Wish Hunter (The Savannah River Series Book 1)

by Hero Bowen

“Are the wishing jars unique to everyone in your family, or are they all the same?” She needed him to bring out that jar while thinking it was his idea. “You know, heirloom-type thingies.”

  He gulped down ice water. “You know what? I don’t know. I never thought to ask. Only child over here, so I didn’t have anyone to compare jars with.” He resumed his tentative nibbling of his tamale. “How about you? You got any siblings?”

  Nadia shifted in her chair. “I’ve got an older sister, but my mom is more like a sibling, or the troublemaking aunt who swings by every Christmas to wreak havoc after a few drinks.”

  “You don’t get along with your mom? Or is it that you don’t see her often?” He seemed genuinely interested, and she figured a little give-and-take, emotionally speaking, might make him more inclined to spill secrets.

  “Neither. I see her every day, and we’re . . . mostly close, but my grandma is more like the mom figure,” Nadia explained. “It suits them—both of them—better that way.”

  Miles nodded. “Are all your family wish hunters too? Like the Osmonds or the Jacksons of the wishing world?”

  “My grandma is pretty much retired, my mom takes a casual approach to it, and my sister . . . Well, she’s doing her own thing these days.” Nadia drew a sad face into the condensation on the Jarritos bottle as she spoke. If she told him that her sister was Savannah’s Wishmaster, it would only invite unwelcome questions. “But we’ve been wish hunters for generations, all the way back to the motherland.”

  He canted his head. “And that’s where?”

  “Poland.”

  He gave a low whistle. “Czesław Niemen! One of the best rock balladeers to come out of the twentieth century. He made singing in your own language cool, long before K-pop came along. Hell of a voice. Smooth as butter.”

  “I can’t say I’ve heard of him,” Nadia admitted, suddenly feeling unpatriotic.

  “You should check him out. He’s dead now, but like so many greats, his legacy lives on.” Miles turned wistful, as though imagining what his own legacy might be. “Do you like the family line of work, then? Or are you like a third-generation kid who just has to take up the business?”

  Nadia chuckled tightly. “The latter.” It was the first time she’d openly admitted to someone other than Nick that she didn’t like her family’s vocation.

  “Why keep doing it? If your big sis is doing her own thing, like you said, then why don’t you?” Miles said it so casually that she envied his naïveté. “I mean, wish hunting must be the equivalent of busking when you can’t sing. It doesn’t pay well, and it scoops out another piece of your dignity every time you do it.”

  Nadia eyed him. “It’s more of a debt I have to pay.”

  “Lemme guess, you screwed up something massive with the Wishmaster?” Miles finished the last of his now-cooled tamales. Maybe he knew a few things about the wishing world after all.

  “Not exactly. I nearly died in a car accident, and my family used a super potent wish to save my life. One that cost them a hefty amount,” Nadia said. “Plus, my family would disown me if I abandoned the business. And Polish grandmas can be terrifying when you go against the status quo. I’d rather face a flesh-eating, gut-liquefying, fire-breathing demon than get on the wrong side of my grandma.”

  “That’s rough,” he replied. “Makes me feel pretty happy to have been born to my parents.”

  Trying to shake off the fresh flush of annoyance, she focused on the job at hand. “Did they ever teach you how to steal wishes? Your folks, I mean. It must be in your history somewhere, if you all get wishes when you turn eighteen.”

  “I’m sure I’ve got some wish-hunting ancestors, but the knowledge got lost at some point down the line. We were left with the instruments, but they had the sheet music.” He hesitated, fingers poised over his taquitos. “Would you be up for sharing trade secrets?”

  She narrowed her eyes, catching a subtle, darker shift in his expression. “How do you think it works?”

  “Maybe I’ve had one too many brain cells jiggled out of place by not wearing in-ears, but I always figured it’d be some type of blood ritual. Like, you prick the victim’s finger or something, put their blood inside a wishing jar, and—bam!—you get their wish.”

  She feigned shock and nodded eagerly. He was all the way on the wrong side of the fence with his guess, but Nadia got the feeling he hated being wrong, and that was about to work perfectly to her advantage.

  “If that was a guess,” she said, “then you need to go put numbers on the lottery right now because you got it in one. Why else do you think people get so weirded out about wish hunting? Blood freaks folks out, but you get used to it once you’ve done it a few times. And it’s only a bead or two at most, unless you’re slippery with the needle.”

  Miles puffed out his chest, visibly thrilled he’d guessed “correctly.” “Mom and I figured it out years ago, after I showed her my wishing jar. We saw this little dark stain at the bottom. I mean, I’m no forensic genius, but blood’s pretty obvious, even when it’s hella crusty and old. We agreed that wishes were probably collected by taking a bit of the life juice. A Sleeping Beauty deal, without the thorns and the coma.”

  “Maybe your mom somehow remembered it subconsciously,” Nadia said.

  His brow furrowed. “I dunno. She definitely didn’t know for sure that was how it was done because her mom and grandma never said, but it seemed believable enough.” His shoulders slumped. “Wish I could tell her we had it right.”

  “Is she not around anymore?”

  Nadia had assumed his parents would still be living in Savannah, since this was his hometown. But maybe she was just projecting her own family’s stubbornness onto his.

  Miles smiled sadly and pointed a finger upward.

  “Ah . . . I’m so sorry,” she said, looking down at her hands.

  He shrugged. “She passed a couple years back. Cancer. It’s why I quit touring for a while. Kinda dropped out, you know? My world lost its rhythm when I lost my mom. Let me tell you, ‘comebacks’ suck at the best of times, but after that? Shit, I’m surprised anybody bought the last album. Rolling Stone called it ‘twelve tracks of unrelenting misery, appropriate only for listeners with a residual emo allegiance.’ That’s why they tell you to never read the reviews.” He scratched his sharp jaw. “I would’ve wished the cancer away if I could’ve, but I couldn’t get my hands on a wish in time. Seemed to be some kind of chaos with your people back then.”

  If it was when Nadia suspected, she could guess the date his mom got sick. After Adrian had fallen—and ran off to who knew where—there’d been a brief power vacuum. It hadn’t quite been a one-horse race, despite Kaleena being the one to overthrow Adrian. Other groups had muscled in from all over the region, gunning to take the top spot in Savannah for themselves. But in the end, there was no doubt who’d come out on top. The lucky would-be Wishmasters scurried away with their tails between their legs back to wherever they came from—and the unlucky ones wound up feeding the fish in the Savannah River. With all the turmoil at the top, it had been nearly impossible to buy a wish then, since they were getting used up in the turf war faster than they could be stolen.

  “I’m not sure it would’ve helped, even if you had,” Nadia replied awkwardly. “Healing wishes often don’t play out the way you want, since wishes can’t affect other people directly. With my accident, my grandma and mom couldn’t wish for me to be healed, so they had to wish for an organ replacement. That’s the only reason I survived.”

  He smiled stiffly. “I figured as much. Everything has to be in sync, right? If I’d wished for a way to save her, it would’ve come out all jumbled and wrong. All Monkey’s Paw–like, right?”

  She nodded. “Speaking of moms . . .” Nadia wanted to push the conversation away from thoughts of lost loved ones. “Mine is going to murder me for breaking the wishing box. It was an heirloom, which is why I asked if all your family jars are the same.” She almost cringed at the clunky segue.
“Honestly, even though I’ve been in this business my whole life, I never knew they came in forms other than boxes.” It was a lie, but one she hoped he’d buy.

  He put his hands into his kangaroo pouch. “Do you want to see it? Since we’re trading knowledge and all.” He leaned forward, as if to hide what he was carrying. “I only brought it along because that Black Hat kid said it might get me some money back. Wish traps don’t come cheap, seems like.”

  Nadia had to resist bouncing in her seat. All this tit-for-tat talk was about to gain her a bunch of tat, if that was polite to say.

  “I told him yeah because it’s not like I’ve got any use for the thing anymore,” Miles continued. “I don’t capture wishes, and I’ve got zero interest in being a thief like you and Black Hat. I prefer to steal hearts onstage.”

  Don’t roll your eyes, don’t roll your eyes, don’t roll your eyes. She couldn’t believe anyone would actually say that out loud and not want the ground to swallow them up in embarrassment.

  He produced the object she’d been seeking for the entire conversation. It looked like the love child of a small urn and a whimsical gift shop honeypot. The wooden jar was pale and glossy, with vines coiling across the curvaceous shape where they’d been burned into the wood. Like all wish traps, it was certainly made from the Wishing Tree itself, although Nadia wondered how the Tree yielded so many wooden contraptions without ending up in bits. Their ancestors must’ve known, but the Wishing Tree was said to have hidden itself away centuries ago, and thus no more wish traps could be created. She really wasn’t looking forward to telling Basha what had happened to their priceless wishing box.

  “Can I take a closer look?” Nadia asked, swallowing her eagerness. “I know a thing or two about wish trap value. I also know Black Hat. He probably tried to rip you off.”

  Miles sniffed. “I knew he was shady as soon as I saw him. Although, in fairness, when I bought my second wish, that went off without a hitch.”

  He handed the jar to her as if it were a tourist knickknack and not an irreplicable museum-quality object.

  Nadia opened the hinged lid and felt the slight suck of a rubberlike seal around the rim. She peered inside. “I see what you mean about the little stain.”

  It had smudged against the bottom of the vessel, but she knew it wasn’t blood—it was the burn mark of a death wish. Usually, they appeared when someone tried to take the wish of a dead person, in that strange limbo before all the lights went out in the brain. When someone died, their wishes evaporated—both used and unused—but she’d heard a myth that there was a specific second when a wish could be taken with the deceased’s last breath, no heart secret or exact wish wording required. The trouble was that those wishes apparently went bad 99 percent of the time, since they hadn’t been timed right. As for the 1 percent, the secretive art of attaining the death wish had long been forgotten.

  “Have you ever told anyone about your wishes? Not just that you have them, but what wish you actually made when you blew out those candles?” she asked, still examining the jar. It had a good energy about it, though it lacked some of the life experience of her broken wishing box.

  Miles looked uncomfortable. “Can’t say I’ve ever mentioned either.”

  Most wishers knew to never tell someone what wishes they’d made—particularly not with the exact wording—in case hope stealers decided they wanted to destroy that used wish or take it for themselves. That superstition had leaked into the wider world, as many wishing things did, with the idea that a wish wouldn’t come true if you told it to anyone. Nadia had no interest in stealing used wishes, but she understood the appeal; some wishes were more potent than others, and stealing the exact wish meant you’d already know how it would manifest.

  But Nadia was willing to gamble that Miles didn’t know about hope stealers. After all, he hadn’t known all the rules around saving lives, he didn’t know how to steal wishes, and he didn’t seem that au fait with the black market.

  “When did you make your wishes?” Nadia pressed. A powerful enough heart secret from Miles would activate the wishing jar, allowing her to extract and trap the wish sitting so temptingly inside him. Her ticket to true freedom from the debt.

  He flicked a grain of salt across the table. “One when I was eighteen, and the other one was . . . a while after.”

  “I guess it’s hard to wait to make a wish when you’re eighteen and there are so many things you want.” She cradled the jar in her palms, praying she’d feel that telltale warmth when Miles spewed a secret that was strong enough. The secrets he was sharing so far hadn’t been emotionally weighty or specific enough, unless she’d missed her chance when he’d spoken of his mother’s cancer and his inability to wish her disease away.

  Miles cracked his neck. “I’m not a very patient person. Mom was. She saved her wish for later in life, but I just dove right in.”

  “What did you ask for, that first time? Was it to always look flawless?”

  Flattery had worked before, so might as well give it another go. Instead, he stared at her, flexing and unflexing his knuckles as though deeply unsettled. Or maybe he had early onset arthritis from shredding his guitar one too many times.

  “What’s with the third degree?” he muttered, his expression shifting toward suspicious—not all the way there yet, but turning into the neighborhood.

  She laughed as brightly as she could. “Ah, sorry, occupational hazard.”

  “Huh?”

  “When I’m not working my ‘nighttime job,’ I’m a marriage counselor. It was my way of rebelling—by getting a real job,” she explained, cursing herself for admitting too much private information. Reckless and dangerous. If she had a wish of her own, she might have lost it by being so open. “I tend to accidentally interrogate people about their personal lives. I can’t help it. When I start saying ‘And how does that make you feel?’ I give you my permission to throw that glass of water at me.”

  Thankfully, that small glimpse into her everyday life seemed to relax him a little. He stopped flexing his knuckles and instead steepled them on the table.

  Miles smiled and nodded. “Therapy is so important these days. I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve had a session or two. Go ahead, ask what you like. Just as long as you’re not going to bill me five hundred bucks at the end of this.”

  Nadia forced a grin. “I wouldn’t be picking the cheapest thing on the menu if I charged that much.”

  “To tell you the truth,” he went on, his voice taking on that hesitant, embarrassing ailment of a doctor’s office tone, “my second wish was plain stupid.”

  Nadia clicked her tongue. “You didn’t wish you could fly, did you? That just gets you a bunch of air miles, or a spammed inbox full of airline deals.”

  “No . . . I wished I could find what I was looking for,” he replied sheepishly. “I never lose my keys anymore, but the thing is, finding what you’re looking for ain’t the same thing as knowing what you want. You get me?”

  Nadia smiled as the jar warmed in her hands. She closed the lid with a practiced nonchalance, careful to maintain eye contact with Miles so he’d keep his focus on her and not her sleight of hand.

  “The Wishing Tree got it twisted,” she said. “Happens to the best of us.” Or so she’d heard.

  “Man, it felt good to get that out in the open.” He sat back, unleashing a world-weary sigh.

  “I totally get what you mean. You can want to find a million bucks, but that would only take you to a bank. The hard work has to come from you,” she said, her insides flip-flopping like a tangled fish. Thanks to his shared secret about his second wish, his unspent third wish was now heating the jar in her hands. Now all she had to do was find a way to leave the restaurant without arousing his suspicion.

  Miles nodded. “Exactly. I regret making that wish, although it comes in handy when I’m in a rush and nothing is where I left it, or the set list has vanished. But it also led me to the place where I’d find wish number three—saving your life
.” He grinned boyishly at her, and Nadia almost felt bad.

  Almost.

  Warm jar in hand, she dipped frantically into her satchel and took out her phone, as if it were buzzing. She pretended to slide an Answer icon and put the phone to her ear. “Mom? Mom, slow down. Yeah . . . yeah, I hear you. I told you where I was.” She paused for effect. “You heard about that? Look, I’m on my way home. I’m fine, I didn’t get hurt . . . Just take my word for it! I’m fine, Mom, just—”

  She took the phone from her ear and stared at it, putting on her best panicked face.

  “I’m so sorry, but you’d just have to know my mom. She’s a wreck. I know I said I’d buy, but can you take care of the check?” Nadia skidded a twenty across the table and bolted.

  She’d barely gone five paces when he said, “Hey, the tickle is gone . . .”

  Nadia didn’t look back. She heaved forward, sprinting through the gauntlet of the crammed restaurant, weaving in and out of the tables.

  His voice bellowed across the room. “Hold up! Give it back!” The man had some pipes on him, that was for sure.

  She shot out the door and raced across the parking lot to her Chevy. After fumbling for her keys, she threw open the driver door she’d purposefully left unlocked for her fast getaway and ducked into the seat, just as Miles burst out of the restaurant. Unfortunately for him, a gaggle of fans who’d been waiting outside swarmed him like flies on crap, brandishing phones at him for selfies. Unless he wanted to land himself in a lawsuit by shoving them out of the way, it would take him some time to get past them.

  Fully appreciating her head start, she peeled out of the parking lot, leaving him with the bill and without a wish. Not to mention a lack of transportation. He’d have to call his chauffeur to save the day, or attempt a zombie apocalypse–style escape with those screaming girls trailing him back into town.

  “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap!” Nadia shrieked as she sped away, hardly able to believe she’d done it. The jar rested between her thighs, nice and toasty from the wish she’d thieved.