Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [117]
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 vampires 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