Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [75]
After what I’d seen tonight—a fairy queen willingly scarring those who worked for her because they hadn’t brought issues to her attention fast enough—maybe they were right. Maybe we shouldn’t be trusted.
God, I was beginning to depress myself.
Without any better option, I pulled over into a parking space and turned off the car. The city was relatively quiet, but the night still carried a quiet buzz. There was an energy in Chicago. Even if we weren’t the city that didn’t sleep, we certainly were the city that never rested.
Thinking a katana was a little too lightning rod for my taste, I unbuckled the sword and left it in the car. Humans were already afraid of us; there was no point in riling them up when we had other problems to address.
I was a block from State Street, so I walked over to it, sticking close to the edge of the buildings while looking for anything that might be amiss. The streets were relatively empty except for bar-hoppers and folks scanning the sky for meteors or aliens or some other explanation for its color.
I followed State to the river, noting the strange tingle of its increasingly powerful magical vacuum, and walked across the bridge, stopping in the middle to take a look. The river stretched out in front and behind me—a frozen, black artery through downtown. The sky was uniformly red above, heavy clouds also tinted red by . . . whatever. The side effect of some curse, some ancient charm, some bitter hex?
Unfortunately, I had no clue. If there was a focus, I hadn’t found it. Nothing seemed any different out here. There were no sorcerers casting spells upon the sky. No fire-breathing dragons. Tate, as far as I was aware, hadn’t escaped into the Loop to transfix us all with his strange magic.
While none of those developments would have been exactly welcome, at least they would have been developments. Hints of answers.
I walked back toward my car, pausing at a bus stop and sitting down on the empty bench. The city was undergoing natural disasters with no obvious cause, and apparently these were only the symptoms of some larger issue. How was I supposed to figure this out? Vampires could sense magic, but only if it was really close by. This was way beyond my expertise. I needed a diviner—the witches who walked around with forked branches and searched out hidden springs—except I needed one for magic.
I sat up straight and pulled out my phone. And since he was the closest thing to a water witch I had, I dialed up Catcher.
“You’re still alive.”
“Last time I checked. And here’s a fact to add to your database—fairy blood turns vampires batshit crazy.”
I heard the creak of his chair as he sat up. “You shed fairy blood?”
“Actually, no. Claudia, the queen, got irritated with her guards. They hadn’t filled her in on the sky yet.”
He made a low whistle. “Since the sky is still red, I assume the fairies weren’t the problem.”
“They were not. That’s three strikes. The water sups didn’t mess with the water; the sky sups didn’t mess with the sky. Claudia thinks we’re seeing the effects of a larger magical problem with elemental magic as the visible symptoms.”
I heard his sigh through the phone. “Elemental magic,” he said. “I should have put two and two together. I should have thought about that.”
My heart raced—were we getting somewhere? Did he have an answer? “Does that mean something to you?”
“It gives the magic context. It shows the pattern.”
“Is there a group, a species, a person who uses that pattern?”
“Not specifically. But it proves that magic is involved.”
I rolled my eyes. Hadn’t we already figured magic was involved? Jonah’s suggestions notwithstanding, it seemed unlikely humans had simply flipped a switch that had turned the sky red and sent lightning crashing across it.
As if irritated by the thought, a bolt of lightning suddenly struck a car three blocks down the street. Its car alarm began to chirp in warning. I huddled back into the bus stop, wishing I was already back