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.
Even if she survived for the next couple of years, I knew exactly what lay ahead: abuse, more abuse, rape, beatings, drugs, death. Few of the kids endured to adulthood, and those who managed it didn’t live long.
But if the priests of Moloch saw her with me and got their claws on her, they would cook her alive just to hurt me. I had to let her go. Once this was over, I would find her again.
“What’s your name?”
“Marten.”
Usually street kids had nicknames like Rat or Weasel. “Who named you that?”
“I named me.”
“Why Marten?”
“Because they’re smart and cute. And fast. You can’t catch them.”
“Squirrels are fast.”
“Squirrels are dumb. Pine Martens eat squirrels.”
Fair enough. “There was a blue building on the corner of Harpy Street, Marten. Is it still there?”
She nodded.
I dropped the silver into her grimy hand. “They’ll take it away from you as soon as I’m gone. Let them have it.”
She sighed. “Dougie doesn’t take our money. Dougie is too nice. He isn’t mean. He is…”
“Soft.”
Marten nodded. She wasn’t soft. Not even a little bit. Dougie was bigger and older, but she would last longer.
“Give him the silver anyway.” She couldn’t protect it, and it would only make her a target. “Come to the blue building tomorrow. Go through the second doorway. Inside turn left, count eight steps. There is a loose board in the floor. I’ll leave something there for you.”
She squinted at me.
“Keep low for the next few days. If something else weird happens or if anybody else comes asking about this, hide from them and go straight to the Order and ask for Aurelia. They’ll keep you safe until I get there. Tell the other kids, too. Anybody shows up with questions about Pastor Haywood, bolt and hide.”
I let her off the horse. She ran back, skinny legs flying, the silver clutched in her small fist. The little gang closed about her. Dougie wrapped his arm around Marten’s shoulders, gave me a wary look, and the lot of them ran away around the corner.
She was me. Except I was thirteen when Kate took me off the streets.
Suddenly I wanted to go home. It scraped at me like claws, ripping through my resolve to the vulnerable soft place I’d been trying to armor. I could picture it in my head, the sunlit kitchen; Curran gliding through the house, quiet like a ghost; Conlan leaping over the fence after running in the woods next door, the big, smelly poodle trailing him; and Kate standing in the kitchen, cooking something, her sword within reach. I wanted to go home and hug the three of them. I’d been gone for eight years. Talking on the phone wasn’t enough. Meeting Conlan in Roland’s magic prison was nothing compared to getting a hug in person. I was so homesick, if I were a wolf, I would’ve howled. I needed to see my family and make sure they were okay.
But if I did, they would die.
I exhaled slowly, reasserting control.
This city was bad for me. It was tearing wounds open that had long ago scabbed over.
I was a princess of Shinar. More, I was the child Kate raised. People in our family didn’t waste time feeling sorry for ourselves. We killed the monster blocking the front door, so we could go home.
I urged Tulip on, and she started down the street, light on her feet. Although many denominations, Methodists included, rejected holy relics, the existence of magical artifacts and relics was a fact. Some religious items had gained magical properties after the Shift. Finding and selling these artifacts became a small but lucrative business and even spawned its own profession: relic hunters.
These hunters were a rough crowd. These were people with nothing to lose, who crawled into abandoned temples, opened cursed tombs, and dug graves out of sacred ground at a time when myths proved real and phantom monsters turned flesh. They would do just about anything for a profit.
According to Nick’s file, Pastor Haywood had very few assets, so it was unlikely relic hunters had tried to sell him a magical artifact. Most likely, they’d wanted to know if the object they’d found was the real deal. As a man of his god, Pastor Haywood would have been able to recognize a relic of his deity and assess its power.
I was looking for someone who had or thought he had a Christian holy item. The first step would be to contact Pastor Haywood’s chain of command and see if they referred anyone to him.
I didn’t hold out much hope. Pastor Haywood was famous enough that someone might have found him even without a referral. But it was still worth a try.
Unfortunately, all of that had to wait. I had to go home to put up wards, and I had to do it now.
When I’d mentioned shapeshifters to Fleming, he didn’t contradict me, and he didn’t ask questions. A law enforcement officer who’d had no idea shapeshifters had trampled the crime scene he’d been guarding would want to know the details. Why did I think shapeshifters had been there? How many shapeshifters? When did they visit? Fleming had just let it drop. He must’ve owed the Pack a favor or he had taken their money. Either way, he would contact them the first chance he got. A team would be dispatched to the scene, and they would track me.
There were ways to knock a shapeshifter off your scent. Wolfsbane worked well. It had the same effect on a shapeshifter as sticking your head into a bucket of pine pollen would have on a human. If a single shapeshifter was following my scent, using it might have been an option. But I wouldn’t be tracked by a single shapeshifter. I would be tracked by a team, so sanding my trail with wolfsbane was futile. I might get the leading tracker, but the rest would just go around the wolfsbane, spread out, and pick up my scent again.
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.