Biting Bad: A Chicagoland Vampires Novel (31 page)

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I said, pointing to the table.

We took seats around it, and when we were all seated, Ethan kicked things off.

“We believe John McKetrick has been manufacturing a serum intended to turn vampires back into humans. We believe he used Alan Bryant, Charla Bryant’s brother, to develop that serum. We aren’t certain if he planned to allow vampires the choice to become humans again or not. But given his history, it seems likely he would have made the decision for us.

“Alan Bryant wouldn’t provide the information McKetrick needed. So McKetrick stole that information, torched Bryant Industries, and induced a riot to cover up the evidence.”

“It was a distraction,” Jonah said. “Keeping us focused on vampire haters, not on what was really going on between himself and Alan Bryant.”

“And the Grey House riot?” Luc asked.

“Perfecting the distraction,” Jonah said. “One night of rioting is a riot. It’s ne’er-do-wells in action. Two nights of rioting? That’s a movement. That’s political activism.”

“And it spreads his larger message of anti-vampire vitriol,” Ethan said.

Jonah nodded.

“But why my grandfather?” I asked. “He had nothing to do with any of this. He’s only secondarily involved.”

“Maybe he wasn’t only secondarily involved.”

We all looked at Catcher, who met my gaze. “He was looking at that body for Detective Jacobs. The one that washed ashore.”

Ethan frowned. “Okay? So?”

“He called because they weren’t supernaturally able to identify it—because they weren’t exactly sure what it was.”

We sat in stunned silence for a moment.

“It was a failed experiment,” I realized. “McKetrick’s been working on the serum, and he’s had failures. That’s why he kept going back to Alan Bryant. McKetrick must have known he was involved and thought he was getting too close.” I looked at Catcher. “What did Grandpa learn?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But he’d learned something. He was supposed to meet with Detective Jacobs for coffee the next day.”

“McKetrick found out and decided to put a kibosh on that meeting,” Ethan said. “And your grandfather was involved with vampires, so the rioting cover story plays.”

“That sick, twisted, manipulative son of a bitch,” I muttered.

“So he is,” Ethan said. “And that’s why we’re putting an end to this. Jeff,” he prompted. “The building?”

Jeff spread a map on the table. “It used to be Weingarten Freight,” he said. “Now it’s Hornet Freight, but the floor plan is online either way.”

“What do they ship?” Luc asked, leaning over to get a better glance.

“According to their Web site,” Jeff said, “pretty much anything you want them to. Retail goods, medical goods, sporting equipment, industrial stuff.”

The building was essentially a large square divided into chunks: offices, loading area, warehousing area.

“Entrance here,” he said, pointing to a door. “Loading bays along this wall. Emergency exits here and here.”

He pointed to the back corner of the building. “The admin area was set up here, along the front-left corner, and the rest of the space is divided into the loading and unloading area and the place they stored the goods between pickups and deliveries.”

“What’s the goal here?” Luc asked, looking to Ethan.

“I want to go in,” Ethan said. “I want to garner evidence of what McKetrick’s doing, and I want to end his ability to do it.”

“And the CPD?” Catcher asked.

“McKetrick is the ultimate slime. If we go in without them, he’ll claim we attacked, and chalk it up to more vampire violence.” Ethan’s gaze narrowed. “But I want my opportunity to chat with him face-to-face.”

“Ethan—,” Luc said, but Ethan held up a hand.

“No,” he said. “This isn’t about practicalities or safety. He has ordered assassinations, endangered my vampires, destroyed homes, nearly killed Chuck. And now he thinks he can play God? No.” His eyes flamed silver and green. “I will have a shot at him first. After that, assuming he survives, the humans can do what they will.”

Catcher and Ethan looked at each other for a moment, until Catcher nodded.

“A little late notice never hurt anyone,” he said.

Ethan nodded. “We have to assume he’ll have weapons, and many of them. Specifically, we know he’s got aspen guns, so I’m proposing the first wave be non-vampires.”

He looked at Mallory. “We need help tonight, and we’ll hire you to join our team for this mission if you’re willing. I’ve already checked with Gabriel, and he’s approved.”

Mallory had helped us before, including when we tackled a fallen angel and ended his reign of terror over the city. She’d done it to help, and because her magic had created the problem in the first place. So it wasn’t that Ethan had asked Mallory to assist us . . . but that he was
hiring
her to do it. She wasn’t being dragged into supernatural drama; she was being hired by Cadogan House as an employee and given the imprimatur of authority that went with it. Ethan was putting his stamp of approval on a girl trying to live with her magic—and that stamp would likely go a long, long way toward her having a real future.

By the expression on her face, she realized the boon he’d offered her.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Absolutely I will help. I appreciate the chance and the opportunity.”

“It’s dangerous,” Ethan said. “Very dangerous, especially if you’re the first line.”

“I’m not afraid,” Mallory said. And for the first time in a while, I think she actually meant it.

But Catcher was less than thrilled. He practically snarled at Ethan. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is going to be?”

“I do,” Ethan said. “I’ll be fighting and sending my Sentinel into danger, and I realize precisely how frightening that proposition is.”

His voice flattened. “I also recall it was dangerous in Nebraska, and that night on the Midway.”

Ethan’s meaning was unspoken, but still clear—Mallory had put us in danger before, and we’d responded despite it all. It wasn’t any more unfair to ask her to pony up.

“You can be an asshole, you know that, Sullivan?”

Ethan smiled. “I do. We do what we must to protect our own.”

Catcher looked at Mallory. “It’s your call.”

She nodded. “I already said yes. It’s the right thing to do.”

“We go in in two waves. Jeff, Catcher, Mallory, through the front. Me, Merit, Jonah, Luc, Lindsey, through the back. We find him. We capture him. We preserve evidence as we can. And we nail his ass to the wall.”

“I assume you’ll want us to lay down magical cover for the rest of you?” Catcher asked.

“If you can do it?” Ethan said, a dare in his voice.

“You know I can,” Catcher said.

“You know what we need?” Jeff said, rolling up the map. “A rallying cry, like ‘Avengers, assemble!’ or ‘Regulators, mount up!’”

“How about ‘Bring back the head of John McKetrick’?” Ethan suggested.

“Grim,” Jeff said, “but I think it works.”

“For the sake of saying it, Liege,” Luc said, “do you really think you should go? You know, for safety purposes?”

The chilling look in Ethan’s expression left little doubt about his answer to that question.

“Alrighty then,” Luc said. “Earbuds for all.” He passed out the earbuds, which now rested in a jar on his desktop like the world’s worst candy. “Good luck, and do try not to get killed.”

“It’s my nightly goal,” Ethan said, rising from his chair. Jonah and I followed, and we walked back into the hallway and climbed the stairs.

We paused in the foyer when Jonah held up his phone. “I’m going to give Scott an update.”

Ethan nodded and looked at me. “While he’s doing that, you’ll want to go upstairs and change.”

I frowned and tugged at the bottom of my jacket. “I don’t have anything to change into; my leathers were toasted in the fire.”

“Just go, Sentinel,” Ethan said, clearly with some other plan afoot. It didn’t seem worth making a scene in front of Jonah, so I climbed the stairs again and headed back into our apartments.

Hanging inside the closet was a set of new leathers—sleek and black with crimson trim. A small white envelope was tied to the hanger with a crimson ribbon. I slipped out the card and read it.

“‘To my favorite Sentinel,’” I read aloud, “‘with love on belated Valentine’s Day.’”

Smiling gleefully, I removed the jeans and suit jacket, then slipped the leather pants from the hanger. They were buttery soft and fitted, with a thin strip of crimson piping down each leg. I climbed into them and zipped them up. They fit like a glove, with the slightest flare at the bottom to cover the boot.

The jacket was heavier than my old version, although it had the same segmented shoulders and elbows for freedom of movement. The crimson trim was subtle, but gorgeous, a secret vein at the edges of the leather. Ethan wouldn’t have overlooked that, and he probably picked them particularly because of it. Because it hinted at who I was beneath the clothes, the fire that lurked inside the brunette.

I pulled the jacket on, and of course it fit perfectly. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Ethan had learned the curve of my body and could guess my size. I modeled the ensemble in the mirror, more pleased than I probably should have been at how it looked.

It looked . . . perfect. Perfectly me, perfectly Sentinel, perfectly Cadogan.

Now, if I could just keep them from catching fire.

—

We met in the foyer. Catcher, Mallory, and Jeff would drive together, as would Luc and Lindsey. Neither my loaner nor Ethan’s Ferrari was big enough for three, so Jonah volunteered—once again—to drive us in his vehicle.

We were going to have to start reimbursing him for mileage.

Jonah was a man on a mission, and he slalomed through traffic—nothing reckless that would raise the attention of cops, but enough to make the trip as efficient as possible.

The House was a twenty-minute drive from Hornet Freight. Jonah took the longer but faster freeway route to Midway Airport, then squeezed between taxis into the exit lane. But we diverged from the line of sedans and followed a second road through an industrial neighborhood.

Hornet Freight was on the left side of the road. A giant black and yellow sign bearing the business’s name and a photograph of the bug lit up the night. It was a brick building, two stories tall, the last in a line of eight identical buildings. None of them appeared to have been occupied recently.

We parked in a row in a designated lot about a quarter mile away. “From here,” Jonah said, “Hornet Freight looks legit.”

“Looks,”
Ethan emphasized.

“Agreed.” We got out of the car and belted on swords, the eight of us gathering behind our shield of vehicles.

“Earbuds in,” Luc said, and we maneuvered the little buggers into our ears. Preparations made, we looked at Ethan.

As always, he was prepared to speechify.

“We are here for a reason,” Ethan said, “because we’ve decided hatred and manipulation can only go so far. Be brave, but moreover, be safe. Bravery only gets you so far. Let’s get into position.”

There were nods all around, and we formed a sort of line, with the aspen-immune sorcerers at the front and the rest of us at the back.

“Tomorrow,” Ethan whispered beside me, “we make time to celebrate Valentine’s Day. But tonight, Merit, my Sentinel, my warrior, let’s go find John McKetrick. And let’s kick his ass.”

VAMPIRES, ASSEMBLE!

W
e descended into the low—and thankfully empty—ditch that bordered the road, and we walked toward the building. We stopped when we were a football field away. From this distance, it looked utterly innocuous. It was an unremarkable building in an unremarkable part of the city, remarkable tonight only because it had become a bastion of hatred.

When we reached the parking lot, we separated into our groups and ran full out, dodging lampposts and ruts in the concrete. We separated from the sorcerer/shifter crew, running toward the back of the building.

“Luc, you and Lindsey take the door on the west,” Ethan said. “We’ll take the east. Don’t let anyone out of the building.”

“On it,” Luc said. He kissed Lindsey, her eyes darting with surprise, and they ran low across the back of the building to the other side.

Ethan looked at me and Jonah. “You ready?”

We both nodded.

“Then let’s go.”

We moved around to the door, which was rusted and a couple of steps above the ground. We lined up against the wall, Jonah on one side, me and Ethan on the other.

Jonah moved closer, pressing an ear to the door, listening for anything on the other side of the wall. After a moment, he shook his head, then pulled two dangerous-looking knives from his jacket. Ethan and I drew our swords.

Ethan signaled us to move . . . and the battle began.

Jonah kicked open the door, and we rounded it, swords drawn.

The door led into an enormous open space dotted by processing equipment just like we’d seen at Bryant Industries—an assembly line of gleaming silver tanks and conveyor belts, currently still but clearly ready for action.

Yelling sounded from various points around the room. The people he’d employed to guard or work at his facility had seen us. They rushed forward, wearing Clean Chicago T-shirts.

“Something’s wrong,” Jonah said.

He meant with the attackers. They looked like mostly humans, but their eyes were nearly white, as if they’d lost all pigment, and their features were oddly stretched, as if someone had attempted to sculpt a human from clay and hadn’t quite gotten the features right.

For a moment, we stared at them.

“I presume they’ve been given the serum,” Ethan murmured, gripping his sword and preparing to strike.

“We’ll find out,” Jonah said.

They screamed at us, rushing forward, the attack begun. Ethan, Jonah, and I separated, driving them apart.

Three came toward me, waving arms and legs but with no obvious weapons in hand. McKetrick wanted to build them, but maybe he hadn’t believed in them enough to give them weaponry.

I dropped my sword to the ground, thinking it only fair that we fought on the same terms. The first one to make a move ran toward me, hand already fisted for a punch. I grabbed his wrist, twisted, and sent him to the ground, then used an elbow at his neck to knock him unconscious.

The next one launched, airborne and ready for a fight. I ducked to the ground, letting him sail above me and land behind. I swung around, offering him a kick to the ribs that sent him skidding across the room. He landed flat on his back.

I looked back at the third and smiled, just a little. “Ready?”

She bared her teeth and came running. I expected a strike, but she pummeled me like a linebacker, knocking me to the ground. She pulled my hair, and screamed into my ear—“Vampire whore!”—before clamping her hands around my neck.

Suddenly, I couldn’t get oxygen, which made me panic.

I kicked beneath her, trying to roll and dislodge her away, but I couldn’t get enough oxygen to make my limbs move.

I punched her in the stomach, then the ribs, but she ignored the pain. Was she human, but with the strength of a vampire? That, I thought, as my vision began to dim at the edges, was disturbing.

And then her weight was bodily lifted from me, and she was thrown across the room.

Before I could crawl to my feet, I was hauled upright and saw green eyes staring back at me.

I huffed for air and put a hand around my neck, feeling for the bruise I imagined had already popped up.

I saw the worry in Ethan’s eyes, but his sarcasm masked it. This was a battle, after all. “Let’s try to stay on our feet, shall we, Sentinel?”

I nodded weakly and got to my feet again. “Doing my best, Liege.”

I glanced around, ensuring Jonah was all right. He pushed the hair from his eyes and seemed healthy; the floor was littered with minions we’d dealt with handily. But where, I wondered, was the main course?

A
boom
sounded in the other section of the warehouse.

“That’s the sorcerers,” Ethan said. “Let’s go!”

I grabbed my sword. Ethan in front, me behind, we ran through the door and into an even larger space. This one held stacks and stacks of boxes. They contained syringes, if the box closest to me was any indication, and a lot of them.

A wall of blue smoke had divided the space in two. The smoke shifted, and Mallory, Catcher, and Jeff ran toward us through the smoke.

“They’re behind us,” they said, and we backed up.

“Make a line,” Ethan said, and we did.

And when the smoke cleared, we could see the enemy. The protohumans, with their milky white eyes, had assembled into a line, probably forty strong. We stood against them, our cadre of supernaturals.

They’d corralled us together.

Jeff whistled. “He’s built his own army.”

“The only kind he could stomach,” Jonah said. “Vampires who aren’t vampires any longer.”

Jeff blew out a nervous breath. “At the risk of playing Anti–Little Mary Sunshine here, there are a lot of them over there.”

Nervously, I adjusted my fingers on the sword. “Remind me why you didn’t appoint me House librarian?” I asked Ethan.

“Because, Sentinel, you’re so very good with a sword.”

McKetrick emerged from the shadows in black fatigues, his face scarred and one eye milky white.

I didn’t wait for him to speak first. “What have you done to them?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that not everyone chooses to be a vampire? That some, after becoming vampires, realize they have become monsters, and they want to go back?”

“We aren’t monsters,” Jonah said. “And they don’t look entirely human.”

“The catalyst is a work in progress,” McKetrick said. “All science requires experimentation, mistakes. They were willing to sacrifice for the coming revolution.”

“The coming revolution?” Ethan asked.

“When humans finally tire of your antics. Your demands. Your insistence that you be treated like everyone else, when we all know exactly what you are. Genetic rejects.”

“Is that what you told Brooklyn?” Jonah asked. “Did you convince her she was a genetic reject?”

“Brooklyn wanted to live a mortal life. I respected her wish and provided her with a solution.”

“Your solution poisoned her,” Jonah said. “She’s in a hospital bed right now, a sacrifice to your ‘progress.’”

McKetrick didn’t look moved.

“All this because of Turkey?” I asked.

His expression steeled. “Because of Turkey? That’s how you refer to the sacrifices made by men who served this country, who were some of its finest warriors? You
freaks
killed them, and you know what I got? A citation for letting you get away. For not bringing vampires back so you could be studied and used as weapons.” He slapped a hand to his chest. “My brothers were killed because of your greed, your insatiable appetites.”

“We are sorry for your loss,” I said, “but we weren’t there. I wasn’t even a vampire when that happened. How can you blame us for something we weren’t even involved in?”

“I blame you,” he gritted out, “because you carry the disease. And this city will not be safe from your appetites, your treachery, until you’ve been swept from it, wholly and completely.”

McKetrick pulled a long-bladed knife from the utility belt on his pants and tossed the knife from hand to hand.

His army moved closer toward us, the circle growing tighter.

My stomach knotted with nerves, already taut from the spill of nervous magic that permeated the room.

“Catcher?” Ethan prompted.

“We’re out of mojo at the moment,” he said. “Currently refueling.” Sorcerers had a limited amount of magical draw at any one time.

“Then I think we do this the old-fashioned way,” Ethan said. “Novitiates?”

“Ready,” we said together.

“Jeff, you want to get busy?” I asked.

“Done and done,” Jeff said, and a blinding flash of light shot across the space, as human man turned into gigantic, stalking white tiger.

It was just the distraction we needed.

“Go!” Ethan said, and like the soldiers in a centuries-old battle, we rushed toward each other, weapons raised.

Ethan ran toward McKetrick. I took the minion closest to me. Creatively, he dodged immediately for my feet. Unfortunately for him, I brought the butt of my sword down onto his head, sending him flat to the floor.

Two former vampires, both in snug T-shirts and stylish sheepskin boots, came at me from either side, both with box cutters in hand. There was something pitiful about the weaponry, not just because McKetrick hadn’t trusted them enough, but because he also clearly hadn’t cared enough to make them anything other than expendable.

“You don’t have to fight us, you know,” I said, dodging one strike and sending my sword wheeling around to try to catch the other girl off-kilter.

“You’re the enemy,” she said, dodging the strike and kicking me in the ribs. “You think I wanted to be a monster? My family kicked me out. I got fired. You think this is any way to live? Crawling around in the dark like a snake?”

“You have immortality,” I reminded her, as the other girl tried to box my ears. I got her in the stomach with the butt of the sword, a classic move, and offered the mouthy one a spinning crescent kick. She moved backward but stumbled over a box and hit the ground, skittering away. . . . Unfortunately, she skittered right into the face of a Siberian tiger, who dared her to move.

She fainted dead away, which saved us both the trouble.

But her friend wasn’t impressed. “Vampire whore!” she screamed out, jumping on my back and wrapping her arms around my neck. I tried to shake her off, but she was strong and nimble.

“Mouth!” I warned her, maneuvering backward toward a stack of the boxes, and mashing her backward into them until she finally fell away.

Then she got a kick to the head for her trouble.

Sirens suddenly wailed outside, audible because the doors had been thrown open. A swarm of men and women in black uniforms with guns moved inside.

I guessed our time was up. The CPD had arrived.

“Chicago Police Department!” cried the leader. “All weapons on the ground!” they said. “Right now, all weapons on the ground. Hands on the back of your heads. All of you!”

To a one, humans and sups alike dropped their weapons.

Except for one man.

Ethan stood over McKetrick, sword in hand. “It would be so easy, you know. So easy for me to do this, to take your life as you’ve taken the lives of so many others.”

“Do it,” McKetrick gritted out. “Do it.” McKetrick dared him to murder, expecting, of course, that Ethan would oblige him. McKetrick might be dead, but his vengeance and his plan would be utterly validated. He’d have proved that vampires were merciless killing machines.

“The problem is,” Ethan said, “I’m not you.”

He tossed his sword away and stepped back, raising his arms as the CPD surrounded McKetrick.

“It’s over,” Ethan said. “And good riddance to you.”

—

Detective Jacobs had given us a head start, just enough to work out some aggression against McKetrick and the others, but not so long that we’d have to make too many excuses.

Detective Jacobs whistled when he saw the processing equipment in the back. But despite the equipment, there wasn’t a single syringe in sight. Apparently, McKetrick hadn’t actually been able to get the assembly line working. He’d manufactured the serum a syringe at a time, and Brooklyn had gotten the last one.

A top-of-the-line computer sat on a top-of-the-line desk, and when Jacobs’s tech guys booted it up, they found information aplenty: e-mails to and from McKetrick and the rioters, a copy of the chemical analysis Alan Bryant had given him, copies of the materials he’d stolen from Bryant Industries, and years of records regarding his attempts to sabotage and assassinate vampires across the country.

When the debriefing was over, with its very satisfying result, we were officially dismissed; we walked across the warehouse floor to the front door.

I happened to glance down, where a glint of silver caught my eye. There on the ground, resting halfway beneath a wooden pallet, was a single syringe, filled with a pale green fluid. It gleamed like a jewel and promised things I hadn’t thought to ask for in a very long time.

Humanity.

The allure was stronger than I would have imagined, as memories plucked at my heartstrings: Sunshine. Summer boat rides on the lake. Morning jogs in the chill of spring. Shopping at noon on a Saturday. Spending my remaining human years with my family, instead of living long past them. Finishing my dissertation, becoming a professor.