Blood Games

Chapter Thirteen EAT YOUR HEART OUT

Ethan was gone when I rose, the remains of breakfast on the tray Margot usually left by the door at sunset. An empty bottle of blood, crumbs from a croissant. He’d left me a second bottle and pastry, and a trio of lusciously red strawberries that made me glad spring was on its way.

I sat down at the small desk in the sitting area, glanced at the folded Tribune that sat beside the tray. Samantha Ingram’s murder was the main story, and the headline was telling: WOULD-BE VAMP KILLED—SUPERNATURALS AT FAULT?

On the other hand, reading through the story, it looked like the reporter hadn’t yet made the connection between the sword and pentacle murders. Not that several cops, an Ombudsman, two vamps, a sorcerer, and a shifter had made the connection, either. It took a sorceress with a love of all things weird and witchy.

When I felt prepared to face the night, I checked my phone, found messages waiting.

Mallory had worked her particular magic. YOU’RE LUCKY, she’d said. THE MAGIC SHOPPE HAS OVERNIGHT INVENTORY TONIGHT; THEY’LL BE EXPECTING US.

I arranged to meet her in an hour, traffic depending, at her Wicker Park home.

My grandfather had also sent a message: There was, unfortunately, still no sign of Mitzy Burrows. But they had confirmed—and quickly this time—that Samantha Ingram had been given Rohypnol, just like Brett.

Both victims had been drugged, killed, laid out in very public spaces, their bodies arranged like scenes in a very particular type of tarot card. Both had been marked with small blue crosses. Those were particular, unusual, and supernatural elements. But why? Because the killer loved magic? Or hated it? Or did the killer not care either way, but wanted to take out a handful of people, and found the city’s supernaturals very convenient scapegoats?

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the answers. I did have a sword and a fast car, and no specific interest in talking to Ethan yet tonight. So I sent him and Luc a message, advised them of my travel plans, and grabbed my jacket and sword.

I headed north toward Wicker Park. Mallory and Catcher lived in the town house I’d once shared with her, a home she’d inherited when her only living relative, an aunt, had passed away. It still held her aunt’s flowery and comfy furniture, although Catcher had upgraded the audio equipment, and Catcher had transformed the musty and spider-laden basement into a spell-crafting room worthy of Martha Stewart.

I took the opportunity to call Jonah and check in.

“Hey,” he slowly said. “Thanks for calling me, Grandma. Hold on just a minute.”

I blinked at the non sequitur—and the muffled words I couldn’t make out in the interim—but kept my eyes on the road. “I’m holding and assume you’ll explain what this is momentarily.”

“Absolutely, Grandma.”

More muffled words, followed by the squeak of furniture and shuffling. The reason for the pretense belatedly occurred to me.

“You’re on a date!”

“I am sorry I missed your birthday, Grandma, and I’m glad you called so we could talk it over.”

“Is she cute? Ooh, is she human? River nymph?” It was immature, but flustering him was fun. It also helped our relationship from becoming too awkward, since he’d once expressed feelings for me.

“Uncool, Merit.”

I grinned. “You called me your grandmother. Which I take to mean you’re dating a human, since I’m not aware you have any living relatives.”

“First date,” he admitted. “I found it didn’t work so well when I told girls I was a vampire right off the bat.”

“Twilight effect?”

“Twilight effect,” he agreed. “They get bummed when I show up without brown hair, pale skin, a moody expression, and sparkles.”

“And how’s it going?”

“It’s going. And since it’s going, what can I do for you?”

“Sorry, small update: They found Rohypnol in Samantha Ingram’s system, too.”

“Another connection between the murders.”

“Yeah. I’m heading to the Magic Shoppe right now to take a look-see with Mallory.”

“Excellent. You get on that, and give me an update when you can. Go team. And I’m hanging up now, because my date is beginning to look at me suspiciously.”

“Just wait until she sees your fangs, sunshine.”

Wicker Park was technically part of the West Town neighborhood and had a main street full of quirky shops, restaurants, and bars. The streets were quiet tonight, although humans still stood outside bars, cigarettes in hand, and music still pumped from the open doorways of clubs.

Parking in Wicker Park, like in most Chicago neighborhoods, was tricky. Mallory was one of the lucky few to have a garage behind her town house, but the small drive was filled by her and Catcher’s vehicles.

I cruised for a few minutes, just in case rock-star-quality parking was available outside her town house, but gave up and parked Moneypenny a block away. The spot wasn’t ideal; I’d wedged her in between a truck and an SUV whose drivers I hoped were good at squeaking their way out of parallel spots without bumping the cars around them. But at least the piles of snow were nearly gone, and I didn’t have to climb a gray wall of ice and gravel in order to make it to the sidewalk.

I walked to the house, climbed the front steps, and knocked on the door. Catcher answered it a moment later, a frilly apron tied around his waist.

I opened my mouth, closed it again. Settled on, “There are hardly words.”

“Oh, good. Vampire humor. You should really think about doing stand-up.”

I spiraled a finger in the air, pointing at the apron. It featured cats knitting, although I wasn’t sure how they managed to hold knitting needles in their little paws. “The apron,” I said. “Let’s discuss.”

“I’m making cookies. I didn’t want to ruin my shirt. It was in a drawer.”

I bypassed the apron to focus on the more important part. “You bake?”

“Very well. Would you like a madeleine?”

“When wouldn’t I want a madeleine?”

“Fair point,” he said, turning toward the kitchen.

I followed him through the house’s dining room and into the quaint kitchen, the smells of butter and lemon wafting through the air.

“They smell amazing.”

“They are.” Catcher wasn’t one for modesty. He donned a quilted mitt and pulled a narrow aluminum tray of shell-shaped cakes from the oven. They were beautifully puffed and golden and made my stomach rumble immediately. It didn’t care that I’d had breakfast; it recognized sugar and fat.

“These need to rest,” he said, putting the pan carefully on a wire rack to cool. “But there’s more over there.” He slid another tray into the oven, then pulled off the mitt, gestured to a plastic container half-full of the small cakes.

I grabbed one, bit in, and had a new kind of respect for Catcher. He took care of my grandfather, seemed to make Mallory happy, and had taught me how to wield a sword. And he could bake.

“Amazing,” I said, leaning against the counter as I savored the small cake—buttery and sweet with the tang of fresh lemon—bite by tiny bite. “What’s the occasion?”

The oven timer beeped, and he donned the mitt again, pulled out another tray, and made room on the cooling rack for a new batch of madeleines.

“I don’t need an occasion to bake, any more than you need an occasion to eat.”

“I’ll chalk that down as ‘I enjoy it.’ Where’s your intrepid blue-haired girlfriend? We’re supposed to go to the magic store.”

“Downstairs. She’s just finishing something up with the obelisk. Looking for source. Color of magic or some such. Frankly, it’s a bit more chemistry than I’m usually into.”

Since he’d just made madeleines—with carefully measured ingredients, if the digital scale on the counter was any indication—I found that ironic.

“I’ll see myself downstairs,” I said, and grabbed two more madeleines for good measure, tossing them between my fingers to keep from boiling myself.

I took the stairs to the basement and the meticulously organized workshop that had supplanted the cobweb-infested basement. The walls had been finished, the floors redone, the ingredients for charms or hexes or whatever she worked up down here in neat jars and baskets along shelved walls.

Mallory sat cross-legged on a white stool in front of the large white table that tonight held a stack of books and an array of ingredients in white ceramic pots, the obelisk in front of them.

Her hair was pulled into two side buns that made her look like Princess Leia had been dunked in Kool-Aid. She held a yogurt container in one hand and a spoon in the other, and she’d paired jeans with a T-shirt with HONORARY OMBUDDY across the front in block letters.

“Where did you get that?” I asked as she dug around the container for the remnants of vanilla with blueberries.

“The official Ombudsman gift shop, all rights reserved.”

I offered a (single) madeleine, which she happily accepted in exchange for the empty yogurt cup, which I tossed away. “Nobody told me about a gift shop. Or brought me a T-shirt. I want to be an honorary Ombuddy.”

“I think you probably are because, you know, genetics. Your grandfather hasn’t given you one yet?”

“No,” I said, jealousy prickling. “But the last time I saw him he did have other things on his mind.”

“Murder and whatnot?” she asked.

“In fairness, yeah. Mostly the murder. Little bit of the whatnot. You working on the obelisk?”

“I am,” she said with a frown, nibbling the cookie and using a hand to push off the tabletop, rotate on her stool. “And I am getting nowhere. Except that it’s a polyglot.”

“I’m sorry—the obelisk is a polyglot?”

She rotated again. “It speaks several languages.”

“I understand the word; I don’t understand the application.”

She grabbed the table’s edge with her fingertips, pulled herself to a stop. “So, when you magick something—as this bit of alabaster has been charmed—there are different ways you apply the magic. You can do it with words; you can do it with stuff; you can do it with feeling.”

“That will of the universe stuff?” That was how Catcher had first explained his and Mallory’s magic to me—that they were able to exert their wills on the universe. I’d learned later that was one of many approaches to the magical world, which were as varied and sundry as human religions.

Mallory nodded. “Precisely. And within each one of those ways, there are sub-ways. If you’re working up a spell, you can add the ingredients in a different order, say the words differently, mix it under a full moon, what have you. Those are basically languages.”

“And you can tell what language was used?”

“To some degree, yeah. Each step leaves a kind of”—she searched for a word—“fingerprint in the magic. You work a little reverse magic, you can try to read all those fingerprints.”

“That’s really awesome. It’s like magic forensics.”

“It is magic forensics,” Mallory said. “Just don’t tell Catcher that you said so. Too ‘newfangled’ for him. Although I am super good at it.”

“You could add it to your résumé. Along with SWOB.”

“SWOB!” she playfully chanted, throwing a fist in the air.

“So what are the fingerprints here?”

“Little bit of Speilwerk—that’s magic with Pennsylvania Dutch origins. Little bit of British herbalism. But the primary language is American, including the main ingredient.” She reached out, grabbed a bowl, and held it out to me. “Smell.”

I lifted a brow, looked down into the bowl, which held a fine gray-green powder. “Will it turn me into a newt?”

“Yes,” she flatly said. “Smell it anyway.”

I leaned toward the bowl, sniffed delicately. “It smells . . . green. Pungent. Herby. What is it?”

Mallory smiled, put the bowl back on the table. “Exactly. It’s filé powder—the ground leaves of the sassafras tree. It’s primarily used in gumbo or, in certain locations in the South, in certain herbal remedies and charms. Such as this little gal here.” She picked up the obelisk, put it down again.

“What does that tell you about the person who magicked it?”

“That’s what I’m still trying to figure out. First impression? Someone who’s versed in different schools of magic, but not just academically. There’s a certain creativity here—a willingness to mix the different styles. Like jazz. This was, kind of, a magical riff.”

“Is this the work of a sorcerer?” There was concern behind the question, and from her expression, she realized it. A rogue sorcerer was bad enough; a rogue sorcerer helping unknown parties control vampires was much, much worse.

“It could be,” she said. “This improvisational magic—you have to have a certain level of experience and knowledge to do that. Otherwise every third grader with a plastic recorder would be a Coltrane. But you don’t have to be a sorcerer—the way we define it—to make magic. Spells, charms, herbalism. Those are approaches to magic that we can use, but we aren’t the only ones.”

“So we have the what, but not really the who?”

She smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. It’s possible I’ll get something else out of it, but there’s not a guidebook I can use for this. I kind of have to make it up as I go along.” She pointed at me. “Now, if you can get me something from a suspect, I could see if the magicks match.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“I will say this: To get involved in that kind of vampire drama—that level of vampire drama?—they’d demand a price. Money, power . . . I don’t know. But it would be steep.”

I nodded, thinking of the GP—its current members all based in Europe. They seemed the most likely to have the connections, resources, and opportunity to hijack Darius’s brain.

I realized I hadn’t yet heard from my dad about the Swiss account to which the U.S. money had been transferred, and sent him a follow-up message. I felt a little guilty asking him for help when I hadn’t seen him in weeks. On the other hand, he’d tried to bribe Ethan to make me a vampire, and he was still working off that particular debt.

“Does the Order have any contact with their European counterparts?” The Order was the American union of sorcerers.

“Once upon a time,” Mallory said, leaning forward and linking her hands on the table, “there was this little thing called the American Revolution.”

“I’m vaguely familiar.”

She stuck out her tongue. “The answer is no. They don’t communicate. Postrevolutionary bitterness.”

“One if by land, grouchy if by sea.”

“Exactly.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “We should get going. I told them we’d be there around ten.” She uncrossed her legs and hopped off the stool. I followed her upstairs to the living room, where she grabbed a jacket from the back of the love seat. “We’re leaving,” she told Catcher.

He looked up from his spot on the other couch, already tucked in with a bottle of 312 beer and a magazine. “Did you take out the trash?”

“What? Oh, sorry, can’t hear you . . .” she mumbled, grabbing her keys and purse and hustling me outside.

I guessed she wasn’t taking out the trash.

“Sounds like things are back to normal with you and Catcher,” I said as we walked down the stairs to the sidewalk.

“Things are domestic.” At my look of concern, she waved me off.

“It’s not a bad thing, just an adjustment. You’ve seen him mostly naked. He has the body of a god, Merit. Seriously—he has muscles I didn’t even know existed. Very nommable hills and valleys. And he’s going on about the trash.”

Ethan and I hadn’t really had the opportunity to argue about the trash—both because we usually had too much other drama to deal with and, frankly, because he hired staff to do that kind of thing. Helen, the House’s den mother, managed the general upkeep of the centuries-old building, so Ethan and I hadn’t once had to argue about the vacuuming or the dishes. Considering my preference for equality and his imperial nature, I bet those conversations would have been frequent and unpleasant.

Score one for Helen.

“Car’s right here,” I said, gesturing, but she waved me on and kept walking toward Division.

“It’s, like, six blocks away. We’ll chat, get a little exercise.” She hooked an arm through mine. “Now, give me all the dish at Cadogan House.”

There was, of course, a lot to tell, at least as far as my relationship was concerned. As we walked past the town houses of Wicker Park—tall, narrow, and brick, with cute stoops and tiny patches of green in front—I told her about Ethan and the mysterious woman in his past.

“So he’s got a mysterious lady in his past, and she’s making threats because she doesn’t want him to lead the GP?” She kicked a rock, sent it skipping down the sidewalk. “Were they lovers?”

Mallory wasn’t one to mince words, which was exactly why I’d told her. “I don’t know. But it wouldn’t matter to me if she was. I mean, I accept that he has a past. I wasn’t a saint before we met.”

She slid me a glance.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were a nerdy English lit student; you were as close as it gets without beatification. But keep going.”

For the sake of my emotional well-being, I ignored my urge to fight the point, got us back on track. “I can live with Ethan’s past, his ego, the fact that he’s an alpha. But he’s pushing me away about this, and I don’t understand why.”

“You really don’t see it?” she asked, spritely dodging a suspicious brown pile in the middle of the sidewalk.

“See what?”

“His problem. To not put too fine a point on it, he’s a control freak. I don’t mean that in a bad way. He works hard to protect what’s his, and now he’s trying to extend that range of protection. He’s trying to exert his sizable will on the GP, the Houses in Europe and the U.S.

“But he’s got people from his past—including this crazy woman—coming out of the woodwork. He doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s vulnerable—or that you are—and she knows exactly what buttons to push. She knows how to get to Ethan. And that scares the shit out of him. Especially now, the very time he’s trying to prove how strong and powerful and fearless he is. That’s like a Darth Sullivan tornado of horrors.”

Faux words aside, she made a lot of sense.

“Bottom line, he loves you. Powerfully. And he’s trying to build a life with you. This heifer’s getting in the way. Maybe he’s a little embarrassed he can’t control it; maybe he’s a little afraid he’ll lose you because of it.”

“He’s been pushing me away.”

“Better to push you away than have you see him as less or different than you do now. I’ve seen you look at him, Merit. He’s seen you look at him. There’s a lot of things there—love, heat, amusement. But there’s also admiration. A man like Ethan isn’t going to risk that lightly.”

I nodded, and we walked a few steps in companionable silence. I cleared my throat, told her the rest of it. “Before all this, he was hinting about a proposal.”

She stopped short, jaw dropped. “You are shitting me.”

“Not even a little.”

Mallory looked at me for a moment, and then her smile dawned bright and excited. “Darth Sullivan is going to propose.”

“Well, he was going to propose. Now who the hell knows?” I blew out a breath, rolled my shoulders in frustration. “What do I do about this, Mallory? It makes me want to scream and cry at the same time.”

“You two have always run hot,” she said. “Most people, I think they operate somewhere between four and seven.”

“Four and seven?”

“On a scale of one to ten. One being totally disinterested, ten being crazy, can’t-keep-our-hands-off-each-other love.”

“Angelina and Billy Bob.”

“Correct. You two operate in the seven to nine zone, and that’s only the stuff I’ve actually been around to see. I’d guess you two run hot the rest of the time, too.”

“He told me he just gave me the chance to blossom, to become the person I was meant to be.”

Mallory put a hand on her chest, sighed. “For all his faults, which are legion, Darth Sullivan has a way with words. I assume he also has a way with what I’m assuming is an impressive endowment. Is sex an option? I find it fixes many things that ail the alpha type.”

“That’s not really a problematic area.”

“Good. And not surprising. Vampire or not, he cleans up well.” She bobbed her head as she considered. “In that case, I say you have to mix things up. Steal the ball. Run a new play. Jump higher than everyone else. Fake out the QB.”

“You can stop with the mixed sports metaphors. I suppose I need to stage some kind of Ethan intervention.”

She nodded emphatically. “Merit, sneaking around behind Darth Sullivan’s back? I love it.”

“If he kicks me out, I can sleep under your table in the crafts room, right?”

“No,” she said, without hesitation. “But you can sleep on the floor of the Ombud’s van.”

But not with my own Ombuddy T-shirt, I glumly thought.