The Sorcerer Heir (Heir Chronicles) (32 page)

L
eesha Middleton pulled on her red Gucci python boots—the ones that always gave her confidence. Not to mention five extra inches of height.

Aunt Millie eyed her critically. “I worry about you, Alicia, in those boots. They are lovely, to be sure, but not exactly practical on icy sidewalks.”

Leesha lifted her foot, showing off the heels. “These are actually great on the ice. Like spikes.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me to have Martin pull the car around?”

“Martin’s not here, Aunt Millie.”

“
Another
day off?” Millie frowned. “That man is never here.”

“That’s because he died three years ago.”

“Ah. That would explain it,” Aunt Millie said with a sigh. “I am getting terribly forgetful, aren’t I?”

“You are,” Leesha said. “The thing is, the older you get, the more you have to remember.” She kissed her aunt on her forehead, breathing in the scent of patchouli and sage.

“Where are you off to, dear?”

“Another meeting.” Leesha tried not to roll her eyes. Aunt Millie didn’t approve of eye rolling.

“You’ve been all wound up ever since Emma left,” Aunt Millie said. “She’s not coming back, is she?”

The thing about Aunt Millie was, she missed a lot, but you couldn’t count on her
not
noticing stuff.

Leesha shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She edged toward the door, hoping to make her escape without having to elaborate.

“It’s because of me, isn’t it, dear?” Aunt Millie said sadly. “I know I am hard to live with sometimes—this problem I’m having. I seem to have lost my knack for magic, but it’s very hard to give it up.”

“I wouldn’t want to give it up either, if I were you,” Leesha said. “You’ve always been so good at it. But Emma didn’t leave because of you. She’s very fond of you, Aunt Mill.”

There came a knock at the front door. “That’ll be Fitch,” Leesha said.

“I do like that young man,” Aunt Millie said. “He looks to be a bit of a ruffian, and
Fitch
is an odd sort of name, but he has a very warm smile. And he comes to the door. None of this horn-honking.”

“He does have a very warm smile,” Leesha said.

Aunt Millie cocked her head, studying her through narrowed eyes. “Are you
blushing
, Alicia?”

Exactly. That thing about Aunt Millie.

“Bye now. I might be a while.”

She pulled open the door to find Fitch smiling his warm smile, a navy watch cap pulled down over his ears. “You ready for this?”

“Sure, why not?” Leesha said. “Maybe I’ll be hit by a car on the way over.”

The church was already half full, with people gathered into the usual factions. Seph and Maddie and Jack and Ellen huddled together, talking.

Leesha spotted Rowan DeVries right away. He stood alone, or as alone as a person can be when he’s surrounded by bodyguards. He looked thinner than before, his bones more sharply defined.

He looked like a person on a mission.

As Leesha watched, Hackleford and Burroughs joined him. They nodded curtly to each other, like they were frenemies, forced together by circumstance. Hackleford, in particular, resembled a crow waiting to get at a fresh kill.

As soon as DeVries saw Leesha, he headed right for her, his bodyguard posse swarming after him. Gripping her elbow, he tried to pull her aside, but Fitch came right along.

“Who are you?” DeVries demanded, looking Fitch up and down.

“He’s
my
bodyguard,” Leesha said. “Now, take your hands off me.”

“Who is guarding whom?” DeVries said, rolling his eyes. But he did let go of her.

“I’m glad to see that you are recovering,” Leesha said, trying to be gracious.

DeVries brushed that aside. “Have you seen Emma?”

“Emma?” Leesha shook her head. “Not lately. Why?”

“She was supposed to be here,” DeVries said. “She’s not answering her cell phone either. Isn’t she staying with you?”

“She is, but I haven’t seen her in several days. She said she was going to stay over in Cleveland.” She’s not answering
my
phone calls either, Leesha thought.

“Downtown!” DeVries seemed stunned. “At that—at the Anchorage?”

Leesha nodded. “She still has an apartment there, I guess.”

“Why would she
do
that?” He looked almost...distraught. Betrayed?

“Maybe she was afraid the roads would be bad and it would be too hard to drive back and forth,” Leesha said. She paused. “Not to be nosy, but why are you so concerned about Emma’s whereabouts? I didn’t realize that you two even knew each other.”

DeVries pressed his lips together, straightening his body. “Either I misjudged her,” he said, his voice clipped and cold, “or someone has made certain that she wouldn’t be here.”

“What are you talking about?” Leesha said. But just then the side door banged open, and Mercedes entered. “Let’s get this thing started, shall we?” she said, letting the door slam behind her.

The buzz of conversation ended, and people found their seats with amazing efficiency.

“Now, then,” Mercedes said, “I have called this meeting of the task force because Mr. DeVries tells me that he has new evidence to offer relating to the Weir murders, including those on Halloween. As usual, we will proceed in an informal manner unless we are compelled to impose more stringent rules.” She paused, her gaze flicking to each person in the room, allowing time for the threat to register. “Mr. DeVries, I’m sure I speak for many when I say that I am glad to see that rumors of your death were, at the very least, exaggerated.”

DeVries smiled thinly. “Perhaps, but I suspect my recovery is disappointing to so many more,” he said. “I appreciate your calling this meeting on such short notice. Now that I am improving, this matter needs to be dealt with before any more lives are lost. I’ll remind you that these have been wizard murders, primarily, and so we have a special interest in seeing this handled. My colleagues and I”—he gestured toward Burroughs and Hackleford—“we believe that we have identified those responsible.”

“By all means, enlighten us,” Mercedes said. “We can scarcely stand the suspense.”

DeVries seemed unruffled. “If you’ll recall, we came before the full council back in the fall, to report that eight wizards had been murdered not far from here, in Cleveland Heights.” The wizard paused. “A massacre, if you will.”

The usual wizard blah blah blah, Leesha thought, reading a similar response on the faces of the rest of the task-force members. A flicker of movement caught her eye, up on the stairs to the gallery. Was somebody eavesdropping? Leaning forward, she focused in. Nothing. She finally decided it must have been shifting shadows from the bare-limbed trees outside.

Her attention was drawn back to what DeVries was saying. “Since the last time I was here, there has been an attack on gifted preschoolers in downtown Cleveland, which, fortunately, did not result in loss of life; and, of course the attack right here in Trinity on Halloween in which I was gravely injured and three lives were lost.” He paused. “I want to apologize to all of you for some of the things I said the last time I came before council,” DeVries said.

That got everyone’s attention. A wizard—apologizing? You could have heard a pin drop in the room.

“At the time, I believed that members of the underguilds must be complicit in the ongoing murders. In particular, I suspected that members of the full council might be involved in protecting these responsible. Now, I realize that this probably isn’t true.”

“Whoa,” Jack murmured, nudging Ellen. “I feel so—I don’t know—redeemed.”

“Once we opened our eyes to new possibilities, we quickly realized that the most likely culprits are those with a long history of terrorist activity, who still carry a grudge against the wizard guild.”

“And so, your theory is...?” Seph said impatiently.

“We believe Gabriel Mandrake and the survivors of Thorn Hill are at the center of a conspiracy to murder the gifted,” DeVries said. “Wizards in particular.”

“The labrats,”
Sylvia Morrison said. “I knew it.”

Mercedes gave Morrison a look, and then turned back to DeVries. “That is a serious accusation,” she said. “Is it only a theory, or do you have some proof?”

Morrison seemingly couldn’t restrain herself. “How much proof do you
need
?”

“Some, as opposed to none,” Mercedes said dryly.

DeVries ticked his arguments off on his fingers. “It’s widely believed that the facility at Thorn Hill was being used to develop powerful magical weapons until something went wrong. Many of the survivors have accused wizards of somehow engineering the accident. The Weir murders began ten years ago—not long after the disaster, and have continued since sporadically. The killings have disproportionately targeted wizards.”

That doesn’t prove anything, Leesha thought. I got my braces off ten years ago, too, and it had nothing to do with Thorn Hill. Or the Weir killings.

“Maybe so,” Seph said. “But if these killings are being carried out in revenge for Thorn Hill, then why have some of the slain been Anawizard Weir? The killers seem to be very good at what they do. I can’t imagine that they would make that sort of mistake.”

Mercedes cleared her throat, fingering the bracelet on one bony wrist. “After the catastrophe in Brazil, there were some who believed that dispatching the survivors was the best solution. There were members of several guilds involved in so-called ‘mercy killings.’”

“Can labrats even read Weirstones?” Hackleford asked. “Does anyone really know?”

“That doesn’t really matter,” Leesha said. “We can’t go accusing
anyone
of a crime without witnesses.”

“That’s been difficult,” DeVries said, “since until recently, the killer or killers have left no witnesses alive. Indeed, that’s what we believed the last time we came before council. But now we know that’s not quite true.”

“If you’re talking about the preschoolers, we did interview them,” Leesha said. “So did the police. Many of their stories were so wildly different that we didn’t know what direction to take the investigation.”

“My Olivia was a witness,” Morrison said. “She has a very good memory. And when you and your friends were attacked, what you saw was consistent with her testimony. Down to that one particular labrat. Kinlock. It seems that whenever he shows up, the zombies are close behind.”

Unless it’s the other way around, Leesha thought.

DeVries looked as if he’d prefer to have a little less support from Morrison. “More important, it turns out that there
was
a witness to the slaughter in Cleveland Heights who survived,” he said. “Emma Greenwood.”

“Emma Greenwood?” Jack cocked his head. “Who’s that?”

“You know her as Emma Lee, but her name is actually Greenwood,” DeVries said. “She’s been living under an assumed name. She came here from Memphis, where she’s being sought for questioning in a murder.”

Murder!
The word blew through the sanctuary like gossip through a small town.

Leesha came to her feet then. “I don’t believe that,” she said, clenching her fists so the nails dug into her palms. “No way.”

DeVries ignored her. “The Cleveland Heights murders took place in her father’s house, and her father was one of those killed. Emma, however, survived, and again disappeared before the police arrived.”

“Something’s not right,” Fitch murmured, at Leesha’s elbow.

“Her father was one of the dead wizards?” Madison asked.

DeVries shook his head. “No,” he said shortly. “Sorcerer. Emma may or may not have been involved in the killings. But she was there, and so was Jonah Kinlock.”

“And you know this how?” Jack said, wearing that familiar skeptical expression.

“Emma told me,” DeVries said.

Leesha snorted. “Why would she confide in you?” she asked.

“If you’ll give me the chance to explain, I’ll—”

“Jonah went up against eight wizards all by himself?” Ellen’s voice was laced with a hint of admiration. Maybe envy.

“He may have had help,” DeVries said. “We just don’t know. But the more we are learning about these magical aberrations, the more we’re understanding how it is that they’ve been so successful at slaughtering us.”

“Is that where the zombies come in?” Morrison asked breathlessly.

Maybe it was the mention of zombies, but Leesha thought she heard something—what sounded like a stealthy footstep overhead. Once again, she peered at the church balcony, festooned with greenery and red satin bows. Saw nothing.

She leaned toward Fitch. “Did you hear somebody moving around upstairs?”

He shook his head. “This place makes a racket in the wind, though. All this talk about zombies doesn’t help.” He squeezed her hand. “You okay?”

Leesha nodded.

“Let’s back up,” Mercedes said. “I’m still hearing accusations, but I have yet to hear any evidence.” She shot a warning look at Morrison to prevent another outburst.

“It’s difficult to know where to start,” Hackleford said.

“Start with Halloween,” Madison said.

DeVries nodded. “That’s actually a good place. The night of the party, I went outside to get some air.”