Biting Cold (21 page)

Something she said rang familiar in a deep part of my brain. “What did you say?”

“What? Oh, I was just saying I normally prefer blonds.”

But it wasn’t her taste in men that interested me—it was the phrase she’d used. “Dark one,” I repeated, my gaze shifting back and forth as I searched my memory. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“Like, as a phrase?” Paige frowned. “I don’t know it. When did you hear it?”

“When we were in Nebraska,” I realized, and the memories clicked into place. “Todd, the gnome, called Tate a ‘dark one.’ I thought he was referring to the color of Tate’s hair—because it’s dark brown. But maybe that’s not what he meant. Maybe it’s not a description. Maybe it’s a name, or a species.”

“I’m not familiar with the term, but I can look it up.” She pulled a giant book closer to her. “I’ll check the sorcerer’s omnibus.”

“Sorcerer’s omnibus?”

“It’s like a giant magical dictionary,” she absently said, and she was already thumbing through the entries. “If it’s not in here, it doesn’t exist.”

She flipped the book open to a page, then skimmed a finger down the page she’d found. But when her shoulders slumped, I knew she hadn’t found it.

“Nothing?”

“It doesn’t exist.” She looked up at me. “If that was really a term of magical art—and not just a description—it would be in here. This thing is super-thorough.”

Maybe, but I wasn’t willing to give up so easily.

“Dark one” was an odd phrase. It wasn’t the kind of thing someone would just randomly say. On the other hand, Todd was an unusual guy.

“ ‘Sorcerers just don’t get us,’ ” I remembered him saying, and I began to smile. Maybe we weren’t coming at this from the right direction. Maybe “dark one” was a magical term of art…but not for sorcerers.

I jumped up, ignored Paige’s question about where I was going, and ran down the aisles until I found the librarian.

“Are you running in my library?”

“Only because I need you. Do we have any books written by gnomes?”

He frowned but nodded. “Yes. Why? I thought you were looking for conjuration spells.”

“Been there, done that.” I smiled and thought of Todd. “I need gnome books. You know, because sorcerers just don’t get them.”

He didn’t get the joke. “They’re in cultural studies. About four rows to the left. Your
other
left!” he corrected, when I dodged right.

A few minutes later, Paige found me on the floor pulling books into my lap. “Bright idea?”

“I think it’s a gnome’s phrase.”

“Damn,” she said. “I wish I’d thought of that.” She sat down on the floor beside me, and I handed over
A Gnome’s Guide to Names
.

“Come on in,” I said. “The water’s fine.”

It wasn’t in
A Gnome’s Guide to Names
. It wasn’t in
Life from the Ground Up
. It wasn’t in
Better
Underground Gardening
,
Home Sweet Hillock
, or
Homes for Gnomes
. (I couldn’t make this stuff up.)

We did learn that gnomes are especially careful about the layout of their underground dwellings. We learned they preferred plaid to gingham in their decor and often used a dozen or more false entrances and baffles to thwart unwelcome visitors.

When we could map out their favorite color palettes, we called the librarian back into it.

Well,
Paige
called the librarian into it. After flouncing up her hair.

Maybe she had been lonely in Nebraska.

“What exactly are you looking for?” he asked.

“Todd, one of the gnomes who fought with us in Nebraska, called Tate a ‘dark one.’ We’re wondering if there’s anything to that.”

The librarian rolled his eyes and walked down the row. “Sometimes I wonder why you don’t just ask me the questions in the first place. Follow me.”

We shoved our books back on the shelves and traced his path to a bureau of long, flat drawers. He opened a long drawer and rifled through it, then pulled out a dark blue paperboard box with brass corners, which he carefully carried to the closest table. He walked slowly, as if the materials in the box were delicate enough to disintegrate if he rattled them too much.

He placed the box on the table and lifted the lid. Scents of old paper and herbs—rosemary and thyme—filled the air, along with the damp scent of earth.

“Gnomes,” I said.

The librarian nodded and pulled a pair of thin cotton gloves from the pocket of his jeans. He slipped them on and carefully removed a sheet from the box.

The sheet was thick and yellowed, the warp and weave of fibers from some ancient plant visible like a watermark through the page.

Across the surface were tidy rows of neat Latin words, and the lines were illuminated with drawings and fanciful letters in red, blue, and gold paint. It wasn’t unlike medieval manuscripts I’d seen while in graduate school.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “What’s it from?”

“It’s a hand-copied page from a document called the
Kantor Scroll
. Kantor was a gnome, a scrivener who put together an impressive library of texts.”

Paige walked around the table to give the document a closer look. “About what?”

“The usual. Love. Religion. Politics. War was a particular specialty. Gnomes are close to the ground, so people tend to forget they’re there. They do a great job of war reporting because they can get in and around so easily.”

The librarian set the first sheet aside and pulled another from the box. This one had a drawing. The images weren’t very sophisticated, but their subject was clear—a mud and stone city under attack by a storm of blue sparks as big as a cloud. The cloud had already consumed some of the buildings, leaving them in shambles.

“I’ve seen that before,” I said, thinking of the wall of magic Tate had sent after us in Iowa. “Where was this?”

“Carthage,” the librarian said. “The city was completely decimated by the Roman army, and they salted the earth afterward so nothing could grow.”

“They destroyed the city with magic?” Paige asked.

“That wasn’t the human version of the story,” I said, but looked at the librarian.

“Do the Romans strike you as folks willing to credit someone else for a victory?”

He had a point.

“According to Kantor,” he said, “the Roman armies claimed the victory, but they didn’t exactly fight the battle.”

I pointed at the document but was careful not to touch. My heart began to race as we moved closer to an answer. “Whoever did the fighting here, Tate can do the same kind of magic. What does Kantor have to say about it?”

“He says the magic was made by a ‘Dark One.’ ” The librarian smiled smugly, but he’d earned it. He was good.

“So what is a ‘Dark One’? Genies? Demigods? Are they related to fairies? Claudia, the queen, seemed to know who Tate was.”

The librarian didn’t look impressed by my magical auction. “You’d hardly believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“They’re called ‘messengers.’ They were tall. Winged. Their magic allowed them to serve the world.”

“Are you talking about angels?” Paige had leaned forward a little, like she was afraid we’d think the question was crazy.

“Yeah, but without the religious baggage,” the librarian said. He pulled out another document. This one showed a fight between two creatures—one with the white wings of a traditional angel, one with wings as dark and slick as a bat’s. They were both tall and sinewy with muscle, their bodies draped in flowing cloth, their wings slicing the air like blades. They were locked in battle with each other.

“There were two kinds of messengers,” the librarian said. “Those who carried peace and bounty, and those who carried out justice.”

“I assume this story does not have a happy ending?” I asked.

“You would be correct,” the librarian said. “The messengers of peace did their jobs. They rewarded the good. The messengers of justice did their parts, too. They punished the evil. Together, they kept the world in balance.

“But the messengers of justice enjoyed the violence a little too much. They decided small missteps by humans were worthy of severe punishment. It wasn’t about justice anymore. It was about ego, about their conceptions of right and wrong. They lost their moral compass.”

“The Dark Ones?” I guessed.

“The Dark Ones,” he confirmed. “Angels with brutal swords of righteousness. Humans fought back against them; the Dark Ones went nuclear. They took out entire cities they thought didn’t measure up to their standards. Carthage was just one example. The conflict goes back much, much further.”

“How far?” Paige asked.

“Sodom and Gomorrah far.”

“Why call them ‘Dark Ones’?” Paige asked.

“According to Kantor, the darker their souls became, the darker their wings became.” He flipped a page again. This drawing showed only a caricature of a creature with dark wings, their size dwarfing the rest of the image. “Because of that, some sups, including your gnomes, referred to them as ‘Dark Ones.’ ”

“And other sups?” I wondered.

He glanced at me. “Humans think of them as demons, although to be a ‘demon’ doesn’t really mean anything. ‘Demon’ is a quality, not a species.
To be demonic
—those who abandon good and give themselves wholly to the darkness.”

“So Todd thinks Seth Tate was a Dark One,” Paige said. “Theory or fact?”

“Tate fought Ethan with a sword, and Paulie was killed with a blade,” I said. “Paulie’s definitely guilty of some transgressions. Manufacturing
V
, for one. If Seth is a Dark One, he could have had a justice motive. Harsh justice, but still.”

“Ironic he doesn’t consider himself worthy of that kind of justice,” Paige muttered. “But even if that explains Seth,” Paige said, “what about the
other
Seth?”

“I have no idea. So, to summarize, Seth was an angry angel, Mallory tried to conjure evil, and Seth touched the book at the same time she triggered the spell. That somehow doubled him up, so now we have two identical angry angels flying around Chicago.”

The very idea made me want to run away screaming…or hide under my bed for a few weeks.

“That would appear to be the case,” Paige said.

I glanced back at the librarian. “Were there a lot of messengers? If he’s one of them, can we narrow down which one?”

“There aren’t many. Some you’ve heard of: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael.”

“The archangels,” I said.

“An angel by any other name,” the librarian said. He flipped back to the first page he’d showed us, the one with the Latin text. “There are three Dark Ones listed: Uriel, Dominic, and Azrael.”

“Are there any drawings that show their faces in any detail?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Every question we managed to answer about Tate seemed only to spawn four or five more.

But the real question was how much time we’d have to figure it all out.

The sun was nearly up before I returned to Ethan’s apartments. I’d have much rather returned to my room, but we’d made too much progress not to give him a report. Trouble didn’t care if he was being an ass; in fact, the Tates probably would have been thrilled to hear it.

I found him in a leather armchair in his sitting room, one leg crossed over the other, his head on the back of the chair, his eyes closed.

He looked exhausted, and I could sympathize. It had been a long night—too full by half of magic books, pretentious Brits, and murder, and not nearly full enough of satisfying answers. But we had at least one more than we’d had a few hours ago, so I stood in front of him at attention and gave him a precise report.

“So Tate is a Dark One. An angel of retribution who couldn’t control his more violent urges.”

“That seems to be the case. Do you know anything else about the ‘Dark Ones’ myth? Does it sound familiar to you?”

“You mean because of my age?”

Angry or not, I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to tease him. “Well, you were alive during the big bang, weren’t you?”

He rolled his eyes. “I know the myths of the fallen angels. Those who didn’t support the right camp and ended up cast aside at a decidedly downward angle. I wasn’t aware they were alleged to have caused the destruction at Carthage. It hardly seems possible the Romans would have been able to destroy all the evidence they weren’t the true victors.”

“You came back from the dead,” I pointed out. “You really aren’t in a position to argue what is and isn’t possible.”

“A fair point.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked him.

“She’s there,” he said, rubbing his temples. “There’s a dull buzzing. But I’ve pushed it back into the corner of my brain dedicated to football and video games.”

“In other words, rarely used.”

“Just so.”

“Is it wrong of me to say this could have been avoided if only the Order had paid better attention to Mallory?”

“Not wrong at all,” he murmured. “Unfortunate that it’s come to this, but not wrong. They have failed all of us, and Mallory, in a multitude of ways. And they appear to be offering no assistance in cleaning up the mess they so tidily made.”

We were quiet for a moment, watching each other. Ethan seemed to be at peace, but it seemed likely his mind was roiling with possibilities, probabilities, strategies, outcomes. I just wasn’t sure how many of those involved me.

I decided to save myself the rejection, even if it was only
temporary. “Well, I should get back to my room. Dawn will be here soon.”

“I want to pretend all is well in the world,” he said. “I want to pretend our House will be safe tomorrow and secure in the bosom of the GP. But that’s not the world around us.”

I think he meant it as an apology, but I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted sleep and a warm body to curl against, and I wasn’t going to get it.

“The world is what it is,” I said. “We can only battle it back.”

As dawn approached, I slipped back into my room and my own bed, the sheets cool and undisturbed. I tried to quiet my mind, and I tried not to worry about what tomorrow might bring, or the fact that the Tates were still out there, undoubtedly planning their next attack. The sun was rising, and there was nothing I could do about it now.