Free The Enchanter Heir by Cinda Williams Chima Page B

couldn’t stand the awkward silence any longer, she said, “So? Now what?”
    Tyler twisted his napkin between his fingers. “First a question, Emma . . . did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
    “No,” Emma said. “You told me not to.”
    He nodded, looking relieved. “Good. That’s good.” He paused again. “Look, you’re welcome to stay with me. We can get you enrolled in school and all, see how it goes.” When She made a face, he said, “Aw, come on, it won’t be that bad.”
    Emma thought about it. It wasn’t like she had a lot of choices. It could be risky, moving in with a stranger, but she’d chance it if it kept her off the streets and out of foster care. No law said she had to stay if he turned out to be crazy dangerous.
    “You’d have your own room,” Tyler persisted. “We can fix it up, any way you like.”
    He really wants this, Emma thought, scarcely able to believe it. After all this time.
    “The thing is—I’m used to doing pretty much what I want,” she said. “Coming and going as I please. Sonny Lee didn’t nanny me much. I don’t want to move in and have you all of a sudden setting up rules and curfews.”
    “If you live at my house, you’ll go to school,” Tyler said. “These days, you can’t make a living without schooling. No drinking, no drugs, no friends in the house when I’m not there. No staying out all night when I don’t know where you are. Most everything else, we can talk about.”
    “Sounds like a lot of rules,” Emma observed.
    “Well. You don’t have to sign anything,” Tyler said. “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
    “Is there a place for a woodshop?”
    “A woodshop?” Tyler raised his eyebrows.
    This is my father, and he knows nothing about me, Emma thought.
    “I rescued some things from Sonny Lee’s shop on my way out of town. Things he left to me. They’re big tools—that take a lot of space. If you got a place to put them, it’s a deal.”

Chapter Eight

Teach
    The sun was just breaking over the horizon when Jonah arrived at the fitness center. It was new—a state-of-theart facility with glass walls overlooking the lake, funded by the Anchorage Foundation. The adaptive equipment and tailored exercise programs received considerable media attention. Medical personnel came from all over the world to learn from the Anchorage experience.
    Hidden under the skin of the Anchorage was another school—an academy to train Nightshade assassins in the specialized skills needed for their work as shadeslayers.
    It wasn’t all assassination, of course. Operations also needed healers, weapons designers and fabricators, intelligence and tech experts. Savants interested in joining Nightshade trained under Gabriel’s lieutenants—shadeslayers expert at evaluating gifts and determining their usefulness to the cause.
    Slayers were at a natural disadvantage when it came to fighting shades. Shades never hesitated to risk their borrowed bodies in a fight, since they felt no pain and could simply
    Smove into another body if the old one suffered heavy damage. Shadeslayers didn’t have that option. So considerable time was spent on weapons training and weaponless fighting techniques. All slayers were expected to schedule time in the gym . . . even those who, like Jonah, got plenty of practice in the field.
    Jonah’s physical gifts and fighting experience made it difficult to match him with an appropriate sparring partner. Alison came closest, and he sparred with her at least once a week. Charlie, when he was in town. Since those two weren’t always available, Gabriel had hit on the strategy of matching Jonah against entire packs of slayers-in-training.
    Jonah’s sparring sessions were closed to the public.
    On his way to the gym, Jonah stopped in the armory and selected an array of shivs and cutting blades.
    As he left the armory, he looked up at the board. Today it was a group of nine who had been training together. They must be getting