by Chloe Neill
“You’re a cruel woman.”
She looked up at me and grinned. “I know. I’m a much better doctor.” She gently patted on a cooling gel, then turned me toward the light and inspected the arm she’d cleaned and medicated. “Much better. Let’s get the clean T-shirt on you, and you’ll want to keep that uncovered and clear for a little while. It’s nearly healed, and you don’t want to have to deal with this again.”
“No,” I said, wincing as Lindsey helped me pull the shirt over my head. “I do not. And thank you for the help. Even if I’d like to punch you a little bit right now.”
“I can’t say I blame you.”
Delia’s phone rang, and she pulled it from her pocket and glanced at the screen. “And duty calls again. I need to run.” She glanced at Ethan and got his nod of approval.
“Thank you for the help,” I called out as she hurried toward the door. I looked back at Ethan. “In case that didn’t register, will you please thank her for me?”
“I will,” he said. “And she’s happy to help.” He smiled slyly. “But you should probably work on not getting shot again.”
It was on my agenda.
• • •
“Now that we’ve addressed Merit’s injury,” Ethan said, when we’d reset from a medical discussion to a strategic one, “she also made a rather significant discovery.”
“That’s why I brought that up here,” Luc said, pointing behind me. I followed the direction of his gesture, saw the enormous, wheeled whiteboard near the wall behind us. We used it when we needed to do investigating, identify facts, formulate theories. And lately, we’d been doing a lot of it. My grandfather’s influence, maybe.
“Two new marker colors, too,” Luc said, eyes gleaming. “So we can color-code as necessary.”
Ethan gestured the group to the sitting area while Luc arranged the board in front of the bookshelves and uncapped a marker, the scent of solvent filling the room.
“Also strong colors,” Lindsey said, wrinkling her nose as she sat in one of the club chairs in the sitting area. Malik took the other chair after offering it to Juliet. She declined with a wave of her hand, sat down on the floor, crossing her slender legs in front of her.
Ethan walked to the small refrigerator tucked into the bookshelves, pulled out two bottles of blood. He handed me one, then took a seat on the leather couch beside me.
I opened the blood, took a satisfying drink. In the company of vampires, it was a perfectly normal thing to do.
“Seriously,” Juliet said, waving a hand in front of her face, “that marker could clear a room.”
“Good,” Luc said, positioning himself in front of the board, marker in his fist like an expensive, bladed weapon.
“What am I always telling you about weaponry?” Luc asked, scanning the faces of the guards.
“Anything is a weapon, and a weapon is anything,” we parroted back like perfect pupils. But with more sarcasm.
“Good,” Luc said with an approving nod. “You need to clear a room, you now know how to do it.”
“Committed to memory,” Lindsey said, tapping a nail against her temple.
Luc grunted doubtfully but looked at us. “All right, Sentinel. You’ve got our attention. Give us the details of tonight’s trouble.”
“Dead shifter,” I said, “apparently killed by a vampire under the El tracks at the Addison Station. And nearby, alchemical symbols written on a concrete pedestal.”
Luc nodded, wrote the three headlines at the top of the board: vampire, shifter, sorcerer. Then he marked a line through “shifter,” killing him symbolically.
“That’s quite a variety of supernaturals in one place,” Malik said.
“No argument there,” Ethan said.
“Shifter had puncture marks on his left-hand side,” I said. “Blood near the body, blood near the pedestal.”
“The shifter’s name was Caleb Franklin,” Ethan put in. “An NAC member who defected.”
Malik’s eyebrows rose, and he looked up from the tablet on which he’d been writing notes. “Defected?”
“Defected,” Ethan confirmed. “Keene didn’t provide details, only said Franklin wanted more ‘freedom.’” Ethan used air quotes, which meant he’d found the excuse as questionable as I had.
“You buy that?” Luc asked, arms crossed.
“I do not,” Ethan said. “But one does not interrogate the Apex of the NAC Pack near the scene of his dead, if former, Pack mate and in front of several of his comrades.”
“A wise political course,” Malik said.
“What about the vampire?” Luc asked.
I gave them his description. “I didn’t see his full face, but what I did see didn’t look familiar.”
“Me, neither,” Ethan said.
But he might, I thought, look familiar to someone else. I pulled out my phone. “I’m going to see if Jeff can check security cams in the area. Maybe we can get at least a partial still of his face.”
“Good,” Luc said, and wrote Need photograph on the board. “We can send that to Scott and Morgan, see if he’s familiar to them.”
“I’ll also send it to Noah,” I said. Noah Beck was the unofficial leader of the city’s Rogue vampires. He’d hooked me up with the Red Guard, a secret vampire corps, and was a member himself, but I hadn’t seen him in a while.
“And the alchemy?” Luc asked, after adding Noah’s name to the board.
“There were a lot of symbols,” I said. “Jeff and Catcher took pictures, and they’re working on an analysis. Mallory and Catcher think it’s some kind of equation based on the way it’s written—neat rows and columns—but they’ve got to translate in order to know what kind.”
Luc glanced at Ethan. “Paige?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Ethan said with a nod. “When we receive the photographs, will you see if she can help? Mallory will assist, but there’s a lot to translate in order to figure out what was written there.”
“And that’s our biggest question,” Luc said, writing ALCHEMY in all caps across the board with a bright green marker even stinkier than the first.
“This reminds me that I knew an alchemist once upon a time,” Ethan said, his gaze on the board. “Or a man who called himself an alchemist, at any rate. He was in Munich in the employ of a baron who wanted more wealth. He was convinced turning lead into gold was possible.”
“When was this?” I asked. Ethan had nearly four hundred years under his belt, after all.
He frowned. “Mid–seventeen hundreds, I believe. Alchemy had its run, but as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t been popular in magical circles in a very long time.”
“I assume the purported alchemist wasn’t successful?” Malik asked.
“He was not. He supposedly had success using a meteorite discovered in the Carpathian Mountains, but, to no one’s surprise, he wasn’t able to repeat the results for an audience.” Ethan lifted a shoulder. “He was a charlatan. He lived off the baron for nine or ten years before the baron grew tired of tricks.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“Put the alchemist’s head on a pike to warn away anyone else who might have hoped to deceive him.”
Juliet glanced back at me. “Any chance this alchemy was practice, scribbles, the ravings of a madman, anything like that?”
“It was awfully precise to be scribbles,” Ethan said, glancing at me. “There were, what, a few hundred symbols there?”
I nodded. “At least that.”
“Someone has magic planned,” Malik said, and a heaviness fell over the room.
Luc tapped the plastic marker against the board. “Let’s talk through what that magic might be.”
“It was close to Wrigley Field,” I said, and all eyes turned to me. “Maybe the geography matters. Maybe they plan to hit it.”
“On
the night of a game,” Juliet said, and I nodded, anger bristling beneath my skin. Supernaturals being violent toward one another was one thing. But targeting humans—those who didn’t have their strength, their power, their immortality—was something else entirely. It was a breach of the rules, whatever that game might have been.
Luc blew out a breath, wrote the idea on the board. “What else?”
“The El,” Ethan said. “The symbols were written on the trestle. Perhaps the magic was intended to disrupt service, to knock out a pedestal and derail the cars.”
“Like an explosion,” Luc said, and added that possibility to the list. He glanced back at me. “Only the one pedestal?”
“Yeah. We don’t know if he or she only meant to prep one and got interrupted, or only needed one in the first place.”
Luc uncapped the marker, drew three enormous question marks in the middle of the board. “So we need intel there. Translating the equation, hopefully, will fill in some of it.”
“We can also check the chatter,” Juliet said. “If it’s a big operation, there’s a chance someone is talking about it on the Web.”
“Good,” Luc said, adding the strategy to the board. “And how do the shifter and vampire fit into this?”
“If they’re friends with the sorcerer,” Juliet said, “they could have been entourage, buddy, bodyguard. Maybe a disagreement broke out.”
“Or, if not friends,” Lindsey said, glancing at Juliet, “maybe a rival or personal disagreement. Maybe the shifter was trying to interrupt the sorcerer.”
Lindsey nodded. “Doesn’t like what the sorcerer’s doing, doesn’t like how he’s doing it, so the vampire takes him out.”
“Or maybe the vampire was the antagonist,” Luc said. “Shifter and sorcerer are working together, vampire shows up, tries to head off the magic. Takes out the shifter, but the sorcerer gets away.”
“If that’s true,” I said, “and the vampire’s trying to avoid some big alchemical whatsit, why would he run away from us?”
“Maybe he’s on our side, relatively speaking, but didn’t want to be identified.” Luc glanced at Ethan. “Could have been a Red Guard member.” Luc was one of the few Cadogan vampires who knew I was involved in activities outside the House; he didn’t know that activity was the Red Guard or that Jonah, the Guard captain of Grey House, was my partner.
Or had been, anyway. Things were tense between us at present because I was sleeping with the presumed “enemy,” whom I refused to spy on.
“Could have been,” Ethan said with a slow nod. “But murder isn’t typically the RG’s MO. They aren’t normally that violent or that proactive. And killing with a bite isn’t their style.”
I’ll ask, I told Ethan silently, already brainstorming how, exactly, I was going to do that without making things worse. (“Hey, Jonah. I know we aren’t really talking right now, but did one of our RG colleagues kill a shifter near Grey House earlier tonight?”)
Ethan looked at Luc. “The shifter is our best lead at the moment. We have a name, a position, and a Pack. Find out what you can about his defection, and we’ll talk to Gabriel. He said they’ll host a wake tomorrow.”
Luc’s eyebrows lifted with surprise. “Even though he defected?”
“That was my question, too,” I said.
Luc nodded thoughtfully, considered. “We’ll do the research.”
“Discreetly,” Ethan said.
“I am nothing if not discreet.”
Lindsey snorted. “You walked down the hallway wearing nothing but a towel the other day.”
Luc grinned, stretched his arms. “I was hungry.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “You were showing off.”
Ethan laughed lightly, but then closed his eyes, rubbed his temples. Here, in front of his trusted staff, he could be vulnerable. “Alert the House just in case. If an unknown sorcerer is spreading magic around the city, and a vampire is killing shifters, that kind of trouble could find its way here.”
“Already has, arguably,” Luc said.
Ethan nodded. “Nothing so far indicates the man or woman who wrote these symbols is known to us. Until we figure out the reason for the magic, we treat it as antagonistic. We don’t need to lock down the House, but I want everyone on alert.”
“The House is already prepared because of Reed,” Malik said, comforting. “They’ll be careful.”
Ethan nodded at Malik, then looked around the room, meeting the gaze of each vampire in turn. “A shifter was killed by a vampire tonight. Gabriel trusts us to a point, but that trust will only extend so far. We don’t want to put our alliance at risk.” He rose. “I’d like a report at dusk with what we’ve learned about the defection, the shifter, the symbols.”
The other vampires understood the meaning of Ethan’s change in position, and they rose, too.
“On it, hoss,” Luc said, then nodded at me and headed toward the door, his guards behind him.
I rose to follow Luc, but Ethan put a hand on my arm. “Go upstairs. Take the rest of the night off.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “We’ve only a few hours before dawn in any event, and tomorrow promises to be busy. I’d like you to help Mallory and Paige with the translation. I’ll clear it with Luc.”
He wouldn’t, actually. As Master, he’d inform Luc, which was a very different thing.
“I’m not sure how much help I can be,” I said. “I don’t really know much about alchemy, just recognized the symbols.”
“That’s why you’ll be their minion, and not the other way around.”
“Ha-ha.”
He pressed his mouth to mine. “I’m going to take care of a few issues here, including updating the AAM, and then I’ll join you in the apartments. Perhaps we’ll enjoy some wine in front of the fire.”
The AAM was the Assembly of American Masters.
“Is dealing with Nicole going to put you in the mood for wine drinking?” Nicole Heart was the Master of Atlanta’s Heart House, and the vampire who’d been elected leader of the AAM.
He chuckled. “It will certainly put me in the mood to want a drink.” He pressed his lips to mine, softly, tenderly. “Have a rest, Sentinel. I’ll see you soon.”
• • •
The Masters’ apartments were on the third floor of Cadogan House and were composed of a suite of rooms: sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, and enormous closet that held Ethan’s collection of suits and my leather fighting ensemble.
The rooms were as luxurious as the rest of the House, with beautiful furniture and art, fresh flowers, and, since the night was waning, the silver tray of snacks that Margot, the House chef, left for us every night. Tonight, it was here earlier than usual, but Ethan had probably told her how our evening had gone, requested she prepare it.
When I’d closed the door and kicked off my shoes, I unwrapped one of the gold-foiled chocolates she’d taken to leaving lately, a mix of chocolate, hazelnuts, and toffee that hit the spot.
As carefully as I could, I stripped off the rest of my clothes and headed for the shower. Ethan hadn’t spared any expense in the bathroom, with lots of marble, gleaming fixtures, and the fluffiest towels I’d ever used. And of course they were monogrammed with a curvaceous “C” in rich navy blue.
I turned on the enormous shower, let the water warm and the steam rise, and stepped inside. Eyes closed, I dunked my head and let the heat roll over me until I felt soothed again.
When I was dry and robed, I surveyed my pajama options in the bedroom’s chest of drawers. I usually opted for a tank or T-shirt and patterned shorts or bottoms. It was unlikely an emergency would occur during daylight hours—what could we do about it anyway?—but I liked being dressed just in case.
There were fancier things in the drawers—silk lingerie so delicate it felt like liquid between my fingertips, lacy and strappy things that weren’t built for comfor
t, but to excite. I couldn’t say I was feeling especially amorous, not with Caleb Franklin on my mind. I was feeling emotionally exhausted by supernatural drama.
The apartment door opened, closed, locked. Ethan appeared around the doorway, a leather portfolio in hand. He put it on the desk and glanced through the apartment, looking for me.
“Feeling indecisive?” he asked with a smile.
“Unsettled.” I pulled out a Cadogan tank, matching bottoms, placed them on the bed. Ethan had branded the House from top to bottom and everywhere in between. It wouldn’t have surprised me much to wake up one evening and find an inked “C” on my biceps. “I didn’t expect you to come up so early.”
“I decided I could also use a break.” Ethan walked closer, eyebrows drawn together in concern. “You’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Just tired and frustrated.”
His body tensed. Not much, but then I was attuned to it—and his moods—more than most. “Frustrated? About what?”
“About everything.” I walked back to the bed, sat down. “Ethan, every time we turn around, somebody wants to kill us, control us, put us out of business, put the Pack out of business. I guess I’m feeling burned out.”
He walked closer, pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You aren’t the only vampire to have these feelings.”
I looked up at him. “Oh?”
“Many Novitiates, many staff, have talked to me about their frustration, their fear, their stress.” He sat beside me, hands clasped in his lap. “We lived unmolested for many years before Celina decided to announce us. If we’d stayed quiet and let others handle the problems that arose, we wouldn’t have drawn as much attention. But we did. And so we face the consequences of our caring.”
And wasn’t that a kick in the ass? “I know,” I said. “It’s just . . .” I groped for words, pulled up my legs to sit cross-legged, and glanced at him. “I don’t want our child to grow up in a world like the one we’re facing right now. Where every night is a new battle.”