Biting Cold (15 page)

He was so handsome. So strong—the epitome of the alpha male. Smart. Strategic and stubborn, often to his detriment. And although I’d spent plenty of time trying, it was pointless to deny the attraction between us. Which was equally strong and stubborn.

I watched him work for a minute—the long fingers and steady gaze, the quirk of an eyebrow when he read a passage he apparently didn’t like.

This was hardly the time to have lascivious thoughts about my boss, but if not now, when? The world was not perfect, and the timing probably would never be.

I walked in, made sure we were alone, and shut the door. He
looked up at the sound and watched me stride toward him, then rose from his seat with alarm in his expression.

“What is it?”

I didn’t waste time with explanations or pretensions. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my face into the slick warm cotton of his shirt.

He stroked my hair. “You’re all right?”

I nodded. “I’m just really glad to be home.”

He pulled back and looked down at me, and the comfort turned into a kiss, inviting and full of promise. He splayed his hands against my back, his fingers hot to the touch, and used teeth and tongue to remind me that I’d come home into his arms again.

He slid his hands down my arms…and I instinctively flinched as his fingers made contact with the bruise he’d made.

Ethan pulled back and stared down at me, a new anxiety in his eyes.

Without another word, he returned to his seat, leaving me standing there awkwardly, my stomach doing somersaults.

“What just happened?”

He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He looked down at the papers on his desk and kept his eyes there, shuffling through them like they held the world’s precious secrets.

“Ethan.”

“Merit, I have work to do.”

“Don’t you think we should talk about this?”

He didn’t answer, but his gaze shifted to my arm, the one he’d grabbed. The one he’d bruised. “I hurt you.”

“I’m fine. It’s
nothing
.”

“Did I leave a mark?”

I let my silence answer, and he swore under his breath. After a moment of twisting nerves, he looked up at me again.

“You didn’t hurt me,” I insisted.

“I bruised you. You flinched.”

“You’re a vampire and you’re strong. It happens.”

“Not to me it doesn’t.” He wet his lips and looked away. “Paige is settled?”

I had no idea what to say, so I answered the question. “She’s in the guest suite.”

He nodded. Just a single nod before focusing on his papers again.

“Ethan,” I began, but I wasn’t sure how to finish.

He looked up. “Merit, Darius is on his way. I really need to prepare.”

He seemed earnest, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt that he wanted to be ready for his meeting with Darius…but that didn’t ease the low ache in my stomach.

I’d just made it back to the main staircase when Catcher texted me:
GABRIEL IS READY
.

Stunned, I checked my watch. We’d been home for only a few hours. I guess shifters weren’t keen on speed limits, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn he’d used a little of his own magic to speed up the trip, particularly given his cargo.

Catcher provided an address, so I assumed I was supposed to meet him there. Well,
we
were supposed to meet him there. Paige actually seemed like she had a level head on her shoulders, and she surpassed Simon in common sense by a large margin. That made her the better of the two potential Order representatives who undoubtedly wanted to check in on Mallory. The choice was clear.

I grabbed my sword and dropped by the guest suite to let Paige know we were ready to go. She was in trendy clothes this time: skinny jeans, a long cardigan, and furry boots.

“Helen did good,” I said. “With the clothes, I mean.”

She looked down at her ensemble. “I was pleasantly surprised. Vamps seem to wear a lot of black. I was afraid she’d put me in head-to-toe waiter wear.” She seemed to remember I was wearing black, too, and winced a little. “No offense.”

“None taken. Black is the House uniform.” I gestured toward the stairs. Paige fell into step beside me and we headed back down to the second floor.

“Color is the new black.”

“Not according to Ethan Sullivan.”

“So where are we going exactly?”

I glanced down at the address Catcher had given me…and smiled a little. If we were going where I thought, Gabriel had been right about my knowing Mallory’s caretaker.

“Someplace familiar” was all I said.

We drove into a neighborhood in the western part of the city known as Ukrainian Village. It was a working-class neighborhood with churches and food and people from the old country, and it was home to the unofficial Chicago headquarters of the North American Central Pack, a bar called Little Red.

That’s precisely where we were headed.

The bar was on the corner of a strip of run-down buildings. Shifters tended to favor substance over style…and hearty Eastern European food over delicate snacks. We hadn’t even parked the car when I could begin to smell the tangy, meaty goodness.

I pulled into a spot at the end of a line of diagonally parked motorcycles. Shifters also preferred bikes to cars and prided themselves on the leather and chrome of their usually custom rides.

“They’re holding her in a bar?” Paige asked.

“I’m not entirely sure. But it’s the Pack’s bar, so we’ll see.”

We got out of the car and skirted the bikes for the sidewalk. Out of respect, I left my sword in the car. Cadogan House vamps had a delicate alliance with the NAC, and I had no interest in screwing that up, especially since they were doing us a favor by keeping Mallory safer and more secure than the Order had been able to.

Catcher pulled up on the other side of my car in his hipster sedan. He popped out of the driver’s seat, looking completely exhausted, his eyes red, his cheeks gaunt. He was another casualty of her obsession with the
Maleficium
. He’d probably spent more than a few sleepless nights lately worrying about Mallory and wondering what he might have done to prevent the trauma.

We stopped on the sidewalk. “Jeff gave me the basics,” Catcher said, “but I want to hear it from you, because it makes no sense to me.”

“If he told you the
Maleficium
was destroyed, and in the process Tate split into two, he was telling the truth. It was as simple and insane as it sounds.”

Paige stepped beside us.

“Catcher, this is Paige, who I believe you’ve heard of. The Tates burned down her house and her entire research library.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Paige didn’t seem impressed with the apology.

Eager to change the subject, I nodded toward the bar. “Did Gabriel say anything about what she’s doing here?”

He shook his head. “Not a thing, which doesn’t thrill me. I’m not happy about what she’s done, but I also don’t want her mistreated. I’m here to make sure she’s okay.”

“If you don’t like it,” Paige suddenly burst out, “you’ll have nothing to say about it. You neither observed her nor stopped her, which is exactly what the Order predicted would happen. You
want to know why you were prohibited from coming back to Chicago? For exactly this reason. The prophecy was made—that if you came back to Chicago, things would go bad. You ignored the Order’s requests, and now you’ve fulfilled that prophecy. And look where that’s gotten us.”

Awkward silence descended.

We’d been told Catcher had been kicked out of the Order because he’d wanted an HQ in Chicago, but the Order was being too stubborn to let him do it. I guessed we hadn’t gotten the entire truth. But it also seemed unlikely we were going to get the truth outside a bar in Ukrainian Village, so I pressed on.

“Let’s just get this show on the road,” I said, and started walking toward the door.

Guitar-heavy music accompanied the smells of food that spilled onto the sidewalk and announced to the world that the bar’s patrons were serious about their food, their drink, and their rock.

We walked inside, a bell on the door announcing our existence, but no one paid us any mind. The bar was lined with tables in front of a giant picture window. Members of the NAC nursed drinks and chatted quietly, completely ignoring our trespass into their territory.

They must have known we were coming, because shifters were rarely so nonchalant about intruders in their homes, alliances or not.

“You. Come. Sit.”

We looked over at the long wooden bar that lined the other side of the room. A heavy woman stood behind it, her formerly bleached blond hair now a vibrant shade of crimson. This was Berna, Little Red’s resident den mother and barmaid.

I walked over to the bar. “Hi, Berna.”

She immediately scowled at me. “Still too thin. You eat?” she asked, her voice thick with an Eastern European accent.

“I eat constantly,” I promised.

She shook her head and muttered something under her breath. Then she pounded a fist on the bar and stared at all of us. “You will eat now.”

I sat down. Paige was smart enough to do the same.

“Where’s Mallory?” Catcher asked.

“She is not ready yet. You sit; you eat.”

“She’s my girlfriend,” Catcher said, as if that information would be enough to change Berna’s mind.

He was incorrect.

The entire bar went silent, and a fog of prickly magic crossed the room. Catcher may have been a friend of Jeff’s and a friend of mine, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a shifter, and he wasn’t a known ally. He was the boyfriend of the woman who’d unleashed evil on the city and brought them another round of trouble they hadn’t asked for.

But Berna didn’t need the glares of the shifters at tables around the room to enforce her will. She put a hand on the bar and leaned over it, her bosoms nearly touching the counter as she stared Catcher down.

“You sit. You eat,” she said.

Catcher slid onto the stool beside mine while Berna, a victorious smile on her face, disappeared behind the red leather door that led to the back of the bar.

“Good choice,” I said.

Catcher rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t want food,” he said. “I want this to be over.”

“I get that,” I whispered back. “But I think part of this exercise
is giving up control. Mallory did what she wanted without regard for others; look where that got us. The Pack is intervening, giving her a chance they don’t owe her and she arguably doesn’t deserve. You’re letting them do the heavy lifting; let them make the rules, too.”

Catcher made a sarcastic sound, but he didn’t walk out. I called that my own victory.

Berna and a shifter helper I didn’t recognize brought out plates of food that she set down in front of each of us. Cabbage rolls, by the look of them, which were a particular specialty. While we unrolled paper-wrapped silverware, she poured an unmarked glass bottle of wine into three short cups, then passed those out as well.

“I hope no one’s a vegetarian,” I said, wasting no time digging into the heady, spicy meat and cabbage. There were few things that took the edge off stress like a good, hearty meal, and I thanked the gods—Ukrainian or otherwise—that I could eat what I wanted with impunity. Sometimes, it didn’t suck to be a vampire.

We ate quietly and with purpose while Berna watched behind the bar. She alternated between checking the amount of food on our plates and the status of the soap opera on the small, fuzzy, black-and-white television behind the bar. I didn’t know the show or the characters, but a doctor and a nurse were having an affair over the comatose body of, I think, the doctor’s stricken wife.

When we’d cleaned our plates—Berna allowed no other option—she cleared them away, then made a low whistle.

After a moment, Gabriel walked through the red leather door. He beckoned us to follow him into the bar’s shabby back room, where three other shifters in leather jackets sat around an old vinyl-topped table, cards in their hands and glasses of liquor within easy reach.

I gave them respectful nods and was pleased when they nodded back. Catcher, wisely, kept his mouth shut.

We followed Gabriel through another door into a part of the bar I hadn’t seen—the kitchen, which smelled strongly of disinfectant, meat, and well-cooked cabbage.

A few more footsteps put us in the doorway of the back room, where a petite woman in jeans, a T-shirt, and a hairnet stood in front of an industrial sink, scouring food from dishes with a giant sprayer.

Each time something surprised me, I was pretty sure it was the last surprising thing I’d see for a while. And it never, ever was.

The girl with the sprayer? One Mallory Delancey Carmichael.

“Mallory,” Gabriel said.

She turned off the sprayer and looked over at him, crimson rising in her cheeks when she realized whom he’d brought into what was apparently her new abode.

She hung the sprayer over a hook on the wall and dried her hands on her pants. Her thin T-shirt was nearly soaked through, and her hands were raw and chapped. That was probably less from the water than from the magic she’d just done.

“Hi,” she said meekly.

Cool air flowed in from a screen door at the other end of the room. In front of it stood a beefy shifter in an NAC jacket, a large automatic weapon in his hands. I guessed they weren’t taking any chances on another escape.

“You’re okay?” Catcher asked.

She nodded, gnawing on her bottom lip. “All things considered.” She wouldn’t make eye contact with me, so we stood there in silence for a moment.

“Why don’t we let them catch up?” Gabriel asked. “Mallory has more work to do before the night’s over, and she can finish while she talks to Catcher.”

Given the height of the stack of dishes she hadn’t yet cleared, she had a good bit of work to go. I wondered if Berna had seconds.

“Good idea,” I said, turning around, then motioning Paige to follow me. We walked back into the back room, the table now empty of booze and card players.

“Have a seat,” Gabriel said.

I did as I was told. “That guy has a big gun,” I noted.

“She caused big trouble.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “Is this her punishment? Doing dishes?”