CHAPTER TWENTY

FACTS OF WAR

Gabriel let CPD corral the shifters into a corner of the yard. They lay facedown, hands on their heads, while Catcher, my grandfather, the SWAT team members watched them. The SWAT men and women had weapons in hand, and they looked as though they were daring the shifters to move.

There’d been seventeen of them. They’d come to the House in the Humvee on the lawn, two more parked outside it. It had taken two vehicles to pull off the gate—proving that no system was foolproof.

The House looked like an apocalypse had rolled through. The entryway was a disaster. The front doors were gone, and most of the front windows had been blown out. The stone was pockmarked with bullets. It hadn’t looked this bad since the last time the shifters attacked us. That had been Adam Keene’s doing. And for that and other sins, he hadn’t lived to talk about it.

Gabriel Keene would have much to answer for.

Kane had been gathered up, deposited on the other side of the lawn away from his friends or minions, whoever he’d gotten to follow his crusade.

Ethan and I stood around him, katanas unsheathed and at our sides. Gabriel stood in front of him, his anger unmasked, hot waves of furious magic spilling through the yard like an angry tsunami.

“We were at Bill’s Eat Place,” Kane said.

“Where’s Bill’s Eat Place?” Ethan asked.

“What does it matter?” Kane asked, frustration ringing in his voice. I imagined from his perspective we were ignoring the obvious.

Gabriel crouched in front of him. “I told you to answer whatever questions he asked you. You don’t answer his questions, and I’ll turn your ass over to Sullivan and his Sentinel right now, and let them decide what to do with you.”

Kane turned his brown eyes on me. I let my eyes silver and my fangs descend, and showed them off.

“Wrigleyville,” he said. “It’s in Wrigleyville.” He looked back at Gabriel, as if that might make the horrifying specter of me disappear. “We were having drinks, and Kyle Farr and me went out to the alley to piss. We finished up, and I’m going back inside. I look back, and Farr’s squinting at people down the alley a little ways. Sups. They start walking toward us—vampire and another guy—I didn’t get a good look at him.

“Kyle starts walking down the alley toward them. I’m thinking he’s going to confront them, and I’m up for some action. They get closer. I can see the vamp, but the man hangs back, stays in the shadows. Then he whispers something, does some abracadabra. Draws this symbol in the air, and it glows like neon.”

“What kind of symbol?” Ethan asked.

Kane shrugged. “Nothing I recognized. Some kind of shapes. Square or triangle or something? I don’t know. Anyway, soon as he did that, Farr got this faraway look in his eyes. And then he starts whaling on me. I’m like, what the hell, man? I give him a punch of my own, but he just keeps coming. And the entire time, the vamp and sorcerer—I’m figuring that’s what he is at this point—they’re just standing there with this symbol just glowing. And every time the sorcerer moves a finger, Farr does something else. He just keeps coming and coming and wailing on me.”

Gabriel shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

Kane pulled down his shoulder, showed a jagged wound that I hadn’t put there. “Absolutely possible. Absolutely happened.”

I felt the sharp shock of Ethan’s magic. He’d been under the control of a sorcerer once—brought back to life by Mallory when she’d been under the influence of black magic. She’d tried, and failed, to make him a familiar, but the magic had left a temporary link between them, one that allowed her to work through him and feel her emotions. This sorcerer was using alchemy, but the power sounded just as disturbing.

“Anyway, Kyle keeps coming and coming, and I finally get him on the ground. By this time, Twitch has come out of the bar, and Rick, and all those guys. They see Farr on the ground and these sups down the alley, and I say, let’s get these guys. The vampire says he also took out Franklin and we can thank Cadogan House because they paid for both.”

Gabriel worked his jaw in obvious frustration. “And did he say why Cadogan House would pay him to kill a shifter?”

Kane slid his gaze to Ethan. “Because Sullivan wants control of the city, and he’s proving to you that he’s in charge.”

And wasn’t that ironic, coming from Reed’s minion?

“Where’s Farr?” Gabe asked.

Kane finally looked regretful. “Don’t know. That symbol disappeared, and so did they. When we looked back, he was gone.”

They disappeared him? Ethan asked silently.

Or convinced him to walk away, I said. Or worse, convinced him to go with them.

“And so you came here,” Gabriel said. “With Humvees and automatic weapons.”

“We protect our own.”

Gabriel sighed. “I’m sure you believe you were protecting the Pack, Kane. Unfortunately, you’re protecting it from the wrong people. You got played.”

“No, but they said—”

“And they were lying. The vampire you saw is the one who killed Franklin, but Cadogan House didn’t do it.”

“They were there when it happened.”

“They were there after it happened because they’d been going to a goddamn night game. And instead of leaving our man where he was, they chased the vampire and got shot in the process.”

Kane looked suspiciously from Ethan to me. I almost showed him my bullet wound, but decided I wasn’t going to justify my existence to a man so ready to believe the worst of us.

“But the vampire said—”

“You got played,” Gabriel said again. “You attacked innocents who’ve been trying to find Caleb’s killer. And when you had a chance to take him down, you were dazzled by magic and let him go.”

Kane deflated like a balloon, like all the piss and vinegar and righteousness leaked out of him at once.

“Haul him up,” Gabriel said to Fallon and Eli Keene; Gabriel had called them into action, probably because he knew they were trustworthy. “Put him with the others.” There was sympathy and disappointment and anger in his voice.

They escorted Kane to the holding area for the other shifters, stepping over broken and bloody pavement to get there.

“Tell me the rest of it,” Gabriel said, watching his men. Ethan glanced at me, nodded. This was my story to tell.

“We think Reed has two main players—the sorcerer and the vampire. We don’t have an ID for the sorcerer. We believe the vampire’s a Rogue”—I paused—“and we know he’s the Rogue who attacked me the night I became a vampire.”

Gabriel went very still. “Last night—your fight on the train. That was him.”

I nodded.

“You’re all right?”

I nodded. “I’ll do.”

He watched me for a long, silent moment. “I told you, when he killed Caleb, that I wanted him. I’d say you’ve got a claim, too.”

I nodded. I could admit I wanted my chance at the Rogue.

Our deal done, Gabe looked at Ethan again. “And we don’t know anything about the sorcerer?”

“He belongs to Reed,” Ethan began, “knows alchemy, and doesn’t like to be seen.”

“And apparently has the ability to control a shifter, to make him fight like a damn marionette.”

“Is Kane trustworthy?” Ethan asked.

Gabriel made a rough and ragged sound. “I wouldn’t have said no before tonight. But what kind of judge am I now?” He put his hands on his head, turned around, and looked back at the House. “We’ve wrought destruction here tonight.” He glanced back at Ethan. “But there may be worse coming. It was alchemy? What he saw?”

“The symbol the sorcerer drew could have been alchemical. But there’s nothing we’ve translated so far about controlling shifters.”

Ethan glanced at me for confirmation, and I nodded. “Nothing in the parts we’ve been able to translate. But we’re still missing some glyphs.”

“It may not just be shifters,” Gabriel said. “He’s not known to have any specific animus against us. We may have been the unlucky ones they’ve tested this on. The rollout may be larger.”

“But the purpose might be the same,” I said. “Not just controlling supernaturals, but using them to fight.” Just as they had with Farr.

“You’re talking about an army,” Gabe said. “A supernatural one.”

“We don’t know how long he’s had this in the works,” I said. “But he knows we’ve been watching him, and that he’s been connected to the Circle. He wants control of the city. Supposedly wants to bring order to it. More likely, he wants to unify his kingdoms. The Circle’s got plenty of guns and money. Supernaturals would make a fine army.”

Ethan glanced at Gabe. “At the risk of minimizing what he’s done to my House, if Kane’s retelling the story accurately, I don’t entirely blame him. This is as disturbing as it gets.”

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “For you, for us, for the city.” He glanced back at his shifters. “I’m not going to object to their arrest. A little prison time might knock some sense into them.”

Ethan nodded. “You, of course, still owe us.”

“Acknowledged,” Gabriel said, teeth gritted.

“You can start by arranging medical care for the human guards and preparing the House for dawn.” Ethan checked his watch. “We don’t have much time.”

“Then I’ll need to get on that, Your Highness.” Gabe’s tone was flat, and frustrated magic seemed to swim around him as he gestured for Fallon. “And I can now worry about the shifter I’m missing and the possibility a man with an unbridled ego has figured out some kind of charm to control us. Helluva goddamn night,” he said, then gestured toward the damage to the House. “Reed wants to hurt sups, or make us look bad in the press, he couldn’t have planned this better.”

“Who says he didn’t?” I said.

Ethan and Gabriel looked at me.

“I’m not saying he finagled getting your people to the bar, but the sorcerer and vampire were smart enough—and had authority enough—to take advantage of the situation they found themselves in. They play with the shifter, and then they turn the heat onto us. That keeps us from working on the alchemy, getting closer.”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Ethan agreed with a nod.

Gabriel ran a hand through his tousled waves, which glinted gold under the House’s security lights. Even at night, even in darkness, Gabriel seemed touched by the sun.

“Actually,” Ethan said with resignation, “there is something that will make us slightly more even.” He pulled from his pocket Caleb Franklin’s key.

About damn time, I thought.

“What’s that?”

“A safe-deposit box key we found when we searched Franklin’s house.”

Gabriel’s jaw clenched. “You didn’t mention that when you came to the bar. When you came to the bar,” Gabriel said again, “and berated me for withholding information.”

“So now you’ve proven you’re both assholes,” I said.

They both, very slowly, turned their heads to look at me again.

“Assholes whom I respect immensely,” I said, holding up my hands. “But still assholes. And that’s not an insult to either one of you. Sometimes you’re assholes because you have to be. Because that’s what’s required, and better you be the asshole than risk the people you’re supposed to protect.”

They both watched me for a minute, as if unsure whether to yell at me or not. Finally, Gabriel relented. “What bank?”

“We don’t know,” Ethan said, then paused before identifying the man who was investigating that. “Jeff’s looking into it.”

“Sneaky,” Gabriel said. “I knew he continued to work with you, and didn’t object to that. I didn’t know it was about this.”

My grandfather walked toward us. “They’d like to begin escorting the shifters out to the supernatural facility.”

The city had renovated a former ceramics factory into a prison for supernaturals, given their special needs (like darkness) and abilities (like glamour). Had Ethan and I been formally charged, we’d probably have ended up there.

“Do what you need to do,” Gabriel said. “They’ve got punishment coming to them, and this might knock sense into their damn heads.”

“We’ll give you the origin story later,” Ethan said to my grandfather. “I know you’ll want the details.”

“I would. The disagreement, let’s call it, is done for now?” he asked, looking between Apex and Master.

“It is,” they agreed.

“Good. We don’t need infighting right now. Not when we’re all on the cusp.”

“Truer words,” Gabe said, then pulled out his phone. “I’ll call a contractor. I’ve got friends with connections. I’ll be sure that they have someone here at sunrise to begin the repairs.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Ethan said. “As to Reed, he’s planning something big, and the alchemy is part of it. Farr, or what happened to him, could be, too. You want in—the investigation, the fight—you’re in.”

Gabriel nodded. “You keep me informed, and I’ll keep you informed.”

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 symbols 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.”