I kicked my legs over the side, and when I was sure it was stable enough, crawled on hands and knees toward the girl. I could see her fingers—dirty with bleeding nails—on the edge of the asphalt.
“I’m here,” I told her. “I’m here.” I belly-crawled to the edge and glanced over it. We were forty feet from the ground. Assuming I remembered how to jump safely, the fall wouldn’t bother me. But at this height, she’d wouldn’t be so lucky.
I found her wrist and grabbed on.
She sobbed and loosened her grip on the asphalt with that hand, which would make it easier for me to pull her up, but gave me the burden of all of her weight. It’s not that she was heavy—she was a very petite girl—but we were both dangling over a square of asphalt connected only by our fingers wrapped around sweaty, dirty skin.
“Don’t let go,” I told her.
Her face reddened with the effort, but she managed a nod. I had the strength to lift her up, but her skin was damp with sweat, and my fingers were slipping. This wasn’t working.
“What’s your name?”
“Miss—Missy,” she stuttered out. “Missy.”
“Missy, I need you to do something for me, okay?” I wrapped another hand around her wrist. Her hand slipped another centimeter, and a bolt of lightning lit the sky.
She screamed, and I saw the pulse of fear in her eyes. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Missy, listen to me. Missy. Missy!” I repeated her name until she met my gaze again. “I can help you up here, but I need you to help me, too, okay? I need you to give me your other hand.”
Her gaze skittered to her ragged fingernails, which were barely gripping the edge of the asphalt. “I can’t.”
“You can,” I assured her. “You absolutely can. And I’m strong enough to grab you and pull you up, but I need your help okay?”
She slipped another centimeter, and as the crowd below us screamed, I fought back my own rising panic.
“On three,” I told her. “I want you to give me your left hand. You can do this. I know you can. Okay?”
She shook her head. “I’m not strong enough. I’m not strong enough.”
I’m not sure if she slipped or let go, but I reached out and grabbed her hand just as her fingertips lost contact with the blacktop. With both wrists in hand, I braced myself and pulled her up and over the ledge.
She immediately wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, God, thank you. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, helping her take a seat on the ledge. She embraced me in a hug, tears flowing now, and I let her cry until she’d calmed down enough to let me pull away.
“You did really good,” I told her.
“I still have to get down,” she sniffed out. “I was only going to get milk. From the store. Just milk. It’s the vampires, isn’t it? This is their fault?”
My chest went cold, but I pushed down the burst of anger and my urge to argue with her. This was neither the time, nor the place.
I glanced around. Firemen with ladders were moving toward our mountain. They made eye contact with me, and motioned that they’d be up.
I looked around the rest of Wrigleyville, which looked like a disaster area—dunes of dirt and asphalt and cars riddling the street, people bleeding, dust and smoke everywhere.
I looked back at Missy. “There are two firemen on the way to get you down,” I said, pointing at them. “Will you be okay here until they get here? I need to get back to work. There might be other people who need help.”
“Of course. God, thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I carefully stood up again, but looked back at her. “I’m a vampire,” I told her. “We didn’t cause this, but we’re trying to stop it.” I smiled kindly. “Okay?”
Her face went a little more pale, but she nodded. “Okay, okay. Sure. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” With a final smile, I took the first truly, truly awful step that turned into the oh-my-God-fucking-fantastic jump back to the ground.
I hit the ground in a crouch again, one hand on the ground, and lifted my gaze to stare back into Morgan’s. He stood at the edge of the crowd, his clubbing attire still perfectly clean. Apparently, he hadn’t bothered to help.
I shook my head ruefully, and hoped he was embarrassed by his inaction. And if he wasn’t, if there was some deeper, better reason for his inaction than his refusal to dirty his fancy clothes, I was going to have to investigate that, too. I was going to have to figure out what the hell was going on in Navarre House. But, again, that was a problem for another day.
I stood up and looked around. Morgan might not be willing to act, but Ethan had taught me better. Even if I had to go it alone, I wasn’t going to stand by and let someone else do my job for me.
I walked around the hill of dirt and got back to work.
The earth stopped rumbling, but there were dozens of cars overturned or abandoned and innumerable tons of earth in the middle of Wrigleyville. The architectural damage wasn’t extensive, but the roads and sidewalks in four blocks of Wrigleyville were beat to hell. And it wasn’t the only one; there were pockets of damageketEth in neighborhoods across the city.
Thankfully, I hadn’t heard of any fatalities, but the injuries and damage to cars, roads, and property were going to be bad enough for us. I was filthy, cold, and as the scope of the destruction—and the possibility of severe consequences for vampires—became clear, I grew wearier.
This wasn’t our fault. There was no evidence vampires had any role in what had gone on in Wrigleyville. But I hadn’t been able to stop it, and that weight sat heavily on my shoulders and in my gut. I’d investigated and interviewed, hypothesized and theorized . . . and I’d come up empty-handed. Tate knew too much for me to dismiss his involvement, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what that was. And while I thought Simon was the key to the
Maleficium
, I couldn’t get close enough to him to find out.
That was going to have to change.
I needed a little bit of time and space from the chaos, so I walked up the street a few blocks until the sounds and smells of new, damp earth began to fade.
I reached the barricades the CPD had established at the edge of the destruction, and was ruing the fact that my grandfather could no longer show up at these events in an official capacity, when I stopped short.
A few feet away from the barricade, my father stood on the sidewalk beneath a streetlight in dress pants, a button-up shirt, and a MERIT PROPERTIES windbreaker. He was supervising two men who were unloading plastic-wrapped packs of water bottles onto the sidewalk, where a woman I recognized as an admin in my father’s office handed them out.
I walked toward them, and waited until the workers left my father alone. “What are you doing here?”
“Public service,” he said. “The office is just up the road, and we happened to have the truck ready for a conference at a building in Naperville. We decided it could be put to a better use, so we hurried down here.”
The reason might have been legitimate, but I still questioned his motives. I couldn’t help it; my father brought out the worst in me. I’d always been a stranger where my family was concerned, and the business with Ethan hadn’t helped. My father thought he’d been doing me a favor—gifting me with an immortality I hadn’t asked for—but that didn’t make it any less of a violation.
He gestured behind me, and I glanced back. Dusty and scraped men and women stood or sat on curbs nearby sipping water.
“This was a nice thought,” I said. “But you can’t use bridges that were burned a long time ago.”
He used a box cutter to slice through the plastic wrap on a new bundle of bottles and passed one over to me. “That’s the difference between you and me: I refuse to believe bridges were burned. Every moment is a new opportunity.”
I accepted the bottle of water, and let that stand in for any additional thanks. I walked across the street to the curb and sat down, my muscles aching from the work.
I’d taken a single sip when Jonah sat down beside me. He looked as filthy as I did, streaks of mud and dirt on his jeans and T-shirt.
“Everything okay at Grey House?” I asked.
“Yeah. The damage didn’t extend that far.” He scanned the street, eyes narrowing when he saw the truck. “Did your father suddenly become charitable?”
“Not without an ulterior motive. A suggestion?d onggen he sa
Jonah took the bottle of water from me and took a long drink. “What’s that?”
“While you’re busy having my back, don’t be surprised when family members are there to stab me in it.”
“That’s what partners are for,” he assured. “Well, that, and getting you out of Dodge when things get dicey.” He gestured toward some humans on the other side of the street who were beginning to look at us askew. Maybe they recognized us as vampires, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they weren’t thrilled about the destruction in their neighborhood, and it looked like they were looking for someone to blame.
“We’ll go to Grey House,” he said, a hand at my elbow to help me up. “We’ll convene there and we’ll make a plan and we’ll get this thing figured out.”
“You think it will be that easy?”
“Not even close,” he said. “But it’s RG rule number one: Make a plan.”
I guess a plan was better than nothing.
Scott Grey’s vampires were taking shifts assisting in the aftermath of the destruction, and he’d set up food and aid stations in the House’s open atrium for any vampires in the vicinity who needed a break. He also gave me a quiet spot to give Catcher a call.
“How are things up north?” he asked.
“Pretty bad,” I admitted, and gave him the lay of the land . . . and the magic. “It looks like Claudia was right and we’re looking at elemental magic. Water. Air—”
“And now earth,” Catcher finished.
“Yeah. I didn’t see any hint this time that Tate was involved, but his magical imbalance theory is looking more plausible. And if he’s right, that means someone has the
Maleficium
. I want to talk to Simon.”
“And your suggestion for getting past Order bitchiness?”
“Remind them the world might be ending? Tell them we think the
Maleficium
is at work. Have my grandfather call them, or tell them the former mayor—who may or may not be some kind of ancient magical being—may or may not be trying to herald in a new era of evil. Tell them whatever you want. But make them understand.”
He murmured something about women and hormones, but when he hung up the phone, I decided I’d made my point.
Jonah stepped into the doorway. “Find anything out?”
“That goddamned bureaucracies are killing me this week. Catcher’s giving me trouble about setting up a meeting with Simon.”
“We could probably try Tate again, too.”
I didn’t want to do that, but I was running out of options.
I spent a few minutes giving Kelley and Malik an update, and got the text just as I’d finished: SIMON. ONE HOUR. JENKINS SUPPLY CO.
“Jenkins Supply Company?” Jonah asked when I showed him the message. “What’s that?”
“I have no clue,” I answered, tucking the phone away again. “Let’s go find out.”
Jenkins Supply Company, it turned out, was a hardware store not far from Hyde Park. Before heading in, we stood outside for a moment just taking in the building. It was a mom and pop store, with a sign above the door in olthe I’d fd-fashioned, red cursive letters. There weren’t many cars in the lot, but the lights were still on, so we headed inside.
Like most hardware stores, it smelled like rubber and paint and wood. An older man with white hair and square glasses tidied the area near a cash register, and he nodded at us as we entered.
We offered smiles and moved past him into an aisle of cold weather gear—shovels, ice melt, gloves, and snowblowers. All the necessities of a Chicago winter.
There was no immediate sign of Simon, but there was a lingering trail of magic in the store. I motioned to Jonah, and followed it like a bloodhound.
We found Simon and Mallory together in an aisle with small tools—hammers, screwdrivers, that kind of thing. They were loading items into a basket.
Jonah and I exchanged a glance, then made our way down the aisle.
Simon looked up as we walked toward him. He wore a polo shirt and jeans, and looked completely innocuous. But there was no mistaking the concern in his expression. Was it concern about what was going on—or because he’d been caught?
Mallory also looked worse for wear; exams had clearly taken a toll. She looked tired, and her T-shirt and skinny jeans seemed baggier than usual. I always gained weight during exams—too many late night pizzas and ice cream breaks. She smiled a little at me, then crossed her arms, hiding her hands. She barely made eye contact.
My stomach balled with nerves. Maybe Simon did know something about the
Maleficium
—and she couldn’t get away to tell us.