Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires, #12)(92)

“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.