anyone there is from Grey House . .
.”
“If anyone there is from Grey House, they’ll think I’m there to find them, enforce House rules, and drag them back to rationality—right before I kick their asses. Grey House is not Navarre House. We may enjoy sports, but we respect authority. We’re a team—a unit. There’s a clear chain of authority, and we follow it.”
“And Scott’s the coach?”
“And the general,” he agreed.
While that might be theoretically true, I thought, Jonah was still a member of an organization whose mission was to secretly police the Masters. That didn’t exactly fit the Scott-is-my-general analogy.
“Anyway, no worries on my end,” Jonah concluded.
We passed a line of tourists burdened with restaurant leftovers and shopping bags. They looked exhausted, as if it was well past time for them to return to their hotel.
“I’ve never been to an actual rave before,” I said after we passed them. I looked over at him.
“Have you?”
“Near one, didn’t go in.”
“I’m nervous,” I confessed.
“I have no objection to nerves before an op,” Jonah said. “They keep you sharp. On your toes.
As long as you won’t freeze up—and from what I’ve heard about the attack on Cadogan, you aren’t going to freeze up.”
“I’ve been good so far.”
“So far counts.” He came to a stop at the light and pointed to the left. “We’ll cross here, then a couple of blocks up.”
When the light changed, we walked across the street and headed east, a couple of blocks off Michigan.
“This is it,” Jonah said.
It was . . . definitely something. The building looked like a gleaming black spear thrust into the banks of the Chicago River—at least up to the top three or four floors. They were still under construction, their skeletal structures wrapped in hazy plastic.
A plywood sign announced the building was the future home of a finance company.
“Today,” Jonah said, “we’re playing invited guests. Act like you belong.” He pushed through the building’s revolving door. As I followed, Jonah smiled at the man behind the security desk and sauntered over, looking exactly like he belonged in a penthouse vampire party.
“We’re here for the, er, mixer,” Jonah casually said.
“Security code?” the uniform asked.
Jonah smiled. “Temptress.”
For a second, I thought he’d gotten it wrong.
The uniform looked at Jonah, then me, before apparently deciding we were in the building for legitimate reasons, and gesturing toward the elevator. “Top floor. Stay away from the edges.
It’s a nasty fall.”
Jonah walked toward the elevator, then pushed the button. When the car arrived, we slipped inside.
“Are you ready for this?” he asked when the door closed.
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“You can do it. Just remember, if this is a rave, our goal isn’t to close them down tonight. We step in, and we figure out what Mr. Jackson might have seen. We identify perps, feuds, whatever we can. One step forward is good enough for our purposes.”
“That sounds reasonable enough.”
“The RG is a very reasonable organization.”
“Not that it matters tonight,” I pointed out.
“The RG always matters. Our welfare always matters.”
The intensity in his voice made me ask, “Is this a test? An RG vetting process?”
The elevator zipped us to the top floor, and a female voice announced “Penthouse suite” as the doors
“Only coincidentally,” Jonah finally answered, putting a hand at my waist. “Let’s go.”
I nodded, and we stepped out of the elevator.
To call it a penthouse was vastly overstating it.
One day, it might get there. But today, it was a construction site.
The space itself was humongous, a giant, mostly empty rectangle with a center core of steel beams that I assumed marked the places where inner walls would eventually stand. The room itself was darkish, lit by a handful of hanging work lights and the lambent glow of the night-lit city through the plastic that wrapped the exterior walls. The floor was concrete and marked by construction debris, and boxes of materials sat in piles throughout the room.
Altogether, the effect was creepy, like the place in a horror movie where two lovers sneak off to make out— just before the killer bursts through the walls, knife in hand.
I didn’t see any humans, but a couple dozen vampires stood in clusters throughout the space, their attire ranging from couture to casual, from Jimmy Choo to thrift-store flannel. With this many vamps in play, it seemed unlikely they were all Rogues without a House connection.
“Do you see anyone you recognize?” I asked Jonah, scanning the crowd for some sign of House affiliation— gold medals on chains for Navarre and Cadogan vamps, jerseys for Grey House vamps. But I didn’t recognize any Cadogan vamps, and I saw nothing that gave me any sense of where they otherwise might have come from.
“No one,” he absently said.
This magical mystery mix of vampires swayed as the whining guitar of Rob Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” buzzed through the air, which was thick with magic. A haze of it, potent stuff, that immediately raised goose bumps on my arms.
“Magic,” I murmured.
His fingers tightened at my waist. “A lot of magic. A lot of glamour. Will you succumb?”
I could feel the tendrils of glamour moving around me, checking me out, trying to seep inside. I’d sensed testing magic once before—the first time I met Celina, when she worked me over with magic to get a sense of my power.
But even with Celina, I hadn’t sensed this much of it in a single place. I centered myself and forced myself to breathe through it, to relax and let the magic flow as it would. Generally resistance only made glamour harder to resist, like it welcomed the challenge to sway you to its side.
But I didn’t think this glamour was trying to convince me of anything. I didn’t sense any vampires trying to make me believe they were smarter, prettier, or stronger than they were, or to convince me to give up my inhibitions. Maybe this was just the collective swell of magic leaked from a roomful of vampires. Add that to the resounding bass and zingy guitar, and you had a recipe for a migraine.
I rolled my shoulders and imagined the magic rolling over me like a warm Gulf Coast wave. As it flowed and discovered I didn’t offer a game to be won, the wave rolled past. The air still prickled with magic, but I could move through it, instead of vice versa.
“I’ll be fine,” I quietly told Jonah, my arms and legs tingling.
“You do have resistance,” he said, gazing at me with appreciation in his eyes.
“I can’t glamour,” I confessed. “Resistance is the gift I got. But this feeling, this room, is still wrong. Still off.”
“I know.”
I made myself throw out the connection I’d already made. “Celina can work this kind of magic. Maybe not the quantity, but it does feel like her. The way it looks into you.”
“Good thought. Let’s hope we aren’t running against her, as well.” He released the grip on my waist, but entwined his fingers into mine. “Until we figure it out, stay close.”
“I’m right beside you,” I assured him.
