“Mallory, stop whatever you’re doing. You are killing Chicago.”
“The harm is temporary,” she said.
Watching her there, perform magic that felt greasy, uncomfortable,
evil
, I knew the repercussions would be anything but temporary.
“This will fix things,” she said.
“This will destroy things,” I corrected.
But as the magic surrounded us in a tighter and tighter spiral—the centrifugal force pushing the air from my lungs—she shook her head.
“I am tired of worrying about what everyone else wants. You. Catcher. Simon. I was not responsible for the separation of good and evil. But I will be responsible for closing the loop. Stop being so goddamned shortsighted.”
I tried my final strategy. “Mallory, I’ve been dreaming about Ethan. You’ve been hurting him. And if you finish this spell, if you set the city on fire, it will be me and the rest of the Houses that pay for it.”
She smiled a little sadly. “Honey, by then, I’ll be long gone.”
She lifted her arms, and the magic squeezed into a knot. My vision dimmed at the edges, and then went dark completely.
For the second time in a year, my best friend in the world knocked me out cold.
I sat up just in time to see Jonah running toward me. I rubbed the back of my head, sore from where I’d fallen to the ground, but relieved that I’d been out only long enough for him to get here.
That meant I might still have a chance.
He crouched in front of me, panic in his eyes. “What happened?”
“She confessed. She stole the
Maleficium
and Ethan’s ashes to try and bring him back as a familiar. She thinks I want that—but mostly she’s obsessed with black magic. She’s addicted to it, and she thinks completing the spell will help bring good and evil back into balance.”
He helped me to my feet.
“She worked magic onork in me, knocked me out.” I looked over at him. “She’s made up her mind to go through with it. We have to find her, and we have to stop her. If she completes the magic . . .”
I didn’t finish the prediction; saying it aloud wasn’t going to make the choice any easier.
“Do you have any idea where she’s gone?”
I racked my brain, but couldn’t come up with anything. The only places I knew she’d visited recently were her house in Wicker Park and the hardware store. She trained somewhere in Schaumburg and at Catcher’s gym in the River North neighborhood, but neither seemed like likely spots for her to perform big magic.
But if I couldn’t find Mallory, maybe I could find the book . . .
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the librarian.
“The
Maleficium
is gone,” I told him, without introduction. “Mallory Carmichael stole it from the vault when she was staying at the House with me. I don’t suppose you’ve got a way to track it?”
Mallory would not have been pleased at the slew of words that erupted through the phone—or the unflattering comments about the ethical propensities of sorceresses. But once he’d gotten that out of his system, he got down to business.
“One does not guard the
Maleficium
without a contingency plan,” he said, and I heard rustling on the other side of the phone.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Do you have a tracking spell or something?”
“You could say that. I slipped a GPS chip into the spine. I didn’t mention that to the Order, of course, as they would have crucified me for damaging the book, but that is neither here nor there. This is
exactly
why I did it. Let me pull up the location.”
While he worked the tech, I glanced up at the sky. Midnight blue was beginning to tint a sickly shade of red. I didn’t doubt the water had darkened, and mountains were moving somewhere in the city.
She’d already started.
“Found it,” he said. “It’s nearby, and not moving.”
“This is a big city. ‘Nearby’ isn’t going to help me.”
“Hold on, I’m narrowing.” He paused. “The Midway!” he finally exclaimed. “It’s in the Midway.”
I thanked him, hung up, and pointed down the road. “She’s at the Midway. I’m going there now. Find Luc and Malik and Catcher—tell them what’s going on.”
“I don’t want you to face her alone.”
I looked back at him and smiled ruefully. “Sixty-seventh rule of the Red Guard—trust your partner.”
“That’s actually rule number two.”
“Even better,” I said, faking a smile.
Jonah’s jaw clenched, but he relented. “Then find her. Stop her. By whatever means necessary.”
That’s exactly what I was afraid of.
I jogged four blocks down the street, and then stopped in the middle of it, mouth agape.
The entire Midway Plaisance was on fire. Not with the orange and gold flames of a basic, secular fire, but with flames of translucent blue that reached toward the sky with pointy, clawlike curls. However they loowee orange oked, their effect was the same as regular fire: The trees on the edge of the Midway had begun to crackle and spark from the heat.
The sky above had gone fully scarlet, an angry pulsing red, bloody like an open wound, and unlike anything I had seen before. Lightning flashed across it, raising goose bumps along my arms.
Beneath me, I felt a dull tremor. Mountains were undoubtedly springing up somewhere. As Mallory worked her magic every element was spinning wildly out of balance.
Fire trucks screamed down the street, sirens blaring. They parked on the edge of the Midway and immediately began shooting water cannons at the blaze; little good they did. The flames roared like a tornado, updrafts of heat that pushed across the park, hotter and harsher as the fire grew.
I found Mallory in front of the Masaryk statue, a pile of books and materials at her feet. The largest item—the
Maleficium
—was open and glowing, the text swirling on the page. Her blond hair whipped around her face in the hot wind thrown off by the fire.
She seemed oblivious to the danger she was creating, so I had little doubt she’d destroy the city if she could. I just wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it. I had no sword and no dagger. Maybe I could get close enough to knock her out or at least disrupt the magic, although I doubted she’d let me get that close. But until the cavalry arrived, I had to try.
There was no way I was going to walk between her and the fire, so I ran around the statue and approached her from behind. When I was close enough to see the chipping, matte blue paint on her fingernails, I called out her name.
She glanced back with little evident concern, mumbling words as she spelled her magic. “Little busy here, Merit.”
“Mallory, you have to stop this!” I yelled over the roar of the flames. The earth beneath my feet was shaking now, and I stumbled forward. “Can’t you see what you’re doing to the city?”
A tree popped, cracked, and fell forward, and the inferno rushed toward it, engulfing it in flames. It wouldn’t be long before the tree line was breached completely and the fire spilled onto the streets.
“You’ll kill us all!”
“Not when the spell is done,” she called back. “You’ll see. The world will feel so much better when good and evil are joined again. The world will be
whole
.”
Her hands were shaking as she dipped them into jars of powders and sprinkled the contents above the open pages of the
Maleficium
. I scanned the detritus of her magic, but saw no sign of the urn that had held Ethan’s ashes.
They were gone, maybe used to trigger some previous part of the spell. And when we stopped the spell—
if
we could stop the spell—I wouldn’t even have his ashes as a memory.
“Please, Mallory,
stop
.”
She kept right on working, but another voice stopped me cold.
“I knew vampires were at the heart of this!”
I glanced back. McKetrick was moving toward us, a big gun in his hands, pointed at me. “Why don’t you step away from that girl, Merit?”
“That girl is attempting to destroy the city,” I warned him, but he rolled his eyes. Mallory had been blinded by her addiction to black magic. McKetrick was blinded by his ignorance, his unwavering confidence that nfi, bvampires were to blame for every ill in Chicago.
“It looks to me like she’s trying to stop it,” he said.
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I told him. “You’re an ignorant fool.”
“I got the registration law passed.”
“Because you lied and failed to mention you attacked me on a public street. You fight things that mean no harm to you and are completely blind to the real threats.”
Lightning crashed into one of the trees on the other side of the Midway, splitting it in half and sending it crashing down into the flames.
Mallory was still murmuring spell words, and the flames were growing higher by the second.
Yes, he could have used the gun. And yes, an aspen sliver to the heart would probably have done me in. But I was tired of McKetrick, and I didn’t have time for his shenanigans right now.
“You are helping her do this,” I said, not really concerned that I was outing sorcerers. They were totally on my shit list.
“Liar,” he muttered. And hand shaking with fury, he pulled the trigger.
The gun backfired, the barrel exploding, sending wood and metal shrapnel through the air. I instantaneously ducked, and still felt the shock of pain as shrapnel caught me in the back.
But I was still alive.
I looked up. McKetrick was alive, as well, but he hadn’t been so lucky. His face was dotted with blood spots from shrapnel hits, and his right hand was a mess of blood and bone. He lay on his back, blinking up at the crimson sky, his hand pressed to his chest.
It probably said unflattering things about me that I had trouble gathering up any sympathy, but McKetrick would undoubtedly blame his injuries on us anyway.
A bolt of lightning struck a light pole nearby, drawing my attention back to the unfolding magical drama. The flames were taller than the trees now, their fingers licking up toward the red sky, which was now covered by a haze of blue smoke.
“Mallory!” I called out, stepping toward the plinth again. “You have got to stop this.”
She lifted her hands into the air, and I could feel the magic gathering and swirling again.
“Why should I stop? So you can gloat about how you nailed the screwed-up little sorceress? No, thank you.”
“This isn’t about you and me!” I yelled full-out over the roar and crackle of fire and the swirling wind. “It’s about Chicago. It’s about your new obsession with black magic.”
“You don’t have a clue, Merit. Keep living in your tidy little vampire dorm. You’re oblivious to the world around you—to the energy and the magic. But that’s not my fault.”
Catcher emerged through the smoke on the other side of the plinth. “Mallory! Stop this!”
“No!” she yelled out. “You will not interrupt me!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t let you do this.”
“If you stop me now, you’ll kill Ethan.” She pointed at me. “Tell her that, Catcher. Tell her that you’ll keep me from bringing him back.”
But he kept walking closer and closer toward her. “If you bring him back, it whimou’ll kon’t be him. He’ll be a zombie, Mallory, and you know that. I know why you’re doing this. I know how good it feels, and how bad it feels, all at the same time. But you can learn to control it, I swear to God you can.”
“I don’t want to control it,” she said. “I want to
own
it. All of it. I want to feel
better
.”
But Catcher persisted. “Simon was an awful tutor, and I’m sorry I didn’t recognize it. I’m sorry I didn’t see how dangerous his stupidity was. More sorry than you’ll ever know. I didn’t know you were going through this. I just thought you were pulling away from me. I thought he was turning you away from me. This is
my
fault, Mallory.” Tears streamed down his face. “My fault.”
“You know nothing,” she spat out, and hefted up the
Maleficium
. “No one understands this—how important it is.”
“It’s not that important,” Catcher calmly said. “You’re just high on it. On the power. On the potential. But it’s false, Mallory. That sense that you have in your chest?” He beat a fist against his heart. “It’s false. Doing evil won’t make the world a better place. It won’t make that feeling go away. It will only make it stronger, and you’ll have driven away everyone you love.”
He raised his other hand, and I could feel the pulse of magic as he prepared to whip something toward her.
“You can’t stop this,” she said evilly. “You can’t affect my magic.”
“No, I can’t,” he said with resignation. “But I can affect you.” Magic began to glow and swirl in his palm as he prepared to strike.