“We have other evac plans,” Ethan said. “Even if we have to swim, we’ll make our way off that island.”
“If the harbor’s frozen, we could probably just walk across the lake. But I take your point.”
Mallory’s triumphant yell cut through the room like a knife through frosted cake.
“Oh yes!” she said, jumping up to high-five her husband.
We moved to them. “You figured it out?” I asked. “Already?”
We moved to the table, where Mallory had spread out the pages into groupings of two rows of four or six sheets each.
“It took very nimble finagling and rearranging,” she said. “When the foldouts were separated from the main text, they were also separated from each other, so we had to reorganize them.” She pointed down at the six pages directly in front of us. “This is the foldout from the Egregore page.”
Ethan and I frowned down at the pages. Unlike the main body of the manuscript, these pages consisted mostly of line drawings, the paper and ink having long since faded to sepia, even on the center’s excellent color copies. But if the drawings were supposed to represent something, I didn’t get it. They looked like random squiggles, without the recognizable globe and human form we’d seen on the main page.
“I get nothing beyond Portnoy’s horrid penmanship,” Ethan said, hands on his hips as he surveyed the pages.
“He’s not going to win any handwriting awards,” Catcher agreed.
“Portnoy clearly didn’t want anyone futzing around with his grimoire,” Mallory said. “The illustrations work on the same principle that the words did; they need the same kind of translation. But you’ve got to get them into the right position.”
“My turn,” Catcher said, then shook his hands, preparing himself. He reached out, turned the page in the top right corner ninety degrees clockwise. Then he turned the page in the bottom left corner ninety degrees counterclockwise, made a symbol in the air above the set of images.
Just like with the text, the line drawings began to reorganize themselves—not just the discrete lines changing size and position, but the entire drawing rearranging, reassembling itself into a different whole as magic vibrated softly in the air.
And what was pictured there left us in silence.
The spark from the Egregore’s page was there, and beside it what looked like a complex arrangement of alchemical symbols. And after that, presumably created from the working of alchemy on the Egregore magical spirit, was a large animal-like form that loomed over a sleepy village. The Egregore’s spark was barely a dot in the middle of its broad and jagged forehead.
“She’s going to give the Egregore a physical form,” Mallory quietly said.
“We said she wanted a weapon,” Catcher said. “Someone to fight her battles for her. We were right.”
“How could she do this?” Ethan’s voice was tight with concern.
“That’s the really clever bit,” Mallory said. She moved to the next set of images, moved these into different positions, and made another symbol. This time, the lines rearranged themselves into a mass of clouds over the same village.
“She did it with the weather?” I asked, confused.
“Not weather,” Mallory said. “That’s coincidental.” She looked back at us. “We thought the clouds over Towerline were a heat sink—that she was pulling all the heat out of the city, and that’s why the weather turned, the lakes froze, whatnot. But what is heat, really?”
Understanding widened Ethan’s eyes. “It’s energy.”
Mallory touched her nose. “And the vampire gets it. It wasn’t a heat sink, or not as its main purpose. It’s an energy sink, because that’s what heat is—the effect of solar radiation and whatever. She wanted all that energy”—Mallory pointed back at the animal—“because she’s got big magic to do.”
“This is good work, Mallory,” Ethan said. “This is damn good work. She wants the Egregore to be physical, and she’s pulling energy to make that magic. What form will she pick?”
“That,” Catcher said, “we can’t tell you. The spell doesn’t specify a form. She could pick whatever she wants.”
“Narwhal?” I asked.
“Or swamp monster, wooly mammoth, polar bear, griffin,” Mallory said. “She just needs something that can hold the Egregore’s magic, and its sentience.”
“So we’re going to meet her at Northerly Island,” Ethan said, pacing to the bookshelves, then turning back, “and she’s going to bring a monster to fight us.”
“Or she’ll manifest it then,” Mallory said. “She may want to work the magic in front of us—show off a little. And if she does that, I’ve got a little something that may help.”
She reached over, picked up something small and round.
“A Color Bomb makeup compact?” I said, reading the gold script on the top.
“It’s a governor. Like on a car. I mixed it up while Merit was on campus.”
“A governor?” Ethan asked. “As in the elected official?”
“As in speed governor,” Mallory said. “Like on a car, except this is for magic. I didn’t have much time, but it’s supposed to limit how much power she can use at one time. It might keep her from gathering up enough power to manifest the Egregore.”
Even Catcher looked impressed. “How did you come up with that?”
She smiled. “You don’t want to hear the full tangential train, but I thought of it on the way to the bachelorette party. Well, kind of. I was thinking about being chauffeured, and I wondered if Ethan put some kind of governor on his car so that Brody could only drive a reasonable speed, like, for safety. And then I thought, no, that might hamper things if he needed to get away in a hurry, and that’s no good. And then I started thinking about other kinds of governors, or things that operate like governors—like how ovens can only go up to certain temperatures, and planned obsolescence, and why pencils are exactly the length that they are, instead of some other length, because they’d last longer.”
“Your mind is a weird little labyrinth,” I said.
She grinned. “Sometimes the randomness comes in handy. Not always, but sometimes.”
“Good thinking,” Ethan said. “Very good thinking. That gives us another line of defense.” He looked at Catcher. “You need to tell Chuck, and he needs to alert the CPD.”
“On it,” Catcher said, pulling out his phone.
Ethan looked at the clock, something we’d been doing a lot of lately, then glanced at me. “A moment, Sentinel?” he asked, then drew me back to the other side of the room. When we got there, he looked down at me, silence between us, full of words unsaid. But this wasn’t the time to say them, to talk about futures that seemed so suddenly uncertain. Not with half a dozen people in the room.
“You will take no chances with your life.”
“I will take no irrational chances with my life.”
An eyebrow lifted.
“That’s as good as you’re going to get considering what we’re about to do. And I say the same thing to you.” I pointed a finger at him. “There will be no sacrificing of self for others.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?”
“No. Because Mallory and I are both going to walk away. And hopefully, Sorcha will not. Not this time.”
“Sire. Sentinel.”
We looked back. Malik stood in the doorway, a sly smile on his face. “I think you’d better get out here.”
We didn’t bother to ask questions, but followed him to the front door, Mallory and Catcher behind us.
A dozen vampires stood on the lawn, every single one of them in Midnight High School T-shirts, a dozen members of the Red Guard. They wore the shirts to identify themselves on an op.
As far as I knew, the RG members themselves were the only ones who knew what the T-shirts symbolized. Although that might change if the House saw them all here together. And particularly the vampire who stood in front of them, auburn hair blowing in the wind.