Wild Things: A Chicagolands Vampire Novel (Chicagoland Vampires)

by Neill, Chloe

  There were sparks of excitement in the hallway.

  “We’d hoped our provision of these medals would be in a slightly more formal occasion,” Ethan said. “But it is the symbol that matters, not the pomp and circumstance.”

  Ethan leaned forward, and Malik clasped the first pendant around Ethan’s neck, which shined like a droplet of silver blood at the base of his throat. There was something nearly sensuous about the curve of it and the way it settled perfectly there.

  Helen, the House’s den mother, appeared at Ethan’s side in her typical tweed suit, a basket of small crimson jewelry boxes on her arm. She began handing out the boxes to the Novitiates in the foyer.

  “Be strong,” Ethan said, glancing across the room and meeting my gaze with a short and decisive nod. “I’ll be back soon enough.” He stepped outside and pulled the door closed, disappearing from view.

  Fear tightened my chest.

  Lindsey stepped beside me, put an arm around my waist. Luc took point at my other side.

  “He’ll come through this,” Luc assured me. “He’s a soldier. He is trained and can endure much.”

  “I don’t want him to endure anything. I don’t want his life, his well-being, to be fodder for someone else’s political career.” Keep him safe, I thought, pleading to the universe and whatever gods inhabited it. Please keep him safe.

  “We know you don’t,” Luc said, patting my back tenderly and a little awkwardly. “But he is Master of this House, and he does what he must to protect it. It’s the life he chose to lead.”

  “Because he can handle it,” Lindsey said.

  “He definitely can. There are stories I could tell you.”

  “Your stories are always disgusting,” Lindsey said, reaching around me to poke him in the shoulder. “And they usually involve bordellos. I don’t think that’s really going to help Merit.”

  It actually did help Merit, and I chuckled a little in spite of myself. “Bordellos? Really?”

  “Chicago had its share once upon a time,” Luc said with a shit-eating grin that earned an eye roll from Lindsey. “There was this one, Ruby Red’s. Every single girl was a redhead, natural or otherwise.”

  I held up a hand. “I don’t need the specifics. I just want Ethan to be okay.”

  Luc looked earnestly at me. “Merit, of all the vampires in the world, who else is stubborn and pretentious enough to stand up to a self-righteous prig like Diane Kowalcyzk?”

  He had a point there.

  • • •

  Since there was no use in spending the hours of Ethan’s incarceration staring at the door like loyal hounds waiting for him to return, we received our House medals, clasped them on, and walked back downstairs to the basement, where the Ops Room was located. Much like the Brecks’, Cadogan’s Ops Room was where Luc and his guards held court and monitored security. It was also, appropriately enough, where we planned operations against House enemies, and it was home to the whiteboard we used to work through our investigations.

  Like the ops room in the Breck house, it was all about tech. A conference room where we could plan, a large screen on the back wall for videos, monitoring, considering evidence. Computer stations lined the walls, where vampires could keep an eye on the House’s security cameras or do research.

  I walked to the conference table, prepared to take a seat, but stopped, trying to make sense of what I saw on the tabletop.

  A bag of kettle-style salt-and-vinegar potato chips had been slit down the middle and lay in the middle of the table. The chips had been pushed to one side, and the other bore a puddle of ketchup. I had, as I assumed did most people, a love-hate relationship with salt-and-vinegar potato chips. But the ketchup was new. And, frankly, a blasphemy.

  “What’s this?” I asked, swirling a finger in the air above what I assumed was intended to be a “snack.”

  “That,” Luc said, “is a bit of a miracle. Brody introduced us. Say hi, Brody.”

  Brody, blond, thin, and as tall as a skyscraper, sat at one of the computer stations that lined the room. He was one of the Novitiates Luc had temporarily hired to help with House security since we were down a couple of full-time guards. He’d been a member of Cadogan House for fourteen years, a Yale graduate and former Olympic swimmer whose athletic career had been ended by a drunk driver. He’d applied for House membership in the hopes of finding a new kind of team.

  Brody turned and waved with a charming smile. “’S’up.”

  “We’re thinking about bringing him on board full-time,” Luc said, gesturing toward the snacks. “He shared this little nugget in his interview.”

  “It’s pretty good,” Brody said. He stood up—I nearly winced at the possibility he’d knock his head on the ceiling—then walked over and dipped two chips in the ketchup, popped the concoction in his mouth. “You’re missing out.”

  I was an adventurous eater, but pairing potato chips and ketchup was going to require a paradigm shift I wasn’t currently prepared to entertain.

  I sat down at the conference table, put my hands flat on the tabletop. “Let’s talk about the carnival.”

  Luc and Lindsey joined me. Luc dipped a chip into the ketchup, ate it with a grin while I looked on. “Mmm,” he said, earning an elbow from Lindsey.

  “Maybe you’ll want to skip the noshing and ask the rest of the gang to join us?”

  “You’re no fun, Sentinel,” he said, but pushed the dials on the phone and conferenced them in.

  “This is Luc in the Cadogan Ops Room,” he said with faux gravity, “dialing you in to discuss the carnival investigation by direct order from the Sentinel of Cadogan House.”

  I glanced mildly at Lindsey. “Did you spike his blood with caffeine?”

  “Die Hard marathon was on TV last night,” she said. “He’s been weaponized since then.”

  Jeff, Catcher, and Paige offered their hellos through the conference phone.

  “No librarian?” Jeff asked, when he didn’t say hello.

  “He’s back in the stacks looking through newspapers,” Paige said with amusement. “And not to be disturbed.”

  “You’re a better woman than I am, Paige,” Luc said, earning curious glances from all of us. Thankfully, he moved on. “Let’s talk carnival, folks.”

  As if optimism and preparation would be enough to make developments happen, I moved to the whiteboard, marker in hand.

  “We’ve identified not so much a pattern, but a path,” Paige said. “The carnival basically treks back and forth across the upper Midwest once a season. They go out as far as Montana, then come back as far east as Ohio. They ignore the seasons—hold carnivals year-round.”

  “I suppose the hunt for supernaturals doesn’t have a season,” Luc grimly said.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Paige agreed.

  “What about Chicago?” I asked.

  “They hit it once every season, and it’s always after Loring Park.”

  “Good,” Luc said. “Good find. Where do they go?”

  “We’ve identified four possible spots so far. Two of them don’t exist anymore. They were parking lots, but they’ve been built over. They also camped near Prospect Park and the grounds of St. Athenogenus—it’s a Catholic school in West Town. Arthur’s looking for any additional stops in Chicago. But since they aren’t online, he has to go through the actual papers and microfiche.”

  I held up a hand. “I’m sorry—Arthur?”

  There was silence for a moment as we all leaned eagerly toward the phone, awaiting confirmation that the librarian actually had a name.

  “Oh, crap,” Paige said, and I could imagine her wince through the phone. “I was not supposed to say that. He prefers to go by his title, for the respect, you know. He’s ‘the librarian.’ But I’ve gotten so used to calling him Arthur.”

  “We’ll stick with ‘librarian,’�
� Luc said, smiling at the rest of us. We’d all heard the name; there’d be no unringing that particular bell.

  I added Prospect Park and St. Athenogenus to the whiteboard. “We need to get folks out there right now to check those locations,” I said.

  “Don’t need people,” Jeff said. “Got satellites.” The familiar clack of keys echoed through the receiver. He must have been back with his computers, although it occurred to me I wasn’t exactly sure where that was. The Frankensteinian computer he’d used at my grandfather’s house had been torched in the fire.

  “Where are you working?” I asked.

  “Home,” Jeff said. “My own equipment. Which makes for a change. Differently tactile than the Brecks’ stuff.”

  It occurred to me that I had no idea where Jeff actually lived. “And where is home?”

  He cleared his throat. “I have a condo in the Loop.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “Where?”

  “Um, it’s in the Fortified Steel building.”

  He said it so quietly the words were garbled, and it took my brain a moment to unscramble them. Fortified Steel was one of Chicago’s most historic buildings, built when the city was a commodities powerhouse. It sat beside the Chicago River, a tall, square column of symmetrical windows with a famous copper dome on top. It was one of the many prestigious addresses in the Loop.

  I’d had no idea Jeff had those kinds of resources. And since he’d barely mumbled the address, he apparently didn’t want to discuss it.

  “All right,” he said, changing the subject. “I’m pulling satellite images for those locations, popping them up to you.”

  The screen behind us turned on with a glow and hum, and two photographs filled it. One was a parking lot, the other a park field still covered in snow. Neither held a hint of a carnival.

  “Crap,” Luc said. “That’s a strikeout.”

  “Could be they haven’t set up yet,” Brody said. “They only left Loring Park a few hours ago.”

  “Good thought from the new guy,” Luc agreed, scanning the photos. “But the equipment has to go somewhere, even if they aren’t open to the public yet. Jeff, can you zoom out? Maybe there are semis parked in a lot nearby.”

  Jeff zoomed out both images, giving me an odd sense of vertigo. And it didn’t help substantively, either. Neither image showed anything more than we’d seen before.

  “They could be at a different location, or they broke pattern,” Luc said. “Maybe they realized they’d been tagged, decided to go somewhere else. Or maybe they’re lying low for a few days until the heat’s off.”

  “Or maybe they’re lying low for a few days because they’re planning the next kidnapping,” I said.

  “We’ll keep looking,” Paige said. “And let you know if we find anything.”

  “That brings us to the next point,” Luc said. “Catcher, have you had a chance to talk to sups?”

  Silence.

  “Catcher?”

  “Sorry. Sorry. I’m here. I was being bugged by a sorceress.”

  “I wasn’t bugging anyone,” Mallory, the aforementioned sorceress, said in the background. “I just want you to keep your damn feet off the coffee table. And I don’t care that I don’t sleep here right now. That’s not an excuse.”

  “Ah, supernatural love,” Luc said, giving Lindsey a baleful look, which made her roll her eyes. But she still smiled a little.

  “Sups,” Catcher said. “Talked to Grey House, asked Jonah to get a message to Navarre, considering. Called the nymphs, River trolls. They haven’t been invited by anyone to a carnival. They didn’t even know one would be going on, especially in February. They’re also on the lookout for unusual magic. They know to call us if anything happens.”

  “What about Regan?” I asked. “Jeff, any luck there?”

  “I haven’t found anything else,” Jeff said. “Not even a couple of levels down. She’s completely off the radar, or at least under her current name.”

  “I might have something,” Catcher said. “Baumgartner recognized the photograph. He didn’t have a name, but he thought she looked like a woman who’d come to the Order four or five years ago looking for membership. Said she had magic, wanted to join up. He did some initial testing, determined she wasn’t a sorceress, and rejected her.”

  Luc whistled. “And that, my friends, is what we call a motive. She gets rejected by the Order, decides to start targeting sups.”

  “Not all of the people rejected by the Order become serial kidnappers,” Catcher dryly said.

  “You weren’t rejected,” Luc said. “You got kicked out for bad behavior.”

  “So she’s definitely not a sorceress.” I’d half hoped the sulfuric smell of her had been a coincidence, or malfunctioning HVAC at the grocery story. I guess that was not to be. “That means we have to consider the possibility she’s connected to the Messengers.” And given her skills, the presumptive ringleader of these particular shenanigans.

  “That’s impossible,” Mallory said.

  “Only in the traditional sense,” Luc said. “Maybe she’s not one of them per se. But she could be a student, a pretender—a kid with magic who wants us to believe that magic is ancient and prestigious. Hell, as little as we know, she could be Seth Tate’s kid, for Christ’s sake.”

  Catcher snorted. “In this day and age, any kid of Seth Tate’s would have announced it to the world already.”

  “And he’d have told us,” I said. “Maybe not pre-Maleficium, but after it, certainly. If he’d known he had a kid—or a fourth cousin—who could cause trouble for us, he’d have told us.”

  Or so I hoped.

  Still, I added the possibilities to the whiteboard. “We have to find her,” I said. “Or both of them—Regan and the carnival—before she targets someone else.” And we needed to do that while finding a way to get Ethan out of lockdown before Mayor Kowalcyzk decided to make an example of him.

  Luc checked his watch. “We’ll need to do that,” he agreed. “But we’re nearing sunrise, so it’s not going to happen tonight. Let’s pack it in for now, touch base at sunset. Paige, let us know if the librarian finds anything else.”

  “Roger that,” she said, and there was a click as she dropped from the call.

  We said good-bye to the others, and they dropped off the call as well. Luc’s personal phone rang almost immediately.

  “Luc,” he said, lifting it to his ear.

  He nodded, listened, spoke quietly with the caller, and after a moment, hung up the phone and looked at us. “That was Will, the guard captain at Navarre. The terrorism squad is packing up at Navarre House.”

  That meant Ethan was officially in interview, or in custody, depending on how the mayor’s office was spinning it.

  “That’s good news,” Lindsey earnestly said, catching my gaze. “It means she’s sticking to her word. That’s exactly what we want.”

  I nodded, but the clenched ball of worry in my stomach didn’t unknot much.

  “Why don’t you take some personal time tomorrow at sunset?” Luc said. “You haven’t had a chance to see your grandfather yet. Take an hour—go say hello.”

  It was a good idea. I hadn’t had a chance to visit the hospital since he’d been admitted. We’d gotten home too late tonight, but if I went after sunset tomorrow, I could probably catch him during visiting hours. Still, we were in the middle of an investigation.

  “Is that a good idea right now? Considering?”

  “You need a break,” he said. “And you need to visit your grandfather. Run the carnival bit past him. See if he has any ideas.”

  I nodded.

  “How about a movie tonight?” Lindsey asked. “We don’t have time for a full run before sunup, but we could fit in half a show, maybe some snacks?”

  I thought about the offer. While I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of going back to the
apartments alone and spending the entire evening obsessing about Ethan, I also wasn’t up for another night of entertainment. A bottle of Blood4You, roaring fire, and good book seemed like a much better option.

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass. I’ve been surrounded by sups for a few days now. I need a little quiet time.”

  Luc chuckled, fingered the new pendant around his neck. “Sentinel, you live in a literal house of vampires. You’re going to be surrounded by sups regardless.”

  For better or worse.

  • • •

  I added what we’d discovered to the whiteboard, said my good nights, and headed upstairs to the first floor. I heard sounds coming from the front parlor and walked toward it.

  A dozen Cadogan vampires stood around the television mounted above the fireplace. The TV was tuned to a news station and the coverage of Ethan’s arrival at the Daley Center.

  Ethan climbed out of a town car and then walked, Andrew at his side and four officers surrounding him, into what looked like an underground entrance. Reporters who’d staked out the door yelled questions and accusations, wondering why Ethan had killed Harold Monmonth, where he’d been for the last three days, and why he’d finally come back to Chicago. He kept his eyes clear and stared straight ahead, ignoring the questions. But the line between his eyes tightened with each new volley, and it was clear he had plenty of things to say to them.

  After a moment, Andrew directed him to stop and faced the camera. With his broad shoulders and intense expression, Andrew looked more like a soldier or bodyguard than a lawyer. But either way, and whatever the reason, he commanded their attention. They quieted immediately.

  “Ethan Sullivan is innocent of the various accusations—political, criminal, and otherwise—that have been leveled against him. He is being targeted because he is a vampire, and the mayor’s office, respectfully, is targeting him because she’s looking for a scapegoat. The citizens of Chicago know better, and I’ll be glad when we can put this entire matter to rest.”