“And she is pissed,” said a woman with dark skin and a cloud of curly hair depressed by a slender headset and mouthpiece. She wore slim black pants and a crimson top beneath a dark gray suit jacket, her badge on a chain around her neck. I guessed her to be in her early thirties. “Pierce,” she said. “Agent Mikaela. FBI Paranormal Response Unit.”
This was the first I’d heard of such a thing, but I wouldn’t argue that it was unnecessary. The clouds above Towerline proved its necessity easily enough.
“Agent,” my grandfather said, shaking her hand. “Chuck Merit. Catcher Bell, my associate.”
She nodded at them. “I’m based in New York, but I’ve heard a lot about your work in Chicago.” She looked at us. “And I’ve heard a lot about you, Ethan and Merit.”
“Do you know Victor Garcia?” Ethan asked. He was the head of New York’s Cabot House.
“I do,” she said with a wry smile. “He asked me to pass along his good wishes if I saw you, and said you could call him if you wanted to check my bona fides.”
Ethan smiled, appreciating that she’d prepared for this meeting. “I’ll keep that in mind. What brings you to Chicago?”
“The peace and quiet,” she said, without missing a beat. “Should we turn to the magic?”
“Let’s do,” my grandfather said.
“We’ve scanned the building looking for heat signals and movement,” she said, “and found nothing. Sorcha, if she has returned to Chicago, isn’t in the building. The chopper will be reporting momentarily.”
Pierce put a finger against her ear as the thwack of helicopter blades began to beat the air overhead. “First copter report coming in,” she said. “And . . . the roof is empty. There’s no indication of movement or activity.”
“Is it colder up there?” Catcher asked. “Directly beneath the cloud formation?”
She lifted her brows but repeated the question into her headset. “That’s affirmative. Temperature readings are ten degrees colder in the space between Towerline and the phenomenon.”
She pushed the mouthpiece away, looked back at us. “What does that mean?”
I looked at Catcher, who seemed to be as flummoxed as the rest of us. His gaze was on the cloud swirling ominously above the tower, hands on his hips as he tried to ferret out its meaning.
“It has to be the source of the weather, but I don’t know how or why. The last time I’ve seen something like this, something meteorological, was . . .”
“Mallory,” I finished for him, thinking of the havoc she’d wrought through Chicago during her thankfully brief stint as a dark sorceress. She’d torn the city apart.
“Yeah,” Catcher said. “The wards say this is Sorcha. But I’m not sure how she’s doing it, or what it’s supposed to be doing.”
I crossed my arms as the temperature seemed to drop another fifteen degrees instantaneously, my breath turning to pale vapor in the chilling wind.
“She’s going to freeze us out,” Ethan said.
Catcher rubbed fingers across his forehead. “That’s a possibility,” he said, but one he didn’t look sure of. And Catcher wasn’t a man who liked not knowing.
There were gasps of shock behind us. I turned, expecting to find Sorcha descending onto the Michigan Avenue bridge like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Instead, people had gathered at the ornate balustrade at the edge of the bridge that overlooked the river.
I jogged over, Ethan in step behind me, and squeezed through the people until I could see the water below—and the thick white scale that was working its way down the river and toward the lake.
“What is that?” he asked beside me. “Some kind of contaminant?”
“No,” I said, and the dread that settled into my bones was as cold as the cutting breeze. “The river is freezing.”
I’d seen the river flowing, and I’d seen it frozen. But I’d never watched it freeze, never seen ice crystallize on a scale that large, watched water turn opaque and opalescent, its movement stiffening like someone had flipped a switch and turned it off.
It shouldn’t have happened so quickly. The river shouldn’t have frozen all at once, and certainly not in August.
Screams issued up from the canal.
Notwithstanding the snow, it had been a warm day, and people had taken advantage of the weather—and the chance to experience the weirdness of snow in August. A tour boat, its upper deck full of people, was approaching the Michigan Avenue dock but was still a dozen yards west of it. The water was expanding as it froze, and that force—that volume—was pushing the boat into the concrete bank.
The groan of metal filled the air, then a sound like a shotgun. The boat lurched, spilling people into the narrow gap between the boat and the river. A chasm that was filled with solidifying slush. The ice would crush the boat, and everyone else would be crushed by the pressure or sent into the river.
The CPD was behind us, and they’d get divers out as soon as they could. But we were here now.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether vampires could drown or get hypothermia—surely not?—but it didn’t really matter. Our chances of survival were higher than theirs. So we had to take the chance.
A look at each other, a confirming nod, and then we climbed onto the balustrade, and jumped.
• • •
Vampire and gravity were friends. Maybe not BFFs—we had to plan our falls to keep from being injured—but we made the twenty-foot drop to the boat below without breaking any bones. We still skidded along the ice-covered deck but managed to catch ourselves, stand up straight again.
And we probably should have announced our presence, because two people suddenly dropping into a ship of screaming passengers didn’t exactly help calm them.
“I’ll help those in the gap,” Ethan said.
“I’ll take this deck, try to get them down the stairs and closer to the dock.”
I’d guessed marriage was going to require divvying up responsibilities. I hadn’t expected we’d be dividing jobs in two separate rescue missions less than twenty-four hours into it.
Forever, Ethan said to me, then jumped down to the second deck.
“It’s all right,” I said, striding forward to the humans who were hanging on to benches bolted to the deck in an effort to stay upright and keep from sliding into the gap themselves. “We’re going to get you off the boat. And onto the dock,” I added, since getting them off the boat and into the water was a real possibility.
The boat’s staff were downstairs, so I looked around, found someone who looked reasonably strong and reasonably calm, pointed at him. He was young, with tan skin, dark hair, and a faint mustache over his top lip that he probably wished was thicker.
“You!” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Pham.”
“Excellent, Pham. I’m Merit. You’re going to help me, okay?”
He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin neck. “Okay.”
I put a hand on his arm. “You’ve got this.” I glanced around, pointed to the closest stairway—or the boat’s half-ladder, half-stairway version of one—where people were pushing and shoving to get to the first deck. The stairs were already leaning and slick, so pushing was a recipe for certain disaster. “Go stand at the stairs,” I said.
“I can’t swim,” he said, blinking back tears I could see he was working not to shed. “I don’t want to drown.”
“Pham, do you know who I am?”
“Vampire,” he said with a nod.
“Exactly. I’m immortal, which means this water can’t hurt me.” Or so I hoped. God, I really, really hoped. “So one way or another, I will be here to make sure you get off this boat. Okay?”
That seemed to be enough to satisfy him. With grit in his eyes, he nodded, then slip-slid down the leaning deck toward the stairway, squeezing his lean form into the line and positioning himself at the access point. “One person at a time!” he yelled out. “One person at a time!”
I found another supervisor, a woman with strong shoulders and a narrow waist. A swimmer’s build, I hoped. Just in case. I put her in charge of the opposite stairwell.