My grandfather huffed. “Those are hardly worth it.” He glanced at my meal appraisingly. “But a bite of that might be worth it. Is that a Funyun?”
“Damn right, it is,” I said with a grin, and slid the leftovers toward him. “Excellent taste is clearly genetic.”
“I question several things about that statement,” Ethan said. “But considering our circumstances, I’ll hold them back.”
My grandfather picked up his fork, blew snow off the picnic table before pulling my dinner the rest of the way, began to dig out a forkful of Garbage Dog.
“So,” I said, “to summarize, we think the delusions are some kind of latent effect of Sorcha’s work at Towerline. And the snow?”
“The wards sounded,” Catcher said. “And it’s still fifty degrees out here, and not falling from an actual cloud. So it’s active magic. Snow-adjacent magic.”
“‘Snow-adjacent’?” my grandfather asked.
“Too warm, no clouds,” I said. “It’s falling like snow, but it’s not created the same way.”
“Exactly,” Catcher said.
“So she’s not really manipulating the weather,” my grandfather said.
“Not in the technical sense, although she is creating a meteorological phenomenon.” Catcher put his elbows on the table, linked his hands as he leaned forward. “That’s the thing I don’t get, don’t understand. Why snow? Chicagoans have seen snow before. We’ve lived through blizzards.”
“And yet . . .” Ethan said.
“And yet,” Catcher growled.
My grandfather’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, frowned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Message from Jeff. It just says, ‘Look at Towerline.’”
We all looked to the northeast, but couldn’t see that far in the tangle of skyscrapers.
“I guess we’re going for a walk,” Catcher said. We rose, tossed our trash, and set out on our next journey, dread collecting around us.
• • •
We zigzagged east and north toward the river. My grandfather was on the phone, having called in the CPD to cordon off the building, just in case.
The temperature was dropping, the snow now beginning to stick on slick roads and sidewalks. It still had no obvious meteorological origin—the sky was clear above the snow—but that didn’t seem to matter.
“Does Reed still own Towerline?” I asked. I wasn’t entirely sure what happened when you became a supervillain. Were your assets forfeit?
“I don’t know if he had a will,” my grandfather said. “He died before Sorcha, and she probably would have been the beneficiary of his assets. But since she killed him, the Slayer Statute would likely prevent her from inheriting. They didn’t have children, so I’m guessing his parents would be next in line.”
“Either way,” Ethan said, “Towerline and everything else he owned will be tied up in probate for years to come.” He glanced at me. “So your father won’t be reclaiming it anytime soon.”
I wasn’t sure he wanted to. We hadn’t talked about it, but I had the sense he considered Towerline a personal failure, even though he’d given it up for good reasons, and that wasn’t the kind of thing my father wanted to commiserate about. I wouldn’t say the building was cursed, but I wouldn’t want to own real estate with that much supernatural baggage.
We emerged from the labyrinth of buildings at the corner of State and Wabash, the State Street bridge in front of us, the corncob-shaped Marina Towers to our right. And to our left, in the prime real estate on the north side of the river at Michigan, was the Towerline building. Or what remained of its structural shell. The missing glass panels in the tall lobby had been boarded over. It was an ugly solution the city didn’t like, but until the courts resolved the issue of ownership, there were no funds to repair it.
And given the sight in front of us, I doubted those funds would be coming anytime soon.
A column of clouds rose above the building, bands of swirling white and brilliant purple against a sky otherwise as dark as pitch. It looked like a cyclonic storm, but the snow wasn’t coming from these clouds, or any others.
“No snow,” I said. “But does anyone else think it’s colder over here?”
“The temperature dropped the closer we got to Towerline,” my grandfather agreed.