The Enchanter Heir

“Oh. No.”

“How old was he?”

“All I saw was his eyes.”

“If you had to guess.”

“From his voice, I’d say he was younger rather than older. Teens or twenties.”

“Are any of these people familiar?” Rowan had his own array of photographs stored in his phone, the same people the other wizards had shown her. “I don’t recognize any of them.” She handed the phone back.

“How about this one?”

It was a photograph of a girl with chestnut hair in a tennis outfit. The resemblance between her and Rowan was striking. It pinged something in Emma’s memory.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Is that your sister?”

“Yes,” he said, putting the phone away. “What can you tell me about Tyler?”

“I don’t really know him that well.”

“He’s your father, right?” Rowan said, raising an eyebrow.

“I just came to live with him a few months ago.”

“Where were you before that?”

“I lived with my grandfather in Memphis. After he died, I came here.”

And then Emma could have sworn that Rowan did the flicker-eye thing. The lying thing. He looked down at his hands. Then back up at Emma. “So. Since you’ve been living with Tyler, have you seen people coming and going? Meetings at the house? Did he seem to be involved in any kind of . . . conspiracy?”

“No. Nobody ever came over. He didn’t seem to have any friends. He was pretty much a homebody, except when he went out for gigs.”

“Gigs?”

“He plays—played—bass guitar in a band.”

“Did you ever see him work with chemicals, plants, poisons, magical devices?”

“No, never.”

“He was a sorcerer.” It was a half question.

“That’s what I’m told. But I never saw any sign of it.”

“How about you? Are you a sorcerer as well?”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t know what I am. Maybe nothing. Tyler said I was gifted, but that was the first I heard about it.”

Rowan seemed to have run out of questions temporarily. Closing his eyes, he rubbed his forehead, looking about as weary and heartsick as Emma felt. “What happens now?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.

“We’ll keep trying, Emma, until you remember more.”

“And if I don’t?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I want the truth, Emma. Nothing more and nothing less.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “Will you tell me the truth, then?”

His eyes narrowed. “It depends on the question.”

“If you can’t tell me the truth, tell me nothing at all,” she said. “I can’t stand a liar. How did they die? My father and the others?”

He shifted his gaze away. “Do you really want the details? I mean—we don’t have to—”

“I’m not like other people,” Emma said. “I’ve been told that all my life. And I want to know how my father died.”

“Very well, if you insist,” Rowan said. “Greenwood— your father—had a deep cutting wound to the thigh. He had some . . . he was burned, and he’d been cut by broken glass, but what killed him must have been blood loss.”

“And the others?”

“Two of the dead, including my sister, were badly cut up, too. Stabbed and slashed. One was shot. The others didn’t have a mark on them. We’ve seen that before. So we’ve been thinking there were several attackers, using different weapons.”

“Did you call the police?” By now, Emma was fairly certain he hadn’t. “Did you even do an autopsy?”

Rowan rolled his eyes, as if Emma were a hopeless case. “That would be a colossal waste of time.”

“Really? Maybe you could use the help. You don’t seem to be doing such a great job on your own.” Emma’s anger was bubbling to the surface again, despite her efforts to contain it. “Tell me this,” she said. “What were your sister and those others doing at my house? I assume they weren’t looking to book a gig.”

Rowan chewed on his lower lip a moment, as if debating how much to say. “We’ve been looking for people with a connection to Thorn Hill. We think there’s a connection between what happened there and a series of murders going on now. Including the killing of my sister and your father.”

Chapter Thirty

Ask Me No Questions

“Thorn Hill?” Emma asked, playing dumb.

“It was a Weir terrorist camp in Brazil. All of the underguilds were involved, to a degree, but it was mostly sorcerers. They flocked their to work in secret on weapons they could use against the Wizard Guild.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Emma blurted, recalling what Tyler had said. “And not what I remember.”

Rowan’s eyes widened in surprise. “You were there?”

Brasilia. Memory poured over her. The scent of jasmine and four o’clocks in the gathering dusk. Emma and her mother, riding in a Jeep on a rutted country road, hitting bumps at full speed and flying through the air. Emma shrieking with laughter. Go faster, Mommy.

Of course, as a five-year-old, she had no way of telling what else went on there.

With that, Emma’s beaten-down memory struggled back to life, surfacing a scrap of conversation she’d had with Tyler. About her mother.

She was working for Mr. DeVries at the time.

Mr. DeVries? Who’s that?

Somebody you never want to meet. A wizard.

That was why the name DeVries was familiar. Rowan’s father was the wizard her mother had worked for. The one she was frightened of. The one she fled to Brazil to get away from.

“Emma?”

Emma looked up to find Rowan DeVries staring at her. “What is it?” he said, leaning toward her, his hands on his knees. “What do you remember?”

“I was there. When I was little.”

“And? ”

Two impulses warred within her. Her first impulse was to withhold as much information as possible. But she realized that this might be an opportunity to learn more about her mother.

“Tyler told me that my mother used to work for your father,” Emma said finally.

“Did she?” He didn’t seem surprised.

“And she ran away to Thorn Hill to get away from him.”

“That’s certainly possible,” Rowan said, nodding. “So?”

“Is it true that she used to make poisons?” Emma knew that she was taking a risk, poking and prodding, digging up the truth about her mother. If your mother is dead, and if nobody will tell you a thing about her, you can make up whatever kind of mother you want. But she wasn’t interested in made-up mothers. Emma was a person who liked to take the truth by the throat and shake it. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was a liar.