Midnight Marked

The smell of death—overripe and cruel and undeniable—spilled out from the darkness. Something had met a very ugly end here.

Or someone, I realized, glancing at the body on the ground.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

 

BAD BITE



The man was young, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. He had rough, tanned skin, brown eyes, and deep lines around his mouth. His body was whipcord lean beneath jeans and a T-shirt, and thatchy brown hair stood in mussed spikes on his head.

Magic still lingered in the air above him like heavy fog waiting to settle. And it carried with it the faint sense of animal.

He was dead . . . and a shifter.

His face was horribly swollen and bloody, his hands ripped at the knuckles. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The left neck and shoulder of his T-shirt was saturated with blood that had drained from the puncture wounds on his neck. More had spilled on the ground around him.

He hadn’t just been killed. He’d been murdered . . . by one of us.

I felt a sick twist of guilt. The North American Central Pack was our ally and many of its members were our friends. But they wouldn’t take kindly to the death of their own by one of ours.

A second man in jeans and a dark, long-sleeved shirt burst out of the alley, ramming into Mallory and throwing her to the ground. In that fraction of a second while he stumbled forward, he turned toward me. There was something familiar in the scent and magic that surrounded him, but nothing I could place. The bill of his cap shaded his face, showed only the thick, dark beard above pale skin. And the scent of the blood he’d stolen still clung to him.

The moment passed. The vampire—the apparent murderer—caught himself with a hand on the sidewalk before bolting to his feet again and taking off.

I didn’t stop to think. I tore after him, heard Ethan fall into step behind me, his footfalls light and fast.

The vampire darted through the alley across the street, disappearing into shadow. He was twenty feet in front of me, but when the alley dead-ended, he dodged into the street and the glow of overhead lights. He darted between buildings with rooftop views of Wrigley, and then onto Sheffield on the stadium’s east side.

Music blaring in the bars around us, Ethan and I kept pace with each other, our gazes on the perpetrator, who still trailed the magic of the murder he’d wrought.

I doubted any Housed vampire would take out a shifter on the street, at least not one from Chicago. He was most likely a Rogue, a vampire who lived outside the House system. Or maybe a vampire from another city on some kind of mission to take out a shifter. Either way, there’d be hell to pay with the Pack.

We dodged through a group of girls in pink Cubs T-shirts, one of them wearing a veil. Probably a bachelorette party, and from the curses they hurled after us, they’d been partying for a while.

The vampire neared the intersection with Waveland. He glanced back to check his lead, nearly ran into a group of guys and girls heading across the street from bar to stadium.

“What the hell?” yelled one of the men, tall and skinny with shoulder-length cornrows, neatly sidestepping to avoid getting mowed down by our runner.

“Sorry!” I offered as we slid through the gap he’d created.

We need to cut him off, Sentinel. He killed and he ran, and I doubt he’ll stop.

No argument there. I mentally pictured the neighborhood, tried to guess where he might go. But since I didn’t know him—or where he’d come from, or where he was going, or what kind of transportation he might get into—I really didn’t have anything to go on. He’d been in Wrigleyville, and he’d done murder in Wrigleyville. And now, with two vampires on his tail, he was probably hoping to get out again.

Right, Ethan said as the vampire turned and dodged back toward the El.

Maybe he’d taken the Red Line to get down here, and was planning to take the same route home again.

Stay on him, I told Ethan, and dodged across the street. If I could make headway, I could cut him off before he dodged into the alley again.

“Cubs hats!”

A man stepped in front of me from out of nowhere, wearing a column of stacked baseball caps on his head, a dozen more hanging from his fingers. “You need a Cubs hat?”

He was enormous. A red-and-blue-clad wall of a man. “Not tonight, pal,” I said, and tried to pivot around him, but instead we did the awkward left-or-right dance as he swung his hats back and forth, tried to get a bite.

I finally managed to slip around him, but the effort had slowed me down. The vampire darted across the street and into the shadows under the tracks again. I hit the shadows only seconds before Ethan . . . and nearly too late to hear the engine race. The driver’s door still open, a beat-up Trans Am barreled toward us. The door slammed, the vampire’s face shadowed in the vehicle, but I could see—and sense—perfectly well the handgun that pointed out the window.

I moved with only instinct, and without thought.

“Move!” I told Ethan, and turned in front of him, pushing him to the ground as the shot rang out, the sound slapping off brick and concrete and steel. Tires squealed as the car jerked forward, turned onto the street, and screamed into the night.

I rolled off Ethan. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said testily. “You stepped in front of me.”

“I will always step in front of you. You named me Sentinel.”

“In the larger scheme, not my wisest decision.”

I wasn’t going to argue with that admission of fallibility, even if I disagreed with the sentiment. “You can’t take it back now. I’m finally getting good at it.”

“Jesus, Merit.”

“What? Are you hurt?” I didn’t see blood, so I looked around, then back at Ethan. “Is he back?”

“No,” he said, with silvering eyes that shone in the dark. “You’ve been shot.”

“No, I haven’t.” I glanced down at my arm, saw the crimson rivulets that flowed down my arm and now pooled into my open palm. Adrenaline faded, and I felt the spear of fire that lanced through my biceps.

“Damn it,” I said, my vision dimming at the edges. The world began to spin, but I gritted my teeth. I was a goddamn vampire, and I was absolutely not going to pass out. Not after chasing a murderer and taking a bullet for my Master.

“It looks like I took another bullet for you,” I said.