Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires 12)

“I’m going to check things out,” I said to Mallory and Catcher. At their nods, I switched on the flashlight and moved into the darkness of the alley.

I walked slowly forward, flipping the small but powerful beam back and forth across the ground. Most of it was paved, except for a short stretch behind a row of town houses. Their back doors opened onto a small strip of grass, just enough space for a barbecue grill or an area for pets to take care of business.

The usual suspects were stuck to the broken and stained concrete. Discarded paper, gum, empty plastic bottles. Farther down the alley, cars were wedged into slots only an automotive savant could squeeze into. Bikes were locked onto a forest green rack bolted into the ground, and the smell of beer and fried food lingered above the insistent smell of death.

The railroad trestles rested on square concrete pedestals. The beam of light flickered across one, highlighting what, at first glance, I’d thought was a graffiti tag. But there seemed to be more letters than the few that usually made up a sprayed tag.

I stopped and swung the light back again.

The entire pedestal, probably two-and-a-half-feet tall and just as wide, was covered by lines of characters drawn in black. Row after row of them. Most were symbols—circles and triangles and squares with lines and marks through them, half circles, arrows and squares. Some looked like tiny hieroglyphs—a dragon here, a tiny skeleton there, drawn with a surprisingly careful hand.

They buzzed with a faint and tinny magic, which explained the care—or vice versa. I didn’t recognize the flavor of the magic; it was sharper and more metallic than any I’d run across before, and a sharp contrast to the earthier scent of shifters.

Magic symbols twenty feet away from a shifter’s death. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.

I knelt down, shone light across the pedestal. I knew what these were. They were alchemy symbols, marks used by practitioners who’d believed they could transmute lead into gold, or create a philosopher’s stone that would allow them immortality. I’d studied medieval literature in graduate school. I hadn’t studied magical texts per se, but they’d occasionally appear in a manuscript or the gilded marginalia of a carefully copied text.

Still, while I recognized them for what they were, I didn’t have the knowledge to decipher them. That was a job for people with substantive knowledge about magical languages. Catcher or Mallory, or maybe Paige. She was a sorcerer, formally the Order’s archivist and at present the girlfriend of the Cadogan House Librarian.

I scanned the rest of the pedestal, and the beam flashed across something on the ground—drops of blood. Blood had been shed here, and plenty of it. But why? Because of the vampire? Because of the markings?

I’ve got something, I told Ethan, and waited until he and Mallory gathered beside me. Catcher stayed back with the shifter.

I kept the light trained on the pedestal so they could review the markings, then shifted the circle of light to the blood on the ground below.

“Part of the attack took place here,” Ethan said. “And the symbols?”

“They look alchemical to me,” I said.

Mallory’s gaze tracked back and forth across the lines. “Agreed. Symbols of alchemical elements, built into an equation. That’s why they’re in rows.”

“Wait,” Ethan said. “You mean alchemy, as in changing lead into gold?”

“That’s the most well-known transmutation,” Mallory said, hands on her hips as she leaned over beside him, peered at the magic. “But folks try to do all sorts of things with the practice. Healing, communicating with the spiritual realm, balancing the elements, distilling something down to its true essence.”

Ethan frowned, looked down at the pedestal again. “So what’s the purpose of this?”

“I had to study alchemy when I took my exams. Although I didn’t use them.” She added that quickly, as if to remind us she hadn’t made use of all the magical Keys in existence to create her black magic. Although she’d certainly used enough of them. “I also watched a lot of Fullmetal Alchemist. Quality show. Quality.”

“There are television shows about alchemy?” Ethan asked.

“It’s anime.”

Ethan’s expression stayed blank.

“Never mind,” she said, waving it away. “We’ll have a marathon later. But for now”—she pointed to one symbol, a circle with a dot in the middle—“that’s the sun. And that’s Taurus,” she added, pointing to a small circle topped by a semicircle of horns. “Merit’s astrological sign, as it turns out. It’s probably not related to you,” she said, glancing at me. “It’s just part of the equation related to the positions of the stars. That’s one of the things that makes the alchemy work, at least theoretically.” She put her hands on her hips. “If we want to know why this is here, we need to translate all the symbols and figure out what they mean together, in context.”

We walked back to Catcher, and Mallory explained what we’d seen.

“How does alchemy match up against the Keys?” I asked them. The Keys were the building blocks of magic, at least in Catcher’s particular philosophy.

“It’s just a different way to approach the energy, the power.” He shrugged. “You might say a language different from mine, but a language all the same.”

Mallory looked at him, nodded. “With rules, just like any language would follow.”

“So, who put them here?” Ethan asked. “And why are they near the scene of a shifter’s death by a vampire?”

Mallory looked at Catcher. “I don’t know anyone who practices alchemy, not even through SWOB.” Sorcerers Without Borders was an organization Mallory had created to help newbie sorcerers in the Midwest. It was help she hadn’t gotten when she first learned she had magic—but that she definitely could have used.