Midnight's Son (Darkling Mage 5)

I threw my hands up, narrowly knocking over my beer. “What does that even have to do with anything?”

Herald cleared his throat and gingerly repositioned the bottle on a coaster before continuing.

“The current theory is that you act as a sort of homing beacon for the Eldest. Your powers are tied to them, after all. They’d considered the possibility that Vanitas himself might be attracting the Eldest’s attention, but that’s been thrown out. You didn’t have him with you at the barbecue, did you?”

I shook my head. “But that still doesn’t make sense. How are the shrikes finding me, then? Why are the rifts zooming in on my location?”

Herald bent even closer across the table, then pressed one finger against my chest. “Your heart, Dust. When Thea stabbed you, when she sacrificed you? The tip of the dagger was left there. A shard of star-metal is lodged in your heart.”

I stared at his finger, too stunned to speak, to notice anything apart from the fact that his nail was trimmed at perfectly squared angles, and buffed to an inhuman sheen. He pulled his hand back, his fingers curling into a fist.

“Or at least that’s what the Lorica believes. It’s a sound enough theory. The star-metal weapons serve different purposes, after all. Vanitas was clearly human once, his soul absorbed into the sword when he died. You told me that Carver used his own star-metal dagger to offer sacrifices to the Eldest. It’s not so far-fetched to assume that Thea’s dagger had its own specific use.”

My mouth opened and closed as I searched for the right words. “So you’re saying – I’m a tether? The way entities have anchors in our reality. I’m the tether for the Eldest?”

Herald nodded. “That’s what they think.”

I narrowed my gaze. “I feel like you could have told me about this earlier.”

“I would have – and you know I would have – but this is a very recent development. Very, very recent. The Scions only truly made the decision tonight. That doesn’t happen. It looks like they’re finally acknowledging that Valero is in a state of emergency because of the rifts.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So that’s why they want me dead.”

Herald sighed. “I’m sorry, Dust. I don’t know what else to say. All we can do is try to protect you.”

And by we, he meant our other friends at the Lorica. My escape route had been sketched out from the start. Royce had picked up hints of the plan to eliminate me from the other Scions. That was why he was trying to warn me. Who knows why he felt the need to help me after everything I’d done, but I wanted to think that despite his methods, his commitment to brutality, that Royce still believed in one of the Lorica’s most fundamental tenets: justice.

I’d already texted the boys of the Boneyard that I was safe. We had a running group chat, and Asher was relieved to hear that I was okay. Apparently I’d missed an especially epic fist fight.

Gil had used his superior senses and werewolf reflexes to dodge Royce’s surprise teleport attacks in ways that I never could. It had ended in a stalemate, shortly after Royce started explaining why he’d whisked me away – and shortly before the rest of the Lorica’s Wings started showing up, alerted to the Viridian Dawn fire.

Herald was actually in the middle of casting wards around his apartment when I shadowstepped into his kitchen. He didn’t want the Eyes finding me, clearly, plus it could have been especially risky since Parkway Heights was an entire apartment building filled almost exclusively with residents who also happened to be Lorica employees. Going straight to Herald’s was like walking into a lion’s den, but it made sense for me to hide in plain sight. The Lorica would never think to look for me there.

And just as I thought it, there came a knock on the door. I froze in place, my hand gripping around my half-empty beer. Herald smiled at me tightly, patting me on the back of the hand.

“Relax,” he said. “It’s just Prudence and the others.”

The others?

“Don’t freak out,” Herald said. He reached for my beer, the sides of the bottle coating in frost where he touched it. “Just chill. Drink this. You’ll be fine.”

I looked between him and the beer, wondering how I could possibly relax when he was being so ominous about this, and kept staring as he opened the door. I steeled myself, ready to shadowstep – but it was just Prudence and Bastion, followed closely by Romira.

Bastion lifted the plastic bags he was clutching. “Takeout,” he said. “You like Thai, don’t you, Dust?”

“Um. Sure.” I noticed that they hadn’t closed the door yet. “Why is everyone here, exactly?”

“It’s okay, Dusty,” Romira cooed, slipping into the chair next to me as she cleared the table for the food. “We’re just here to talk. We’re here to protect you.”

“Literally, in a sense,” a voice said from the doorway, one I hadn’t heard in ages.

Odessa stepped into the apartment, shutting the door behind her with pale, delicate fingers. She dressed very simply, but in a way that I still always found so stylish: a bare smock with lace accents, very sparse makeup, her hair cut in blunt bangs and falling straight past her shoulders.

Truly, she wouldn’t have looked out of place somewhere fashionable goths would hang out, say, Harajuku, or maybe a concert, wearing a style that seemed to be favored by waifish teenage girls with a taste for the dark side. Like Royce, Odessa’s dress sense acted as a smokescreen for her personality and her power, because like Royce, Odessa was also a Scion, among the Lorica’s most powerful and most fearsome mages.

After having so many run-ins with Royce – and, well, actually stabbing him in the leg – I thought that I’d already gotten over my irrational fear of Scions. But there was always something different about Odessa.

Part of it was that open secret about how she had extended her lifespan, the fact that I knew she was centuries old, but