Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [17]
I jumped at the words, then glanced behind me. Jonah wore jeans, boots and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt with MIDNIGHT HIGH SCHOOL across the front. The school was fake, a cover used by RG members to signal their membership in case things went awry.
It probably didn’t bode well that he was wearing one now.
“You can feel it, too?” I asked.
“I can now. I couldn’t at the House. I don’t like it,” he added, scanning the lake. “But let’s walk the pier. I want to get closer to the water.”
I nodded and followed him, only just realizing that throngs of people were moving toward the lake. I guess everyone wanted a glimpse. Unfortunately, lines of bundled-up Chicagoans moving en masse through the dark looked uncomfortably zombie-esque. I shivered involuntarily, and followed Jonah.
He was right about the pier. The ten-foot gate was locked. After waiting to avoid a couple of passing guards, he vaulted over the fence with minimal effort. He glanced back at me, then motioned me over with a hand.
I’d mounted a fence before, but wasn’t thrilled to try again in front of this particular audience. My nerves ramped up, I blew out a breath, backed up a few feet, and jumped. I made it a few feet up, and scrambled to reach the top. But just as I swung my legs over the side, I got caught in a tangle of fence posts and jacket pockets. Arms and legs twisted, I hit the ground butt-first, bruising both my derriere and my ego.
“So much for falling gracefully,” Jonah snickered, offering me a hand. I growled out a few choice comments, but took his hand and let him pull me up.
I stood up and dusted off my bottom. “I can scale a fence. I’ve done it before.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
The audience, I thought, but kept the thought to myself. “Nerves, I guess.”
Jonah nodded. “To truly utilize your skills, you’ll have to let go of your human preconceptions and trust your body.”
Before I could make a snappy response, Jonah grabbed my hand and pulled me around the corner of a building just before the guard walked by, his walkie-talkie buzzing with chatter about the lake.
When he’d passed, Jonah peeked around the corner. “He’s gone. Let’s go.”
We headed around the pier in the opposite direction. It was deserted, the ticket booths, restaurants, and snack vendors closed up for the night, the tour boats in dry dock for the winter. We skirted the edge of the buildings to keep a low profile and jogged the length of the pier—nearly a mile—to the end.
There was an open area at the end of the pier, so we checked for guards and then hustled past the stand of flags that dotted the concrete to the edge. I kneeled down and gazed into the water. Just as we’d seen earlier, the lake was pitch-black and absolutely still. The water looked like a black sheet of ice, perfectly frozen and flat. It carried no scent, and it was completely silent. There was no sign of life, and no sound of it, either. No crashing waves. No seagull caws. The lake was eerily still and eerily silent.
It was also eerily antimagical. The vacuum was stronger here, as was the sensation that magic was being pulled toward the lake.
Chicagoans had always had a love-hate relationship with the lake. We flocked to it in the summertime, and bemoaned the freezing winds that rolled off it in the winter. But humans’ reactions to this were going to be different by magnitude. Before, humans feared supernaturals because of who we were. Now, they were going to fear what we could do.
It wasn’t the first time I wished Ethan was here, if only to brainstorm with. He’d already be deep in strategy territory, figuring out how to avoid the possibility humans would blame vampires for whatever was going on.
I glanced behind me and up at Jonah. “This is going to be bad.”
“That’s my thinking. And I am at a complete loss. Four graduate degrees,” he added, with a mischievous grin, “and still at a complete loss.”
Predictably, I rolled my eyes. “Well, let’s do what we can with what we have. Maybe we can find some clue as to the origin.”
The first step in that task, I figured, was getting down there and