that the Dark One had been spotted at each one—meaning he likely had to be present to control them. And though he was a being of great magical power, he was also still a man. Where their own magic failed, they had reasoned, knives and bullets would do the job just as well. If they looked for him, maybe they could find him. Maybe they could kill him.
Sloane rounded a corner and ran down an alley toward the funnel. As she watched, the Drain inhaled a huge wave of water from Lake Michigan and sent it scattering. Some of it escaped the thrust of the Drain’s power and splattered out, wetting the street, the brick walls of buildings that hadn’t yet crumbled, and Sloane’s cheeks. She took one step too far, and the Drain’s magnetism tugged at her legs and arms; she lurched away, knocking Esther back.
“Left!” she shouted. She could hardly hear herself over the roar of magic and power, the screams of those caught in the Drain’s grasp, the hooting of car alarms and the wail of sirens. She jerked Esther to the side, back to the street, and Kyros tumbled after them both. She still couldn’t see the Drain’s center, where the Resurrectionist likely was, grounded by his own magic. He would be the eye of the storm, and to find him, to kill him, she would need to go somewhere open. One of the wider roads, where she could see farther, unobstructed.
Clark, Wells, Franklin, Wacker, she thought. The last street sign she had seen had been ripped from its moorings, but Warner Tower had been on Franklin, so it was only one block north to Wacker Drive. It was the smarter path to take whether she saw the Resurrectionist or not—small streets were crowded, hard to navigate.
She bent low and ran, pulling Esther behind her. The air was thick with dust; Sloane pulled the collar of her shirt up over her mouth and nose to keep from breathing it in. The sidewalks were now full of people running away from the Drain, their faces in grimaces of horror, soot-stained and tear-streaked. The crowd was too dense to penetrate; Sloane led them to the middle of the street instead, where cars stood abandoned. She climbed over two taxis crushed nose to nose and sidestepped the back of a bus, the front of which had collided with a brick building. The seats inside were all empty, purses and briefcases abandoned on the floor.
“Slo!” Esther said between coughs.
“Wacker!” Sloane answered, and she almost laughed at the word despite herself.
Her shirt clung to her back, soaked with sweat, and her legs burned as she climbed over another car. As she stepped on the hood, she saw that the driver was still behind the wheel, blood bubbling from his mouth. She stood for a moment, watching him. His chest was still.
Move on. She jumped down and found herself at the junction of Monroe and Wacker. Wacker Drive, the great double-decker confusion of Chicago, with its upper layer and its lower. Here it was wide with a landscaped, raised median, and tall buildings, titans of glass and steel, bracketed the road. Behind her was the spiral horn of Warner Tower and the twin prongs of the Sears Tower, and in front of her the Drain. As she watched, a woman in one shoe, hobbling away from a building entrance, stepped too close to the inexorable pull of the Drain’s power. A whipcord of energy upended her and dragged her, screaming, into the gray wall of destruction.
But moving away from all the people and cars and uprooted trees and massive bricks of concrete was a solitary figure.
The weight of inevitability settled on Sloane’s shoulders. Cold crept up her spine. Through the cloud of dust and dirt, she saw a face plated with metal siphons with only thin strips of pale skin visible at their seams. The hands that hung heavy at his sides were also metal-plated, as well as what she could see of his throat above the high collar of his robes. A hood covered his hair, and the rest of him was shrouded in the bulk of fabric.
The Resurrectionist.
“Retreat!” Esther screamed, her voice hoarse.
But Sloane couldn’t move. If the theory she had proposed to Esther and Matt after visiting Evan Kowalczyk—that the Resurrectionist was the parallel version of the Dark One—was correct, this was the man she had lived her entire life to kill. This was the man who had painstakingly