Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires, #12)(8)

“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.