Blade Bound (Chicagoland Vampires 13)

Mallory leaned in, frowned. “It looks like the bottom of the page was folded up.” Like I’d done, she flipped back and forth. “But I don’t see any continued pages here. Hmm,” she said, and slid over a tablet, pressed keys. She read the information on the screen, then flipped to the front of the book, checked the title page.

“Damn it,” she said, and looked up at me. “The manuscript has foldout pages—bigger sheets of illustrations that were folded up to fit into the manuscript. Like you might find for advertisements in a magazine. But they were removed from the original manuscript so they could be sold separately. They weren’t found until 1987, which is more than a hundred years after this particular copy of the Danzig was printed.”

“Which explains why they aren’t in there. Do we know what was on them?”

She looked at the screen again, shook her head. “They haven’t been digitized.” A slow smile spread across her face. “And you are not going to believe where they are.” She looked up at me. “They’re at the University of freaking Chicago.”

The U of C was my almost alma mater, the place where I’d been working on my Ph.D. in English literature the night I’d been attacked. The night I’d been made a vampire.

“Probably in the Special Collections Research Center. It’s where they keep the old stuff.”

She checked the tablet again, nodded. “You’re right. How do we get a look at it?”

“Normally,” I said, thinking back to my grad school days, “we’d make a formal request to the center to view the documents. We show up with ID, and a staff member brings it out. But even assuming the library’s still open given the evacuation, that would take time.” And require daylight.

Mallory swore. “So that’s it? We’re out of luck?”

No, I thought. Not if I was willing to go back there. Not if I was willing to open the door I’d closed more than a year ago, and hadn’t reopened since then. But what choice did I have?

;  Ethan’s jaw worked. “I recall what Celina did. And I appreciate the suggestion. But that’s not the focus I want for the House right now.”

“Sire,” Luc said, but his tone clearly said that he thought Ethan was making the wrong decision.

Ethan checked his watch. “We leave here at twenty after three. That gives us time to get to the rendezvous point on the island, do our own look-see before the op.”

“We’ll get the van,” my grandfather said, looking at Jeff. “Get things set up on our end. We’ll meet you there.”

Ethan nodded.

“I’ll keep working on the manuscript,” Mallory said. She glanced up at the clock, which ticked down ominously. “I don’t know if I’ll find anything in a couple of hours, but I’ll try.”

“I’ll help you,” I told her. “We don’t have much time, but maybe our luck will hold.”

“Do the best you can in the time you’ve got,” Ethan said. “I want everyone wired and downstairs, ready to go by then.” He looked at Luc. “You’ll handle the details.”

“Always,” Luc said.

Ethan rose. “In that case, I think we’re done for now.” He began to move toward the door, but turned back. “Relations with humans have improved, undeniably. But they still don’t see us as subject-matter experts on supernaturals. We will hope that is neither their downfall, nor ours. But we should be careful and vigilant. We must be on our toes, and we must take care of each other. Our lives depend on it.”

• • •

Portnoy the Ugly could have easily been called Portnoy the Inarticulate. Portnoy the Obfuscating.

“Portnoy the Jerkface,” Mallory muttered, flipping another page in the manuscript. Since we had only one copy of the document, she sat on my right, reviewing the manuscript’s right-hand pages as I reviewed those on the left.

With a groan, she rose from the chair, stretched arms and neck. We hadn’t gotten any further in the hour we’d been squinting at the pages, trying to find something that related back to the Egregore, explained how it might be used—or how it might be used against us. We’d found charms, potions, a few recipes (for “Gud Bredde,” among others), ramblings against kings, descriptions of plants and animals. And nothing else about the Egregore.

Mallory lay down in the middle of the floor, arms and legs spread. “I’m giving up.”

“You aren’t giving up. You’re just taking a break.”

I flipped another page, found another recipe, this time for a meat pie heavy on organ meats, rendered fat, and “chicken foot jelly,” which I didn’t want to think too closely about.

I blew out a breath as I pushed off with a toe and spun the chair around.

“Maybe we need to go back to the beginning.”

“Towerline?”