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

looked at Ethan. “I can prove what I am.”
    He unclasped the top button of his cassock, then continued down the row until each was unclipped. He wore simple dark pants and a shirt beneath. He dropped the cassock onto the floor, then pulled the T-shirt over his head. His chest was well carved with planks of muscle, but that wasn’t the feature attraction here.
    “Back up,” he said, and we did, stepping farther away from him. He closed his eyes and rolled his shoulders.
    I knew what was coming, but that didn’t diminish the effect of actually watching it happen.
    With a whoosh of air, he unfolded his wings. Like Dominic’s, they were at least twenty feet from tip to tip. But unlike Dominic’s, Seth’s wings were still feathery and white. The top ridgeline was iridescent and downy, while the long, straight feathers below were sharp and crisp. His feathers arced along the top and bottom to points at each end that gleamed like opals.
    The smell of lemon and sugar filled the room—the sugar-cookie smell of a millennia-old angel in twenty-first-century Chicago.
    “They’re beautiful,” I said. But neither the extension of his wings nor the sentiment lifted the veil of sadness from his face. Seth looked, in a word, tortured. As if embarrassed by what he’d done, he whipped his wings into hiding again.
    “I’m sorry,” Ethan said, but Seth shook his head.
    “He is Dominic’s twin brother,” I explained. “Seth, the angel. Dominic, the demon. Born together but with different roles in the world. The Maleficium was created, in part, as a prison for Dominic and the others like him.”
    “So Dominic was inside the Maleficium ?” Ethan asked. “How did he split apart from you?”
    Seth shook his head. “I don’t know.” He turned to pull his T-shirt back over his head. His wings, apparently magical in nature, had completely disappeared. But there in the middle of his back between his shoulder blades was a gruesome scar, a vaguely star-shaped burst of raw pink.
    “Your back,” I began. “What happened?”
    “Magical burn. It happened when I touched the book.”
    I’m not sure how I knew, but I knew. That wasn’t a magical burn.
    “I was right. Mallory didn’t conjure Dominic from the Maleficium ,” I said.
    Ethan frowned at me. “What do you mean?”
    “Dominic popped into being, sure, but not from thin air, or even from the Maleficium .” I looked at Seth. “We watched you split apart. But she didn’t divide you in half, not really. She pulled Dominic out of you —and you have the scar to prove it.”
    “How is that even possible?” Ethan asked. “How could Dominic exist within Seth?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what we have to figure out.” And once again, every question we managed to answer led to six or seven more.
    Seth pulled his T-shirt down.
    “You came to our House,” Ethan told him. His posture and tone had changed—back to calm, cool, and collected Master. “Why are you here?”
    “Atonement,” Seth said without hesitation. “I should have come sooner, but I was, well, mortified. Horrified at what we’ve done. Dominic has killed again. He was created as a being of justice, but he misapplies the rules. Very rarely is murder just, and certainly not when humans have already adjudicated the guilt of those he seeks to punish again.”
    Seth was right—and that was a similarity between Paulie and the cops. Paulie had already been convicted; the cops had been acquitted. Humans had already done their justice making, but Dominic wasn’t satisfied with their results.
    “He’s not the only guilty party.” He walked toward the ballroom wall and looked into one of the mirrors, staring back at his visage as if it were unfamiliar.
    “I have done things.” He shook his head. “Throughout my life, I have worked to build communities, to strengthen individuals. I ran for mayor here, in this time and this city, to help those efforts. But somewhere I fell off course. I endangered people who trusted me. I promoted the sale of drugs to vampires.” He put a hand to his temple. “It made sense at the time?”
    He met my gaze in the mirror. “I owe you a specific apology, Ballerina. Particularly for the things that happened in my office. For putting you through hell. I had information. About your father.” Seth glanced at the others in the room. “About the manner in which you were made a vampire,” he carefully said. “I thought you had the right to