Wild Things

by Chloe Neill

Page 40

  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. ”