Knight-Protector.

“Close the door,” Nick ordered, sitting down behind his desk.

I shut the door and put the tray in front of him.

“Explain.”

I brought him up to speed.

Nick pondered the head, thinking.

I tapped the greasy head in front of me. “Who is he?”

“Jasper. No last name. Rapist, kidnapper, slaver. Do you know about Honeycomb?”

“I know they don’t like outsiders.”

“It used to be a trailer park for retirees. Now it’s a place that scrambles reality.”

Honeycomb sat deep inside Honeycomb Gap, a fissure that cleaved the southeast of Atlanta. According to the city archives, before the Shift, it was a nice place with pretty, white mobile homes and manicured landscaping. I had only seen it after the Shift when it turned into a nightmare. Magic warped the trailer homes and splintered reality into pieces. The double-and single-wides multiplied, growing on top of each other like grapes in a bunch. Outsiders never went into the Honeycomb without a guide. It was a place where people accidentally walked through walls and never came out. One wrong step, and you were gone forever.

“Nobody goes into Honeycomb, and the Honeycombers venture out into the city only when they need money,” Nick continued. “They’re not picky. They’ll do any shitty job that will pay cash. We don’t even know how many of them are in there. Could be ten, could be a hundred.”

“What about Jasper?”

“Until this morning Jasper ran it.” Nick leaned back. “Congratulations. You killed the king of Honeycomb.”

“Think he will be missed?”

“I doubt it. But I can’t discount the possibility that you’ve just made yourself a target for revenge by a gang of deranged assholes. Low profile isn’t really your thing, Ms. Ryder, is it?”

“Jasper didn’t just happen to meet me, Knight-Protector. He tracked me down. Nobody knows me in the city, which means someone hired him to either look into the Haywood murder or make sure I didn’t.”

Nick grimaced. “Probably the second. He was cunning in a way, but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”

He also wasn’t fully human in the strict definition of that word. “Do you know who usually hires him?”