Biting Cold (Chicagoland Vampires 6)

The words finaly seemed to shake Ethan out of his fury.

Chest heaving, he ran his hands through his hair, then linked them atop his head and walked away from us. Just a few feet away, but enough to gain distance. Enough room for him to think.

He didn't walk toward me. He wouldn't even make eye contact.

My stomach tightened with worry.

"Lindsey?" Ethan asked. "You alowed this man to enter our House?"

She looked nervously at me, and I nodded. "This is Seth," she said. "Merit believes she can tel the difference."

Ethan looked back at me, expression flat. "Can she?"

"I can. But he can prove it better than me," I said. After al, I'd seen the pictures in the Kantor Scroll. There was at least one difference between demon and angel, even if it wasn't normaly visible.

Even if they weren't normaly visible.

I looked at Seth. "Show them."

Seth looked at me for a moment, debating the request, then looked at Ethan. "I can prove what I am."

He unclasped the top button of his cassock, then continued down the row until each was unclipped. He wore simple dark pants and a shirt beneath. He dropped the cassock onto the floor, then puled the T-shirt over his head. His chest was wel carved with planks of muscle, but that wasn't the feature attraction here.

"Back up," he said, and we did, stepping farther away from him. He closed his eyes and roled his shoulders.

I knew what was coming, but that didn't diminish the effect of actualy watching it happen.

With a whoosh of air, he unfolded his wings. Like Dominic's, they were at least twenty feet from tip to tip. But unlike Dominic's, Seth's wings were stil feathery and white. The top ridgeline was iridescent and downy, while the long, straight feathers below were sharp and crisp. His feathers arced along the top and bottom to points at each end that gleamed like opals.

The smel of lemon and sugar filed the room - the sugar-cookie smel of a milennia-old angel in twenty-first-century Chicago.

"They're beautiful," I said. But neither the extension of his wings nor the sentiment lifted the veil of sadness from his face.

Seth looked, in a word, tortured. As if embarrassed by what he'd done, he whipped his wings into hiding again.

"I'm sorry," Ethan said, but Seth shook his head.

"He is Dominic's twin brother," I explained. "Seth, the angel.

Dominic, the demon. Born together but with different roles in the world. The Maleficium was created, in part, as a prison for Dominic and the others like him."

"So Dominic was inside the Maleficium?" Ethan asked.

"How did he split apart from you?"

Seth shook his head. "I don't know." He turned to pul his T-shirt back over his head. His wings, apparently magical in nature, had completely disappeared. But there in the middle of his back between his shoulder blades was a gruesome scar, a vaguely star-shaped burst of raw pink.

"Your back," I began. "What happened?"

"Magical burn. It happened when I touched the book."

I'm not sure how I knew, but I knew. That wasn't a magical burn.

"I was right. Malory didn't conjure Dominic from the Maleficium," I said.

Ethan frowned at me. "What do you mean?"

"Dominic popped into being, sure, but not from thin air, or even from the Maleficium." I looked at Seth. "We watched you split apart. But she didn't divide you in half, not realy. She puled Dominic out of you - and you have the scar to prove it."

"How is that even possible?" Ethan asked. "How could Dominic exist within Seth?"

"I don't know," I said. "That's what we have to figure out."

And once again, every question we managed to answer led to six or seven more.

Seth puled his T-shirt down.

"You came to our House," Ethan told him. His posture and tone had changed - back to calm, cool, and colected Master.

"Why are you here?"

"Atonement," Seth said without hesitation. "I should have come sooner, but I was, wel, mortified. Horrified at what we've done. Dominic has kiled again. He was created as a being of justice, but he misapplies the rules. Very rarely is murder just, and certainly not when humans have already adjudicated the guilt of those he seeks to punish again."

Seth was right - and that was a similarity between Paulie and the cops. Paulie had already been convicted; the cops had been acquitted. Humans had already done their justice making, but Dominic wasn't satisfied with their results.

"He's not the only guilty party." He walked toward the balroom wal and looked into one of the mirrors, staring back at his visage as if it were unfamiliar.

"I have done things." He shook his head. "Throughout my life, I have worked to build communities, to strengthen individuals. I ran for mayor here, in this time and this city, to help those efforts.

But somewhere I fel off course. I endangered people who trusted me. I promoted the sale of drugs to vampires." He put a hand to his temple. "It made sense at the time?"

He met my gaze in the mirror. "I owe you a specific apology, Balerina. Particularly for the things that happened in my office.

For putting you through hel. I had information. About your father." Seth glanced at the others in the room. "About the manner in which you were made a vampire," he carefuly said. "I thought you had the right to know."

"At the fund-raiser," I said. "You said you wanted to talk to me. That's what you wanted to talk to me about?"

Seth nodded. "There was never time to say the words, and when the confession finaly came out, it came out in violence. It caused violence." He looked away. "Whatever her faults, Celina did not deserve to die at my hand. Or yours."

Something clenched in my gut, the monumental regret that I'd taken a life, even one as wasted as Celina's. She hadn't been the first I'd kiled, but she was undoubtedly the most memorable.

"And there's nothing we can do now to change what happened," I added.

"Not to change it," Seth said, "but perhaps to atone for it."

"Those actions may not have been yours," Ethan said. "If Dominic was somehow inside you, leading you astray..."

"Maybe it was Dominic. Maybe it was the slow, creeping influence of the Maleficium. Maybe it was just me. But I have never kiled. And I would never do so. He must be stopped. I'l help however I can. I wil make my atonement in that fashion. I wil stand here, and I wil help you face him."

There was strength in his eyes, but I knew it was going to take a lot of time before he was truly healed again. And even if his scar faded, he would be tortured for a very long time.