“Protesting?” Ethan said, gritting out the word. “Protesting what?”
My grandfather looked at me. “They demand Merit and Mallory immediately surrender for the safety of the city.”
Protestors were nothing new. Much like the House’s fans, their numbers waxed and waned, usually depending on the weather and our news coverage. But that didn’t much matter to Ethan.
His magic flared like a burst of energy from the sun. “They would dare . . . They would dare to come near my House and advocate for the death of my wife?”
I could feel his building rage, like a storm that tinted the horizon. I touched his arm, but he just flashed those blazing eyes at me.
“No,” he said. “I will take many things from humans, Merit. But this is not one of them.” He turned on his heel and stormed down the hallway, leaving the rest of us staring.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MERE MORTALS
We followed him down the hall, reaching the foyer as he pulled open the door with enough force that it bounced against the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster.
There were vampires in the hallway, in the foyer. Vampires bundled against the chill, and their gazes slipped away as we moved past them. There was guilt in their eyes—either that Mallory and I had been the unlucky ones called out, or that they’d thought accepting Sorcha’s proposal was a good idea.
I bit my tongue, kept my eyes on Ethan. Ignoring the snow, the ice, the chill, Ethan strode down the sidewalk like a warrior heading into battle, then through the gate to the sidewalk outside.
We trailed him, stopped behind him on the sidewalk, where he stared down at the thirteen humans who’d taken up positions on the strip of snow between sidewalk and street. They were bundled up against the weather, and they’d brought camp and lawn chairs, blankets, mugs of hot chocolate.
They looked cold and a little bit pitiful, but Ethan didn’t seem to care. Defenseless or not, he gave no quarter.
His shoulders were back, his feet planted, his hands fisted at his sides. The wind blew back his hair, the lapels of his expensive jacket, so he looked like an ancient raider come to claim his prize.
“You’re here, in front of my House, drinking coffee and cocoa, and advocating murder. Can you be so casual about it? So callous?”
“They’re immortal,” said a large, pale woman in a camp chair, her gloved hands around an insulated mug. “So turn them over. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“Mallory isn’t immortal,” Ethan said. “And being immortal doesn’t mean you can’t be killed. It means you don’t age.” I could hear dimwit as the unspoken punctuation to his sentence, but he managed not to voice it. “They are vulnerable.”
“We’re more vulnerable,” said a thin, tan man a few seats over. “We’re human. Look what she’s already done to our city.”
“It’s our city, too,” Ethan said.
“It was ours first.” A large man in a ball cap, puffy Cubs jacket, and jeans pushed aside his blanket and stood up, knocking over his lawn chair in the process. “If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Slowly, Ethan turned his gaze on the man. “How, exactly, is this our fault?”
“You riled her up. Pissed her off.” He looked around, nodding at the others, trying to get them to throw their hates into the ring. “This fight doesn’t have anything to do with us. It’s between you supernaturals, and you need to work it out for yourselves.”
“This fight has nothing to do with us,” Ethan gritted out, frustration obviously rising. “A madwoman wants to use magic to put the city under her control, under her power. She is a demagogue with no conscience, and through no fault of ours. But we’re the only ones who seem interested in trying to stop her.” He looked at the humans again. “If she’d asked for your wives, your husbands, your children, would you be so eager to hand them over? And yet, here you are, talking about things you don’t even try to understand.”
“You think you’re better than us,” said the man in the ball cap. “That’s the thing, right?” He gestured toward Cadogan House. “You live in some big House, wear your fancy suits. You don’t know what it’s like to be out there, working every day, and have magic throw your whole world into a spin. The world would be better off without magic in it.”
He’d said so many incorrect things, so many absolutely wrong things, that Ethan looked momentarily dumbstruck. “Get off my lawn,” he said through bared teeth.
“We got constitutional rights.”
Ethan took a step forward. He was a good five inches taller than the man, with all the muscle and power of vampirism.
“I doubt you understand what that phrase actually means, given the context you’ve used it in. But if you want to protest, do it across the street. Better yet, instead of sitting here, chatting with your friends and complaining, go do something about it. Go to the Ombudsman’s office and volunteer. Go to a charitable organization and donate your time.” He spread his gaze over all of them, covering them in furious disapproval. “But don’t you dare think that sitting here and advocating my wife’s murder is something I will allow. You have two minutes until I take things into my own hands. I suggest you use it wisely.”
He stared at them, this ancient raider, and waited for them to flinch.
And of course, they did. It didn’t take bravery to advocate that someone else throw their family to the wolf.
The man with the ball cap muttered insults, but he picked up his chair. The rest of them looked at least a little chagrined, and three climbed into waiting cars, deciding either the weather or the vampires weren’t worth the trouble.
“They’ll come back,” my grandfather said, when the last one had decamped to the strip of grass across the street.
“They will,” Ethan acknowledged. “But perhaps a few of them will think before they demand our blood in exchange.”
He looked back at me, his gaze locked to mine for a very long time. You promised me eternity, Sentinel, he said. I intend to collect.
• • •
Because the snow and ice would make getting downtown more difficult than usual, our two hours was something more like seventy minutes. And then it was time to head downtown again and talk to the mayor about Sorcha’s threat.
“Are you nervous?” Mallory asked as we walked through the foyer to the front door and the SUV that waited outside. Catcher would drive us to the mayor’s office. Everyone in the House would stay here, gates shut, with the House on high alert. My grandfather would drive separately, meet us there. In the meantime, Jeff would work with Luc to apprise the other Houses, our supernatural allies, about the situation.
“Nothing to be nervous about,” I said. That was mostly a lie, because I didn’t trust human politicians—with the possible exception of Seth Tate. But she looked nervous. That wasn’t a common emotion for Mallory, but this particular debacle mixed powerful sorcery, old magic, and extortion, and she hadn’t gotten much sleep. I could be strong for her. “This is just a strategy session.”
“A strategy session,” Mallory said, dipping her chin inside her thick scarf. “Right. Just going to talk a few things over with the mayor.”
“That’s precisely what we’re going to do,” Ethan said, putting a supportive hand on her shoulder and giving me a look behind her back, a nod that said we were in this together.
Good. Because that knot of worry was back. I didn’t like being worried. I’d come far enough as a vampire and Sentinel that I preferred a good old-fashioned fight to magic wrangling.
A few hardy and wrong-minded souls still sat on the strip of snow across the street, clearly convinced of their rightness, the rationality of Sorcha’s two-for-three-million calculation. Would it be the same, I wondered, if she’d asked for one of their wives or husbands or children? I seriously doubted it.
Once we were in the SUV, the going was s
low, and Catcher took his time driving through the alternating mix of crusty slush and snow-covered ice. Beyond Hyde Park, the world was mostly quiet. The El wasn’t running; icicles hung from the elevated platforms, as sharp as sharks’ teeth. Few vehicles braved the roads, and then only snowplows, Guard vehicles, and cars headed out of Chicago, hoping to get clear before things got worse.
There were no people downtown. Those who were still in the city had stayed indoors, because of either the chill in the air or the fear that hung with it.
We parked in front of the building and headed inside.
The mayor asked that we meet her not in her office, but on the roof of City Hall. We went through security, then were escorted up an elevator and into a long hallway.
Lane stood at the end, gaze on a phone, fingers skimming and sliding along the screen. He looked up, nodded. “She’s waiting for you,” he said, then opened a heavy door beside him, sending a gust of cold air down the hallway.
We stepped outside and onto the building’s roof—and into a frozen world. The city spread out around us, most of it gleaming with the ice and snow that Sorcha had managed to dump in less than twenty-four hours. The cold had a boundary; we’d seen it on the map last night. But the parts of the world that remained green weren’t visible from up here.
To the northeast, clouds still swirled over the Towerline building. They didn’t look any bigger or fiercer than they had the night before, but until we figured out exactly what Sorcha was doing, I wasn’t sure that mattered much. How much colder could Chicago get?
Apparently, very cold. The wind on the roof was a thousand ice picks, harsh enough to make breathing feel like fire. Snow was bundled over what looked like planter boxes, with rows between for walking.
The mayor, bundled in a long, baffled down coat, was crouching near one of the piles of snow, sweeping the crust of it back from the plants beneath. Three guards in black suits stood around her, each of them gazing in a different direction, as if waiting for a threat to descend from the air. We walked toward her.
“There was a garden here last week,” she said without glancing up at us, rising and wiping the snow from her gloved hands. “Tomatoes, corn, beans. They were thriving in the heat, the rain we’ve gotten.” She looked around. “Part of the effort to ‘green’ the city and cut our heating and cooling costs. And it was working, until now.”
I didn’t know much about gardening, but I doubted much would survive the snow and the cold.
The mayor crossed her arms, tucked in her hands. “I’ve lived in this city for fifty-three years. And I’d never have imagined seeing something like this. Or not in August, anyway.” She sighed heavily, her breath crystallizing instantly in the frosty air.
She looked back at us. “I asked you to come up here because I wanted you to get a good look at it, to see what she’s done. The lengths she is willing to go to get what she wants.”
It wasn’t hard to guess that we were being set up for something.
“We drove in from Hyde Park,” my grandfather said. “We saw much of the city along the way.”
“A portion of it,” she agreed. “But not the whole. Not the reach of what she’s done. The sheer enormity of the problem she has created, and the suffering she has caused by it.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Ethan asked.
“Because I have a request. And you’re not going to like it.”
• • •
The mood wasn’t any less somber in her office. Worse, since Ethan and Catcher were nearly vibrating with anger, and Mallory didn’t look much better. I wasn’t sure how I’d become the calm one of the four of us, but I’d have to use that to our advantage, if I could. That depended very much on what the mayor had to say.
Lane was back in the office, and when we came in he glanced up at us from the tablet that seemed to absorb most of his attention.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan,” he said by way of greeting, gaze still on the screen.
“‘Merit’ is fine,” I said.
He slid me a glance, looking me over with distaste, like the fact that I’d declined the name made me suspect.
The office door opened. Jim Wilcox and Mikaela Pierce walked in, the man and woman from the SWAT and FBI units who’d been behind the barricade at Towerline. Pierce wore a suit again; Wilcox wore dark fatigues. They nodded at the mayor, at Lane, at us, before moving to the other side of the room to stand alone and apart. If anything, it said we weren’t on the same team.
“Status?” the mayor asked.
Mallory and I stood beside each other, Catcher and Ethan on the outside edges like guards.
“Stable, for the moment,” Pierce said. “The clouds above Towerline continue to spin, but the temperature is holding. There’s been no precipitation in the last two hours.”
“The Guard has units in the designated emergency zones,” Wilcox said. “They’re working to keep people calm, but with the city frozen over, people who would normally be working are home. They’re home, and they’re thinking.” He slid a glance to me, to Mallory. And for the first time, I saw guilt in his eyes.
They were going to ask us to turn ourselves over. There might be some pretty words about not negotiating with terrorists, apologies about the sacrifice, but the question would be asked.
I reached out, squeezed Mallory’s hand in support. She squeezed back, and her expression had gone stony. Whatever fear she might have felt, she was pushing it down, too. Pride blossomed, raising goose bumps along my arms. She was my sister in all the ways that mattered. And tonight, we were in this together.
“They’re thinking about the money they’re losing, the loved ones they can’t check in on, the property damage they’re likely suffering.”
“In fairness,” Pierce said, “some of them are probably happy about the snow day.” She looked at me, tried for a smile. I appreciated that she was trying to keep the mood light, but that telltale guilt was in her eyes, too. And I didn’t give guilt a whole lot of credit these days.
Screw this, I thought, and released Mallory’s hand, took a step forward. She did the same thing, moving to stand beside me.
I felt Ethan’s magic prickle with concern, but I ignored it, settled my gaze on the mayor.
“We are all aware of the situation, Madam Mayor, and of the deadline we’re under. And we all know what you’re about to ask. In the interest of time, perhaps we could get to the point?”
I could feel my grandfather’s concern, too, about the fact that I’d just made demands of the mayor. It certainly wasn’t the usual way of things. But there was no point in waiting.
Lane made a huffing sound of disapproval. He finally put down the tablet, looked at me with more irritation. But when I slid my gaze back to the mayor, there was something different there. A kind of respect I hadn’t seen before.
“I appreciate your candor,” she said.
I nodded, accepting the compliment, while Ethan fumed behind me. But there was no help for it.
She looked at Wilcox, nodded. “Lieutenant.”
“Sunrise is at five forty-eight a.m.,” he said. “In order to make the operation seem as realistic as possible, we propose Merit and Mallory present themselves to Sorcha shortly before that time. We move in, take Sorcha down, and end this.”
“No,” Ethan and Catcher simultaneously said.
I reached back, put a hand on Ethan’s arm. “Where?” I asked.
“Northerly Island,” Wilcox said, looking at me. “It was her idea, but it’s a good one. There’s plenty of open space in the park, good visibility, room for a helicopter on standby to land.”
“How will you neutralize her?” Mallory asked.
“We’re working with Baumgartner,” he said.
“You went to Baumgartner instead of us?” Catcher’s voice was barely controlled fury.
“And the tone of your voice p
roves that decision was correct,” Lane said. “You aren’t neutral.”
“Damn right I’m not neutral. You’re talking about using my wife.”
“Catcher,” Mallory quietly said, but didn’t turn around.
“Baumgartner and several sorcerers of his choosing will take positions on Northerly Island. When Sorcha arrives to meet Merit and Mallory, we’ll move in and take her down, move her to the supernatural holding facility.”
He said it so simply, with such confidence, that it was easy to understand why the mayor had believed him. I wasn’t sure if he believed his own words—his poker face was impressive—but the chance he’d pull off that plan without a hitch was approximately zero.
“By ‘take her down,’ you mean kill,” Ethan said.
The room went silent.
“Because you certainly know she does not intend to discuss the situation with Merit and Mallory. She doesn’t intend to ‘take’ them, or to question them. She intends to kill them.”
“And we intend to prevent that from happening,” Wilcox said.
“With all due respect, your intentions are worth nothing to me. My wife’s life is worth something to me. Mallory is worth something to me. And your plan is literally a bait and switch,” Ethan said. “She will not fall for it.”
“She doesn’t need to fall for it. She only needs to believe it’s possible we would give them up.”
“Which sorcerers?” Mallory asked, interrupting the byplay.
Wilcox closed his eyes, as if to improve his memory. “I believe he said Simpson, Tangetti, Morehouse.”
I glanced at Mallory, who met my gaze, shook her head just a little bit. They weren’t strong enough to take her, I presumed. I wasn’t sure if that was an assessment of anyone Baumgartner might have chosen, because any sorcerer he allowed in the Order was necessarily weaker than him, or because these particular three were weak, and he’d chosen them as bait for a battle he knew he couldn’t win.