We walked back to Catcher, and Mallory explained what we’d seen.
“How does alchemy match up against the Keys?” I asked them. The Keys were the building blocks of magic, at least in Catcher’s particular philosophy.
“It’s just a different way to approach the energy, the power.” He shrugged. “You might say a language different from mine, but a language all the same.”
Mallory looked at him, nodded. “With rules, just like any language would follow.”
“So, who put them here?” Ethan asked. “And why are they near the scene of a shifter’s death by a vampire?”
Mallory looked at Catcher. “I don’t know anyone who practices alchemy, not even through SWOB.” Sorcerers Without Borders was an organization Mallory had created to help newbie sorcerers in the Midwest. It was help she hadn’t gotten when she first learned she had magic—but that she definitely could have used.
“It would have to be a sorcerer, right?” I asked. Everyone looked back at the concrete. We’d been looking for a sorcerer, after all. This wasn’t the kind of magic that Adrien Reed had dabbled in, at least as far as we knew, and there was nothing to tie him to this. That meant we had another sorcerer, another potential enemy, and this one involved in the death of a shifter.
“Yeah,” Mallory said. “These would have been made by a sorcerer.”
“Is it dark magic?”
She opened her mouth, closed it again. “I was going to give you a trite answer. A quick no so everybody would feel better.” She looked back at the pedestal, considered. “Yeah. There’s some darkness there. Not entirely surprising, considering the bloodshed, the murder. Even if the magic didn’t cause them, there’s clearly some kind of relationship.
“But it won’t affect me,” she added. “Dark magic affects the maker and the recipient. I didn’t make it, and there’s no reason to believe it’s supposed to affect us. So you don’t have to worry about me.”
“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.