Blade Bound

by Chloe Neill

  “Go, Hawks,” the men said. Even if they couldn’t agree on magic, they could agree on hockey.

  Perhaps we’d better just plan our meal, Ethan said, gaze narrowing at the dry-erase menu on the side of the truck. What is a “Funyun”?

  The child of an onion ring and a pork rind. You wouldn’t like them.

  Which means you adore them, he said.

  I really do. Which was why I’d settled on the “Garbage Dog.” You should stick to Chicago style, I told Ethan. That’s your favorite.

  He glanced at me. A year of knowing me, and you’ve already figured me out? Am I so predictable, Sentinel?

  That’s Mrs. Sentinel to you. And yeah, I have a pretty good sense of you. Good enough that I could have penned the Novitiate’s Guide to Ethan Sullivan, if I’d had the time. You enjoy being in charge, fine china, food served on fine china, bespoke suits, twenty-year-old Scotch, and, for reasons I don’t understand, Doctor Who.

  He smiled as the line shuffled forward. He’s a Time Lord. I can relate.

  I just shook my head. Ethan had enough honorifics, and certainly didn’t need to add “Time Lord” to the list.

  When we reached the window, we were greeted by a man with tan skin and dark hair, and broad shoulders beneath his SPOTTED DOGS T-shirt. “What can I get ya?”

  “Chicago Dog,” Ethan said.

  “And for the lady?”

  “Garbage Dog,” I said.

  Ethan gave me a sidelong glance. “And?”

  “And . . . fries. And onion rings, too, if we’re already throwing stuff in a fry basket.”

  The man winked. “I like a woman with an appetite.”

  Probably not my particular appetite, given last night’s activities, but whatever. “And a drink.”

  “I recommend the chocolate shakes. We make the best in town.”

  My gaze narrowed, and Ethan just chuckled, pulled bills from his pocket, and offered them to the vendor. “You may have started a conversation you don’t have time to finish.”

  “How chocolate is chocolate?” I asked.

  But the man was prepared, and his expression was utterly serious. “Our chocolate base includes a syrup made from small-batch beans from a roaster in California, flakes of eighty-five percent dark, and cocoa powder from France.”

  “Your terms are acceptable,” I said with equal gravity.

  Shaking his head but resigned to his fate, Ethan peeled off another bill, passed it through the window.

  “You two are cute together,” the vendor said, passing a foam cup through the window. “You should get married.”

  Ethan held up his hand, light glinting off his engraved band. “Already done.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RATIONS

  We took our dogs to the nearby picnic table beneath a wide umbrella that had probably been for shade against the sun but worked pretty well for snow, too.

  The spread of food was nearly embarrassing in both breading and quantity. But odds were good last night’s battle wasn’t the only one we’d face in the coming nights, and I wasn’t going in unprepared.

  Unfortunately, the plastic fork was hardly up to the challenge of a hot dog amalgamation that included mac ’n’ cheese, hot sauce, and fried pickles. I managed a bite, chewed, considered. And frowned.

  “You look unimpressed,” Catcher said, squirting ketchup into a careful circle on a napkin.

  “I’m mostly confused.” I popped a fried pickle, nearly winced with the wonderfully vicious acidity. “And still evaluating. I’m going to have to work through my feelings.”

  Ethan just shook his head, amusement in his face. “My intrepid Sentinel, beaten by a Garbage Dog.”

  Snorting, Catcher wiped his hands to pull his phone from his pocket. He scanned the screen. “Well. That’s interesting.”

  “What?” my grandfather asked, wiping mustard from his cheek.

  “The first two humans Jeff checked out were near Towerline the night Sorcha tried to initiate her alchemical web.”

  “How near?” Ethan asked.

  Catcher swiped the screen. “One was an electrical sub doing some after-hours work when the magic spilled. The other lived across the street, was on the roof watching the action. Neither evacuated.”

  I nodded. “So at least some of the people who hear the screaming were near Towerline when the magic went down.”

  “The delusions started before the snow,” Catcher said. “And the wards didn’t sound until the snow started. Therefore, Sorcha isn’t causing the delusions, at least not by any active, ongoing magic.”

  I looked at Catcher. “Could it be some kind of latent effect from her alchemy?”

  “We unwound her magic,” Catcher said. “It doesn’t make sense that any magic was left, latent or otherwise. On the other hand, while it could be someone other than Sorcha, given the connection to Towerline, that’s highly improbable. ‘Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.’”

  “Sherlock Holmes,” my grandfather said approvingly. “The one which remains, in this case, is her alchemy and its lingering effects.”

  Which meant the delusions, one way or the other, were Sorcha’s fault.

  Ethan’s phone beeped again. He checked it, then looked at my grandfather with a worried expression that didn’t give me any comfort. “The Tribune interviewed the woman who was on the roof after the fact,” he said. “She said there were forty people watching the battle.”

  “They couldn’t evacuate all the high-rises near the battle site,” my grandfather said. “There wasn’t enough time or manpower.”

  “What about Winston?” I asked. “Do we know if he was near Towerline?”

  “We don’t,” my grandfather said.

  “We need to talk to him about that, and about what he’s hearing,” I said. “We need to figure out what’s happening before anyone else is hurt.”

  Ethan nodded. “If physical proximity to Sorcha’s alchemy is the trigger for the delusions, we have a very big problem. We’ll see more delusions, more violence.”

  Catcher took the last bite of dog, wiped his hands, rolled up his napkin. “We’ll cross our fingers that these people were more exposed or differently exposed.” He looked at my grandfather. “But we’ll have to tell the mayor it’s possible there will be more incidents. She’ll need to be prepared—and to have medics at the ready, law enforcement standing by.”

  “I’m less than enthused about giving her those directions.”

  Catcher chuckled. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Chuck.”

  “And give you the title and the van,” I pointed out.

  My grandfather huffed. “Those are hardly worth it.” He glanced at my meal appraisingly. “But a bite of that might be worth it. Is that a Funyun?”

  “Damn right, it is,” I said with a grin, and slid the leftovers toward him. “Excellent taste is clearly genetic.”

  “I question several things about that statement,” Ethan said. “But considering our circumstances, I’ll hold them back.”

  My grandfather picked up his fork, blew snow off the picnic table before pulling my dinner the rest of the way, began to dig out a forkful of Garbage Dog.

  “So,” I said, “to summarize, we think the delusions are some kind of latent effect of Sorcha’s work at Towerline. And the snow?”

  “The wards sounded,” Catcher said. “And it’s still fifty degrees out here, and not falling from an actual cloud. So it’s active magic. Snow-adjacent magic.”

  “‘Snow-adjacent’?” my grandfather asked.

  “Too warm, no clouds,” I said. “It’s falling like snow, but it’s not created the same way.”

  “Exactly,” Catcher said.

  “So she’s not really manipulating the weather,” my grandfather said.

  “Not in the te
chnical sense, although she is creating a meteorological phenomenon.” Catcher put his elbows on the table, linked his hands as he leaned forward. “That’s the thing I don’t get, don’t understand. Why snow? Chicagoans have seen snow before. We’ve lived through blizzards.”

  “And yet . . .” Ethan said.

  “And yet,” Catcher growled.

  My grandfather’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Message from Jeff. It just says, ‘Look at Towerline.’”

  We all looked to the northeast, but couldn’t see that far in the tangle of skyscrapers.

  “I guess we’re going for a walk,” Catcher said. We rose, tossed our trash, and set out on our next journey, dread collecting around us.

  • • •

  We zigzagged east and north toward the river. My grandfather was on the phone, having called in the CPD to cordon off the building, just in case.

  The temperature was dropping, the snow now beginning to stick on slick roads and sidewalks. It still had no obvious meteorological origin—the sky was clear above the snow—but that didn’t seem to matter.

  “Does Reed still own Towerline?” I asked. I wasn’t entirely sure what happened when you became a supervillain. Were your assets forfeit?

  “I don’t know if he had a will,” my grandfather said. “He died before Sorcha, and she probably would have been the beneficiary of his assets. But since she killed him, the Slayer Statute would likely prevent her from inheriting. They didn’t have children, so I’m guessing his parents would be next in line.”

  “Either way,” Ethan said, “Towerline and everything else he owned will be tied up in probate for years to come.” He glanced at me. “So your father won’t be reclaiming it anytime soon.”

  I wasn’t sure he wanted to. We hadn’t talked about it, but I had the sense he considered Towerline a personal failure, even though he’d given it up for good reasons, and that wasn’t the kind of thing my father wanted to commiserate about. I wouldn’t say the building was cursed, but I wouldn’t want to own real estate with that much supernatural baggage.

  We emerged from the labyrinth of buildings at the corner of State and Wabash, the State Street bridge in front of us, the corncob-shaped Marina Towers to our right. And to our left, in the prime real estate on the north side of the river at Michigan, was the Towerline building. Or what remained of its structural shell. The missing glass panels in the tall lobby had been boarded over. It was an ugly solution the city didn’t like, but until the courts resolved the issue of ownership, there were no funds to repair it.

  And given the sight in front of us, I doubted those funds would be coming anytime soon.

  A column of clouds rose above the building, bands of swirling white and brilliant purple against a sky otherwise as dark as pitch. It looked like a cyclonic storm, but the snow wasn’t coming from these clouds, or any others.

  “No snow,” I said. “But does anyone else think it’s colder over here?”

  “The temperature dropped the closer we got to Towerline,” my grandfather agreed.

  Ethan sighed. “The honeymoon is decidedly over.”

  • • •

  I generally tried to be brave, and was certainly more willing to take chances than I had been a year ago as a still-pink vampire. But even I wasn’t taking the rickety construction elevator—or climbing dozens of floors of steps—to the top floor to inspect what might be happening on the roof.

  We left that to the CPD helicopters my grandfather called in, while we crossed the State Street bridge to the area the CPD had once again cordoned off in front of the building’s sweeping plaza.

  Michigan Avenue had been roped off with caution tape, CPD uniforms already posted at intervals along the line. Traffic had been rerouted, but that didn’t stop the pedestrians who gathered at the edges, just like the last time. There seemed to be fewer tonight, maybe because of the weather, hopefully because they’d learned their lessons the last time, understood that this woman’s magic was inherently dangerous.

  And in the middle of the street, behind a barrier of police cruisers and vans, stood the SWAT team members who’d coordinate the CPD’s response to . . . whatever this was.

  There was a buzz around the men and women, but it wasn’t magic. It was steel, my body’s magical reaction to their weapons, a sensitivity related to my connection with my sword.

  “We meet again,” said a man with a strong body and short, pale hair.

  He’d been in charge of the response on that fateful night when we’d beaten back Sorcha the first time. That was also the night Ethan had proposed. We returned now as husband and wife, but just as aware of Sorcha’s power.

  “Pity we didn’t manage to hold her,” the officer said, and there was apology in his expression. Good. There was no way that could be blamed on us.

  “It is a pity,” Ethan said. “And you didn’t offer your name that evening.”

  “My bad,” he said, and offered a hand. “Jim Wilcox.”

  “Ethan Sullivan,” he said.

  “Helicopters on their way?” my grandfather asked.

  “They are.” He gestured to a comm unit built into the back of a white panel van. “The mayor is patched in, and she’s monitoring the situation.”

  “And she is pissed,” said a woman with dark skin and a cloud of curly hair depressed by a slender headset and mouthpiece. She wore slim black pants and a crimson top beneath a dark gray suit jacket, her badge on a chain around her neck. I guessed her to be in her early thirties. “Pierce,” she said. “Agent Mikaela. FBI Paranormal Response Unit.”

  This was the first I’d heard of such a thing, but I wouldn’t argue that it was unnecessary. The clouds above Towerline proved its necessity easily enough.

  “Agent,” my grandfather said, shaking her hand. “Chuck Merit. Catcher Bell, my associate.”

  She nodded at them. “I’m based in New York, but I’ve heard a lot about your work in Chicago.” She looked at us. “And I’ve heard a lot about you, Ethan and Merit.”

  “Do you know Victor Garcia?” Ethan asked. He was the head of New York’s Cabot House.

  “I do,” she said with a wry smile. “He asked me to pass along his good wishes if I saw you, and said you could call him if you wanted to check my bona fides.”

  Ethan smiled, appreciating that she’d prepared for this meeting. “I’ll keep that in mind. What brings you to Chicago?”

  “The peace and quiet,” she said, without missing a beat. “Should we turn to the magic?”

  “Let’s do,” my grandfather said.

  “We’ve scanned the building looking for heat signals and movement,” she said, “and found nothing. Sorcha, if she has returned to Chicago, isn’t in the building. The chopper will be reporting momentarily.”

  Pierce put a finger against her ear as the thwack of helicopter blades began to beat the air overhead. “First copter report coming in,” she said. “And . . . the roof is empty. There’s no indication of movement or activity.”

  “Is it colder up there?” Catcher asked. “Directly beneath the cloud formation?”

  She lifted her brows but repeated the question into her headset. “That’s affirmative. Temperature readings are ten degrees colder in the space between Towerline and the phenomenon.”

  She pushed the mouthpiece away, looked back at us. “What does that mean?”

  I looked at Catcher, who seemed to be as flummoxed as the rest of us. His gaze was on the cloud swirling ominously above the tower, hands on his hips as he tried to ferret out its meaning.

  “It has to be the source of the weather, but I don’t know how or why. The last time I’ve seen something like this, something meteorological, was . . .”

  “Mallory,” I finished for him, thinking of the havoc she’d wrought thro
ugh Chicago during her thankfully brief stint as a dark sorceress. She’d torn the city apart.

  “Yeah,” Catcher said. “The wards say this is Sorcha. But I’m not sure how she’s doing it, or what it’s supposed to be doing.”

  I crossed my arms as the temperature seemed to drop another fifteen degrees instantaneously, my breath turning to pale vapor in the chilling wind.

  “She’s going to freeze us out,” Ethan said.

  Catcher rubbed fingers across his forehead. “That’s a possibility,” he said, but one he didn’t look sure of. And Catcher wasn’t a man who liked not knowing.

  There were gasps of shock behind us. I turned, expecting to find Sorcha descending onto the Michigan Avenue bridge like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  Instead, people had gathered at the ornate balustrade at the edge of the bridge that overlooked the river.

  I jogged over, Ethan in step behind me, and squeezed through the people until I could see the water below—and the thick white scale that was working its way down the river and toward the lake.

  “What is that?” he asked beside me. “Some kind of contaminant?”

  “No,” I said, and the dread that settled into my bones was as cold as the cutting breeze. “The river is freezing.”

  I’d seen the river flowing, and I’d seen it frozen. But I’d never watched it freeze, never seen ice crystallize on a scale that large, watched water turn opaque and opalescent, its movement stiffening like someone had flipped a switch and turned it off.

  It shouldn’t have happened so quickly. The river shouldn’t have frozen all at once, and certainly not in August.

  Screams issued up from the canal.

  Notwithstanding the snow, it had been a warm day, and people had taken advantage of the weather—and the chance to experience the weirdness of snow in August. A tour boat, its upper deck full of people, was approaching the Michigan Avenue dock but was still a dozen yards west of it. The water was expanding as it froze, and that force—that volume—was pushing the boat into the concrete bank.