Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [116]
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 on 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 looked, 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,