Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires 12)

“That sounds about right. Will it work?”

“Kyle Farr is evidence it already worked,” she said. “But on a smaller scale. We figured the symbol had to have a purpose—some reason to use that much magic, that much energy, for it to just be a laser light show.”

Ethan slid his hands into his pockets and regarded us with Masterly suspicion. “Why do I feel like you’re preparing me for something?”

“Because we are,” Paige said. “We think it’s a boundary. Or, maybe more accurately, a net.”

“A net . . . ,” Ethan began, then trailed off as realization struck him. “For the supernaturals in its border. The magic is supposed to reach all the supernaturals within its territory?”

Paige nodded.

“That’s hundreds of square miles,” he said. “And if the QE works the way the sorcerer’s sample with Kyle Farr did, he’ll control every sup in that area?”

“Yeah,” Paige said with a nod. “If you weren’t scared before, you should be now.”

• • •

We left Paige to call Mallory and coordinate on the countermagic while we worked in the Ops Room on the House’s response to the more general threat of Adrien Reed.

That Jeff, Catcher, and Mallory were walking in the front door when we reached the first floor—and that they’d come to the House together without even a warning phone call—didn’t ease my concerns.

“What’s happened?” Ethan asked, apparently of the same mind.

“A lieutenant in Vice, one of the men on the Circle task force, got a wild hair,” Catcher said. “He learned about the document pull, decided this was the time to come down on the Circle and on Reed. His team raided Reed’s home about an hour ago.”

“How did that happen?” Ethan asked.

“There was a leak, probably an informant in the department or the judge’s office that issued the warrant. We aren’t sure; Jacobs is looking into it. Anyway, Reed’s lawyers met them at the door, but by the time they made it inside, the Reeds were gone.”

“He’ll escalate,” Ethan said. “He’d been waiting for the right time to move. This is probably it.”

Catcher nodded, and his expression was bleak. “That’s why we’re here. The Vice guys were going through Reed’s house when a group of River trolls—two men and two women—showed up. There was a shoot-out. Four cops were killed, and all four of the trolls.”

They were the fruitarians we’d discussed a few days ago, large men and women who lived primarily beneath the bascule bridges that crossed the Chicago River.

o;We have a cipher for the rest of the alchemy—the symbols we couldn’t translate. And the cipher was on Reed Industries stationery, which my grandfather thinks is enough for a warrant for Reed.”

Luc whistled. “Productive trip.”

“Damn straight,” I said. “I’m going to go upstairs, help Paige to finish the translation.”

“Do that,” Ethan said. “It’s that, or lose Chicago . . . and possibly ourselves.”

• • •

Two hours later, Paige and I stood in the library in identical poses: legs spread, arms crossed, chins down. The shifter-vampire teams had delivered the rest of the symbols from the QE’s tangents, and we’d arranged all the posters on their respective easels and marked them up with Caleb’s cipher. When we’d marked everything up, we took more photographs, sent them to Mallory and Catcher for the countermagic, and then walked the entire QE like a labyrinth, trying to ferret out from the magic the details of Reed’s plan.

We weren’t comforted.

“There’s nothing that suggests this is limited to shifters,” Paige said, squinting as she leaned in to look at one of the panels in the inner circle. She touched a finger on one of the symbols Caleb had decoded, which looked like an asterisk with a circle around it. It actually meant “magic” and, when paired with the skeleton icon, seemed to refer to those of us who possessed magic or were magical, whatever the form or degree.

“And I don’t want anyone poking around in my brain,” she added, standing straight again.

“Me, neither,” I said, and purposefully made myself put away the fact that Logan had already tried.

As far as the mechanics went, Mallory had been right on. The equation moved from one panel to the next, back and forth in a way that mirrored the magic of a sorcerer (illustrated by the drawing of a crucible) against that of the vampire (a crescent moon). Like the layers of glass in a camera lens, we thought the mirroring focused and magnified the magic. And when coupled with the waves of nullification would basically substitute the evildoers’ will for the supernaturals’.

It was terrifyingly creative.