Blood & Magic by George Barlow Page B

childbirth and, in that moment of pain, he created an escape plan for you. He had a mentalist change your parents memories so they thought you were theirs, after finding a couple who were looking to adopt. Mark has been killed, I don't know how yet, but at that moment your abilities switched on. I'm sorry kid.”
    There was so much to take in, too much. How he was supposed to react, Henry had no clue. His world had been tipped upside down again and again, and, rather than ending the right way up, everything just ended in chaos.
    “You said his name was Mark?” Henry said.
    “Yes, and I am proud to say we were close friends. Hence why he sent me to help you,” Gabriel said.
    “With a gun pointed at me?”
    “What other choice did I have, I couldn't exactly lay it all out, could I? You would be dead if I had not caught you when I did, we only had moments.”
    “Henry, did you not ever question why you just went along with everything Gabriel said?” Sabrina said. “You ended up trying to carry the man who kidnapped you through a sewer, so he wouldn't get killed. Something about him you trusted. You're an Ink and they do that genetic memory stuff well enough. Gabriel and Mark were friends. Then they spent a long time working with each other, and you recognised him somewhere from those memories, your subconscious telling you he was a friend, not a foe.”
    “How do you know all that?” Henry said.
    “Oh, gave too much a way didn't I,” Sabrina paused as a guilty smile tugged at her lips. “While you have been off your face on
my
best wine, I've done a little perusing of your thoughts. I have never seen into an Ink's memories before, interesting stuff. You should teach him how to block that Gabriel.”
    She smiled, but Gabriel was not so cheerful. His face had gone red, his eyes focused intently on her. He threw his glass onto the floor, smashing it into pieces that flew off under the surrounding tables.
    “You did what?” Gabriel shouted.
    He could barely contain the anger, his fist trembling by his side. Gabriel took the gun from inside his pocket and fired twice. Sabrina slumped to the floor.
    “Gabriel, what the hell?” Henry said, kneeling down beside Sabrina.
    “She isn't dead. They don't die that easily, at least not the good ones anyway. Well, you know what I mean, good at their abilities, not as in Sunday school good,” Gabriel said.
    Gabriel walked back to the hallway and didn't turn back, even to see if Henry was following. He wasn't for a moment, still knelt beside Sabrina, until it struck him that if she did wake up having been shot twice, she would probably be in a foul mood. Best to stick with Gabriel.
    Henry caught up with him in the hallway, which was not how he remembered it. The walls were made of metal that had rusted, the whole place on the verge of collapse, with doors standing where the paintings had been.
    “Can you warn me when you do that in the future?” Henry said.
    “Sure.”
    “You know which one we want?”
    “Whichever one has been used most frequently, should take us somewhere fairly safe. Others could be traps I suppose, we'd want to avoid those.”
    Gabriel bent down to examine around the doors, which Henry imagined was to try and see any marks that would suggest frequent use. The problem was really a lot simpler than that.
    “These doors are quite heavy to open, right? Then shouldn't you be looking at the floor and not the doors?” Henry said.
    “The floor? I don't know if you noticed, but there is a lip around the door. It would never touch the floor,” Gabriel said.
    “I did, thanks, but Sabrina is a prostitute right? Well, just going by popular culture references, prostitutes don't wear flats and this floor is wooden.”
    Henry crouched down around the bottom of the door closest him and then moved on to the next, “See, people are creatures of habit. I might not get how all the mushy stuff works, but the mechanics are simple enough. There are indents in the wood