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

and worry in our hearts, at least until Luc’s pager buzzed. He unclipped it and checked the screen. “You might as well head upstairs. Paige is here.”
    I finished my dog and wiped my face with a napkin. “I’ll get her settled in the library.” The next words were out of my mouth before I thought better of it. “Could you tell Ethan about the conjuration spell?”
    Luc and Lindsey exchanged a glance. “Why don’t you tell him?” Lindsey asked.
    Because he’s being an ass , I silently thought, but played my cards diplomatically.
    “I want to get Paige into the library, so I won’t have time to drop by his office, and my phone doesn’t work very well in the library. Because of the stairs. And such.”
    It was a crappy excuse, and I could tell neither one of them bought it, but they let it go.
    “We’ll tell him,” Luc said. “You get to work.”
    I smiled with false cheer, then hightailed it to the door. Lindsey was going to have a field day with this one.
    I found Paige in the first-floor foyer. She had shopping bags in hand, and she was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved White Sox T-shirt. She’d found some clothes of her own; pity she’d picked the wrong team. We did live on the South Side of the city, which made the White Sox a logical choice, but that didn’t diminish my love for the Cubs.
    “Welcome back,” I said.
    “Thanks. It’s been a long night.”
    I guided her toward the stairs, and we headed to the second floor. “Where did you go?”
    “Catcher gave me a lift to meet with Baumgartner. I talked to him. I talked to Simon.”
    “What did Baumgartner have to say?”
    “Not a lot.” She sounded saddened by the answer.
    We rounded the second-floor landing. Paige paused and tapped her fingers against the banister. “I had this idea—that I was part of something good. Something important.”
    “And you don’t think so now?”
    She looked away. “I don’t know. I asked him 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