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

you can never go home again, but I think that’s more for poetic value. That or it should be changed to “you really shouldn’t go home again” which applied a lot harder in my case.
    Our home was a three-bedroom log cabin and the kitchen and bathroom were about the only thing that had been updated since the seventies. The eighteen seventies. The walls were logs and decorated with woven blankets that had been here when I was a kid. The couch was different; our old one had been dark blue, but this had the same heavy Victorian style that looked opulent and sucked to sit on. I chose a handcrafted kitchen chair instead.
    “Who was my father?” I asked. No point in small talk. I didn’t care how they were doing. Besides, I could see how that conversation would go. Hi, how are you? Oh, in danger of being horribly killed, and yourself? Yeah. No.
    “Is she really my sister?” Emerald said.
    “Go to your room, Em,” Jasper told her.
    “Why? Who is she? She’s not Crow.”
    “No,” I said, forming a small ball of purple fire in one palm, “I’m something much, much cooler.” It was more prestidigitation than real magic, but flashy. The stress was getting to me and I felt the need to be petty and push back a little. To remind these people I wasn’t just a kid anymore.
    “Shit,” Em said, her green eyes going wide.
    “Em, language! Jade, please,” Pearl said in a perfect “cut it out” mother voice.
    “Let the kid stay. She should learn how fucked up we really are, eh?” I looked at Em and offered her a wry smile. She couldn’t have been much older than fourteen or fifteen, but I wasn’t sure if she had changed yet, had found her inner shifter animal. Just because her parents were crow shifters didn’t mean she would be. I hoped for her sake that she was.
    Em flopped down onto the couch and gave her parents a stubborn look. Jasper sighed, and Pearl sank down onto one of the other kitchen chairs. Their movements had the feel of habit, of set pieces shifting on a stage.
    “He gave his name as Ash. He was maybe Shoshone or Blackfoot,” Pearl said, wiping her hands on her sundress and leaving sweaty streaks behind on the green cotton. “I don’t have answers for you, Jade. I’m sorry.”
    Sorry? Fuck this. I rose from my chair and paced the short distance to the kitchen window. The view was as I remembered, too, from all those evenings doing dishes standing in this very spot. My life seemed layered onto itself, past and present swirling into an unreality. I had never thought to be back here, so I’d never mentally prepared for this moment. I turned back to them.
    “You just ran off, slept with some random Indian dude, and then came home?”
    “I was confused, lost, and he gave me a lift. It was a strange time for me, after Ruby died.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know I was pregnant until Sky Heart brought me back. I had no way to contact your father anyway, and I hoped, well…” She trailed off. It was clear what she had hoped. She had hoped I was a crow shifter, not whatever my father had been.
    “He was a sorcerer?” I asked. It wasn’t like there were a lot of sorcerers in the world. We tended to kill each other off, or get hunted down and killed by other people. Gaining power by eating the hearts of other magic users doesn’t exactly make us a popular bunch.
    She nodded. “He could do things, like light a fire with just his will. No words, no rituals. He was… special.” The wistfulness in her face was there and gone again like a shooting star, but I didn’t think I’d imagined it.
    For a long moment, no one spoke. Em stared at her sneakers, chewing on her lower lip. Jasper slipped his hand into Pearl’s and she pressed imagined creases out of her dress, not meeting my eye.
    What was there to say? So Jasper wasn’t my dad. Oh well. He hadn’t been my dad for over thirty years. This family wasn’t mine anymore; they’d given up that claim pretty spectacularly by kicking me out and