“Damn,” Jeff said. “You forget how beautiful it is when you only see it from down there. When you only see the anger and petty squabbles.”
“Speaking of which, let’s try to fix this one,” Catcher said.
“I think that’s a hint that my husband is eager to get this show on the road.”
“Husband” still hit my ear wrong.
Mallory, Catcher, and Jeff began to prepare their magic. Beside me, Ethan kept his gaze on the city. I would give it to you if I could, Sentinel. And all of it in peace.
I smiled and held out a hand. Let’s go see if we can make a little of that happen.
A few feet away, Mallory pulled off the satchel she’d worn diagonally across her chest and spread it open. She put both hands inside, very carefully lifted out what looked like a spinning spice rack, and placed it on the ground. There were jars in about a third of the slots, and the middle of the older had been carved out, a small porcelain crucible placed inside. A small, square mirror was mounted on a bracket above it.
Silence followed.
Ethan and I cocked our heads at it.
“Huh,” I said.
“Pretty sweet, isn’t it?”
“It’s not what I expected.”
Mallory moved the bag out of the way. “It’s not the shimmy in the magic, it’s the magic in the shimmy. Right, honey?”
“Put that on a T-shirt,” Catcher said, crouching beside her.
Jeff pulled a tablet from his backpack, began scrambling fingers over the screen. He might not have been vampire—we couldn’t all be so lucky—but his fingers were faster than any I’d ever seen.
Good for Fallon, I thought cheekily.
“How, exactly, will this work?” Ethan asked, peering over my shoulder.
“With unicorn farts and happy wishes,” Catcher said, adjusting the gadget’s glass cylinders. Alchemical symbols were inscribed in the wood around the bottles and crucible.
“Oh, good,” Ethan said. “I was concerned we weren’t adequately addressing our energy needs by ignoring the unicorn farts.”
o;I’d appreciate that,” Ethan said. “As to Reed, he’s planning something big, and the alchemy is part of it. Farr, or what happened to him, could be, too. You want in—the investigation, the fight—you’re in.”
Gabriel nodded. “You keep me informed, and I’ll keep you informed.”
And that, I thought, was as much an apology as he was going to give.
• • •
“What a mess,” I said when Gabriel walked back to Fallon and Eli, began to talk about strategy.
“It’s the inherent danger of shifters,” Ethan said, “and one of the reasons they prefer to live away from humans. They’re as much wild creature as human. They’re strong, potentially violent, often unpredictable.”
“And sometimes amazingly loyal,” I said as Jeff helped a limping Juliet into the House.
“Indeed, Sentinel. Indeed.”
Mallory walked down the sidewalk, mouth agape and a large duffel bag in hand, weighted down in the middle by something relatively small and obviously heavy.
“What the hell?” she asked when she reached us, her gaze still tripping around the destruction.
“Confused shifters,” I said, so we could skip the longer play-by-play. “A shifter was manipulated by magic, and his friends blamed us.”