Biting Cold (29 page)

I’m not sure how I knew, but I knew. That wasn’t a magical burn.

“I was right. Mallory didn’t conjure Dominic from the
Maleficium
,” I said.

Ethan frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

“Dominic popped into being, sure, but not from thin air, or even from the
Maleficium
.” I looked at Seth. “We watched you split apart. But she didn’t divide you in half, not really. She pulled Dominic
out of you
—and you have the scar to prove it.”

“How is that even possible?” Ethan asked. “How could Dominic exist within Seth?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what we have to figure out.” And once again, every question we managed to answer led to six or seven more.

Seth pulled his T-shirt down.

“You came to our House,” Ethan told him. His posture and tone had changed—back to calm, cool, and collected Master. “Why are you here?”

“Atonement,” Seth said without hesitation. “I should have come sooner, but I was, well, mortified. Horrified at what we’ve done. Dominic has killed again. He was created as a being of justice, but he misapplies the rules. Very rarely is murder just, and certainly not when humans have already adjudicated the guilt of those he seeks to punish again.”

Seth was right—and that was a similarity between Paulie and the cops. Paulie had already been convicted; the cops had been acquitted. Humans had already done their justice making, but Dominic wasn’t satisfied with their results.

“He’s not the only guilty party.” He walked toward the ballroom wall and looked into one of the mirrors, staring back at his visage as if it were unfamiliar.

“I have done things.” He shook his head. “Throughout my life, I have worked to build communities, to strengthen individuals. I ran for mayor here, in this time and this city, to help those efforts. But somewhere I fell off course. I endangered people who trusted me. I promoted the sale of drugs to vampires.” He put a hand to his temple. “It made sense at the time?”

He met my gaze in the mirror. “I owe you a specific apology, Ballerina. Particularly for the things that happened in my office. For putting you through hell. I had information. About your father.” Seth glanced at the others in the room. “About the manner in which you were made a vampire,” he carefully said. “I thought you had the right to know.”

“At the fund-raiser,” I said. “You said you wanted to talk to me. That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”

Seth nodded. “There was never time to say the words, and when the confession finally came out, it came out in violence. It caused violence.” He looked away. “Whatever her faults, Celina did not deserve to die at my hand. Or yours.”

Something clenched in my gut, the monumental regret that I’d taken a life, even one as wasted as Celina’s. She hadn’t been the first I’d killed, but she was undoubtedly the most memorable.

“And there’s nothing we can do now to change what happened,” I added.

“Not to change it,” Seth said, “but perhaps to atone for it.”

“Those actions may not have been yours,” Ethan said. “If Dominic was somehow inside you, leading you astray…”

“Maybe it was Dominic. Maybe it was the slow, creeping influence of the
Maleficium
. Maybe it was just me. But I have never killed. And I would never do so. He must be stopped. I’ll help however I can. I will make my atonement in that fashion. I will stand here, and I will help you face him.”

There was strength in his eyes, but I knew it was going to take a lot of time before he was truly healed again. And even if his scar faded, he would be tortured for a very long time.

“What did you have in mind?” Luc asked. “Do you know how to stop him?”

“I do not. I’d hoped your magical friend might have some idea. Her people bound Dominic and the others into the
Maleficium
in the first place. Perhaps we could bind him there again?”

I broke the bad news. “The
Maleficium
was destroyed when you split apart. But surely there’s something else we can do. If he was born, he can die, just like the rest of us.”

“We saw the footage from his attack at the lockup,” Luc said. “He’s powerful. Strong. Bullets don’t affect him.”

“Bullets don’t affect us, either,” I pointed out. “He may be
strong, but we already know he’s susceptible to magic—that’s why the conjuring spell worked. What magic could we work now to bring him down again? Could we create another
Maleficium
?”

“The
Maleficium
was the work of hundreds of sorcerers over decades,” Seth said, raining on my parade. “That wouldn’t be possible. Not in the near term.”

And not before he killed more people. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

“There must be a way,” I said. “There will be a way. There were battles against demons—Carthage, Sodom, Gomorrah. There must have been some fatalities on the demons’ side.”

Ethan nodded. “We have to try something. We are immortal. Better we take a chance on putting him away than humans he could so easily injure. Or worse.” Ethan looked at Luc. “Find Paige and get her and Seth in a room together to discuss the magical underpinnings.”

Luc nodded, then held out an arm to guide Seth back to the door. Seth walked back to us and picked up his cassock from the ground. He stopped when he reached me.

“I am sorry.”

I wasn’t sure I owed him honesty, but I decided I needed it. “I killed someone there, I watched my lover staked through the heart, and you made me believe my father paid him to make me a vampire. Forgiveness will take time.”

He nodded. “Then I accept the challenge of my contrition.” He put a hand on my shoulder, then walked past me toward the door, lemons and sugar in his wake.

Lindsey leaned toward me. “Is it wrong that I really want to eat a cookie right now?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Let’s go, Lindsey,” Luc said, ushering her and Juliet outside
again. Linds gave me a small smile, then left Ethan and me in the ballroom together.

He’d come into the room fighting, and he’d been sullen for most of the conversation with Seth. I had a pretty good sense a fight was looming, so I bucked up my courage and made myself meet Ethan’s gaze.

His eyes flashed silver. “You invited him into this House.”

“Only after I was sure it was him.”

“You believed he wasn’t Dominic. But as you know nothing else about Seth or who he is, that may not have mattered at all. Did you stop to consider what anyone in a position of authority in this House would have decided?”

I didn’t appreciate the insinuation that I hadn’t thought through the considerable consequences of bringing Seth into the House. My own temper rising, I crossed my arms and glared back at him.

“There was no one else in authority,” I said. “Because all the men in this House are too busy whipping theirs out for comparison with Darius West and the
shofet
. And, more important, I stand Sentinel; it’s my job to protect this House. I did so.”

“By bringing its enemy
here
?”

“Seth Tate is not our enemy. Dominic is.”

“And Seth will lure him right into Cadogan House.”

“There’s no evidence Dominic is looking for Seth. And we aren’t exactly kicking Dominic’s ass on our own. We need help. I’ll admit it was a risky move, but I evaluated that risk and made the best decision I could. Hearing him out was the only play I had, and I took it. Besides, you just invited him to make himself at home and you handed him a sorceress.”

Ethan put his hands on his hips and looked away. My answer was perfectly rational, but that hadn’t mitigated his barely contained anger.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” I quietly said. “If I made the wrong call, tell me I did.”

He looked back at me, and there was something much worse than anger in his eyes. There was
disappointment
.

“The rightness or wrongness of the call isn’t the point, Merit. It’s far beyond your authority as Sentinel.”

“I did what I was called upon to do.
There was nobody else to decide.
”

He blew out a breath. “He almost killed you. How can you be so lackadaisical about your life?”

So that’s what this was about. Not about the decision—because he had to agree I was the only one available to make it—but because I’d put myself at risk. Once again, his desire to protect me was overwhelming his ability to make a good decision.

“Seth isn’t Dominic!” I yelled, goose bumps lifting on my arms from the prickle of magic I’d sent through the room. I imagined my eyes were silver, too, and guessed that every other vampire in the House would be able to feel our argument as the magic permeated the building.

If that bothered them, too bad. I’d put my ass on the line, and I’d been right. I wasn’t going to apologize for making the decision—not when I was cleaning up the messes of so many other people who’d flat-out refused to act.

“I was in that room with Dominic, Ethan. I’ve seen that shine of justice in his eyes. Dominic nearly killed me, and he was excited by it. He reveled in it. But that was yesterday. I can’t sit in a locked room for the rest of my life because he
almost
managed to kill me. Celina’s Rogue almost managed to kill me. Celina almost managed to kill me. Mallory almost managed to kill me. McKetrick almost managed to kill me. I’ve been a vampire less than a year and I’ve topped any number of hit lists. I can’t help that, and
I’m not going to sit here waiting for it to happen again. Not when I can do something about it.

“Seth isn’t Dominic,” I said. “And we need Seth. That makes the math easy for me. If you don’t think I’m making the right kinds of decisions as Sentinel, then you know what to do.”

A thought occurred to me. Not one that he’d want to hear, certainly, but something that needed to be said. “Are you really mad at me, or is this because of Mallory?”

“Does it matter?”

I took a step closer to him. “Ethan, for God’s sake, if you’re angry at me, then be angry at me. But if this is Mallory, don’t push me away. Let me
help
you. We are partners—we have proved time and again that we are better together than we were apart. We have battled back angry shifters and crazy Masters and vampire saboteurs. We can manage a skinny little sorceress.”

I saw the flicker of hope in his eyes, and I waited for him to grab on to it, but fear got the better of him, and he turned away again.

“I need to get back to Darius,” he said. And as he walked out of the ballroom, I put my hands on my hips and stared up at the ceiling and wished for patience.

I
stormed up the stairs to the third floor, fueled by my own indignation.

Why did everything have to be his way? Why did he have to control every situation, even when that very control threatened to tear everything apart?

Fear loomed in the back of my mind. Fear that I’d changed, and Ethan had changed, and who we’d become in the months he’d been gone was too different for us to find each other again.

But I put it aside. I was Sentinel of the House, and since Kelley and Luc now had plenty of House guards, I was officially a full-time Sentinel again. I was going Sentineling, and my first stop was Mallory. Paige and Seth could investigate the Dominic-Seth link from here; I’d use my original source. She still may not have been trustworthy, but I doubted anyone else in Chicago had as much knowledge about the
Maleficium
and the evil stuck into it.

I zipped up my leather jacket, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and grabbed my sword. I still gave Kelley a heads-up before I left,
but Ethan was in time-out as far as I was concerned. If he needed me, he could call. I had work to do.

I trotted down the sidewalk to the gate, and both mercenary fairies stared at me as I passed them by. I stopped short, glancing back at them in turn.

“Is everything okay?”

They looked at each other. Since they were nearly identical, it was like watching one of them look into a mirror. A strange effect in the middle of an already strange city.

My instincts triggered, I walked back to them. “What is it?”

They looked at me simultaneously. “Your Dark One,” said the one on the left. “It is possible he will contact her.”

“Her? You mean Claudia?”

He nodded. “They are acquaintances, of a sort.”

So Dominic and Claudia knew each other. She certainly hadn’t confessed that to me. On the other hand, I hadn’t asked her outright, either, and Claudia wasn’t exactly free with information.

“Did they know each other before his wings turned black?”

“Before, during, and after,” said the other fairy, not with approval, but earning a narrow-eyed look from his partner. He must have spilled too much.

I looked back at the apparent team leader and decided to skip the political wrangling. “Why are you telling me this?”

They both look flummoxed by the question. Since we paid them to stand guard outside our House—and, admittedly, I’d been baited into going for one’s jugular while visiting Claudia—the confusion was understandable.

“He is dangerous. She is our queen, but she is…vulnerable to his suggestion. The sooner he is gone, the better for all of us.”