The inheritance, p.1
The Inheritance, page 1
part #1 of Breach Wars Series
THE INHERITANCE
BREACH WARS
BOOK 1
ILONA ANDREWS
This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Inheritance
Copyright © 2025 by Ilona Andrews
Ebook ISBN: 9781641973397
Cover art and interior art by Candice Slater
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
NYLA Publishing
121 W. 27th St, Suite 1201, NY 10001, New York.
http://www.nyliterary.com
CONTENTS
Content Warnings
Letter to the Readers
The Inheritance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Classes and Talents
Also by Ilona Andrews
About the Author
CONTENT WARNINGS
This story is not a tornado that will rip your house apart. This is a well-maintained rollercoaster that passed all safety inspections with flying colors. It might be intense, but you will walk away from this ride. For those who like to know what’s coming, here are the warnings before the drop:
Themes of romantic breakup and divorce, parental abandonment / family estrangement, violence including graphic scenes, mental health themes like panic attacks and anxiety, grief, harm to monster animals (the dog lives!), insects, arachnids.
LETTER TO THE READERS
This was not the plan.
That is to say that THE INHERITANCE was just supposed to be a fun short serial on the blog. A novella conceived to help, in our small way, anyone who’s going through it. Right now things are pretty tough for many people. Traditionally, in times like these, we escape the daily stress through entertainment. Books, movies, TV shows. They become a lifeline, especially when they are serialized. Every new installment gives us something to look forward to.
At some point Ilona turned around in her chair and said, “Let’s do a fun free novella for the blog.” And I said, “How long are you thinking?” She said, “The schedule is already full, so short. Twenty-five thousand words?”
I laughed. Immediately. I’m laughing as I’m typing this. Because I knew that it would not be twenty-five thousand words. Later I heard her tell Jeaniene Frost about it, and I could hear her laughing through the phone. It’s funny, because in her heart, Ilona honestly believed that it would be a short, simple, uncomplicated story. Whenever she says that about a new work, she is absolutely sincere. And it never ends up that way.
Long or short, I liked the idea, so we set about writing it.
Predictably, it kept getting deeper. We had to come up with a universal magic system. Different classes and talents. (We’ve included a list at the end of the book.) Procedures for entering the breaches. Guild politics.
Writing something like this story immediately raises big questions. What would happen to all of us, individually and collectively in the aftermath of such a catastrophic global event? How would we all live in this new world? Would everything collapse into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, or would we find a way to fight back and keep on keeping on? Would we give up like Roger or persevere like Ada?
Ultimately, I believe the main theme of THE INHERITANCE is one of hope and love. Of people adapting to their new normal, horrific as it is, and not only surviving but becoming stronger.
Or maybe it’s just a fun story about going into caves and killing monsters. That is up to you. Thank you for reading our story, and I hope you have fun.
Gordon Andrews
Yes, there is nothing more fun than having your husband and your best friend cackle at you in unison, and then you say, “No, I mean it,” and they just laugh harder. Gordon is right. This was so not the plan, but it happened this way, and now THE INHERITANCE is a novel, and there will likely be one sequel. I give up.
Thank you for giving our work a chance. We appreciate it, and we hope you come to like Ada as much as we do.
Ilona Andrews
THE INHERITANCE
We are at war.
This war isn’t about wealth, resources, or territory. It’s a war of biological extermination. The very existence of humanity is at stake.
The moment the first gate burst, sending a horde of monsters to rage through our world, our future was changed forever. The invasion brought us unimaginable suffering, but it also awoke something slumbering deep within some of us, a means to repel and destroy our enemy. Powers beyond comprehension. Abilities that are legendary.
The war is ongoing. If you are a Talent, your country needs you. The world needs you. I can’t assure you that it will be safe. I can’t tell you that it will be easy. But I promise you that every gate we close means the difference between life and death for the people you love most.
Be the hero you always wanted to be.
Take my hand and answer the call.
Elias McFeron
Guildmaster of Cold Chaos
1
Health insurance with a thousand-dollar maximum family deductible.
Prescription drug coverage with an eighty percent discount off list prices.
The first time I heard about gates, I imagined them to be these portals glowing with a magical blue light. Too many video games, I guess. They were nothing like it. This one was a hole. A deep, black, vertical hole that punched through reality, swirling with pale mist. The tendrils of white smoke curled and slithered within it, but none escaped into our world.
The gate appeared in front of the Elmwood Park Rec Center eight days ago. To the left was Elmwood Public Library, all red brick and tinted windows. To the right was a funeral home followed by perfectly ordinary, three-story boxes of apartment buildings covered in tan stucco. Behind us, to the east, lay Chicago. And straight ahead was an interdimensional tear. Just another Monday.
If someone told me ten years ago that I would be standing in front of a hole leading into a dimensional breach filled with monsters and preparing to risk my life and go inside, I would’ve politely nodded, walked away, and later told Roger I’d met an unhinged person. Of course, a decade ago I was thirty, happily married, with a daughter in elementary school, a son just out of diapers, and a low-risk private sector job I loved. A different life that belonged to a different Adaline.
The future looked bright back then. Until the invasion shattered it.
Free emergency medical care when injured in the line of duty.
I took this job for the benefits, and when it got to me, like now, I recited them in my head like a prayer.
Dental, a one hundred fifty-dollar deductible, fifty percent off braces.
Things that came with age and children: appreciation of the dental plan with orthodontics. Braces were hellishly expensive.
Vision plan, fifteen percent discount off glasses and contacts.
The gate gaped like a dark maw.
At least thirty-five yards tall. Maybe taller. The threat scale ran from blue to red, and the prep packet put this gate at the low-orange risk level. On a dying scale of one to ten, it was about seven.
This was my one hundred and sixty-eighth gate. I’d gone into orange gates many times before. I didn’t want to go into this one. It made my hair stand on end. And the presence of the funeral home wasn’t helping.
“Ominous sonovabitch, isn’t he?” Melissa murmured next to me.
“Mhm.”
The mining foreman crossed her arms on her chest. She was a tall woman, two years older than me, with auburn hair she religiously dyed every four weeks and the kind of face that said she had everything under control. We met years ago, on one of my earlier gate dives, bonded over kids, and stayed friendly ever since.
After the first gates burst, some people gained strange abilities that couldn’t be explained by science. To be fair, science tried its hardest, but if it walked like magic and talked like magic, most people decided it was magic. These abilities were called talents, and to make things extra confusing, people who had them were also called Talents.
Talents fell into two broad categories: combat and noncombat. Combat Talents got a boost to physical prowess and developed abilities like forcefields, summoning energy weapons, or shooting fire from their fingertips. Noncombat Talents got a random skill that was useful only in specific circumstances.
Melissa was a noncombat Talent. She could sense ores. She had to be right on top of them and actively concentrate, but that talent, combined with her previous experience in iron mining, let her rise to the position of the Mining Team Foreman.
Melissa ran her mining crew like a well-oiled machine. She didn’t get rattled, but she was staring at this gate like it was about to reach out and bite her. Something about this hole set both of us on edge.
Melissa narrowed
One of the younger miners rolled her eyes and crouched. “Always on my case…”
“Exactly. I am always on your case. I’m on everyone’s case. If we have to run for our lives out of that gate, I don’t need any of you tripping over your feet, because I’ll have to double back and get you. You have two toddlers to come home to.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Melissa heaved a sigh. “Everybody is full of sass today.”
Around us the mining crew checked their gear, twelve people in indigo Magnaprene coveralls and matching hard hats. Nobody seemed unusually worried. Toolbelts were adjusted, rock drills and shears tested, the generator and floodlights on four industrial carts inspected. The usual.
The escort, five combat Talents in tactical armor, had done their precheck ages ago and were now waiting. Aaron, a bastion class fighter, sat on a crate, leaning against another crate, his eyes closed. His massive adamant-reinforced shield rested on the ground next to him. Three recon strikers mulled about, armed with SIG Spear rifles. They specialized in ranged combat and rapid disengagement, which was tactical speak for shoot the shit out of everything and then run for the exit.
London, the escort unit leader, surveyed the mining crew. He was a blade warden, which meant he could both dish out lethal damage and summon a protective forcefield that made him invulnerable for two minutes. He carried a brutal-looking tactical axe, and on the few occasions I saw him use it, he cut through interdimensional monsters like he was chopping salad.
Both the mining crew and the escort wore indigo gear marked with the emblem of Cold Chaos, an upright sword wrapped in lightning in white on an indigo background. I wore a white hard hat and grey coveralls with a patch of the Dimensional Defense Command on my sleeve. The mining crew and the escorts were private contractors belonging to the Cold Chaos Guild, while I was a representative of the US Government. My official title was Dimension Breach Resource Assessor. The guilds called us DeBRAs, and they were supposed to keep us alive at all costs.
If things went to shit, Aaron would put himself between the mining crew and the threat, the strikers would shoot down whatever got past him, and London would grab me, wrap us both in his warden forcefield, and drag me out of the gate so I could report the disaster to the DDC. Of everyone here, I was the least expendable, as far as the government was concerned.
It didn’t make me feel any better.
The mist swirled inside the hole, sending tendrils of dread toward me. I resisted the urge to hug myself.
Twenty days of recuperation leave. Which was long overdue. Maybe that was part of the problem.
Basic Housing Allowance.
Child Tuition Assistance.
CTA was the big one. It helped me cover tuition for Hino’s Academy. Things were tight but I hadn’t missed a payment yet. The school had stellar academics, but I’d picked it for their underground shelter. If a gate ruptured and a flood of invading monsters washed over the city, Tia and Noah would be safe until the military and the guilds repelled it. Competition for the school was fierce, but since I was DDC, the kids were given special treatment, along with the children of guild members. Advertising that Hino was the school of choice for the children of Talents was good for the academy’s prestige.
“Ada, London is checking you out again,” Melissa said.
Next to me, Stella, Melissa’s baby-faced protégé, snickered quietly. She was twenty, and flirting was still exciting.
A large German Shepherd sitting at Stella’s feet panted as if laughing. Bear came from an illustrious line of police dogs with heroic careers. She had the typical GS coloring, big brown eyes, huge ears, and petting her was off-limits. I’d asked before and was told no. Bear was working like the rest of us. Petting would be distracting.
“Brace yourself, he’s coming this way,” Melissa murmured.
I turned. London was heading straight for us. His real name was Alex Wright, and he was from Liverpool, but everyone called him London anyway. People with combat talents were resistant to wear and tear, and at forty-five, London was still in his prime, tall, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and an easy smile. His job was to keep the miners and me safe, and since he was my designated babysitter, he and I spent a lot of time in close proximity. Even so, he’d been paying me too much attention lately.
London stopped by us. “Everything okay here?”
“Everything was fine until you showed up,” Melissa said.
He grinned at her. “Just doing my due diligence.”
They usually had a fun back-and-forth going. It put people at ease. I worked with guilds all over the Eastern US. In some mining crews, the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife and make a sandwich. Cold Chaos was light and bright.
Their bickering was amusing, but in reality, London was in charge. Melissa gave orders to the miners, but in the breach London had authority over everyone, me included. Disobeying his command meant endangering the entire team, and it wouldn’t be tolerated. If London got a bad feeling, he could halt the entire operation and pull everyone out, and Melissa couldn’t say a word about it.
“Are you worried about us, Escort Captain?” Stella tilted her head, and her mane of dark curly hair drooped to one side.
“It’s my job to worry, Miles. Have you been doing your sprints?” London asked.
“I have,” Stella told him. “Fifteen seconds for the dash.”
A hundred meters in fifteen seconds was damn impressive. It was good to be young. God, I was twice her age. How the hell did that even happen? I was twenty only a few years ago, right?
“Not bad,” London said.
“I can beat both of them,” Stella reported, nodding at me and Melissa.
“Talk to me after you’ve pushed three human beings through your hips and put on forty pounds from the stress of keeping them alive,” Melissa told her.
London turned to me. “Where do you dash, Ada?”
Why are you doing this? You know nothing will come of it. “Gate Park.”
All government gate divers ran - not for distance or endurance – but to survive. A 100-meter sprint, a walking lap around the track, rinse and repeat for an hour, then go home, and take ibuprofen for the aching knees. Three times a week. Five would be better, but three was what I usually managed. The DDC had mandatory PT tests every six months to keep us in shape. When a noncombatant faced a threat in the breach, running to the gate was the best and often the only way to stay alive.
“Maybe I’ll join you sometime,” London said.
Again, why? “You’re out of my league. It would be a waste of your time.”
“Never,” he told me.
“How fast do you dash, Escort Captain?” Stella asked London.
“Let me put it to you this way: I could pick Ada up and give you a three-second head start, and you still wouldn’t beat my time.”
London smiled at us and moved on.
“Is he lying?” Stella asked Melissa.
“No,” the mining foreman told her. “Combat Talents are on another level. We can’t keep up.”
London was sending out all sorts of interested signals. He was nice to look at, charming, and he’d clearly been around the block enough to know what he was doing. By now, he’d had enough experience not to fumble and enough patience to pay attention when it mattered. If I agreed to go on a date, it would go smoothly and end well.
However, the DDC forbade fraternization with guild members. I was supposed to stay neutral and refrain from forming any personal attachments. Even the work-hours friendships like the one with Melissa were frowned upon. Getting involved with a guild Talent would get me fired, and I had two kids and a mortgage. As fun as London would be in bed – and he would be very fun – he wasn’t worth losing my job.
