Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires 12)

Ethan gestured the group to the sitting area while Luc arranged the board in front of the bookshelves and uncapped a marker, the scent of solvent filling the room.

“Also strong colors,” Lindsey said, wrinkling her nose as she sat in one of the club chairs in the sitting area. Malik took the other chair after offering it to Juliet. She declined with a wave of her hand, sat down on the floor, crossing her slender legs in front of her.

Ethan walked to the small refrigerator tucked into the bookshelves, pulled out two bottles of blood. He handed me one, then took a seat on the leather couch beside me.

I opened the blood, took a satisfying drink. In the company of vampires, it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

“Seriously,” Juliet said, waving a hand in front of her face, “that marker could clear a room.”

“Good,” Luc said, positioning himself in front of the board, marker in his fist like an expensive, bladed weapon.

“What am I always telling you about weaponry?” Luc asked, scanning the faces of the guards.

“Anything is a weapon, and a weapon is anything,” we parroted back like perfect pupils. But with more sarcasm.

“Good,” Luc said with an approving nod. “You need to clear a room, you now know how to do it.”

“Committed to memory,” Lindsey said, tapping a nail against her temple.

Luc grunted doubtfully but looked at us. “All right, Sentinel. You’ve got our attention. Give us the details of tonight’s trouble.”

“Dead shifter,” I said, “apparently killed by a vampire under the El tracks at the Addison Station. And nearby, alchemical symbols written on a concrete pedestal.”

Luc nodded, wrote the three headlines at the top of the board: vampire, shifter, sorcerer. Then he marked a line through “shifter,” killing him symbolically.

“That’s quite a variety of supernaturals in one place,” Malik said.

“No argument there,” Ethan said.

“Shifter had puncture marks on his left-hand side,” I said. “Blood near the body, blood near the pedestal.”

“The shifter’s name was Caleb Franklin,” Ethan put in. “An NAC member who defected.”

Malik’s eyebrows rose, and he looked up from the tablet on which he’d been writing notes. “Defected?”

“Defected,” Ethan confirmed. “Keene didn’t provide details, only said Franklin wanted more ‘freedom.’” Ethan used air quotes, which meant he’d found the excuse as questionable as I had.

“You buy that?” Luc asked, arms crossed.

“I do not,” Ethan said. “But one does not interrogate the Apex of the NAC Pack near the scene of his dead, if former, Pack mate and in front of several of his comrades.”

“A wise political course,” Malik said.

“What about the vampire?” Luc asked.

I gave them his description. “I didn’t see his full face, but what I did see didn’t look familiar.”

“Me, neither,” Ethan said.

But he might, I thought, look familiar to someone else. I pulled out my phone. “I’m going to see if Jeff can check security cams in the area. Maybe we can get at least a partial still of his face.”

“Good,” Luc said, and wrote Need photograph on the board. “We can send that to Scott and Morgan, see if he’s familiar to them.”

“I’ll also send it to Noah,” I said. Noah Beck was the unofficial leader of the city’s Rogue vampires. He’d hooked me up with the Red Guard, a secret vampire corps, and was a member himself, but I hadn’t seen him in a while.

“And the alchemy?” Luc asked, after adding Noah’s name to the board.

“There were a lot of symbols,” I said. “Jeff and Catcher took pictures, and they’re working on an analysis. Mallory and Catcher think it’s some kind of equation based on the way it’s written—neat rows and columns—but they’ve got to translate in order to know what kind.”