We condensed into a smaller group, a tighter group, scanning the growing threat.
“Sentinel?” Ethan said. “I believe you’re the one with the experience here.”
They didn’t need killing; they just needed subduing. “Knock them out,” I said. “That’s the best way to keep them from killing themselves or each other.”
“Or us,” Mallory quietly said.
“We can distract them, separate them,” Catcher agreed, gaze narrowed as he looked over the group.
The man with the tire iron raised it over his head.
Mine, Ethan said silently, and took off his jacket, tossed it on a parking meter.
That was the first act of the offensive. Amit’s jacket followed Ethan’s. Mallory and Catcher began to gather power; it bristled around us as they prepared magical fireballs.
“Luc is going to be pissed he missed this,” Lindsey said, stepping beside me. She’d pulled a dark elastic through her hair, was twining it into a bun to keep it out of the way. It was a practical move that matched the determination in her eyes. Lindsey may have enjoyed her shares of sass and fashion, but there was no one fiercer in battle.
“Probably so,” I agreed. “Let’s shut this down.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
WAR OF WORLDS
There was a rhythm to every fight, a kind of dance between opponents. But the speed, the steps, the music of it, varied. When Ethan and I practiced, it was a fine ballet with careful moves and exquisite precision. This fight was a drunken midnight dance. All elbows and unfocused eyes and stepped-on toes.
I separated two women in nightgowns, slippers still on their feet, who were screaming like banshees between sobbing, terrified wails. Like Winston and the first man we’d seen tonight, they tore at their hair like they might rip the demons away. That obviously didn’t work, which seemed to exacerbate their screaming.
It had been unnerving to see Winston struggle. It was exponentially worse to watch the insanity travel its way through a crowd.
The women fought back as I pushed them apart, turning on me instead of each other. I swept the feet of the one on my right with a low kick that put her on the ground. When she went down, I turned to the other, ducking to dodge a ball-fisted slap. She wasn’t a fighter. She was an animal, striking back at something that was attacking her. Something predatory.
I came up again, shoulders hunched in case she tried to make another move. That she wasn’t trained didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. She windmilled both arms at me, nails bared, a manicure that couldn’t have been more than a few days old. I grabbed one of her arms, turned and twisted until she was bent over, wrenched by the shoulder. She wouldn’t know how to escape the move, so I used the moment to my advantage. Or tried to. The other woman popped up again. With my free hand, I hitched up the right side of my dress and kicked out, toe pointed.
I caught her underneath the chin, snapped her head back. Her eyes rolled, and she hit the ground.
“Good girl,” I said, and turned back to the other woman.
“Sentinel,” Ethan said, and I glanced back at the black bow tie he’d extended. His hair was loose around his face, his shirt unbuttoned. “Tie her hands.”
I nodded, took the thin panel of silk as he ran forward and blocked the strike of a woman carrying—quite literally—a wooden rolling pin that looked like it was still dusted with flour. And worse.
Focus, I told myself, and pulled the woman’s other arm back. By that point, her voice had become one long ramble of throaty pleas. “Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop!”
“I’d like to, but you don’t want to be coldcocked, so you’ll have to settle for second place.” I maneuvered her to the bike rack and pushed her to the ground, then pulled her arms through one of the rack’s supports and used the bow tie to secure her. “We’ll get you unconscious as soon as reasonably possible.”
I turned, was pushed backward by Catcher’s outstretched hand as a blue ball of fire whirred past me, thrown by Mallory’s hand. It hit a man wielding a bloody wooden baseball bat in the chest, sent him flying backward, arms and legs thrown forward by the momentum. He flew ten feet before hitting the sidewalk, arms and legs splayed. And he stayed down.
I looked back at Catcher in horror. “Did she kill him?”
“God, no. It’s just force, not fire. Kind of like getting hit by a very large beanbag.”
I looked back at the man. Sure enough, his chest continued to rise and fall, but he didn’t try to get up. I’d say that hit the mark.
“Shit!” Mallory called out, as a hulk of a woman—easily six and a half feet tall and two hundred forty pounds of muscle—stalked toward her. Two whole Mallorys would have barely covered her bulk. Her Cubs T-shirt was torn and bloody, blood dripped from her nose, and her eyes were wild with fear. And she was much too close for Mallory to use magic.
“Stop screaming!” she said, accusation clear in her eyes. “Stop screaming! Stop screaming!”
“I’m not screaming!” Mallory said, now screaming.
“Later,” Catcher said, and went to help his wife.
The gleam of metal in the streetlight caught my eye, and I looked back. A woman walked forward, chef’s knife in her hand. She was wearing pajamas and scuff-style slippers, and I’d bet the knife had come from her kitchen.
For whatever mysterious reason was driving them, she’d probably walked right out of her house and right into hell.
Her hair was short and curly, her eyes wild and panicked. She raised the knife in one hand, beat against her temple with the other. “Get them out of my head!”
“I can help you,” I said, reaching out a hand while I kept my eyes trained on the knife and its wide, flat blade, with a pattern that looked like mokume-gane. If it had been well cared for, it would be sharp and could do some damage.
“You can’t!” She screamed it, putting so much energy into the sound her body bowed with the force of it. “They won’t stop. I will make them stop! I will stop them!”
She held the knife to her throat, and my heart seemed to stop sympathetically.
“Please don’t,” I said, trying to draw her gaze back to me. “I promise I can help you. There’s a place you can go where the voice won’t bother you anymore.”
That place might have involved a cell and a drug-induced coma, but it was all I had to offer at the moment, at least until we learned more.
She paused for a moment, shoulder twitching up toward her ear, and I could see hope spark in her eyes. But it was a small spark, extinguished by whatever delusion ripped through her awareness. She grabbed handfuls of her hair, bent over from the waist like the voice had weight and was pulling her to earth.
She screamed and stomped her feet in obvious frustration, and when she lifted her gaze again, there was a horrible desperation in her eyes. “This won’t end. It doesn’t end. It’s the same thing all day, every day, and there’s nothing you can do about it or that I can do about it. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop!”
She regripped the knife so the blade pointed toward her, a new grim determination in her eyes.
“No!” I said, and ran forward, but I was a moment too late. She plunged the knife into her abdomen, dark blood staining her apron. The fingers still wrapped around the blade turned crimson as she fell to her knees, eyes wide. She looked down, horror filling her eyes, and began to shake.
“Little help here!” I called out, and dodged forward. She pulled one hand away, began to beat back at me. I grabbed her slick wrist, wrapped my free hand around the one still on the knife. There was no telling what she’d punctured, or if pulling out the knife would make the situation worse.
Malik hit his knees beside me. “Do exactly what you’re doing,” he said, and pulled off his jacket. “Keep your hand on the knife. I’m going to apply pressure.”
I just nodded, since I was busy trying to keep the woman??
?s clawing hand away from me. She was still screaming; her plan to kill the noise by giving herself a brutal amount of pain clearly wasn’t working.
Malik wrapped the coat around the knife below our joined hands, pressed firmly down. The woman screamed with pain, which made more delusional heads turn our way.
A blue ball whizzed by, sparks jettisoning as it passed like an out-of-season sparkler. I looked up, watched it stream toward a young man in his early twenties in athletic shorts and shower shoes shuffling forward, hands gripping his head like he was trying to rip away a vice. He hit the pavement much the way the first one had.
“Merit,” Malik said. I looked back, found him nodding toward my skirt.
“Shit,” I murmured, and slapped at the sparks that were eating their way through the silk. But my hands were very much occupied . . .
“I got it,” Amit said, slapping out the sparks with a hand. He blew away the ashes, tamped again just to be sure, and then looked back at the woman bleeding on the ground in front of us. There were streaks of blood on his face.
“Cadogan House has a unique way of partying,” he said.
I looked back at my hands, covered in blood and around an equally bloody knife, hoping to God I wouldn’t lose the woman I hadn’t been able to save.
“Yeah. I’d say that about sums it up.”
• • •
The ambulances arrived first, sirens roaring toward us, lights flashing. Catcher pulled the EMTs to our position, and they worked to stabilize the woman, get her into the ambulance. They must have been experienced with disaster work, as they didn’t flinch at the sight of the chaos, or the humans on the ground.
“Keep her guarded and secured to the bed,” Catcher said of the woman with the knife. “She did this to herself.”
“Suicide?” one of the EMTs asked, crossing himself in the process, two fingers across forehead, breastbone, left, and right.
“Not exactly,” Catcher said. “But we don’t have time to explain right now. The Ombudsman will be in touch.”
They nodded, swept her away and to the hospital with sirens roaring again.
One of the EMTs offered me a bottle of water, and I rinsed the worst of the blood from my hands.
Ethan walked toward me, looked me over, and I did the same to him. Limbs still connected. Filthy and blood smeared, like me, but generally healthy.
“I’m okay,” I said, anticipating the question. “You?”
He nodded, looked down at his now-untucked shirt and ripped pants. “The streets of Chicago are filthy. I don’t recommend rolling around on them.”
I looked down. I’d lost a sleeve, the lace along the bottom of my dress had been shredded, and blood stained the front in ugly vermillion streaks.
“Yeah, my dress is toast.”
He glanced down at it. “You and clothing. At least the wedding was already over.”
I blanched as I realized what would come. I’d have to take the dress back to the House, where Helen would undoubtedly see it. I could all but feel the lecture taking shape, judgment forming like a cloud over us, never mind that I’d paid for the damn thing.
“Helen,” I said, looking up at him, and watched understanding dawn in his eyes.
His gaze went steely. “We’ll move. Our bags are already at the hotel. We’ll just pick up and leave, and she’ll never know what became of it.”
Until the dozens of passersby with cell phones and reporters with cameras—all of whom were outside the hastily hung caution tape—shared their images with the world.
“Too late for that,” I said, and looked back at the carnage that we’d helped wreak tonight.
There had been more humans than supernaturals, but we had more strength and more firepower, literally and figuratively. Some had been knocked out, some were still squirming, and some were tied to bike racks with more abandoned bow ties. More than a dozen prone humans on the ground while we stood, bloodied and torn, over them—humans who’d come down with some kind of delusional disorder we’d seen in a vampire in Cadogan House.
“It wasn’t just Winston,” I said.
“No,” Ethan said. “It wasn’t just Winston. And we need to know why, and how.”
In addition to the people on the ground, two trash receptacles were on fire, sending the scents of burning plastic and garbage into the air. Blood spattered and pooled on the concrete, reflecting the cruisers’ blue and red lights.
When four uniformed CPD officers emerged from their cruisers, we lifted our hands instinctively. But for the wedding attire, it would have looked like we’d made a breakfast buffet of the neighborhood.
My grandfather and Jeff hustled toward us from the library, both still in their pristine suits.
My grandfather pulled out his identification. “I’m the Ombudsman,” he said. “The perpetrators are all on the ground. These are the ones who kept them from killing each other.”
We gave the cops a minute to orient themselves, holster their weapons, and for the officer in charge to find my grandfather.
“Oh, Merit,” Mallory said, joining us. “Your dress.”
“I know. Yours isn’t much better.” There were small circular burns and ugly red smears across the pale green lace.
She glanced down. “Oh yeah. Got a little singed with that last bombardment. Guess I won’t be turning this into a cocktail dress.”
“And I guess I won’t be getting married again.” Not that I’d want a repeat of this evening. Or the latter part of it, anyway.
Accompanied by my grandfather, a detective walked toward us, badge hanging from a chain around his neck. He had a pale, lived-in face, a crop of white hair, and a suit that was turned out, from the sharp lapels to pixel-thin stripes to pocket square. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see spats beneath the pants’ cuffs.
“One dead, twelve injured to some degree,” my grandfather reported. Ambulances were still rushing to and away from the scene, carrying the humans who’d been part of the mob to nearby hospitals.
“I’m Detective Pulaski,” said the detective, notepad in hand. “Who wants to start?”
“We stumbled into it,” Ethan said. “We were taking wedding photographs, rounded the corner, and there they were. Fighting and talking about delusions.”
My grandfather’s gaze widened, and he looked at me. I nodded at the unspoken question. “Same as Winston. They’re panicked and afraid, and they hear screaming. And because of that, for whatever reason, they become violent.”
“Winston Stiles,” my grandfather explained to Pulaski. “A vampire who attacked Merit last night in Cadogan House. He’s currently in lockup at the supernatural facility.”
Pulaski looked back. “Any of these people vampires?”
“All humans,” Ethan said.
“So a vampire went crazy, and then a bunch of humans went crazy?”
Was it contagious? he meant. Were the delusions spreading across the city?
“Vampires did not infect humans,” Ethan said. But there was worry in his eyes. We didn’t know how this had spread—whatever it was. And the only other person we’d seen with delusions had been a vampire in our House.
“Then how did it spread?”
“Maybe it didn’t,” Mallory said, and we all looked at her.
“Delusions aren’t generally contagious, and they don’t have any other symptoms.”
“So what’s the other option?” Pulaski asked.
“They’re telling the truth,” Mallory said. She pushed back the hair that brushed her face, her pale manicure—the same we’d all gotten for the wedding—chipped at the edges. “They’re having the same delusions because they’re hearing the same things. They’re hearing something real.”
Ethan tilted his head. “If the sound—or its origin—is real, why can’t we hear it? Why isn’t everyone affected?”
“I don’t know,” Mallory said. “I think that’s what we have to figure out. And that doesn’t even get to the bigger question.”
“Which is?” Ethan prompted.
She looked at him. “Who is screaming? Who wants so badly to be heard?” She spread her gaze across the city like she was looking for an enemy sail.
“Sorcha?” Ethan asked.
Mallory shook her head. “The wards are intact.”
“And there’s no way for her to get around that?” Ethan asked. “To circumvent it?”
We’d covered this ground before, of course. When the wards were proposed, we’d gone over every detail of the magic, of the wards, of the degree to which they’d give us protection—and fair warning.
“The wards are a circuit. She uses magic, it breaks the circuit, and we hear about it. We haven’t heard about it; ergo . . .”
“It’s not Sorcha,” Ethan concluded.
Mallory nodded. “Besides, she’s an alchemical witch. This doesn’t feel like alchemy.”
Pulaski held up his hand. “I’m not interested in the magical mumbo jumbo. I’ll leave that to you. What I want to know is what, exactly, happened here. In detail.”
“I’ll walk you through it,” Catcher said, and led him a few feet away, pointing at the spot where we’d rounded the corner some unfathomably long time ago.
My grandfather followed them but looked back at us, circled a finger in the air. He wanted us to keep going, to keep talking it through.
“So it’s someone else’s magic?” Ethan asked.
“It has to be,” Mallory said. “I just don’t know whose, or at least not yet. Although there is that weird metallic thing.”
“Yeah,” I said, turning back to Mallory. “I sensed the same thing after seeing Winston. I thought it was because of the delusions. Like, he’d been sick, which gave his magic a weird scent. But maybe it’s a signature of some kind. Is it associated with a certain kind of magic or creature?”
She shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of, but I’ll have to check the books.”
“Paige is out of town,” Ethan said, “or I’d have her look, too.” Paige was a sorceress who practically lived in Cadogan House, mostly owing to her relationship with our Librarian. “The Librarian’s at an ALA conference in New York,” Ethan added. “She’s with him.”