Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [106]
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 damage 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