Midnight Marked

by Chloe Neill

  And that, I thought, was as much an apology as he was going to give.

  • • •

  “What a mess,” I said when Gabriel walked back to Fallon and Eli, began to talk about strategy.

  “It’s the inherent danger of shifters,” Ethan said, “and one of the reasons they prefer to live away from humans. They’re as much wild creature as human. They’re strong, potentially violent, often unpredictable.”

  “And sometimes amazingly loyal,” I said as Jeff helped a limping Juliet into the House.

  “Indeed, Sentinel. Indeed.”

  Mallory walked down the sidewalk, mouth agape and a large duffel bag in hand, weighted down in the middle by something relatively small and obviously heavy.

  “What the hell?” she asked when she reached us, her gaze still tripping around the destruction.

  “Confused shifters,” I said, so we could skip the longer play-by-play. “A shifter was manipulated by magic, and his friends blamed us.”

  “I haven’t heard from Catcher yet, so I didn’t know. Damn, you guys.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a disaster. And there’s something else. The shifter went postal because someone played puppet master with a shifter near the Wrigleyville symbols.”

  Mallory opened her mouth, closed it again. “Say what, now?”

  “You know what we know. Apparently made the controlled shifter beat the crap out of a fellow Pack member while the sorcerer played composer.” I waved a hand back and forth like conducting an orchestra.

  “Holy shit,” Mallory said. “That’s . . . not good.”

  “We’re agreed on that,” Ethan said.

  “How did they make it work? Magically, I mean.”

  “The shifter said the sorcerer drew a symbol in the air,” I said. “He couldn’t ID the symbol, but it was glowing shapes of some kind.”

  She looked at the ground, processed. “So it was alchemy. And Paige had it right—the alchemy is about affecting other people.” She scratched her forehead thoughtfully. “But I just don’t see that reflected in the parts we’ve translated. I’m going to have to think about this. In the meantime, would you like some good news?”

  “God, yes,” Ethan said.

  “The machine’s ready. The alchemical detector—that’s what I’m calling it. We just need to make sure Jeff’s done with his part, and we’re ready to deploy. We just need some height.”

  Ethan glanced back, lifted his gaze to the House. “I believe I know a place.”

  • • •

  We waited until the situation at the House was stable. Until the human guards had been cared for and shifters had covered the broken windows with plywood, installed a make-do door and make-do gate, and stood guard outside both. They’d stay until the House was secure again. Architecturally, anyway.

  We also waited until Scott and the Grey House physician were let through the barrier, could tend to Jonah. Ramón had kept an eye on him during the fracas, monitoring him until the battle was over.

  “Concussion,” the doctor said, but frowned. “I don’t like that he’s unconscious, but it’s not uncommon with a good knock to the head. Let’s get him someplace safe and stable, and I’ll monitor him from there.”

  I pressed a very platonic kiss to Jonah’s cheek and watched as they drove him away.

  Getting all that arranged put us on the House’s narrow widow’s walk only an hour before dawn. It was a narrow space accessible through the attic and a window to the roof and bounded by a wrought-iron rail.

  Cadogan House was the tallest building on the street, which at least meant there weren’t too many line-of-sight issues. The city unfolded around us, a blanket of orange and white lights, buildings tall and short. And to the east, the lake spread like dark, rich ink, virtually untouched by artificial light. It looked as if the world simply stopped.

  “Damn,” Jeff said. “You forget how beautiful it is when you only see it from down there. When you only see the anger and petty squabbles.”

  “Speaking of which, let’s try to fix this one,” Catcher said.

  “I think that’s a hint that my husband is eager to get this show on the road.”

  “Husband” still hit my ear wrong.

  Mallory, Catcher, and Jeff began to prepare their magic. Beside me, Ethan kept his gaze on the city. I would give it to you if I could, Sentinel. And all of it in peace.

  I smiled and held out a hand. Let’s go see if we can make a little of that happen.

  A few feet away, Mallory pulled off the satchel she’d worn diagonally across her chest and spread it open. She put both hands inside, very carefully lifted out what looked like a spinning spice rack, and placed it on the ground. There were jars in about a third of the slots, and the middle of the older had been carved out, a small porcelain crucible placed inside. A small, square mirror was mounted on a bracket above it.

  Silence followed.

  Ethan and I cocked our heads at it.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Pretty sweet, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not what I expected.”

  Mallory moved the bag out of the way. “It’s not the shimmy in the magic, it’s the magic in the shimmy. Right, honey?”

  “Put that on a T-shirt,” Catcher said, crouching beside her.

  Jeff pulled a tablet from his backpack, began scrambling fingers over the screen. He might not have been vampire—we couldn’t all be so lucky—but his fingers were faster than any I’d ever seen.

  Good for Fallon, I thought cheekily.

  “How, exactly, will this work?” Ethan asked, peering over my shoulder.

  “With unicorn farts and happy wishes,” Catcher said, adjusting the gadget’s glass cylinders. Alchemical symbols were inscribed in the wood around the bottles and crucible.

  “Oh, good,” Ethan said. “I was concerned we weren’t adequately addressing our energy needs by ignoring the unicorn farts.”

  “At least you’ve kept your sense of humor,” Mallory said, expression tight with concentration. When they’d adjusted the bottles, she adjusted the mirror, then stood up again.

  Catcher did the same. “This will detect alchemical resonance.”

  Mallory nodded. “We’ve created the appropriate mix of salts and mercury, added the necessary symbology. We just have to quicken the magic. You ready?” she asked Jeff.

  “Calibrating,” he said. “Nearly there.” With a final tap, he rolled his shoulders and moved to stand behind the machine, aiming the tablet at it. “Ready.”

  “We’re going to do Wrigley first,” Catcher said. “We know where those symbols are, so it’ll be a good test.” At Mallory’s nod, he struck a match in the dark. The smell of sulfur singed the air. As Mallory closed her eyes to whisper quiet words, he dropped the match into the crucible.

  There was a pop and the hiss of fire meeting fuel, and a pale beam of smoky light shot from the crucible, bounced off the mirror above it, and shot north. It faded as it moved away from us, and disappeared completely when a building interrupted our line of sight. Probably for the best—we didn’t need to field phone calls about laser beams over Chicago.

  “Here,” Jeff said, and we gathered around him. He’d pulled up the three-dimensional map of the city. The light was green on the tablet, and it speared north from Cadogan House to Wrigleyville.

  “Nice,” Mallory said, offering her husband a high five. But his gaze was stuck to the screen. The beam of light didn’t stop when it reached Wrigleyville. It flared and refracted, flying out on another trajectory until it stopped and flared again, hitting another hot spot.

  And it didn’t stop. The light kept flaring, refracting, traveling again until the program had traced a dozen hot spots across the city. Nearly to Skokie to the north, nearly to Calumet City to the south, and from the lake to Hellriver in the west. There’d been more sy
mbols in Hellriver, and we’d missed them, not that we’d known to look.

  The hot spots and the line between them formed their own alchemical symbol—a circle inside a diamond inside a square, all of which was surrounded by another circle.

  “There are so many of them,” Jeff said quietly.

  Ethan stood silently and stoically beside me, concern flaring as he looked at what seemed an obvious threat to his city, his vampires.

  “Holy Batman Jesus,” Mallory murmured, staring at the screen, then the city, then back again. Then she looked at me. “That’s why the code doesn’t make sense—even when we can translate the symbols. You read it in the round. A little bit from each hot spot, one hot spot after another, in order.”

  I looked down at the symbol again, imagined reading one line of alchemy after another across the symbol before starting back at the beginning and reading through the second line.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. That’s why the phrases seem contradictory. Because they are, at least within each block of text.” I looked back at Ethan. “If we can get images of all the hot spots, we can improve the odds of actually getting the thing translated.”

  “Then we’ll make it happen,” he said. “What’s the significance of the symbol?”

  “It’s called the Quinta Essentia,” Catcher said. “The square represents mankind. The inner circle represents earth. The outer circle is the universe, which represents the higher resonance. The diamond is the mechanism through which you reach the resonance.”

  “Increasing the resonance,” Mallory said. “That’s got to be part of the equation.”

  Catcher looked at her. “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me play it out.” She paced to the other end of the widow’s walk, looked over the city for a moment, arms crossed and cardigan pulled tight against the chilly breeze.

  “Can you send a screenshot of the symbol to Gabriel?” I asked while she paced. “It might be the symbol Kane saw.”

  Jeff nodded, looked down at the tablet. “On that.”

  Mallory walked back to us. “The nullification part of the equation—that’s the part that’s been bothering me. I couldn’t figure out why the sorcerer would want to nullify something about himself. I hadn’t thought about what we know now—that the alchemy is intended to affect other people. And I think that’s true of the nullification term, too.”

  “Who is it nullifying?” Catcher asked with a frown.

  “Us. Our free will.”

  We stared at her.

  “I don’t understand,” Ethan said. “Even vampire glamour can’t conquer free will.”

  “Not alone,” Mallory said. “But we aren’t talking about just a vampire.”

  “We’re talking about a vampire and a sorcerer,” Catcher said, voice low and heavy with concern. “And they’re working in concert.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “We’ll have to check this against the actual code, but what if the alchemy, I guess, twists the vampire’s glamour together with the sorcerer’s magic? Like, I don’t know, braiding steel cables together to make them stronger, or something.”

  “And that’s where the nullification comes in,” Ethan said. “To boost the effect of their magic by eliminating our defenses.”

  The mood went understandably morose. Who wouldn’t be worried about that? I thought of that moment on the train when the Rogue’s glamour had sought out the part of me that was soft and fragile as a nestling. It had been vulnerability stacked atop vulnerability. That exposure twisted and magnified was terrifying. Added to whatever warped activities he actually wanted us to do? Exponentially worse.

  “All right,” Ethan said, the words piercing through the fear-laden magic that swirled with the winds across the roof. “There is no point in fear. That’s what Reed would prefer. We figure a way forward. And I am open to ideas.”

  I couldn’t look away from the pulsing symbol that surrounded an enormous segment of the city. “I don’t know if ideas are going to help us.”

  I felt Ethan’s gaze on me. “Sentinel?”

  “Look at the symbol,” I said, looking back at them. “All the hot spots have been drawn. All the alchemy’s in place. He just has to kindle the magic.”

  The fact that neither Mallory nor Catcher argued with that didn’t improve the mood.

  “We need a countermagic,” he said. “Since we can’t just erase the symbols, the magic needs to be literally reversed.”

  “And that means we need to know the entire equation,” Mallory said, glancing at Jeff. “If we have images of all the hot spots, could you plug them into the algorithm you’ve been working on? Come up with a final code?”

  “It’s possible,” Jeff said. “But it wouldn’t be fast. I’ve got the skeleton of the program under way, but it’s not done yet. I’m missing variables—the symbols we haven’t yet been able to decipher.”

  Catcher looked at Mallory, nodded. “We’ll get to work on a countermagic. I just hope we have enough time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EASEL LIKE SUNDAY MORNING

  Dawn came and went, and dusk followed again. I checked on Jonah, was assured by Scott that he was awake, if not yet at a hundred percent. That was, at least, part of the weight off my shoulders.

  Kane thought the QE was the symbol he’d seen. That pretty much confirmed our controlling-sups theory, and it was terrifying to have gotten that right. Catcher and Mallory would work on a countermagic. We just had to hope we had time to finalize it.

  Jeff had given us a list of the locations Mallory had pegged as Quinta Essentia—QE—hot spots. Gabriel volunteered shifters to visit the spots, take photographs. Malik coordinated joint shifter and guard teams, and they’d been sent across the city to gather the rest of the images, which I was helping Paige translate as they came in. Luc coordinated extra security for the House; since the defenses had been breached, it wasn’t hard to imagine Reed would take advantage and take a shot at us.

  Paige and I sat at the library table that was starting to become a second home to me. Of the dozen sites, information about two of them had come in. We’d gathered every easel and whiteboard in the House and the three nearest office supply stores. After bargaining with the Librarian to move some tables around (Paige took that one), we used the easels to create a mock-up of the QE. That way, we could post the boards on the easels in their relative positions and in the correct order.

  We stared at them, walked around them, brainstormed near them, trying to figure out the symbols we were missing—the ones that would give us the keys to the whole thing.

  My phone rang, Jeff’s image on the screen. I answered it, but not until after I’d gazed around shiftily for the Librarian. I didn’t think he’d want me talking on the phone in the library, but no harm if he hadn’t seen it.

  “Merit,” I said. Quietly, just in case.

  “I found the bank.”

  “The bank?” I asked absently, head tilted as I tried to understand the transition from one set of symbols to the next.

  “For the safe-deposit box key.”

  I stopped moving. “No shit?”

  “No shit. It’s for a box at Chicago Security Bank and Trust. The key is a really old-fashioned shape. They don’t use them much anymore, and I found people complaining about it on a forum online.”

  “You are a genius!”

  “I try. And it turns out, Gabriel Keene is a co-owner of the account.”

  Now, that was interesting. “And was Gabe aware of that fact?”

  “I mean, I only—cough, cough—received this private bank information anonymously.” Of course he had. “But there’s no signature card on file, at least as far as I can tell from what the anonymous informant passed along.” He said each word carefully, like the FBI was listening in. Which probably wasn’t impossible.

  “There�
��s one more thing,” Jeff said. “The account was set up only a couple of days before Caleb was killed.”

  My blood chilled, and my magic must have, too, because Paige looked back at me.

  “He got a safe-deposit box, put Gabe’s name on it, hid the key, and was killed,” I said, working through the timeline. “His death might not have been some spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said darkly. “That’s what I was thinking. You should get down there.”

  I checked the clock. “It’s late. What time does the bank close?”

  “We’re in luck. They run special summer hours two nights a week. This is one of those nights.”

  I was already rising. “You’ll talk to Gabe?”

  “Already done,” Jeff said. “I’m still programming. He’ll meet you there.”

  • • •

  Ethan and I met Gabriel at the bank, and we snuck in right under the wire. A woman in khakis and a bright polo—CSB&T embroidered in white on the pocket—was putting keys in the lock when we arrived.

  “You’re closing?” Gabriel asked.

  “Nope!” she said with a smile. “You’ve got ten minutes. I’m just locking the side door here.”

  “We’d actually like to open a safe-deposit box,” Gabriel said. “I just found out I was named as an owner, but I’m not certain what’s in it.”

  She smiled. “Of course. You have a key and identification?”

  “I do.” Gabriel pulled out his wallet—black leather on a silver chain—slid out his ID, handed it and the key to the woman.

  “I’ll just check this,” she said, and gestured us to follow her. She walked behind a desk, sat down in a rolling chair, and began to type.

  “All right,” she said after a moment, handing the items back to him. She opened a drawer, pulled out a second key on a long silk cord, and rose again. “Just follow me, please.”

  Easy enough, Ethan said silently.

  The deposit boxes were in a long vault behind a barred door, open since we were still, technically, there during business hours. The woman walked to a row of boxes about halfway down the right-hand wall, slid her key into one of the two slots, gestured for Gabriel to do the same.