Biting Cold: A Chicagoland Vampires Novel (CHICAGOLAND VAMPIRES SERIES)

air. Nothing but the lingering, cloying scent of lemon and sugar.
    “She isn’t here,” I said.
    “I don’t suppose we need to ask where she’s gone,” he said.
    I didn’t think so, either. “The silo,” I said. “They want the Maleficium , and that’s where it is.” And I feared that wasn’t the worst of it. Mallory had disappeared just before I caught Tate’s signature scent on the wind—but she’d been nowhere near the silo or the Maleficium . And we’d been so busy handling her that we hadn’t had time to think about Paige or Tate . . . or the entrance to the silo.
    Could Mallory and Tate have been working together?
    I looked at Ethan. “I think Mallory may have been a distraction.”
    “A distraction?”
    “Tate and Mallory both want the book. Mallory knows it’s in the silo, and a little Internet research would have shown her where the door was. If finding it was that easy, why did she pop up so far away from it?”
    “She was a distraction,” Ethan said. “She was there to draw us away while Tate found Paige and forced her to show them where in the silo the book was. But why would Tate and Mallory work together? How would they even have found each other?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But why not work together? Mallory wants the book, they both want the evil to be released, and there are more of us than there are of them. They both have magic, but so does Paige, and they couldn’t have known what kind of security would be waiting for them.”
    I walked back to the front door and glanced outside, but there was no other sign anything was amiss. The farm looked like a farm at the edge of winter, waiting for snow to fall, and snow to clear, and seed to be planted again.
    “The silo?” he asked.
    I nodded. “Let’s go.”
    We walked quietly to the field that held the missile silo, eyes peeled for any sign of them. As we neared it, the scents grew stronger, like a cookie factory had opened up shop down the road.
    The concrete box looked the same as it had when we’d left it. The door was closed, and there weren’t any supernatural lights or sounds that suggested Tate and Mallory were throwing evil around.
    Hope blossomed; maybe we weren’t too late.
    “They’re here.”
    We turned and found Todd behind us, a new patch of crimson on his shoulder.
    “Are you all right?”
    “I’ll heal,” he said. “They went in. I took an orb to the shoulder.”
    “Paige?” I asked.
    “Paige, the other witch, and the dark one.”
    Tate, with his head of dark hair, must have been the dark one.
    “While we were fighting Mallory,” Ethan said, “Tate was nabbing Paige and waiting for Mallory to finish us off.”
    Maybe Paige had been right. With every action she took, Mallory was sliding closer to friendship in the past tense.
    “Thank you for your diligence,” I told Todd. “And thank you for your help earlier.”
    He nodded. “We are done with this fight for now. We’ll go to ground. We’ll regroup. It’s the way of our people.”
    When he looked up again, he looked pissed. “End this tonight.”
    “That’s our every intention,” Ethan promised, holding out a hand. “My apologies again for my behavior earlier. My comments were shortsighted and naive. We are better for having met you, and we are honored that we shared a field of battle.”
    Todd hesitated for a moment, then took Ethan’s hand. “Good luck,” he said, then disappeared across the field. The night was quiet again, stars speeding by overhead.
    “I’d feel a lot better if they were going down there with us,” I said.
    It took Ethan long enough to answer that I looked over at him. His eyes were squeezed closed, his forehead pinched.
    I put a hand on his arm. “Where is she?”
    “Nearby,” he said, rubbing his temples. “I can feel her fretting. But this is different from earlier.”
    “She’s probably preparing to use dark magic again—the real deal. Are you going to be okay?”
    “I’ll be fine. Let’s get this over with.”
    The snap in his voice convinced me not to push the issue. He was a big boy. If he wanted help from me, he could ask for it.
    Carefully, swords drawn, we opened the door to the silo. It was dark even in comparison to the black night outside, and my eyes hadn’t yet adjusted. I walked carefully forward.
    But not carefully enough.
    “Stop!” Ethan called out, wrapping an arm around me before I vaulted into the darkness below.
    The elevator was gone.
    Ethan wrenched me