When we’d wrapped up and were prepared to (finally!) head to the stadium, Colin refused Ethan’s money and tried to shoo us out of the bar; Ethan, ever strategic, managed to slip bills to Sean on the sly. He preferred to pay his debts.
We emerged into the glorious spring night, the crowd bristling with energy and the sheer joy of being outside after a hard Midwestern winter. And, of course, the possibility of destroying the Cardinals on our home turf.
Ethan held my hand as we followed Catcher and Mallory through the crowd to the gate. Our seats were on the third-base side, which had been my favorite spot for an afternoon of baseball.
Ethan glanced back at me, green eyes glowing. I didn’t think he was much of a baseball fan. Maybe it was vicarious excitement, because I was probably elated enough for both of us. Or maybe he was pumped about the free flashlights. Because I certainly was.
Are you ready for this, Sentinel? Ethan asked silently, using the telepathic link between us, forged when he’d made me a vampire that night a year ago.
I smiled back at him. I am bursting with excitement.
He took my hand, and we walked down the street just like two humans, a couple on their way to a night at the ballpark.
Mallory stopped short and turned back toward us, her expression tight, her gaze focused on something behind us. People grunted and cursed as the stream of people was forced to divert around her, and then us, when we reached her.
“Did you feel that?” she asked.
“Feel what?” Catcher said, looking around to find the threat she’d seemed to identify.
“Something magic. Something bad.” Without another word, she began walking away from the stadium. We fell into step behind her, dodging through the stream of fans headed into the stadium as we moved toward Temple Bar.
But she passed the bar, kept going until she turned in to the wide alley that ran beneath the trestle that held up the tracks for the Red Line.
“Mallory!” Catcher called out, and we darted after her into the alley.
The smell of death—overripe and cruel and undeniable—spilled out from the darkness. Something had met a very ugly end here.
Or someone, I realized, glancing at the body on the ground.
CHAPTER TWO
BAD BITE
The man was young, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. He had rough, tanned skin, brown eyes, and deep lines around his mouth. His body was whipcord lean beneath jeans and a T-shirt, and thatchy brown hair stood in mussed spikes on his head.
Magic still lingered in the air above him like heavy fog waiting to settle. And it carried with it the faint sense of animal.
He was dead . . . and a shifter.
His face was horribly swollen and bloody, his hands ripped at the knuckles. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The left neck and shoulder of his T-shirt was saturated with blood that had drained from the puncture wounds on his neck. More had spilled on the ground around him.
He hadn’t just been killed. He’d been murdered . . . by one of us.
I felt a sick twist of guilt. The North American Central Pack was our ally and many of its members were our friends. But they wouldn’t take kindly to the death of their own by one of ours.
A second man in jeans and a dark, long-sleeved shirt burst out of the alley, ramming into Mallory and throwing her to the ground. In that fraction of a second while he stumbled forward, he turned toward me. There was something familiar in the scent and magic that surrounded him, but nothing I could place. The bill of his cap shaded his face, showed only the thick, dark beard above pale skin. And the scent of the blood he’d stolen still clung to him.
The moment passed. The vampire—the apparent murderer—caught himself with a hand on the sidewalk before bolting to his feet again and taking off.
I didn’t stop to think. I tore after him, heard Ethan fall into step behind me, his footfalls light and fast.
The vampire darted through the alley across the street, disappearing into shadow. He was twenty feet in front of me, but when the alley dead-ended, he dodged into the street and the glow of overhead lights. He darted between buildings with rooftop views of Wrigley, and then onto Sheffield on the stadium’s east side.
Music blaring in the bars around us, Ethan and I kept pace with each other, our gazes on the perpetrator, who still trailed the magic of the murder he’d wrought.
I doubted any Housed vampire would take out a shifter on the street, at least not one from Chicago. He was most likely a Rogue, a vampire who lived outside the House system. Or maybe a vampire from another city on some kind of mission to take out a shifter. Either way, there’d be hell to pay with the Pack.
We dodged through a group of girls in pink Cubs T-shirts, one of them wearing a veil. Probably a bachelorette party, and from the curses they hurled after us, they’d been partying for a while.
The vampire neared the intersection with Waveland. He glanced back to check his lead, nearly ran into a group of guys and girls heading across the street from bar to stadium.
“What the hell?” yelled one of the men, tall and skinny with shoulder-length cornrows, neatly sidestepping to avoid getting mowed down by our runner.