by Chloe Neill
Luc nodded. “We’re in your office.”
Snow or not, I wasn’t going for a run.
• • •
We were downstairs in three and a half minutes, and walked into Ethan’s office to find Catcher, Mallory, Malik, Lindsey, and Luc already assembled. All of them were standing, and all had their gazes on the television built into one of the shelves on the far wall.
Catcher and Mallory were still in pajamas—Cadogan House T-shirts and plaid bottoms they’d probably borrowed from Helen for the night. They looked like they hadn’t slept much.
The television was tuned to a news station, where a male reporter stood in front of the Towerline barricade. He wore a coat, scarf, gloves, and hat, and he still looked cold. Behind him, the street was empty and slicked like an ice rink.
“I’m here in front of the Towerline building,” he said as we moved into the crowd, closer to the television, “where moments ago, the sorceress Sorcha Reed appeared to deliver a chilling ultimatum to the city of Chicago. Let’s watch that footage again.”
Cold fear snaked down my spine.
The shot switched to the previously recorded footage—Sorcha, with the golden light of dusk around her—standing in the snow that covered Towerline square. Either she was ignoring the cold, or she’d magicked it so it didn’t affect her. Weather be damned, she wore an emerald ball gown. It was long-sleeved and fitted on the top, a voluminous skirt on the bottom, all of it covered in geometric lace over mesh in the same deep green. Her hair, thick and blond, curled prettily over her shoulders.
She stood with perfect posture, her hands behind her, the dress’s glass beads and sequins sparkling in the spotlights and camera flashes. The smile on her face was contented and only a little smug, like a student showing off her first-prize ribbon at the science fair.
“Good evening, citizens of Chicago. I hope you’ve enjoyed this bracing taste of my powers.” She looked around, pride gleaming in her eyes. “It took remarkably little effort on my part, although it was, of course, helped along by the sophomoric efforts of the sorcerer Mallory Carmichael.”
Mallory cursed under her breath.
I didn’t like the way she used “sorcerer” like a title, like we were characters in a spaghetti Western, and she planned to take care of us at dawn on a dusty, sun-bleached road between worn wooden buildings.
“Rest assured that this is only the beginning—a sample of my practiced powers. And I intend to use them. I had a plan for this city, one that would bring us into a new era. That plan was ruined by your supernaturals, your law enforcement officials, because they are too shortsighted, too stupid, to see the virtue of it.”
Some of that calm and collected visage, the debutante-trained smile, faltered, like a mask slipping away.
“You have debts to pay. I will collect them. I will take back what you’ve taken from me, and I will take what I am owed.”
She smiled, and it was chilling. It was a predator’s smile, amoral and sharp.
“I will take this city in payment of your debts, or I will take the traitors. If Merit of Cadogan House and Mallory Carmichael are delivered to me by dawn, I will release Chicago.”
There was a gasp in the room—maybe it came from me?—and a few heads turned to look at Mallory and me before staring at Sorcha again.
“If you do as I’ve asked you—this one small thing that I’ve asked you—the ice will melt, and the temperatures will climb, and you can have your city back.” Her eyes darkened, like storm clouds passing over. Although she smiled pleasantly, there was nothing pleasant in her eyes. “If you do not, if you deny me what I am owed, you will learn how vindictive I can be. It’s such a small thing to ask, don’t you think? Two lives, in exchange for three million?”
She waited, as if allowing the entire city to gasp, and slid her hands into pockets tucked into the voluminous skirt. “You have ten hours. I hope you’re smart enough to make the right decision.”
There was a movie-worthy swirl of smoke—green, of course—and she disappeared, the scuffed snow the only evidence that she’d been there.
“Okay,” Lindsey said into the intervening silence. “I’m going to cut the tension by saying she’s a stone-cold bitch. But it truly pisses me off how gorgeous she is. Can I have a fashion crush on my mortal enemy?”
“Yes,” Mallory said, gaze narrowed on the screen. “Unrelated issues.”
“Good. Because that dress was sick. I hate her.”
“Because of fashion or mortal enemy?” I wondered.
“Yes,” was Lindsey’s answer. “Because of that.”
“She’s bluffing,” Catcher said, his voice low and dangerous, like fury only barely bridled. “She doesn’t have that kind of power—not to destroy the city.” But he didn’t sound entirely certain.
“She only needs our fear,” Mallory said. “And she has plenty of that to do this. Enough to extort the mayor and everyone else. At least she’s not passive-aggressive.”
“She’s aggressive-aggressive,” Catcher said. “And I want a chance at her this time.”
“She didn’t ask for you,” Mallory said. “She asked for us.”
“She won’t get you,” Ethan said. I looked at him, found his gaze on me, eyes full of flashing heat. “Under no circumstances will you be handed over to Sorcha Reed.”
“Seconded,” Catcher said, a deep timbre to his voice, as if he’d imbued the word itself with magic.
Like me, Mallory looked ready to argue. Not that I wanted to hand myself over to Sorcha—I’d seen what she could do. But nor did I want to sacrifice Chicago—and every person in it—to her sociopathy. There had to be a middle ground between giving in and giving up.
And both of us were smart enough to pick our battles. Mallory and I exchanged a look and the smallest of nods. We’d do what we had to do, to protect our city, our people, and our men.
“We took her out once,” she said, with a long look at her husband. “And she’d have stayed that way if the CPD hadn’t lost her. We’ll take her out again.”
The phones started ringing, the modern-day warning siren, and we pulled them out. “Jonah,” I said, reading mine. “Letting us know Gray House has our back.”
“Your grandfather,” Catcher said. “He and Jeff are on their way; the mayor wants a strategy meeting in two hours.” He looked up. “We won’t be able to avoid it.”
“And the Tribune asking for a quote.” Ethan growled the words, then tossed his phone into an empty chair, where he apparently planned to ignore it.
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to talk to them,” Luc said.
The fury in Ethan’s face made him seem as much wolf as vampire. “She has asked for my wife’s life in exchange for this city. They have no right to justify that demand with questions about whether I’ll accede to it. Whether I’ll turn Merit over to satisfy the whims of a woman who is certifiable.”
Ethan, I silently said, and put a hand on his arm. This won’t help. And he isn’t our enemy.
The room was heavy and silent for a moment, the tension as thick as fog, and then he nodded and took a step back.
“You should tell them what you think,” Luc said, and held up his hands before Ethan could argue. “I know you don’t like press conferences. But we should consider getting our side of the story out there.”
“In less than ten hours, I turn over my wife, or Sorcha destroys the city. Getting my story out there isn’t a high priority.”
“You are a stubborn man.”
“I am,” Ethan said. “And I’ll be damned if my city is brought down by the Wicked Witch of the Midwest.”
Cut and print.
• • •
We took time to get organized, get food, and for Mallory and Catcher to get showered. We gathered again in Ethan’s office, where the screen now displayed the dossier Luc had put together about Sorcha Ree
d.
“If we want to beat the Wicked Witch,” Luc said, “we have to predict her magic. And if we want to predict her magic, we have to know how she ticks.”
“Wicked Bitch, more like,” Lindsey muttered.
“No objection there,” Ethan said.
Luc nodded. “First, Mallory and Catcher have an update.”
Mallory, who’d gotten dressed while we’d gotten ready for the meeting, rose from the couch. Her blue hair was in a high bun today, her petite body swamped by a Cadogan House sweatshirt. She looked a little like a sophomore during finals week. It was a look she pulled off pretty well.
“Thanks to Merit,” she said, “we’ve made quite a bit of progress.”
Hope made my heart beat faster. “You found something in the notes?”
“We did,” Mallory said. “Kind of. So, the notes are basically ramblings, which is probably not surprising given how they were ordered around the room. It looks like tidbits of spells she was interested in, ideas for projects, stuff like that. It was basically a really obsessive bulletin board. Together, the pieces don’t make much sense. So you have to consider them individually. And individually, they didn’t make much sense, either. Until I got to this.”
She offered me the piece of paper. It was a photocopy of what looked like a book or journal page. The top half of the page was filled with handwritten words in the small script of gilded medieval manuscripts. The bottom half of the page bore sketches drawn in a thin, scraggly line. What looked like a globe near what looked like a star, with two-dimensional renderings of humans.
“It looks old,” I said. “But not particularly familiar.”
“Nor to me,” she said. “Especially the completely whacked-out language. But I did a little sleuthing. It’s a page from the Danzig Manuscript.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, but gave the page another look.
“And what is the Danzig Manuscript?” Luc asked.
I hadn’t actually seen the Danzig Manuscript, but I knew enough about it. “A book written in the seventeenth century,” I said. “Drawings of plants and animals that didn’t exist and writings that weren’t in any identifiable language.” Mallory was right—the letter forms weren’t entirely clear on this photocopied page, but it wasn’t a Latin alphabet, or Cyrillic, or any alphabet I recognized.
“There are a few dozen theories on what the book’s supposed to mean,” I said. “Whether it was encoded or encrypted, the last writing in a lost language, the ramblings of a madman, a very old practical joke.”
“And Ethan happens to have a facsimile of the book in his magnificent library.”
Mallory reached out a hand to Catcher, who offered her a large, dark leather book. She opened the book to the page she’d marked with a ribbon. It matched the page from Sorcha’s office exactly.
Ethan looked at the book over my shoulder. “And no one has conclusively determined what it means?”
“Not in four hundred years,” I said.
Mallory smiled slyly. “Well, not until tonight.”
I looked up, stared at her. “What?”
“I translated the Danzig Manuscript.”
“You’re joking.”
Her grin was huge, proud. “I am not joking. It took me a good hour to figure out the trick,” she said with a wink. “But I have skills most academics lack.”
“Skills?” I asked, then looked down at the page again.
“Abracadabra,” Mallory said, and drew a symbol in the air above the text.
Bright magic spilled into the air, and with it the slightly musty scent of old books, of dark and cool library aisles. The letter forms stretched and shifted like they were animated, then reassembled themselves into Latin letter forms and English.
I flipped to the next page, then the next. All of them had been translated by Mallory’s magic.
“Holy shit, Mallory.” I looked up at her. “You translated the Danzig Manuscript.”
“I know, right?” She blew on her fingernails, buffed them on her shirt. “I’m a badass. Fortunately, the magic is contained in the manuscript’s words, not the pages. That’s why this little translation works on Ethan’s facsimile.”
“So what is it?” Lindsey asked. “And what’s the significance here?”
“As it turns out, the Danzig Manuscript isn’t a joke or ramblings, although it was encrypted. It’s a grimoire.”
“A spell book?” I asked.
Mallory nodded. “Of a sorcerer named, I kid you not, Portnoy the Ugly. The words are in English, but they’re in Portnoy’s magical shorthand, which is taking time to translate. We started with the page you found in Sorcha’s office.”
She pointed to the globe, the circle of crudely drawn humans. “The text describes a group of humans with powerful emotions. Strong emotions that are cast off into the world.” She traced a finger to the starlike figure. “Magic unites those emotions, gives them a spark. A creature is born from that collective spirit. It is alive, and it is sentient.”
She lifted her gaze to us. “It’s called an Egregore. That’s whose voice we hear.”
The room went silent.
“How?” Ethan said.
“Sorcha’s Trojan horse,” Mallory said. “The magic that didn’t dissipate after Towerline.”
Catcher leaned forward. “Think about the emotions people were feeling around Towerline when the battle occurred. People were freaked out by the fight, the supernaturals, the river, the possibility of the building falling over. The city was in crisis, and that was in addition to all the other things they normally worry about. All that fear, anger, and worry was gathered together by Sorcha’s magic.”
“It was distilled,” Mallory said. “Just like the scent of that magic is the distilled essence of Chicago.”
“We’re hearing the Egregore,” Ethan quietly said, studying the picture, then lifting his gaze to Mallory. “Magic creating life?”
“A form of it, anyway.”
“And why would she do all this?” Ethan asked. “Create this collective magic? Work to create this Egregore? To foster the delusions? To use them as a weapon?”
“I think the delusions are a side effect,” Catcher said. “There were thousands of people near Towerline, but the delusions have been relatively rare, sporadic, and geographically focused. That’s probably because Sorcha’s magic didn’t disseminate evenly.”
“The fact that she’s never been trained hurts her,” Mallory said, nodding. “She’s got skills, sure. But it’s raw power, untrained.”
“And that’s much more dangerous,” Ethan said. “Not to mention the fact that she’s narcissistic and unpredictable. She has changed the weather. Endangered the lives of millions. Brought the city to a standstill because she could.” He glanced at Mallory. “Because you didn’t let her have her way at Towerline.”
“She’s acting like a hormonal teenager,” Lindsey said. “She is basically the worst Sweet Valley High novel ever written.”
“Based on what we know about her,” Luc said, “that’s how she operated her entire life. She gets what she wants, usually because someone paid for it.”
I nodded. “She doesn’t even fight her own battles. She used alchemy to control sups so they could do the fighting for her. She wants to win the war, but she doesn’t want to fight it. She wants power with impunity.”
“She wants a weapon,” Catcher concluded, nodding at me. “Just like we were supposed to be.”
“The Egregore is sentient,” I said. “If she can control it, it can fight us on her behalf.”
Mallory nodded. “We think that’s where she’s going, too.” She gestured to the book. “But we haven’t had time to get further in the book, so we don’t know what she’ll try next, or how the weather relates to it.”
“Another question,” I said. “If the Egregore is going to be her weapon, w
hy does she want us? Why the ultimatum?”
“Revenge,” Ethan said, and the word hung in the air, heavy and dangerous.
“I’m sure that’s part of it,” Mallory said. “But that can’t be all of it. She’s creating a spectacle, sure. But she’s also giving us a chance to prepare, to be ready. To be armed. We’re missing something. Something involving the Egregore and us together. I just can’t see what it is. I either need more time to work through the Danzig”—she turned to Catcher—“or I need to go to the source.”
Catcher glared back. “Don’t even think what you’re thinking. Jumping into her arms won’t change anything.”
“I love you, but you don’t even know the half of what I’m thinking right now.” Mallory’s teeth were gritted with anger, every word bitten off like a bitter seed.
“He’s right.”
We looked back at my grandfather in the doorway. He walked in, Jeff by his side.
“How much of that did you get?” Catcher asked.
“Enough,” he said. “We’ll get the details later.” He sat down beside Mallory, clasped his hands together. “Even if you and Merit walked right up to her, offered yourselves, do you think it would make a difference? Do you think it would change anything?”
“Probably not,” Mallory admitted. “But if there’s a one percent chance she’d back down? That if we go to her, turn ourselves in, she takes her ice and her couture and walks away? Isn’t that worth taking to save the city?”
“Mallory,” Catcher said, “you know the math doesn’t work that way.”
“It’s just an example,” she said, and rubbed a hand over her face.
It might have been an example, but she had a point. I didn’t want that many people on my conscience, weighing it down.
“I need more time,” she said. “We all need more time.”
“I’m sure she realizes that,” Ethan said. “Which is why time is a luxury she isn’t giving us.” Ethan looked at my grandfather. “What’s the situation outside?”
“The city is frozen and, because of it, quiet. The governor has called in the National Guard, and they’re helping those who’ve opted to evacuate. There’ve been two more instances of humans having delusions, which sent four people to the hospital. No fatalities, thank goodness. And there are protestors on your lawn.”
