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 peering 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.