Midnight Marked

“There’s no way I’d let you come at me with a scalpel.”

“If I had a quarter,” she muttered, gaze narrowed as she poked and prodded. “The bullet damaged your muscle, tendon, but missed the bone. Might be sore for a couple of days, but you’re used to that.”

“You’re a cruel woman.”

She looked up at me and grinned. “I know. I’m a much better doctor.” She gently patted on a cooling gel, then turned me toward the light and inspected the arm she’d cleaned and medicated. “Much better. Let’s get the clean T-shirt on you, and you’ll want to keep that uncovered and clear for a little while. It’s nearly healed, and you don’t want to have to deal with this again.”

“No,” I said, wincing as Lindsey helped me pull the shirt over my head. “I do not. And thank you for the help. Even if I’d like to punch you a little bit right now.”

“I can’t say I blame you.”

Delia’s phone rang, and she pulled it from her pocket and glanced at the screen. “And duty calls again. I need to run.” She glanced at Ethan and got his nod of approval.

“Thank you for the help,” I called out as she hurried toward the door. I looked back at Ethan. “In case that didn’t register, will you please thank her for me?”

“I will,” he said. “And she’s happy to help.” He smiled slyly. “But you should probably work on not getting shot again.”

It was on my agenda.

• • •

“Now that we’ve addressed Merit’s injury,” Ethan said, when we’d reset from a medical discussion to a strategic one, “she also made a rather significant discovery.”

“That’s why I brought that up here,” Luc said, pointing behind me. I followed the direction of his gesture, saw the enormous, wheeled whiteboard near the wall behind us. We used it when we needed to do investigating, identify facts, formulate theories. And lately, we’d been doing a lot of it. My grandfather’s influence, maybe.

“Two new marker colors, too,” Luc said, eyes gleaming. “So we can color-code as necessary.”

Ethan gestured the group to the sitting area while Luc arranged the board in front of the bookshelves and uncapped a marker, the scent of solvent filling the room.

“Also strong colors,” Lindsey said, wrinkling her nose as she sat in one of the club chairs in the sitting area. Malik took the other chair after offering it to Juliet. She declined with a wave of her hand, sat down on the floor, crossing her slender legs in front of her.

Ethan walked to the small refrigerator tucked into the bookshelves, pulled out two bottles of blood. He handed me one, then took a seat on the leather couch beside me.

I opened the blood, took a satisfying drink. In the company of vampires, it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

“Seriously,” Juliet said, waving a hand in front of her face, “that marker could clear a room.”

“Good,” Luc said, positioning himself in front of the board, marker in his fist like an expensive, bladed weapon.

“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.”