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

she’d put me in head-to-toe waiter wear.” She seemed to remember I was wearing black, too, and winced a little. “No offense.”
    “None taken. Black is the House uniform.” I gestured toward the stairs. Paige fell into step beside me and we headed back down to the second floor.
    “Color is the new black.”
    “Not according to Ethan Sullivan.”
    “So where are we going exactly?”
    I glanced down at the address Catcher had given me . . . and smiled a little. If we were going where I thought, Gabriel had been right about my knowing Mallory’s caretaker.
    “Someplace familiar” was all I said.
    We drove into a neighborhood in the western part of the city known as Ukrainian Village. It was a working-class neighborhood with churches and food and people from the old country, and it was home to the unofficial Chicago headquarters of the North American Central Pack, a bar called Little Red.
    That’s precisely where we were headed.
    The bar was on the corner of a strip of run-down buildings. Shifters tended to favor substance over style . . . and hearty Eastern European food over delicate snacks. We hadn’t even parked the car when I could begin to smell the tangy, meaty goodness.
    I pulled into a spot at the end of a line of diagonally parked motorcycles. Shifters also preferred bikes to cars and prided themselves on the leather and chrome of their usually custom rides.
    “They’re holding her in a bar?” Paige asked.
    “I’m not entirely sure. But it’s the Pack’s bar, so we’ll see.”
    We got out of the car and skirted the bikes for the sidewalk. Out of respect, I left my sword in the car. Cadogan House vamps had a delicate alliance with the NAC, and I had no interest in screwing that up, especially since they were doing us a favor by keeping Mallory safer and more secure than the Order had been able to.
    Catcher pulled up on the other side of my car in his hipster sedan. He popped out of the driver’s seat, looking completely exhausted, his eyes red, his cheeks gaunt. He was another casualty of her obsession with the Maleficium . He’d probably spent more than a few sleepless nights lately worrying about Mallory and wondering what he might have done to prevent the trauma.
    We stopped on the sidewalk. “Jeff gave me the basics,” Catcher said, “but I want to hear it from you, because it makes no sense to me.”
    “If he told you the Maleficium was destroyed, and in the process Tate split into two, he was telling the truth. It was as simple and insane as it sounds.”
    Paige stepped beside us.
    “Catcher, this is Paige, who I believe you’ve heard of. The Tates burned down her house and her entire research library.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    Paige didn’t seem impressed with the apology.
    Eager to change the subject, I nodded toward the bar. “Did Gabriel say anything about what she’s doing here?”
    He shook his head. “Not a thing, which doesn’t thrill me. I’m not happy about what she’s done, but I also don’t want her mistreated. I’m here to make sure she’s okay.”
    “If you don’t like it,” Paige suddenly burst out, “you’ll have nothing to say about it. You neither observed her nor stopped her, which is exactly what the Order predicted would happen. You want to know why you were prohibited from coming back to Chicago? For exactly this reason. The prophecy was made—that if you came back to Chicago, things would go bad. You ignored the Order’s requests, and now you’ve fulfilled that prophecy. And look where that’s gotten us.”
    Awkward silence descended.
    We’d been told Catcher had been kicked out of the Order because he’d wanted an HQ in Chicago, but the Order was being too stubborn to let him do it. I guessed we hadn’t gotten the entire truth. But it also seemed unlikely we were going to get the truth outside a bar in Ukrainian Village, so I pressed on.
    “Let’s just get this show on the road,” I said, and started walking toward the door.
    Guitar-heavy music accompanied the smells of food that spilled onto the sidewalk and announced to the world that the bar’s patrons were serious about their food, their drink, and their rock.
    We walked inside, a bell on the door announcing our existence, but no one paid us any mind. The bar was lined with tables in front of a giant picture window. Members of the NAC nursed drinks and chatted quietly, completely ignoring our trespass into their territory.
    They must have known we were coming,