Emma frowned, pretending to think it over. Which she really should have been doing, considering she had $15.97 in her pocket.
Boy Blue leaned in toward her, his warm breath stirring her hair, raising gooseflesh on her neck. “Listen,” he said. “Their tab’ll run into big money. They’ve been drinking all night. And we’re not paying for the cue.”
We? Emma thought.
“What’s the matter?” Graham said. “No confidence in your girlfriend here?”
Someone began a soft chant. “Tails and SCALES! Tails and SCALES!”
Emma frowned. “You know what? He’s right. That doesn’t seem fair. I don’t really have a tab.” She thought a moment. “How about this? If I win, you forget about the cue and buy a round for the room.”
“A round for the room?” Graham scanned the crowd, as if taking a count. “I don’t know. I mean, now I’ll be playing with an unfamiliar cue.” He pretended reluctance when she could tell he was hot for the match.
“What’s the matter?” she said, shoving her hands into her back pockets, looking up at the ceiling. “You scared?”
Graham stiffened and looked back at Emma, appraising her. He must not have been impressed with what he saw, because a cocky smile broke across his face. “You’re on, labrat.”
“Did you all hear that?” Emma said in a carrying voice. “If I win, this fine young man buys a round for the room. If you want to lay any side bets, do it now.”
All of a sudden everyone in the room was interested in the play, though nobody seemed eager to bet on Emma.
While money changed hands Emma strode to the cue rack and looked over the selection. Mostly Sterlings, handful of Furys. Pulling one down, she sighted along the length and swore under her breath. Warped. As were the next two. In the end, she chose a Sterling maple-shafted stick that wasn’t quite as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.
She crossed to Graham’s chosen table, leaned her cue against it, and tied her hair back. “What’s your game?” she said.
Graham blinked at her. “Huh?”
“You know—eight ball, nine ball, straight pool, one pocket, or snooker?”
“Um—eight ball?” he said, doubt creeping into his voice.
“Fair enough,” Emma said, scooping up a triangular rack. “You got any local rules I should know about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you got your Alabama eight ball, crazy eight, last pocket, misery, Missouri, one and fifteen in the sides, rotation eight ball, and like that.”
Graham squinted at her, licking his lips. “I just wanna play pool. You gonna talk or play?”
“Fine,” Emma said. “We’ll keep it simple—classic eight ball. One game only. If you scratch on the break, you lose. Your challenge, your game, my break. Rack ’em up.” She thrust the rack at Graham.
While Graham fussed with the rack, Emma walked around the table. The cloth was in bad shape, torn here and there from heavy use. She’d watched the play on that table earlier and noted that it wasn’t exactly level.
By the time Graham stepped back, Emma had found her shot. She hit a soft break, but still put three balls in the pocket. Methodically, she ran out the table while Graham watched with growing horror. When she’d cleared the table except for the money ball, she pointed her cue at the farthest pocket.
“All right,” she said. “Eight ball in the upper right corner.”
And she nailed it clean.
Cheers erupted all around—from people who hadn’t bet on Graham. Patrons, even mainliners, slapped her on the back. Others bellied up to the bar to place their orders.
Graham swore violently. “You…you cheated,” he said.
Emma cocked her head. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you to watch yourself in a pool hall? You never know when you’re going to run into a shark.”
Graham extended a trembling hand toward Emma, fingers spread like he was about to hex her or something. He opened his mouth, but before he could say a word, Boy Blue had his arms twisted behind his back so he screamed in pain.
“I don’t think you want to do that here,” Boy Blue murmured. “Anyway, nobody likes a sore loser. I suggest you pay up and leave.” Releasing Graham, he gave him a push toward the bar.
Emma stuck out her hand to Boy Blue. “I’m Emma,” she said. “Thanks for the help.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he gripped her hand. “I’m Jonah,” he said. “I guess you didn’t need my help.”
Emma let go of Jonah’s hand, trying to think of something to say. “What was that name they kept calling us? Labrats?”
“Labrats?” He stared at her, as if confused. “I assumed you were from—” He stopped. Then shrugged. And lied…Emma knew he did. “I have no idea.”
Emma gestured toward her hard-won table. “Would you like to sit?”
“Sit?”
“Sit. With me.”
For a moment, he balanced on the balls of his feet, trapped between yes and no. Then the door to the club slammed open, and cold air swirled around them. Jonah’s head came up, and he breathed in sharply, like a predator who’s caught the scent of prey. “No,” he said. “I can’t. I have to—” He swiveled toward the door, suddenly in a hurry. “I have to go.”
And, just like that, he was out the door.
Sorry, Tyler, Emma thought, watching him disappear. I guess I’m just not that good at making friends.
Where, exactly, did you think that was going, Kinlock? Jonah thought as he exited the club. Were you hoping to work your way up from a handshake to a chaperoned slow dance?
And yet—it was such a small and simple pleasure—to talk to someone who didn’t know that the thing he was best at was killing. Leaving the pool-shark girl behind was like ripping off a scab and watching himself bleed.
Focus, he thought, breathing in the night air. No, it hadn’t been his imagination. A shade had just passed by, heading toward Superior.
Jonah didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all. Especially since he was unarmed. You can go into a club with a gun, but just try to get in with a six-foot sword.
It was nearly nine o’clock on a Tuesday, but the bars were jumping in the Warehouse District. Across the river, in Heritage Park and around the aquarium, he could see emergency lights flashing. Maybe an accident of some kind. He hoped it wasn’t something worse.
He ghosted along, following the scent, jogging left on Superior. He lost the trail momentarily, then realized the shade must have cut through the courthouse gardens and down the steps to the river. It might be on the hunt, hoping to find easy prey along the lonely route through the Flats.
He descended through the courthouse grounds, then walked west, along the river, past industrial buildings and high fences topped with barbed wire. Just as he was passing the old B&O terminal, a bell began to clamor. A bridge alarm, signaling street traffic that the bridge was opening for river traffic.
Once past the terminal, Jonah looked downriver, where several rusting lift bridges spanned the crooked river as it snaked its way to the lake.
It was the Carter Road Lift Bridge, just to his left. The barricades were down, lights flashing. As he watched, the bridge deck began to rise into the sky.
Odd. The bridge was closed for repair, and he’d understood that it would be for at least another month. Anyway, why would they be working on the bridge at this time of night?
The wind stirred his hair, and the stench of free magic came to him, stronger than ever, from the direction of the river. Turning off Canal Road, Jonah sprinted up the slight incline toward the bridge.
By the time he reached the foot of the bridge, the deck had stopped high above him. He heard faint cries for help from overhead.
Children?
The door to the access stairs was padlocked. Jonah considered crushing the lock, but disliked the notion of being caged up in the stairwell. Fortunately, the tower seemed made for climbing, a Lego maze of handholds and footrests. Halfway up, he saw the pallid face of a shade peer
ing over the side at him, felt the shade’s fear and hatred boiling down on his head.
So much for the element of surprise. Jonah climbed faster, worrying that his approach might goad the shade into a quick kill.
The higher he climbed, the stronger the scent of the shade’s host. A corpse, and not particularly fresh, from the smell of it. Jonah was nearly at the top when something came hurtling over the edge, a glowing patch of white in the darkness. At first he thought it was the shade, trying to escape, but it emitted a high-pitched wail as it fell, its arms and legs windmilling. A little girl.
Jonah leaped sideways to intercept her. In a split second, he wrapped both arms around her, shifted her to the crook of one arm, and grabbed back on to the tower with the other hand. She continued to kick and wriggle and screech into his ear, nearly deafening him.
“Shhh,” he said. “Hey. It’s all right. I’ve got you.”
At the sound of his voice, she stopped struggling and buried her face in his sweatshirt as if trying to burrow in. She was sniffling, but no longer screaming, at least. She glowed, like an illuminated painting in a church.
His weary synapses finally fired. She was gifted. A wizardling.
She lifted her head and looked at him. “It’s not polite to stare,” she said.
“You’re right,” he said.
“I was trying to grab the zombie’s knife, and he pushed me, and I fell,” she said, as if she thought the situation needed explaining.
“I hate when that happens,” Jonah said. “Can you ride piggyback?”
“Of course.”
“Climb on.”
He turned and she clambered onto his back, wrapping her legs tightly around his middle, her arms around his neck in a choke hold.
The shade peered over the side again, a long, sharp knife in one hand, and something in his other hand that reflected an iridescent light. Jonah flinched sideways, worried it might be some new kind of weapon.
Playing it safe, he ducked under the road deck, leaping from handhold to handhold, and surfaced on the far side of the bridge. Pulling himself up onto the deck, he crouched and the girl climbed down.
She studied him with grave brown eyes. She wore a white T-shirt bearing the legend TRINITY MONTESSORI. “I’m Olivia.”
“I’m Jonah.”
“You’re a good climber,” she said, licking a finger and dabbing at a scratch on her arm.
“And you’re brave.” Jonah pointed to the inner wall of the bridge tower. “Stand right there while I kill the…the monster. Don’t move.”
To Jonah’s relief, Olivia nodded, eyes wide, and flattened herself against the inside wall of the bridge tower.
Jonah turned to face the shade.
It stood, clothed in a rotting corpse, a cohesion of desperate need in a decaying shell.
Behind him, a dozen small children huddled at the center of the bridge deck. Holding hands, some of them whimpering. They all wore the same white T-shirts with TRINITY MONTESSORI printed on them, and they all shone with the auras of the gifted. They were nearly all wizards, with a few other mainliners sprinkled in.
Trinity. That was the headquarters of the mainline guilds.
Children? Really? Shades are going after children now? Wizard children in particular? Now, why would that be?
Using children as hosts had never been of much interest to shades. Not when they had a choice. Children were small and not very strong, and grown-ups felt the need to pen them up. Shades needed strength and size and freedom of movement. That’s what they aimed for in a borrowed body.
Jonah looked around for potential weapons. Ripping a rusting cross-brace free, he hefted it in his hands, hoping it wasn’t anything structurally critical. He preferred a sword, with its cutting edge, but he often used a staff when sparring in the gym. This would do.
“Hey, Jonah,” the shade said, speaking mind to mind. “’Sup?”
Jonah nearly dropped his staff. “You know who I am?” This was another of Jonah’s double-edged gifts. He was the only savant who could communicate, mind to mind, with free shades. Some hosted shades could emit screeches, howls, clicks, and the like, but that was about it.
“You mean you don’t recognize me?” The shade’s tone was bitter, faintly mocking.
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Jonah said, taking a step closer. “I’m guessing you’ve changed a lot since we last met.”
“I’m Brendan Wu,” the shade said.
The name was familiar. Jonah paged through mental files. “I can’t quite place where I—”
“I lived at Safe Harbor,” Brendan said. “You’d come there to see Kenzie all the time.” He paused. “I used to watch those nature videos?”
A faint image came to Jonah’s mind. An older boy with stick-straight black hair and bright, intelligent eyes, who spent hours every day in the whirlpool because his skin blistered and sloughed off constantly. A boy who lived with agonizing pain most of the time.
Brendan had died four years ago. Another miss for Safe Passage.
“I remember you, Brendan,” Jonah said. “We used to talk about Antarctica.”
“I loved Antarctica,” Brendan said wistfully. “So cold and clean.” He paused. “I always wished I had a brother like you. But everyone else in my family died in Brazil.”
“That’s what I don’t get…after all you’ve been through, how could you kill children?”
“Why are you killing us?” Brendan snapped back. “Wizards are to blame for…for all of this.” He waved his hand, taking in the children, the bridge, the river below. “We’re all victims of wizards. So why are you fighting against us and not them?”
A question Jonah had asked a thousand times. And yet…
“Brendan,” he said softly. “Wouldn’t you like to be at peace?” Memory strobed, like a camera flash. Thing One had used almost the same argument on Jonah. About Kenzie.
Brendan laughed bitterly. “I’m aiming a little higher than that.”
“It’s wrong to kill children,” Jonah said with conviction. His was a strange and brutal life, with few moral anchors, but that was one of them.
“This isn’t about revenge. It’s about our survival. Yours, mine—all of the victims of Thorn Hill. You’re killing us. What’s so different about killing them?”
“You think four-year-olds are a threat to you?”
Brendan shook his head, jarring several teeth free. They clattered onto the asphalt. “Of course not. But sometimes sacrifices are necessary. And who better to pay this price than mainliners?”
During this conversation, Jonah had eased forward. Now he was close enough to make out the object the shade held in its hand. It was a bottle made of brilliant glass, with an elaborate stopper.
“What’s the bottle for?” Jonah asked.
“It’s for blood magic.” Brendan held up the bottle and tilted it so it caught the light. “This bottle is specially made to capture it. Killing the gifted frees it. The death of a gifted child is the most powerful source.”
Jonah forced back a shudder. “What do you want it for?”
“Give me these guildlings, and I’ll tell you.”
“I can’t give them to you,” Jonah said, slapping the iron bar against his palm. “They don’t belong to me.”
“Jonah,” Brendan pleaded. “Please listen to me. Things are different now. You’ll see. We’re organizing, we’re getting stronger. We’re not going to have to skulk in alleyways anymore, trading bodies every few days.”
Jonah thought of the army of shades that had attacked the canal boat in London. “Why? What’s changed?”
“Everything,” Brendan said eagerly. “Blood magic is the key. We want to partner with you, with everyone at the Anchorage.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Jonah asked. “Are you the one who’s organizing the shades?”
“No,” Brendan said. “You and I would be the liaisons. Lilith wants to meet with Mr. Mandrake.”
“Lilith? Who’s that?” The name was vaguely
familiar. Maybe someone he knew at Thorn Hill?
“Lilith Greaves. She’s our new leader. She’s amazing. We think that if you just understood what we were planning, you would all come on board.”
All Jonah could think of was that this was some kind of trap, a trick to gain access to Gabriel and the members of Nightshade.
“Fine,” he said. “Tell me what you’re planning.”
“No,” Brendan said. “Forgive my mistrust, but you’ve slaughtered more of us than the rest of Nightshade combined. First, we require a show of good faith.” He tilted his head at the children and extended the bottle toward Jonah. “Help me extract blood magic from these mainliners. Then I’ll take you to Lilith and she’ll explain how it’s used.”
“No,” Jonah said. “Let them go. Then I’ll hear whatever Lilith has to pitch.”
“Suit yourself,” Brendan said. He raised his hand, a signal.
“Jonah!” Olivia screamed. “Look out!”
Jonah swung around, to see shades swarming over the sides of the bridge deck from all directions. They lined up on either side, cadavers of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of crowding in behind. They encircled him, all rotting flesh and protruding bones, resembling the cast of a high-budget horror movie.
The children crouched and covered their heads with their arms. It looked kind of like a preschool disaster drill. With zombies.
Jonah assumed a fighting stance, but Brendan held up his hand, and the shades settled in place, making no move to attack.
And then, ludicrously, Jonah’s phone buzzed. He looked, and saw that he had a screenful of texts from Alison. Where the hell are you? Swiveling, he took photographs of the shade army and the bridge and texted them back.
“Shadeslayer!”
The voice came from high above him. He looked up, and there, on the rusting framework of the railroad bridge, stood a woman…rather, an apparition in the form of a woman, lighting up the entire riverbed. Her garments writhed around her like brilliant vapors, and her arms trailed streamers of light.
“Or would you rather I call you Jonah?”
“You must be Lilith,” Jonah said. “But I still don’t know exactly what you are.”