Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [90]
Ethan had clasped the medal around my neck. Since his death, I’d rarely removed it. But the problems facing Chicago and its supernaturals were bigger than me or Ethan or a small bit of gold, so I relented.
Without a word to Tate—although I could feel his smug satisfaction from across the table—I unclasped the medal and let it fall into my hand.
Tate held out his hand to receive it, but I shook my head.
“Information first,” I told him. “Prize later.”
“I had no idea you were so . . . tenacious.”
“I learned from the best,” I said, smiling sweetly. “Get on with it.”
Tate considered the bargain for a moment, and finally nodded.
“Fine. The deal is struck. But as you might imagine, I don’t get visitors often. I’m taking the long road. Besides, you are clearly woefully undereducated about the supernatural world.”
I couldn’t fight back a sigh. Getting a lengthy history lecture from Tate wasn’t high on my list of things to accomplish tonight. (“Saving the city” was actually number one on that list.) On the other hand, he was probably right. I was undereducated.
While he may have planned to take the long road, he didn’t waste a moment getting comfortable in his chair and imparting his wisdom.
“Magic wasn’t born on the eve of vampires’ creation,” he lectured. “It existed for millennia on this plane and others. Good and evil lived together in relationship slightly more, shall we say, symbiotic than this one. They were partners, neither better than the other, coexisting in peace. There was a certain justice in the world. Magic was unified—dark and light. Good and evil. The distinctions didn’t exist. Magic only was. Neither moral or immoral, but amoral, as it was meant to be. And then one red-letter day, humans decided evil wasn’t merely the other side of the coin—it was wrong. Bad. Not the other half of good, but its opposite. Its apotheosis.”
Tate drew a square on the tabletop with a finger. “The evil was deemed a contamination. It was drawn from good, separated.”
Mallory had once told me that black magic was like a second four-quadrant grid that lay above the four Keys. It sounded like her explanation had been pretty accurate.
“How was the magic separated?” I wondered.
“Carefully,” he said. “There were a number of iterations. Gods were divided into two halves; one moral, one immoral. Sides were taken, and angels were deemed true or fallen. Most important, some would say, evil was placed into a vessel that would contain it. It was parceled out only to a few who would seek to wield it.”
“What was the vessel?”
“It’s called the Maleficium.”
“So what does this have to do with the city? I’ve been told we’re seeing effects in the lake and sky because the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—are unbalanced.”
“Like I mentioned, that’s a typical human instinct—to create categories to explain the world and blame the unfamiliar on a disruption in the categories. But categories don’t explain things; they describe them. You’ve heard the myth of the four Keys?”
“The four divisions of magic? Yeah, but I’ve never heard them referred to as a ‘myth.’ ”
Tate rolled his eyes. “That’s because sorcerers aren’t honest with themselves. Every categorization of magic—by Keys, by elements, by astrological signs, whatever—is just a way of ordering the universe for purposes of their practice. Each sect creates its own divisions and distributes magical properties into those divisions. But the divisions don’t matter.”
I found that revelation to be surprisingly disappointing—that the philosophy of magic Catcher had imparted to me those months ago wasn’t quite accurate, or at least it was only one of many half-accurate ideas.
“The point, Merit, is not that the magical systems are incorrect—but that they simply aren’t important.”
“Then what is?”
“The distinction between dark and light.” He placed a hand flat on the table. “Assume this hand is the entire world of magic.” He spread his fingers. “Call