Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires, #12)(7)
“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?”