Biting Cold - By Chloe Neill Page 0,56
about Mallory, about Simon, about Catcher. About what they all missed.”
“What did he say?”
“He shrugged. Just kind of”—she imitated a beefy, shoulder shrug—“shrugged, and said we do the best we can.”
“That’s pretty lame. I mean, the Order failed this city—and Mallory—in a pretty spectacular way.”
“Yeah,” Paige said. “And I asked him about Tate. He said it was interesting, and that was that. He went back to polishing his bowling ball.”
“He was not polishing his bowling ball.”
“Hand to God. The Order is a union, and I guess not in the workers-rights-and-fair-labor-standards way. More like the let’s-sit-around-and-blame-Jimmy-Hoffa way. I’ve only talked to Baumgartner on the phone, and I guess I never got how truly lame they are. And there’s so much talk about the majesty of our magic, how powerful we are, how special. And how do we use that power? We talk a lot and completely ignore what’s going on around us.”
“Too much talky, too little walky?”
“Exactly!”
“That is a bummer.”
“How’s Mallory doing?” I felt weird asking the question, like I was checking in with my best friend’s new best friend.
“You’d know better than me. I didn’t know her before, so it’s hard to compare what she’s like now. The shifters still have her doing manual labor, and I don’t think they’re going to change that plan anytime soon.”
“A little more of that walking we were referring to,” I thought aloud. “They’re very particular about the things they get involved in, but when they’re in, they’re in all the way.”
Paige nodded. “That was my impression.”
“Catcher told you about the spell she tried to work?”
“Conjuration?” Paige nodded. “Yeah. That’s another advanced spell, impressive for her to work.”
“I still don’t buy that a conjuration spell made one Tate split into two Tates. That doesn’t make any sense to me. That should be the result of a duplication spell or something.”
She nodded. “Duplication’s not the way the conjuration spell is supposed to work; it’s not the predicted outcome. Hey, about Catcher, and what I said earlier. I’m not trying to bash him. He’s a legend in Order circles. Famous—or infamous, as the case may be. I know he’s got the goods, or the Order wouldn’t care so much. But when I called him out yesterday, I really felt like I had to lay down the law, you know?”
“You definitely put him in his place.”
She grimaced. “I wasn’t trying to humiliate him, but somebody has to step up.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “What’s the story about the prophecy?”
“He made a prediction—you know we can do that, right?”
I nodded.
“The prediction was about really bad things going down in Chicago. He warned the Order, but the Order was afraid that because he’d made the prediction, he’d be involved in those really bad things. They banned him from coming to Chicago.”
“He came anyway.”
“He came anyway,” Paige agreed, “and they kicked him out of the Order because of it. I asked him about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said the world would continue to turn and the prophecy would fulfill itself, and he wanted to be here when it did. He said he worked to stop all the natural disasters when they were going on and tried to help you figure out what was going on. The irony was that the trouble was boiling in front of his eyes, but he was so focused on the city, he completely ignored it.”
“And so here we are,” I said.
“Here we are,” she agreed.
“Actually, I meant that literally.” I pointed Paige to the double doors in front of us, then opened them with a whoosh of air.
It was an impressive reveal, if I do say so myself. The Cadogan House library was pretty spectacular. Two floors of books linked by a red wrought-iron staircase. The library held volumes on all sorts of vampire and supernatural topics, from history and food to a complete set of the Canon of the North American Vampire Houses, the codified law for American vampires.
Paige’s reaction was pretty similar to what mine had been a few months ago. She walked inside, mouth agape, and stared up at the shelves and stacks and balcony of books. I figured it was an important room for an archivist.
“Welcome to the Cadogan House library.”
“Shut the front door,” she said. She walked toward the closest row and began to scan the books’ spines. “Morphology of Vampirus Americanus. Pixies and Their Parts. The Horn of the Unicorn, and Other Important Features.”
She trailed her fingertips across more of the spines, then looked back at me, eyes wide