I shut off the lights and sent Jude and J.B. outside first so that I could lock the interior door. Not that Chloe would notice if someone broke in, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
I drifted through the outside door and saw J.B. and Jude waiting for me on the sidewalk.
We started walking north back to my place. J.B. carried the binder under his arm, and Jude trotted a little bit ahead, sniffing as he went.
We were on Lincoln, across from the Burrito House and near the public play lot, when Jude stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
He whined, pawing at the metal fence that surrounded the play lot. I reached around him and opened the gate.
He darted inside, nose pressed to the ground, and crossed between the swings and the slide. The playground was bordered by a high wall that supported the Metra tracks that ran through the neighborhood.
Jude went right up to the wall, sniffing and whining so that we would follow him. J.B. and I followed, bewildered.
After a few minutes Jude stopped and barked. He pointed with his nose toward the wall.
There, inscribed in the metal support, was a tiny symbol—a circle topped by an upside-down V.
“The sigil of the charcarion demons,” I said.
Jude barked.
“This is probably a portal,” I muttered. “But why put it so close to my house? Why risk my finding it?”
“If it’s a portal, can you open it?” J.B. asked.
I stared at the symbol. The last time I’d opened a portal like this, I’d found the wolf cubs that had been taken from Wade’s pack. If I went through the portal now, would I find the missing Agents? Would I find Azazel?
Or was it a trick, a trap planted by Azazel? If I went through the portal, would I find nothing but my own doom?
I looked down at the tattoo of the coiling snake on my right palm. There was no tingle of magic, no prompting to open the portal.
Then again, my little parasite had been rather quiet lately. Not that I’d noticed, what with everything else that was going on.
“Better not try to open it now,” I said finally. “We don’t know where it goes.”
“It could lead to Chloe,” J.B. said.
Jude barked.
“Or it could lead to a nest of charcarion demons,” I said. “We don’t know how long that sigil has been there.”
“But—” J.B. said.
“No,” I repeated. “I’ve reached my limit of foolish, impulsive decisions for the last twenty-four hours. Let’s go home and try and see if Chloe left anything useful for us. We know that the sigil is here, so if we don’t come up with any other options, we can always come back to it.”
“If you don’t want to go through it now, maybe you should seal it,” J.B. said with obvious reluctance. “It’s right next to a playground. What if Azazel decides to send a bunch of demons through during the day when kids are playing here?”
That was a terrifying thought.
“I’m not sure I want to risk leaving it open, in that case,” I said.
“Either we should go through now, or we should seal it,” J.B. said.
Would I be sealing Chloe and the other Agents behind my spell, never to be found? Could I take that kind of chance?
Alternatively, could I risk the lives of innocent children who might fall prey to some wild plan of Azazel’s?
There wasn’t really a choice when I put it in those terms.
“Stand back,” I said, and lifted my hand to the sigil.
My tattoo lay quiet on my skin, but I didn’t need its help for this spell anymore. The metal glowed hot and yellow beneath my touch, and when I pulled my hand away the sigil was blackened, closed forever.
None of us spoke as we continued home. We all knew there was no other real option than to close the portal, but it was hard to feel good about that choice.
I only hoped that whatever Chloe had discovered in Azazel’s notebooks led us to her and the other Agents, and I wouldn’t have to regret closing the sigil.
Beezle buzzed into the living room as soon as we walked through the front door.
“I have been as annoying as I possibly could be. I think Nathaniel wants to kill me, but Bryson hasn’t given up anything interesting yet,” he said.
“Keep working on him,” I said. “I don’t want to let him go until sunrise.”
Beezle shrugged. “Okay.”
He went back downstairs while I settled in at the table with the binder. Jude went into the bathroom and came back out as a human being. He’d taken to keeping a pair of jeans in there.
I opened the binder and divided the papers into three stacks, one for each of us. I grabbed some yellow legal pads and pencils from the side table and gave one each to Jude and J.B. “Now the fun part begins. Write down any notes that Chloe made and the context, if you can understand it.”
It was slow and tedious work. Chloe had written a lot of formulas in the margins, and her formulas made as little sense to me as Azazel’s. She’d also written cryptic things like “beam?” and “how to hold it internally?”
I heard Jude sighing a lot. J.B. just got that fixed, long-suffering look that he usually had after dealing with one of my escapades.
As I was nearing the end of my pile, I came across a sheet that had a large purple box around the word “SUNSHINE.” Chloe had surrounded this word with many, many more exclamation points than were strictly necessary.
“Sunshine,” I said, and looked back over my notes. “How to hold it…”
I thought about Azazel’s own cryptic notes. Blood donors. Vampires. Sunshine.
“Gods above and below,” I said. “He’s trying to make vampires immune to the sun.”
“He can’t do that,” Jude scoffed. “Vampires are destroyed by the sun.”
“He’s doing it,” I said grimly. “Or at least he’s trying.”
“How would he do something like that?” J.B. asked.
“I’m not sure, because math is definitely not my strong suit, but I think that he’s trying to inject the power of sunlight into human donors. Then he’s letting the vampires drain the humans.”
“And over time the vampires will build up an immunity to the sun?” Jude said skeptically.
“Well, I don’t think it’s worked so far,” I said. “Because we saw the vampires at his mansion. The vampires were getting crisped in the sun, just as they should.”
“So maybe it’s not possible,” J.B. said. “He’s just wasting his time.”
“Or maybe,” I said slowly, “he had the wrong kind of donors.”
“The kidnapped Agents? What would they have that ordinary humans wouldn’t?”
“Agents’ magic is tied to the dead, right? And vampires are essentially dead,” I said, warming to my theory. “So an Agent’s blood might be better tolerated by a vampire, especially when something that would normally kill the vamp is running in the blood.”
“And once vampires had built up an immunity to sunlight, then what?” J.B. said.
“I think the massacre that we saw today was just a little taste,” I said.
“Vampires roaming free during the day, terrorizing the city?” Jude asked.
I nodded. “And since it’s Azazel, you know that’s only the smallest part of the plan. The vampires would probably be a distraction for some bigger splash he’d intended.”
“If you’re right, then the kidnapped Agents are probably being drained by vampires as we speak,” J.B. said.
“More importantly, if it works, then Azazel will want more Agents,” I said.
J.B. stared at me, his green eyes filled with horror. “The whole Agency is at risk.”