Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires, #12)(14)

“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.”