Biting Cold (24 page)

I
woke to searing pain and blinding light. My leather jacket was gone, and sunlight poured over my bare arms. I pulled them back into the shadow that covered the rest of my body.

Tears sprang to my eyes as blisters lifted down my arms, but the pain was the least of my worries. My mind fuzzy, I squinted against the glare and looked around.

I was in a square concrete room with a window on one wall. The window was uncovered, and sunlight spilled across the room. I was tucked into the only shaded corner, a little ball of vampire…and my phone had been in my missing jacket.

“Handy, isn’t it?”

I also shouldn’t have been awake at this hour. Slowly and groggily, I looked toward the sound of Tate’s voice. He stood in an open doorway that was twenty feet of sun-drenched concrete away from me.

The doorway led directly outside. Even if I managed to cross the room, there was nowhere to go.

Tate had imprisoned me with sunlight. He’d even left me my
sword, because what could I possibly do with it? I had no room to wield it, unless I hoped to spare myself the pain of death by sunshine.

“You’re a sadist,” I said.

“Hardly. I’m a realist,” he said. “The world could be better than it is. I intend to prove that.”

My mind was dull and slow. “Where are we?”

“That’s not important,” he said. “The more important question is
why
we’re here.”

“Because you’re a vindictive son of a bitch?”

Tate laughed and walked into the room. He wore dark pants and a T-shirt. His wings had disappeared, but his T-shirt was mottled with blood. I guessed Jonah had gotten in a few shots.

He chuckled and moved closer. It was disturbing to watch him move. So handsome…and so deadly. I looked him over, scanning his face and body for any detail that would help me differentiate between the two of them. But I saw nothing.

“I prefer messenger of justice, thank you.”

I guessed the librarian had been right. “Prefer it all you want. Playing judge, jury, and executioner doesn’t make you just. It makes you arrogant.”

“I’m not the arrogant one, Sentinel of Cadogan House.”

“You’re a fallen angel, aren’t you? A Dark One? That’s arrogance by definition. You thought you knew better than everyone else.”

“I know right from wrong.”

“Is this right? Punishing me because I tried to help save four police officers? Putting me in this room, where I’ll burn to ashes in a couple of hours?”

“Those men were corrupt,” he said. “Their souls were corrupt.”

“Those men have families. They have wives and children.”

“They hurt others. They deserved punishing,” he insisted.

“That’s not your call to make.”

He stilled, and it was almost scarier than arguing with him, like I was staring back at a furious man suddenly frozen in marble.

“Those who say we cannot tell right from wrong have no courage. They have no will to make the decisions that must be made. Justice should be meted out by those who have the willpower to act, the stomach for punishment. No one forced those men to their actions. They chose their own paths. They should bear the burden of the consequences.”

“They would have. That’s why they’d been imprisoned.”

“And they were released. The human justice system has no backbone.”

“You don’t get to make that decision. Isn’t that what got you in trouble millennia ago?”

My hands began to shake with exhaustion, my body rebelling against the fact that I was awake. I squeezed them into fists and forced myself to concentrate.

“You are weak creatures with no stomach for justice.”

“What you call justice, we call war. Destruction. Havoc.” I swallowed down a scream of pain. Ethan was probably frantic, but Jonah would have seen me disappear. They’d have to work to find me, but they would. God willing, they would.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

“To make an example of you.”

“For what?”

“You stopped me from completing my work, just as the scarlet witch tried to do. You asked for this, remember?”

Paige must have been the scarlet witch. “You burned her house down because she tried to stop you?”

“Justice does not veer for cowards.”

“And killing people doesn’t make you brave. It just makes you a killer.”

“I can see that you’re regretting your decision to stand in for the corrupt cops. You’ll have a little while yet to regret that decision, won’t you?”

He pointed at the line of sunlight, which had shifted a few more degrees. Soon my bit of shadow would shrink to nothing, and I would be completely exposed to sunlight.

“I’ll admit,” he said, surveying the room, “this is my first time using this particular mechanism. A single slice with a sword wouldn’t quite have the same effect on you, would it? You’d too easily survive that.”

For the first time, I actually regretted having fast healing powers. But I wasn’t going to let Tate get the emotional upper hand.

“You’ve already lost once today,” I said. “We stopped you. They’ll find me, and you’ll lose again.”

But with each second that passed, it seemed more and more unlikely that they’d find me in time. The press conference had taken place in the early evening. An entire night had come and gone, and the sun had risen again. No one had found me yet. And now the sun was up, and neither Jonah nor Ethan could look for me.

Soon I’d be out of time.

Tate pulled something from his pocket, then held it up. It was shiny and reflected the light, and I looked away again, blinking back the glare.

“You still have my Cadogan medal,” I said. “That’s not news.”

“It is, actually.” I heard the clink of the chain and assumed he’d tucked it away again. No point in waving it in my face if I wasn’t going to look.

“I find it interestingly symbolic. A girl, a graduate student,
changed into a vampire one night against her will. Reborn into a vampire House right here in Chicago. She fashions herself a savior of lost souls and decides to battle me for supremacy. She loses, and here she dies.”

“So you won’t be needing that anymore.”

“Au contraire,”
he said. “It is a prize. A remembrance.”

He meant when the sun finished its journey, I’d be gone. Reduced to ash, but he’d still have a trophy of having beaten me. (Either he didn’t notice I was wearing a replacement medal, or he wasn’t going to let a bit of inconvenient fact get in the way of the victory he was already imagining.)

I knew I couldn’t hear Ethan anymore, but I still imagined his voice in my head, giving me a speech similar to the one I’d given him on the field in Nebraska. Reminding me I was a Cadogan vampire, that I was stronger than Tate believed, that I would survive until he found me.

And he would find me.
He would.
I only had to hang on until he arrived. I only had to survive.

Move!
I told myself. I shifted a centimeter to the right, and I forced myself to keep talking. I might as well use the time alone with Tate for a good purpose.

“There are two of you now.”

“In a fashion,” he enigmatically said.

I frowned at him. “I saw you. You touched the
Maleficium
and you split in half.”

He clucked his tongue. “I am not split in half, Ballerina. I am whole. My name is Dominic.”

He was one of the three Dark Ones the librarian had identified—Uriel, Azrael, and Dominic. “You destroyed Carthage?”

He laughed heartily. “I did not. That was not my particular
handiwork. It belonged to my brothers in arms. But at least you better appreciate what we’re about.”

“Destruction and revenge?”

“Only if deserved,” he said, clearly having no qualms about appointing himself the man to decide what someone did or didn’t deserve.

“The world is a cruel place,” he said. “Often unfair.” Dominic moved to the window and looked outside, then back at me.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said. “Don’t move.”

He strode from the room. For a moment, I hoped he might have seen someone outside—a rescuer intent on saving me. But the world remained quiet.

I shuddered with exhaustion, the edge of my arm grazing a band of sunlight. Pain shot through me, and I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. If things got worse, I could stand up, squeezing myself into the tiny sliver of space. But then I’d be out of room, without even my jacket to protect me.

That he’d taken away my jacket just to bare my arms and expose me to even more sunlight was disgustingly thorough. I guessed I should have been thankful he hadn’t stripped me naked and left me entirely vulnerable, not that the clothes would help much when my bit of shade was gone.

And it was disappearing fast.

Please, someone, find me,
I thought.

Merit?

My name echoed in my head. I thought a panicky response.
Ethan?

It’s Morgan. I’m with Ethan. He’s here. He asked me to talk to you. Do you know where you are?

I closed my eyes in relief. I’d all but forgotten about my connection with Morgan Greer. Thank God someone had remembered.

I looked around the room, the images blurry, my head swimming with exhaustion.
I don’t know. I’m in a room; there’s a lot of sunlight. I’m trying to stay in the shade. But there’s not much left.

Can you see anything? Does anything look familiar?

I squeezed my eyes closed to clear my vision, then opened them again. I squinted against the sunlight and caught a glance of red outside the window. My retinas burned viciously.

Red,
I told him, closing my eyes again and weeping in relief.
There’s red outside.

For a moment, there was only silence. Panic stabbed through me.
Morgan? Are you there? Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.

I’m here, Merit. Jeff and Catcher and Ethan are here. We’re talking about where you might be. Can you tell me what kind of red you can see? Bright red? Dark red?

I swallowed thickly and made myself look again.
Dark red. Orange-red.

Anything else?

Tears slipped from my eyes.
I don’t know. I’m so tired.

I know you are. But you must concentrate. What else is around you?

I can’t see anything else.

That’s okay, Merit. Use your other senses. What do you smell? What do you hear?

I closed my eyes and loosened the barriers against the sights and smells of the room. I heard the scuffle and
coos
of pigeons roosting in the ceiling above me and felt the damp breeze in the air.

I think we’re near the lake,
I told Morgan.

That’s good, Merit. What else?

He meant it wasn’t enough to know I was near the lake. Lake Michigan was enormous, and they might never find me.

No,
I told myself.
Focus. If you want to live through this, focus!

I tried again, letting my senses explore the world around me. More pigeons. Gravel. Damp and dying grass.

And beneath all of those smells, a sharp, dry scent. Something powdery. Something dusty.

Something familiar.

I searched my mind for the memory, but my brain was sluggish.

Merit? Are you still there? Ethan is asking about you.

Morgan meant it encouragingly, but I could tell it was hard for him to mention Ethan’s name, to reference our relationship.

He was hurting himself to help me,
I thought, and that realization was enough to focus my mind and send the memory back into sharp focus: I was standing in a room, and Seth Tate was seated at a table before me. The smells of lemon and sugar filled the air. But beneath that scent, there was something more…the same scent of chalk that I smelled now.

I knew where I was.

The ceramics factory,
I said.

It was an abandoned compound where Seth Tate had been held before he’d sought out the
Maleficium
. I’d visited him there—
here
—twice. Both times at night, but both times for a good long while as Tate taught me about the
Maleficium
and magic.

There are pigeons above me.

They know where you are, Merit. They’re coming for you. Hang on.

Please don’t leave me.
I skittered an inch deeper into the corner. If they didn’t find me in time, I didn’t want to be alone. Not here. Not in this place with Tate.

I won’t,
he said.
I’m right here.

I don’t know how many minutes or hours passed, but I was standing in the corner, my back pressed to the wall, mere inches of space between me and the moving sunlight, when a sound as loud as a gunshot split the air, and I clapped my hands over my ears.
Voices burst out. Yelling, the roar of an engine, the sound of rocks and gravel.

Unaware of the danger it posed, immune to my tears, the sunlight crept closer. I was running out of time. “Please be help. Please be help.”

Morgan’s voice popped into my head again, as exhausted as mine must have sounded.
Merit, they’re coming to get you. Hold on, okay?