The Enchanter Heir

According to the online city directory, Boykin lived alone.

Gabriel’s rule was: no witnesses. So Nightshade operations would never be tied to the Anchorage. Maybe that didn’t really matter anymore, but still . . . old habits die hard.

Jonah pulled out the close-fitting black ski mask he’d brought along and yanked it down over his face. He didn’t want to have to kill Tyler Boykin if he were an innocent man.

For an innocent man, Boykin had a top-of-the-line security system.

Jonah entered through a basement window. After a quick visual check, he slid through, feetfirst, twisting to force his shoulders through the narrow opening. He landed in near darkness, in a fighting stance, breathing in the scent of mold and old paper, fresh sawdust and shellac. Then pulled his sword in after him.

The light from the window dimly illuminated the room he was in. It was a woodshop, with a workbench at one end, a Peg-Board with tools hung in neat rows. Wood shavings littered the floor, and sawdust coated everything. Jonah fought back a sneeze.

Large table-mounted tools lined one wall. Jonah didn’t know much about woodworking, but he recognized the lathe and the band saw. Lengths of fine woods hung in racks along the wall or stood in bins by the door. Was this Studio Greenwood’s new digs?

Light seeped under a door to his right, and muted sound. Somebody was working late in the basement.

Jonah soft-footed it to the door and cracked it open, noticing the thick padding on the inside. His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword as he eased the door open and peered in.

It wasn’t Tyler Boykin at all. It was a girl. She sat on a tall stool, half turned away from him, head bent over her work, so he couldn’t see her face. She was tuning a guitar, swearing under her breath. Her hair was the color of scorched caramel, thick and wavy, tied back with a bandanna, her skin three shades lighter. She wore stained jeans, work boots, and a plaid flannel shirt two sizes too big.

Jonah searched for a Weirstone and found one, but his read on it had the muddled, diffuse quality he associated with savants.

A savant? Here? This wasn’t in the script.

Three unfinished guitars stood in stands, glued and clamped up. Posters of old blues singers lined the walls.

Her flat-top acoustic, he could see, had a sound-hole preamp installed. It was feeding into a mixer and then into a laptop on her workbench. What kind of guitar was it? The letters SG were blazoned on the fingerboard. He didn’t recognize the brand.

The girl twisted the tuning keys, plucked at the strings. Out of tune. Angry, discordant notes struck Jonah’s ears, nearly bringing him to his knees. His stomach churned, and he thought his head would split open. Another quick adjustment, and the notes that now cascaded from the instrument were perfectly in tune. Aligned like stars in a perfect universe.

She leaned forward, reaching for a flat pick on the workbench, and Jonah got his first good look at her face.

Her profile was less than classic: high cheekbones, her nose a bit overlarge for the rest of her face, lush lips, bottomless brown eyes. She was beautiful, and yet there was something feral about her, something enchantingly off-key. Hardwired wild.

Recognition flamed through him. He’d seen her before . . . but where?

And then it came to him. She was Emma, the pool-shark savant from Club Catastrophe. But what was she doing in Tyler Greenwood’s basement? Did she work for him? Had the sorcerer sent her to Club Catastrophe for a reason?

She began to play, bending her head over the fingerboard, eyes closed, silently moving her lips the way guitarists sometimes do. In that instant, Jonah was lost.

He had never heard music like this. It sluiced over him, carrying away every troubled thought, filling his heart with hope and joy. He forgot everything: the sorcerer upstairs, the mission, his own imperfection, and the shame and bitterness that came with it. Jonah listened, the music dripping into him like a mainline drug, until the song was over.

He rested his forehead against the doorframe. He wished he could leave her be. There was no need for this girl— whoever she was—to be involved in what was about to happen. With any luck, between the soundproofing and her own music, he could escape without her hearing a thing.

But leaving now would violate a cardinal rule of these operations: Secure the premises first. Avoid any nasty surprises.

Jonah took a breath. Let it out.

And pushed the door open, all the way.

Chapter Twenty-one

After Midnight

Emma heard her father’s step on the stairs. “Are you down here again, Emma?”

“I never left,” she said. “I’ll come up pretty soon. I need to let these set up a bit anyway.” She surveyed the guitars, lined up in stands against the wall—the first she’d produced in her new shop. They weren’t really guitars, yet—just tops and bottoms of maple and spruce, bookmatched and joined, then glued up and clamped. They didn’t have their songs in them yet, as Sonny Lee liked to say. Used to say.

“You do beautiful work,” Tyler said, now from the foot of the stairs. “And you have a great hand with the guitar. Your grandpa would be proud of you.”

“He was proud of me,” Emma said. This is the first thing— the only thing—I’ve ever been good at.

Tyler sat down on the third step, dropping his hands between his knees as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them. Emma knew she still made him nervous, but she just wasn’t sure what to do about it. “Didn’t you say you had some algebra homework?” he said finally.

“Come on, now, it’s Friday night.” Forcing away the mem ory of other Friday nights, Emma lifted the Oscar Schmidt Galiano twelve-string from its stand, and propped a foot on Sonny Lee’s stool. She brushed her fingers over the steel strings, and they harmonized—bold, bright, and brassy like a church choir.

Her fingers found the familiar chords of “Don’t You Lie to Me.” At least she could play the blues—the appropriate sound track for her life right now. All she had to look forward to was month after month of failure.

It just seems like there ought to be a place I fit into, where I can be myself.

She needed a world without so many standards and restrictions and expectations—one more friendly to a girl who thought differently from other people. I need a world with a frontier, Emma thought. A wilderness I can go to, when I need it.

For a while, that frontier had been Memphis. It was a world she fit into, cradled by the call and response of twelvebar blues. But it had turned out to be a world with no future. “Emma,” Tyler said, bringing her back to now. “Algebra?”

“I’m sorry,” Emma whispered. “I could give up all my Friday nights to algebra, but I don’t know that it would make a difference. It’s just gibberish to me. You’ve put a lot of time in, and I have, and it seems like I work harder than anybody else, but—”

“No,” her father said. “I’m sorry. When you’re young, you don’t think about anybody but yourself. You think the usual rules don’t apply to you. You do things that you regret for the rest of your life. Your mama and I . . . we . . .” And then he stopped, as he always did, never quite finishing the apology.

He’s not talking about me, Emma thought. He’s talking about himself. Was he sorry he’d turned his only child over to Sonny Lee for raising? Because now the two of them were all but strangers. Maybe if she’d had a more regular kind of childhood, she wouldn’t feel like a fish out of water all the time.

Tyler stood. “All right, Emma, I’ll leave you be. I need to get some practice in for tomorrow night. But don’t stay up too late, even if it’s Friday night. Get some sleep, and tomorrow, I want you to at least give that homework