Murder of Crows (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Samir. He was a big slab of a man with red-brown skin, and light blue eyes that were his namesake. His black hair was down to his knees, woven through with crow feathers and brightly colored threads until it looked more like a Plain’s Indian headdress than a man’s hair. He wore a western style shirt with mother of pearl buttons and jeans with cowboy boots and had the physical and charismatic presence of John Wayne and Charles Manson all rolled into one.
    Alek held up one hand and made sure his silver feather necklace was visible. “I am a Justice of the Council of Nine,” he said in a tone I remembered from the time we met and he accused me of being a murderer. It’s not a tone you want directed at you, that’s for damn certain. “I am here to investigate the murders of your people.”
    “And her?” Sky Heart swung the gun toward me and I think I burned a couple permanent willpower points not blasting him off his feet.
    “Hello, Granddad,” I said instead. Technically he wasn’t my grandfather, something I hadn’t known until Jasper did the whole reverse Darth Vader thing on me, but it still felt satisfying to see Sky Heart’s face tense and then squeeze into an unattractive expression of disgust.
    “You are an exile,” he said.
    “She’s with me,” Alek said at the same time. “We have questions for you, if you’d prefer to answer them inside.” He motioned at the house after casting a pointed glance around at the growing crowd.
    “You, I will talk to,” Sky Heart said. “Not her.”
    “It’s fine,” I said to Alek. “I’ll talk to people out here.”
    He looked unhappy about it, but nodded, seeing the logic, and followed the already retreating Sky Heart into the house. The people around us started moving again, and a hum of low conversation buzzed in my ears, the words blending together but the sounds giving off impressions of hope and fear mixing like oil and water.
    “Go on, all of you,” my mother said to the crowd, making a shooing motion with her hands. “You’ve got better things to do than gawk.”
    I recognized my two cousins standing near Jasper, John and Connor. The infamous two who had led me into an abandoned mine when I was very small and left me there, lost and alone. I’d gotten Wolf out of the deal, so it wasn’t all bad. They looked like men now, not the gangly boys they had been when I had left. They didn’t meet my gaze, turning away at Pearl’s shooing, and fading back into the trees with most of the rest of the People.
    One girl didn’t. She hovered at the edge of the nearest pole barn, her face somehow familiar to me even though she couldn’t have been older than her early teens. Shifters can live for hundreds of years, but until about twenty or so, they age at the same pace as humans. The girl had chin length black hair and deep green eyes, the only anomaly on her otherwise perfectly Native American face. Her lips were wide, her nose straight, her cheekbones high and sharp.
    She looked a bit, well, like me.
    “Fuck,” I muttered. I looked at Pearl. “Tell me that’s not your daughter?”
    Pearl stepped forward, her dark eyes inscrutable. “Emerald,” she said, waving at the girl, “come meet your sister.”
    In the last two days I’d learned that my father wasn’t my father and now I had a sister. Awesomesauce. And someone was kind of literally decimating these people. Double awesomesauce.
    “I’m Jade,” I said.
    “She’s not my sister,” said Emerald, who was clearly the latest victim of our family’s rock-centric naming scheme.
    “Half, I guess,” I said, dishing out a glare for Jasper.
    “You told her?” Pearl said, her lips pressing into a line.
    “She needed to know. Where have the lies gotten us?”
    “Yeah, about that,” I said.
    “Not here.” Pearl turned and walked away.
    Emerald gave me a searing once over with all the scorn a teenager could muster, and stomped after our mother.
    I had little choice but to follow.
    They say