“For fuck’s sake, Kit, they’re not there.” Mary’s voice was sharp as a whip when he once again checked the streets for Benny and the others. “Don’t you trust that we’re not complete idiots?”
Kit bit back a response, his mind racing as he tried to remember exactly where Nona had stopped the bus a few days before. Which street had he seen them turn down? Although he was certain it’d been to the left, he couldn’t help but wonder if it’d been the right.
“You talked to all the shop owners?” he checked again. “What about homeowners?”
“The shop owners, yes. The homeowners won’t open up no matter how much we knock,” his foster sister said testily, “this is mostly a magic-less neighborhood. Unless we want to point the enforcers in their direction, we’ll get nowhere.”
“Do you think the magic-less have something to do with this?” Before, he never would’ve thought the magic-less capable of kidnapping a trained witch child. But then he met Gentry.
“I highly doubt it. Nona made sure all the kids knew defense magic, Kit. They also sure as hell wouldn’t trust a stranger within ten feet of them. They knew better.”
Kit stopped his mindless walking for a moment and looked at his foster sister. Mary was a tall, robust woman with dusky skin and beautiful curly hair. She was looking down at her cell rather than at him, most likely because she was directing their other siblings where to search next. That was Mary, she’d always been the leader of their cohort, much like Benny was for the little ones.
Kit had used to resent her for her bossiness, hadn’t liked that she and the other kids were so forgiving of Nona dropping them off at Skadra without so much as a warning. They’d been the first generation of Sophia’s orphanage, and Nona hadn’t quite known what she had been doing back then.
For example, she’d separated Kit from his older, magic-less sister, hadn’t given them a way to stay in contact with each other after they’d been left at Skadra. Breanne had stayed behind at Nona’s orphanage.
It’d been a betrayal that had made Kit furious beyond belief. He’d alienated himself from the others as he’d struck up his own path in Skadra, fighting and doing dangerous jobs that would’ve given Nona a heart attack had she known what he was up to.
Unlike Mary and the others, he hadn’t wanted to join a coven for a better life. Rather, he’d been desperately trying to gather up money so he could leave Skadra and get back to Breanne.
That was how he’d fallen in with Visha. The Jumpers had been hiring out some dangerous jobs and he’d been desperate. After they’d gotten to know each other, Visha had provided Kit with a phone — his one lifeline to his sister. But then it’d been too late. Breanne had chosen to be adopted by a magic-less family who could offer more stability than Nona could.
Her new parents hadn’t approved of their talking together, and slowly, Breanne had responded less and less. It’d been a painful way to lose his one connection to his birth family.
It had made him resentful of his foster siblings and so Kit had chosen to withdraw and integrate into the Jumpers. A choice he sorely regretted.
“I have no clue how the enforcers haven’t found anything yet,” Mary said, pulling him out of his thoughts, “they take kidnapping very seriously.”
Kit frowned. The enforcers served under the Weavers, and their job was to uphold Skadra’s law. One of their most important duties was making sure the witchlings were protected from threats like this. In fact, Kit had never heard of a crime against a child going unpunished in Skadra, let alone children going missing.
“We should start checking the Underground,” he told Mary, “it’s the only place the enforcers have a hard time with.” It had so many tunnels and secret passageways that only the vamps seemed to know all its secrets.
“On it, telling everyone else”—Mary’s fingers flew before she looked up at Kit and gave him a watery smile—“we’ll find them, Kit. Thanks for helping.”
The acknowledgement threw him off balance, but he recovered and nodded. This wasn’t the way he’d wanted to reconnect with his siblings, but it warmed something within him to see that the relationship could be salvaged. In hindsight, Visha had fanned the flames of his anger towards Nona and the others, but it’d been him to make the choice to cut them off. At the end of the day, it wasn’t their fault Breanne had chosen her magic-less family over him. He wondered if Nona had been trying to protect him from that rejection by not letting them talk.
Mary levitated a manhole cover upwards, and Kit was the first one to go down in the darkness.
If it took years, he’d somehow make it up to his family. But first he had to save the kids.
thirty-two
Gentry
For once, Gentry wasn’t sure whether she was glad that she had internet because there wasn’t a single useful thing she could think to look up.
All she had was her father’s notes, which weren’t terribly helpful. They had names and events that she couldn’t verify online no matter how hard she tried. On the backs of her family’s pictures, he told fantastical, halfway-there stories about a witch named Lydia, who he claimed was from the extinct coven the Cobalts. She was the soul seamstress, the one who murdered all the girls they’d tried to pair to Drayer Netherton. It was interesting information, but not useful.
A search through the apartment yielded no other written documents, no further clues, but every little bit of her father she saw in his sparse belongings made her heart twinge with grief. His coffee mugs, shirts, and ways of organizing his many identities remained unchanged. It was almost as if he’d just been waiting for her to show back up in his life. A lifetime of regret hung around her as Gentry debated what to do next.
Her dad’s notes weren’t terribly reliable; at one point, he referred to Drayer as a ‘good boy’. Perhaps his mind had been more fried from the memory manipulation spells than she thought.
Regardless, if Clea’s necromancer didn’t work out, Gentry would need the necromancer bones Lydia had used to sew her to the politician, but she had no cluewhereto find her.
What was the point of someone having a name if it wasn’t plastered online for Gentry to study?
That was the question she wrestled with as she wasted twelve straight hours on trying to glean something useful from her father’s notes. Her laptop fans whirled in protest from the number of tabs she had open.
