Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(5)

There was no point in looking for trouble. I’d lost enough time as it was. I shifted my weight in the saddle, and Tulip trotted onto the bridge.

Nobody followed us.





*



I sat on a big chunk of concrete in the middle of the street. Around me the old bones of Midtown spread under the pale grey pre-dawn sky. Jagged corpses of skyscrapers jutted from the sea of rubble. Some had fallen whole; others broke off midway, and their husks stared at the world with black holes of empty windows. Strange lichens sheathed their walls, some coiling in ridges on the brick and stucco like ancient fossil shells, others drooping in long crimson strands that moved and shivered without any wind. Decorative hedges that once bordered sidewalks had grown foot-long thorns. Otherworldly vines, dotted with flowers, spilled from the gutted ruins.

The first magic wave had stabbed Atlanta in the heart, leaving a ragged, gaping wound that cut through Midtown. The wound bled magic even during the strongest tech, and its current had warped this area beyond all recognition. The locals called it Unicorn Lane. Nothing was what it seemed here, and everything tried to kill you. Even the biggest magical heavyweights steered clear of it. To enter Unicorn Lane, you had to be desperate or crazy. Good thing I was both.

In front of me, a small space had been cleared free of rubble. A ten-foot-tall stele thrust from its center, a narrow stone slab with four equal sides. A pack of small russet-furred beasts somewhere on the crossroads of squirrels and mongoose dashed down a narrow path and around it. The thing that chased them had no name. About the size of a large rottweiler, it scrambled over the refuse on six legs. Its fur was a forest of hair-thin black needles. It looked like a sea urchin, except for its head with long jaws and dinosaur teeth. The beast dashed after the pseudo-squirrels, slipped, and slammed into an abandoned car wrapped in orange moss.

The moss turned bright red from the impact. The beast staggered away, swayed, and collapsed, its side awash with scarlet. The needles drooped, liquifying. A thick puddle of brown blood spread from the creature. Dozens of critters no bigger than a rat streamed out of the ruins like a blue-grey tide to drink it.

Tulip neighed at me for the third time.

“Fine.” I got off the rock and untacked her. “Don’t go deep.”

Tulip tossed her head and took off down the street, a splash of white.

“Is that wise?” a familiar female voice asked.

I turned. Sienna stood by the stele. She wore a long dark cloak, and her hood was down, revealing her face and strawberry blond hair shorn in a new short bob. Her skin was pale, her features delicate and gentle, and her eyes distant. Before the Shift, people used to draw fae like her. Nobody would ever draw a delicate fae again.

“Tulip will be fine. What happened to the hair?”

She smiled. “Needed power for a spell.”

Sienna was an oracle who saw into the future. I had focused on her prophecies so much over the last four years, sometimes I forgot that she was a witch.

I walked over, and we hugged. She used to be sickly, almost skeletal, and sometimes she still forgot to eat, because she lived with one foot in another time. She felt solid now. Good.

“Why here?” I asked, nodding at the stele.

“I have my reasons.”

Sienna looked at the monument and the single name chiseled on it. SAIMAN.

“I always wondered why nothing else was written here,” she said.

“That’s the way he wanted it.”

I remembered the day we buried him. It rained so hard, all of us looked like we were crying. I wasn’t sure if anyone actually had. He’d stabbed too many of his pallbearers in the back.

A grandson of a frost giant, Saiman had been an expert on magic. He’d also been a polymorph. He could turn himself into anyone he wanted, any age, any gender, any shape within human limits, and he’d used that gift to live a thoroughly selfish life, using people, manipulating them, trampling over them in a hedonistic pursuit of wealth and pleasure. Then the city had had to come together to face a terrible threat, and Saiman had one brief, shining chance to cast aside his cowardice and step up to the plate. He took it, and it killed him.

I hadn’t mourned him, I’d never trusted him, but I was sorry he had died. A lot of people, better people, had also died in that battle.

Sienna looked at the stele, or rather through it, at something only she could see. I waited.

She’d called me yesterday. This is your last chance to stop it. Meet me by Saiman’s grave before sunrise. Then she’d hung up.

Rushing her and asking questions would accomplish nothing. She weighed and measured each word a hundred times before she said it. And even so, most of what she said made no sense until it was too late. I just had to be patient and hope I figured it out in time.

Last chance. The very last one.

Four years ago, she’d called me in the middle of the night. Sienna had foreseen disasters before, wars, plagues, dragons. Nothing rattled her, but that night her voice shook. She told me that an elder god had been reborn as an avatar in Arizona. Moloch, the Child Eater, the deity of the Canaanites condemned in the Old Testament, who took his sustenance from infants burned alive in the fires of his forges and metal bulls. For nearly three decades he had been building up his domain, preparing to expand, and that night Sienna had seen his first target.

Moloch would kill Kate. The woman who raised me as her daughter.