“How could she do this?” Ethan’s voice was tight with concern.
“That’s the really clever bit,” Mallory said. She moved to the next set of images, moved these into different positions, and made another symbol. This time, the lines rearranged themselves into a mass of clouds over the same village.
“She did it with the weather?” I asked, confused.
“Not weather,” Mallory said. “That’s coincidental.” She looked back at us. “We thought the clouds over Towerline were a heat sink—that she was pulling all the heat out of the city, and that’s why the weather turned, the lakes froze, whatnot. But what is heat, really?”
Understanding widened Ethan’s eyes. “It’s energy.”
Mallory touched her nose. “And the vampire gets it. It wasn’t a heat sink, or not as its main purpose. It’s an energy sink, because that’s what heat is—the effect of solar radiation and whatever. She wanted all that energy”—Mallory pointed back at the animal—“because she’s got big magic to do.”
“This is good work, Mallory,” Ethan said. “This is damn good work. She wants the Egregore to be physical, and she’s pulling energy to make that magic. What form will she pick?”
“That,” Catcher said, “we can’t tell you. The spell doesn’t specify a form. She could pick whatever she wants.”
“Narwhal?” I asked.
“Or swamp monster, wooly mammoth, polar bear, griffin,” Mallory said. “She just needs something that can hold the Egregore’s magic, and its sentience.”
“So we’re going to meet her at Northerly Island,” Ethan said, pacing to the bookshelves, then turning back, “and she’s going to bring a monster to fight us.”
“Or she’ll manifest it then,” Mallory said. “She may want to work the magic in front of us—show off a little. And if she does that, I’ve got a little something that may help.”
She reached over, picked up something small and round.
“A Color Bomb makeup compact?” I said, reading the gold script on the top.
“It’s a governor. Like on a car. I mixed it up while Merit was on campus.”
“A governor?” Ethan asked. “As in the elected official?”
“As in speed governor,” Mallory said. “Like on a car, except this is for magic. I didn’t have much time, but it’s supposed to limit how much power she can use at one time. It might keep her from gathering up enough power to manifest the Egregore.”
Even Catcher looked impressed. “How did you come up with that?”
She smiled. “You don’t want to hear the full tangential train, but I thought of it on the way to the bachelorette party. Well, kind of. I was thinking about being chauffeured, and I wondered if Ethan put some kind of governor on his car so that Brody could only drive a reasonable speed, like, for safety. And then I thought, no, that might hamper things if he needed to get away in a hurry, and that’s no good. And then I started thinking about other kinds of governors, or things that operate like governors—like how ovens can only go up to certain temperatures, and planned obsolescence, and why pencils are exactly the length that they are, instead of some other length, because they’d last longer.”
“Your mind is a weird little labyrinth,” I said.
She grinned. “Sometimes the randomness comes in handy. Not always, but sometimes.”
“Good thinking,” Ethan said. “Very good thinking. That gives us another line of defense.” He looked at Catcher. “You need to tell Chuck, and he needs to alert the CPD.”
“On it,” Catcher said, pulling out his phone.
Ethan looked at the clock, something we’d been doing a lot of lately, then glanced at me. “A moment, Sentinel?” he asked, then drew me back to the other side of the room. When we got there, he looked down at me, silence between us, full of words unsaid. But this wasn’t the time to say them, to talk about futures that seemed so suddenly uncertain. Not with half a dozen people in the room.
“You will take no chances with your life.”
“I will take no irrational chances with my life.”
An eyebrow lifted.
“That’s as good as you’re going to get considering what we’re about to do. And I say the same thing to you.” I pointed a finger at him. “There will be no sacrificing of self for others.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?”
“No. Because Mallory and I are both going to walk away. And hopefully, Sorcha will not. Not this time.”
“Sire. Sentinel.”
We looked back. Malik stood in the doorway, a sly smile on his face. “I think you’d better get out here.”
We didn’t bother to ask questions, but followed him to the front door, Mallory and Catcher behind us.
A dozen vampires stood on the lawn, every single one of them in Midnight High School T-shirts, a dozen members of the Red Guard. They wore the shirts to identify themselves on an op.
As far as I knew, the RG members themselves were the only ones who knew what the T-shirts symbolized. Although that might change if the House saw them all here together. And particularly the vampire who stood in front of them, auburn hair blowing in the wind.
“Holy shit,” I murmured, as Jonah walked toward us, then nodded at Ethan, at me.
“Jonah,” Ethan said.
“Ethan.”
“What are you doing here?” My voice was a whisper. “This isn’t exactly secret agent–type activity.”
Jonah’s smile was sly. “We’re doing our jobs,” he said as calmly as if we were discussing the weather. Maybe not this particular weather, but weather generally . . .