Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires 12)

I yanked back my hand, glanced behind me. A man on the shorter side, pale skin, dark hair, was rolling toward us a brass cart filled with a dozen more books. Also an exception to the Cadogan uniform rule, he wore jeans and a black Polo shirt with a small Cadogan seal embroidered on the chest.

“Sire,” he said. “Merit.”

“Librarian,” Ethan said. His name was Arthur, but everyone except Paige used his title. The Librarian was the master of this two-story kingdom within a kingdom and the books within it, including the Canon, the laws that governed vampires, at least for now. The AAM was still working out the legal situation.

“I found one more,” said the startlingly beautiful woman who emerged from between two rows of shelves. She was tall and slender, with pale skin, green eyes, and a wavy head of red curls. She wore jeans, leopard-print flats, and a simple white T-shirt that still managed to look elegant and refined.

This was Paige Martin, a sorcerer and former Order Archivist. We’d brought her back from Nebraska after Mallory absconded with a book of evil magic. Paige and the Librarian had hit it off immediately.

She stood beside him, a good four inches taller, and passed him the books. “Merit, Ethan. I was just about to get started.”

“Jeff sent you the pictures?” Ethan asked.

“He did,” she said, and there was no denying the excitement in her eyes. She put a hand on her chest. “I don’t want to make light of what happened to Caleb. It’s just—I’ve never actually seen alchemy in practice. It’s such a rare specialty. I’m—I guess ‘intellectually intrigued’ would be the best phrase.”

She walked around the table, picked up a large poster that had been mounted to a sheet of foam board. It was at least four feet long and covered in rows of symbols.

“I just need to grab an easel from the storage room. Jeff figured out a way to blow up the symbols so they’re clearer and easier for us to read. And he’s divided them into two sets—one for me and one for Mallory.”

“How can I help?” I asked, not entirely sure that I could.

“Alchemical equations typically have their own architecture. I’m hoping this one does, too. If that’s right, and I can break the equations into their subparts, I’m going to give you some of the subparts for translation using these.” She tapped a finger on the books.

“Do you have any idea what the alchemy might be used for?” Ethan asked.

“Not without translating,” she said. “But I can tell you this—whatever it is, it’s big. Most alchemical equations are pretty simple; that’s the nature of alchemy. Right or wrong, alchemists believed you could change matter—change one thing into another, realize the true ‘essence’ of something—if you applied the right kind of solvent at the correct time of year, under the influence of the right heavenly bodies. It can get more complicated, sure.” She gestured to the board. “But this? This is a lot of symbols, plus pictographs—the hand-drawn elements. And there’s no explanatory text whatsoever. I think that’s the point of the pictographs—concealing the instructions. As far as I’m aware, they’re unique to the sorcerer, in which case the puzzle will be even harder to solve.”

“Bottom-line it for me,” Ethan said.

“Someone cared enough to be very careful and very specific about the thing addressed here. I’m just not yet sure what that ‘thing’ is. But you’ll be the first one to know.”

Ethan’s phone rang, and he pulled it out, checked the screen. “Give us a minute, would you?” he asked, and Paige and the Librarian nodded and disappeared into a row.

“It’s Gabriel,” Ethan said when we were alone, and pressed a button. “Ethan and Merit.”

Gabe didn’t waste any time. “I need a favor.”

Ethan’s brows lifted, and he put his hands on his hips. “I’m listening.”

“I’ve got an address for Caleb, but I can’t get away to check it out. I’ve got obligations as Apex related to the death, the wake.”

Ethan lifted his brows again, and I could guess the line of his thoughts: Why did an Apex have obligations to a member who’d defected? I didn’t doubt Gabriel was grieving; we’d seen it last night. But the Pack prided itself on loyalty. We simply didn’t have the entire story.

“If you could take a look, or get your people to take a look, maybe you’ll find something that ties him to the sorcerer, to the vampire. Something that explains why he was killed.”

“We’ll take a look,” Ethan said, nodding at me. “The address?”

Gabriel read it off. “I understand it’s near Hellriver. So be careful.”

In the 1950s, Hellriver had been “Belle River,” a pretty suburb near the Des Plaines River. That changed forty years ago, when an ugly chemical spill sent most of the neighborhood packing. The houses, churches, and stores were still there, but Chicago hadn’t been able to get the funds for a cleanup, and nobody wanted to live in still-toxic Hellriver.

“We always are. How did you find the address?”

“Damien made some calls. Caleb may not have been a Pack member, but he still had friends inside. It’s not supposed to work that way—defection is defection—but I can’t stop what I don’t see.”

“And now you can see it,” Ethan said.

“Yeah. We’ll be having some discussions about that.”