by Chloe Neill
“That was the Trans Am part,” Ethan said. “I can describe the vehicle, but it didn’t have plates, so there won’t be much to go on. And we didn’t get a good look at his face. White male, probably six feet tall. Slender. Dark hair, thick beard.”
Mallory must have noticed my worried expression. “You sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I assured her. Or would be, as soon as my arm began to heal. The pain had already changed, from a sharp-edged sting to a throbbing, dull ache.
We turned our attention to the man on the ground.
Shifters could heal human injuries if they shifted into their respective animal forms. If they were capable of shifting. I guessed the victim hadn’t been able to manage it.
“He wasn’t here very long before you left,” Catcher said. “He was still warm.”
“I felt some kind of magic,” Mallory said, looking down at him. “I don’t know what it was, but there was something here.”
There was no outward sign of magic here—just the shifter and the vampire. Ethan looked at her quizzically. “Have you ever felt anything like that before?”
She shook her head, blew out a breath through pursed lips. “No. Never. And I gotta say, it’s freaking me out a little bit. I’m not sure I want to be the girl who can suddenly sense death.” She put a hand on her chest, her mouth screwed into an “O” of horror. “Oh my God, what if I’m the new Grim Reaper?”
“You aren’t the new Grim Reaper,” I said. “And not to be more grim, but there are a lot of people on the planet, and I’m pretty sure someone is always dying. Can you feel anybody else?”
Mallory blinked. “Well, no, now that you mention it. Which is a relief.”
“So you felt it because of this shifter’s proximity,” Ethan said, “or his magic.” He glanced at Catcher. “Did you feel anything?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. But she’s more sensitive than I am that way. Which is fine by me. We called Chuck,” he added.
My grandfather, Chuck Merit, was Chicago’s supernatural Ombudsman, a human who acted as a liaison between the Chicago Police Department and the city’s magical populations. Catcher was one of his employees, as was Jeff Christopher, a tech-savvy shifter and mostly white-hat hacker.
“We called Gabriel, too,” Catcher added. “That seemed like the best thing to do, all things considered.”
Ethan nodded. Gabriel Keene was the Apex of the North America Central Pack of shifters. This shifter was in his territory, so he was most likely one of Gabe’s people.
As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Catcher put a protective arm around Mallory, pulled her closer. But she wouldn’t have anything to fear from Gabe. He’d sheltered her, retrained her, after her addiction to black magic threatened to destroy her.
Sorcerer and shifter had become allies, too. And now a vampire threatened to strain the Pack’s relationship with all of us.
I’d like to have a look around the alley, I told Ethan. Why don’t you stay here with them? I glanced back at the ever-growing crowd. The fewer people milling around in whatever evidence is around here, the better.
That’s a good thought, Ethan said with a nod, and pulled a pocket-sized black flashlight from his pocket, handed it to me. It wasn’t a Cubs flashlight, but it would do.
“I’m going to check things out,” I said to Mallory and Catcher. At their nods, I switched on the flashlight and moved into the darkness of the alley.
I walked slowly forward, flipping the small but powerful beam back and forth across the ground. Most of it was paved, except for a short stretch behind a row of town houses. Their back doors opened onto a small strip of grass, just enough space for a barbecue grill or an area for pets to take care of business.
The usual suspects were stuck to the broken and stained concrete. Discarded paper, gum, empty plastic bottles. Farther down the alley, cars were wedged into slots only an automotive savant could squeeze into. Bikes were locked onto a forest green rack bolted into the ground, and the smell of beer and fried food lingered above the insistent smell of death.
The railroad trestles rested on square concrete pedestals. The beam of light flickered across one, highlighting what, at first glance, I’d thought was a graffiti tag. But there seemed to be more letters than the few that usually made up a sprayed tag.
I stopped and swung the light back again.
The entire pedestal, probably two-and-a-half-feet tall and just as wide, was covered by lines of characters drawn in black. Row after row of them. Most were symbols—circles and triangles and squares with lines and marks through them, half circles, arrows and squares. Some looked like tiny hieroglyphs—a dragon here, a tiny skeleton there, drawn with a surprisingly careful hand.
They buzzed with a faint and tinny magic, which explained the care—or vice versa. I didn’t recognize the flavor of the magic; it was sharper and more metallic than any I’d run across before, and a sharp contrast to the earthier scent of shifters.
Magic symbols twenty feet away from a shifter’s death. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
I knelt down, shone light across the pedestal. I knew what these were. They were alchemy symbols, marks used by practitioners who’d believed they could transmute lead into gold, or create a philosopher’s stone that would allow them immortality. I’d studied medieval literature in graduate school. I hadn’t studied magical texts per se, but they’d occasionally appear in a manuscript or the gilded marginalia of a carefully copied text.
Still, while I recognized them for what they were, I didn’t have the knowledge to decipher them. That was a job for people with substantive knowledge about magical languages. Catcher or Mallory, or maybe Paige. She was a sorcerer, formally the Order’s archivist and at present the girlfriend of the Cadogan House Librarian.
I scanned the rest of the pedestal, and the beam flashed across something on the ground—drops of blood. Blood had been shed here, and plenty of it. But why? Because of the vampire? Because of the markings?
I’ve got something, I told Ethan, and waited until he and Mallory gathered beside me. Catcher stayed back with the shifter.
I kept the light trained on the pedestal so they could review the markings, then shifted the circle of light to the blood on the ground below.
“Part of the attack took place here,” Ethan said. “And the symbols?”
“They look alchemical to me,” I said.
Mallory’s gaze tracked back and forth across the lines. “Agreed. Symbols of alchemical elements, built into an equation. That’s why they’re in rows.”
“Wait,” Ethan said. “You mean alchemy, as in changing lead into gold?”
“That’s the most well-known transmutation,” Mallory said, hands on her hips as she leaned over beside him, peered at the magic. “But folks try to do all sorts of things with the practice. Healing, communicating with the spiritual realm, balancing the elements, distilling something down to its true essence.”
Ethan frowned, looked down at the pedestal again. “So what’s the purpose of this?”
“I had to study alchemy when I took my exams. Although I didn’t use them.” She added that quickly, as if to remind us she hadn’t made use of all the magical Keys in existence to create her black magic. Although she’d certainly used enough of them. “I also watched a lot of Fullmetal Alchemist. Quality show. Quality.”
“There are television shows about alchemy?” Ethan asked.
“It’s anime.”
Ethan’s expression stayed blank.
“Never mind,” she said, waving it away. “We’ll have a marathon later. But for now”—she pointed to one symbol, a circle with a dot in the middle—“that’s the sun. And that’s Taurus,” she added, pointing to a small circle topped by a semicircle of horns. “Merit’s astrological sign, as it turns out. It’s probably not related to you,” she said,
glancing at me. “It’s just part of the equation related to the positions of the stars. That’s one of the things that makes the alchemy work, at least theoretically.” She put her hands on her hips. “If we want to know why this is here, we need to translate all the symbols and figure out what they mean together, in context.”
We walked back to Catcher, and Mallory explained what we’d seen.
“How does alchemy match up against the Keys?” I asked them. The Keys were the building blocks of magic, at least in Catcher’s particular philosophy.
“It’s just a different way to approach the energy, the power.” He shrugged. “You might say a language different from mine, but a language all the same.”
Mallory looked at him, nodded. “With rules, just like any language would follow.”
“So, who put them here?” Ethan asked. “And why are they near the scene of a shifter’s death by a vampire?”
Mallory looked at Catcher. “I don’t know anyone who practices alchemy, not even through SWOB.” Sorcerers Without Borders was an organization Mallory had created to help newbie sorcerers in the Midwest. It was help she hadn’t gotten when she first learned she had magic—but that she definitely could have used.
“It would have to be a sorcerer, right?” I asked. Everyone looked back at the concrete. We’d been looking for a sorcerer, after all. This wasn’t the kind of magic that Adrien Reed had dabbled in, at least as far as we knew, and there was nothing to tie him to this. That meant we had another sorcerer, another potential enemy, and this one involved in the death of a shifter.
“Yeah,” Mallory said. “These would have been made by a sorcerer.”
“Is it dark magic?”
She opened her mouth, closed it again. “I was going to give you a trite answer. A quick no so everybody would feel better.” She looked back at the pedestal, considered. “Yeah. There’s some darkness there. Not entirely surprising, considering the bloodshed, the murder. Even if the magic didn’t cause them, there’s clearly some kind of relationship.
“But it won’t affect me,” she added. “Dark magic affects the maker and the recipient. I didn’t make it, and there’s no reason to believe it’s supposed to affect us. So you don’t have to worry about me.”
“We aren’t worried,” Ethan said, and the confidence in his voice made her relax a little.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She said the first one for us; I was pretty sure she said the second one for herself.
“So we’ve got a sorcerer, a shifter, and a vampire here together,” Catcher said. “And the shifter ends up dead.”
“VSS,” Mallory said, the acronym for the “game” she’d invented earlier. “And the first round is a dead loss.”
CHAPTER THREE
RED FLAG
My grandfather appeared a few minutes later, pulling over to the curb in his official white van. He wore a short-sleeve plaid shirt, slacks, and thickly soled shoes. He still used the cane he’d needed since he was trapped in a house fire caused by anti-vampire malcontents, but moved spryly with it.
Jeff Christopher, brown-haired and lanky, climbed out of the car’s passenger side, waited while my grandfather gave instructions to the officers who’d pulled up behind him in two CPD cruisers. When my grandfather finished his instructions and moved toward us, the cops turned to the crowd, creating a barricade to control the gathering people.
“Merit, Ethan,” my grandfather said, then nodded to Mallory and Catcher. His expression was serious and slightly sympathetic, not an uncommon expression for a man who, more often than not, was dealing with supernatural fallout.
“Sorry it took so long,” my grandfather said. “There’s an accident on Lake Shore Drive. Traffic was moving at a crawl.”
Not an unusual circumstance for Chicago.
“We’re sorry you had to drive out all this way,” I said. My grandfather’s office was on the city’s South Side, relocated from the basement of his house after the firebombing.
My grandfather looked around. “You reached Gabriel?”
“Should be here anytime,” Catcher said with a nod.
And so they were. The rhythmic thunder of bikes roared as the shifters moved into the alley. Seven traveled together tonight, and they slipped around my grandfather’s car in a line of chrome and black leather.
Their arrival made me nervous—not because I feared shifters, but because I regretted what had gone on here and knew some blamed all vampires equally, including us. It hadn’t been that long ago that we were in Colorado, watching animosity between shifter and vampire bubble up.
Ethan reached out, put a hand at the small of my back, a reminder that he was there. He couldn’t change the circumstances—death, murder, bitter magic—but he’d remind me that I wouldn’t face them alone.
Gabriel rode in front, an imposing figure on a long bike with wide handles, every inch of the chrome gleaming to a mirrored perfection. He stopped his bike ten feet away, pulled off his helmet, and ran a hand through his shoulder-length mane of tousled golden-brown hair. His eyes were the same tawny gold, his shoulders broad beneath a snug black V-neck T-shirt that he’d paired with jeans and intimidating black leather boots. He hung the helmet on a gleaming handlebar, swung a strong thigh over the back of the bike, and walked toward us, followed by his only sister, Fallon.
She was Jeff’s girlfriend, a slight woman of surprising strength, with warm eyes and long, wavy hair in the same multihued shades as her brother. She rode the bike directly behind his, wore a skirt with boots and tights, a gray tank under a short-sleeved leather top with lots of pleats and zippers.
The other shifters were male, with broad shoulders, plenty of leather, and generally dour looks.
Gabriel nodded at my grandfather, at Jeff, then looked at Ethan.
“Sullivan,” he said, then glanced at me. “Kitten. He’s one of ours?”
“We don’t know if he’s one of the Pack’s,” Ethan said. “But he’s definitely a shifter, so we wanted to give you the opportunity to find out.”
We escorted him to the body, and Gabriel crouched by the fallen shifter, his leather boots creaking with the movement. Elbows on his knees, hands linked together, he looked slowly and carefully over the body, his gaze finally settling on the wounds at his throat.
The silence was thick and to my mind, threatening.
“His name was Caleb Franklin,” Gabe said. “He was a Pack member—a soldier. A shifter who helped keep order in the territory. He’d go on runs with Damien, actually.”
Damien Garza was a tall, dark, and handsome shifter with a quiet personality, a dry wit, and an exceptional hand with an omelet.
Gabriel stood up. “But Caleb’s not a Pack member anymore. He defected.”
Ethan’s eyebrows lifted. “He left the Pack by choice?”
“He did.”
“Why?” Ethan asked.
“He wanted more freedom.”
Since the Pack was all about freedom—the open road, communing with nature, good food, and good drink—I guessed we weren’t getting the full story. The look on Ethan’s face said he didn’t entirely buy it, either. But this wasn’t the setting for an interrogation of the Pack Apex.
“The vampire?” Gabriel asked.
“We gave chase, but he got away.”
Gabriel nodded, noticed the bandage on my arm. “And got you in the process.”
“Handgun through the window of a beat-up Trans Am. I don’t suppose that vehicle rings any bells?”
He shook his head, glanced at Fallon. She shook her head, too.
“He did this in a relatively public space,” my grandfather said, “but he was eager to get away.”
“We found something else,” I said, gesturing down the alley.
We walked toward the pedestal—a human, two vampires, three shifters, and two sorcerers, all of u
s impotent in the face of death.
Fallon, Gabriel, and my grandfather studied the pedestal.
“Alchemical,” my grandfather said.
“And the Merits are two for two,” Catcher said. “That’s as far as we’ve gotten. We can pick out individual symbols, but we don’t know what they mean in context.” He glanced at Gabriel. “This mean anything to you?”
Gabe shook his head. “I can feel the magic but don’t recognize it.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” All eyes turned to me. “I mean, it has a weird edge. A sharp edge.”
“Metallic,” Mallory said, nodding. “That’s the nature of alchemy.”
“And there’s one more thing,” Catcher said. “Mallory felt something. Some kind of magic.”
All eyes shifted to her now.
“That’s how I found him,” she told Gabriel. “I felt—I don’t know how else to describe it—like a magical pulse. And then we looked for him, found him.”
Gabriel cocked his head at her. “You haven’t sensed anything like that before?”
“No,” she said. “And God knows I’ve been around enough bad magic in my time.”
I reached out and squeezed her hand, found it a little clammy. She gripped mine hard and didn’t let go.
• • •
Jeff and Catcher took photographs of the symbols. My and Mallory’s hands were still linked when we walked back toward the body. Three more of the shifters had dismounted, and they stood around him protectively.
“We’ll want to take him home tonight,” Gabriel said.
“You know that won’t be possible.” My grandfather’s tone was polite but firm. “We’ll release him to his family, but not until the postmortem is complete.”
“We’re his family,” Gabriel said gruffly. “Or the closest thing to it. The Pack doesn’t give two shits what Cook County has to say about cause of death. Especially since that cause should be brutally obvious to anyone with a brain.”
“Gabriel,” Ethan said, the word as much warning as name.
“Don’t start with me, Sullivan.” Magic began to rise in the air, peppery and dangerous. “He may not have been mine when he was alive, but he’s mine now.”