Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder #1) - Ilona Andrews Page 0,1

offices with thick walls, strong doors, and narrow windows guarded by steel bars. The soft yellow glow of electric lights fought with the gloom. The magic was down now. If it had been up, some of the grates on the windows would shine with silver and the blue radiance of fey lanterns would replace the electric bulbs.

The city looked the same as when I left it. It felt the same too, dangerous, indifferent, watchful, yet somehow still achingly familiar. Home, despite all the years I’d been gone. I’d been almost eighteen when I left. I was twenty-six now. It felt like a lifetime ago.

I never meant to be gone this long, and this wasn’t how I wanted to come back to Atlanta. My biological family was dead, but my found family was alive and well, and they’d wanted me back for a long time. In my mind, I would’ve called ahead, and they would meet me at the ley line, mob me, hug me, and we would all go home. That was the original plan.

But if I went home now, I’d be signing their death warrants. I had to stay off the radar, and I couldn’t afford to be recognized.

Not that I would be recognized. When most people came home after a long absence, their family said things like “You lost weight” and “Is that a new hair cut?” If I went home, my family would ask, “Who the hell are you?” Nothing about me was the same. Not my body, not my face, not my voice, or my scent.

A hint of movement on the left jerked me right out of my memories and into the present.

I was several blocks deep into a deserted street. On the left, a ruined heap of a building crouched, still steeped in night shadows. On the right, a wall rose, new construction, solid, thick, and topped with razor wire. Ahead, the street ended, as if sheared with a giant’s knife. A chasm gaped, dropping a full fifty feet down below, about a third of a mile across.

The chasm was new, but not surprising. Magic waves didn’t just birth monsters; they produced new rivers, raised hills, and split the ground. Atlanta had dealt with the chasm, as was evidenced by a single-lane wooden bridge spanning it.

The bridge wasn’t the issue. The three shapeshifters that moved out of the shadows to block it were.

There was absolutely no reason for a Pack patrol to be here at this hour. Their territory was all the way on the other side of the city. The timing wasn’t right either, just before dawn, when they should’ve been returning to the Keep, to perform their morning meditation and curl up for a nap like well-behaved monsters. Yet here they were, dressed in matching Pack sweats and blocking my way.

Atlanta was a bitch of a city.

All three were male and young and showed no intention of moving out of my way. The itty-bitty welcoming committee.

“Hi there!” I called. “I need to get on this bridge.”

The middle of the shapeshifters, who looked about twenty, tan, with longish dark hair, smiled at me. “Password?”

Aren’t you cute? “Why do I need a password? Is this bridge in the Pack’s territory?”

“That’s not important,” the leader said. “What’s important is that there are three of us and one of you.”

Well, look who learned to count.

“If you want to cross the bridge, you have to give us the password,” the shapeshifter said. “If you don’t know it, you’ll have to pay the fine.”

The smaller shapeshifter on his right grinned and let out an eerie cackle. Boudas. Of course.

Boudas, the werehyenas, belonged to one of the smaller of the Pack’s seven clans. There weren’t many of them, but they were dangerous and utterly nuts. Wolves, jackals, rats, all of them could be reasoned with. Boudas did things like climb into a captive polar bear’s enclosure and tickle it with their claws to see what would happen.

Fine. I’d go around.

I tensed my right leg a fraction. Tulip turned, more anticipating the command rather than obeying it, the sound of her hooves clopping on the pavement too loud in the night. Two more shapeshifters stepped out of the shadows, blocking my exit.

Right. The story of my life.

“Did I say three?” the bouda called out. “I meant five.”

A normal Pack patrol had two shapeshifters, three if it was on the border with the People, because necromancers made a dangerous enemy. Five shapeshifters meant a strike team. They had run some sort of