“We aren’t worried,” Ethan said, and the confidence in his voice made her relax a little.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She said the first one for us; I was pretty sure she said the second one for herself.
“So we’ve got a sorcerer, a shifter, and a vampire here together,” Catcher said. “And the shifter ends up dead.”
“VSS,” Mallory said, the acronym for the “game” she’d invented earlier. “And the first round is a dead loss.”
CHAPTER THREE
RED FLAG
My grandfather appeared a few minutes later, pulling over to the curb in his official white van. He wore a short-sleeve plaid shirt, slacks, and thickly soled shoes. He still used the cane he’d needed since he was trapped in a house fire caused by anti-vampire malcontents, but moved spryly with it.
Jeff Christopher, brown-haired and lanky, climbed out of the car’s passenger side, waited while my grandfather gave instructions to the officers who’d pulled up behind him in two CPD cruisers. When my grandfather finished his instructions and moved toward us, the cops turned to the crowd, creating a barricade to control the gathering people.
“Merit, Ethan,” my grandfather said, then nodded to Mallory and Catcher. His expression was serious and slightly sympathetic, not an uncommon expression for a man who, more often than not, was dealing with supernatural fallout.
“Sorry it took so long,” my grandfather said. “There’s an accident on Lake Shore Drive. Traffic was moving at a crawl.”
Not an unusual circumstance for Chicago.
“We’re sorry you had to drive out all this way,” I said. My grandfather’s office was on the city’s South Side, relocated from the basement of his house after the firebombing.
My grandfather looked around. “You reached Gabriel?”
“Should be here anytime,” Catcher said with a nod.
And so they were. The rhythmic thunder of bikes roared as the shifters moved into the alley. Seven traveled together tonight, and they slipped around my grandfather’s car in a line of chrome and black leather.
Their arrival made me nervous—not because I feared shifters, but because I regretted what had gone on here and knew some blamed all vampires equally, including us. It hadn’t been that long ago that we were in Colorado, watching animosity between shifter and vampire bubble up.
Ethan reached out, put a hand at the small of my back, a reminder that he was there. He couldn’t change the circumstances—death, murder, bitter magic—but he’d remind me that I wouldn’t face them alone.
Gabriel rode in front, an imposing figure on a long bike with wide handles, every inch of the chrome gleaming to a mirrored perfection. He stopped his bike ten feet away, pulled off his helmet, and ran a hand through his shoulder-length mane of tousled golden-brown hair. His eyes were the same tawny gold, his shoulders broad beneath a snug black V-neck T-shirt that he’d paired with jeans and intimidating black leather boots. He hung the helmet on a gleaming handlebar, swung a strong thigh over the back of the bike, and walked toward us, followed by his only sister, Fallon.
She was Jeff’s girlfriend, a slight woman of surprising strength, with warm eyes and long, wavy hair in the same multihued shades as her brother. She rode the bike directly behind his, wore a skirt with boots and tights, a gray tank under a short-sleeved leather top with lots of pleats and zippers.
The other shifters were male, with broad shoulders, plenty of leather, and generally dour looks.
Gabriel nodded at my grandfather, at Jeff, then looked at Ethan.
“Sullivan,” he said, then glanced at me. “Kitten. He’s one of ours?”
“We don’t know if he’s one of the Pack’s,” Ethan said. “But he’s definitely a shifter, so we wanted to give you the opportunity to find out.”
We escorted him to the body, and Gabriel crouched by the fallen shifter, his leather boots creaking with the movement. Elbows on his knees, hands linked together, he looked slowly and carefully over the body, his gaze finally settling on the wounds at his throat.
The silence was thick and to my mind, threatening.
“His name was Caleb Franklin,” Gabe said. “He was a Pack member—a soldier. A shifter who helped keep order in the territory. He’d go on runs with Damien, actually.”
Damien Garza was a tall, dark, and handsome shifter with a quiet personality, a dry wit, and an exceptional hand with an omelet.
Gabriel stood up. “But Caleb’s not a Pack member anymore. He defected.”
Ethan’s eyebrows lifted. “He left the Pack by choice?”
“He did.”
“Why?” Ethan asked.
“He wanted more freedom.”
Since the Pack was all about freedom—the open road, communing with nature, good food, and good drink—I guessed we weren’t getting the full story. The look on Ethan’s face said he didn’t entirely buy it, either. But this wasn’t the setting for an interrogation of the Pack Apex.
“The vampire?” Gabriel asked.
“We gave chase, but he got away.”
Gabriel nodded, noticed the bandage on my arm. “And got you in the process.”
“Handgun through the window of a beat-up Trans Am. I don’t suppose that vehicle rings any bells?”
He shook his head, glanced at Fallon. She shook her head, too.
“He did this in a relatively public space,” my grandfather said, “but he was eager to get away.”
“We found something else,” I said, gesturing down the alley.
We walked toward the pedestal—a human, two vampires, three shifters, and two sorcerers, all of us impotent in the face of death.
Fallon, Gabriel, and my grandfather studied the pedestal.
“Alchemical,” my grandfather said.
“And the Merits are two for two,” Catcher said. “That’s as far as we’ve gotten. We can pick out individual symbols, but we don’t know what they mean in context.” He glanced at Gabriel. “This mean anything to you?”
Gabe shook his head. “I can feel the magic but don’t recognize it.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” All eyes turned to me. “I mean, it has a weird edge. A sharp edge.”
“Metallic,” Mallory said, nodding. “That’s the nature of alchemy.”