Biting Cold (Chicagoland Vampires #6)(71)
Author: Chloe Neill

He put the box down again and slipped his hands into his pockets. He must have had doubts about leaving the GP, but you’d never have known it to look at him.

"Al I ask is that you vote your consciences," he said. "If you do that, whatever the outcome, I wil support it. I wil be proud of it." He nodded once. "You are dismissed."

The vampires filed out of the room again, and the chatter started immediately.

"What are you going to do?"

"Is this completely crazy?"

Their doubts were loud, but at the same time there was a bit of nervously hopeful energy. I guessed these weren’t the types of decisions Novitiates were usualy alowed to make.

When the room was mostly clear, Ethan stepped down from the platform and walked to me, hand extended. I took it.

"What do you think they’l do?" I asked.

"It hardly matters," he said. "The decision isn’t important. The action is. Either we recommit to the GP and beg for their forgiveness, or we reject their authority on terms of our own. These are exciting times, Sentinel."

Hand in hand, we walked to the balroom door. "By exciting, do you mean moderately terrifying?"

"I wasn’t going to use those words, but if the shoe fits…"

"Que sera, sera," I said. "Now, let’s go kil an angel."

Okay, that had sounded a lot better in my head.

We assembled in the Ops Room: the messenger, the sorceress, the vampires. And on the phone, a sorcerer, another sorceress, and a shifter.

We hardly fit around the conference table, but that wasn’t the important part. We were a team, working together to solve a problem, even if Darius would have preferred we simply let the world spin around us.

We were also working the low-tech way. Instead of whiteboards or touch screens, we’d placed giant sheets of white paper in the middle of the table, and everyone had a permanent marker.

"So," Luc said, "we know the actual battle goes down with a sword. That’s Ethan’s job." He pointed at Ethan with his marker, then wrote SWORD on one end of the page.

"And on the other end," Lindsey said, "is actualy getting Dominic to the battle spot. That’s where the summoning comes in." She wrote SUMMONING on the other end of the page.

"That process is relatively straightforward," Seth said, putting the sigil on the table. "The sigil is like a phone number for an angel of justice. We draw the sigil, and Dominic must appear."

"Does that work for you, too?" I asked.

Seth shook his head. "In fact, it’s entirely new to me.

According to our research, only angels of justice were assigned sigils. It was a check on their power, created by archangels who apparently believed there was a risk the angels of justice would act beyond their authority."

"Which is precisely what they did," Ethan darkly said.

Seth nodded.

"Okay, then," Luc said. "We have summoning magic to get him here. We have a sword bearer to fight him." He drew a circle in the middle of the page. "Now, we just need a way to make him vulnerable." He looked at Paige. "Thoughts?"

Paige grimaced. "Not yet. I mean, technicaly, we’ve got some ideas. We think nulification would work on him. If it can work on sorcerers, there’s no reason it can’t work on messengers. They’re both creatures of magic. But there is a bit of a logistical problem."

"Which is?" Ethan asked.

"Nulification is what’s caled a wicking spel. The person working the magic has to actualy touch the other one to wick their power away. It doesn’t take long, and there are things we can do to expedite the spel, but there’s no way Dominic is going to let me, Catcher, or Malory touch him. He knows what we are, and he won’t let us get near him."

"That’s a problem," Luc said.

"Actualy, maybe not," I said. "There may be a way to manage it."

"What’s that?" Paige asked.

I blew out a breath, steeled my courage, and looked at Ethan.

"You can get closer to Dominic than anyone else. He won’t think you’re a threat – not like they are. He’s let you close enough to punch him before. But we already know Ethan and Malory have a connection to each other. I was thinking we could use that."

"No," Catcher and Ethan simultaneously said.

"There is no way in hel I wil let someone control me," Ethan said. "Besides, I’m supposed to be fighting him. I can’t concentrate on anything when she’s in there, much less fighting him."

"We’re not talking about control," I quietly said. "Malory can’t do that anyway, because the spel wasn’t completed. But maybe she could work the wicking spel through you."

"No," Catcher repeated. "She’s not putting herself at that kind of risk. He’s an angel, for Christ’s sake. Do you know how much magic he has? And how much she’d have to funnel through both of them? That could kil her."

Magic peaked in the room as tensions rose – from Ethan and the rest.

"I’l do it," Malory quietly said.

We stared at the phone.

"This is my fault," she said. "There’s no argument about that, and no way around it. If this is the way it has to be, then so be it."

"Malory – " Catcher interrupted, and I imagined her shaking her head.

"I have to do this," she said. "If Ethan wil alow it."

The room was quiet as he silently fumed. And after a moment, I watched the anger fade into something else – savvy.

"How would it work?" he asked.

I leaned toward the phone. "Malory, as I understand it, the point of a familiar is to give you an extra bit of capacity for controling the universe, right?"

"That’s the basic idea," she said. "The familiar’s like a battery. Kind of. But he’s not a familiar."

"Not enough that you could actualy make him do something," I agreed. "But you have a connection, certainly. And if your emotions are connected, maybe the magic could be, too? And maybe, if you can use Ethan to funnel power, couldn’t he also be used to take it away from Dominic? You don’t need to control him for that – he just needs to act as a conduit. A magical conduit between you and Dominic."

Silence.

Ethan ran his hands through his hair, then looked back at me.

"He wouldn’t expect me."

"Not to use magic. To punch him in the face, though? Yes. He would probably expect that. But that’s the key – it fits with who he thinks you are. He’d suspect you were getting close enough to hit him. Not to wick his magic away."

"So I’m to become a utility. A functionality of magic?"